Notable Playwrights (Magill's Choice)

Notable Playwrights

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MAGILL’S C H O I C E

Notable Playwrights Volume 1 Kfbf Abe — Susan Glaspell 1 — 372

Edited by

Carl Rollyson Baruch College, City University of New York

Salem Press, Inc. Pasadena, California

Hackensack, New Jersey

Copyright © 2005, by Salem Press, Inc. All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address the publisher, Salem Press, Inc., P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, California 91115. All the essays in this set originally appeared in Critical Survey of Drama, Second Revised Edition, 2003, edited by Carl Rollyson. Some new material has been added. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Notable playwrights / editor, Carl Rollyson. p. cm. — (Magill’s choice) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 1-58765-195-5 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-58765-196-3 (vol. 1 : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-58765-197-1 (vol. 2 : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-58765-198-X (vol. 3 : alk. paper) 1. Drama—Bio-bibliography—Dictionaries. 2. Drama—Biography—Dictionaries. 3. Drama—History and criticism—Dictionaries. I. Rollyson, Carl E. (Carl Edmund) II. Series. PN1625.N68 2005 809.2’003—dc22 2004011762

First Printing

printed in the united states of america

Contents — Volume 1 Publisher’s Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Complete List of Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii Abe, Kfbf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Aeschylus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Albee, Edward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Anouilh, Jean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Aristophanes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Ayckbourn, Sir Alan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Baraka, Amiri . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Beckett, Samuel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 Behan, Brendan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Bogosian, Eric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Brecht, Bertolt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 Byron, George Gordon, Lord . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro . %apek, Karel . . . . . . . . . Chekhov, Anton . . . . . . . Chikamatsu Monzaemon . . Chin, Frank . . . . . . . . . . Churchill, Caryl . . . . . . . Cocteau, Jean . . . . . . . . . Congreve, William . . . . . . Corneille, Pierre . . . . . . . Coward, Noël . . . . . . . .

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131 142 153 166 173 181 187 195 210 222

Dryden, John. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230 Durang, Christopher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248 Eliot, T. S. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 Euripides . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270 v

Notable Playwrights

Farquhar, Gseorge . Foote, Horton . . . Friel, Brian . . . . . Frisch, Max. . . . . Fugard, Athol . . . .

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283 289 295 306 315

García Lorca, Federico Genet, Jean . . . . . . . Gilbert, W. S.. . . . . . Glaspell, Susan . . . . .

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329 342 356 367

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Publisher’s Note Publisher’s Note

Notable Playwrights contains biographical sketches and critical studies of 106 of the most important and best-known dramatists from antiquity to the present day. Publication of this set completes Salem Press’s adaptation of all its Critical Survey sets in the Magill’s Choice line of books, which now includes Short Story Writers (1997), Notable Poets (1998), Notable American Novelists (1999), and Notable British Novelists (2001), The essays in Notable Playwrights originally appeared in Salem’s Critical Survey of Drama, Revised Edition (2003), which combined and updated earlier editions and added entirely new essays. The 106 essays in Notable Playwrights constitute one-sixth of the profiles in Critical Survey of Drama; however, the editors of Notable Playwrights have taken special care to include the dramatists whose plays are most often studied in high school and undergraduate literature and drama courses. The set should thus cover the writers of greatest interest to students. Coverage. Of the 106 playwrights covered in Notable Playwrights, 72 are Englishlanguage writers and 34 are foreign-language writers whose works are widely studied in translation. Thirty-three are American playwrights, and 30 are British. Among the 42 playwrights from other countries are 12 from France; 4 each from Germany and Greece; 3 each from Italy, Japan, and Spain; and 2 from Canada. The Geographical Index of playwrights in volume 3 lists all the playwrights covered by the countries and regions from which they come and with which they are associated. The collection of playwrights in Notable Playwrights reflects the development of drama from ancient Greek and Roman playwrights up to European, American, Asian, and African writers of the present century. Among the many movements and dramatic genres represented by playwrights in this set are postmodernism (27 playwrights), comedy (15), absurdism (14), modernism (12), and expressionism (8). The Categorized Index of playwrights in volume 3 lists all the writers by the genres and movements with which they are most closely associated. Organization and Structure of the Set. Essays in Notable Playwrights are arranged alphabetically by playwrights’ names: From Kfbf Abe through Paul Zindel. Each volume’s table of contents is followed by a complete list of the playwrights covered in the set’s three volumes. In addition to the indexes already mentioned, volume 3 contains a glossary of Dramatic Terms and Movements, a Time Line listing the playwrights by their birthdates, and a general Subject Index. Every essay is organized under the same basic subject headings. The essays open with their playwrights’ full names and details of their births and deaths, followed by these sections: Principal drama: Lists the writer’s major plays through 2003, providing full titles and dates of production (pr.) and publication (pb.). Other literary forms: Describes the writer’s work in genres other than drama to help students differentiate authors known primarily as dramatists from those who are equally well known for their work in other genres. Achievements: Discusses the writer’s honors, awards, and other tangible recognitions and sums up the writer’s influence and contributions to drama and literature. Biography: Offers a condensed biographical sketch with vital information from birth up to the writer’s latest activities. vii

Notable Playwrights Analysis: Provides an overview of the writer’s development as a writer, with attention to recurrent themes and genres that lead into subsections on major plays and aspects of the writer’s work as a dramatist. This section examines the plays that are most representative of the playwright’s best and most significant work and offers examples of the techniques and themes found in these plays. Other major works: Lists the playwright’s principal works in nondramatic genres, such as screenplays, fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Bibliography: Lists published secondary sources that are appropriate for students. All these bibliographies have been updated through 2003. Contributor byline: Identifies the essay’s original contributor, as well as the scholar or scholars who have updated it. The editors of Salem Press wish, once again, to thank the 121 scholars who wrote and updated the essays used in Notable Playwrights. Their names are listed at the beginning of volume 1. We are especially grateful to Carl Rollyson, of the City University of New York’s Baruch College, for serving as the project’s Editor.

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List of Contributors List of Contributors

Patrick Adcock Henderson State University

Cynthia A. Bily Adrian College

Jacob H. Adler Purdue University

Franz G. Blaha University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Thomas P. Adler Purdue University

Robert G. Blake Elon University

Andrew J. Angyal Elon College

Harold Branam Savannah State University

Stanley Archer Texas A&M University

Gerhard Brand California State University, Los Angeles

Gerald S. Argetsinger Rochester Institute of Technology

Timothy Brennan University of Minnesota

Philip Bader Independent Scholar

J. R. Broadus Original Contributor

Lowell A. Bangerter Original Contributor

Mitzi Brunsdale Mayville State College

Thomas Banks Ohio Northern University

Lorne M. Buchman California College of Arts & Crafts

Theodore Baroody American Psychological Foundation

Ralph S. Carlson Azusa Pacific University

David Barratt Independent Scholar

Thomas Gregory Carpenter Lipscomb University

Ronald H. Bayes Original Contributor

C. L. Chua California State University, Fresno

Kirk H. Beetz Original Contributor

Richard N. Coe Original Contributor

Rebecca Bell-Metereau Original Contributor

Robert T. Corum, Jr. Independent Scholar

Milton Berman University of Rochester

J. D. Daubs Independent Scholar ix

Notable Playwrights Frank Day Clemson University

Shelley P. Haley Original Contributor

Elliott A. Denniston Missouri Southern State College

Robert W. Haynes Texas A&M International University

Margaret A. Dodson Independent Scholar

William J. Heim University of South Florida

Lillian Doherty University of Maryland

Holly Hill John Jay College

Henry J. Donaghy Idaho State University

Peter C. Holloran New England Historical Association

Susan Duffy Original Contributor

John R. Holmes Franciscan University of Steubenville

Ayne C. Durham Original Contributor

Joan Hope Independent Scholar

Stefan Dziemianowicz Independent Scholar

Glenn Hopp Howard Payne University

Rodney Farnsworth Original Contributor

Eril Barnett Hughes East Central University

Anne Fletcher Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

William Hutchings University of Alabama, Birmingham

Howard L. Ford University of North Texas

Rhona Justice-Malloy Central Michigan University

Steven H. Gale Kentucky State University

B. A. Kachur University of Missouri, St. Louis

Peter W. Graham Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Albert E. Kalson Purdue University Irma M. Kashuba Original Contributor

Ira Grushow Franklin and Marshall College

Nancy Kearns Mercer University, Atlanta

Angela Hague Middle Tennessee State University

Howard A. Kerner Polk Community College

Elsie Galbreath Haley Metropolitan State College of Denver

Leigh Husband Kimmel Independent Scholar x

List of Contributors Anne Mills King Prince George’s Community College

Sally Osborne Norton University of Redlands

Matthew J. Kopans University of Pittsburgh

George O’Brien Georgetown University

Mildred C. Kuner Hunter College, City University of New York

Robert H. O’Connor North Dakota State University Robert M. Otten Marymount University

Gregory W. Lanier University of West Florida

Cóilín D. Owens George Mason University

Norman Lavers Arkansas State University

Sidney F. Parham St. Cloud State University

Katherine Lederer Southwest Missouri State University

David B. Parsell Furman University

Stanley Longman University of Georgia

Peter Petro University of British Columbia

Robert McClenaghan Independent Scholar

Victoria Price Lamar University

Richard D. McGhee Arkansas State University

Maureen Puffer-Rothenberg Valdosta State University

Barry Mann Independent Scholar

J. Thomas Rimer University of Pittsburgh

Patricia Marks Valdosta State College

James W. Robinson, Jr. Independent Scholar

Joseph Marohl Original Contributor Richard A. Mazzara Original Contributor

Carl Rollyson Baruch College, City University of New York

Jennifer Michaels Grinnell College

Joseph Rosenblum University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Anne Newgarden Independent Scholar

Matthew C. Roudané Independent Scholar

Evelyn S. Newlyn Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Irene Struthers Rush Independent Scholar

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Notable Playwrights Susan Rusinko Bloomsburg University

Eric Sterling Auburn University

Murray Sachs Brandeis University

Roy Arthur Swanson University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Arthur M. Saltzman Missouri Southern State College

Daniel Taylor Bethel College

June Schlueter Lafayette College

Judith K. Taylor Northern Kentucky University

Fredericka A. Schmadel Indiana State University

Thomas J. Taylor University of Akron

Hugh Short Original Contributor

Currie K. Thompson Gettysburg College

R. Baird Shuman University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign

Jonathan L. Thorndike Belmont University Gordon Walters Independent Scholar

K. M. Sibbald Original Contributor

Craig Werner University of Wisconsin

Thomas J. Sienkewicz Monmouth College

Barbara Wiedeman Auburn University, Montgomery

Genevieve Slomski Independent Scholar

Thomas N. Winter University of Nebraska

August W. Staub University of Georgia

Robert F. Willson, Jr. University of Missouri

Judith Steininger Milwaukee School of Engineering

Michael Zeitlin University of Toronto

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Complete List of Contents Contents—Volume 1 Abe, Kfbf, 1 Aeschylus, 6 Albee, Edward, 15 Anouilh, Jean, 30 Aristophanes, 42 Ayckbourn, Sir Alan, 51 Baraka, Amiri, 61 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de, 74 Beckett, Samuel, 83 Behan, Brendan, 91 Bogosian, Eric, 99 Brecht, Bertolt, 104 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 116 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 131 %apek, Karel, 142 Chekhov, Anton, 153 Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 166 Chin, Frank, 173

Churchill, Caryl, 181 Cocteau, Jean, 187 Congreve, William, 195 Corneille, Pierre, 210 Coward, Noël, 222 Dryden, John, 230 Durang, Christopher, 241 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, 248 Eliot, T. S., 257 Euripides, 270 Farquhar, George, 283 Foote, Horton, 289 Friel, Brian, 295 Frisch, Max, 306 Fugard, Athol, 315 García Lorca, Federico, 329 Genet, Jean, 342 Gilbert, W. S., 356 Glaspell, Susan, 367

Contents—Volume 2 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 373 Goldsmith, Oliver, 385 Gray, Simon, 395 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 404 Hakim, Tawfiq al-, 412 Handke, Peter, 422 Hansberry, Lorraine, 431 Havel, Václav, 440 Hellman, Lillian, 447 Henley, Beth, 457 Howe, Tina, 464 Hwang, David Henry, 471 Ibsen, Henrik, 480

Inge, William, 493 Ionesco, Eugène, 501 Jonson, Ben, 516 Kushner, Tony, 526 Lagerkvist, Pär, 531 McCullers, Carson, 542 Mamet, David, 551 Marlowe, Christopher, 563 Middleton, Thomas, 578 Miller, Arthur, 587 Mishima, Yukio, 602 Molière, 610 O’Casey, Sean, 621 xiii

Notable Playwrights

Odets, Clifford, 630 O’Neill, Eugene, 640 Orton, Joe, 651 Osborne, John, 659 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 668 Pinero, Arthur Wing, 674 Pinter, Harold, 685

Pirandello, Luigi, 697 Plautus, 705 Priestley, J. B., 711 Racine, Jean, 723 Rattigan, Terence, 734 Rostand, Edmond, 743

Contents—Volume 3 Ryga, George, 751 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 760 Schiller, Friedrich, 773 Shaffer, Peter, 783 Shakespeare, William, 795 Shange, Ntozake, 827 Shaw, George Bernard, 835 Shepard, Sam, 850 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 861 Simon, Neil, 873 Sondheim, Stephen, 885 Sophocles, 890 Soyinka, Wole, 901 Stoppard, Tom, 914 Strindberg, August, 925 Synge, John Millington, 935 Terence, 944 Tremblay, Michel, 950 Valdez, Luis Miguel, 961

Vega Carpio, Lope de, 969 Voltaire, 979 Wasserstein, Wendy, 988 Wilde, Oscar, 994 Wilder, Thornton, 1004 Williams, Tennessee, 1016 Wilson, August, 1032 Wilson, Lanford, 1039 Wycherley, William, 1048 Yeats, William Butler, 1057 Zindel, Paul, 1064 Dramatic Terms and Movements, 1074 Time Line, 1098 Geographical Index, 1103 Categorized Index, 1107 Subject Index, 1113

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Kobo Abe Kfbf Abe

Born: Tokyo, Japan; March 7, 1924 Died: Tokyo, Japan; January 22, 1993 Principal drama • Seifuku, pr., pb. 1955; Ywrei wa koko ni iru, pr. 1958, pb. 1959 (The Ghost Is Here, 1993); Omae ni mo tsumi ga aru, pr., pb. 1965 (You, Too, Are Guilty, 1978); Tomodachi, pr., pb. 1967 (Friends, 1969); Bf ni natta otoko, pr., pb. 1969 (The Man Who Turned into a Stick, 1975); Gikyoku zenshw, pb. 1970; Imeiji no tenrankai, pr. 1971 (pr. in U.S. as The Little Elephant Is Dead, 1979); Mihitsu no koi, pr., pb. 1971 (Involuntary Homicide, 1993); Gaido bukku, pr. 1971; Midoriiro no sutokkingu, pr., pb. 1974 (The Green Stockings, 1993); Ue: Shin doreigari, pr., pb. 1975; Three Plays, pb. 1993 Other literary forms • A man of myriad talents, Kobo Abe first established himself in the literary world as a novelist, but his reputation rests almost equally on his dramatic works. His first published work, in 1947, was a collection of poetry entitled Mumei shishw (collection of nameless poems). His best-known novel is Suna no onna (1962; The Woman in the Dunes, 1964), and his Daiyon kanpyfki (1958-1959, serial; 1959, book; Inter Ice Age 4, 1970) is science fiction. Abe also wrote short stories, some of which are collected in Four Stories by Kfbf Abe (1973), political essays, screenplays, film scripts, and film criticism. Achievements • Kobo Abe received the Second Postwar Literary Prize (1951) for his short story “Akai mayu” (1950; “The Red Cocoon,” 1966). Later in the same year, he was given the twenty-fifth Akutagawa Prize for the title story in his collection Kabe (1951; walls), a surrealistic work. His 1967 play Friends was awarded the Tanizaki Jun’ichiro Prize. For most of the forty years preceding his death in 1993, Abe was a central figure among avant-garde artists in Japan. In 1975, Columbia University conferred on him the honorary degree Doctor of Humane Letters. He was frequently mentioned as a likely Nobel Prize candidate, but his death in 1993 prevented realization of that honor. Biography • Although Kobo (Kimifusa) Abe’s parents lived in Manchuria, China, where his father worked as a doctor, he was born in Tokyo in 1924 because his father had brought the family back to Japan in order to conduct some research. His mother, like his father, was from the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, and she had written novels as a young woman. The young Abe and his mother moved to Hokkaido temporarily in 1931 to avoid the Japanese invasion of the Chinese mainland. Both Manchuria and Hokkaido are important in that they represent the only frontier lands that many Japanese would ever have the opportunity to experience, and they were also the only places where the significance of “being Japanese” was not a given. Those living in these marginal places were not completely excluded nor were they wholly accepted by mainstream Japanese society. This fact is reflected in Abe’s writings, in which he portrays Manchuria as a bleak, flat, hostile place and Hokkaido as a land of promise, a Japanese “Wild West.” Though Abe grew up in a colonial setting, his school books were those issued by the Ministry of Education in Japan, so he had read textbook descriptions about the landscape of Japan with its mountains, rivers, and 1

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cherry blossoms, but in Manchuria, he knew only plains and no cherry trees. On occasions when he was scolded by teachers, he was told that “a child back home would never do such a thing,” reinforcing in Abe’s mind the fact that he was not a typical Japanese. Abe has commented on how he grew to doubt the significance of belonging to any nation or to any society. In 1943, Abe entered medical school in Tokyo at the strong urging of his father, and although Abe took no pleasure in his studies, the training may have contributed to his ability to make precise descriptions and to look on situations and on people with emotional detachment. He remarked jokingly that he was allowed to graduate only on the condition that he never practice medicine. Abe began writing fiction upon his graduation from medical school. His first (Library of Congress) long work, Owarishi michi shirube ni (the road sign at the end of the road) was published in 1948. When Abe was in his early twenties, he met and married Machiko Yamada, who would be his lifelong companion and artistic collaborator. A brilliant artist in her own right, she designed the covers for most of Abe’s books as well as sets for the Abe Studio productions. They had one child, a daughter, Neri, who became a physician and writer in Tokyo. In Manchuria the concept of the “harmony of the five races” had instilled in Abe a sense of the equality of all peoples, but when he watched the behavior of the Japanese, which contrasted so greatly with what he had been taught, he felt frustration and anger. This experience may have contributed to his attraction to the Japanese Communist Party, which he joined. Even before his writing began to receive literary awards, Abe was involved with party operations. Trips to Eastern Europe in the late 1950’s provided direct exposure to a communistic society, and he became disillusioned. It was, however, in this part of the world that his work first received international attention. Abe’s play Friends, the story of a man whose home is invaded by unwanted visitors, slipped past the censors and provided its audiences with an allegorical comment on their own situation. Abe’s criticism of the Japanese Communist Party led to his expulsion from the party. Following a period of poverty and hardship in which he and his young wife lived in Tokyo and sold charcoal and pickles on the street, the 1950’s proved to be very productive and increasingly prosperous for Abe. He published more than a dozen short stories, four major novels, a collection of political essays, and a collection of film criticism. He also staged seven plays, released a film that he had written, and broadcast a dozen radio plays or teleplays.

Kfbf Abe

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The 1960’s were also successful, and Abe’s work included the works for which he is best known: the stage play Friends and the novel The Woman in the Dunes. Other major works of the period include the novels Inter Ice Age 4, Tanin no kao (1964; The Face of Another, 1966), and Moetsukita chizu (1967; The Ruined Map, 1969); the stage play You, Too, Are Guilty; and the film versions of The Woman in the Dunes and The Face of Another. In 1971, Abe formed his own theater troupe, the Abe Studio. For the next seven years, the studio held one or two productions a year, most of them written by Abe. He worked not only on scripts but also on sets, lighting, direction, and musical scores. Abe continued his work in various genres throughout the 1980’s, but in the early 1990’s, his health began to fail. The last novel he would see in print, Kangarw nfto (The Kangaroo Notebook, 1996), was published in 1991. In 1992, he was hospitalized and died of heart failure on January 22, 1993. Analysis • Kobo Abe’s background may have been a prime influence in his coming to occupy a central position among Japanese avant-garde writers. Though he was born in Japan, being brought up in Manchuria isolated him from mainstream Japanese life. The sense of alienation and utter isolation he experienced provided one of the most powerful themes that would emerge in almost all his work. Many of Abe’s sources were not Japanese; therefore, his work appealed to an international audience, and a substantial number of his plays were translated into English and other languages. Although Abe’s earlier works were relatively structured and linear, they were characterized by social satire, allegory, and black humor. The later experimental plays moved away from allegorical social criticism toward allegories involving dream imagery, and some of the later plays were freely created in rehearsals. Seifuku • Two themes that would be evident in much of Abe’s later work, the censure of others’ suffering and the rejection of what Abe felt to be Japan’s self-victimization, are particularly clear in this 1955 play, Seifuku (uniform). In this allegorical play, a broken old soldier who wears the ragged uniform of a colonial police officer and is stranded at a port in North Korea in 1945 represents Japan’s colonial experience, which left the nation impoverished and unable to shed its disgrace. In the old soldier, the play depicts the Japanese colonial spirit, which has been broken and is stranded on a foreign shore, unable to return home. All the characters fulfill an allegorical role: the innocent youth of Korea, the conscience of Japan, and the spirit of Japanese womanhood, symbol of hearth and home. Friends • In Friends, his most successful play, Abe critiques Japanese communal values, which he views as stifling of individual creativity. One evening, a family of strangers bursts into the apartment of a man who enjoys his solitude in order, they say, to save him from his loneliness. Although he resists their forced companionship, he is unable to remove them from his home. Finally, he dies, a victim of their aggressive communality. The play portrays the consequences of social pressures and the kind of mandatory communal spirit a communist totalitarianism would inflict on the citizenry. Abe had broken with the Communist Party just a few years before the play appeared. The Man Who Turned into a Stick • Abe dealt with the theme of the exploitation of one group of people by another in a number of his plays, but perhaps the consequences of this behavior are most clearly investigated in The Man Who Turned into a Stick. Abe explained the play as depicting the alienation occurring in modern society,

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in which a sticklike man who has no reason for existence except being used by others is punished from within himself precisely for being a stick. The man turns into an actual stick, falling from the roof of a department store as his son watches. Two characters have to find the stick and take it with them to Hell, where they are employed specifically to gather up all the sticks into which many people have turned. The message is clear: In a world in which people are merely tools—the source of another’s livelihood—there is no room for mercy or sentimentality. The Green Stockings • By depicting characters who could not possibly exist, Abe intended to administer a shock to the theatrical form. The Green Stockings moves away from Abe’s socially critical works toward interior-oriented plays with dreamlike allegorical qualities with no obvious reference to the exterior, real world. Pajama-clad Man stands center stage against the backdrop of a dreamscape of an immense wild field. Man, initially a narrator, turns into a nameless main character, a go-between for the performers and the audience. Man is obsessed with lingerie and, in an effort to transcend everyday existence, raids clotheslines for items, including green stockings, on Mondays and Fridays. Not satisfied, Man attempts suicide, and although a doctor offers him a new life as a grass-eating man, his emptiness prevails. The play poses the difficult question of whether reality, fiction, and dream are distinguishable even in one’s mind. Ue: Shin doreigari • Built around a hoax in which two characters pretend to be an exotic species of animal, Ue: Shin doreigari (the new slave hunters) may be the quintessential Abe Studio production. A professor receives a box containing a pair of ue along with instructions and a note reading “Limited only by your imagination! You may put these remarkable creatures to any use you wish.” Actually, the ue are the sister of the professor’s daughter-in-law and her husband, participating in a game to extort money from the professor by his son. At first dubious, the professor succumbs to a yearning to believe that animals that look just like human beings could exist. The fake ue become human, and the rest of the household also assume animal identities that correspond to their latent qualities. The Little Elephant Is Dead • The full Japanese title for this play when it was performed in the United States is Kozf wa shinda: Nikutai + ongaku + kotoba + imeiji no shi (The Little Elephant Is Dead: Bodies + music + words = image poem). This title demonstrates what happens when words are supplanted by integrated but diffuse information. As Abe’s last play, it provides a good means of measuring the departures from his earliest works as well as the continuities. The play is especially difficult to comprehend, for the underlying “logic” is not logic, but the illogic of a world of dreams. The Little Elephant Is Dead comes as close to a purely gestural theater as is possible. Other major works long fiction: Owarishi michi shirube ni, 1948; Baberu no tf no tanuki, 1951; Mahf no chfku, 1951; Kiga dfmei, 1954; Kemonotachi wa kokyf o mezasu, 1957; Daiyon kanpyfki, 1958-1959 (serial), 1959 (book; Inter Ice Age 4, 1970); Ishi no me, 1960; Suna no onna, 1962 (The Woman in the Dunes, 1964); Tanin no kao, 1964 (The Face of Another, 1966); Moetsukita chizu, 1967 (The Ruined Map, 1969); Hako otoko, 1973 (The Box Man, 1974); Mikkai, 1977 (Secret Rendezvous, 1979); Hakobune sakuramaru, 1984 (The Ark Sakura, 1988); Kangarw nfto, 1991 (The Kangaroo Notebook, 1996); Tobu otoko, 1994.

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short fiction: Kabe, 1951; Suichw toshi, 1964; Yume no tfbf, 1968; Four Stories by Kfbf Abe, 1973; Beyond the Curve, 1991. poetry: Mumei shishw, 1947. nonfiction: Uchinaru henkyf, 1971. miscellaneous: Abe Kobo zenshw, 1972-1997 (30 volumes). Bibliography Goodman, David. Japanese Drama and Culture in the 1960’s: The Return of the Gods. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1988. This translation of five plays representative of the period provides commentary by a leading Japanese critic. The central thesis is that the decade of the 1960’s was characterized by disillusionment with the radical politics of the pre-World War II era and a quest for viable alternatives. Olsen, Lance. Ellipse of Uncertainty: An Introduction to Post-modern Fantasy. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. The first study to examine the intersection of fantasy and postmodernism in literature. Olsen develops working definitions of these terms and then analyses various postmodernist fantasy works. Accessible to intellectually mature undergraduates. Shields, Nancy K. Fake Fish: The Theater of Kfbf Abe. New York: Weatherhill, 1996. Provides plot summaries of the plays that were produced in the Abe Studio, the theater group that Abe began in 1971. Also discusses techniques used and themes developed in the plays and provides descriptions of Abe’s rehearsal sessions. Yamanoguchi, Hisaaki. “In Search of Identity: Abe Kobo and be Kenzaburo.” In The Search for Authenticity in Modern Japanese Literature. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Compares and contrasts works of Abe Kobo and be Kenzaburo, both of whom are concerned with the solitude of men and women alienated from contemporary society and suffering from a loss of identity. Notes that Abe shares a greater kinship with contemporary European writers such as Franz Kafka than other Japanese writers do. Victoria Price

Aeschylus Aeschylus

Born: Eleusis, Greece; 525-524 b.c.e. Died: Gela, Sicily; 456-455 b.c.e. Principal drama • Of the more than 80 known plays of Aeschylus, only 7 tragedies survive in more or less complete form: Persai, 472 b.c.e. (The Persians, 1777); Hepta epi ThTbas, 467 b.c.e. (Seven Against Thebes, 1777); Hiketides, 463 b.c.e.? (The Suppliants, 1777); Oresteia, 458 b.c.e. (English translation, 1777; includes Agamemnfn [Agamemnon], ChoTphoroi [Libation Bearers], and Eumenides); Prometheus desmftTs, date unknown (Prometheus Bound, 1777) Other literary forms • A few surviving epigrams and elegiac fragments show that Aeschylus did not limit himself to drama but also experimented with other forms of poetic expression. The ancient Life of Aeschylus mentions that the playwright lost a competition with the poet Simonides to compose an elegy for the heroes of Marathon. Although Aeschylus’s entry was judged to lack the “sympathetic delicacy” of that of Simonides, the elegy, fragments of which were discovered in the Athenian agora in 1933, projects the dignity and the majesty that mark Aeschylus’s dramatic style. It is doubtful that Aeschylus’s surviving tombstone inscription is autobiographical, despite such ancient authorities as Athenaeus and Pausanias, because the epigram mentions the place of Aeschylus’s death. Achievements • The earliest of the three ancient Greek tragedians whose work is extant, Aeschylus made major contributions to the development of fifth century b.c.e. Athenian tragedy. According to Aristotle’s De poetica (c. 334-323 b.c.e.; Poetics, 1705), it was Aeschylus who “first introduced a second actor to tragedy and lessened the role of the chorus and made dialogue take the lead.” This innovation marks a principal stage in the evolution of Greek tragedy, for although one actor could interact with the chorus, the addition by Aeschylus of a second actor made possible the great dramatic agons, or debates between actors, for which Greek tragedy is noted. Aeschylus also is the probable inventor of the connected trilogy/tetralogy. Before Aeschylus, the three tragedies and one satyr play that traditionally constituted a tragic production at the festival of the Greater Dionysia in Athens were unconnected in theme and plot, and Aeschylus’s earliest extant play, The Persians, was not linked with the other plays in its group. All the other surviving plays of Aeschylus were almost certainly part of connected groups, although the Oresteia, composed of the extant Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and Eumenides, is the only connected tragic trilogy that survived intact. However, the loss of the Oresteia’s satyr play, Proteus, makes observations on Aeschylus’s use of connected tetralogies (three tragedies and one satyr play) nearly impossible. In fact, there is no certain evidence that Aeschylus always used the connected group in his later productions, and imitations of this dramatic form by other fifth century b.c.e. playwrights are not firmly documented. The triadic form of the Oresteia, however, has certainly had a great influence on the development of modern dramatic trilogies. Aeschylus’s brilliant use of the chorus as protagonist in The Suppliants may have been another significant innovation. 6

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Until the discovery in 1952 of a papyrus text, The Suppliants was universally considered the earliest surviving Greek tragedy, and the central place of the chorus of Danaids was thought to reflect the choral role of early tragedy. As a result of the play’s revised dating to 463 b.c.e., The Suppliants’ chorus is now viewed as demonstrating a deliberate attempt to make the chorus a part of the action of the tragedy. Certainly, the chorus of The Suppliants is the earliest known example of a Greek tragic chorus, traditionally nondramatic and reflective, transformed into a significant dramatic participant. Although later dramatists rarely borrowed this choral technique, The Suppliants’ chorus underscores Aeschylus’s originality and experimentation in the development of Greek tragedy. Aeschylus’s historical play Persai (472 b.c.e.; The Persians, 1777) must also be mentioned as the only extant Greek tragedy based directly on historical events rather than on mythology. At least two other historical tragedies are known to have been produced in the early fifth century b.c.e., both by Phrynichus: Capture of Miletus (492 b.c.e.), based on the fall of that Greek city to the Persians in 494, and Phoenissae (c. 476 b.c.e.), based on the naval battle of Salamis in 480. Themistocles, the Athenian victor at Salamis, was Phrynichus’s choregus, or producer. Aeschylus’s The Persians, then, is clearly an imitation in the main of Phrynichus’s Phoenissae, but it is impossible to judge whether Aeschylus derived from the play the idea to depict the Greek victory from the perspective of the defeated Persians. This ability to divest his historical tragedy of jingoism and propaganda makes Aeschylus’s The Persians a universal statement on the tragic cause and meaning of defeat. Aeschylus was known in antiquity for his spectacular stagecraft and especially for his use of stage trappings, special effects, and costuming. Examples of Aeschylus’s skilled attention to such visual elements of drama include his dramatic employment in Agamemnon and Libation Bearers of stage machinery such as the eccyclema, a wheeled vehicle used to display the interior; his striking use of altars and tombs in The Suppliants and in Libation Bearers; his fondness for spectral appearances, such as the ghosts of Darius in The Persians and of Clytemnestra in Eumenides; and the terrifying costuming of the chorus of Furies in Eumenides, said to have been so effective that it caused miscarriages among pregnant spectators. Aeschylus’s plays were held in such great esteem in the late fifth and fourth centuries b.c.e. that posthumous revivals of his works were granted special license to compete at the Greater Dionysia and often won first prize. The famous debate between the ghosts of Aeschylus and Euripides in Aristophanes’ comedy Batrachoi (405 b.c.e.; The Frogs, 1780) is perhaps the best ancient statement of (Library of Congress) Aeschylus’s dramatic and literary

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significance. Aeschylus’s plays were widely adapted by Roman tragedians, who in the second and first centuries b.c.e. still had access to the entire Aeschylean corpus, but Seneca’s Agamemnon (c. 40-55 c.e.; English translation, 1581) is the only surviving example of such Roman imitation. The first complete ancient edition of the Aeschylean corpus was not made until the late fourth century b.c.e. by the orator Lycurgus. This edition became the basis of the definitive Alexandrian edition by Aristophanes of Byzantium in the second century b.c.e. The seven surviving plays are probably the result of a school selection made by the fifth century c.e. The work of Aeschylus was unknown in Western Europe from early medieval times until the fifteenth century, when the impending fall of Constantinople to the Turks brought many Byzantine scholars to the West. The first printed edition of the extant plays was the Aldine edition of Venice, in 1518. Perhaps because of the difficulty of Aeschylus’s poetic language, which is generally indirect and metaphoric, Aeschylus’s extant corpus has not been as directly influential as the works of Sophocles and Euripides have been on the history of tragedy since the Renaissance. Nevertheless, Aeschylus is recognized today as a brilliant dramatist whose contributions to the fifth century b.c.e. Athenian theater have made him a “father of Western tragedy.” Biography • The life of Aeschylus can be pieced together from ancient sources, especially from several biographies that survive in the manuscript tradition that are probably derived from an Alexandrian volume of biographies, perhaps by Chamaeloon. Aeschylus was born in about 525-524 b.c.e. in the Attic town of Eleusis. His father, Euphorion, was a Eupatrid (an aristocrat) and probably very wealthy. As a youth, Aeschylus witnessed the fall of Pisistratid tyranny in Athens and the beginnings of Athenian democracy, and he later lived through the Persian invasions of mainland Greece in 490 and 480 b.c.e. He is said to have fought at Marathon in 490, where he lost a brother, Cynegirus, and at Salamis in 480. Aeschylus’s description in The Persians of the great sea battle of Salamis suggests that he was an eyewitness. Ancient reports that Aeschylus also fought in other battles of the Persian Wars, including Artemisium in 480 and Plataea in 479, are more doubtful. Aeschylus’s wellknown patriotism may have led to the tradition of his being involved in all these battles. Aesychlus lived in an age not only of the citizen-soldier but also of nationalistic and political poetry, and allusions to contemporary issues can be found in Aeschylus’s plays. In addition to the historical play The Persians, other political references in the extant Aeschylean corpus include those in Eumenides to the reform of the Athenian Areopagus by Ephialtes in 462 and to the Athenian alliance with Argos in 458. Evidence for Aeschylus’s connections with the Eleusinian Mysteries is contradictory. In The Frogs, Aristophanes implies that Aeschylus was initiated into this famous mystery cult of his native city; however, in Ethica Nicomachea (335-323 b.c.e.; Nicomachean Ethics, 1797), Aristotle states that Aeschylus was accused of revealing the secrets of the mysteries in a play, and Clement of Alexandria asserts that Aeschylus was acquitted of this charge by proving that he had not been initiated. Scholars have searched the surviving plays and fragments for such a revelation, but none has been found. Certainly, the religious piety that pervades the extant plays makes conscious revelation most unlikely. Aeschylus’s dramatic career probably began very early in the fifth century b.c.e. with his first dramatic production at the Greater Dionysia between 499 and 496. His first tragic victory, for unknown plays, was won in 484, and he earned at least twelve more victories in his lifetime and several more posthumously. The Persians, presented

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in 472 together with the lost Phineus and Glaucus Potnieus, is Aeschylus’s earliest extant play and won first prize. That the choragus of this group was Pericles, the great Athenian general and statesman, may suggest Aeschylean sympathy for Periclean political reforms. A second production of The Persians was probably made within a few years at the court of Hieron, tyrant of Gela in Sicily, where Aeschylus also wrote a play called Aetnae, now lost, in honor of Hieron’s founding of the city of Aetna in 476 b.c.e. Aeschylus’s Sicilian connections can be readily explained by noting that Hieron, like other Greek tyrants, such as Polycrates of Samos and the Pisistratids of Athens, was a great patron of the arts and attracted to his court many poets and philosophers, including Pindar, Bacchylides, Simonides, and Xenophanes. Aeschylus had certainly returned to Athens by 468 b.c.e., for he lost in the Greater Dionysia of that year to Sophocles, who won his first tragic victory. In the next year, however, Aeschylus was victorious with Laius, Oedipus, and the extant Seven Against Thebes, a tragic group often called Aeschylus’s Theban trilogy. Evidence suggests that Aeschylus produced his Danaid trilogy, including the extant The Suppliants and the lost Egyptians and Danaids, in 463, when he was victorious over Sophocles. This trilogy was formerly dated on stylistic grounds as early as 490, but subsequently discovered evidence has caused scholars to revise their conclusions about Aeschylus’s dramatic development and about the evolution of Greek tragedy in general. Aeschylus’s surviving trilogy, the Oresteia, was produced in Athens in 458 b.c.e. and was followed shortly by the poet’s second trip to Gela, where he died and was buried in 456-455. The Gelans erected the following tombstone inscription in the poet’s honor: This memorial hides Aeschylus, the Athenian, son of Euphorion Who died in wheat-bearing Gela. The sacred battlefield of Marathon may tell of his great valor. So, too, can the long-haired Mede, who knows it well. Conspicuously absent from this epitaph is any reference to the literary accomplishments of Aeschylus, who is remembered only as a patriotic Athenian. The author of The Persians and Eumenides would have wanted no other eulogy. Aeschylus had at least two sons, Euaeon and Euphorion, both of whom wrote tragedies. In 431 b.c.e., Euphorion defeated Sophocles as well as Euripides, who produced his MTdeia (Medea, 1781) in that year. Aeschylus’s nephew Philocles was also a tragedian; according to an ancient hypothesis (an introductory note providing information about the play) to Sophocles’ Oidipous Tyrannos (c. 429 b.c.e.; Oedipus Tyrannus, 1715), one of Philocles’ productions was even considered better than Sophocles’ play. Analysis • Despite the fifth century b.c.e. Athenian political and religious issues that are diffused more often in Aeschylus’s tragedies than in those of Sophocles and Euripides and that demand some historical explanation for the modern reader, the plays of Aeschylus still possess that timeless quality of thought and form that is the hallmark of classical Greek literature and that has made the themes of Aeschylean drama forever contemporary. Although Aeschylus’s intense Athenian patriotism and probable support for Periclean democratic reforms is fairly well documented in his biographical sources and is reinforced by the dramatic evidence, it is his attention to theological and ethical issues and especially to the connection between Zeus and justice and to the rules

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governing relationships among humans and between humanity and divinity that provide a central focus for his tragedies. It cannot be a coincidence that all seven extant tragedies, while less than onetwelfth of his total corpus, reflect a constant Aeschylean concern with the theme of human suffering and its causes. Again and again, the plays of Aeschylus suggest that human suffering is divine punishment caused by human transgressions and that people bring on themselves their own sorrows by overstepping their human bounds through hybris, hubris or excessive pride. At the same time, the role of the gods, and especially of Zeus, in this sequence of human action and human suffering is of particular interest to Aeschylus, whose plays seek in Zeus a source of justice and of fair retribution despite the vagaries of an apparently unjust world. The Persians • The Persians, Aeschylus’s earliest surviving tragedy, analyzes this system of divine retribution in the context of the unsuccessful invasion of Greece by the Persian king Xerxes in 480-479 b.c.e. Instead of the jubilant Greek victory ode that this drama could have become in the hands of a less perceptive artist, The Persians, presenting events from the viewpoint of the defeated Persians rather than that of the victorious Greeks, transforms the specific, historical events into a general, universal dramatization of defeat and its causes, of hubristic actions and their punishment. The tragedy, set in the palace of Xerxes at Sousa, far from the events with which it is concerned, sacrifices the immediacy of the battlefield for a broadened perspective. The Persian defeat at Salamis is dramatically foreshadowed in the parodos, or choral entrance song, in which description of the magnificent departure of the Persian forces contrasts with the chorus’s fear of impending disaster. A central cause of this apprehension is the yoking of the Hellespont, which the Persian king had ordered to facilitate departure, and, with overweening pride, to punish the sea for inhibiting Darius’s earlier expedition against Greece. The chorus of elders does not speak here specifically of hubris, but of ate, an untranslatable Greek word implying “blindness,” “delusion,” “reckless sin,” and “ruin.” At the climax of the parodos, the ropes that bind the Hellespont become a metaphor for the nets of ate from which no mortal “who enters is able to escape.” Foreshadowing is continued in the first episode, in which the queen mother Atossa describes to the chorus a vision of Xerxes’ defeat, which has troubled her at night. The chorus’s response to this dream is the suggestion that the queen sacrifice to the chthonic powers and especially to the dead Darius, but before Atossa can act on this advice, a messenger arrives with news of the disaster at Salamis. This scene is an example of the structural and dramatic variety open to the Greek dramatist with Aeschylus’s introduction of the second actor. The messenger’s opening lines are in the traditional anapestic meter reserved for entrances and are followed by an epirrhematic passage in which the messenger speaks in iambic trimeter while the chorus responds in sung lyrics. No details of the battle are provided by the messenger until the queen requests them, and there follow several messenger reports, one listing Persian losses, another describing the sea battle at Salamis, a third the nearby land battle, and, finally, one announcing the losses in the fleet on the return journey. These reports are interrupted by brief interchanges between the messenger and the queen, in which both speakers respond in two or more lines of trimeter. Rarely in this early play can be found the rapid stichomythia, or conversation in alternate lines of trimeter, that is later used so effectively by two or more speakers in Greek tragedy. The messenger scene substantiates the earlier fears of the queen and the

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chorus with the reality of defeat, and the dramatic effect of the series of speeches is like a sequence of disastrous waves on the Persian nation. The choral ode that follows the messenger scene is a lyric lament over the disaster and contrasts vividly in its pathos with the majesty of the parodos, in which the expedition’s departure was described. The messenger scene dramatizes the actuality of the Persian defeat, but the causes of this defeat are not explained until the second episode, in which Atossa and the chorus call forth the ghost of Darius as they had planned to do before the arrival of the messenger. It is Darius who, as a ghost, has the atemporal perspective to link cause and effect and to explain the defeat of his son Xerxes. When the disaster of Salamis is announced to him, Darius’s initial response is that “some great divine force has made Xerxes unable to think clearly,” and he then elaborates by linking both Zeus and Xerxes himself as agents in the disaster. Darius says that Xerxes’ senses were diseased when he yoked the Hellespont: “Although a mortal, he thought to have power over all the gods, but not with good counsel.” Zeus did not stop Xerxes in his folly because “god joins in when a man hastens [his own destruction],” a doom that Xerxes “in his youthful boldness unwittedly accomplished.” Thus, it is Xerxes’ senseless pride, his haughty attempt to become more than human, which is his downfall, and the gods, especially Zeus, not only acquiesce but also assist in this downfall. Darius makes this most explicit in his prophecy of the Persian defeat at Plataea (479 b.c.e.), in which he speaks specifically of “hybris blossoming forth and having the fruit of ate” and of Zeus who is “a harsh accountant and punisher of excessively arrogant thoughts.” This dramatically central episode ends with Darius advising the absent Xerxes to be more moderate. The arrival of the defeated Xerxes in the exodos, or last scene, is, in a sense, an undramatic but necessary anticlimax to the psychopomp of Darius in the second episode. The scene with Xerxes is a purely lyric lament in which no further dramatic or thematic development is achieved. There is, in fact, no reference in the exodos to the appearance of Darius or to his explanation of events. The drama ends with Xerxes, still unconscious of his own fatal role in the disaster, giving himself over to uninhibited lamentation. This ignorance is a significant feature of Greek tragedy, and of Aeschylean tragedy in particular, a fact that has been obfuscated by Aristotelian criticism. In his Poetics, Aristotle placed great emphasis on a tragic fall (peripeteia) linked with recognition (anagnorisis) and tragic flaw (hamartia). Most Greek tragedies cannot be successfully interpreted through Aristotelian terminology; certainly not The Persians, in which there is no recognition (anagnorisis) of his tragic flaw (hamartia) by Xerxes. The disastrous effects of Xerxes’ pride are well developed in The Persians, but they are developed for Atossa, the chorus, and the audience, not for Xerxes. Agamemnon • The theological and ethical system suggested in The Persians can also be seen in Agamemnon, a play in which the theme of pride and its punishment is complicated by the issues of blood guilt and family curse. The plot is not historical in the modern sense of the word, but rather mythical, which, for the Greeks, was also historical, and it is concerned with the homecoming of Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek forces in the Trojan War, and with his subsequent brutal murder by his wife, Clytemnestra, and his cousin Aegisthus. The story is at least as old as Homer, who uses it in the Odyssey (c. 725 b.c.e.; English translation, 1614), but it is impossible to determine whether the stark thematic contrasts between the Aeschylean and Homeric versions are a result of an intermediary

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source or Aeschylean innovation. In Homer, the tale is used as an exemplum of filial duty and feminine deception: Telemachus should show as much fidelity to his missing father as Orestes did to his late father, Agamemnon, and on his visit to Hades, Odysseus is warned by the ghost of Agamemnon to beware of the guile of women. In Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, the death of the king is not simply a result of the deception of Clytemnestra; rather, the play is a dramatized quest for the deeper causes of events, causes that are seen as a combination of past and present deeds, individual and collective guilt, and human and divine motivation. The parodos of Agamemnon deals with the past. In this unusually long entrance song, the chorus of elders reflects forebodingly on the crucial event surrounding Agamemnon’s departure for Troy—the sacrifice by Agamemnon of his own daughter Iphigenia. This sacrifice presented a dilemma for Agamemnon. On the one hand, it was clear that Zeus was sending him against Troy because Troy broke the Greek custom of xenia, or guest-friendship, in the theft of Helen, wife of Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus, by the Trojan prince Paris. On the other hand, the departing Greeks had offended the goddess Artemis, who would not permit departure until Iphigenia was sacrificed. Agamemnon was thus placed in the impossible situation of either offending Zeus or killing his own daughter. He reluctantly chose the latter course. Significantly, the chorus’s narration of these events is broken by the famous “Hymn to Zeus.” In this prayer, occurring at the narrative point at which Agamemnon must make his decision, the chorus turns to Zeus as a source of wisdom, as a god who “has led men to think, who has set down the rule that wisdom comes through suffering.” These lines, often considered the heart of Agamemnon, if not of the entire Oresteia, underscore Zeus’s central role in dramatic events. Agamemnon dies not only because he killed Iphigenia, but also because of Zeus’s didactic system of learning through suffering (pathei mathos). The lessons of Zeus’s instruction are explained in the first choral ode, a song of victory for the fall of Troy in which the chorus argues that the city fell by the lightning stroke of Zeus because of Paris’s insolence in stealing Helen. It is in reference to Paris that the chorus says that “someone has denied that the gods deign to care about mortals who trample upon the beauty of holy things.” Yet, by the end of the ode, Zeus’s anger is not only directed toward Paris but also toward someone else who has caused so many war dead, who has become “prosperous beyond justice.” Although his name is not mentioned, it is clear that this man is Agamemnon. The hubris of Agamemnon, implied in the first ode, becomes more explicit in the second episode, when a messenger arrives to confirm the fall of Troy and to report that even the temples of the gods at Troy have been destroyed. The burden for this unwarranted and insolent offense against the gods must fall squarely on the shoulders of Agamemnon, as commander, and is an act of hubris similar to Xerxes’ yoking of the Hellespont. Agamemnon’s hubris is dramatically confirmed in the famous third episode, often called the “Carpet Scene” because of the purple carpet that Clytemnestra craftily laid in the path of her returning husband, supposedly as a gesture of respect but actually for Agamemnon’s spiritual destruction. Agamemnon himself refers to this carpet as an honor befitting the gods alone and asks that he should be respected as a mortal, not a god. Nevertheless, Clytemnestra is able to coax her husband across the fatal tapestry by the mention of Priam, Agamemnon’s defeated Trojan rival, who, in his Eastern opulence, would certainly have accepted the honor. So, the Greek king walks on the carpet into his palace and his death, not without an apotropaic prayer that “no god strike him from afar” as he does so.

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Although hubris is not mentioned in this scene, there is no need to do so. Agamemnon’s act is in itself visual proof of the king’s overweening pride, of his excessive selfesteem. Agamemnon dies, then, for his own sins. There are, however, further considerations: There is Cassandra, a Trojan princess whom Agamemnon has brought home as his slave and mistress. Cassandra is another proof of Agamemnon’s pride; he has what a god could not have. Cassandra, a prophetess of Apollo, had dedicated her virginity to the god. When she refused the god’s sexual advances, Apollo punished her by making her prophecies never believed but always true. Aeschylus uses this prophetic skill of Cassandra to great effect in the climactic fourth episode, in which the prophetess repeatedly predicts the king’s and her own imminent deaths, but no one believes her. At the same time, Cassandra adds another perspective to the death of Agamemnon by mentioning “small children crying for their own death.” This is a reference to the crime of Agamemnon’s father, Atreus, who had killed his nephews, Aegisthus’s brothers, and served them for dinner to their father, Thyestes. Cassandra’s prophetic abilities thus serve to clarify the causes of Agamemnon’s death, just as the ghost of Darius did Xerxes’ downfall. In this way, Aeschylus manipulates Greek belief in prophecy and in ghosts to great dramatic effect. By the time that Agamemnon’s death cries ring from the palace, the king’s death has been shown to be not only the result of his own sins of pride but also the result of blood guilt, of the sins of his father. The net in which Clytemnestra and Aegisthus capture Agamemnon is no simple affair, but an entangled web of his own and his father’s making, of human and divine cause and effect. This web engulfs Agamemnon in the first play of the Oresteia and engulfs his son in the remaining two plays. Xerxes in The Persians had been caught in a similar net of pride, and such links of theme and imagery between these two plays, which together represent Aeschylus’s earliest and latest extant plays, suggest a continuity of thought in the Aeschylean corpus centered around hubris and its consequences. Variations on this theme can be found in the other surviving plays, such as The Suppliants, in which a just but mysterious Zeus is seen as the protector of the good and the punisher of evil, and Seven Against Thebes, in which human and divine will together with blood guilt again coalesce into disaster. Despite its diversity, the Aeschylean corpus presents a peculiar cohesion of thought. Although the lessons derived from dramatic events may be lost on Aeschylus’s main characters, such as Xerxes and Agamemnon, for whom there is no “learning through suffering,” the lesson of Aeschylus’s plays is directed especially to the audience, not only a fifth century b.c.e. Athenian audience but also a more universal one for whom the Aeschylean play is a timeless attempt to explain the causes of human suffering through a complicated chain of cause and effect, of human action and divine punishment. Through a masterful combination of great poetry and ingenious stagecraft, Aeschylus presents in his plays the outstanding moral issues of his day and of all time. Prometheus Bound • Prometheus Bound, the seventh play in Aeschylus’s manuscript tradition, cannot be firmly dated and contains so many problems and idiosyncrasies of meter, languages, staging, and structure that a large number of modern scholars have come to question Aeschylean authorship. The arguments on both sides of the authorship debate have been thoroughly discussed by C. J. Herington in The Author of the “Prometheus Bound” (1970) and by M. Griffith in The Authenticity of “Prometheus Bound” (1977), and the debate has remained a stalemate. If this play was written by Aeschylus, it must have been written toward the end of Aeschylus’s lifetime, probably after 460,

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and may have been part of a connected trilogy including the lost Prometheus Lyomenos (unbound) and Prometheus Pyrphoros (fire-bearer). Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Aeschylus. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2001. Part of a series on dramatists meant for secondary school students, this book contains essays examining the work and life of Aeschylus. Includes bibliography and index. Connacher, D. J. Aeschylus: The Earlier Plays and Related Studies. Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press, 1996. A study of the Greek dramatist’s earlier works, with particular emphasis on his technique. Includes bibliography. Goward, Barbara. Telling Tragedy: Narrative Technique in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. London: Duckworth, 1999. The author examines the function of narrative in the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Includes bibliography and index. Griffith, M. The Authenticity of “Prometheus Bound.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Discusses the question of whether Aeschylus wrote Prometheus Bound. Harrison, Thomas E. H. The Emptiness of Asia: Aeschylus’ “Persians” and the History of the Fifth Century. London: Duckworth, 2000. An examination of Aeschylus’s The Persians from the historical perspective. Includes bibliography and index. Herington, C. J. The Author of the “Prometheus Bound.” Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970. An examination of the authorship question regarding Prometheus Bound. Podlecki, Anthony J. The Political Background of Aeschylean Tragedy. 2d ed. London: Bristol Classical Press, 1999. In addition to providing literary criticism, the author looks at the politics that pervades much of Aeschylus’s work. Includes bibliography and index. Sullivan, Shirley Darcus. Aeschylus’s Use of Psychological Terminology: Traditional and New. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997. Sullivan examines the psychological aspects of the language used in Aeschylus’s tragedies. Includes bibliography and index. Taplin, Oliver. The Stagecraft of Aeschylus: The Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy. Reprint. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989. Taplin focuses on Aeschylus’s stagecraft, particularly his use of dramatic visual devices. Thomas J. Sienkewicz

Edward Albee Edward Albee

Born: Virginia; March 12, 1928 Principal drama • The Zoo Story, pr. 1959, pb. 1960; The Death of Bessie Smith, pr., pb. 1960; The Sandbox, pr., pb. 1960; Fam and Yam, pr., pb. 1960; The American Dream, pr., pb. 1961; Bartleby, pr. 1961 (libretto, with James Hinton, Jr.; music by William Flanagan; adaptation of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”); Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, pr., pb. 1962; The Ballad of the Sad Café, pr., pb. 1963 (adaptation of Carson McCullers’s novel); Tiny Alice, pr. 1964, pb. 1965; A Delicate Balance, pr., pb. 1966; Malcolm, pr., pb. 1966 (adaptation of James Purdy’s novel Malcolm); Everything in the Garden, pr. 1967, pb. 1968 (adaptation of Giles Cooper’s play Everything in the Garden); Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, pr. 1968, pb. 1969 (2 one-acts); All Over, pr., pb. 1971; Seascape, pr., pb. 1975; Counting the Ways, pr. 1976, pb. 1977; Listening, pr., pb. 1977; The Lady from Dubuque, pr., pb. 1980; Lolita, pr. 1981, pb. 1984 (adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel); The Man Who Had Three Arms, pr., pb. 1982; Finding the Sun, pr. 1983, pb. 1994; Marriage Play, pr. 1987, pb. 1995; Three Tall Women, pr. 1991, pb. 1994; The Lorca Play, pr. 1992; Fragments: A Sit Around, pr. 1993, pb. 1995; The Play About the Baby, pr. 1998, pb. 2002; The Goat: Or, Who Is Sylvia?, pr., pb. 2002; Occupant, pr. 2002 Other literary forms • Although Edward Albee has written the libretto for an unsuccessful operatic version of Herman Melville’s story “Bartleby the Scrivener,” as well as some occasional essays and a few adaptations, he is known primarily for his plays. Albee’s unpublished works include a short story and at least one novel written while he was a teenager. Esquire published the first chapter of a novel he began writing in 1963 but never completed. Achievements • Edward Albee is, with David Mamet, Sam Shepard, and August Wilson, one of the few American playwrights to emerge since the 1950’s with any claim to being considered a major dramatist ranked among the pantheon of Eugene O’Neill, Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams. Since The Zoo Story first appeared, Albee has produced a sustained and varied body of work, often of considerably higher quality than his critical and popular reputation would suggest. In the introduction to his most experimental works, the two one-acts published together in Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, Albee sets forth the two “obligations” of a playwright: to illuminate the human condition and to make some statement about the art form itself by altering “the forms within which his precursors have had to work.” Like O’Neill before him, Albee has always been an experimentalist, refusing to go back and repeat the earlier formulas simply because they have proved commercially and critically successful. Although acutely disturbed by the downward spiral and paralysis of will that seem to have overtaken modern civilization and committed to charting these in his work, Albee is not primarily a social playwright, and there is hardly one of his plays that is totally naturalistic or realistic. In form and style, they range, indeed, from surrealism (The Sandbox) to allegory (Tiny Alice), from the quasi-religious drawingroom play (A Delicate Balance) to the fable (Seascape), from the picaresque journey (Malcolm) to the ritual deathwatch (both All Over and The Lady from Dubuque), from 15

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scenes linked by cinematic techniques (The Death of Bessie Smith) to monodrama for a disembodied voice (Box), and from traditional memory play (Three Tall Women) to postmodern burlesque (The Play About the Baby). Albee has received numerous awards and honors, including two Obie Awards, one in 1959-1960 for The Zoo Story and a second in 1993-1994 for sustained achievement, and two Tony Awards for best play, for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1963 and for The Goat: Or, Who Is Sylvia? in 2002. He was awarded three Pulitzer Prizes in Drama, for A Delicate Balance in 1967, Seascape in 1975, and Three Tall Women in 1994. The New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play was given to three of Albee’s dramas: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1963), Three Tall Women (1994), and The Goat (2002). Other honors include the Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Award (1996) and the National Medal of Arts (1997). Biography • Born on March 12, 1928, Edward Franklin Albee was adopted at the age of two weeks by the socially prominent and wealthy New Yorkers Reed and Frances Albee. His adoptive father was the scion of the family who owned the Keith-Albee chain of vaudeville houses; his adoptive mother was a former Bergdorf high-fashion model. Albee’s deep-seated resentment of the natural parents who abandoned him finds reflection in the child motifs that pervade both his original plays and his adaptations: the orphan in The Zoo Story and The Ballad of the Sad Café, the mutilated twin in The American Dream, the intensely hoped-for child who is never conceived and the conceived child who is unwanted in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the dead son in A Delicate Balance, the child in search of his father in Malcolm, the prodigal son detested by a haughty mother in Three Tall Women, and the apparently kidnapped child in The Play About the Baby. Living with the Albees was Edward’s maternal grandmother, Grandma Cotta, whom he revered and would later memorialize in The Sandbox and The American Dream. After his primary education at the Rye Country Day School, Albee attended a succession of prep schools (Lawrenceville School for Boys, Valley Forge Military Academy), finally graduating from Choate in 1946 before enrolling at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where he studied for a year and a half. While in high school, he wrote both poetry and plays. In 1953, Albee was living in Greenwich Village and working at a variety of odd jobs when, with the encouragement of Thornton Wilder, he committed himself to the theater. The Zoo Story, written in only two weeks, premiered in Berlin on September 28, 1959; when it opened Off-Broadway at the Provincetown Playhouse on a double bill with Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (pr., pb. 1958) in January, 1960, it brought Albee immediate acclaim as the most promising of the new playwrights and won for him an Obie Award as Best Play of the Year. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Albee’s first full-length work—and still his most famous—opened on Broadway in October, 1962, winning for him both the Drama Critics Circle Award and the Tony Award for the Best American Play of that season; the Drama Jury voted it the Pulitzer Prize, but the Advisory Board of Columbia University overturned the nomination because of the play’s strong language, and, as a result, John Gassner and John Mason Brown resigned from the jury in protest. Albee went on, however, to win three Pulitzers, for A Delicate Balance, Seascape, and Three Tall Women. Along with the New York productions of numerous original one-act plays and original full-length works, Albee has done four adaptations for the stage: of Carson McCullers’s 1951 novella The Ballad of the Sad Café; of James Purdy’s 1959 novel Malcolm; of Giles Cooper’s 1962 play Everything in the Garden; and of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita. From the time of his own early successes, Albee has ac-

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tively encouraged the development of other young dramatists and, as part of a production team, has also brought the work of major avantgarde foreign dramatists to New York. Under the auspices of the State Department, he toured behind the Iron Curtain and in South America, and he has become a frequent and popular lecturer on the college cirImage not available cuit, as well as a director of revivals of his own plays. Albee is an impassioned defender of the National Endowment for the Arts. He has also been actively involved with the international writers association PEN and served as president of the International Theater Institute. After a residency at the University of Houston, Albee directed the world premieres of Marriage Play and Three Tall Women, both (AP/Wide World Photos) at the English Theatre in Vienna; he also directed Marriage Play at the Alley Theatre in 1991 and at the McCarter Theatre in 1992. Between 1993 and 1994, the Signature Theatre Company presented a season of plays by Albee that included the New York premieres of Finding the Sun, Marriage Play and Fragments. Albee’s plays and the actors who perform in them are perennial nominees for Tony and Obie Awards. The Goat, Albee’s nineteenth play produced on Broadway, won the Tony Award for Best Play in 2002 as well as a New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. In 1996, he became only the fourth playwright to receive a Kennedy Center Honor. Critic David Richards of The New York Times noted that Albee, “increasingly introspective over the years,” has countered his disappointment with Broadway (The Man Who Had Three Arms saw only sixteen performances in 1983) by becoming “a European playwright.” Analysis • Though he is touted sometimes as the chief American practitioner of the absurd in drama, Edward Albee only rarely combines in a single work both the techniques and the philosophy associated with that movement and is seldom as unremittingly bleak and despairing an author as Beckett. Yet the influence of Eugène Ionesco’s humor and of Jean Genet’s rituals can be discerned in isolated works, as can the battle of the sexes and the voracious, emasculating female from August Strindberg, the illusion/ reality motif from Luigi Pirandello and O’Neill, and the poetic language of T. S. Eliot, Beckett, and Harold Pinter, as well as the recessive action and lack of definite resolution and closure often found in Beckett and Pinter. As the only avant-garde American dramatist of his generation to attain a wide measure of popular success, Albee sometimes demonstrates, especially in the plays from the first decade of his career, the rather strident and accusatory voice of the angry young man. The outlook in his later works, however, is more that of the compassionate moralist, linking him—perhaps unexpectedly—with Anton Chekhov; one of the characters in

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All Over, recognizing the disparity between what human beings could become and what they have settled for, even echoes the Russian master’s Madame Ranevsky when she says, “How dull our lives are.” Even in his most technically and stylistically avant-garde dramas, however, Albee remains essentially very traditional in the values he espouses, as he underlines the necessity for human contact and communion, for family ties and friendships, which provide individuals with the courage to grow and face the unknown. Always prodding people to become more, yet, at the same time, sympathetically accepting their fear and anxiety over change, Albee has increasingly become a gentle apologist for human beings, who need one crutch after another, who need one illusion after another, so that—in a paraphrase of O’Neill’s words—they can make it through life and comfort their fears of death. Despite a lengthy career that has, especially in its second half, been marked by more critical downs than ups, Albee has not been satisfied to rest on his successes, such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, nor has he been content simply to repeat the formulas that have worked for him in the past. Instead, he has continued to experiment with dramatic form, to venture into new structures and styles. In so doing, he has grown into a major voice in dramatic literature, the progress of whose career in itself reflects his overriding theme: No emotional or artistic or spiritual growth is possible without embracing the terror—and perhaps the glory—of tomorrow’s unknown, for the unknown is contemporary humanity’s only certainty. The major recurrent pattern in Albee’s plays finds his characters facing a test or a challenge to become more fully human. In The Zoo Story, Jerry arrives at a bench in Central Park to jar Peter out of his passivity and Madison Avenue complacence; in The Death of Bessie Smith, the black blues singer arrives dying at a southern hospital only to be turned away because of racial prejudice; in Tiny Alice, Brother Julian arrives at Miss Alice’s mansion to undergo his dark night of the soul; in A Delicate Balance, Harry and Edna arrive at the home of their dearest friends to test the limits of friendship and measure the quality of Agnes and Tobias’s life; in Seascape, the lizards Leslie and Sarah come up from the sea to challenge Charlie to renewed activity and to try their own readiness for the human adventure; and in The Lady from Dubuque, the Lady and her black traveling companion arrive to ease Jo to her death and help her husband learn to let go. To effect the desired change in Peter, Jerry in The Zoo Story must first break down the barriers that hinder communication. Accomplishing this might even require deliberate cruelty, because kindness by itself may no longer be enough: Oftentimes in Albee, one character needs to hurt another before he can help, the hurt then becoming a creative rather than a destructive force. Along with the focus on lack of communication and on a love and concern that dare to be critical, Albee consistently pursues several additional thematic emphases throughout his works. The American Dream, which comments on the decline and fall from grace of Western civilization and on the spiritual aridity of a society that lives solely by a materialistic ethic, also decries the emasculation of Daddy at the hands of Mommy; to a greater or lesser degree. The Death of Bessie Smith, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and A Delicate Balance all speak as well to what Albee sees as a disturbing reversal of gender roles (a motif he inherits from Strindberg), though Albee does become increasingly understanding of the female characters in his later works. Several plays, among them Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and A Delicate Balance, consider the delimiting effect of time on human choice and the way in which humanity’s potential for constructive change decreases as time goes on. Characters in both A Delicate Balance and Tiny Alice face the existential void, suffering the anxiety that arises over the possibility of there being a meaninglessness at the very core of existence,

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while characters in several others, including Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung, All Over, and The Lady from Dubuque, confront mortality as they ponder the distinction between dying (which ends) and death (which goes on) and the suffering of the survivor. Elsewhere, particularly in Counting the Ways, Albee insists on the difficulty of ever arriving at certainty in matters of the heart, which cannot be known or proved quantitatively. Finally, in such works as Malcolm and Seascape, he explores the notion that innocence must be lost—or at least risked—before there can be any hope of achieving a paradise regained. If the mood of many Albee works is autumnal, even wintry, it is because the dramatist continually prods his audiences into questioning whether the answers that the characters put forward in response to the human dilemma—such panaceas as religion (Tiny Alice) or formulaic social rituals (All Over)—might not in themselves all be simply illusions in which human beings hide from a confrontation with the ultimate nothingness of existence. In this, he comes closer to the absurdists, though he is more positive in his holding out of salvific acts: the sacrifice to save the other that ends The Zoo Story, the gesture of communion that concludes Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the affirmation of shared humanness that ends Seascape, and the merciful comforting of the survivor that concludes The Lady from Dubuque. If Albee’s characters often live a death-in-life existence, it is equally evident that human beings, God’s only metaphor-making animals, can sometimes achieve a breakthrough by coming to full consciousness of their condition and by recognizing the symbolic, allegorical, and anagogical planes of existence. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? • Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which brought Albee immediate fame as the most important American dramatist since Williams and Miller, is probably also the single most important American play of the 1960’s, the only one from that decade with any likelihood of becoming a classic work of dramatic literature. In this, his first full-length drama, Albee continues several strands from his one-act plays—including the need to hurt in order to help from The Zoo Story, the criticism of Western civilization from The American Dream, and the Strindbergian battle of the sexes from that play and The Death of Bessie Smith—while weaving in several others that become increasingly prominent in his work: excoriating wit, a concern with illusion/reality, the structuring of action through games and game-playing (here, “Humiliate the Host,” “Hump the Hostess,” “Get the Guests,” and “Bringing Up Baby”), and a mature emphasis on the need to accept change and the potentially creative possibilities it offers. Tightly unified in time, place, and action, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? occurs in the early hours of Sunday morning in the home of George, a professor of history, and his wife, Martha, in the mythical eastern town of New Carthage. After a party given by her father, the college president, Martha invites Nick, a young biology teacher, and his wife, Honey, back home for a nightcap. Through the ensuing confrontations and games that occasionally turn bitter and vicious, both the older and the younger couples experience a radical, regenerative transformation. George, who sees himself as a humanist who lives for the multiplicity and infinite variety that have always characterized history, immediately sets himself up against Nick, the man of science, or, better yet, of scientism, whose narrow, amoral view of inevitability—wherein every creature would be determined down to color of hair and eyes— would sound the death knell for civilization. Like the attractive, muscular young men from The American Dream and The Sandbox, Nick is appealing on the outside but spiritually vapid within. If his ethical sense is un-

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developed, even nonexistent, and his intellect sterile, he is also physically impotent when he and Martha go off to bed, though his temporary impotence should probably be regarded mainly as symbolic of the general sterility of his entire life. George apparently intends, much as Jerry had in The Zoo Story, to jar Nick out of his present condition, which involves being overly solicitous of his mousey, infantile wife. Though experiencing a false pregnancy when Nick married her, Honey, slim-hipped and unable to hold her liquor—her repeated exits to the bathroom are adroitly managed to move characters on and off the stage—is frightened of childbirth. As George detects, she has been preventing conception or aborting without Nick’s knowledge, and in this way unmanning her husband, preventing him from transmitting his genes. By the play’s end, Nick and Honey have seen the intense emptiness that can infect a marriage without children, and Honey three times cries out that she wants a child. George and Martha were unable to have children—neither will cast blame on the other for this—and so, twenty-one years earlier, they created an imaginary son, an illusion so powerful that it has become, for all intents and purposes, a reality for them. If not intellectually weak, George, who is in fact Albee’s spokesperson in the play, does share with Nick the condition of being under the emotional and physical control of his wife. Ever since the time when Martha’s Daddy insisted that his faculty participate in an exhibition sparring match to demonstrate their readiness to fight in the war and Martha knocked George down in the huckleberry bush, she has taunted George with being a blank and a cipher. It is unlikely that he will ever succeed her father as college president—he will not even become head of the history department. Martha claims that George married her to be humiliated and that she has worn the pants in the family not by choice but because someone must be stronger in any relationship. George realizes that if he does not act decisively to change his life by taking control, the time for any possible action will have passed. In a formulation of the evolutionary metaphor that Albee recurrently employs, George, who, like civilization, is facing a watershed, remarks that a person can descend only so many rungs on the ladder before there can be no turning back; he must stop contemplating the past and decide to “alter the future.” Martha, too, seems to want George to take hold and become more forceful; she, indeed, is openly happy when he exerts himself, as when he frightens them all with a rifle that shoots a parasol proclaiming “Bang,” in one of the absurd jokes of which Albee is fond. Martha, despite being loud and brash and vulgar, is also sensual and extremely vulnerable. She does indeed love George, who is the only man she has ever loved, and fears that someday she will go so far in belittling him that she will lose him forever. The imaginary son has served not only as a uniting force in their marriage but also as a beanbag they can toss against each other. When George decides to kill the son whom they mutually created through an act of imagination, Martha desperately insists that he does not have the right to do this on his own, but to no avail. Even if the child, who was to have reached his twenty-first birthday and legal maturity on the day of the play, had been real, the parents would have had to let go and continue alone, facing the future with only each other. As George says, “It was time.” He kills the illusion, intoning the mass for the dead. It is Sunday morning, and Martha is still frightened of “Virginia Woolf,” of living without illusion, and of facing the unknown. “Maybe it will be better,” George tells her, for one can never be totally certain of what is to come. Just as there can be no assurance—though all signs point in that direction—that Nick and Honey’s marriage will be firmer with a child, there can be no certainty that

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George and Martha’s will be better without their imaginary son, though George is now prepared to offer Martha the strength and support needed to see her through her fear. Finally, Albee seems to be saying, human beings must not only accept change but also actively embrace it for the possibilities it presents for growth. The future is always terrifying, an uncharted territory, yet if one does not walk into it, one has no other choice but death. Tiny Alice • Tiny Alice is Albee’s richest work from a philosophical point of view; it also represents his most explicit excursion into the realm of the absurd. In it, Albee addresses the problem of how human beings come to know the reality outside themselves, even questioning whether there is, finally, any reality to know. To do this, Albee builds his play around a series of dichotomies: between faith and reason, between present memory and past occurrence, and between symbol and substance. The play opens with a scene that could almost stand on its own as a little one-act play, demonstrating Albee’s wit at its virulent best. A Lawyer and a Cardinal, old school chums and, apparently, homosexual lovers in their adolescence, attack each other verbally, revealing the venery of both civil and religious authority. The Lawyer has come as the emissary of Miss Alice, ready to bequeath to the Church one hundred million dollars a year for the next twenty years; the Cardinal’s secretary, the lay Brother Julian, will be sent to her castle to complete the transaction. For Julian, this becomes an allegorical dark night of the soul, a period when his religious faith will be tempted and tested. On the literal level, the play seems preposterous at times and even muddled; the suspicion that all this has been planned by some extortion ring, though it is unclear what they hope to gain by involving Julian, or even, perhaps, that all this is a charade devised by Julian to provide himself with an opportunity for sacrifice, is never quite dispelled. On the metaphoric and symbolic levels, however, as a religious drama about contemporary humanity’s need to make the abstract concrete in order to have some object to worship, Tiny Alice is clear and consistent and succeeds admirably. Julian, who earlier suffered a temporary loss of sanity over the disparity between his own conception of God and the false gods that human beings create in their own image, is now undergoing a further crisis. His temptation now is to search out a personification of the Godhead in order to make the Unknowable knowable, by making it concrete through a symbol; he hopes to prove that God exists by making contact with an experiential representation of him. To represent the Deity in this manner is, however, as the Lawyer insists, to distort and diminish it so that it can be understood in human terms. Up to this point, Julian has always fought against precisely such a reduction of the divine. The symbol that Julian now literally embraces—through a sexual consummation and marriage that is both religious and erotic—is Miss Alice, the surrogate for Tiny Alice. That God in Albee’s play is named “Tiny Alice” points, in itself, to the strange modern phenomenon of a reduced and delimited rather than an expansive deity. Instead of the real (Miss Alice) being a pale shadowing forth of the ideal form (Tiny Alice), here the symbol (Alice) is larger than what it represents, just as the mansion in which the action after scene 1 occurs is larger than its replica, exact down to the last detail, that is onstage in the library. The Lawyer insists that human beings can never worship an abstraction, for to do so always results in worshiping only the symbol and never the substance or the thing symbolized. Furthermore, he causes Julian to question whether that substance has any tangible existence: Is it only the symbol, and not the thing symbolized, that exists? If so, then Julian faces the possibility of nothingness, of there being

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nothing there, of there being only the finite, sense-accessible dimension in which people live and no higher order that provides meaning. In the face of this dilemma, Brother Julian can either despair of ever knowing his God or make a leap of faith. When the financial arrangements have been completed, the Lawyer, who—like the Butler—has had Miss Alice as his mistress, shoots Julian, who has always dreamed of sacrificing himself for his faith. Martyrdom, the ultimate form of service to one’s God, always involves questions of suicidal intent, of doing, as Eliot’s hero in Murder in the Cathedral (pr., pb. 1935) knows, “the right deed for the wrong reason.” Is one dying for self, or as a totally submissive instrument of God? As Julian dies in the posture of one crucified, he demands, in a paroxysm blending sexual hysteria and religious ecstasy, that the transcendent personify itself; indeed, a shadow moves through the mansion, accompanied by an ever-increasing heartbeat and everlouder breathing, until it totally envelops the room. As Albee himself commented, two possibilities present themselves: Either the transcendent is real, and the God Tiny Alice actually manifests itself to Brother Julian at the moment of his death, or Julian’s desire for transcendence is so great that he deceives himself. The play’s ending, while allowing for the person of faith to be confirmed in his or her belief about the spiritual reality behind the physical symbol, is at the same time disquieting in that it insists on the equally possible option that the revelation of transcendence is merely a figment of one’s imagination. What Albee may well be suggesting, then, and what brings him to the doorstep of the absurdists in this provocative work, is that there is, finally, nothing there except what human beings, through their illusions, are able to call up as a shield against the void. A Delicate Balance • A Delicate Balance, for which Albee deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize denied him by the Advisory Board four seasons earlier for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, is an autumnal play about death-in-life. A metaphysical drawing-room drama in the manner of Eliot and Graham Greene, it focuses on a well-to-do middleaged couple, Agnes and Tobias, who are forced one October weekend to assess their lives by the unexpected visit of their closest friends, Harry and Edna (characters in Albee traditionally lack surnames). The latter couple arrives on Friday night, frightened by a sudden perception of emptiness. Having faced the existential void, they flee, terrified, to the warmth and succor of Agnes and Tobias’s home, trusting that they will discover there some shelter from meaninglessness, some proof that at least the personal values of friendship and love remain. As the stage directions imply, an audience should not measure these visitors-in-the-night against the requirements of realistic character portrayal; they function, instead, as mirror images for their hosts, who, by looking at them, are forced to confront the emotional and spiritual malaise of their own lives. Agnes’s live-in sister, the self-proclaimed alcoholic Claire—whose name suggests the clear-sightedness of this woman who stands on the sidelines and sees things as they are—understands the threat that Harry and Edna bring with them. Agnes fears that their guests come bearing the “plague,” and Claire understands that this weekend will be spent waiting for the biopsy, for confirmation of whether some dread, terminal disease afflicts this family. Agnes not only has no desire for selfknowledge but also deliberately guards against any diagnosis of the family’s ills. As the fulcrum, she is able to maintain the family’s status quo only by keeping herself and Tobias in a condition of stasis, insulated from the currents that threaten to upset the “delicate balance” that allows them to go on without ever questioning their assump-

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tions. A somewhat haughty though gracious woman, whose highly artificial and carefully measured language reflects the controlled pattern of her existence and her inability to tolerate or handle the unexpected, Agnes muses frequently on sex roles. A dramatic descendant of Strindberg’s male characters rather than of his female characters, she decries all of those things that have made the sexes too similar and have thus threatened the stability of the traditional family unit. From her perspective, it is the wife’s function to maintain the family after the husband has made the decisions: She only holds the reins; Tobias decides the route. It is Tobias’s house that is not in order, and only he, she says, can decide what should be done. Tobias himself would claim that Agnes rules, but Agnes would counter that this is only his illusion. Clearly, Tobias seems to have relinquished his position of authority after the death of their son, Teddy; at that point, according to their oft-divorced daughter, Julia, now inopportunely home again after a fourth failed marriage, Tobias became a pleasant, ineffectual, gray noneminence. Undoubtedly, his insufficiencies as a father have had an adverse effect upon his daughter’s relationships with men, and although Tobias rationalizes that he did not want another son because of the potential suffering it might have caused for Agnes, he might equally have feared his own inadequacy as a role model. That Tobias lacks essential self-criticism and decisiveness is suggested by the motto he has cheerfully adopted: “We do what we can.” In other words, he takes the path of least resistance, no longer exerting himself to do more than the minimum in his personal relationships. At one point in the play, Tobias tells a story about his cat and him—a parable similar to Jerry’s tale of the dog in The Zoo Story—which illustrates Tobias’s attitude toward having demands placed on him and being judged. Believing that the cat was accusing him of being neglectful, and resenting this assessment, he turned to hating the cat, which he finally had put to sleep in an act Claire terms the “least ugly” choice. Now, with Harry and Edna’s visit, Tobias is again having his motives and the depth of his concern measured. He realizes that if he does not respond positively to their needs, he will be tacitly admitting that his whole life, even his marriage to Agnes, has been empty. In one of the verbal arias for which Albee is justly famous, Tobias begs, even demands, that they remain, though he does not want this burden and disruption. When, despite his desperate entreaties, they insist on leaving, Agnes can calmly remark, “Come now; we can begin the day,” satisfied that the dark night of terror is safely passed. Her closing line must, however, be understood as ironic. Although it is Sunday morning, there has been no resurrection or renewal; the opportunity for salvation has been missed, and Tobias must now live on with the knowledge that he has failed, that much of his life has been a sham. As is true of the characters at the end of O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (pr., pb. 1956) Tobias’s tragedy is that he has come to self-knowledge too late to act upon the new recognition. Albee’s central perception in A Delicate Balance appears to be that time diminishes the possibilities for human choice and change. Try as he might, it is now too late for Tobias to break out of the pattern, and so he is condemned to living out his days with an awareness of how little he has become because he lacks the comforting illusions of propriety and magnanimity that Agnes can call on for solace. He has seen his soul and has found it wanting, and things can never be the same again. For Tobias, in what is Albee’s most beautiful play, the “delicate balance” that everyone erects as a shelter has tipped, but not in his favor. As Agnes muses, “Time happens,” and all that remains is rust, bones, and wind. These are Albee’s hollow people for whom the dark never ends.

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Seascape • If Tiny Alice and A Delicate Balance are dark plays, Seascape is a play of light, Albee’s most luminous work to date. An optimistic tone poem that won for Albee his second Pulitzer, Seascape might, indeed, profitably be seen as a reverse image of A Delicate Balance, which won for him his first. In the later play, Albee again focuses on a couple in their middle age who ask: Where do we go from here? Are change and growth still possible, or is all that remains a gradual process of physical and spiritual atrophy until death? Nearly the entire first act of Seascape—which is primarily a play of scintillating discussion rather than action—is a two-character drama, with the diametrically opposed viewpoints of Nancy and Charlie temporarily poised in a tenuous equilibrium. Nancy’s inclination is to follow the urge to ever fuller life, while Charlie is seduced by the prospect of a painless withdrawal from all purposive activity. The “seascape” of the play’s title is the literal setting, but it is also an “escape,” for the sea lying beyond the dunes is the archetype of both life and death; if it once symbolized Charlie’s will-to-life, it now communicates his willed desire for the inertia of death or, at least, for a kind of premoral existence in which life simply passes. The shadow of Albee’s dark plays still falls over Seascape in Charlie’s initial stance as a man experiencing existential angst, terrified by the premonition of loneliness if Nancy should no longer be with him, fearful that even life itself may be only an illusion. In the face of these terrors—symbolized by the recurrent sound of the jet planes passing overhead—death beckons as a welcome release for Charlie because he has lived well. As his watchword, he chooses “we’ll see,” just another way of saying that things will be put off until they are blessedly forgotten. Nancy, on the other hand, refuses to vegetate by retreating from life and living out her remaining days in a condition equivalent to “purgatory before purgatory,” insisting instead that they “do something.” She understands that if nothing is ever ventured, nothing can be gained. If Charlie, like Agnes in A Delicate Balance, desires stasis, a condition comfortable precisely because it is known and therefore can be controlled, Nancy will make the leap of faith into the unknown, accepting change and flux as a necessary precondition for progress and growth. Nancy accuses Charlie of a lack of “interest in imagery”; if, as Albee has frequently said, it is the metaphor-making ability that renders humanity truly human, then Charlie’s deficiency in this regard signals his diminished condition. No sooner has Nancy finished her admonition to Charlie that they “try something new” than the opportunity presents itself in the appearance of Leslie and Sarah, two great green talking lizards come up from the sea. Their arrival, a startling yet delightful coup de théâtre, raises the work to the level of parable and allegory: Leslie and Sarah, existing at some prehuman stage on the evolutionary scale, serve as recollections of what the older couple’s heritage was eons ago—as well as of what Charlie desires to become once again. Leslie and Sarah, like Harry and Edna in A Delicate Balance, are afraid not of the prospect of dying and finding nothingness or the void but of the challenge of becoming more highly developed, which is to say more human and morally responsible creatures. Life in the sea, unterrifying because a known quantity, was also more restricted and limiting. What inspires them to seek something more are the inklings of a sense of wonder, of awe, and of a childlike enthusiasm—qualities Nancy possesses in abundance. Their choice, then, exactly parallels Charlie’s: They can make do by settling for less than a full life, or they can expand their lives qualitatively by becoming conscious of themselves as thinking and feeling beings, although that requires a willingness to experience consciously suffering as well as joy. Significantly, it is Charlie, himself afraid, who persuades Leslie and Sarah to remain up on earth rather than descend back into

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the deep. In the moment of convincing them, he himself undergoes a regenerative epiphany that saves him, too. At the climactic point in Seascape, Charlie, like Jerry in The Zoo Story and George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? before him, gives Leslie and Sarah a “survival kit.” To accomplish this requires that he hurt them, especially Sarah. Because what separates human beings from the lower animals is precisely their consciousness of being alive, of being vulnerable, and of finally being mortal, Charlie realizes that he can help Leslie and Sarah complete their transformation from beast to human only by making them feel truly human emotions. Playing on Sarah’s fear that Leslie might someday leave her and never return, he deliberately, in an action that recalls the necessary violence of Jerry toward Peter, makes Sarah cry; that, in turn, makes Leslie so defensive and angry that he hits and chokes Charlie. Having tasted these human emotions of sorrow and wrath, Sarah and Leslie at first desire more than ever to return to the ooze, to the prehuman security of the sea. What quenches their fears is Nancy and Charlie pleading with them not to retreat, extending their hands to the younger couple in a gesture of compassion and human solidarity. In aiding Leslie and Sarah on the mythic journey from the womb into the world that, no matter how traumatic, must in time be taken, Charlie simultaneously leaves behind his desire to escape from life and asserts once more his will to live. If Charlie is a representative Everyman, fallen prey to ennui and despair, then Leslie’s “Begin,” on which the curtain falls, is a declaration of faith, trust, and determination, uttered not only for himself and Sarah but also for all humankind, who must periodically be roused and inspired to continue their journey. The Man Who Had Three Arms • In The Man Who Had Three Arms, Albee abolished the fourth wall of the theater in a manner that reminded many critics of the works of Luigi Pirandello. The play’s protagonist, coyly named “Himself,” spends much of the drama lecturing to the audience. Himself claims to have been an ordinary man who aspired to little more in life than his marriage, family, and success at work until the morning he discovered a third arm growing out of his back. Seduced by his newfound celebrity, he embarks on a lucrative and highly conspicuous career, exploiting his anomalous “talent” and indulging morally challenging impulses with the seeming approval of an admiring public. One day, however, the third arm mysterously withers away and disappears, leaving him financially bankrupt, spritiually broken and forsaken by his supporters. Coming on the heels of The Lady from Dubuque, which garnered mixed reviews and closed after only twelve performances on Broadway, and the failed adaptation of Lolita, which earned Albee some of the worst reviews of his stage career (as well as criticism by the Nabokov estate and the condemnation of several special interest groups), The Man Who Had Three Arms struck many critics as a transparently autobiographical play in which a self-pitying Albee lashed out at a public that he felt had celebrated him during his successful years, then abandoned him. Many reviewers, in fact, decried The Man Who Had Three Arms as a virtual attack on its audience. Albee concurred, noting that he agreed with Atonin Artaud that at times a dramatist must “literally draw blood.” He admitted that the drama was “an act of aggression” and “probably the most violent play I’ve written,” but he also disputed the autobiographical allusions many saw in the play. The Man Who Had Three Arms closed after sixteen performances, capping a period that marks a low point both personally and professionally for Albee, in which it

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Notable Playwrights

seemed his relevance and ability to enlighten as well as provoke theater audiences had, like the symbolic third arm of his protagonist, withered away to nothing. Three Tall Women • With Three Tall Women, Albee proved that second acts are possible in a theater career. The play earned him his third Pulitzer Prize and inaugurated a revival of interest in his work that continued through the 1990’s and beyond. It is a touchstone for many themes that he has tackled in other dramas, notably the illusions people cling to to distract them from the emptiness of their lives and the disillusionment that comes as aging gradually shuts off the individual’s capacity for change and redemption. The play also reflects a highly original melding of Albee’s influences. It is a Chekhovian play in its compassion for its characters, and might almost be seen as Albee’s rendition of Tri sestry (pr., pb. 1901, revised pb. 1904; The Three Sisters, 1920) in its treatment of three heroines who reflect with nostalgia and regret on the choices they have made in their lives. At the same time, its observations on personal decline and its minimalist staging techniques suggest the spare and despairing spirit of the plays of Beckett. The first act establishes the personalities of three distinct characters who are on stage for the entire play. Woman A is a frail and needy woman in her early nineties. Described in the character notes as “thin, autocratic, proud,” she radiates fading glory and dominates the dialogue with memories of her life as a girl from an ordinary family who married into wealth and soon learned the self-deceiving social rituals and hypocrisies of the moneyed class. A has outlived the philandering husband she once loved by more than thirty years. She speaks proudly of her accomplishments but grows childish and petulant when her memory fails or she finds herself physically incapable of activities she could once perform. B, who “looks rather as A would have at fifty-two,” serves A as a nurse and caretaker. She is dutiful and understanding and calm to the point of seeming enigmatic. B serves as a buffer between A and C, who “looks rather as B would have at twenty-six” and who shows all the impatience and selfishness one associates with youth. Though serving A in a vaguely legal capacity, C taunts A with the deficiencies of her age and openly expresses her exasperation with the older woman. There is no action per se in the first act, only verbal exchanges between the three women, who oscillate back and forth between heated, catty arguments with each other and conspiratorial schoolgirl confidences until A suffers an apparent stroke that brings down the curtain on first act. The seemingly naturalistic development of the play collapses in the second half when it becomes apparent that A, B, and C are actually different incarnations of the same character at different ages in her life, a nod (as some critics have suggested) to Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (pr., pb. 1958), in which an aging man labors to reconcile his current self with tape-recorded messages that reflect the person he was on several different birthdays at earlier times in his life. The emotional makeup and personalities of these three tall women are shaped by their expectations and experiences of the moment. A has come to accept that the arc of her life has gradually moved her away from the attractive fantasy of things she hoped for as a young woman—love and happiness—to the cold reality of things she settled for: financial security and social status. B is embittered by the fresh memory (for her) of the son who despised her for her compromises and acquiescence to disappointment and who ran away from home (and who visits A and curries her favor, much to B’s dismay). C is two years younger than

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the woman she will be when she marries; she clings desperately to the belief that the best times of her life are all ahead of her, when in fact observations from A and B suggest that the best years of her life—the years that A and B might look back on wistfully—are soon to end. Despite the fact that these three women are the same character, each has no sympathy for the others and either resists or repudiates the person that the other is. However, though they act as if irreconcilable toward one another, the three provide one of Albee’s most elaborate character mirrorings, yielding a single sympathetic reflection of someone once young, beautiful, and full of hope whose life has devolved into a simple, seemingly pointless struggle to survive. As in previous plays, Albee provides his characters with an illusion that serves them as a crutch for getting through life: the jewelry the three women are given by their husband. Each interprets the illusion and its significance differently, based on her different self-awareness. C, who is still beholden to the illusions of youth, cherishes her jewelry as “tangible proof . . . that we’re valuable.” B is of a more cynical frame shaped by her disillusionments and disappointments: She sees no difference between real and fake jewelry “because the fake looks as good as the real, even feels the same, and why should anybody know our business?” Virtually all of A’s jewelry is fake: Over the years, she has had to sell her real jewelry to support herself, a type of self-cannibalization that crystallizes the decline into emotional and spiritual entropy at the play’s core. In his introduction to the published edition of the play, Albee reveals that Three Tall Women grew out of his troubled relationship with his adoptive mother Frankie, whom the characters are meant to represent. Albee himself appears in the play as the prodigal son, who is present at A’s sickbed but does not speak a line. He writes, “As she moved toward ninety, began rapidly failing both physically and mentally, I was touched by the survivor, the figure clinging to the wreckage only partly of her own making, refusing to go under.” The play thus makes an interesting bookend to The Man Who Had Three Arms, for which Albee appears to have drawn from his personal life to craft a theatrical act of revenge. With Three Tall Women he showed it was possible to draw from the same life and fashion a compassionate reflection equally devastating in its honesty. Marriage Play • Marriage Play confines its violence to the stage, where the protagonists, a married couple named Jack and Gillian, alternate between bouts of physical abuse and scenes of tenderness and physical attraction. Jack and Gillian are in some ways reminiscent of the battling couples of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but the newer play also incorporates the sort of metaphysical speculation that marks much of Albee’s later work. Marriage Play encapsulates many of the principal themes of Albee’s dramatic career. The Play About the Baby • With The Play About the Baby, Albee’s career came full circle. The play reprises ideas and themes from earlier plays, albeit in a synthesis that makes it stand apart from the works from which it borrows. Its central conceit, a baby that may just be a figment of the characters’ imaginations, seems a self-conscious nod to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and is reinforced by the pairing of a younger and older couple. At the same time, the free-form absurdism of the play calls to mind Albee’s debut The Zoo Story, with its escalation to an act of dramatic provocation to shock a character out of a complacent frame of mind. Girl and Boy, the younger couple, have apparently had a baby together. Their nemeses are Man and Woman, an older couple—possibly married, possibly not—who first claim to have taken the baby,

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then proceed to call the baby’s very reality in question. While the young couple plead for the return of their child, the older couple taunt them with word games, false memories, and similar challenges that hinder the younger couple’s ability to prove who they are and the reality of their child. The play ends with the couples agreeing—possibly under emotional duress, possibly faced with irrefutable proof—that there is no baby. Although very much a chamber piece, the play shows Albee at his wittiest and builds on distillations of trademark ideas in his dramas, including the notion that individual reality is shaped by needs, and the therapeutic value of an act of cruelty to save people from the illusions that focus their life. The Goat • Albee’s award-winning The Goat is, on the surface, a comedy, but it has an underlying tone of tragedy. Like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, it centers on a married couple, successful upper-class New York architect Martin, who has just won the Pritzker Prize, and Stevie, his wife of more than twenty years. This couple, however, has a seventeen-year-old gay son, and the center of their conflict involves Martin’s infidelity. His infidelity is revealed during the course of a television interview. Martin explains that although he loves his wife, he fell in love while looking at property in upstate New York. When Martin shows the interviewer, his friend Ross, a photograph of his new love, Ross is shocked to see a photo of a goat—Sylvia. The second act deals, largely humorously, with Stevie’s feelings as she comes to terms with Martin’s infidelity; she is especially angry and feels unclean when she realizes that Martin had been having sex with both her and the goat for several months. She complains that he has brought her down, and as she exits, she threatens to bring him down as well. The couple’s son, Billy, argues with his father, comparing their sexual preferences, and when they reconcile, a kiss turns sexual. When Ross walks in and sees the kiss, he expresses his disgust, and in return, Martin describes a father being sexually aroused after bouncing his baby on his lap. It is this scene rather than, as might be expected, the references to bestiality that brought shocked responses from the audience. Some critics suggest that this is because Albee’s treatment of bestiality is similar to the early treatment of homosexuality in its vagueness. In the last act, Stevie returns, dragging along the body of Sylvia. Martin is grief-stricken, able only to say “I’m sorry.” A reviewer for The New Republic noted that Albee manages to sympathetically portray Martin, the goatlover, despite the repugnance that many people feel for those who engage in bestiality. Bibliography Amacher, Richard E. Edward Albee. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Taking Albee’s career through The Man Who Had Three Arms, this study is part biography, part script analysis, and part career assessment. Amacher is best at discussing Albee’s “place in the theatre” and his marriage of the well-made play form with the formless Theater of the Absurd. Good second opinion after C. W. E. Bigsby’s edition of essays in 1975. Chronology, notes, bibliography. Bigsby, C. W. E., ed. Edward Albee: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975. Part of the Twentieth Century Views series, this collection includes notable names in theater and scholarship, such as Gerald Weales, Martin Esslin, Richard Schechner, Alan Schneider, Harold Clurman, Philip Roth, and Robert Brustein. They contribute several interpretations of the symbolic aspect of Albee’s plays, usually, but not always, in single-play discussions. Chronology and select bibliography.

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Bottoms, Stephen J. Albee: “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. A thorough study of Albee’s best-known play. Bryer, Jackson R. “Edward Albee.” In The Playwright’s Art. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Interview conducted in 1991 that discusses most of Albee’s major plays at the time, both successes and failures. Albee reveals himself as clever and articulate as the characters in his plays, and makes pointed statements about the Broadway establishment and its impact on playwriting in America. “Edward Albee.” In Playwrights at Work. New York: Modern Library, 2000. Although this interview appeared in the Paris Review in 1966, when Albee had taken several critical hits in the wake of his success with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, it captures him in the full flush of his “angry young man” interval and records observations on the art and craft of playwriting that continue to inform his work. Gussow, Mel. Edward Albee: A Singular Journey. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. A comprehensive biocritical study of the playwright by a leading cultural critic of The New York Times, whose association with Albee extends back to 1962. Written with Albee’s cooperation and input, it discusses all his plays in the context of his life and his beliefs as an artist. With photos, bibliography, and index. Kolin, Philip C., and J. Madison Davis. Critical Essays on Edward Albee. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986. Part of a series of critical essays on American literature, this collection of original reviews (from The Zoo Story to Counting the Ways), general criticism, and an overview of Albee’s importance to world theater is comprehensive and thorough, with some thirty-seven articles, as well as an annotated bibliography of Albee interviews (with its own index). McCarthy, Gerry. Edward Albee. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. Stronger than other studies on Albee’s theater sense, as opposed to his plays as dramatic literature, this brief but informative overview puts the work in a dynamic, action-andreaction-oriented structural perspective. Some production stills, index, and brief bibliography. Roudané, Matthew. Understanding Edward Albee. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987. Organized chronologically, and pairing the plays in each chapter (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? gets its own), this study focuses on Albee’s plays in a “culture seeking to locate its identity through the ritualized action implicit in the art of theater.” Bibliography and index. ________. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: Necessary Fictions, Terrifying Realities. Boston: Twayne, 1990. A close study of Albee’s landmark drama, by one of Albee’s most perceptive critics. A followup to the author’s Understanding Edward Albee, with particular emphasis on the function and purpose of illusion in Albee’s dramas. Wasserman, Julian, ed. Edward Albee: An Interview and Essays. Houston, Tex.: University of St. Thomas, 1983. This 1981 interview, on translations, audiences, and similar earthly subjects, has a show-biz tone to it, without much of the transcendental abstractions of later interviews. A good place to start a study of Albee because he articulates his intentions here with some clarity and grace. Wasserman contributes an essay on language; seven other authors offer single-play discussions, not including Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but including The Lady from Dubuque, Seascape, and Counting the Ways. Thomas P. Adler, updated by Thomas J. Taylor, Robert McClenaghan, and Stefan Dziemianowicz

Jean Anouilh Jean Anouilh

Born: Cérisole, near Bordeaux, France; June 23, 1910 Died: Lausanne, Switzerland; October 3, 1987 Principal drama • L’Hermine, pr. 1932, pb. 1934 (The Ermine, 1955); Le Bal des voleurs, wr. 1932, pr., pb. 1938 (Thieves’ Carnival, 1952); Le Voyageur sans bagage, pr., pb. 1937 (Traveller Without Luggage, 1959); La Sauvage, pr., pb. 1938 (Restless Heart, 1957); Léocadia, pr. 1940, pb. 1942 (Time Remembered, 1955); Le Rendez-vous de Senlis, pr. 1941, pb. 1942 (Dinner with the Family, 1958); Antigone, pr. 1944, pb. 1946 (English translation, 1946); Jézabel, pb. 1946; Roméo et Jeannette, pr., pb. 1946 (Romeo and Jeanette, 1958); L’Invitation au château, pr. 1947, pb. 1953 (Ring Round the Moon, 1950); Ardèle: Ou, La Marguerite, pr. 1948, pb. 1949 (Ardèle, 1951); La Répétition: Ou, L’Amour puni, pr., pb. 1950 (The Rehearsal, 1958); Colombe, pr. 1951, pb. 1953 (Mademoiselle Colombe, 1954); La Valse des toréadors, pr., pb. 1952 (The Waltz of the Toreadors, 1953); L’Alouette, pr., pb. 1953 (The Lark, 1955); Ornifle: Ou, Le Courant d’air, pr. 1955, pb. 1956 (Ornifle, 1970); Pauvre Bitos: Ou, Le Dîner de têtes, pr., pb. 1956 (Poor Bitos, 1964); Jean Anouilh, pb. 1958-1967 (3 volumes); L’Hurluberlu: Ou, Le Réactionnaire amoureux, pr., pb. 1959 (The Fighting Cock, 1960); Becket: Ou, L’Honneur de Dieu, pr., pb. 1959 (Becket: Or, The Honor of God, 1960); La Foire d’empoigne, pb. 1960, pr. 1962 (Catch as Catch Can, 1967); L’Orchestre, pr. 1962, pb. 1970 (The Orchestra, 1967); The Collected Plays, pb. 1966-1967 (2 volumes); Le Boulanger, la boulangère et le petit mitron, pr. 1968, pb. 1969; Cher Antoine: Ou, L’Amour raté, pr., pb. 1969 (Dear Antoine: Or, The Love that Failed, 1971); Les Poissons rouges: Ou, Mon père, ce héros, pr., pb. 1970; Le Directeur de l’opéra, pr., pb. 1972 (The Director of the Opera, 1973); L’Arrestation, pr., pb. 1975 (The Arrest, 1978); Le Scénario, pr., pb. 1976; Le Nombril, pr., pb. 1981; Number One, pr. 1984 Other literary forms • Jean Anouilh is known only for his plays. With the exception of infrequent reviews, he wrote nothing else and was known to refuse requests for occasional pieces with characteristic truculence, professing his inability “to write.” Achievements • Active as a dramatist well past the age of sixty-five, Jean Anouilh wrote nearly fifty plays in roughly as many years, among them five or ten true masterpieces that more than suffice to assure him a position of high distinction in the history of French drama. Achieving distinction in his mid-twenties with such memorable successes as Traveller Without Luggage and Thieves’ Carnival, Anouilh soon thereafter consolidated his reputation with the thought-provoking Antigone to become the preeminent dramatist of wartime and postwar France, reaching both a serious and a popular audience. Among the most instinctively “theatrical” of playwrights, Anouilh proved equally skillful at comedy, melodrama, near-tragedy, and satire, adopting for his efforts a new, if tonguein-cheek, system of genre classification: In the standard collections of his theater, the pieces are duly classified as “pink” plays, “black” plays, “shining” plays, “grating” plays, and so on. During the 1950’s, Anouilh added, with considerable success, a new category: “costume” plays based, if somewhat less than faithfully, on the characters and incidents of 30

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history. Both The Lark, which re-creates the life and death of Joan of Arc, and Becket, studying the tortured relationship between Thomas à Becket and Henry II, achieved great success worldwide, as did a subsequent film version of the latter, featuring Richard Burton in the title role and Peter O’Toole as the king. Increasingly involved in the staging and direction of his plays, Anouilh wrote little new for the theater during the 1960’s. A subsequent phase of his career, beginning around 1970, brought forth several new plays deemed generally inferior to Anouilh’s prior standard, with a tendency toward repetition, yet eminently stage worthy thanks to the author’s personal involvement in their production. For reasons difficult to fathom, Anouilh’s plays have fared somewhat less well in English translation than might have been expected, with appreciably better success in Britain than in the United States or Canada. At times ill-served by his translators, even down to the titles of his plays, Anouilh was perhaps too irretrievably Gallic in thought and expression to reach an American audience. Even in America, however, he is destined to be remembered as the most talented, versatile, and representative French dramatist of the mid-twentieth century. Biography • “I have no biography,” wrote Jean-Marie-Lucien-Pierre Anouilh around the age of thirty-five to one of his earliest critics, “and am quite pleased not to have any.” Going on to sketch in such bare essentials as a year of law school and two years in advertising, with some desultory work in films, Anouilh observed that he had discovered the theater at an early age and had fortunately (he claimed) never had to resort to journalism. Thus did Anouilh drape about his life a screen of privacy that more or less protected him for the rest of his life. To an even greater degree than in the case of most prolific authors, Anouilh’s work was his life, and vice versa. Anouilh’s “life in the theater” began in late 1929 or early 1930, when he succeeded the scenarist and playwright Georges Neveux as secretary to the eminent director Louis Jouvet, who had “discovered” and developed the playwriting talents of Jean Giraudoux, by then France’s most eminent dramatist. Almost at once, Anouilh began to try his hand at writing plays, initially without much success; later he withdrew certain of his early efforts from circulation, and they remain to this day in a limbo perhaps well deserved. One of the few anecdotes attaching itself to the playwright’s early life holds that on Anouilh’s marriage in 1932 to the actress Monelle Valentin, Jouvet “gave” the young couple some opulent stage properties left over from his production of Giraudoux’s Siegfried (pr., pb. 1928; English translation, 1930) to furnish their otherwise bare apartment. Not long afterward, with Siegfried scheduled for revival, Anouilh and his wife returned home to find their flat stripped clean of furniture. Anouilh, meanwhile, was beginning to attract favorable attention with his attempts at playwriting; a sale of film rights to Hollywood around 1934 proved sufficient to assure his financial independence—despite the fact that the play, Y avait un prisonnier, was never filmed and has since been repudiated by its author. Following the runaway success of Traveller Without Luggage in 1937, Anouilh settled into the life of the professional playwright. Divorced from Monelle Valentin, with whom he had one child, Anouilh around 1953 married an actress known professionally as Charlotte Chardon, with whom he had three more children. Soon thereafter, following the success of The Lark, Anouilh assumed increasing responsibility in the mounting of his plays, usually in collaboration with the director Roland Piétri. Only after around 1968, with a cycle of generally superficial plays offered mainly as

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a pretext for his own involvement in their production, did Anouilh begin to inject an autobiographical element into his work. The character of Antoine de Saint-Flour, featured in several of the plays, is a successful (but harried) writer modeled clearly on the author in the manner of Neil Simon; several of these late plays also portray shabby casino orchestras similar to those in which Anouilh’s mother played violin during the author’s childhood. In any case, however, Anouilh appears to have been quite justified in attempting to divert public attention away from his life, all the more so as his work provides a most useful and reliable record. It is no exaggeration to say that the life of Jean Anouilh is most readily accessible through the history of the French stage in the midtwentieth century. Analysis • The young Jean Anouilh arrived in Paris during one of the richest periods of French dramatic activity since the seventeenth century. Recently rescued from the commercial doldrums by a “Cartel” of four brilliant directors, infused with new life from abroad (German expressionism and the ground-breaking work of Luigi Pirandello), French drama in the late 1920’s and the early 1930’s enjoyed a genuine renaissance. Jean Giraudoux, previously known as a diplomat and a rather esoteric novelist, was charming even the crowds with his ethereal yet somehow earthy speculations on politics and love, joining such established talents as the Freudian Henri-René Lenormand, the neo-Shakespearean Jean Sarment, and the highly inventive Armand Salacrou, who was just then beginning to hit his stride as a singular interpreter of life as lived in a world of broken (and inevitably breakable) dreams. Receptive to such influences, Anouilh soon joined his perceptions to his innate sense of theater to forge a dramatic style that was uniquely and unmistakably his own, very much of its time yet destined, at its best, to prove timeless. Today, only the work of Giraudoux has achieved anything even approaching the staying power of Anouilh’s finest efforts. Salacrou, at one time Anouilh’s closest competitor, fell far behind him during the postwar years and never managed to regain his stride. Sarment and Lenormand, even their best works now hopelessly dated, are all but forgotten except by students of the interwar French theater. To a large degree, the abiding strength of Anouilh’s dramaturgy resides in its basic theatricality, a polyvalent sense of play and playing that recalls and renews the most playful moments in the works of Molière and William Shakespeare. In the words of critic John Harvey, Anouilh discovered the secret early in his career, after The Ermine, when he ceased “toiling” at his material and began “toying” with it instead. The Ermine, although the first of Anouilh’s plays to attract widespread recognition, is perhaps the least innovative in its presentation, its originality residing primarily in Anouilh’s announcement and treatment of themes that would soon come to characterize his theater. Cast in a naturalistic mold, The Ermine contrasts the wealthy Monime with the underprivileged, ambitious Frantz, who will stop at nothing, even murder, in order to win her hand. Monime, however, does not decide that she loves Frantz until after he has claimed responsibility for the crime and turned himself in to the authorities. Such hopelessness, usually polarized between rich and poor, would continue to haunt Anouilh’s would-be lovers throughout the rest of his career as a playwright. Although the masterful Thieves’ Carnival had already been written by the winter of 1936-1937, it was Traveller Without Luggage, produced during that season by the illustrious Pitoëffs (Georges and Ludmilla), that truly secured Anouilh’s reputation as a dramatist. In total control of his material for the first time, Anouilh moves deftly and playfully between satiric farce and near-tragedy only to conclude, with a self-mocking coup

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de théâtre at the end, that the concept of tragedy has long since outlived its usefulness. A similar undercutting of tragedy characterizes Anouilh’s memorable treatment of time-honored classical themes in Antigone, whose heroine consciously gives her life in vain. Both plays, however, were among the first to be classified by their author under the heading of “black” plays, perhaps because they are too bleak and pessimistic to be considered wholly tragic. Closely related to the “black” plays are the early “pink” plays, ostensible comedies in which, as the author has observed, there are nevertheless woven fine strands of black. Even when cast in the comic mode, Anouilh’s personal vision remains profoundly pessimistic, hinting at the corrosive effects of life-as-lived and the frequently intolerable burdens of the past. Dinner with the Family, about a married man who rents a house for one evening and hires actors to represent his family in order to impress his would-be second mistress (or wife), is at once the most frankly theatrical and the most successful of the pink plays and remains one of Anouilh’s finest achievements. Owing mainly to the resonant, if ambivalent, success of his Antigone, Anouilh in the 1940’s acquired a reputation as a “writer-thinker” whose plays merited serious evaluation for their “ideas” alongside the works of such consciously philosophical dramatists as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Anouilh, who had never made any claim to writing anything but playable theater, was miscast in such company, and his “ideas,” in consequence, were frequently found wanting. His strongest plays, however, do express a worldview by no means incompatible with Sartre’s existentialism or Camus’s speculations on the Absurd. Like Sartre, Anouilh presents characters “in situation” and totally at the mercy of their own actions, with no deity available to rescue them (except in the most blatantly contrived of self-consciously theatrical situations). Long since corrupted by conflicting interests recalling those of Sartre’s bourgeois salauds, the world inhabited by Anouilh’s characters is a disquieting place, with communication among mortals (let alone love) as impossible as in Sartre’s Huis clos (1944; No Exit, 1946), and for most of the same reasons. Dehumanized by poverty, conditioned by their aspirations to expect a world of satisfactions that simply does not exist, the have-nots among Anouilh’s characters, spiritual descendants of Frantz in The Ermine, experience an awareness of the Absurd not unlike that of the murderous Martha in Camus’s Le Malentendu (1944; The Misunderstanding, 1948). Anouilh’s work, however, differs profoundly from that of Sartre and Camus in that ideas are secondary in importance to the prime value of dramatic art; never presented solely on their own merits, the ideas to be found in Anouilh’s theater are of interest to the author only insofar as they help him to present, or the audience to understand, the motivation of his characters. It is therefore more than a bit hyperbolic to see in Antigone, as did a number of commentators at the time, a reactionary counterpoise to the existentialist, politically liberal stance of Sartre’s Les Mouches (1943; The Flies, 1946). Given Anouilh’s lack of religious belief, it is wholly natural that Antigone be disabused of the faith that supposedly motivates her actions, just as the “sainthood” of Becket in Anouilh’s later play will be attributed to wholly aesthetic, nonreligious, and “human” standards of behavior. A number of critics also erred in their assumption that Creon, the pragmatist, emerges somehow as the hero of Antigone; there are simply no heroes in Anouilh’s theatrical universe, and the playwright’s main point throughout the play is to stress the eventual futility of all human action. During the years following World War II, Anouilh expanded his repertory to include such new categories as the “shining” or “brilliant” (Pièces brillantes), “grating” (Pièces grinçantes), and quasi-historical (Pièces costumées) plays. An offshoot of the prewar

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Pièces roses, or pink plays, the Pièces brillantes offer a particularly sophisticated form of satiric comedy, or comic satire; in the view of critic Lewis Falb, the plays resemble the diamonds recalled in their title in that they are sparkling, many-faceted, yet cold and hard at the center. Perhaps best known of the Pièces brillantes is Ring Round the Moon. Recalling the ludic wit of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People (pr. 1895), Ring Round the Moon features twin brothers intended to be played by the same actor, with split-second entries and exits. Also notable among the “brilliant” plays are The Rehearsal and Mademoiselle Colombe. Trenchant social satire, never far from the surface in any of Anouilh’s plays, rises to a featured position in the “grating” plays, presumably so named because they are designed to set one’s teeth on edge. Featuring intentionally disagreeable characters often presented in broad caricature, the “grating” plays recall such early “black” plays as The Ermine and Restless Heart in their treatment of the necessary compromise between aspirations and reality. Ardèle and The Waltz of the Toreadors, linked by common featured characters, are perhaps the most notable of the earlier grating plays; others include Ornifle, a generally weak reworking of the Don Juan theme, and Poor Bitos, a biting political satire juxtaposing World War II and the French Revolution. Anouilh’s finest plays during the 1950’s, however, were two of his somewhat misnamed “costume” plays, historical at least in setting, which are about as close as he ever came to writing true “plays of ideas.” Both The Lark and Becket remain thought-provoking as well as highly playable, inviting the audience to speculate on what might have been going on in the characters’ minds as they performed the actions now duly recorded in the pages of history. Like Albert Camus in his Caligula (wr. 1938-1939, pb. 1944; English translation, 1948), Anouilh made no claim to a faithful re-creation of history, or even to writing “historical” plays. As with Camus, history serves as little more than a pretext—a fecund source of potentially fascinating theatrical characters. Earlier in his career, Anouilh, like Giraudoux and several others just before him, had appropriated the characters and setting of classical mythology to make some very contemporary theatrical statements, of which Antigone is the best; during the 1950’s, history came to serve him much as mythology had done earlier. Devoid of faith and admittedly uncomfortable with the concept of sainthood, Anouilh in The Lark and Becket revisits the lives of two saints in order to present them in wholly human terms. As Anouilh sees them, Joan of Arc and Thomas à Becket are heroic figures, highprincipled to be sure, but hardly otherworldly. Joan, offered a reprieve, pragmatically chooses martyrdom in order to provide a shining example for posterity; Thomas, denied the consolation of true belief, has adopted instead an aesthetic standard of behavior that dictates that he do the best possible job at whatever he is supposed to do, even at the cost of his life. Remarkable in their affirmation of basic human dignity, The Lark and Becket remain among the finest of Anouilh’s efforts, equal or superior in vigor to such comparable efforts as Maxwell Anderson’s Joan of Lorraine (pr., pb. 1946) or T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral (pr., pb. 1935). Some ten years after the success of Becket, Anouilh resumed work on a new cycle of “grating” plays that he had in fact begun even before Becket with The Fighting Cock, the latter a dark-edged comedy satirizing, among other things, the “postmodern” drama of Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and the early Arthur Adamov. By the late 1960’s, however, Anouilh had himself assimilated many of the perspectives and techniques of the newer dramatists and had begun incorporating them into his own work. Les Poissons rouges, generally considered to be the finest play in the new cycle, dispenses with chronology in order to present various stages in the protagonist’s life, all compressed into

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the space of one particularly trying day. A parallel cycle of “baroque” plays, often featuring some of the same characters, has proved somewhat less successful, but the strongest of them, such as Dear Antoine, have been well received in production. Traveller Without Luggage • Frankly derived from such sources as Giraudoux’s Siegfried, which deals with an amnesiac veteran of World War I, and Jean Cocteau’s La Machine infernale (1934; The Infernal Machine, 1936), a playful reworking of the Oedipus legend, Traveller Without Luggage nevertheless served notice of a new and highly innovative talent. Gleefully exploiting the conventions and resources of the stage, at times assuming the spectator’s familiarity with his obvious sources, the young Anouilh both charmed and disconcerted his audiences by proving, at least in theatrical terms, that there is in life no problem too large to run away from. In skillful parody of the Oedipus legend, Anouilh presented as his protagonist an amnesiac veteran known only as “Gaston,” who is presumably in search of his own identity. Unlike Oedipus, however, Gaston will resolutely—and successfully—turn his back on the overwhelming evidence at hand. Institutionalized for eighteen years since the Armistice, Gaston has been interviewed by nearly three hundred families in search of a missing son or brother, and even as he meets with the prosperous, respectable Georges Renaud, there are supposedly five or six other families just offstage, eagerly awaiting their turn. Considerable tension soon develops between the mounting evidence that Georges Renaud has at last found his brother Jacques and Gaston’s increasing revulsion against the character of Jacques as revealed. Jacques, it seems, was for the eighteen known years of his life a most disagreeable fellow who shot birds out of trees, crippled his best friend by pushing him down a flight of stairs, and eventually slept with his brother’s wife. In further parody of the Oedipus material, Gaston keeps asking questions in relentless pursuit of the hideous truth; quite unlike Oedipus, however, he will feel no constraint to live with what he has learned. Over the years, Gaston has apparently envisioned himself as a tabula rasa about to acquire the imprint of a joyous childhood, and he will certainly not stop now. Ironically, the cold obstinacy with which Gaston refuses to accept his identity amply proves, to the satisfaction of both the audience and his fellow characters, that he is in fact Jacques Renaud. Crucial to the developing action is the figure of Georges Renaud’s wife, Valentine, whose abiding love for the seemingly unlovable Jacques has survived the eighteen years of his absence. Anticipating by several weeks her husband’s planned interview with the “living unknown soldier,” Valentine entered the asylum disguised as a laundress, and she maneuvered the unsuspecting Gaston into an amorous encounter. Horrified to learn that he has thus been tricked, Gaston remains unmoved by Valentine’s unquestioning love and acceptance—even after the revelation that Valentine had loved Jacques first and had subsequently married his older, established brother only for reasons of financial expediency. Georges, for his part, remains understanding, perhaps even forgiving, but for Gaston that is not enough. Oddly, the affair with Valentine appears to strike him as the least forgivable of Jacques Renaud’s many recorded dastardly deeds, and he remains resolutely “pure,” indeed even priggish, in her presence. Valentine, whose love for Jacques has long since been stripped of illusions, urges Gaston to return to the human race, accepting both himself and her. As proof of his identity, she asks him to look for a scar on his back, the remnant of a lover’s quarrel shortly before Jacques’s departure for the front, when Valentine suspected Jacques of infidelity and jabbed him with a hatpin.

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The device of the scar, surely the most obvious of Anouilh’s allusions to the Oedipus legend, ironically becomes the agent of Gaston’s eventual and unabashedly theatrical deliverance. The scar is there, and Gaston bursts into tears (offstage) when he sees it in the mirror, but it is not long before he craftily turns Valentine’s love against her, using the scar as evidence to “prove” that he is in fact someone else. Like the amorous female Sphinx in The Infernal Machine who has told Oedipus the answers to the riddle in the hope of winning his affections, Valentine finds herself thrust aside by the machinations of an overweening masculine ego. For Gaston, though, there will be no eventual reckoning or even recognition. In place of tragedy, Anouilh seems to be saying, there is for most people only tedium, made bearable at best by a seemingly limitless capacity for self-delusion. The controversial ending of Traveller Without Luggage, alternately criticized or misconstrued by observers, merely suggests that modern man, his back to the wall, will either seek refuge in daydreams or lie, cheat, and steal. Gaston in effect does both, exchanging his “real” life for one chosen after his fancy. Had Anouilh sent Gaston off to a literal castle in Spain, he could hardly have made his message more explicit; the English country house with “marvelous ponies” will surely do in a pinch. Far from being “rescued” by a deus ex machina in the person of the little English boy who needs an adult “nephew” in order to claim his inheritance, Gaston has in fact chosen the thoroughly human hell of anonymity, rejecting Valentine’s promise of a life (likened to a full page of writing) “full of spots and crossed-out words, but also full of joys.” Gaston’s refuge, if such it may be called, is hardly preferable to that of the ostrich. Nearly forty years after the first performances of Traveller Without Luggage, the play’s—or Gaston’s—basic premise was intriguingly and rather effectively questioned by Eugène Ionesco in a play suggestively titled L’Homme aux valises (pr., pb. 1975; Man with Bags, 1977). In Ionesco’s play, the anonymous protagonist trudges through at least forty years of recent history lugging two heavy suitcases that he doggedly refuses to put down for fear of losing them, and with them his identity. Oddly replicating Valentine’s appeals to Gaston, Ionesco makes the point that while identity and heredity may be cumbersome, they are all that one can confidently claim and are at the very least a point of departure for one’s actions; without them, one might as well be dead. The Arrest • Curiously, the theatrical season of Man with Bags, 1975, also brought forth a new play by Anouilh titled The Arrest, itself a thought-provoking coda to Gaston’s concept of identity. Its title no doubt an intentional double entendre embracing cardiac arrest as well, The Arrest expands to two hours the final moments in the life of an aging gangster, fatally wounded in a motor accident while fleeing the police. Indebted for its structure to Salacrou’s L’Inconnue d’Arras (1935), which dramatizes the last thoughts of a suicide, The Arrest poses a new, pertinent, and most intriguing question: Is not the deepest (and most futile) human need that of being “understood”? Breathing his last, the hoodlum Frédéric Walter asks many questions about his life, and is fortunate enough to have them answered by the avuncular Inspector, who, like Victor Hugo’s Javert in Les Misérables (1862; English translation, 1862), has devoted his life’s work to learning the habits and lifestyle of one particular criminal. As Walter prepares to die, the Inspector helps him to “understand” himself far more effectively than any parent, child, wife, mistress, or psychoanalyst ever could. As the Prayer of St. Francis implies, it is far more human to seek to be understood than to understand, and Frédéric Walter is surely no saint. Unlike Gaston, however, he both seeks and finds the truth about himself in highly memorable theatrical terms.

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Dinner with the Family • Written soon after Traveller Without Luggage, although not staged until some four years later, Dinner with the Family is perhaps the strongest and most memorable of Anouilh’s “pink” plays, with a highly entertaining restatement of the author’s characteristic themes. Like Gaston of Traveller Without Luggage, Georges of Dinner with the Family longs for, and seeks to re-create, an idyllic life quite different from the one that he has found himself obliged to lead. A young man of some means, he has rented a charming country house for one evening in order to impress a young woman with whom he has fallen in love; to represent his parents, he has hired an aging actor and actress who at first appear to need a considerable amount of coaching in their roles. As the action proceeds, the various threads of Georges’s dream begin to unravel, if never quite completely. His parents, it seems, are very much alive and very demanding of Georges’s time and money, as are his wife, Henriette, and a rather sympathetic mistress named Barbara, who happens to be the wife of Georges’s best friend, Robert. It is Barbara who precipitates much of the early action by warning Georges, in a telephone call, that Henriette has threatened to rid the house of freeloaders—his parents included—if Georges does not return at once. As in Traveller Without Luggage, considerable tension develops between the protagonist’s aspirations and the somewhat more sordid reality of his life. Georges, however, is a more sympathetic character than is Jacques/ Gaston; he is portrayed throughout as a fundamentally decent man whose sustained attention to the needs of other people has hampered his own emotional development. Counterpointed by the presence of the two professional actors, who frequently offer their opinion as to how a particular scene should be played, the various levels of reality and artifice in Georges’s life remain in delicate balance throughout the play. His marriage, it seems, was arranged by his parents as a solution to their own financial woes, and they have in fact been sponging off him ever since. His wife, although she professes to love him, may well be incapable of love, and Robert (with his wife) has joined the small army of freeloaders even as he has come to envy and detest his erstwhile boyhood friend. The only sane or sympathetic character in the lot is Barbara, who loves Georges deeply and without illusion. A close spiritual descendant of Valentine Renaud, Barbara alone can see, or will admit, that Georges’s life has been nearly devoured by the demands of his family and other hangers-on; in the final analysis, she loves Georges enough to grant him his right to freedom. Isabelle, the charming young woman with whom Georges has fallen in love, may well represent his last chance to “reclaim himself,” and Barbara will not stand in his way. Criticized in its time as false or at the very least incredible, the ending of Dinner with the Family, although frankly contrived, now seems prophetic of a later generation in which “fresh starts,” if not the rule, are at least no longer the exception. Today it seems almost plausible, if still humorous, that Georges be reunited with Isabelle for their long-delayed evening meal, sometime after which they will go off to the mountains and raise bees. Georges, in fact, may well be the first member of the dropout counterculture to have been portrayed sympathetically on the stage. Antigone • The best-known and most frequently performed of Anouilh’s many plays, rivaled only by The Lark and Becket, Antigone is certainly one of his strongest efforts, as relevant and resonant today as it was when it first appeared onstage. Near the last in a long (and sometimes distinguished) line of French plays with a classical setting that began to appear in the late 1920’s, including Giraudoux’s Amphitryon 38 (pr., pb. 1929; English translation, 1938) and Électre (pr., pb. 1937; Electra, 1952), Antigone

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is an even stronger and more original play than it must at first have seemed. Understatedly theatrical in presentation, intended to be played in inconspicuous modern dress, Anouilh’s restatement of the Antigone-Creon debate remains one of the theater’s most powerful and memorable portrayals of the inevitable conflict between youth and age, between uncompromising idealism and the weathered voice of experience. Displaying his usual sure sense of theater, Anouilh replaces the traditional Greek chorus with a single dinner-jacketed male figure, recalling the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (pr., pb. 1938). The Chorus, as he is known, steps forward on a stage full of characters to explain, in urbane tones, the role and function of each character in the drama that is to follow. As the action progresses, the Chorus will continue to serve as both the narrator and commentator, with a suitable coda at the end. Given Anouilh’s reluctance to make public statements, the words and thoughts of Antigone’s Chorus are often quoted, no doubt with some justice, as being those of the author himself. To a somewhat greater degree than Anouilh’s earlier efforts, Antigone expresses the author’s singular, profound, but often overlooked capacity for “poetry.” Eschewing the overblown rhetoric of certain of his predecessors and contemporaries in the theater, Anouilh was nevertheless highly skilled at the creation of poetic imagery, often expressed in a simple, highly memorable conceit or metaphor. In Antigone, particularly in the title character’s dialogues with her governess and with her fiancé, Hémon, such imagery helps to establish Antigone as a character and fix her in the spectator’s mind. As her language shows, Antigone combines the strength of such characters as Valentine and Barbara with the impossible idealism generally associated with the author’s male protagonists, making her more than a match for the toughened, world-weary Creon. By far the most memorable feature of Antigone is the stylized yet credible debate between Antigone and her uncle, whose thankless task it has been to clean up the mess created by Oedipus and his family. In one scene, anticipating numerous more modern family quarrels, Creon accuses his niece of resembling her father in her refusal to leave well enough alone; her branch of the family, he observes, tends to ask too many questions and make trouble for everyone. Politically bound to leave one of her dead brothers unburied in order to keep the peace, Creon astonishes the headstrong, idealistic Antigone by informing her that he was unable to tell the two bodies apart and that he honestly does not care which was which; after all, he concludes, both boys were venal scoundrels quite different from the heroes envisioned by their adoring younger sister. Thus disabused of any true motivation for her actions, Antigone nevertheless perseveres in defying Creon’s orders, telling him that her “role” is to say no to him and die. Anouilh thus casts in purely heroic terms the refusal hitherto exemplified in the attempts of Gaston and Georges to escape the sordid pettiness of life. Although hers will be a hollow victory, exemplified in death, Antigone at least achieves a grandeur of sorts by refusing to accept her uncle’s “adult” world of smoke-filled rooms, trade-offs, and compromise. First performed during 1944 with World War II still in progress, Antigone initially drew both praise and blame from both sides of the political fence. There was little doubt in anyone’s mind that Antigone represented the uncompromising, if barely visible, spirit of Free France, or Creon as those who collaborated with the Germans, if need be, in order to keep the country running. Disagreement arose, however, as to which of the characters was more sympathetically presented, and there were those who saw Antigone’s martyrdom as sufficiently “meaningless” to render Creon, by default, the true hero of the piece. Antigone, however, typical of Anouilh’s theater in general, seeks less to make a statement than to reflect the many ambiguities of life itself.

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Today Antigone still speaks eloquently of youth and age, idealism and compromise, to spectators yet unborn at the time of its first performance. Ardèle and The Waltz of the Toreadors • No doubt somewhat disconcerted by the freight of meaning attached to Antigone by numerous spectators, Anouilh during the postwar years appeared to turn his back on “serious” playwriting, preferring instead to occupy himself primarily with comedy and satire. The “shining” plays all date from this period, as do the first of the “grating” plays. Two of the more successful among the latter are Ardèle and The Waltz of the Toreadors, linked by the common, slightly ridiculous character of General Saint-Pé. An aged version of Georges and other would-be romantic lovers in the earlier “pink” plays, the General has never quite relinquished the dreams of his lost youth, even as he has outwardly accepted all the “necessary” tradeoffs, substituting assignations for idylls and bottom-pinching on the stairs for stolen kisses in the garden. In Ardèle, the envious General declares a family crisis when he learns that his hunchbacked sister Ardèle has fallen in love with his son’s hunchbacked tutor. A “ridiculous” love such as theirs cannot be allowed to survive, he proclaims. Presumably the love itself survives, but the lovers, alas, do not, choosing double suicide as the only “reasonable” alternative to the corrupt perversions of “love” that they have observed in the behavior of the General himself, his deranged wife Amélie, and other members of the family. Throughout the action, Anouilh steers a tight course between broad farce and melodrama, avoiding bathos through his use of pasteboard caricatures in place of more fully rounded characters. A similar approach obtains in The Waltz of the Toreadors, in which the General, even more cynical than before, attempts reunion with a woman who briefly crossed his path nearly twenty years earlier. During the years since, the General has had several more brief encounters with Ghislaine but has thus far resisted the temptation to leave Amélie and elope with her. Arriving at long last to claim the General as her own, Ghislaine confronts him with purported evidence of his wife’s infidelity. After much slapstick and stage business, the charges turn out to be true, but by that time Ghislaine has fallen irretrievably in love with Gaston, the General’s painfully shy male secretary. By the final curtain, four of the characters have threatened or attempted suicide, yet all remain alive to contemplate a future fraught with compromise and disillusionment. As he does in Ardèle, in The Waltz of the Toreadors Anouilh avoids bathos through the judicious use of caricature; here, however, both the General and his ostensibly insane wife emerge as more fully rounded and therefore credible characters than in the earlier play. The General, very much a weathered version of Anouilh’s post-Romantic heroes, elicits the spectator’s sympathy as he wonders precisely what has gone wrong in his life, where and when. His wife Amélie, equally credible, has chosen to express her love through jealousy, feigning invalidism for more than a decade in order to keep her basically compassionate husband from deserting her. Grim and unrelenting in its satire of contemporary marriage and morals, The Waltz of the Toreadors is nevertheless highly playable and has been successfully filmed. The Lark • With the notable exception of Antigone, Anouilh achieved his greatest worldwide success with two of his “costume” plays—both of them drawn, loosely and somewhat ironically, from the recorded lives of saints. Making no claim whatever to interpret history (a process that he likens to the permanent dismantling of a favorite toy), Anouilh frequently discards or distorts such data as do not happen to suit him, al-

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tering chronology if need be in order to render playable the stuff of legend. In both The Lark and Becket, Anouilh is considerably less concerned with what happened than with what the characters might be able to tell the contemporary audience about itself. His presentation of Thomas à Becket, for example, shaves at least ten years off Becket’s real age and deliberately exploits the nineteenth century myth, long since corrected, of Becket’s Saxon ancestry. Such distortions, however, serve in the final analysis to create highly entertaining, thought-provoking theater. Anouilh’s mature sense of the theatrical serves him well indeed in The Lark, in which several different characters (including Joan herself) take turns narrating (and commenting on) the action in the manner of Antigone’s one-man Chorus. As in the earlier play, the action is assumed complete and immutable as the curtain rises; all that remains to be seen is the particular form that the retelling will take. The characters, who at first appear to be actors rehearsing a play-within-a-play, debate among themselves as to how the action will be presented; it is Cauchon who decides that Joan’s entire career must be reviewed, rather than only her trial and execution. The action then proceeds in chronological order, interrupted only by the “testimony” of the various participants and witnesses. The scene of Joan’s martyrdom, although realistically portrayed, is interrupted in quasi-cinematic style to present an opulent, triumphant final scene depicting the coronation of the erstwhile Dauphin at Rheims. For critic Lewis Falb, The Lark remains a weaker play than Antigone precisely because it lacks ambiguity. In The Lark, he claims, the boundaries are too well defined to allow for true dramatic tension or suspense; unlike Antigone, Joan is far too obviously right, and she seems to know as much. Nevertheless, The Lark remains an impressive effort, frequently revived in production and one of the more memorable plays devoted to the life and death of Joan. Becket • Anouilh’s growing fascination with the adaptation of “cinematic” techniques for the stage, adumbrated in the final scene of The Lark, takes over almost completely in Becket, by far the longest and most technically complicated of his many plays. Indeed, the text of Becket often reads more like a scenario than a play, with abundant flashbacks, rapid scene changes, and highly specific instructions as to how a particular line is to be delivered. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Becket has been equally successful in its well-known film version, which is extremely faithful to the play. Ranging freely across the conventions of the murder mystery, spy fiction, and broad political satire, Anouilh in Becket presents a highly convincing and entertaining portrayal of a close friendship gone sour—with repercussions far beyond personal loss. Containing some of Anouilh’s finest, most memorable dialogue, Becket shows the audience “not a saint, but a man,” a character closely descended from such other demanding protagonists as Antigone and Joan. Inner-directed, secretive, at times seemingly heartless, Anouilh’s Thomas is a shrewd political manipulator and pragmatist who carries both in his heart and on his sleeve the defeat of his beloved Saxon people. The defeat, it seems, has made it impossible for Becket to believe in anything except himself and the strict code of personal conduct that has somehow ensured his survival. When asked by the king if he believes in right and wrong, Becket replies enigmatically that he believes certain actions to be more “beautiful” than others, having long since chosen an aesthetic standard of behavior in the absence of ethical or moral imperatives. When the king, irritated by the clergy, impulsively names Becket chancellor, Becket is at first awed by the responsibility but soon warms to the task, proving himself to be a most adept and manipulative politician with an instinctive sense of

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power. As he tells the king, his personal code dictates that he do the best—or at least most “beautiful”—job he can at whatever he is called on to do. Such apparent loyalty will eventually rebound on the king, who, seeking to control the clergy by appointing his own man—the somewhat underqualified Becket—as Archbishop of Canterbury, finds that he has unwittingly provided himself with the most formidable and indomitable of adversaries. Becket, committed as usual to performing any appointed task to the best of his ability, dedicates his skills to defending an embattled Church against the Crown. As presented by Anouilh, Becket’s apparent change of allegiance is most readily understood by the audience, but not by the king. Closely balanced between comedy and pathos (or perhaps pathology), Anouilh’s Henry II is one of his most masterful if least admirable creations. Weak, petulant, self-indulgent, and henpecked by his wife and mother, Henry emerges as a most incompetent and impulsive ruler, a compulsive womanizer with more than a trace of latent homosexuality. Trembling with rage, he responds to Becket’s apparent defection with all the hysteria of an abandoned mistress, seeking mindless vengeance even as he hopes against hope for an eventual reconciliation with his erstwhile friend and boon companion. Anouilh, in whose work the lack or loss of close friendship has always loomed large, achieves remarkable results in his attribution of the king’s vengeance to a friend’s perceived betrayal. As the king lies almost paralyzed with unrequited love for Becket, unable even to give orders, his henchmen decide to “rescue” him by assassinating Becket, their movements orchestrated by the gradually amplified “beating” of the king’s heart. Unwieldy and expensive to produce, perhaps a shade too long and discursive, Becket is nevertheless a superb play. Together with Antigone, The Lark, and Traveller Without Luggage, and perhaps the strongest of the pink and grating plays, it secures Anouilh’s international reputation as one of the century’s most versatile and significant dramatists. Bibliography Carrington, Ildiko de Papp. “Recasting the Orpheus Myth: Alice Munro’s The Children Stay and Jean Anouilh’s Eurydice.” Essays on Canadian Writing 66 (Winter 1998): 191203. Examines the way in which Munro’s characters are recast from Anouilh’s Eurydice in order to reject his conception of a pure, fated love. Falb, Lewis W. Jean Anouilh. New York: F. Ungar, 1977. Explores Anouilh’s life and works. Index and bibliography. Grossvogel, David I. The Self-Conscious Stage in Modern French Theatre. New York: Columbia University, 1958. Explores the history and criticism of twentieth century French theater. Bibliography and index. Guicharnaud, Jacques. Modern French Theatre: From Giraudoux to Genet. 1961. Rev. ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972. Examines critical playwrights and prominent themes of modern-day French theater. Harvey, John. Anouilh: A Study in Theatrics. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964. Provides criticism and interpretation of Anouilh’s works. Bibliography. McIntire, H. G. The Theatre of Jean Anouilh. London: Harrap, 1981. An introductory survey of Anouilh’s plays. Counters the criticism of his work and suggests a new approach to understanding his place in French theater. Bibliography and index. Pronko, Leonard C. The World of Jean Anouilh. 1961. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. Provides criticism and interpretation of Anouilh and examines his place in French theater. Bibliography. David B. Parsell

Aristophanes Aristophanes

Born: Athens, Greece; c. 450 b.c.e. Died: Athens, Greece; c. 385 b.c.e. Principal drama • AcharnTs, 425 b.c.e. (The Acharnians, 1812); HippTs, 424 b.c.e. (The Knights, 1812); Nephelai, 423 b.c.e. (The Clouds, 1708); SphTkes, 422 b.c.e. (The Wasps, 1812); EirTnT, 421 b.c.e. (Peace, 1837); Ornithes, 414 b.c.e. (The Birds, 1824); LysistratT, 411 b.c.e. (Lysistrata, 1837); Thesmophoriazousai, 411 b.c.e. (Thesmophoriazusae, 1837); Batrachoi, 405 b.c.e. (The Frogs, 1780); Ekklesiazousai, 392 b.c.e.? (Ecclesiazusae, 1837); Ploutos, 388 b.c.e. (Plutus, 1651) Other literary forms • Aristophanes is remembered only for his plays. Achievements • Because the plays of his contemporaries and rivals have all been lost, it is impossible to credit Aristophanes with specific innovations in the development of Greek comedy. In his eleven surviving plays, however, one can trace an evolution in his own work. Although this evolution corresponds to a broader trend (the movement from Old Comedy to Middle and New Comedy), which in turn was influenced by changes in political and social conditions, Aristophanes’ own development as an artist undoubtedly influenced such larger developments as much as it was shaped by them. Aristophanes was recognized as a great comic poet in his lifetime, winning many first prizes in dramatic competitions and almost never taking less than second prize. His first two plays have been lost, but his third, The Acharnians, displays an early mastery of comic technique and a profound unity of theme. Only later did Aristophanes develop unity of action; it was clearly not expected of Old Comedy, which had grown out of two or more heterogeneous elements (including the animal chorus and primitive forms of farce). Indeed, the unity of plot to be discerned in Aristophanes’ later comedies (Lysistrata, Ecclesiazusae, and Plutus) is to some extent a compensation for the loss of certain features of the early plays—notably the freedom of the chorus to engage in wild ad hominem attacks and unbridled political satire. The outstanding features of Aristophanes’ art are the audacity of his comic metaphors and the beauty of his choral lyrics. These are best displayed in his early and middle plays, as well as in The Frogs, a brilliant post mortem on Greek tragedy and the culture of imperial Athens (the Athenian defeat, marking the end of the Peloponnesian War, was imminent when the play was produced). Though Aristophanes survived his city’s defeat and continued to develop as an artist, the postwar plays betray a certain weariness, a flagging of comic invention, corresponding to the political and cultural exhaustion of Athens in the early fourth century b.c.e. Perhaps the greatest single achievement of Aristophanes is the fact that his are the only plays of the Old Comedy to have survived—a tribute, surely, to his superb comic craftsmanship. Biography • Very little is known of Aristophanes’ life; most of what is known has been gleaned from his plays and is therefore vague or uncertain because of the comic content. The only evidence for his birthdate is the fact that he was “very young” when his first play was produced in 427 b.c.e. His first three plays were produced by another 42

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man, but it is not known whether this was because of a legal age limit, Aristophanes’ inexperience, or simple preference (some of his later plays were also produced by others). He belonged to the deme (township) of Kudathenaion, and his father’s name was Philippos. Nothing is known, however, of the family’s social or economic status. A line in The Acharnians has been interpreted to mean that he or his father had land holdings on the island of Aegina, but these may have been acquired during the distribution of Aeginetan land to Athenian citizens after the expulsion of the islanders in 431. According to the scholiasts, Aristophanes was indicted several times by the demagogue Cleon—whom he attacked in several plays—for usurping citizenship rights and for holding Athens up to ridicule before foreign visitors (the latter charge stemmed from his lost play The Babylonians, produced in 426, which portrayed the subject-allies of Athens as Babylonian slaves). Apparently Cleon was unable to make either charge stick, and Aristophanes returned to the attack. The Knights, presented in 424 (and which won a first place), portrays Cleon as a venal slave who flatters and cheats his master Demos (“the people” personified). The popularity of the play did not, however, have any effect on Cleon’s popularity: A few weeks after it won first prize, Cleon was chosen as one of the city’s ten generals for the following year. From the lists of victors in the dramatic festivals, it can be inferred that Aristophanes was a prolific and popular playwright. The Alexandrian scholars of the third and second centuries b.c.e. knew of forty-four plays attributed to him, forty of which they considered genuine. According to an early fourth century b.c.e. inscription, he also held public office (as prytanis, one of the presiding members of the Boul4, the council that set the agenda for the legislative assembly). His last datable play is the Plutus, staged in 388; two other plays were staged, perhaps posthumously, by his son Araros. All three of Aristophanes’ sons tried their hand at writing comedies, but their works have not survived. There is one further piece of biographical evidence: the vivid portrait of Aristophanes drawn by Plato in his dialogue the Symposion (388-368 b.c.e.; Symposium, 1701). As a character in the dialogue, Aristophanes delivers a brilliantly witty speech on the origin of erotic love, which he traces to the “globular” condition of the first mortals. These globular humans had two heads, four arms, and four legs apiece, and were so powerful that the gods felt threatened by them, so Zeus cut each one in half. Sexual love is thus the attraction between “halves” of formerly whole beings. What lovers really seek is indissoluble union with their other halves. This speech cannot be attributed to the historical Aristophanes. Plato was a great stylist and could easily have invented the whole. Yet the comic myth is akin to those found in Aristophanes’ plays, and it sheds an interesting light on the relationship between the comic dramatist and the philosopher Socrates, whom Aristophanes satirized (unfairly, many scholars feel) in his play The Clouds. Socrates is also a character in the Symposium, and his speech, which follows and rebuts that of Aristophanes, reveals the irreducible opposition between the two men’s views of the human condition. As scholar David Grene has put it, what Aristophanes most objected to in Socrates’ teaching was the idea that philosophical investigation superseded all other claims on people’s attention and energy, including the pleasures of food, sex, and poetry. These pleasures, together with that of competition, which Plato also deplored, are central to Aristophanes’ comic vision. Analysis • Because Aristophanes has had no real literary heirs, or imitators, in subsequent European literature, some discussion of Old Comedy as a genre is in order.

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There are good reasons why this genre died out when Athens went into its decline and was never revived. Old Comedy was nurtured and sustained by a constellation of social and political features of imperial Athens, which never came together in quite the same way subsequently. The fifth century b.c.e. saw the height of Athenian fortunes, and the sense of limitless possibility that the times inspired is reflected in Aristophanes’ early plays. Athenian democracy was also at its height. It was a limited democracy, insofar as citizenship was limited, but a direct democracy in which the citizens themselves voted on every proposed law and treaty. There were obvious analogies between the legislative assembly, the popular courts (where juries numbered in the hundreds, sometimes in the thousands), and the theater, where the people assembled in a body on a few festival days each year to see productions subsidized by state taxes. The no-holds-barred approach prevailing in assembly and court debate spilled over into the comedies, which are filled with ad hominem attacks on individuals. Politicians and poets were favorite targets, but a man might be singled out for ridicule because of his appearance, his cowardice in battle, or even his sexual proclivities. Two unique features of Old Comedy reflect its political and social setting with special vividness. These are the agon and the parabasis. The agon is a contest, partly physical but chiefly verbal, between the protagonist and the chorus. Its rhetoric reflects that of the assembly and law courts (and of Greek tragedy as well, which had a similar relationship to its social and political milieu). The parabasis is an address to the audience in which the comic chorus drops whatever dramatic identity the play imposes on it to speak in the first person, in the poet’s own voice. The parabasis may be only tangentially related to the plot and can address any political or social issue, although always in a fantastic vein that must have blunted its political impact. Scholars disagree considerably on the question of Aristophanes’ political purpose and beliefs, though most see him as in some sense conservative—that is, supportive of moderate (as opposed to radical) democracy and of the “traditional” virtues proper to an agrarian, nonimperial economy: peace, political stability, and free trade. It is difficult, though, to elicit any specific political program from the plays, because of their essentially anarchic spirit, which tends to subvert the few sober pronouncements of individual characters. Even if it could be demonstrated from the plays that Aristophanes had such a program, the question of its impact would remain. Here again (Library of Congress) evidence is slight and ambiguous.

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There is no known case in which a comedy demonstrably influenced public policy. Aristophanes produced a whole series of brilliant antiwar plays during the course of the Peloponnesian War (some took first prize), but the war continued. Even the Peace of 421, staged the same year the Peace of Nicias between Athens and Sparta was concluded, seems more a reflection of the city’s mood than a peace initiative on Aristophanes’ part. The attack on Socrates in The Clouds is cited by Plato in the Apologia Sfkratous (399-390 b.c.e.; Apology, 1675; which purports to be Socrates’ own defense at his trial) as a source of popular hostility against the philosopher, but The Clouds preceded the trial by twenty-five years. What is more, to judge from the Symposium, Aristophanes and Socrates belonged to the same circle of friends; surely the poet had no intention of urging any action against the philosopher. Scholar K. J. Dover has pointed out that Aristophanes survived the advent of oligarchic regimes as well as the democratic backlash that accompanied their overthrow; this would hardly have been possible had he been perceived as a partisan of either. A careful reading of his plays will reveal that they take advantage precisely of the freedom from responsibility that Old Comedy permits to create a world of fantasy and wish-fulfillment. Though Aristophanes addresses real political issues, the solutions he offers are not political but poetic ones. The Acharnians • The Acharnians, Aristophanes’ earliest surviving play, deserves close consideration not only because of its intrinsic merit but also because it exemplifies two strands that run throughout his work: a celebration of the joys of peace (with its corollary, an attack on the evils of war) and a fantasy of limitless possibility for the protagonist. These two strands are intimately interwoven, for the “pacifism” of Aristophanes is by no means the selfless and idealistic stance evoked by that word in modern times. His heroes hate war not because it entails the shedding of blood but because it results in a dearth of good things: food, wine, sex, and the freedom to do what one pleases and go where one pleases. Therefore, Dikaiopolis, the hero of The Acharnians, after trying in vain to raise the issue of peace negotiations in the assembly, makes his own private treaty with Sparta and proceeds to enjoy the benefits: freedom to celebrate the rural Dionysia, to trade with former enemies for imported delicacies, and to stay at home and feast while General Lamachos goes off to battle with his rations of salt fish and onions. The agon in this play is a debate between Dikaiopolis and a chorus of Acharnian charcoal-burners (from Acharnai, one of the demes of Attica), who hate the Spartans for ravaging their lands and can think of nothing but revenge. Dikaiopolis wins them over with a comic version of the war’s causes (a parody of Herodotus’s account of the reasons for enmity between Greece and Asia Minor) and a reminder that poor men have the least to gain from war. Like many of Aristophanes’ heroes, Dikaiopolis is a “little man” of middle age or older whose triumph over the powers that be is symbolized by his rejuvenation or restored sexual potency at the end of the play. As Lamachos returns wounded from battle, Dikaiopolis returns drunk from the feast, ready for a night of lovemaking with two courtesans. Yet this play is hardly a straightforward plea for the “little man,” for once he has his treaty, Dikaiopolis refuses to extend it to include another farmer whose two oxen have been seized by the enemy. The consistency of the play lies in its imagery. On the level of dramatic action, each Aristophanic comedy is built on one or more controlling images that assume a life of their own; in the choral odes, these and other images appear in a “crystallized” form. (In Old Comedy, as in Greek tragedy, the choral poetry provides a kind of lyric reflec-

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tion on the action it interrupts.) In The Acharnians, the central comic image is that of wine, which becomes a metaphor for peace thanks to a pun: The Greek for “truce” is spondai, literally the “libations” that accompanied ratification of treaties. Dikaiopolis is offered three kinds of spondai by the Spartans and picks the best “vintage”—that is, the longest truce. The image is appropriate in other ways as well, for peace was associated with the euphoria of drunkenness and the freedom to celebrate festivals (many of which were curtailed during the war). At the play’s end, Dikaiopolis is proclaimed the winner in a drinking contest—a standard feature of the Lenaia, the festival at which the play was produced—and his victory is made to suggest (before the fact) the poet’s own victory in the dramatic contest. It should be obvious that such “pacifism” as the play contains is fully compatible with the most vigorous forms of competition; within the comic universe of his plays, Aristophanes loves a good fight as much as anyone. Nor would his Greek audience have perceived this as a paradox: There was a traditional distinction, going back at least to Hesiod’s Erga kai Emerai (c. 700 b.c.e.; Works and Days, 1618), between useful and destructive eris, “strife.” Only the latter was considered hateful; rivalry and emulation were encouraged as the means to excellence and prosperity. Peace • This preoccupation with competition is visible, though somewhat more restrained, in the two other extant antiwar plays of Aristophanes. Peace is unusual in that it has no agon; instead, the members of the chorus, farmers from all the city-states, are made to “pull together” (literally and figuratively) as they raise the goddess Peace from the pit to which War has consigned her. Exhumation is only one of a constellation of images presiding over the action of this most earthy play, which opens with two slaves kneading cakes of excrement to feed a giant dung-beetle. The play’s hero, Trygaios, mounts the beetle and flies to heaven, where he finds War preparing to pound the Greek cities in a mortar. No pestle is available, however (both the Athenian and the Spartan commanders in chief, Cleon and Brasidas, having recently died), and Trygaios takes advantage of the circumstance to unearth Peace, whose acolyte Opora (Harvest) he then weds. His flight to heaven notwithstanding, Trygaios has less of the entrepreneur about him than does Dikaiopolis. He is willing to share his good fortune with all who desire peace, and he even presents the goddess’s other acolyte, Theoria (Ceremony), to the Council as a gift. Lysistrata • In his generosity, Trygaios anticipates Lysistrata, heroine of the play that bears her name. Though she leads the women of Greece in a successful coup that leaves them in possession of the Acropolis (and the Athenian treasury), her only aim is to induce the men to make peace; she keeps nothing for herself. The motif of competition recurs in the “battle of the sexes” she so cunningly orchestrates. The agon of Lysistrata involves two semi-choruses, one of old men and one of old women, who at first shower one another with abuse but are eventually reconciled, forming a single chorus. The attack on the Acropolis that the old men stage, complete with battering rams and torches, is an obvious sexual metaphor. True to their oath to resist their husbands’ advances, the women repulse the attack and douse the torches. Once the men have signed a treaty ending the war, they are admitted for a banquet, and each goes home with his own wife, in a mass version of the “wedding” that so often closes Aristophanes’ plays. Frequently in Aristophanes, and notably in Trygaios’s address to the Council as he presents them with Theoria, the sexual act itself is described as a struggle, yet another form of contention. That it is an example of “good” strife

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should be obvious because it is also a form of union, and indeed, Trygaios compares it to various events in the athletic contests, which were among the few truly Panhellenic institutions of the fifth century b.c.e. Despite these points of comparison, the three antiwar plays differ from one another in important ways, as might be expected from their dates of production. The Acharnians, fairly early in the war, allows its hero greater selfishness and irresponsibility than does either of the later plays; the mood of Peace, staged in 421 when peace seemed imminent, is more euphoric than that of Lysistrata in 411. There is even a note of pathos in Lysistrata’s plea for the women left widowed and unmarried by the ongoing war, in which they have no say. The fantasy of unlimited possibility, reflected in Dikaiopolis’s private treaty and Trygaios’s flight to heaven, has disappeared from the latter play. Its fullest development was reached not in the war plays but in The Knights, and especially The Birds. The Knights • The Knights and The Birds are quintessentially Athenian celebrations of a quality that only the Athenians (and not all of them at that) considered a virtue: polupragmosunT, “doing-muchness,” or “having a finger in every pie.” The Knights is an attack on the demagogue Cleon, whom Aristophanes accuses of pandering to the people’s whims for his own profit. Cleon is defeated and replaced in the course of the play (which is one protracted agon) by a man who outdoes him in pandering—a SausageSeller, whose qualifications for the role of demagogue are low birth, an ear-splitting voice, and the ways of the streetwise. Cleon and the Sausage-Seller compete to satisfy the appetite of Demos, “the people” personified. Although ostensibly Demos’s slaves, the two panderers hold the purse strings, and what finally recommends the Sausage-Seller to Demos is the fact that he holds nothing back for himself. At the play’s end, the Sausage-Seller rejuvenates his master (by “cooking” him, as Medea promised to do for the aged King Pelias), bringing back the sober and responsible Demos of the Persian War era. This miracle, however, lacks the dramatic power of his unrestrained pandering contest with Cleon. To judge from the parabasis, the poet’s nostalgia is not so much for the sobriety of the old Athens as for its unchallenged supremacy. The Birds • Aristophanes’ ultimate power-fantasy is The Birds. Two Athenians, Pisthetairos and Euelpides, leave their city and go to live with the birds, because, they say, Athens has become unlivable. They proceed to found a new city in the sky (Nephelokokkugia, or “Cloudcuckooland”), which outdoes even imperial Athens in polupragmosunT. With the birds’ help, they build a wall between heaven and earth that keeps the smoke of burnt offerings from reaching the gods; reduced to starvation, the gods are forced to yield Basileia, a female personification of kingship, to Pisthetairos. The controlling metaphor in this play is flight, which confers not only freedom from the ordinary constraints of the human condition but also vast power—the power of one who surveys the world from a great height, the better to administer it. It is the divine power of Zeus, in short, for Pisthetairos is not content merely to become a bird; he must become a god and king of the gods. The Birds is the most fully realized of Aristophanes’ power-fantasies, both in its dramatic coherence and in the beauty of its lyrics. It is also the one that leaves the “real world” most completely behind. Regardless of whether Aristophanes intended it as a commentary on the Sicilian expedition (which had been launched the previous year), it conveys perfectly the boundless Athenian audacity behind the expedition.

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The Clouds • The Clouds, although a relatively early play, deserves to be considered with the later plays for several reasons. In the first place, it ends not with the apotheosis of the hero but with an act of violence bred of his frustration. At the same time, it places greater emphasis on the portrayal and interaction of the characters, a trait associated with the later plays (The Frogs, Ecclesiazusae, Plutus). The text of The Clouds that has survived is unfortunately not the text that was staged; it is a revision, though an incomplete one. In the revised parabasis, Aristophanes claims that he considers The Clouds his best play to date; he insists particularly on its subtlety and originality. Scholar Grene has suggested that he is referring to “the psychological study of human personality,” which looms larger in this than in the other early plays. Though it lacks consistency and dramatic unity (perhaps because of the incomplete revision), the play features an unusually realistic hero—indeed, a sort of antihero. His name is Strepsiades (which means, roughly, “Twister”), and he is of humble country stock, like Dikaiopolis and Trygaios; unlike them, however, he is genuinely corrupt. In order to get out of paying the debts his son has incurred, Strepsiades enrolls at the Thinkery, presided over by Socrates, who is here made to represent all the dubious achievements of the “new learning” (the sophistic movement of the fifth century b.c.e.). Strepsiades himself is too thick-witted to learn what Socrates has to teach, however, so he persuades his son Pheidippides to take the course—and thereby gets his comeuppance, for Pheidippides uses the specious reasoning he learns to justify not only defaulting on debts but also beating his parents. Strepsiades gets his revenge—by burning down the Thinkery, an act of desperation, not an assertion of comic possibility like Dikaiopolis’s truce or the Sausage-Seller’s trouncing of Cleon. In this play, Aristophanes came to grips with a knotty problem that has not lost its contemporary flavor: the interaction of character and values in the educational process. Perhaps because of this very complexity, the resolution, as it stands, lacks the comic release of most of Aristophanes’ finales. Ecclesiazusae • In this respect, The Clouds resembles Ecclesiazusae, one of Aristophanes’ two surviving fourth century b.c.e. plays. Though it lacks the wit and subtlety of The Clouds, Ecclesiazusae shares its realistic, not to say pessimistic, perspective. Ecclesiazusae is also a kind of anti-Lysistrata, for it sets up a utopia under the leadership of women but then severely undercuts it by dramatizing the chaos that results. The women’s edicts are either unenforceable (when ordered to surrender their goods to the community, some citizens simply withhold them) or profoundly unnatural (the young and beautiful are forced to gratify the sexual desires of the old and ugly). The sense of realism and disenchantment is strengthened by a drastic reduction in the role of the chorus (resulting in a dearth of lyric passages) and by a more concentrated plot. The old Aristophanes can be detected, though, in the antiphilosophical stances of the play. Though the idea of pooling goods and sexual partners is attributed to the heroine, Praxagora, it is likely to have been the brainchild of a sophist or philosopher. Plato was its most famous exponent, but his Politeia (388-368 b.c.e.; Republic, 1701) came later (unless an early version of it was already in circulation in 392). Whatever its source, the idea belongs, in Aristophanes’ view, to that class of abstractions ridiculed in The Clouds for the discomfort they cause to all but the few clever enough to manipulate them. It has been suggested that in contrast with the early plays, in which the old heroes are rejuvenated and the clock turned back to a more vigorous age, the late plays merely complete the work of destruction already in progress. According to this view, the rule of women is symbolic of the dissolution of the polity and the victory of the private over

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the political sphere. It is certain that politics disappeared entirely from New Comedy, the forerunner of the romance and of most modern comedy, in which the private sphere fills the foreground. The Frogs • The Frogs is the last surviving work of Old Comedy and perhaps the greatest. It was produced in 405, shortly after the deaths of Sophocles and Euripides and just before the Athenian defeat at Aegospotami, which ended the Peloponnesian War. The hero is Dionysus, divine patron of the theater, who undertakes a trip to Hades because he can find no good tragedians aboveground. His idea is to bring back Euripides, but once below, he finds himself called on to judge between Euripides and Aeschylus, who are contending for the “chair of tragedy.” In the end, Dionysus declares Aeschylus the winner and brings him back to Athens. There are two choruses: one of frogs, who engage in a shouting match with Dionysus as he rows across the Stygian lake in Charon’s boat, and one of Initiates to the Eleusinian Mysteries, whose life in the underworld is a joyous one of choral song and torchlight revels. The Initiates represent a kind of ideal community, warning away all who would engage in sedition or accept bribes, but they are also a true comic chorus, full of insults and bawdy jokes. This harmonizes perfectly with their dramatic identity as initiates, for the mysteries blended fertility cult with eschatological promises, and the ceremonies included the hurling of bawdy taunts. The agon consists of the dramatic contest between the two tragedians, including hilarious parodies of each man’s style and culminating in the actual weighing of their verses on a scale. Much has been made of the fact that Dionysus bases his final decision on the two men’s political advice to the city. As in the finale of The Knights, however, the emphasis is not so much on the actual content of the advice as on the evocation of a time—that of Aeschylus’s prime—when Athens was the unchallenged leader of Greece. Despite the play’s premise, that the best poets are all in Hades, there is surprisingly little black comedy. The choral lyrics radiate hope (albeit an eschatological hope), and the spirit of emulation proper to Aristophanes’ early plays enlivens The Frogs from first to last. In addition to the agon proper, there is not only a shouting match between Dionysus and the frogs but also a whipping contest between Dionysus and his slave Xanthias (to determine which of them is the god). Aristophanes is aware, as always, of the dramatic competition in which he is himself a contestant and pulls out all the stops—just as he depicts Aeschylus and Euripides doing—in order to win. At the same time, however, there is a poignant emphasis on the need for reconciliation among the city’s various factions if Athens is to survive. Therefore, the parabasis, sung by the chorus of Initiates, pleads not for Aristophanes’ victory but for a general amnesty permitting exiled citizens to return. Though Aristophanes delights in competition to the very end, he recognizes that if the terms of competition are not adhered to, the city cannot stand. For later readers of The Frogs, the play’s poignancy is increased by hindsight: Athens did fall, never to regain the eminence it enjoyed in Aeschylus’s day. The fact that he chose Initiates for his chorus suggests that Aristophanes had an intimation of this and that he realized the dramatic art of Athens need not share the city’s political fate—precisely because the “solutions” it offered were not political but poetic and self-sustaining visions. Bibliography Bowie, A. M. Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual, and Comedy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Bowie uses anthropological techniques in comparing Aristophanes’

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plays with Greek myths and rituals with similar story lines in an attempt to discover how the original audiences would have responded to the plays. Includes bibliography and index. Harvey, David, and John Wilkins, eds. The Rivals of Aristophanes: Studies in Athenian Old Comedy. London: Duckworth and the Classical Press of Wales, 2000. Twenty-eight essays on the other comic poets of Athenian Old Comedy, based on the fragments and citations that survive. Includes bibliography. Lada-Richards, Ismene. Initiating Dionysus: Ritual and Theatre in Aristophanes’ “Frogs.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. The author uses literary and anthropological approaches in looking at how a member of Greek society would have viewed the play and Dionysus as a dramatic figure. Includes bibliography and indexes. MacDowell, Douglas M. Aristophanes and Athens: An Introduction to the Plays. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. MacDowell provides an introduction to Aristophanes’ plays, including information about Athens and the political climate, essential to understanding some of the allusions in Aristophanes’ works. Includes bibliography and index. Russo, Carlo Ferdinando. Aristophanes: An Author for the Stage. New York: Routledge, 1994. Russo examines Aristophanes’ dramatic technique in a work that is both scholarly and lively. Includes bibliography and index. Taaffe, Laurne K. Aristophanes and Women. New York: Routledge, 1993. Taaffe examines the portrayal of women in Aristophanes’ plays, focusing on Lysistrata, Thesmophoriazusae, and Ecclesiazusae. Includes bibliography and index. Lillian Doherty

Sir Alan Ayckbourn Sir Alan Ayckbourn

Born: Hampstead, London, England; April 12, 1939 Principal drama • The Square Cat, pr. 1959 (as Roland Allen); Love After All, pr. 1959 (as Roland Allen); Mr. Whatnot, pr. 1963 (revised version pr. 1964); Relatively Speaking, pr. 1967, pb. 1968 (originally as Meet My Father, pr. 1965); Ernie’s Incredible Illucinations, pb. 1969, pr. 1971 (for children); How the Other Half Loves, pr. 1969, pb. 1972; Time and Time Again, pr. 1971, pb. 1973; Absurd Person Singular, pr. 1972, pb. 1974; The Norman Conquests, pr. 1973, pb. 1975 (includes Table Manners, Living Together, and Round and Round the Garden); Absent Friends, pr. 1974, pb. 1975; Confusions, pr. 1974, pb. 1977 (five one-acts); Bedroom Farce, pr. 1975, pb. 1977; Just Between Ourselves, pr. 1976, pb. 1978; Ten Times Table, pr. 1977, pb. 1978; Joking Apart, pr. 1978, pb. 1979; Men on Women on Men, pr. 1978 (lyrics; music by Paul Todd); Sisterly Feelings, pr. 1979, pb. 1981; Taking Steps, pr. 1979, pb. 1981; Suburban Strains, pr. 1980, pb. 1982 (music by Todd); Season’s Greetings, pr. 1980, pb. 1982; Way Upstream, pr. 1981, pb. 1983; Me, Myself, and I, pr. 1981, pb. 1989 (music by Todd); Intimate Exchanges, pr. 1982, pb. 1985; A Chorus of Disapproval, pr. 1984, pb. 1985; Woman in Mind, pr. 1985, pb. 1986; A Small Family Business, pr., pb. 1987; Henceforward, pr. 1987, pb. 1988; Mr. A’s Amazing Maze Plays, pr. 1988, pb. 1989 (for children); Man of the Moment, pr. 1988, pb. 1990; Invisible Friends, pr. 1989, pb. 1991; The Revengers’ Comedies, pr. 1989, pb. 1991; Body Language, pr. 1990, pb. 2001; This Is Where He Came In, pr. 1990, pb. 1995 (for children); Wildest Dreams, pr. 1991, pb. 1993; My Very Own Story, pr. 1991, pb. 1995 (for children); Dreams from a Summer House, pr. 1992, pb. 1997 (music by John Pattison); Time of My Life, pr. 1992, pb. 1993; Communicating Doors, pr. 1994, pb. 1995; Haunting Julia, pr. 1994; The Musical Jigsaw Play, pr. 1994 (for children); Plays, pb. 1995-1998 (2 volumes); A Word from Our Sponsor, pr. 1995, pb. 1998 (music by Pattison); By Jeeves, pr. 1996 (music by Andrew Lloyd Webber); The Champion of Paribanou, pr. 1996, pb. 1998 (for children); Things We Do for Love, pr. 1997, pb. 1998; The Boy Who Fell into a Book, pr. 1998, pb. 2000 (for children); Comic Potential, pr. 1998, pb. 1999; Gizmo, pr. 1998, pb. 1999; “House” and “Garden,” pr., pb. 2000 Other literary forms • Alan Ayckbourn is known primarily for his plays. Achievements • A farceur of contemporary suburbia, Alan Ayckbourn enjoys distinction not only as a prolific writer of entertaining, well-made plays during a stage revolution when the pièce bien faite was out of fashion but also as a dramatist who, beginning in 1959, has averaged one play a year, claiming to have surpassed even William Shakespeare in the sheer quantity of plays written by the early 1990’s. His early reputation as a commercial dramatist, however, changed with the times and the development of his own style and themes, so that he has enjoyed productions of his plays even at the prestigious National Theatre in London. A critic of contemporary society’s greed, he has increasingly honed his farce into black comedy, earning for it the label of “theater of embarrassment.” In 1987 Ayckbourn was awarded a royal honor as Commander of the British Empire, and in 1997 he was knighted for services to the theater. 51

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In 1992 he was appointed Cameron Mackintosh professor of contemporary theater at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. Among other awards he has received are the Montblanc de la Culture Award for Europe and the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Lifetime Achievement Award. He has received several honorary degrees, and his work has been translated into more than forty languages. Biography • Alan Ayckbourn was born in Hampstead, London, on April 12, 1939, to Horace and Irene Worley Ayckbourn, his father the first violinist with the London Symphony Orchestra and his mother a novelist and short-story writer for popular women’s magazines. In 1943, when he was five, his parents were divorced and his mother married Cecil Pye, a manager for Barclays Bank. Winning a Barclays Bank scholarship, Ayckbourn attended Haileybury School in Hertfordshire, where, during the next five years, he became interested in drama, touring in Holland as Peter in Romeo and Juliet and in the United States and Canada as Macduff in Macbeth. Thus began Ayckbourn’s lifelong affair with the theater. He left school with “A” levels in English and history and, at seventeen, joined Sir Donald Wolfit’s company at the Edinburgh Festival as acting assistant stage manager. He also worked in summer theater at Leatherhead and then at Scarborough’s Studio Theatre (under Stephen Joseph, son of actress Hermione Ferdinanda Gingold), writing plays even as he was initiated into the production rites of professional theater. In 1959, Ayckbourn married actress Christine Roland, had a son (Steven Paul), and saw two of his plays (The Square Cat and Love After All) produced in Scarborough under the pseudonym of Roland Allen. In 1962, his second son, Nicholas Phillip, was born, and in 1964, Ayckbourn’s Mr. Whatnot opened at the Arts Theatre in London. Thereafter, he has averaged writing at least one play per year, and he is wont to talk fondly of providing amusement for bored surburbanite vacationers on rainy Scarborough days. Ayckbourn’s early days in the theater included acting in roles such as Vladimir in Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot (pb. 1952, pr. 1953; Waiting for Godot, pb. 1954) and Stanley in Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party (pr. 1958, pb. 1960). He was foundermember and associate director of Victoria Theatre in Stoke on Trent, produced dramas on the British Broadcasting Corporation’s radio, in Leeds, and, after Stephen Joseph’s death in 1967, returned to Scarborough in 1970. After several name changes, the Victoria Theatre became the Stephen Joseph Theatre-in-the-Round in 1996, in tribute to Ayckbourn’s mentor. It became also Ayckbourn’s tryout home before openings in theaters in and around London and all over the world. In the United States, the Alley Theatre in Houston, the Arena Stage in Washington, and the Manhattan Theater Club in New York, among others, became homes for Ayckbourn’s plays. Having succeeded in small English theaters such as The Arts, The Roundhouse, and The Richmond Orange Tree, and later in commercial houses in the West End, Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce reached the Royal National Theatre, where both his plays and his directorship (1986) have long enjoyed a liaison. In the best of all possible theater worlds—the provincial, fringe, West End commercial, Royal National, and international theaters producing his plays—Ayckbourn not only has survived the early critical attacks for writing the commercially profitable well-made play but also has continued writing in a long career that has no contemporary equal in quantity and consistency of experimentation. With more than fifty plays, Ayckbourn has continued to be more prolific than any of the new playwrights since the stage revolution began in 1956 with John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (pr. 1956, pb. 1957).

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His marriage to Roland led to separation and divorce some years later. In 1997 he married Heather Stoney. He has continued to live in Scarborough, Yorkshire. Analysis • With labels flourishing during the new era in drama (Osborne’s angry theater, Beckett’s Theater of the Absurd, Pinter’s comedy of menace, Arnold Wesker’s kitchen-sink drama), Alan Ayckbourn, too, has been honored with his own label, the comedy of embarrassment, based on the increasingly black comedy in his later farces. The term derives from the unease of audiences as their laughter is deflected by the intrusion of realities underlying that hilarity. For example, the accidental murders in A Small Family Business and Man of the Moment obtrude through the farce, giving it a hollow ring. This jarring union of farce and tragedy, alien to standard farce expectations, in fact, is subtly present even in early comedies such as How the Other Half Loves, markedly so in A Chorus of Disapproval, and shatteringly so in A Small Family Business and Man of the Moment. Ayckbourn has become the hilarious tragedian of contemporary life, not unlike Ben Jonson, whose seventeenth century farces about greed seem ancestors to Ayckbourn’s. Ayckbourn met the charges of early critics who faulted him for his commercially viable formula plays, commenting that one “cannot begin to shatter theatrical conventions or break golden rules until he is reasonably sure in himself what they are and how they were arrived at.” The rules to which Ayckbourn is referring are the time-honored ones practiced by Greeks and Romans, Shakespeare, Jonson, Molière, George Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde. With the acknowledged influence of William Congreve, Wilde, Georges Feydeau, Anton Chekhov, Noël Coward, Terence Rattigan, J. B. Priestley, and Pinter, Ayckbourn has forged a style of old and new that has given his plays their unique quality. Using the farce conventions of his predecessors, he has experimented with the mechanics of traditional plotting by challenging its limits and extending its boundaries. One of his most noticeable changes in farce techniques is his avoidance of the linear movement of the plot and his replacing it with a sense of indefiniteness. The outcome is a circular movement, resulting in a play structure that is more akin to the static quality of Chekhov’s plots than to the active one of Wilde’s and Shaw’s plays. His disarrangement of linear plot lines creates the illusion of a standard farce, deceiving the audience in its usual comic expectations. His technique is partly explained by the tripling, sometimes quadrupling, of the number of potentially comic couples or comic situations in the conventional farce. The standard use of the double takes what seems a quantum leap in Ayckbourn’s farces. The tripling extends to the overall architecture of plays, a number of them taking the form of trilogies. In The Norman Conquests, each of the three plays treats the same character and situations, one being the offstage action of what happens onstage in another. The order of performance of the three plays, thus, is of little consequence, for each is essentially repetitious of the other two. The chief difference among them is their locale: One occurs in the dining room, the second in the living room, and the third in the garden. The difference is diversionary, suggesting a traditional plot movement where there really is none. Ayckbourn’s trilogy Sisterly Feelings goes even further in its structural inventiveness, with each play’s conclusion in a given performance being determined arbitrarily by a member of the cast. Still another sometimes confusing plot invention is Ayckbourn’s use of the same stage space at the same time by two or more different sets of characters (frequently couples), most prominently illustrated in How the Other Half Loves, Bedroom

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Farce, and Taking Steps. The single most famous of these scenes, in How the Other Half Loves, involves two different dinner parties by two different middle-class couples (one having achieved social status and the other desperately trying to do so) seated at the same table, their only common element a third couple who are the guests at both dinners. Ayckbourn’s ingenious plotting strategies provide him ample room to comment on his favorite theme: a satire on the foibles of individuals functioning in suburbia, his chosen slice of middle-class society. His satire has its brief, unrelieved grim moments as in A Small Family Business and Henceforeward, plays in which the families’ children become victims of the pervasive greed of individuals and their society and are helpless to extricate themselves. The artificially happy ending of a farce is replaced by a realistically sober ending in which the comic surfaces of the plot are maintained, even as they cannot disguise the underlying tragic realities. Thus the play stylistically satisfies the farce’s requirement for a happy ending while substantively changing the genre to an ironic farce at its best and a black comedy at its most pessimistic. It is appropriate that the title of one of Ayckbourn’s late plays, The Revengers’ Comedies, derives from Cyril Tourneur’s seventeenth century title The Revenger’s Tragedy (pr. 1606-1607, pb. 1607), with the obvious parallel of the earlier era with Thatcherite England of the 1980’s. The traditional purpose of comedy has been to reveal and thereby correct the vices of the society that it portrays by exposing them (usually with a deus ex machina ending), thereby bringing about correction of behavior in that society. The exposure involves stereotypical characters whose mechanical behavior engenders laughter. Mere exposure is the punishment for the perpetrator of the vice, either reform or prison frequently being the result of that exposure. The vices of the age have no such corrective results in Ayckbourn’s farces. In his exposure of rampant acquisitiveness, however, Ayckbourn does realize half of the farceur’s aim. At the same time, he admits to an unease about the corrective results of prevailing farces. Of the Thatcherite regime he says, “It’s no coincidence that you hardly ever see members of the present Government in the theatre. . . . The arts and gentle, civilized living are rapidly being downgraded for the fast buck. It has a narrowing effect. It creates an uncaringness.” The traditional purpose of tragedy has been to cleanse the body politic of its moral stain and to affirm life through increased self-knowledge on the part of the hero, a process in which guilty and innocent alike suffer. As realistic rather than stereotypical characters who embody the values of their respective societies, characters evoke, according to Aristotelian precepts, pity and fear in the polis even as they endure individual punishments and rewards. There is no such individual or collective affirmation in Ayckbourn’s plays. Again, the darker elements only continue in their nonresolution, in character-generated farces, such as Jack McCracken of A Small Family Business and Douglas Beechey of Man of the Moment. Societally, business and mass-media corrupters conspire in their lack of awareness of the morality or immorality of their actions. Individually and collectively, characters continue in a context in which punishment and rewards in a moral sense do not exist. Ayckbourn regards Absurd Person Singular with its three Christmas Eve celebrations as his first “offstage action” play, one in which two socially aspiring couples land in the thick of adversities of the most successful couple. The offstage importance increases with every play, with further inability on the part of the characters to extricate themselves from their adversities. For example, the celebratory tableaulike ending to A

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Small Family Business coexists with a tableau of the young daughter in her drug-induced pain in the bathroom. John Peter describes an Ayckbourn play as “a requiem scored for screams and laughter.” As a dark farceur par excellence of contemporary suburbia, as an ongoing reinventor of farce technique, and as the most prolific of a huge number of new dramatists in the second half of the twentieth century, Ayckbourn continues to be a force on the world stage. Relatively Speaking • Ayckbourn’s first London success, Relatively Speaking, illustrates his roots in the traditional mechanics of the well-made farce, such as abundant coincidences, well-timed exits and entrances, complicated romantic intrigues, central misunderstandings, quid pro quos, secrets known to the audience but not to the characters, and the crucial use of an object to progress the plot. At the same time, Ayckbourn rejects the suspense-creating, teeter-totter action, the big revelatory scene, and the ending that neatly ties together the loose ends of the plot. Instead, as a keen observer and creator of character, he treats familial and marital situations whose problems are revealed rather than resolved. The results are Chekhov-like revelations of states of being, contained within the guise of farce and an increasingly bitter satire on the moral bankruptcy of contemporary society. Deceptively embodied in the local, his farce is ultimately universal in its depiction of human foibles that know no bounds of time or place. With echoes of the exploits of Oscar Wilde’s Jack and Ernest in The Importance of Being Earnest (pr. 1895, pb. 1899), Relatively Speaking, a four-character play, involves a young unmarried couple who set off for the country, each for secret reasons withheld from the other. Ginny wishes to retrieve letters from her former lover (and employer) to put a definite end to that affair. Unbeknown to her, Greg, her current lover, suspicious because of the flowers and chocolates cluttering Ginny’s flat and the address he notices on her cigarette pack (like the cigarette case in Wilde’s play), follows her on a different train. Ginny’s lie about a visit to her “parents” begins a series of deceptions multiplied at breakneck speed, deceptions that stretch out to include an older couple, Philip and his wife, Sheila. A sine qua non of any farce, the seemingly unstoppable piling up of deceptions, misunderstandings, and coincidences is absurd, one of the most comical being Greg’s misinterpretation of Sheila’s truthful insistence that she is not Ginny’s mother. To Greg, Sheila is merely eluding potential embarrassment at having to reveal the illegitimacy of Ginny’s birth. Like all farceurs, Ayckbourn bases his suspense on secrets known to only some of the characters and on not having all characters on the stage at the same time until the play’s end. Consequently, all characters act on the basis of only a partial knowledge of things. While observing this convention, Ayckbourn ignores the artificial disclosure scene (also known as the big scene, obligatory scene, or scène à faire) in which all secrets are revealed, all misunderstandings cleared up, and a happy ending contrived. For even as Ginny and Philip depart happily, neither Greg nor Philip is fully apprised of what has happened, the former of Philip’s deceptive vacation plans having included Ginny and the latter of Sheila’s untruthful claims to having a lover. Thus the turning point in the conventional farce (two of the most famous occurring in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, pr. 1777, pb. 1780, and Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest) gives way even in Ayckbourn’s early farces to a Chekhovian technique of the undramatic.

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How the Other Half Loves • In How the Other Half Loves, Ayckbourn takes his technique one step further, this time in the use of stage space in a simultaneous depiction of two separate dinner parties. He superimposes the dinner party of one upwardly mobile couple (the Fosters) on that of a more affluent couple (the Phillipses) so that both couples are hosts to the same dinner guests (the Featherstones). In an eye-defying sequence of movements, the audience witnesses the two couples preparing for their guests in the same stage space, the distinctions between the relative affluence of the aspiring sets of hosts made clear only by a change in a few minor furnishings, such as pillows. The hilarious scene in which two separate dinner parties at two separate times are staged at one table is Ayckbourn’s most inventive climactic scene. Their common guest, Mr. Featherstone, is the victim simultaneously of Teresa Phillips’s thrown soup (intended for her husband) and the leaking upstairs toilet at the Fosters’ home. Unwitting victim of the accidental physical high jinks of his hosts, Mr. Featherstone is victim in another sense, for although the fortunes of the Phillipses and the Fosters seem to be put to rights at the end of the play, the Featherstones—clearly the couple to be impressed—reveal their own marital problems, foreboding, ironically, similar problems for their younger, aspiring hosts. Time and Time Again • Up to Time and Time Again, Ayckbourn’s inventions focused on plots and staging areas. About this play, however, Ayckbourn speaks of “upsetting the balance,” an upsetting involving the nature of his main character. Normally the driving force in the plot, the protagonist, Leonard, is upsettingly passive. According to Ayckbourn, he “attracts people who have an irresistible impulse to push him in one direction, but he slides out of the push.” Some audiences, Ayckbourn continues, are “angered by this type,” while “others get concerned.” Hence, Ayckbourn himself supplies yet another basis for the label applied to him as a writer of the theater of embarrassment. Leonard’s “sliding” in the play is his refusal to be drawn into the banalities of middle-class social lunches and teas. He has developed his own system of quiet resistance. At one point, he relates the story of a telling of a tale from his former marriage. A schoolteacher at the time, Leonard arrives home one day to find his wife sampling homemade wine with a male friend. Unable or unwilling to react, Leonard spends the evening in the local jail, regaling the officers with his story and retelling it to every fresh batch of police officers as they arrive for duty. Leonard is the first of a series of Ayckbourn’s passive heroes, the most humorous being Norman of The Norman Conquests; the most sympathetically satiric, Guy Jones in A Chorus of Disapproval; and the most devastating, Douglas Beechey in Man of the Moment. There is an aggressive element in Leonard’s passivity as he forces others to respond to his lack of involvement. From his school days, he tells yet another story of having developed a system of quoting a line or two of poetry, an “infallible system to fool all headmasters and school inspectors.” He continues this pattern of behavior even as an adult. Bored by the others and interested by Leonard’s erratic behavior, Joan, his current interest, joins Leonard in his game. In the meantime, Graham, a husband also attracted to Joan, pushes Peter, another admirer of Joan mistaken by Graham as her lover, into a physical fight. Leonard, as a result of the mistake, goes scot-free. The play ends with Leonard eventually leaving Joan (as he earlier had left his wife and her lover to entertain the local police officers) and walking off compatibly with Peter to the playing field, Graham and Peter still laboring under their misunderstanding.

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Absurd Person Singular • Another Ayckbourn technique becomes more apparent with every play: his inventive use of the room. As character becomes more important than plot, Ayckbourn utilizes the room (frequently the kitchen) as a microscope under which he examines contemporary middle-class behavior in all of its acquisitiveness and sexual rituals. The kitchen, its appliances emblems of materialistic greed, is an appropriate setting for his examination. In his Absurd Person Singular, structured loosely as three one-act plays, three couples celebrate Christmas Eve in three successive years in three different homes, the kitchen winding up as the room in which most of the action takes place. In the first act, the first host-couple, lowest on the social rung, aspire to the social status of their guests. In the second act, the hosts have to some extent realized their social aims. In act 3, the hosts, having played the social-status game longer than their guests, have long since been in a state of total noncommunication, a direction toward which the other two couples seem to be heading. The final scene of act 3 finds all three couples crowding the kitchen, each person in a wild frenzy of attending to chores such as replacing a light bulb, completely ignoring the suicide attempt of their hostess, with her head in the gas oven. The three couples are a variation on those in How the Other Half Loves. The Norman Conquests • Rooms continue to be the means of Ayckbourn’s microscopic examination of suburban rituals in The Norman Conquests. Here, Ayckbourn locates the similar actions in three different places: the dining room in Table Manners, the living room in Living Together, and the garden in Round and Round the Garden. The family consists of Annie, who is single and the caretaker of their sick mother, her married sister Ruth, and her married brother Reg (and the spouses of the latter two). All convene in the family’s country home to provide some relief for Annie. Norman, Ruth’s husband, enjoys hilariously romantic encounters with the women in each location of the three plays. Like Leonard of Time and Time Again, Norman attracts female attention and finds himself in situations not of his making. A Chekhovian immobility asserts itself in Annie’s abortive plans for a “dirty weekend” with Norman in East Grinstead. There is a sixth character, an outsider in the person of a slow-witted local veterinarian, played in the original stage production with exquisitely hilarious dullness by Michael Gambon, who would later become a regular actor in Ayckbourn’s plays. He is a foil to Norman, whose sexual attractiveness and agility drive the women to respond to him. Each of the three plays is complete in itself, and the order in which they are performed (or seen) is more or less immaterial to the audience’s understanding of each play because the action in each does not essentially depend on that in the other two and because the actions in all three are essentially the same, their different “rooms” creating different perspectives on the same situation. Taking Steps and Bedroom Farce • Two plays, Taking Steps and Bedroom Farce, revert to Ayckbourn’s reliance on hectic physical stage business as in How the Other Half Loves. The action of Taking Steps occurs on three different floors of an old Victorian house, but one stage space is used to represent all three floors of the house. Hence the actors must take a variety of steps in imitation of stair climbing. Similarly, in Bedroom Farce, one stage area is occupied by three large beds to represent three different bedrooms. The potential audience confusions as to who is doing what in whose bed and the risk of actors in making false steps as they maneuver their way through time and space create suspense and keep the play’s pace lively. At times, Ayckbourn’s risk tak-

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ing with physical matters seems its own excuse for being, an entertaining ploy to avoid the greater risk of banality potentially inherent in his repetitive marital and extramarital situations. Season’s Greetings • In the plays of the 1960’s and 1970’s, Ayckbourn’s ingenious strategies of plot, space, and character dominate, and laughter governs the plays’ moods. In the 1980’s, however, the hilarity, although remaining intact to the end of the play, is mixed with increasing audience uncertainty—to laugh or not to laugh. For example, in Season’s Greetings, a stranger (a writer with only one book to his credit) becomes the romantic object of attention of the females. A guest of the single sister at a Christmas family gathering, he is a later version of the outsider, Leonard, in Time and Time Again. When the women of the household (including his hostess, the unmarried sister) are attracted to him, an angry husband shoots and almost kills him. The intrusion on farce of a potential disaster changes the nature of the laughter into the kind produced by Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, whose shot at his rival misfires. Chekhov-like also in his use of a family gathering as the central event of a play, Ayckbourn has commented on that event as unimportant. It is, rather, “the response to the dinner party, not the dinner party itself.” He spoke to author Bernard Dukore of the inevitable line in that response: “Wasn’t that a boring dinner party?” In that line and as a consequence of it, revelations occur, not only of the problems of those couples who have succeeded but also of the pending fate of those who have not yet arrived but are on the same path. An attractive outsider acts as a catalyst to reveal the Chekhovian inner states of being that lie beneath the politely banal surfaces. A Chorus of Disapproval • The outsider in A Chorus of Disapproval is Guy Jones, a lonely bachelor drawn into a provincial production of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (pr., pb. 1728), when the leading role is suddenly vacated. A fuller version of dull Tom in The Norman Conquests, he rises to the occasion, though untalented and inexperienced, and becomes the hero not only of the production but also of the women who thrust themselves on him as a result of dissatisfactions in their own marriages. He is the means by which they respond to the emptiness of their suburban lives. A Small Family Business, Henceforward, and Man of the Moment • In three later plays—A Small Family Business, Henceforward, and Man of the Moment—the farce is increasingly ironic in Ayckbourn’s progressive shift to emphasize the emotional and moral bankruptcy of middle-class family life in Thatcherite England of the 1980’s. In all three, outside forces exert pressures on family situations, pressures that the family finds difficult or impossible to control. In A Small Family Business, the pressure is money, involving a family furniture business in which greed corrupts completely, simultaneously involving a hilariously stereotyped, Mafia-like quintet of Italian brothers. In Henceforward, a gang-infested neighborhood is a refuge for a divorced composer of electronic music, who contests his wife for custody of their daughter. In a stunning move, Ayckbourn deploys a female robot, the composer’s means of assuring the social worker of the presence of a maternal influence in his daughter’s life. Ayckbourn compounds this bit of theatricality with the appearance of the teen daughter in full regalia as a member of one of the neighborhood gangs. In Man of the Moment, the theatricality takes the form of an overweight woman who accidentally kills a most repulsive character when she steps on him rather than

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saving him, as was her intention. Individual greed and corruption, although present, are given societal approval in the impunity and impersonality with which a television crew exploits personal tragedy in the name of a good news story. Both business and television interests conspire in a cover-up of the real story. In these three plays, the laughter caused by coincidences and central misunderstandings is still there, but now the plays are darkened by their context of a pervasive societal hypocrisy. The problems are no longer those of innocently human complications but of socially accepted amorality. In A Small Family Business, the last person with any scruples, Jack, the new head of the business, cannot extricate himself from its corruption. The gang-infested neighborhood of Henceforward and the moral vacuum of the mass media in Man of the Moment remain. Ayckbourn provides no artificial resolutions to the problems, only a microscopic examination of them. Amid the farcical humor that is sustained to the end in two of the plays, two teenagers, as a result of their being ignored because of other family problems, become innocent victims, one a drug addict and the other a gang member. In the third play, an adult innocent, dull and passive Douglas Beechey, is a subject for both hilarity and tragedy, as he is made into a massmedia hero through no attempt on his part. He belongs to a long gallery of Ayckbourn characters who have their roots in the early outsider characters such as Tom in The Norman Conquests. Despite widening his settings, for example to the Costa del Sol in southern Spain in Man of the Moment, to ethnic restaurants, in Time of My Life, even to imaginary landscapes, as in The Revengers’ Comedies and futuristic households, as in Henceforward, Ayckbourn’s themes and theatricality have developed naturally. He has never lost sight of the little man and his desire for self-fulfillment in domesticity, even though evil may lurk abroad. Other major works screenplay: A Chorus of Disapproval, 1989 (adaptation of his play). teleplay: Service Not Included, 1974. Bibliography Allen, Paul. Alan Ayckbourn: Grinning at the Edge. New York: Continuum, 2002. A biography that looks at the playwright’s life and works. Based on more than twenty years of interviews with Ayckbourn and of his friends and acquaintainces. Photographs. Index. Billington, Michael. Alan Ayckbourn. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. A chronological analysis by a leading critic and scholar of Ayckbourn’s plays, from his earliest unpublished works to The Revengers’ Comedies. Dukore, Bernard. Alan Ayckbourn: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1992. A compilation of lively, analytical articles on Ayckbourn’s plays in terms of their stylistic and thematic characteristics, as well as their effectiveness onstage. Includes an interview with Ayckbourn, a complete chronology, and an extensive bibliography. Holt, Michael. Alan Ayckbourn. Plymouth, England: Northcote House, 1999. One of the British Council’s “Writers and their Works” series, it is a sensible introduction. It contains a biography, bibliography, and commentary on the plays up to Things We Do for Love. Kalson, Albert E. Laughter in the Dark: The Plays of Alan Ayckbourn. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Press for Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993. The first chapter is biographical, then aspects of Ayckbourn’s theater are explored, including

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chapters on technique; men’s and women’s roles; and moral, social, and political aspects. There is a separate chapter on Absent Friends. The best full study of the dramatist. Page, Malcolm. File on Ayckbourn. London: Methuen Drama, 1989. A compilation of biographical information, production and publication data, synopses and comments on each play, interview excerpts, and a bibliography. Watson, Ian. Conversations with Ayckbourn. Rev. ed. London: Faber and Faber, 1988. Unified into what seems to be an autobiography, Ayckbourn’s comments range over the achievements of his entire career. Includes useful play synopses and chronology. White, Sidney Howard. Alan Ayckbourn. Boston: Twayne, 1984. A chronological discussion of Ayckbourn’s plays, tracing the dramatist’s progress from farce to plays of character up to 1972. Includes a chronology, a bibliography, and an index. Susan Rusinko, updated by David Barratt

Amiri Baraka Amiri Baraka

LeRoi Jones Born: Newark, New Jersey; October 7, 1934 Principal drama • The Baptism, pr. 1964, pb. 1966; Dutchman, pr., pb. 1964; The Slave, pr., pb. 1964; The Toilet, pr., pb. 1964; Experimental Death Unit #1, pr. 1965, pb. 1969; Jello, pr. 1965, pb. 1970; A Black Mass, pr. 1966, pb. 1969; Arm Yourself, or Harm Yourself, pr., pb. 1967; Great Goodness of Life (A Coon Show), pr. 1967, pb. 1969; Madheart, pr. 1967, pb. 1969; Slave Ship: A Historical Pageant, pr., pb. 1967; The Death of Malcolm X, pb. 1969; Bloodrites, pr. 1970, pb. 1971; Junkies Are Full of (SHHH . . .), pr. 1970, pb. 1971; A Recent Killing, pr. 1973; S-1, pr. 1976, pb. 1978; The Motion of History, pr. 1977, pb. 1978; The Sidney Poet Heroical, pb. 1979 (originally as Sidnee Poet Heroical, pr. 1975); What Was the Relationship of the Lone Ranger to the Means of Production?, pr., pb. 1979; At the Dim’cracker Convention, pr. 1980; Weimar, pr. 1981; Money: A Jazz Opera, pr. 1982; Primitive World: An Anti-Nuclear Jazz Musical, pr. 1984, pb. 1997; The Life and Life of Bumpy Johnson, pr. 1991; General Hag’s Skeezag, pb. 1992; Meeting Lillie, pr. 1993; The Election Machine Warehouse, pr. 1996, pb. 1997 Other literary forms • Amiri Baraka is an exceptionally versatile literary figure, equally well known for his poetry, drama, and essays. In addition, he has written short stories, collected in Tales (1967), and an experimental novel, The System of Dante’s Hell (1965), which includes numerous poetic and dramatic passages. Baraka’s early volumes of poetry Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961) and The Dead Lecturer (1964) derive from his period of involvement with the New York City avant-garde. Other volumes, such as Black Magic: Sabotage, Target Study, Black Art—Collected Poetry, 1961-1967 (1969) and It’s Nation Time (1970), reflect his intense involvement with Black Nationalist politics. Later volumes, such as Hard Facts (1975) and Reggae or Not! (1981), reflect his developing movement to a leftist political position and have generally failed to appeal to either his avant-garde or his Black Nationalist audience. Baraka’s critical and political prose has been collected in Home: Social Essays (1966), Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965 (1971), Selected Plays and Prose (1979), and Daggers and Javelins: Essays (1984). The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka was published in 1984. Achievements • One of the most politically controversial playwrights of the 1960’s, Amiri Baraka is best known for his brilliant early play Dutchman and for his contribution to the development of a community-based black nationalist theater. Throughout his career, he has sought dramatic forms for expressing the consciousness of those alienated from the psychological, economic, and racial mainstream of American society. Even though no consensus exists concerning the success of his experiments, particularly those with ritualistic forms for political drama, his challenge to the aesthetic preconceptions of the American mainstream and the inspiration he has provided younger black playwrights such as Ed Bullins and Ron Milner guarantee his place in the history of American drama. Already well known as an avant-garde poet, Baraka, then LeRoi Jones, first rose to 61

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prominence in the theatrical world with the 1964 productions of The Baptism, Dutchman, The Slave, and The Toilet, which established him as a major Off-Broadway presence. Shortly after winning the Obie Award for Dutchman, however, Baraka broke his ties with the white avant-garde to concentrate on the creation of a militant African American theater. As his mainstream reputation declined, he gained recognition as a leading voice of the Black Arts movement, ultimately assuming a position of public political visibility matched by only a handful of American literary figures. Baraka’s many awards and honors include the Longview Best Essay of the Year award (1961) for his essay “Cuba Libre”; the John Whitney Foundation fellowship for poetry and fiction (1962); the Obie Award for Best American Off-Broadway Play of 1964 for Dutchman; a Guggenheim Fellowship (1965-1966); second prize in the First World Festival of Negro Arts (1966) for his play The Slave; a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1966); an honorary doctorate from Malcolm X College in Chicago (1972); a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in drama (1981); a National Endowment for the Arts poetry award (1981); a New Jersey Council for the Arts award (1982); the American Book Award (established by the Before Columbus Foundation), for Confirmation: An Anthology of African-American Women; a PEN-Faulkner Award (1989); the Langston Hughes Medal (1989) for outstanding contributions to literature; Italy’s Ferroni Award and Foreign Poet Award (1993); and the Playwright’s Award from the Black Drama Festival of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1997. Biography • Everett LeRoi Jones, who took the name Amiri Baraka in 1967, was born into a black middle-class family in Newark, New Jersey. An excellent student whose parents encouraged his intellectual interests, Jones was graduated from Howard University of Washington, D.C., in 1954, at the age of nineteen. After spending two years in the United States Air Force, primarily in Puerto Rico, he moved to Greenwich Village, where he embarked on his literary career in 1957. During the early stage of his career, Jones associated closely with numerous white avant-garde poets, including Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, and Dianne DiPrima, and, with DiPrima, he founded the American Theatre for Poets in 1961. Baraka married Hettie Cohen, a white woman with whom he edited the magazine Yugen from 1958 to 1963, and he established himself as an important young poet, critic, and editor. Among the many magazines to which he contributed was the jazz journal Downbeat, where he first developed the interest in African American musical culture that helped shape his theatrical “rituals.” The political interests that were to dominate Jones’s later work were unmistakably present as early as 1960, when he toured Cuba with a group of black intellectuals. This experience sparked his perception of the United States as a corrupt bourgeois society and seems particularly significant in relation to his subsequent socialist stance. Jones’s growing political interest influenced his first produced plays, including the Obie Award-winning Dutchman, which anticipated the first major transformation of Jones’s life. Separating from Hettie Cohen and severing ties with his white associates, Jones moved from Greenwich Village to Harlem in 1965. Turning his attention to direct action within the black community, he founded the Black Arts Theatre and School in Harlem and, following his return to his native city in 1966, the Spirit House in Newark. After marrying a black woman, Sylvia Robinson (Amina Baraka), in 1966, Jones adopted a new name, “Amiri” (which means “prince”) “Baraka” (“blessed one”), to which he added the honorary title “Imamu” (“spiritual leader”). Over the next halfdozen years, Baraka helped found and develop organizations such as the Black Com-

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munity Development and Defense Organization, the Congress of African Peoples (convened in Atlanta in 1970), and the National Black Political Convention (convened in Gary, Indiana, in 1972). As a leading spokesperson of the Black Arts movement, Baraka provided personal and artistic support for young black poets and playwrights, including Larry Neal, Ed Bullins, Marvin X, and Ron Milner. During the Newark riots of 1967, Baraka was arrested for unlawful possession of firearms. Although convicted and given the maximum sentence after the judge read the jury his poem “Black People!” as an example of incitement to riot, Baraka was later cleared on appeal. Baraka supported Ken Gibson’s campaign to become the first black mayor of Newark in 1970, but later broke with him over what he perceived as the Gibson administra(Library of Congress) tion’s bourgeois values. This disillusionment with black politics within the American system and Baraka’s attendance at the Sixth Pan-African Conference at Dar es Salaam in 1974 precipitated the next stage of his political evolution. Although he did not abandon his commitment to confronting the special problems of African Americans in the United States, Baraka began interpreting these problems within the framework of an overarching “Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong” philosophy. In conjunction with this second transformation, Baraka dropped the title “Imamu” and changed the name of his Newark publishing firm from “Jihad” to “People’s War.” He undertook visiting professorships at Yale and George Washington universities before accepting a more permanent position at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In 1979, Baraka was arrested during a dispute with his wife; he wrote The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones while serving the resulting sentence at a halfway house in Harlem. In 1990, he was involved in a widely publicized dispute with Rutgers University officials who had denied him tenure; he compared the school’s faculty to the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi Party. Though such controversies perhaps exacerbated the difficulty Baraka experienced in finding publishers for his socialist writings, he remained an important voice in the literary world and the African American community. After teaching for twenty years in the Department of African Studies at State University of New YorkStony Brook, Baraka retired from his position in 1999. Analysis • Working with forms ranging from the morality play to avant-garde expressionism, Amiri Baraka throughout his career sought to create dramatic rituals express-

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ing the intensity of the physical and psychological violence that dominates his vision of American culture. From his early plays on “universal” alienation through his Black Nationalist celebrations to his multimedia proletarian pageants, Baraka has focused on a variety of sacrificial victims as his central dramatic presences. Some of these victims remain passive scapegoats who allow a corrupt and vicious system to dictate their fate. Others assume the role of heroic martyr in the cause of community consciousness. Yet a third type of victim is the doomed oppressor whose death marks the transformation of the martyr’s consciousness into a ritual action designed to free the community from continuing passive victimization. The dominant type in Baraka’s early plays, the passive scapegoats unaware of their participation in ritual actions, condemn themselves and their communities to blind repetition of destructive patterns. Their apparent mastery of the forms of European American cultural literacy simply obscures the fact of their ignorance of the underlying reality of oppression. Responding to this ironic situation, Baraka’s Black Nationalist plays emphasize the new forms of consciousness, their roots in Africa rather than Europe, needed to free the African American community from the historical and psychological forces that enforce such blind repetition. Inverting the traditional moral symbolism of European American culture, Baraka creates rituals that substitute symbolically white scapegoats for the symbolically black victims of his earlier works. These rituals frequently reject the image of salvation through self-sacrifice (seen as a technique for the pacification of the black masses), insisting instead that only an active struggle can break the cycle of oppression. Because the rituals of Baraka’s Black Nationalist plays frequently culminate in violence directed against whites, or symbolically white members of the black bourgeois, or aspects of the individual black psyche, numerous critics have attacked him for perpetuating the violence and racism he ostensibly criticizes. These critics frequently condemn him for oversimplifying reality, citing his movement from psychologically complex ironic forms to much more explicit allegorical modes in his later drama; the most insistent simply dismiss his post-Dutchman plays as strident propaganda, lacking all aesthetic and moral merit. Basing their critiques firmly on European American aesthetic assumptions, such critics in fact overlook the central importance of Baraka’s changing sense of his audience. Repudiating the largely white avant-garde audience that applauded his early work, Baraka turned almost exclusively to an African American audience more aware of the storefront preacher and popular music groups such as the Temptations than of August Strindberg and Edward Albee. In adopting a style of performance in accord with this cultural perception, Baraka assumed a didactic voice intended to focus attention on immediate issues of survival and community or class defense. The Baptism • First produced in leading New York theaters such as St. Mark’s Playhouse (The Slave and The Toilet), the Cherry Lane Theatre (Dutchman), and the Writers’ Stage Theatre (The Baptism), Baraka’s early plays clearly reflect both his developing concern with issues of survival and his fascination with European American avantgarde traditions. The Baptism, in particular, draws on the conventions of expressionist theater to comment on the absurdity of contemporary American ideas of salvation, which in fact simply mask a larger scheme of victimization. Identified only as symbolic types, Baraka’s characters speak a surreal mixture of street language and theological argot. While the slang references link them to the social reality familiar to the audience, their actions are dictated by the sudden shifts and thematic ambiguities charac-

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teristic of works such as Strindberg’s Ett drömspel (pb. 1902; A Dream Play, 1912) and the “Circe” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). The play’s central character, named simply “the Boy,” resembles a traditional Christ figure struggling to come to terms with his vocation. Baraka treats his protagonist with a mixture of irony and empathy, focusing on the ambiguous roles of the spirit and the flesh in relation to salvation. Pressured by the Minister to deny his body and by the cynical Homosexual to immerse himself in the profane as a path to the truly sacred, the Boy vacillates. At times he claims divine status; at times he insists, “I am only flesh.” The chorus of Women, at once holy virgins and temple prostitutes, reinforces his confusion. Shortly after identifying him as “the Son of God,” they refer to him as the “Chief Religious jelly roll of the universe.” Given these irreconcilable roles, which he is expected to fulfill, the Boy’s destiny as scapegoat and martyr seems inevitable; the dramatic tension revolves around the question of who will victimize him and why. Baraka uses a sequence of conflicting views of the Boy’s role, each of which momentarily dominates his self-image, to heighten this tension. Responding to the Homosexual’s insistence that “the devil is a part of creation like an ash tray or senator,” the Boy first confesses his past sins and demands baptism. When the Women respond by elevating him to the status of “Son of God/ Son of Man,” he explicitly rejects all claim to spiritual purity. The ambiguous masquerade culminates in an attack on the Boy, who is accused of using his spiritual status to seduce women who “wanted to be virgins of the Lord.” Supported only by the Homosexual, the Boy defends himself against the Women and the Minister, who clamor for his sacrifice, ostensibly as punishment for his sins. Insisting that “there will be no second crucifixion,” the Boy slays his antagonists with a phallic sword, which he interprets as the embodiment of spiritual glory. For a brief moment, the figures of Christ as scapegoat and Christ as avenger seem reconciled in a baptism of fire. Baraka undercuts this moment of equilibrium almost immediately. Having escaped martyrdom at the hands of the mob (ironically, itself victimized), the Boy confronts the Messenger, who wears a motorcycle jacket embellished with a gold crown and the words “The Man.” In Baraka’s dream allegory, the Man can represent the Roman/ American legal system or be a symbol for God the Father, both powers that severely limit the Boy’s control over events. The Boy’s first reaction to the Messenger is to reclaim his superior spiritual status, insisting that he has “brought love to many people” and calling on his “Father” for compassion. Rejecting these pleas, the Messenger indicates that “the Man’s destroying the whole works tonight.” The Boy responds defiantly: “Neither God nor man shall force me to leave. I was sent here to save man and I’ll not leave until I do.” The allegory suggests several different levels of interpretation: social, psychological, and symbolic. The Boy rejects his responsibility to concrete individuals (the mob he kills, the Man) in order to save an abstract entity (the mob as an ideal man). Ultimately, he claims his right to the martyr’s death, which he killed the mob in order to avoid, by repudiating the martyr’s submission to a higher power. Losing patience with the Boy’s rhetoric, the Messenger responds not by killing him but by knocking him out and dragging him offstage. His attitude of boredom effectively deflates the allegorical seriousness of the Boy’s defiance, a deflation reinforced by the Homosexual’s concluding comment that the scene resembles “some really uninteresting kind of orgy.” The Baptism’s treatment of the interlocking themes of sacrifice, ritual, and victimization emphasizes their inherent ambiguity and suggests the impossibility of moral action in a culture that confuses God with the leader of a motorcycle gang. The encom-

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passing irony of the Christ figure sacrificing his congregation to ensure universal destruction recalls T. S. Eliot’s treatment of myth in The Waste Land (1922) and his essay “Ulysses: Myth and Order.” Eliot’s use of classical allusions and mythic analogies to underscore the triviality of modern life clearly anticipates Baraka’s ironic vision of Christian ritual. Baraka’s baptism initiates the Boy into absurdity rather than responsibility. If any sins have been washed away, they are resurrected immediately in pointless ritual violence and immature rhetoric. Although he does not develop the theme explicitly in The Baptism, Baraka suggests that there is an underlying philosophical corruption in European American culture, in this case derived from Christianity’s tendency to divorce flesh from spirit. Increasingly, this philosophical corruption takes the center of Baraka’s dramatic presentation of Western civilization. Dutchman • Widely recognized as Baraka’s greatest work in any genre, Dutchman combines the irony of his avant-garde period with the emotional power and social insight of his later work. Clay, a young black man with a highly developed sense of self, occupies a central position in the play analogous to that of the Boy in The Baptism. The central dramatic action of the play involves Clay’s confrontation with a young white woman, Lula, who may in fact be seen as an aspect of Clay’s own self-awareness. In both thematic emphasis and dramatic structure, Dutchman parallels Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story (pr., pb. 1959). Both plays focus on a clash between characters from divergent social and philosophical backgrounds, both comment on the internal divisions of individuals in American society, and both culminate in acts of violence that are at once realistic and symbolic. What sets Dutchman apart, however, is its intricate exploration of the psychology that leads Clay to a symbolic rebellion that ironically guarantees his real victimization. Clay thinks he exists as an autonomous individual struggling for existential awareness. Baraka implies, however, that this European American conception of self simply enforces Clay’s preordained role as ritual scapegoat. As the Everyman figure his name suggests, Clay represents all individuals trapped by self-deception and social pressure. As a black man in a racist culture, he shares the more specific problem of those whose self-consciousness has been determined by white definitions. The stage directions for Dutchman emphasize the link between Clay’s situation and the decline of European American culture, describing the subway car where the action transpires as “the flying underbelly of the city . . . heaped in modern myth.” Lula enters eating an apple, evoking the myth of the Fall. Together, these allusions contribute a literary dimension to the foreboding atmosphere surrounding the extended conversation that leads to Clay’s sacrifice at the hands of Lula and the subway riders, mostly white but some black. Throughout, Lula maintains clear awareness of her symbolic and political intentions, while Clay remains effectively blind. Lula’s role demands simply that she maintain the interest of the black man until it is convenient to kill him. Meanwhile, Clay believes he can somehow occupy a position of detachment or spiritual superiority. Changing approach frequently, Lula plays the roles of temptress, intellectual, psychologist, and racist. Clay responds variously to these gambits, sometimes with amusement, ultimately with anger and contempt. Consistently, however, he fails to recognize the genocidal reality underlying Lula’s masquerade, unwittingly assuming his preordained role in the controlling ritual of black destruction. Much like the legendary ghost ship for which it was named, the Dutchman, Baraka implies, will continue to sail so long as blacks allow the white world to control the premises of the racial debate.

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This rigged debate reflects Baraka’s reassessment of his universalist beliefs and his movement toward Black Nationalism. Clay resembles the early LeRoi Jones in many ways: Both are articulate natives of New Jersey with aspirations to avant-garde artistic success. Dutchman implies that both are subject to fantasies about the amount of meaningful success possible for them in the realm of European American culture. Lula alternately reduces Clay to a “well-known type” and condemns him for rejecting his roots and embracing “a tradition you ought to feel oppressed by.” During the first act, Clay stays “cool” until Lula sarcastically declares him the “Black Baudelaire” and follows with the repeated phrase “My Christ. My Christ.” Suddenly shifting emphasis, she immediately denies his Christ-like stature and insists, “You’re a murderer,” compressing the two major attributes of the Boy in The Baptism, this time with a specifically social resonance. The sudden shift disrupts Clay’s balance. Ironically restating and simplifying the thesis of Ralph Ellison’s universalist novel Invisible Man (1922), Lula concludes the opening act with an ironic resolution to “pretend the people cannot see you . . . that you are free of your own history. And I am free of my history.” The rapid movement from Clay as Christ and murderer—standard black roles in the fantasy life of white America—to the pretense of his freedom underscores the inevitability of his victimization, an inevitability clearly dictated by the historical forces controlling Lula, forces that Clay steadfastly refuses to recognize. Clay’s lack of awareness blinds him to the fact that the subway car, occupied only by himself and Lula during act 1, fills up with people during act 2. Continuing to manipulate Clay through rapid shifts of focus, Lula diverts his attention from the context, first by fantasizing a sexual affair with him and then by ridiculing him as an “escaped nigger” with absurd pretensions to cultural whiteness. Abandoning his cool perspective for the first time, Clay angrily takes “control” of the conversation. His powerful soliloquy establishes his superior understanding of his interaction with Lula, but only in the theoretical terms of European American academic discourse. Admitting his hatred for whites, Clay claims a deep affinity with the explosive anger lying beneath the humorous surface of the work of the great black musicians Bessie Smith and Charlie Parker. Ridiculing Lula’s interpretation of his psychological makeup, Clay warns her that whites should beware of preaching “rationalism” to blacks, since the best cure for the black neurosis would be the random murder of whites. After this demonstration of his superior, and highly rational, awareness, Clay turns to go. He dismisses Lula with contempt, saying, “we won’t be acting out that little pageant you outlined before.” Immediately thereafter, Lula kills him. The murder is in fact the final act of the real pageant, the ritual of black sacrifice. Seen from Lula’s perspective, the entire conversation amounts to an extended assault on Clay’s awareness of the basic necessities of survival. Seen from Baraka’s viewpoint, the heightened racial awareness of Clay’s final speech is simply an illusion, worthless if divorced from action. Clay’s unwilling participation in the pageant of white mythology reveals the futility of all attempts to respond to white culture on its own terms. Regarded in this light, Baraka’s subsequent movement away from the theoretical avant-garde and from European American modes of psychological analysis seems inevitable. Black Nationalist plays • Baraka’s Black Nationalist plays, many of them written for community theater groups such as Spirit House Movers and the San Francisco State College Black Arts Alliance, occasionally employ specific avant-garde techniques. His earlier works take the techniques “seriously,” but even his most experimental nationalist plays, such as Experimental Death Unit #1, clearly attempt to subvert the values im-

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plied by the European American aesthetic. Determined to communicate with his community through its own idiom, Baraka sought new forms in the African American aesthetic embodied in dance and music, African chants, experimental jazz, rhythm and blues, and reggae. Particularly when its is performed in predominantly black contexts, Baraka’s work in this idiom creates an emotional intensity difficult to describe in standard academic terms, an atmosphere often extremely uncomfortable for white viewers. Even while embracing and exploiting the aesthetic potential of the idiom, however, Baraka attempts to purify and transform it. Repudiating his earlier vision of universal alienation and victimization, Baraka no longer sympathizes with, or even tolerates, passive scapegoats such as Clay and the Boy. He does not, however, remove the victim from the center of his drama. Rather, he emphasizes two new types of victims in his nationalist rituals: the clearly heroic African American martyr in Great Goodness of Life (A Coon Show) and The Death of Malcolm X, and the whitewashed black and overthrown white oppressor in Madheart and Slave Ship, portrayed as deserving their death. Madheart • Madheart and Great Goodness of Life (A Coon Show) employ different constellations of these figures to criticize the failure of the black community to purge its consciousness of European American values. Like A Black Mass, Madheart borrows the image of the “white devil” from the theology of the Nation of Islam (sometimes referred to inaccurately as the “Black Muslims”) to account for the fallen condition of black awareness. Beginning with a confrontation between allegorical characters identified as Black Man and Devil Lady, Madheart focuses on the Devil Lady’s influence over the Black Man’s Mother and Sister, whose red and blonde wigs indicate the extent of their corruption. Aided by the supportive Black Woman, Black Man rejects and sacrifices the Devil Lady, symbolically repudiating white culture. Mother and Sister, however, refuse to participate in the ritual of purification. Sister loses consciousness, believing that the death of the Devil Lady is also her own death. Lamenting over her daughter, Mother calls on white “saints” such as Tony Bennett, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Batman for deliverance. Clinging to their belief in whiteness, Mother and a revived Sister descend to the level of slobbering animals. Motivated by love rather than hatred, Black Man turns a firehose on them as the play ends. His concluding speech echoes Baraka’s basic attitude toward his suffering community: “This stuff can’t go on. They’ll die or help us, be black or white and dead. I’ll save them or kill them.” To avoid being sacrificed like Clay, Baraka implies, the African American community must repudiate its internal whiteness. The elimination of the white “devil,” far from being an end in itself, is simply a preliminary step toward the purification of the black self-image. Great Goodness of Life (A Coon Show) • Extending this critique of the internalization of white corruption, Great Goodness of Life (A Coon Show), with its title ironic at several levels, focuses on the trial of Court Royal, a middle-aged black man accused of unspecified crimes. An offstage voice, supported by a sequence of increasingly respectable-looking Ku Klux Klan figures, echoes Lula in Dutchman, claiming that Court Royal has been harboring a murderer. Although Court Royal interprets the claim in concrete terms, the voice seeks primarily to bring about his repudiation of his black identity. Manipulating his fear of personal loss, the voice forces Court to preside over the ritual murder of a black martyr whose body is carried onstage to the

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accompaniment of projected slides showing martyrs such as Malcolm X and Patrice Lumumba. Ordering the disposal of the corpse, the voice says: “Conceal the body in a stone. And sink the stone deep under the ocean. Call the newspapers and give the official history. Make sure his voice is in that stone too.” In fact, the primary aim of the voice is to silence the African American cultural tradition by encouraging individuals to see their own situations as divorced from that of their community. Despite Court Royal’s dim awareness that the “body” is that of a collective figure, the voice forces him to deny his sense that “there are many faces.” After Court Royal acquiesces to this European American vision of individualism, the voice declares him “free,” stipulating only that he “perform the rite.” The rite is the execution of the “body.” Assuring Court Royal that the murderer is already dead, the voice nevertheless demands that he actively contribute to the destruction of the African American tradition by sacrificing the “murderer” within. To distract Court Royal from the genocidal reality of his act, the voice delivers an intricate statement on the nature of ritual action. Court, caught in the trap of European American rhetoric, ironically assumes the role of the white God and executes his symbolic son; the young black man cries out “Papa” as he dies. His soul “washed white as snow,” Court merely returns to his night-out bowling. His voice sunk beneath the sea, Court can only echo the white voice that commands his passive acceptance of European American rituals. Where Clay was killed by white society directly, the martyr in Great Goodness of Life (A Coon Show) is killed by white society acting indirectly through the timorous and self-deluded black bourgeois. Ritual murder metamorphoses into ritual suicide. Baraka clearly intimates the need for new rituals that will be capable of presenting new alternatives not under the control of the white voice. Slave Ship • Slave Ship, Baraka’s most convincing and theatrically effective Black Nationalist play, develops both the form and the content of these rituals. Thematically, the play places the perceptions of Madheart and Great Goodness of Life (A Coon Show) in a broader historical perspective. Beginning in West Africa and progressing through the American Civil War, Baraka traces the evolution of African American culture, stressing the recurring scenes of betrayal in which traitors, frequently preachers, curry favor with their white masters by selling out their people. Such repeated betrayals, coupled with scenes of white violence against blacks, create a tension that is released only with the sudden ritual killing of the white voice and the black traitor. This sacrifice emphasizes Baraka’s demand for an uncompromising response to the forces, inside and outside the community, responsible for centuries of black misery. The real power of Slave Ship, however, stems from its performance style, which combines lighting, music, and at times even smell, to create an encompassing atmosphere of oppression that gives way to an even more overwhelming celebration. The sound of white laughter and black singing and moaning surrounds the recurring visual images that link the historical vignettes. A drumbeat reasserts itself at moments of tension and seeming despair, suggesting the saving presence of the African heritage. The drum, joined by a jazz saxophone as the black community rises to break its chains, initiates the celebratory chant: “When we gonna rise up, brother/ When we gonna rise above the sun/ When we gonna take our own place, brother/ Like the world had just begun?” Superimposed on the continuing background moaning, the chant inspires a communal dance that combines African and African American styles.

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Invoking the choreography of the “Miracles/Temptations dancing line,” Baraka calls the dance the “Boogalooyoruba,” compressing historical past and present in a ritual designed to create a brighter future. Following the climactic sacrifice, the severed heads of black traitor and white oppressor are cast down on the stage. Given ideal context and performance, the dancing of the Boogalooyoruba will then spread through the audience. Slave Ship thus exemplifies African American ritual drama of the 1960’s; merging aesthetic performance and political statement, it marks the culmination of Baraka’s Black Nationalist work. Plays of the 1970’s and 1980’s • Baraka’s later plays express the Marxist-LeninistMao Zedong philosophy he embraced in the mid-1970’s. Gauging the success of monumental dramas such as The Motion of History and The Sidney Poet Heroical is difficult, in part because they are rarely performed, in larger part because of a generally hostile political climate. The texts of the plays reflect Baraka’s continuing interest in multimedia performance styles, incorporating a great deal of musical and cinematic material. Both plays comprise numerous brief scenes revealing the action of historical forces, primarily economic in The Motion of History and primarily racial in The Sidney Poet Heroical. Both plays also present images of martyr-heroes and oppressor-scapegoats. On the page, however, both appear programmatic and somewhat naïvely ideological. The climaxes, for example, feature mass meetings intended to inspire the audience to political commitment, a technique anticipated in proletarian dramas of the 1930’s such as Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty (pr., pb. 1935). The cries “Long live socialist revolution” and “Victory to Black People! Victory to all oppressed people!” that conclude The Motion of History and The Sidney Poet Heroical obviously require both a sensitive production and a politically sympathetic audience to work their desired effect. In the political climate of the late 1970’s and 1980’s, neither element was common, and Baraka’s plays of this period could be considered closet dramas. Primitive World • In his 1984 Primitive World: An Anti-Nuclear Jazz Musical, Baraka presents the money gods as the arch-fiends. Displeased at the audacity of the humans—and especially, the poor—to “want things,” these money gods decide to put an end to human history. Speaking of the “grim moral” of his play, Baraka said, “we seem to be more endangered by greed and selfishness than we are by the weapons we have created to destroy each other.” In this play, as in his earlier work, Baraka attempts to exorcise the demons and the demonic element within each human being that seem bent on nothing so much as the destruction of humanity—and, ultimately, of humankind. In his speech on “Poetry and the Public Sphere” at the 1997 Conference on Contemporary Poetry, Baraka addressed more generally the recurrent theme of his work: “it is this wailing, this defiance, this resistance, this joy in the overwhelming of evil by good, that is at the base of our poetic traditions, our history, our continuing lives.” In his 1969 poem “Black Art,” the poet asks that his poem “clean out the world for virtue and love”; and, bidding his poem scream, he cries, “Let Black People understand/ that they are the lovers and the sons/ of lovers and warriors and sons/ of warriors Are poems & poets &/ all the loveliness here in the world.” In his still earlier drama A Black Mass, his black priest Tanzil speaks of reaching “back to warmth and feelings, to the human mind, and compassion. And ris[ing] again, back on up the scale, reaching again for the sphere of spheres, back to original reason. To where we always were.” The exorcism of the demon oppressor in A Black Mass is not left to the imagina-

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tion/intellect of the viewer as it is in Primitive World. The narrator of A Black Mass speaks to the audience of the need for diligence in the seeking out and in the destruction of the evil that the priests have let loose on the world in their experiment-gonewrong—in their creation of the “soulless [white] monster.” The oppressors in neither play recognize or employ the reason and the compassion possible to the occupants of this “sphere of spheres.” Later Plays • When “White people. . . made [him] famous” for Dutchman, Baraka felt that they were making it possible for him to “continue [the] tradition” passed on to him by his people: I don’t know if y’all still have that in your homes. . . . I can’t speak on that, but I know that is what we as writers have to do, continue that tradition. The only way I can see that tradition being extended is through the role and function of the writer in the community. It is not surprising that, while he was praised by such prominent African American authors as James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Ntozake Shange, and Maya Angelou, the admittedly vengeful nature of much of his art did not afford him a sustained popularity with mainstream audiences and he found himself unable to make a living as a writer. According to Baraka, his 1982 Money: A Jazz Opera was even “banned in France by the United States” because it was considered antiAmerican. Baraka’s 1990’s plays The Life and Life of Bumpy Johnson and Meeting Lillie were somewhat less strident and, perhaps as a result, somewhat better received by mainstream critics. Addressing a group of aspiring writers in 1998, Baraka spoke of his being readied by his parents and his grandmother for his life’s work as out-of-the-mainstream writer and activist: It was like you had been doctored on by masters. . . . Every night at dinner, they’d be running it. . . . They would be telling you the history of the South, the history of Black people, the history of Black music and you would be sitting there. . . . My grandmother would tell me all the time about this Black boy they accused of raping this woman and they cut off his genitals and stuffed them in his mouth and then made all the Black women come there and watch. . . . Why would your grandmother tell you that story? . . . Oh, you still know the story, you still got it in your mind sixty years later. . . . Well, that’s why she told it to you. Baraka in his body of work strives to exorcise soullessness and to restore loveliness and humanity to humankind. Twentieth century African Americans, from Nobel Prizewinning author to factory worker, were influenced by the man who abandoned the title but not the role of “imamu”—spiritual leader. It remains to be seen whether the twenty-first century mainstream can overlook Baraka’s and its own subjectivity in order that it may benefit, as well, from the spirit of his work. Other major works long fiction: The System of Dante’s Hell, 1965. short fiction: Tales, 1967; The Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 2000. poetry: Spring and Soforth, 1960; Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, 1961; The Dead Lecturer, 1964; Black Art, 1966; A Poem for Black Hearts, 1967; Black Magic: Sabotage,

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Target Study, Black Art—Collected Poetry, 1961-1967, 1969; It’s Nation Time, 1970; In Our Terribleness: Some Elements and Meaning in Black Style, 1970 (with Fundi [Billy Abernathy]); Spirit Reach, 1972; Afrikan Revolution, 1973; Hard Facts, 1975; Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1979; Reggae or Not!, 1981; Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka, 1995; Wise, Why’s, Y’s, 1995; Funklore: New Poems, 1984-1995, 1996. nonfiction: Blues People: Negro Music in White America, 1963; Home: Social Essays, 1966; Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965, 1971; The New Nationalism, 1972; The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984, revised 1997; Daggers and Javelins: Essays, 1984; The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987 (with Amina Baraka). edited texts: The Moderns: New Fiction in America, 1963; Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, 1968 (with Larry Neal); African Congress: A Documentary of the First Modern Pan-African Congress, 1972; Confirmation: An Anthology of African-American Women, 1983 (with Amina Baraka). miscellaneous: Selected Plays and Prose, 1979; The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, 1991. Bibliography Benston, Kimberly W., ed. Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones): A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978. A whole section, titled “Black Labs of the Heart,” examines Baraka’s drama in six essays on Dutchman, The Slave, The Toilet, Great Goodness of Life (A Coon Show), Madheart, and Slave Ship. “Baraka’s theatre is one of deliverance, inexorably oriented toward liberation through confrontation,” says Benston in her introduction. Contains a bibliography. Brown, Lloyd W. Amiri Baraka. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Separating Baraka’s literary output by major genre, Brown covers drama last, beginning with Mao Zedong’s influence on the socialist perspective of such plays as The Motion of History and S-1. Even in Baraka’s four early plays—The Baptism, The Toilet, Dutchman, and The Slave— Brown sees not an advocacy of revolution but “a highly effective analysis of American society” before his political views find an ideology. Slave Ship is a successful “ritual drama,” Brown notes. Chronology, bibliography, index. Gwynne, James B., ed. Amiri Baraka: The Kaleidoscopic Torch. Harlem, N.Y.: Steppingstones Press, 1985. This collection of essays hails Baraka as torchbearer: “He opened tightly guarded doors for not only Blacks but poor whites as well, and of course, Native Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans” (Maurice Kenny); “Baraka . . . stands with Wheatley, Douglass, Dunbar, Hughes, Hurston, Wright, and Ellison as one of the eight figures . . . who have significantly affected the course of African American literary culture” (Arnold Rampersad). Harris, William J. The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985. In his study, Harris shows that “throughout his career, even during the . . . Marxist stage, [Baraka] has used the jazz aesthetic process to create a new black art from the artistic and conceptual innovations of the twentieth-century avant-garde.” A late chapter discusses Baraka’s significance to and influence on African American artists. Includes selected bibliography and index. Hudson, Theodore R. From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka: The Literary Works. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1973. The last chapter, “Not the Weak Hamlets,” deals with Baraka’s almost single-handed invention of black theater and his theory of the drama as “a device for [political] edification and motivation.” Hudson states that six plays produced in 1964 and an Obie Award established Baraka as “the subject of se-

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rious critical consideration by the American theatre establishment.” Index and bibliography. Lacey, Henry C. To Raise, Destroy, and Create: The Poetry, Drama, and Fiction of Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1981. Unlike other studies, which separate the works by genres, this volume divides Baraka’s life into a Beat period, a transition, and a rebirth symbolized by taking on a new name. Also discusses Baraka’s dramatic work in context with his writing in other genres. Supplemented by an index and a list of Baraka’s works. Reilly, Charlie, ed. Conversations with Amiri Baraka. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. In the text’s introduction, the editor prepares the reader for the telling of the story—“much of it told for the first time”—of “the acclaimed author who walked back into the ghetto to support his people and who never looked back.” Includes chronology and index. Sollors, Werner. Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Populist Modernism.” New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Three chapters of this study deal with Baraka’s drama. “From Off-Bowery to Off Broadway” provides a close study of The Baptism and The Toilet; Dutchman gets a whole chapter to itself. Good photograph section of production stills. Bibliography and index. Watts, Jerry Gafio. Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual. New York: New York University Press, 2001. A critical appraisal of Baraka from his early Beat poetry and on. Watts argues that Baraka’s artistry declined as he became more politically active, though he considers Baraka an important poet and lens through which African American political history can be viewed. Craig Werner, updated by Thomas J. Taylor, Robert McClenaghan, and Judith K. Taylor

Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais

Pierre-Augustin Caron Born: Paris, France; January 24, 1732 Died: Paris, France; May 18, 1799 Principal drama • Eugénie, pr., pb. 1767 (The School of Rakes, 1795); Les Deux Amis: Ou, Le Négociant de Lyon, pr., pb. 1770 (The Two Friends: Or, The Liverpool Merchant, 1800); Le Barbier de Séville: Ou, La Précaution inutile, pr., pb. 1775 (The Barber of Seville: Or, The Useless Precaution, 1776); La Folle Journée: Ou, Le Mariage de Figaro, wr. 1775-1778, pr. 1784, pb. 1785 (The Marriage of Figaro, 1784); Tarare, pr., pb. 1787 (libretto; music by Antonio Salieri); L’Autre Tartuffe: Ou, La Mère coupable, pr. 1792, pb. 1797 (Frailty and Hypocrisy, 1804); Théâtre, pb. 1966 Other literary forms • Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais is known as a literary figure only for his plays, which were the only fictional works he published during his lifetime. Although he also wrote poetry, some of which was published posthumously, none of it proved to be of enduring value. His early, unpublished works for the theater were in the form of short curtain raisers or sidewalk shows, which the French call parades, some of which have also been posthumously published. Beaumarchais also published mémoires, or legal arguments, to defend his own position in several notorious lawsuits in which he was involved, and wrote prefaces for all but one of his plays, which describe the theoretical basis of his dramaturgy and exemplify his work as a critic. A considerable amount of Beaumarchais’s correspondence has also been published, most of it merely of documentary value but some of it marked by a passion for ideas and a sparkling of style that elevate it to the status of literature. Achievements • Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais is that rarity among literary figures: a famous writer who also has solid achievements to his credit in other, nonliterary, domains. For example, at the age of only twenty-one, Beaumarchais invented a new mechanical device for pocket watches that permitted the construction of small, flat timepieces in place of the bulky, spherical ones then current. The invention made him famous in the scientific community, earned for him the title of “Watchmaker to the King,” and assured the prosperity of his father’s watchmaking business for years to come. Later, when he was in his forties, Beaumarchais made significant contributions to the French monarch as a diplomat on foreign missions, his most notable achievement being his creation of a shipping company that helped the American colonists arm themselves during the American Revolution. Beaumarchais managed to supply the arms without implicating the French crown, earning the gratitude of his own government and a permanent niche in U.S. history as well. During that same period, Beaumarchais, by then a published playwright, was instrumental in founding the Société des Auteurs and was elected its first president, thus assuring for himself a place of honor in the history of playwriting as a profession in France. 74

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Even taken together, however, all of Beaumarchais’s extraliterary achievements are not the equal of his achievement as the author of the finest French comedy of the eighteenth century, The Marriage of Figaro, and as the creator of the modern, postclassical theater in France. This theater managed to take many liberties with the rigid rules of classical tradition without losing any of the aesthetic and philosophical power inherent in the nature of drama. Beaumarchais’s greatest achievement was accomplished by example: He demonstrated how a play could be freed of the constraints of a prescribed form and yet be a work of art. Biography • An ambitious activist by nature, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, born Pierre-Augustin Caron, led a far more eventful life than is customary for a man of letters. The ups and downs of his often agitated existence, however, were seldom directly related to the literary life, resulting rather from his determined pursuit of wealth, preferment, and pleasure, from his involvement in legal wrangles, and, most honorably, from Beaumarchais’s disinterested struggles against injustice. The son of a watchmaker, Beaumarchais was apprenticed at an early age to his father’s craft and mastered it so thoroughly that, when only twenty-one, he worked out a solution to one of the craft’s most difficult problems in mechanics: the contrivance of a radically simplified escapement, the device that transfers the energy of a watch’s spring to the network of interlocking wheels that make up its movement. The naïve young watchmaker made the mistake of showing his device to an older colleague, who promptly published a description of it as his own invention. The younger Caron complained to the Academy of Sciences, won public vindication and recognition thereby, and from that notoriety was able to establish himself as a personage of consequence at the court of Louis XV, even becoming music teacher to the king’s daughters. Thus launched into the social whirl, Beaumarchais went on to a series of other activities and enterprises over the next fifteen years, increasing his fortune and prestige, while marrying and acquiring the title that enabled him to call himself Caron de Beaumarchais. In those years, he continued to encounter envy and injustice and continued to fight against those evils with courage and energy, at the same time learning valuable lessons about the human heart. Those lessons came to fruition when Beaumarchais began his career as a playwright in 1767, at the age of thirty-five, with a tearful family drama about a young and innocent girl seduced and deceived by an aristocrat. The play, The School of Rakes (Eugénie in the original French, after its heroine-victim), enjoyed only a brief and modest success with the public. With characteristic determination, Beaumarchais tried for public success in the theater three years later, with his second play The Two Friends, which fared even worse with the public and was withdrawn after a very few performances. Beaumarchais was disappointed in the public failure to understand his theme of the virtues of the merchant class but was still undeterred from his theatrical ambitions. Meanwhile, Beaumarchais found himself embroiled in a lawsuit over an inheritance and discovered that the judge in the case had been corrupted. Again injustice brought out his best, and he turned the evil to his own advantage by publishing a brilliant mémoire in which he revealed the judge’s corrupt dealings, thereby winning public support and acclaim. Eventually he even won his lawsuit, though it took four more years. Meanwhile, he had his first unalloyed success in the theater in 1775 with his Molièresque comedy, The Barber of Seville, in which the public delighted. A year later, aided by secret government funding, Beaumarchais found himself energetically assisting the American rebels in their war against the British by procuring and shipping ar-

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maments to them, having recruited a veritable fleet of ships for the purpose, from all over Europe. Beaumarchais attained the pinnacle of his career even while engaged with his enterprise to aid the Americans. He had written a sequel to The Barber of Seville, called The Marriage of Figaro, which was ready for production in 1778 but was denied permission for public performance, by decree of the royal censor, because some of its themes struck the censor as disrespectful toward the ruling aristocracy. Not until 1784 were the objections overcome, but when the play was finally performed, it proved to be Beaumarchais’s greatest triumph and one of the most successful plays of the entire century. Because the play was thought by some to be frankly revolutionary in its implications, Beaumarchais found himself in relatively good standing with the revolutionary government when it took over a few years later. This success, Beaumarchais’s last play, Frailty and Hypocrisy, a rather solemn sequel to The Marriage of Figaro, was coolly received by the public in 1792 when it was first presented. Moreover, the envy and injustice that had dogged his entire life soon emerged again, in his relations with the revolutionary government. Falsely accused of counterrevolutionary activity, he was forced into exile for several years, and all his property was confiscated. In failing health, Beaumarchais was permitted to return to Paris in 1796; he died of a stroke in the spring of 1799. Analysis • Perhaps because he was already in his middle thirties when his literary career began, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais showed little of the ambitious originality or inventiveness of youth in his plays—most of his plots and character-types were quite consciously derived from the work of others—but he exhibited, from the first, an exceptional understanding of the real world, which he approached with high moral seriousness. Whether somber or lighthearted in tone, whether contemporary or historical in setting, whether traditional or modern in form, the plays of Beaumarchais are all, without exception, centrally concerned with some abuse or injustice in his own society. It is true that all of Beaumarchais’s plays, even the most somber, end happily and may in that sense be called romantic comedies; yet each play, including the most cheerfully frivolous of them, has an underlying seriousness of theme which is unmistakable. Although he quickly mastered the trick of entertaining the sophisticated Paris public, Beaumarchais never allowed his moralist’s impulse to be obscured by theatrical technique. In his art as in his life, he remained always the passionate and vocal opponent of injustice and fraud: His open advocacy of moral positions was perhaps his most distinctive trait as a playwright. Through two of his plays, The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, Beaumarchais redefined the art of theatrical comedy in France, making moral seriousness an acceptable main ingredient of the genre, and gave future generations one of the great character-types in literature with the invention of Figaro. He has had a significant and durable influence on all subsequent theatrical writing in France. The School of Rakes • Beaumarchais’s outspoken advocacy of moral positions was already fully in evidence with his very first play, The School of Rakes. The focus of the play is a crisis in the life of a young and innocent English lady, Eugénie, who believes herself to be married to a prominent aristocrat, Lord Clarendon, only to learn, by chance, that her “husband” is about to marry someone else. The announcement of that impending marriage reveals to Eugénie that she has been deceived by Lord Claren-

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don, who staged a false wedding ceremony with the complicity of servants and friends in order to make her his mistress. To make her sense of shame truly complete, Eugénie finds herself newly pregnant just when the crushing truth of her plight emerges. The result is a crisis of despair, followed by a tense confrontation scene with Lord Clarendon as the play’s dramatic climax. The play ends with a genuine marriage between a contrite Lord Clarendon and a forgiving Eugénie, but Beaumarchais’s thrust is plain: His purpose is to attack the immoral cynicism of the powerful nobility, who prey on the innocence of decent young ladies. Surprisingly modern in its viewpoint, The School of Rakes is a protest against high society’s double standard of sexual morality. The theme of the social victimization of women was probably “borrowed” by Beaumarchais from Denis Diderot’s novel La Religieuse (1796; The Nun, 1797), which had been written in 1760 and had made the subject popular. Beaumarchais openly claimed Diderot as his inspiration for the form of his play, at any rate, noting in his preface that he admired Diderot’s invention of a new theatrical genre called le drame sérieux—a play neither tragic nor comic but occupying the intermediate ground between the two. It was that middle ground Beaumarchais sought to occupy with The School of Rakes, portraying scenes of great emotional anguish arising out of common human events, rather than events of heroic dimension, and showing the amusing side of human behavior as well, without employing the devices of excess and exaggeration that make up classic comedy. For Diderot, and for his admirer Beaumarchais, the new order of theater, le drame sérieux, was to be above all human, and therefore touching, rather than awe-inspiring as the classic theater had been, because it dealt with human behavior at its extreme limits. The Two Friends • These theories of Diderot were even more fully put into practice in Beaumarchais’s second play, The Two Friends—more fully because, whereas The School of Rakes had concerned privileged members of the English aristocracy, albeit with very ordinary problems of human relationships, The Two Friends concerns members of the urban middle class, men engaged in commerce and finance, and a drama of bankruptcy and the sense of honor in the world of business. Diderot had advocated a focus on middle-class values in order to make the theater accessible to an increasingly middle-class audience—Diderot’s preferred term was le drame bourgeois—but it proved difficult, after all, to find themes of compellingly high drama among the daily passions of the bourgeoisie. Diderot himself never wrote a successful play, in spite of the persuasiveness of his theory about the imperatives of a truly modern theater, and Beaumarchais had the worst disaster of his career with the play in which Diderot’s theories were most faithfully followed. The Two Friends failed both with the public and with the critics and had to be withdrawn after a few performances in 1770. With characteristic resilience, however, Beaumarchais abandoned le drame sérieux, devised a play with a more frankly comic action reminiscent of Molière, and in early 1775 was represented on the Paris stage with his first genuine success, the play that made him famous, The Barber of Seville. The Barber of Seville • The basic plot of The Barber of Seville derives from the ancient traditions of farce, and had its most notably successful incarnation, before Beaumarchais, in Molière’s witty comedy L’École des femmes (1662; The School for Wives, 1732). The ingredients of the plot are simple. An apparently innocent young girl is the

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ward of a tyrannical older man who keeps her strictly isolated from the company of potential young suitors because he intends to marry her himself. In spite of the guardian’s vigilance, however, the not-so-innocent young girl finds a way to make contact with a suitable young man and so defeat the guardian’s evil scheme. Beaumarchais’s distinctive contribution to this ancient plot is the invention of a clever and resourceful character of the servant class—Figaro—who conducts the intrigue by which the young suitor successfully wins the girl. Moreover, as one might expect, the playwright found in the simple comic plot an underlying serious theme to which he proposed to give some prominence: the abuse of the powers of guardianship and the consequent oppression of women. Perhaps because he feared that such criticism of the social customs of his day might run afoul of the royal censor, Beaumarchais decided to set his play in the Spain of the seventeenth century rather than in the Paris of the eighteenth. To mask the seriousness of his theme, he adopted a tone of cheerful cynicism that pervaded all the dialogue and characterized the attitudes and actions of all the principal players. This tone is precisely established in the very first scene, in which Count Almaviva, in disguise, waits in a Seville street to catch a glimpse of Rosine at her window and sees coming toward him his former valet, Figaro, now a barber and general handyman for anyone who will pay him. The dialogue that ensues is witty, disrespectful, even impudent, but always lighthearted. For example, when the Count reminds Figaro that, as a servant, he had been rather a bad lot, lazy and careless about his responsibilities, Figaro immediately replies: “Yes, my lord, but only in comparison to what is demanded of servant. . . . Considering the virtues expected of a domestic, does Your Excellence know very many Masters who have the qualifications to be Valets?” Not only is the tone for the whole play set by this witty dialogue, but also the work of exposition is skillfully accomplished; in short order, the reader learns why the Count has followed Rosine from Madrid to Seville, why Doctor Bartholo is keeping her so carefully sequestered, and how Figaro can use his position as barber to the Bartholo household to arrange for the Count to have a private talk with Rosine. The scene that follows completes the exposition, showing Rosine in hostile conversation with Dr. Bartholo, while contriving to drop a written message from her window to the Count in the street below without allowing her guardian to grasp what is happening. As Figaro laughingly remarks of Rosine’s maneuver: “If you want to bring out the skill of even the most innocent young girl, you have only to imprison her.” The rest of the play, which is constructed in four acts, simply treats the audience to the step-by-step working out of the conspiracy among Count Almaviva, Rosine, and Figaro adumbrated in the two expository scenes that begin the play. Such a simple plot, in which Dr. Bartholo’s selfish designs are thwarted and Count Almaviva wins the hand of Rosine, has the great virtue of giving the play constant clarity of direction and aesthetically satisfying unity of action, but it carries the concomitant risk of boring the audience: The outcome is predictable from the opening moments. Beaumarchais uses two devices to overcome this predictability and intensify the sense of dramatic excitement as the action unfolds. First, he tightens the time frame by having Bartholo learn, early in the second act, from Rosine’s music teacher Don Bazile, that Count Almaviva is in Seville, disguised and determined to make contact with Rosine. This news causes Bartholo to make hasty arrangements to marry his ward the very next day, leaving the conspirators only a few hours in which to achieve their goal.

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Beaumarchais contrives a series of incidents, in the plays’ second, third, and fourth acts, in which Rosine, the Count, Figaro, or all three together find themselves in danger of having their plan found out by Bartholo. Each such scene causes the tension to mount until the danger passes, at the same time forestalling any tendency on the spectator’s part to become bored, since the outcome is thus repeatedly put in doubt. It is, however, probably not the plot so much as the characters that attract and hold the interest of spectators and readers alike. Almaviva’s insouciance and Rosine’s native shrewdness make them an engaging couple, and their common enemy, Bartholo, is so absurdly self-centered and so maliciously jealous as a guardian that it affords the audience a positive pleasure to see his villainous intentions circumvented. The frank cynicism of Don Bazile, always ready to serve the highest bidder, is well calculated to amuse, and nowhere more so than in his brilliant and memorable speech, in the second act, explaining the virtues of calumny as the best weapon available against one’s enemies. The finest creation in the play, however, is unquestionably the character of Figaro, with his ready wit and indomitable good humor, his resourcefulness and amoral pleasure in every kind of intrigue, and above all his impudence in the face of power and his generous capacity for indignation against injustice. Nothing contributed more to the popular success of The Barber of Seville than the invention of this novel personality, so appealingly sympathique to the middle-class theater audiences of the 1770’s. Beaumarchais understood, instinctively, the source of his sudden popularity, as he demonstrated by producing, almost immediately, a sequel to The Barber of Seville in which Figaro was even more prominently the main character. This was the sparkling masterpiece, The Marriage of Figaro, universally regarded as the crown jewel of Beaumarchais’s theater. The Marriage of Figaro • Having successfully slipped his rather strong social criticism in The Barber of Seville past the censor by burying it unobtrusively beneath a barrage of witty and irreverent dialogue, Beaumarchais set out, with perhaps understandable overconfidence, to make his sequel a much more explicit attack on the injustices of his time. By 1778, he was ready to present his new play, but the royal censor found it unacceptable. It took Beaumarchais six full years to overcome all the official objections and to see his new play, at last, on the boards. When it was finally performed, in 1784, it was to enthusiastic acclaim, both from the public and from the critics—not only Beaumarchais’s greatest success but also probably the most successful work of the century in the theater. The plot of The Marriage of Figaro is as intricate and convoluted as that of The Barber of Seville is simple and unilinear. It is true that, despite the complex interweaving of plots and subplots, the action of The Marriage of Figaro takes place within the space of a single day—but it is, as the subtitle in the original French indicates, a “mad day,” full of unexpected twists and turns, arrivals and departures, disguises and deceptions, all of which transform Count Almaviva’s palace into a daylong carnival. However complicated, the action is nevertheless coherently organized around one central event that lends a certain unity to the whole: the promised marriage of Figaro, now in the full-time service of Almaviva as valet and concierge, to Suzanne, first chambermaid of the former Rosine, now Countess Almaviva. What complicates the plot is that the impending marriage faces threats from several quarters: Almaviva himself, who has granted permission for the marriage, is nevertheless scheming to seduce Su-

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zanne and make her his convenient in-house mistress, using the threat to refuse permission for the wedding if Suzanne will not cooperate; Marceline, the former mistress of Dr. Bartholo, is bent on forcing Figaro to live up to a promise he made her in writing to marry her if he failed to repay a loan by a specific date; and the Countess, suffering in the role of abandoned wife, seeks to thwart her husband’s efforts to seduce Suzanne, which in turn angers Almaviva and makes him prone to go back on his promise to Figaro. Further complexities are added by the intersecting subplots involving the adolescent page, Chérubin, and the gardener’s adolescent daughter, Fanchette; the old affair between Bartholo and Marceline, which turns out to have had surprising consequences when it is revealed that Figaro is their long-lost son; and the active plotting of the Countess, who suddenly decides to play an inopportune trick on her husband in an effort to win back his love. This multiplicity of events imparts to the play a magical air of movement, merriment, and surprise that keeps the reader constantly amused and attentive, as though observing the action of a new and complicated mechanical toy. It is this interlocking of so many diverse elements that has led some critics to see, in the structure of The Marriage of Figaro, the influence of Beaumarchais’s training as a watchmaker. Certainly that intricate structure has much to do with the enchantment that the play produces in its audiences. When well staged, The Marriage of Figaro is a delightful kaleidoscopic spectacle. The multiplicity of the action is matched by the variety of the comic devices used, the many rather daring shifts in tone from scene to scene, and the dizzyingly numerous reversals in fortune; the advantage seems to lie now with Figaro, now with the Count, over the matter of who will have his way. The Marriage of Figaro is a play that is constantly in motion: Not only are the actors required to move about a lot physically, but also they are required to exhibit a wide gamut of changing moods and emotions, and to time their entrances, exits, dialogue, and gestures with exceptional precision. Nothing is more distinctive about this play—especially in contrast to The Barber of Seville—than the breakneck pace at which it must be performed. There is nothing very original about the individual scenes, for as always with Beaumarchais, the dramatic ideas are quite derivative, but the intricate meshing of so many different types of scenes, without any loss of coherence or unity, is a tour de force of inventive ingenuity, the result of which was a style of comic theater that had never been seen before in France. The Marriage of Figaro, however, is much more than a triumph of theatrical technique. For all its artificiality, which is obtrusive and undeniable, the play still manages to be memorably alive, by virtue both of the underlying truth of certain of its characters and situations and of the major themes to which it gives powerful expression. An unforgettable example of truth in characterization is the figure of Chérubin, who makes a kind of poetry out of the impulses of puberty, feeling impelled by instincts he does not understand to be constantly in the female presence and comporting himself with the strangest mixture of mischievous playfulness and exaggerated sentiment. Chérubin is not so much a realistic as an imaginative portrait of an adolescent, simultaneously child and man. Among the situations that delicately evoke emotions in the play is the daring moment, early in act 2, in which the Countess and Suzanne are trying out their scheme to disguise Chérubin as a girl so that he can be part of the wedding celebration, instead of going off to join a regiment as the Count has ordered. The situation is farcical in nature,

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but Beaumarchais is able to display a remarkable interplay of sensibilities as the two women react, each in a different way, to the ambiguous sexuality of the embarrassed adolescent. The most pervasive of the play’s principal themes is that represented by the struggle between Figaro and the Count, which epitomizes the eternal clash between figures of authority and privilege and the common individual longing for dignity. The nature of that clash and its basic injustice are memorably articulated by Figaro in his famous monologue of act 5, in which he complains that all the Count had to do to have so much wealth, prestige, and power was “to give himself the trouble to be born.” Such words were daringly provocative to the Paris audiences of 1784, among whom the mood of revolution against aristocratic authority was already close to the surface. A second important theme is that of the systematic oppression of women, evident in the way the Count treats both the Countess and Suzanne, and the way Bartholo and Figaro deal with Marceline’s wish to be legally married. Again the theme is strikingly articulated in the famous words of Marceline in act 3, which read even today as a very enlightened manifesto of women’s rights. One might add that the theme of injustice is broached in a variety of forms in the play, but nowhere more pointedly than in the trial scenes of act 3, in which Beaumarchais brings off a hilarious satire of the legal system of the time. It seems inescapable that the true greatness and originality of The Marriage of Figaro must, in the final analysis, be defined as an extraordinary blend of technical energy in comic style and moral passion powerfully expressed. It is difficult to find its equal in that special combination of qualities. Tarare and Frailty and Hypocrisy • Beaumarchais himself never again reached such heights in his career. The libretto he composed for the opera Tarare, a few years after The Marriage of Figaro, was excessively simplistic and sentimental in plot, and written in flat and unimaginative verse. Poetry was not one of his talents. When Beaumarchais tried to revive his flagging popularity among the new postrevolutionary audiences, he turned to the material that had brought him success in the past and composed a sequel to The Marriage of Figaro, entitled Frailty and Hypocrisy, which was performed in 1792. The comic verve was gone, however, and the characters of Figaro, Suzanne, Almaviva, and the Countess had all lost their youthful sparkle; the play seemed a self-righteous sermon on the need for compassion between spouses for the sins of youth. There was little in that final play of Beaumarchais’s career to suggest the skillful theatrical technician of twenty years earlier. Only the passions of the committed moralist and the determined enemy of injustice were still in evidence, poignant reminders of past glory. Though Frailty and Hypocrisy was poorly received in 1792, it is interesting to note that a revival of the play in 1797 had a great success, and certainly eased the sorrow of Beaumarchais’s painful last years. Nevertheless, the reputation he left behind was a major one. Other major works nonfiction: Mémoires, 1773-1774. Bibliography Dunkley, John. Beaumarchais: “Le Barbier de Séville.” Critical Guides to French Texts 86. London: Grant and Cutler, 1991. A critical appraisal of Beaumarchais’s The Barber of Seville. Includes a bibliography.

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Grendel, Frédéric. Beaumarchais: The Man Who Was Figaro. New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1977. An examination of the life and work of Beaumarchais. Includes a bibliography and index. Howarth, W. D. Beaumarchais and the Theatre. New York: Routledge, 1995. Howarth examines six of Beaumarchais’s plays and their reception by audiences, placing them within the context of pre-revolutionary France. He traces the dramatist’s legacy in nineteenth century vaudeville and twentieth century comic drama. Includes a bibliography and index. Niklaus, Robert. Beaumarchias: “Le Mariage de Figaro.” Critical Guides to French Texts 21. London: Grant and Cutler, 1995. Niklaus provides a critical examination of Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro. Includes a bibliography Sungolowsky, Joseph. Beaumarchais. New York: Twayne, 1974. A basic biography of Beaumarchais, along with criticism and interpretation of his works. Includes a bibliography. Murray Sachs

Samuel Beckett Samuel Beckett

Born: Foxrock, Ireland; April 13, 1906 Died: Paris, France; December 22, 1989 Principal drama • En attendant Godot, pb. 1952, pr. 1953 (Waiting for Godot, 1954); “Fin de partie,” Suivi de “Acte sans paroles,” pr., pb. 1957 (music by John Beckett; “Endgame: A Play in One Act,” Followed by “Act Without Words: A Mime for One Player,” 1958); Krapp’s Last Tape, pr., pb. 1958 (one act), revised pb. 1992; Act Without Words II, pr., pb. 1960 (one-act mime); Happy Days, pr., pb. 1961; Play, pr., pb. 1963 (English translation, 1964); Come and Go: Dramaticule, pr., pb. 1965 (one scene; English translation, 1967); Not I, pr. 1972, pb. 1973; That Time, pr., pb. 1976; Footfalls, pr., pb. 1976; Ends and Odds, pb. 1976; A Piece of Monologue, pr., pb. 1979; Rockaby, pr., pb. 1981; Ohio Impromptu, pr., pb. 1981; Catastrophe, pr. 1982, pb. 1983; Company, pr. 1983; Collected Shorter Plays, pb. 1984 Other literary forms • Samuel Beckett worked in literary forms other than drama. Although his radio plays, film script, and teleplays may be viewed as dramas that differ only in their use of various media, they nevertheless indicate his versatile and experimental approach to literary form. In prose fiction, he wrote both novels and short stories. The trilogy of novels, Molloy (1951; English translation, 1955), Malone meurt (1951; Malone Dies, 1956), and L’Innommable (1953; The Unnamable, 1958), written in French between 1947 and 1949, constitutes a major accomplishment in the genre. These works, like the earlier novel Murphy (1938), developed a monologue style of unique tone, with which Beckett had first begun to experiment in his short stories, collected as More Pricks than Kicks (1934). Beckett’s first published literary work, however, was a poem on time and René Descartes, Whoroscope (1930), which won for him a prize; this work was followed by a collection of poems entitled Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates (1935). Beckett also turned to translations of Spanish poetry with Octavio Paz’s An Anthology of Mexican Poetry in 1958. In addition, he distinguished himself with his several translations of his own work, from English into French (such as Murphy) and French into English (such as Malone meurt); Beckett continued this practice throughout his career as dramatist, notably with En attendant Godot, which he translated into Waiting for Godot, and Fin de partie, which he translated into Endgame. Achievements • Samuel Beckett is famous for his fiction and drama, which he wrote both in French and in English. Waiting for Godot established the Irish Beckett as a unique writer because he elected the French language as his primary means of composition and English as his secondary one. The success of Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape, as well as his trilogy of French novels, led to Trinity College’s awarding Beckett an honorary doctorate in 1959. Beckett also explored radio, cinema, and television for his art. So conscious was he of style that people disappeared into mere voices, mere echoes, and his plays could be called, as one was, ironically, simply Play, performed in 1963 at about the same time as his screenplay, Film, was being made. In 1961, Beckett received the International Publishers’ Prize with Jorge Luis Borges, and in 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for artistic achievements 83

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that define the ironic stance of modern reactions to an increasingly meaningless existence. Biography • Samuel Barclay Beckett was born at Foxrock, near Dublin, Ireland, on April 13, 1906, the second son of Mary and William Beckett. In 1920, he was sent to Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, and in 1923, he proceeded to Trinity College, Dublin, to study Italian and French. After receiving his B.A. degree in 1927, he went to Belfast as a French tutor, then to the École Normale Supérieure in Paris as a lecturer for two years, a period during which he became acquainted with James Joyce. Beckett then became lecturer in French at Trinity College and studied for his M.A. After two years, he left for Germany and returned to Paris in 1932. Doing odd jobs and writing when he could, he traveled to London, through France and Germany. This trip led to two publications: More Pricks than Kicks in 1934 and Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates in 1935. Meanwhile, he had inherited an annuity after his father’s death in 1933, allowing him to concentrate on his writing. In 1937, Beckett returned again to Paris, where he began to write in French. At the same time, he was preoccupied with the English text of his first novel, Murphy, which was published in 1938, the same year that he was stabbed on a Paris street and nearly died. He recovered, however, and established himself in an apartment where he would live throughout World War II and long after, at 6, rue des Favorites. There, he began, with Alfred Péron, to translate Murphy into French. His friendship with Péron, however, was doomed by the war, which began while Beckett was visiting his mother in Dublin. Nevertheless, Beckett returned to Paris, where he joined the French Resistance. Most of his colleagues, including Péron, disappeared, and Beckett himself barely escaped capture by the Nazis in 1942, when he fled to Free France with Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, whom he married in 1961. While in Free France, he worked on a farm for two years and began his novel Watt (1953). After the war, in 1945, Beckett began a remarkable period of five years during which he wrote most of his important fiction and drama. His fame began, though, with productions of Waiting for Godot in French in 1953 and in English in 1955, followed by productions of Endgame in French in 1957 and in English in 1958. Meanwhile, other plays were produced, including his radio dramas All That Fall and Embers, broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1957 and 1959, respectively. (© The Nobel Foundation) These productions complemented

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the mimes that Beckett prepared for the stage at about the same time, beginning with Act Without Words, which was produced on a double bill with Endgame, and continuing with variations to the end of Beckett’s career with Nacht und Träume in 1983. He also prepared the script for a motion picture, Film, with Buster Keaton in the leading role, filmed in New York in 1964. After Endgame, Beckett composed two important stage plays, Krapp’s Last Tape first produced in 1958, and Happy Days, in 1961. Radio and television, however, were his favorite media. From 1959, with Embers, and 1966, with Eh Joe, to the time of his death in 1989, Beckett devoted much of his talent to numerous radio and television works, testing the limits of audience understanding. Analysis • The dramatic works of Samuel Beckett reflect the evolution of his interests in various means of artistic expression, as he composed plays for stage, radio, cinema, and television. In his stage plays, he parodies traditional dramatic action and borrows the techniques used in other modes of entertainment. His themes are not constant, but they are grimly developed through a steady mood of ironic laughter if not outright sarcasm. Like the character “O” who runs from the camera’s eye (“E”) in Film, Beckett’s art finds its form in a flight from conventional expectations and traditional observations. What seems meaningless and absurd is shown to be the only meaning possible in a universe where the human experience of consciousness (as subject) seems trapped by a nature and body (as object) without consciousness. Laughter is an intellectual triumph over material absurdity, and self-denial is self-affirmation. Beckett’s plays are made of such paradoxes. Whether it is in the nameless characters in Play, the lone and aging Krapp awaiting imminent death in Krapp’s Last Tape, the pathetic Winnie sinking in her grave in Happy Days, the dying family in the masochistic Endgame, the monotonous life of waiting of Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, or the down-and-outers in other dramatic works, Beckett demonstrates a preference for passive characters who attempt to make sense of an increasingly absurd existence and who struggle to survive in a universe that lacks love and meaningful relationships. As a critic, a transitional thinker, an innovator, and a postmodernist who probed the human condition and sensed the absurdity of the modern world, Beckett tried to link art and life into unusual theatrical images in order to etch human beings’ inner world and the human experience of consciousness. Even though his vision of life and the human predicament is discouraging, his plays are rich with clownish characters, slapstick humor, word games, irony, and sarcasm, allowing laughter to triumph over material absurdity. Beckett is best known as the author of four intriguingly powerful stage plays; Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Happy Days. His later work has begun to receive critical attention, particularly those plays that focus on women, such as Play and especially Not I. With his first stunningly successful stage play, however, there is not a woman to be seen. Only two tramps, two strangely united male travelers, and a boy are on the stage of Waiting for Godot. Waiting for Godot • In this play, Beckett established his major tone of comic despair, with his characters resigned to waiting for something to happen that never happens. He also created his major dramatic style out of vaudevillian and silent-film skits by clownish characters who are determined to endure without understanding why they must. In two acts that mirror each other in language and action, Waiting for Godot mocks audience desire for significant form and visionary comprehension of human experience. The two protagonists are tramps by the name of Estragon (called Gogo) and

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Vladimir (called Didi). They seem doomed to repeat forever the experiences played out in the two acts, as they wait for the arrival of a mysterious person known to them only as Godot. This Godot never does arrive. Instead, a lordly fellow named Pozzo appears in the first act, leading his servant Lucky by a rope; in the second act, these two reappear, though Pozzo is now blind and Lucky is dumb. The spareness of plot and scarcity of characters are reinforced by the stark setting. Only a tree (leafless in act 1, bearing a few leaves in act 2) and a lonely country road mark the location of this play’s action through a day of trivial concerns by the two tramps. The interruption by Pozzo and Lucky of their monotonous life of waiting is dramatic, but it is drained of its significance by the incomprehension of the characters who participate in it. The dialogue of the four characters is, in its variety, a counterpoint to the monotony of the slapstick action: The tramps talk in short, quick bursts of verbal response to each other, Pozzo exclaims himself in bombastic rhetoric, and Lucky overflows once in a stream-of-consciousness monologue called “thinking.” When they reappear in act 2, Pozzo’s pomposity has been deflated into whining, and Lucky cannot speak at all. Thus does this play illustrate Beckett’s intense concern for the nature and function of language itself in a world where there is so little worth communicating. At the end of each act, Vladimir and Estragon threaten to separate, to leave—but in each act, they do not move as the curtain descends on them. The two tramps play word games to pass the time, and they entertain themselves with strategies for suicide, but they cannot kill themselves. Waiting is a part of their fate. Each act ends with the arrival of a boy to announce that Godot will not arrive this evening, but that he will come another time. The boy’s claim that he is not the same boy who appeared in the first act, that he tends sheep and that the other boy is his brother, a goatherd, constitutes allusions hinting at some religious mystery in the identity of Godot, the god who will separate sheep from goats on the day of judgment. If Didi and Gogo are denied their meeting with Godot, they are no less heroic for their waiting. Endgame • Endgame is one act of waiting also, not for an arrival but rather for a departure. The servant of this play, called Clov, threatens to leave his master, Hamm, when a boy is sighted through one of the two windows in the room, or “shelter,” that makes the setting for this play’s action. The curtain drops without a definite commitment by Clov to move outside, and the boy is never seen by anyone except Clov. The title refers to the last phase of a game of chess, and two of the four characters move as if they were pieces in such a game. Hamm is unable to leave his chair, and Clov is unable to sit; Hamm orders Clov about, and Clov moves Hamm around. A blind ruler of his household, Hamm is a modern King Lear, blind and helpless to tend to his bodily needs. He wants his painkiller, and Clov tells him it is depleted. Hamm wants the ultimate painkiller of death but that seems elusive as well. Both Hamm and Clov wait for the end of the game of life, as all life outside their room seems at an end, except for the mysterious arrival of the boy. On the stage are two other characters, Nagg and Nell, Hamm’s parents. They have lost their legs in an accident and are as immobile as their son. They are kept by Hamm inside ash bins, pathetically reminiscing about their lives until the mother, Nell, dies and Nagg is sealed in his bin by Clov on orders from Hamm. Family values are far from the traditional ones of conventional domestic plots. Hamm tortures his father, or what remains of him, and Nagg torments his son exactly as he did when Hamm was a child. There is some remnant of affection in this play, though, just as there was in Waiting for Godot. The emotional tie between Gogo and Didi is repeated between

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Hamm and Clov, whose past binds them together even while they express a wish to separate. There is also a tie of romance holding the two parents together, though they cannot now reach each other for a kiss, and one of their most romantic adventures led to their helplessness—they lost their legs in a bicycle accident. This play hints, through various allusions, at a meaning that transcends its apparent lack of meaning. Hamm is both an acting ham and a Prince Hamlet, calling attention to his role as a mockery of art in a meaningless universe; Hamm is also a piece of meat spiced by Clov in a world where human dignity no longer exists. The words and postures of both Hamm and Clov sometimes suggest that they are parodies of Christ on the Cross (where flesh is hammered with nails, puns on the names of the four characters), but there is no salvation for anyone in this play’s world, unless it is to be in the boy waiting, perhaps contemplating his navel, beside a rock outside. Hamm is anxious for all life to end, even including that of a louse, so that the absurdity of human consciousness will cease. That boy outside is a threat, and so Hamm wants his life. Will life go on despite Hamm and evolve again, or will it finally wind down into nothingness? The play does not provide a clear sign of the answer as it concludes: Hamm replaces a bloody handkerchief over his blind eyes, and Clov, dressed as if for traveling, stands immobile watching the last pathetic moves of his master. Pathos is not the essence, however, of Endgame, though it may threaten to become so, as in the relationship of the tramps in Waiting for Godot. At the point of revealing a depth of passion that might pass for pathos, Beckett’s plays pull back and laugh at the pointlessness of the possibility. Everything falls into nothing, everything dies, everything comes to a stop, though not quite, and that is the wild absurdity of it all. Krapp’s Last Tape • If the drama of entropy cannot quite come to a complete stop, that is not the fault of desire for it. In Krapp’s Last Tape, where an ingenious use of recording tapes creates a dimension of time always present in its absence, the protagonist (and only character onstage) listens to recordings of his own voice from many years past, especially one when he was thirty-nine years old, some thirty years before. Krapp’s wait for death, for an end to entropy, is supported by his ironic dismissal of all that was meaningful at the time that he recorded the most important events of his life. In the present time of the play, Krapp is about to record the fact that the sound of the word “spool” is important, but he is drawn back to listen again and again to his recording of thirty years ago, when he described a lovemaking scene on a boat. His lust has declined, but his hunger for bananas and his thirst for wine have not, as he records his last tape. Krapp’s sense of himself, however, is threatened by the fragmented voices from his past; indeed, there is no continuous identity in this character, whose self-recording is a figure for the author’s work itself. There is an irony of similarity here, for Beckett’s own work may be reflected by the “plot” of Krapp’s Last Tape. Voices are separated from the body, memories are mixed by mechanical forms, and the self is a stranger to itself. The drama of this discovery is in the encounter of one self with another, of silence yielding to voice, and voice subsiding into silence. These features increasingly preoccupied Beckett, as he moved his wit more and more into the regions of radio (all sound and voice) and mimes (no sound or voice). Happy Days • More pathetic than all is the situation of Winnie in Happy Days. Entropy is visually represented by the intensifying imprisonment of Winnie, who appears in act 1 buried in a mound up to her waist and then, in act 2, up to her neck; she has be-

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come increasingly immobilized, and through it all she maintains her view of life as one of “happy days.” She is happily stupid or courageously optimistic as she recounts her life’s pleasures against the background of an unresponsive husband, Willie. At the end, dressed fit to kill, Willie calls his wife “Win” and seems prepared to shoot her with a pistol that she cannot seize for herself. She may be happy because she expects now to end it all with her death at last. Winnie’s immobility is unchosen, and her waiting is absurdly imposed by the earth itself. As a ridiculous version of the earth-mother, Winnie is the opposite of her lethargic though “free” husband, and so she reflects the social condition of all women as well as the exploitation of that condition by men. Happy Days, like Krapp’s Last Tape, develops through monologue rather than dialogue, though in both plays the possibility for dialogue is kept alive for the sake of its ironic futility. Play • The futility of dialogue, of communication, even perhaps of drama itself seems to direct the shape of the play called Play, which appears to have three characters who talk to one another, but in fact has three characters who talk without regard for, or awareness of, one another. The ash bins of Nell and Nagg in Endgame have become three gray urns in Play, and these contain the three characters—rather, they contain the heads of three characters who stare straight ahead, as if at the audience, but in fact only into a fiercely interrogating spotlight. Their predicament, like that of Winnie in Happy Days, is more frustrating for communication and self-dignity than that of Winnie or Nell and Nagg, whose memories are functional for some modicum of dialogue with another who shares those memories with them. The nameless characters of Play are two women and one man, once involved in a shabby conventional love tryst of a married couple and “another woman.” The drama of Play is a hell of isolation, regrets, emotional ignorance, and intellectual darkness. The play proceeds from a chorus of three voices in counterpoint, interrupted reminiscences without self-understanding, and a concluding chorus that repeats the opening, as if about to begin again. The urns are funereal wombs for talking heads. The emptiness of meaning from the lives of these characters is the utmost meaning they can express, and their lack of relationship is a judgment by the play on the failure of relationships in modern life generally. As in other Beckett plays of this period, the women of Play have a particularly painful message to deliver: Love and marriage do not exist as real possibilities for meaning for anyone anymore, especially for women, who have depended on them far more than men. The refusal to accept this predicament without a protest is dramatized in Not I, a play in which an apparently female character is divided between a Mouth of denial and an Auditor of silent protest. Here, Beckett has combined mime with radiolike monologue, and he has done it through a sexual pun on “ad-libbing.” All That Fall • To his achievements in stage plays, Beckett added successful accomplishments in radio and television drama, as well as one interesting script for motion pictures, Film. The radio plays of note are All That Fall and Embers; the teleplay deserving attention is Eh Joe. Communication, its failure or its emptiness, is a common theme running through Beckett’s writing, and his experiments in various modes of artistic expression illustrate his search for success in communication. Radio was a challenging medium, using voice and other sounds to create imaginative shapes for audiences. All That Fall uses the muttering voice of an overweight old woman, Mrs. (Maddy) Rooney, making her way to a train station to meet her blind husband, Mr. (Dan) Rooney; her innermost thoughts and feelings

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are easily expressed in this medium, as are the concerns of those she meets along her way. Like Beckett’s other women, Mrs. Rooney has little to report that is fulfilling in her marriage; indeed, she mourns the loss of her one child, a daughter who would have been forty had she lived. Mrs. Rooney’s real character is in her voice, not in her body; she can feel her self through her peculiar choice of words and sentence arrangements. This attention to vocabulary reveals Beckett’s profound interest in the power of language as shaped and shaping sound. Of lesser interest is the terrible deed that lies at the center of this play’s plot, the death of a child beneath the wheels of a train. Whether Mr. Rooney killed the child or not is less important than whether the audience can be moved by the mere articulation of sound to feel the horror of such a life-denying deed. All That Fall takes its title from a biblical verse that praises the power of a deity who protects “all that fall.” The Rooneys hoot at this notion, though the child that fell beneath the train may, for all they can know, be better off than all those who, like the Rooneys, merely endure as they slowly decay with the rest of the universe. Embers and Eh Joe • Like them, the narrating speaker of Embers, Henry, endures through a failing nature, but he uses language to explain rather than affirm failure and death. Like the waves of the sea beside which he sits while he speaks, Henry returns again and again to the same scenes of his life, trying to make them acceptable, especially his father’s death and his wife’s love. They are not yet coherent for him because they were experiences of futility rather than fulfillment, and so he goes on telling his story, revising as he composes, and composing as he speaks. Henry’s regrets are motives for his narratives, and in Eh Joe, Joe’s refusal to feel regret is a motive for the teleplay. As the television camera moves, like an interrogator or conscience, for an ultimate close-up of Joe’s face, a voice interrupts, or propels, the camera’s movement to tell a tale of suicide by a woman condemning Joe. Film • This technique is similar to that of Film, in which a male figure (played by Buster Keaton) fails to avoid self-perception, self-condemnation. In the movement of the film’s narrative, the male figure is an Object (“O”) for the subject of the camera’s Eye (“E”); the whole action is a movement by the object of avoidance of becoming a subject. The drama of the story ends with the failure of avoidance. Art exists because of the duality narrated by the action of the film, and when the duality approaches unity, as self recognizes itself, the art ends and the object fades into a rocking subject. All that man the object, or the male figure, seems to be is an attempt to escape his consciousness of himself, including his destruction of photographs (apparently of himself) from his past. Ironically, however, in that final desperate attempt to remove images of himself, he is most fully brought to recognize himself as a subject. The destructive deed turns out to be a constructive act, as if Beckett’s film were commenting on the nature of his own art as a successful communication about failures of communication, an integration of disintegrating forms, and a discovery of meaning in meaninglessness. Other major works long fiction: Murphy, 1938; Molloy, 1951 (English translation, 1955); Malone meurt, 1951 (Malone Dies, 1956); L’Innommable, 1953 (The Unnamable, 1958); Watt, 1953; Comment c’est, 1961 (How It Is, 1964); Mercier et Camier, 1970 (Mercier and Camier, 1974); Le Dépeupleur, 1971 (The Lost Ones, 1972); Company, 1980; Mal vu mal dit, 1981 (Ill Seen Ill Said, 1981); Worstward Ho, 1983.

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short fiction: More Pricks than Kicks, 1934; Nouvelles et textes pour rien, 1955 (Stories and Texts for Nothing, 1967); No’s Knife: Collected Shorter Prose, 1947-1966, 1967; First Love and Other Shorts, 1974; Pour finir encore et autres foirades, 1976 (Fizzles, 1976). poetry: Whoroscope, 1930; Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates, 1935; Poems in English, 1961; Collected Poems in English and French, 1977. screenplay: Film, 1965. teleplays: Eh Joe, 1966 (Dis Joe, 1967); Tryst, 1976; Shades, 1977; Quad, 1981. radio plays: All That Fall, 1957, revised 1968; Embers, 1959; Words and Music, 1962 (music by John Beckett); Cascando, 1963 (music by Marcel Mihalovici). nonfiction: Proust, 1931. translation: An Anthology of Mexican Poetry, 1958 (Octavio Paz, editor). miscellaneous: I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On: A Selection from Samuel Beckett’s Work, 1976 (Richard Seaver, editor). Bibliography Acheson, James. Samuel Beckett’s Artistic Theory and Practice: Criticism, Drama, and Early Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. An examination of Beckett’s literary viewpoint as it expressed itself in his drama and early fiction. Bibliography and index. Birkett, Jennifer, and Kate Ince, eds. Samuel Beckett. New York: Longman, 2000. A collection of criticism of Beckett’s works. Bibliography and index. Essif, Les. Empty Figure on an Empty Stage: The Theatre of Samuel Beckett and His Generation. Drama and Performance Studies 13. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. A look at the criticism of Beckett’s theatrical works over time. Bibliography and index. Kim, Hwa Soon. The Counterpoint of Hope, Obsession, and Desire for Death in Five Plays by Samuel Beckett. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. An analysis of several psychological aspects present in Beckett’s plays, including death and obsession. Bibliography and index. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Knowlson retraces the personal development and literary evolution of Beckett, known to many as a creator of unique worlds inhabited by solitary individuals imprisoned in a world devoid of coherent communication. Bibliography and index. McMullan, Anna. Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett’s Later Drama. New York: Routledge, 1993. An examination of the later plays created by Beckett. Bibliography and index. Oppenheim, Lois, ed. Directing Beckett. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. This study examines the production and direction of Beckett plays. Bibliography and index. Pattie, David. The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett. New York: Routledge, 2000. A reference volume that combines biographical information with critical analysis of Beckett’s literary works. Bibliography and index. Pilling, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. A comprehensive reference work that provides considerable information about the life and works of Beckett. Bibliography and indexes. Worth, Katharine. Samuel Beckett’s Theatre: Life Journeys. New York: Clarendon Press, 1999. A look at the production history and psychological aspects of Beckett’s plays. Bibliography and index. Richard D. McGhee

Brendan Behan Brendan Behan

Born: Dublin, Ireland; February 9, 1923 Died: Dublin, Ireland; March 20, 1964 Principal drama • Gretna Green, pr. 1947; The Quare Fellow, pr. 1954, pb. 1956 (translation and revision of his Gaelic play “Casadh Súgáin Eile,” wr. 1946); The Big House, pr. 1957 (radio play), pr. 1958 (staged), pb. 1961; An Giall, pr. 1958, pb. 1981 (in Gaelic); The Hostage, pr., pb. 1958 (translation and revision of An Giall ); Richard’s Cork Leg, pr. 1972, pb. 1973 (begun 1960, completed posthumously by Alan Simpson, 1964); The Complete Plays, pb. 1978 Other literary forms • Brendan Behan’s literary reputation rests on the merits of three works: The Quare Fellow and The Hostage, his dramatic masterpieces, and The Borstal Boy (1958), his autobiography, published in England by Hutchinson and in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf. The two plays were performed several times before their publication, and the performance rights are still retained by the Theatre Workshop in East London. The Borstal Boy, set in 1931-1941, is an autobiographical narrative of Behan’s adolescent years in prison. Several Behan stories included in The Borstal Boy appeared initially in literary magazines and journals. Brendan Behan’s Island: An Irish Sketchbook (1962) was intended by Behan to be similar in tone and structure to John Millington Synge’s The Aran Islands (1907), but it does not stand up to this literary comparison. Unable to write for extended periods of time in his later years, Behan began taping his stories and subsequently had them edited by his publishing guardian angel and friend, Rae Jeffs. Brendan Behan’s Island, Hold Your Hour and Have Another (1963), Brendan Behan’s New York (1964), and Confessions of an Irish Rebel (1965) are all edited results of taping sessions. The Scarperer (1964) was published in book form the year Behan died but had been published first as a series in The Irish Times, in 1953, under the pseudonym “Emmet Street.” Several of Behan’s works were published posthumously. Among these are Confessions of an Irish Rebel, Moving Out (1952), A Garden Party (1952), and Richard’s Cork Leg, the latter of which was begun by Behan in 1960 and ultimately completed by Alan Simpson. In addition to his plays and books, Behan contributed scores of short stories and poems on a variety of subjects to journals and newspapers throughout his life. He was as renowned for his balladeering as he was for his writings, and he composed the songs for his plays. A recording entitled Brendan Behan Sings Irish Folksongs and Ballads, produced by Spoken Arts, provides insight into Behan’s passionate personality. Achievements • Brendan Behan has been called the most important postwar Irish writer by contemporary Irish, English, and American critics. His works represent an extraordinary mixture of Irish romance, history, patriotism, and racism. All his works reflect, in some measure, the Irish Republican Army’s efforts to rid Northern Ireland of the English. Paradoxically, his major literary successes came first in England, and though productions of The Quare Fellow and The Hostage met with 91

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moderate success in the United States, his most receptive audience was always in London. Stylistically, Behan has been compared to Jonathan Swift, James Joyce, Synge, and Sean O’Casey. His treatment of the Irish in his plays and stories is simultaneously warm and biting. Clearly a social critic, Behan’s writings indict law, religion, Ireland, England, and the absurdity of politics. His literary career spans barely twenty years, though the most productive of these amount to less than a decade. His first story, “I Become a Borstal Boy,” was published in June, 1942, after which he regularly contributed nationalistic essays, stories, and poems to various Irish periodicals, including organs of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) such as Fianna: The Voice of Young Ireland and the Wolfe Tone Weekly. Behan’s most productive years (1953-1959) were marked by the production of both The Quare Fellow and The Hostage and the publication of The Borstal Boy. During these years, Behan’s fame began to wane, and his creative talent floundered in a sea of alcohol. Behan wrote principally of a world of men, yet ironically it was his association with two women that accounted for much of his artistic success. Joan Littlewood, director and manager of the Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, London, directed The Quare Fellow in 1956 and catapulted Behan into the international limelight. Her production of The Hostage in 1958 earned for Behan equally high praise. His friend Jeffs can be credited with virtually all Behan’s productivity during his final years. The publicity manager for Hutchinson’s Publishing Company, she was “assigned” the obstreperous Behan in 1957. From 1957 to 1964, Jeffs’s formidable task included following Behan from pub to pub, trailing and assisting him on his trips from England to the United States to Ireland, all the while making sure he was writing or taping his work, to be edited later. Ultimately, she performed her task as a labor of love, serving as friend and confidante to both Behan and his wife, Beatrice. Without Jeffs’s tenacity, Behan’s literary career would have ended in 1957 in an alcoholic stupor. In his final years, Behan became a drunken caricature of himself. The early works evidence the true spark of genius that carried him through the years of honor to the dark years plagued by alcoholism and self-doubt. It is to these early works that one must turn to capture the real genius embodied in the literature of this twentieth century Irish phenomenon. Biography • Brendan Behan was born February 9, 1923, in Dublin, Ireland, the first child of Stephen and Kathleen (Kearney) Behan, though his mother had two sons by a previous marriage. Born into a family with radical political leanings, Behan was reared on a double dose of IRA propaganda and Roman Catholicism. The radical Left was part of his genetic makeup. His grandmother and a grandfather were jailed for their roles in the revolution, the former for illegal possession of explosives when she was seventy years old and the latter for his part in the murder of Lord Cavendish. Both of Behan’s parents fought in the Irish Revolution and in the Troubles. Ultimately jailed for his participation in the violence, Behan’s father saw his son for the first time through prison bars. Behan was a precocious child whose reverence for writers was spawned by his father’s readings of Samuel Pepys, Charles Dickens, Émile Zola, George Bernard Shaw, and various polemical treatises to his children. By Behan’s own account, his home was filled with reading, song, and revolution. Juxtaposed to this violent heritage was

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Behan’s conservative religious training. He attended schools run by the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, where he was a favorite, and another operated by the Irish Christian Brothers, where he found himself in constant disfavor. Behan’s militant disposition surfaced early, when at the age of nine he joined the Fianna Éireann, the junior wing of the IRA. He spent most of his early adult years in prison. After being arrested in Liverpool at the age of sixteen for participating in IRA bombings in England, Behan spent three years in the Borstal, the English correctional institution for juvenile delinquents. Released in 1941 and deported to Ireland, Behan was again incarcerated the following year for shooting at a police officer. He had served four years of a fourteen-year sentence when he was released in 1946. Additional stays in jail followed throughout his life. The worldview projected in Behan’s works recalls the environment in which he matured, one dominated by a radical family and by his prison experience. Cradled in the romance of revolution, Behan was cultured in a more traditional sense. Kathleen and Stephen Behan reared their children with a love for music and literature. Nurtured with a reverential attitude toward Kathleen’s brother Peadar Kearney, a noted composer who wrote the Irish national anthem, the Behan children learned his marches and ballads in a home continuously filled with music. According to Colbert Kearney, Behan’s precociousness as a child was largely attributable to the education he received at home. Behan’s father instilled in him a deep-seated respect for Irish writers and rhetoricians. He learned to read at an early age and was fond of memorizing speeches by Irish patriots such as Robert Emmet. Not as readily discernible in Behan’s work is the influence of his strict upbringing in Roman Catholicism. Behan had a love-hate relationship with the Church, and often his works condemn religion. Yet one of his most bitter disappointments came when he was excommunicated while serving time in prison. Some critics believe that this was a crisis in Behan’s life from which he never recovered. Behan began writing while in prison, and his first story, “I Become a Borstal Boy,” was published in The Bell in 1942. The plays, poems, and short stories written during his prison terms are all autobiographical. The years from 1946 to 1956 were the most ambitious of his career. For a time he lived in Paris, but he was eventually drawn back to Ireland, where he worked as a housepainter and freelance journalist. During this hiatus from serious encounters with the law, he married Beatrice Salkeld, daughter of the noted Irish artist Cecil Salkeld. Behan’s major break came when Alan Simpson agreed to produce The Quare Fellow at the Pike Theatre in Dublin in 1954. The play met with critical acclaim, but, to Behan’s disappointment, the more prestigious Irish theaters such as the Abbey refused to stage it. This rejection spurred in Behan an overwhelming desire to be accepted as an artist in his own country. The Quare Fellow was noticed by Joan Littlewood, whose 1956 London production made Behan an international sensation. He followed this success with another play, An Giall, which he wrote in Gaelic and later translated as The Hostage. Littlewood’s subsequent production of The Hostage proved an even greater success than The Quare Fellow. Critics proclaimed Behan a literary genius, but he was destroyed by his success. His notorious interruptions of his plays with drunken speeches shouted from his seat in the audience and his intoxication during interviews for the British Broadcasting Corporation enhanced the “bad boy” image he so carefully cultivated, but ultimately it killed him. The most tragic repercussion of his alcoholism proved to be his inability to sit and write for an extended period of time. The Hostage was Behan’s last good work. When

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his writing sojourns to Ibiza, his favorite retreat, and the United States and Canada produced little, he resorted to taping sessions to meet his publication contracts. By 1960, after two major breakdowns as well as intermittent stays in hospitals to dry out, Behan was a shell of his former robust personality. Riding on his reputation of acknowledged artistry, he found himself incapable of writing, which led him to drink even more. Behan died March 20, 1964, at the age of forty-one. Several of his edited works published after his death created a brief, cultish interest in the man and his writing, but this adulation soon passed. What remains is the recognition that Behan was one of the finest twentieth century Irish writers. His talent will be recognized long after his colorful reputation has faded. Analysis • To understand Brendan Behan’s work, one must first recognize the underlying Behan legend, which is built on paradox. Frank O’Connor, writing in the Sunday Independent (Dublin), said of Behan that “under his turbulent exterior there was quite clearly the soul of an altar boy.” Behan was a kind, gentle man who acted violently. He was insecure and feared publicity yet perpetrated outrageous stunts to capture attention. He wrote of reasonableness and absurdity in the world yet persisted in his personal irrationality. Behan was saint and sinner, moralist and profligate, and this dichotomy is carried over into his works. Even his overriding thematic consideration, a politically divided Ireland, is complex. Gordon Wickstrom believes Behan writes of three Irelands: the Ireland of contemporary, illegal Republican fanaticism, dedicated to the destruction of everything English; the Ireland of glorious memory of the Troubles and Easter Week, needing no justification beyond the private experience of valor and sacrifice; and Ireland as it actually exists, complete with police attacks, sirens, bloodbaths, and terror. The principal themes in Behan’s works are culled from his close association with the Irish Republican Army: death, freedom, and the absurdity of humanity’s impermanence in a hostile world. Behan’s major plays, The Quare Fellow and The Hostage, examine these themes through the eyes of a prisoner, a character-type that figures prominently in Behan’s works. As his life stands as a series of paradoxes, so, too, does his style. Behan fills his works with unsavory gallows humor and swings erratically between comedy and tragedy in a decidedly Brechtian manner. Yet the early works are tightly structured and astonishingly poetic. Songs incorporated into Behan’s plays serve as lyric Gaelic laments but can quickly turn into obscene ditties. Behan’s use of vernacular and the overwhelming sense of freedom in the lines contribute to the impressive strength of his writing. An unlikely coupling of naturalism and absurdism is characteristic of his best work. His characters are drawn from the lower classes, with Irish nationalism, bordering on racism, binding them together. Ironically, Behan’s genteel audiences find it easy to empathize with his murderers, prostitutes, homosexuals, and radicals, perhaps because the sordid individuals in Behan’s plays and stories are presented with a depth of compassion and understanding usually reserved for more noble literary characters. Behan’s prison years had a profound influence on him. During these stultifying periods, he became preoccupied with the two themes that dominate his works: death and freedom. In the cells and work yards of the Borstal and Mountjoy prisons, Behan mentally cataloged information about individuals, human nature, and the absurdity of the world and its systems. The examination of conflicts between gentleness and violence, a trademark of Behan’s work, stems directly from his own divided nature as much as his early background. Major characters such as Dunlavin and the Warder in The Quare

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Fellow, Monsewer and Williams in The Hostage, or the prisoner in The Borstal Boy reflect various facets of his personality. The Quare Fellow • In November, 1954, The Quare Fellow was labeled “a powerful piece of propaganda” by A. J. Leventhal, writing in Dublin Magazine. This assessment of Behan’s first literary and theatrical success holds true for all his works. Though his plays do not strictly adhere to agitation-propaganda techniques used by earlier European playwrights, Behan’s works are obviously propagandistic. The Quare Fellow, the most structured of his plays, examines the issue of capital punishment. Set in a prison, The Quare Fellow is a series of episodes in which the prison community prepares for the execution of the unseen titular character. Tension is deftly established on two levels: the friction maintained in the relationship between prisoners and warders and the more insidious anxiety, hidden beneath the prattle and routine of the prison, that eats at the souls of both warders and prisoners as the moment of execution draws near. Every character waits in dread for the final moment, when a man will die. Their empathetic response to ritualized, state-supported death reinforces the horror felt by the audience. The prison serves as Behan’s microcosm of the world in which primal struggles of life and death as well as social struggles of promotion, acceptance, pretense, and charity are all in evidence. The Quare Fellow opens with the singing of a man in solitary confinement, trying to keep his sanity. His haunting lament, floating over the prison grounds, becomes almost a dirge as the play progresses. The plot is moved by the institution’s preparations for the day of execution. Each character fears the approach of the hour of death and manifests his uneasiness in a different way. The prisoners attempt a forced jauntiness and irreverence but are unable to call the condemned man by his Christian name, preferring instead to force on him anonymity, calling him only “the quare fellow.” As the climax approaches and the moment of death is imminent, a prisoner cynically announces the offstage procession to the gallows as though it were the start of a horse race: “We’re off, in this order: The Governor, The Chief, two screws Regan and Crimmin, the quare fellow between them.” Yet this comic diversion is incapable of diluting the dramatic effect of the climax when the clock strikes the hour and the prisoners wail, howl, and roar in primal lamentation, as the trap drops and the quare fellow hangs. The hero of the play, the quare fellow, never appears onstage. Dunlavin, a crusty, experienced prisoner, and Regan, a compassionate warder, are the principal characters. This den of thieves and murderers has its own order, a social hierarchy based on criminal offenses and experience. Sex offenders are ostracized by the prison community, and Dunlavin bemoans his misfortune at having one placed in the cell next to his. The sex offender, for his part, is appalled that he must live among murderers and takes to quoting Thomas Carlyle. Religion is brutally satirized in The Quare Fellow. The hypocritical representative from the Department of Justice is dubbed “Holy Healey” by the inmates, who paste religious pictures on their walls to curry favor during his visits. Dunlavin’s friend and neighbor in the cellblock comments on the importance of the Bible to prisoners, stating, “Many’s the time the Bible was a consolation to a fellow all alone in the old cell,” not for its spiritual comfort, but because prisoners rolled mattress bits within its pages and smoked them. Dunlavin, in turn, recounts how in his first twelve months he smoked his way halfway through Genesis. The executioner, referred to imperially as “Himself,” cannot face his job in a sober state and must be accompanied by a teetotaling, Bible-quoting, hymn-singing assistant to see him to his appointed rounds.

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The incongruity of this misallied pair is obvious as Jenkinson, the assistant, sings a hymn while the hangman audibly calculates the weight of the condemned man and the height of the drop needed to kill him. Behan’s vision of the value of life and the awesome power of death is painted in masterful strokes throughout The Quare Follow. The dignity of humankind, the worth of an individual life, and the inhumanity of a system devised for correctional purposes are powerfully juxtaposed in this play. The 1954 Pike Theatre production of The Quare Fellow was well received, but it was Joan Littlewood’s direction in 1956 that made it a modern classic. Although the play has been criticized as being melodramatic, Behan mixes well-developed characters with stereotypes and caricatures to provide diverse opportunities for commentary on various levels. The Quare Fellow is not wholly a tragedy, nor is it merely black comedy. It is an unnatural two-backed beast that violently gives birth to Behan’s pessimistic worldview. The Hostage • The music-hall atmosphere of The Hostage differs radically from the sterile environment of The Quare Fellow. From the opening jig, danced by two prostitutes and two homosexuals, to the rousing chorus, sung by the corpse, Behan jars his audience with the unexpected. Like Bertolt Brecht’s Die Dreigroschenoper (pr. 1928; The Threepenny Opera, 1949), The Hostage is populated by a cast of societal misfits. Brechtian influences can be noticed in the play’s structure as well. The Hostage, according to Richard A. Duprey in The Critic, is an indictment of law, religion, home, country, human decency, art, and even death. What is espoused within its tenuous structure is IRA radicalism, but even this cannot escape Behan’s satiric barbs. The IRA officer in the play is outraged by the shoddy accommodations—a brothel—afforded him and his political prisoner, while Pat, manager of the “brockel” and a veteran of the Easter Rebellion and the Troubles, denounces the new IRA soldiers as “white-faced loons with their trench coats, berets and teetotal badges.” Thematically, The Hostage compares with Behan’s other major works in that the protagonist is a prisoner. Leslie Williams has committed no crime except that he is an English soldier in Ireland. Taken as a hostage by IRA reactionaries, Williams is offered in trade for a jailed Irish youth sentenced to hang. The IRA cause is felt most strongly in this play, and Behan’s nationalistic biases are given ample voice in the songs about the Easter Rebellion, Monsewer’s senile ravings about the days of glorious conflict, and Pat’s diatribes against modern Ireland. Hidden beneath the brash, gaudy, and colorful language of the play, such weighty underpinnings emerge in flashes of seriousness. A mélange of dramatic styles pushes the plot through a series of vignettes, comedy routines, and song-and-dance numbers. Songs, jokes, and malapropisms abound in this very political play. Individually, the characters lack depth and are only one step removed from the stereotyped clowns of burlesque houses. Collectively, they champion traditional Irish Republicanism while at the same time denouncing the absurdity of its violent contemporary manifestations. This is a play about the Republican cause; it is also a play about the value of life. Leslie Williams is an apolitical character who dies needlessly, an injustice that Behan adroitly condemns. Life and death in Behan’s work are never equal forces; life always triumphs. He breaks the serious mood of his final scene, in which Williams’s death is disclosed, by having the corpse jump up and sing, “The bells of hell go ting a ling a ling for you but not for me. . . .” The original Gaelic-language version of the play, An Giall, was a much more serious play than the version presented in the internationally acclaimed 1958 London production. The seminal version had but ten characters, whereas The Hostage has fifteen.

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Writer Colbert Kearney notes that An Giall is essentially a naturalistic tragedy, while The Hostage is a musical extravaganza. Certainly, the latter tolerates a greater degree of bawdiness than the original. Critics charged that Joan Littlewood’s company substantially altered An Giall while in production for The Hostage, yet this was partially Behan’s fault. During 1957 and 1958, he was committed to two projects: translating An Giall into The Hostage for Littlewood and finishing The Borstal Boy. Behan became preoccupied with the publicity and lavish promotion given The Borstal Boy and neglected his commitments to Littlewood. Consequently, parts of The Hostage grew out of the improvisations of the Theatre Workshop and, though sanctioned by Behan, changed the play significantly from the original work. Scholar Ulick O’Connor believes several of the non sequitur scenes in The Hostage were invented by Littlewood and do not reflect Behan’s hand in the revision. Nevertheless, the production was a hit. The Hostage was selected to represent Great Britain at the prestigious Théâtre des Nations festival in 1959, and it moved to the fashionable Wyndham Theatre on London’s West End. Productions of Behan’s plays opened in Dublin, New York, Paris, and Berlin. The Hostage proved to be Behan’s last theatrical success. His reputation sustained him as an artist for the next six years, but his talent abandoned him. He began another play, Richard’s Cork Leg, but it remained unfinished at his death. The Hostage is not as neatly structured as The Quare Fellow, though Behan’s genius for dialogue and mise en scène pervades the work. Behan—patriot, nationalist, and racist—is plainly seen in The Hostage, yet his persona, so dominant in his plays, turns to reveal Behan the humanitarian in equally sharp focus. Behan’s works, like the man, are paradoxical. His legend lives on, supported by contemporary interest in Behan the revolutionary and artist. Other major works long fiction: The Scarperer, 1953 (serial), 1964 (book; as Emmet Street); The Dubbalin Man, 1954-1956 (serial), 1997 (book). short fiction: After the Wake, 1981. radio plays: A Garden Party, 1952; Moving Out, 1952. nonfiction: The Borstal Boy, 1958; Brendan Behan’s Island: An Irish Sketchbook, 1962; Hold Your Hour and Have Another, 1963; Brendan Behan’s New York, 1964; Confessions of an Irish Rebel, 1965; The Letters of Brendan Behan, 1992 (E. H. Mikhail, editor). miscellaneous: Poems and Stories, 1978; Poems and a Play in Irish, 1981 (includes the play An Giall ). Bibliography Behan, Brian, with Aubrey Dillon-Malone. The Brother Behan. Dublin: Ashfield Press, 1998. The brother of Brendan Behan writes of their lives and his brother’s work. Behan, Kathleen. Mother of All the Behans: The Autobiography of Kathleen Behan as Told to Brian Behan. 1984. Reprint. Dublin: Poolbeg, 1994. The mother of the dramatist and revolutionary describes her life and her family. De Búrca, Séamus. Brendan Behan: A Memoir. 1971. Reprint. Dublin: P. J. Bourke, 1985. A memoir-style biography of the famous dramatist, covering his life and works. Mikhail, E. H., ed. Brendan Behan: Interviews and Recollections. 2 vols. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble Books, 1982. A collection of extracts from published memoirs and interviews given by those who knew Behan. Contains fifty-one items in volume 1 and fifty-five in volume 2. Mikhail’s introduction insightfully compares Behan and Oscar Wilde.

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O’Sullivan, Michael. Brendan Behan: A Life. Boulder, Colo.: Roberts Rinehart, 1999. A biography of Behan that examines his life and works. Bibliography and index. Witoszek, Walentyna. “The Funeral Comedy of Brendan Behan.” Études irlandaises 11 (December, 1988): 83-91. Witoszek discusses the puzzling presence of laughter in Behan’s writings in which execution is imminent. Though Death is the “central character” in all Behan’s plays, there is also an orgiastic atmosphere of carnival madness, which is analyzed in terms of ritual, the Irish image of the laughing death, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of the carnivalesque. Susan Duffy, updated by William Hutchings

Eric Bogosian Eric Bogosian

Born: Woburn, Massachusetts; April 24, 1953 Principal drama • Careful Movement, pr. 1977; Slavery, pr. 1977; Garden, pr. 1978; Heaven, Heaven, Heaven, pr. 1978; The Ricky Paul Show, pr. 1979; Sheer Heaven, pr. 1980; That Girl, pr. 1981; The New World, pr. 1981; Men Inside, pr. 1981, pb. 1994; Voices of America, pr. 1982, pb. 1994; Advocate, pr. 1983; FunHouse, pr. 1983, pb. 1994; I Saw the Seven Angels, pr. 1984; Talk Radio, pr. 1984, pb. 1988; Drinking in America, pr. 1986, pb. 1987; Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll, pr., pb. 1990; Scenes from the New World, pb. 1993; The Essential Bogosian, pb. 1994; Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead, pr., pb. 1994; subUrbia, pr. 1994, pb. 1995; 31 Ejaculations, pr. 1996, pb. 2000; Griller, pr. 1998; Bitter Sauce, pr., pb. 1998; Wake Up and Smell the Coffee, pr. 2000, pb. 2001 Other literary forms • In addition to his prolific career as a playwright and creator of solo shows, Eric Bogosian has branched out into other written forms as well. Notes from Underground (1994), which takes its inspiration from Fyodor Dostoevski’s Zapiski iz podpolya (1864; Letters from the Underworld, 1913; better known as Notes from the Underground ), is a novella in journal form detailing an isolated man’s attempts to connect with the outside world and his increasing tendency toward antisocial and sociopathic behavior. Bogosian also published a novel, Mall (2000), which focuses on the ways in which a shopping mall ties together the lives of a bizarre array of seemingly unrelated characters. The novel is part comedy and part crime thriller and contains much of the stinging social criticism found in his plays. Bogosian also wrote introductions to two books: Physiognomy: The Mark Seliger Photographs (1999), a collection of celebrity photographs, and How to Talk Dirty and Influence People (1992), the autobiography of comedian Lenny Bruce, whose standup routines laced with social criticism are an obvious forerunner to much of Bogosian’s work as a dramatist. In addition, Bogosian has also written screenplays for adaptations of his work including Talk Radio (1988), which he co-wrote with director Oliver Stone, Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll (1991), and subUrbia (1996), as well as the pilot episode of the television program High Incident (1996). Achievements • Eric Bogosian has been an active and versatile playwright since the late 1970’s, crafting numerous short ensemble dramas and full-length plays, of which Talk Radio and subUrbia, which were both adapted to film, and Griller are the best known. However, Bogosian’s greatest contribution to modern drama is his series of solo shows. These solo performance pieces—Men Inside; FunHouse; Drinking in America; Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll; Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead; and Wake Up and Smell the Coffee—consist of short monologues spoken by different characters and have led to three Obie awards. Drinking in America and Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead each garnered the Obie Award for playwriting, and Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll received a special citation. An outspoken supporter of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Bogosian has received two NEA fellowships, and the film version of Talk Radio received the Silver Bear Award from the Berlin Film Festival. 99

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Bogosian’s work, more than that of most writers, has drawn particular praise for being “hip” by demonstrating a thorough understanding of contemporary culture and concerns. From his searing indictments of consumer culture to his satirical takes on morally compromised yuppies, drug pushers, Hollywood agents, and traditional tough guys, Bogosian has garnered a reputation as a devastating social critic with a biting, edgy, and oftentimes grim sense of humor. Biography • Eric Bogosian grew up in the suburbs in Woburn, Massachusetts, participating in theater at his local high school and enrolling in the University of Chicago. He dropped out of college in 1973 and returned to Woburn, where he worked as an assistant manager at a clothing store in the local mall before transferring to the theater department at Oberlin College, from which he was graduated. In 1975 he moved to New York City and began pursuing a writing career. After arriving in New York, he immersed himself in the world of theater and performance art and began contributing ensemble plays by the end of the 1970’s. To help make ends meet, he learned to capitalize on his talents as a performer by creating monologues that he could produce inexpensively. This work brought him to the attention of producer Joseph Papp, and Bogosian appeared in the producer’s Shakespeare Festival in 1982. During the early 1980’s, Bogosian continued to develop his solo work, completing his first two solo shows, and in 1984 he completed a version of his first full-length ensemble play, Talk Radio. He also began to land sporadic acting jobs on television in such programs as Miami Vice and The Twilight Zone. In 1986 he completed a longer collection of monologues, Drinking in America, for which he received an Obie Award and which was subsequently shortened and filmed as part of a comedy special on Cinemax. A successful New York production of Talk Radio in 1987 led to Bogosian’s collaboration with film director Oliver Stone. The two expanded on the original play by including background material and incorporating elements from the life of Alan Berg, a Colorado radio talk-show host who had been murdered. The resulting film, in which Bogosian also starred, received a good deal of attention and was honored at the Berlin Film Festival. Capitalizing on his rising visibility as a performer, Bogosian landed a leading role in Robert Altman’s television adaptation of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (1988), and Bogosian’s next solo show, Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll, was filmed by director John McNaughton in 1991. Bogosian continued making occasional acting appearances in television programs such as Law and Order and The Larry Sanders Show in the early 1990’s, and in 1994 he published his first novella, Notes from Underground. In 1994 Bogosian was quite busy. Theatre Communications Group published his early solo work along with Talk Radio in an anthology, The Essential Bogosian; he completed another award-winning solo show, Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead; and he wrote his second, full-length ensemble play, subUrbia. The next year he accepted a high-profile acting job as the villain in the action film Under Siege 2 (1995), and in 1996 he wrote the screenplay for director Richard Linklater’s adaptation of subUrbia. He remained busy during the remainder of the 1990’s, acting in small roles in films such as Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry (1997); writing another ensemble play, Griller; completing another solo show, Wake Up and Smell the Coffee; and publishing a novel, Mall. A New York resident, Bogosian is married to Jo Bonney, who has also directed several of his solo shows. Analysis • Eric Bogosian’s work as a performer has continued to flourish along with his writing career, and his sensibilities as an actor have heavily influenced his writing.

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Unlike playwrights, such as Arthur Miller, who strived to produce the well-made play, Bogosian creates character-driven works, often with little regard to formalities of plot and theme. He tries to produce an event or a happening with his plays, placing his emphasis on the performance over the text. Although this technique might seem to make his drama less accessible to literary analysis, it Image not available actually provides his work with its greatest sense of intellectual tension. Rather than carefully formulating his productions, Bogosian lets his characters bring to the stage all of their many contradictions and paradoxes, often leaving the reader or viewer with an uneasy (and highly literary) sense of ambiguity. He does not ask simple questions and does not provide direct answers. Rather, he uses the theater as a means for (AP/Wide World Photos) self-expression, particularly in his solo shows, in which he can pursue whatever thoughts are plaguing him at the moment and he can speak to his audience, whom he frequently refers to as his “tribe.” Many of those “plaguing thoughts” involve generational issues and popular culture. He often explores the ways in which his generation has moved from idealism to materialism, particularly in Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll and Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead. His view of the United States is large, and in his solo shows as well as the ensemble play, Scenes from the New World, he depicts a cross-section of the United States, presenting what he often describes in interviews as the “archetypes” for people that he knows. Readers of Bogosian’s plays are as likely to encounter winos, prostitutes, muggers, rednecks, and drug addicts as they are to find yuppies, Hollywood agents, rock stars, family men, and business executives. In fact, although one might be tempted to point to obvious theatrical and cultural predecessors such as Bertolt Brecht and Lenny Bruce in order to place Bogosian’s drama in a literary context, his affinity for such a broad range of American characters as well as his ability to juggle contradictory ideologies and personalize all the material links him as closely to the American poet Walt Whitman as to any other playwrights or performers. Talk Radio • Bogosian’s first full-length ensemble play, Talk Radio, centers on the personality of Barry Champlain, a confrontational radio talk-show host, whose program, Nighttalk, is on the verge of being distributed nationally. The action takes place during one difficult night when Champlain wrestles with off-beat phone calls, pressures to change the show, and ultimately, a crisis of conscience. He begins to question whether going national is “selling out,” and both the character, Champlain, and the writer, Bogosian, seem to question whether there is any artistic integrity in such a show

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at all. The play ponders whether such programs are public forums for exchanging important ideas or merely spectacle entertainments for passive listeners who derive their pleasure from hearing Champlain take on the various callers. This play bears the hallmarks of much of the playwright’s subsequent work in that it asks more questions than it answers and examines the relationship of a performer to his audience, a theme that runs as a subtext throughout much of Bogosian’s solo work. Talk Radio amply demonstrates his penchant for being “ahead of the curve” in terms of trends in popular culture. With Talk Radio, Bogosian actually anticipates the arrival of such celebrity hosts as Howard Stern, but when the play was first completed in the mid-1980’s, the notion of the blistering talk-show host had not yet emerged as a national phenomenon. Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll • In this collection of monologues, Bogosian presents another diverse array of characters, including a British rock star turned recovering drug addict, a Texas “stud” who boasts of his sexual prowess, and a cutthroat business executive. Some of the pieces are more inventive conceptually than his previous monologues, such as “Benefit,” which features the rock star and establishes as its unseen context a television interview show. As he notes in his introduction, Bogosian, as a child of the 1970’s, has very mixed feelings about sex, drugs, and rock and roll. For many people of his generation, “sex, drugs, rock and roll” was not merely a slogan, but actually a motto for living that defined a sense of nonconformity and rebellion, and thus, implied some vague sense of integrity. Yet, as his monologues detail, the sex, the drugs, and the rock and roll are, all three, suspect in that they have all contributed to disease, death, and debilitation for many of these characters. Bogosian’s sense of contradiction and paradox is fully at work in this show as he manages to evoke the mixed feeling of a generation struggling to romanticize the values of its youth while simultaneously questioning the validity of those values. subUrbia • Bogosian’s second full-length ensemble play, subUrbia, focuses on a handful of young people, most in their early twenties, who spend their time hanging out behind a local 7-Eleven convenience store drinking beer, eating pizza, and discussing sex. The action focuses on one evening when an old friend of the group who has gained a small degree of fame as a member of a rock band returns home with his publicist. Although the play begins as a comedy, simultaneously reveling in and satirizing the various attitudes struck by the characters, it grows increasingly serious in tone with incidents of racism, threats of violence, betrayal, drug overdoses, and ultimately tragedy when one of the characters unexpectedly dies. While Bogosian has suggested that the characters and events of the play emerged from his own experiences in the 1970’s, the play speaks much more directly to the existentialist and nihilistic impulses of Generation X in the 1990’s. Most of the characters struggle with a sense of aimlessness in which such time-killing activities as eating, drinking, and “hanging out,” become an end unto themselves rather than the means to an end. The play also fits quite comfortably into the context of a mid-1990’s comedy of manners, much like the television program Seinfeld (1990-1998) and films such as Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) and Kevin Smith’s Clerks (1994) in that it provides characters who are not particularly well educated or intellectually sophisticated with what is nevertheless a highly complex and, at times, elevated rhetorical style of speech, as these young people explore the deeper philosophical implications of how they see the world.

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Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead • This solo show demonstrates increasing ambition and experimentation in Bogosian’s work. It begins with “America,” in which a nameless speaker launches into an extreme attack against anyone and anything even purporting to be politically “liberal.” He follows this disturbing opening monologue with a deliberately offensive one, spoken in black dialect, by a train conductor who claims to be spreading diseases to everyone, including audience members who may be sitting in a chair in which he has urinated or leaning against a wall where he has vomited. After sufficiently numbing his audience, Bogosian then appears as “himself,” attacking the audience for not applauding the previous monologue. By the end of this monologue, he winds up arguing with himself backstage about his image as an “angry” performer. This type of textual self-awareness, in which monologues segue smoothly from one to another and in which Bogosian directly draws his own character into the fray, is new to the solo shows and gives Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead a greater sense of unity and development than its predecessors. Other major works long fiction: Mall, 2000. screenplays: Talk Radio, 1988 (with Oliver Stone); Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll, 1991; subUrbia, 1996. teleplay: High Incident, 1996. miscellaneous: Notes from Underground, 1994 (novella and play). Bibliography Clements, Marcelle. “Eric Bogosian as the Man Who Won’t Shut Up.” Esquire, September, 1991, 184. This profile attempts to see the similarities between Bogosian in private and his public persona as evidenced in Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll. Handelman, David. “A Man Under the Influence.” Rolling Stone, June 19, 1986, 49-51. Written during the period of Bogosian’s solo show, Drinking in America, this article connects the performance to the playwright’s feelings about the death of the comedian John Belushi. Lacher, Irene. “Bogosian Says So Long to Solo Performances: The Older and Wiser Bad Boy of Monologuists Says He Is Moving on to New Projects.” Los Angeles Times, February 6, 2002, p. F2. Bogosian discusses his years of doing monologues and expresses how his interests and focus have changed since he began. He suggests that he might stop doing solo shows and devote his attention to other works. Shirley, Don. “At His Worst.” Review of The Worst of Eric Bogosian. Los Angeles Times, February 8, 2002, p. F21. A review of The Worst of Eric Bogosian, a monologue taken from Bogosian’s Wake Up and Smell the Coffee and other solo performances. Shirley finds the show, in which Bogosian portrays a series of flawed men, including an obsequious actor at an audition and a randy drug dealer, to be a sort of “best of” compilation. Thomas Gregory Carpenter

Bertolt Brecht Bertolt Brecht

Born: Augsburg, Germany; February 10, 1898 Died: East Berlin, East Germany; August 14, 1956 Principal drama • Baal, wr. 1918, pb. 1922, pr. 1923 (English translation, 1963); Trommeln in der Nacht, wr. 1919-1920, pr., pb. 1922 (Drums in the Night, 1961); Die Hochzeit, wr. 1919, pr. 1926, pb. 1953 as Die Keinbürgerhochzeit (The Wedding, 1970); Im Dickicht der Städte, pr. 1923, pb. 1927 (In the Jungle of Cities, 1961); Leben Eduards des Zweiten von England, pr., pb. 1924 (with Lion Feuchtwanger; based on Christopher Marlowe’s play Edward II; Edward II, 1966); Mann ist Mann, pr. 1926, pb. 1927 (A Man’s a Man, 1961); Die Dreigroschenoper, pr. 1928, pb. 1929 (libretto; based on John Gay’s play The Beggar’s Opera; The Threepenny Opera, 1949); Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, pb. 1929, pr. 1930 (libretto; Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, 1957); Das Badener Lehrstück vom Einverständnis, pr. 1929, pb. 1930 (The Didactic Play of Baden: On Consent, 1960); Happy End, pr. 1929, pb. 1958 (libretto; lyrics with Elisabeth Hauptmann; English translation, 1972); Der Ozeanflug, pr., pb. 1929 (radio play; The Flight of the Lindberghs, 1930); Die Ausnahme und die Regel, wr. 1930, pb. 1937, pr. 1938 (The Exception and the Rule, 1954); Der Jasager, pr. 1930, pb. 1931 (based on the Japanese No play Taniko; He Who Said Yes, 1946); Die Massnahme, pr. 1930, pb. 1931 (libretto; The Measures Taken, 1960); Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe, pb. 1931, pr. 1932 (radio play), pr. 1959 (staged; St. Joan of the Stockyards, 1956); Der Neinsager, pb. 1931 (He Who Said No, 1946); Die Mutter, pr., pb. 1932 (based on Maxim Gorky’s novel Mat; The Mother, 1965); Die Sieben Todsünden der Kleinbürger, pr. 1933, pb. 1959 (cantata; The Seven Deadly Sins, 1961); Die Horatier und die Kuriatier, wr. 1934, pb. 1938, pr. 1958 (The Horatians and the Curatians, 1947); Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe, pr. 1935, pb. 1936 (based on William Shakespeare’s play Measure for Measure; The Roundheads and the Peakheads, 1937); Die Gewehre der Frau Carrar, pr., pb. 1937 (Señora Carrar’s Rifles, 1938); Furcht und Elend des dritten Reiches, pr. in French 1938, pr. in English 1945, pb. in German 1945 (The Private Life of the Master Race, 1944); Leben des Galilei, first version wr. 1938-1939, pr. 1943; second version wr. 1945-1947, third version pb. 1955 (The Life of Galileo, 1947, also known as Galileo); Der gute Mensch von Sezuan, wr. 1938-1940, pr. 1943, pb. 1953 (The Good Woman of Setzuan, 1948); Das Verhör des Lukullus, pr. 1940 (radio play), pb. 1940, pr. 1951 (staged; libretto; The Trial of Lucullus, 1943); Herr Puntila und sein Knecht, Matti, wr. 1940, pr. 1948, pb. 1951 (Mr. Puntila and His Hired Man, Matti, 1976); Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, pr. 1941, pb. 1949 (based on Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’s Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus; Mother Courage and Her Children, 1941); Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui, wr. 1941, pb. 1957, pr. 1958 (The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, 1972); Die Gesichte der Simone Machard, wr. 1941-1943, pb. 1956, pr. 1957 (with Feuchtwanger; The Visions of Simone Machard, 1961); Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg, wr. 1941-1943, pr. in Polish 1957, pb. 1957, pr. in German 1958 (based on Jaroslav Hašek’s novel Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka ve sv0tove války; Schweyk in the Second World War, 1975); Der kaukasische Kreidekreis, wr. 1944-1945, pr. in English 1948, pb. 1949, pr. in German 1958 (based on Li Xingdao’s play The Circle of Chalk; The Caucasian Chalk Circle, 1948); Die Antigone des Sophokles, pr., pb. 1948 (Sophocles’ Antigone, 1990); Die Tage der Commune, wr. 1948-1949, pr. 1956, pb. 1957 (based on Nordahl Grieg’s Nederlaget; The Days of the 104

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Commune, 1971); Der Hofmeister, pr. 1950, pb. 1951 (adaptation of Jacob Lenz’s Der Hofmeister; The Tutor, 1972); Turandot: Oder, Der Kongress der Weisswäscher, wr. 19501954, pr. 1970; Der Prozess der Jeanne d’Arc zu Rouen, 1431, pr. 1952, pb. 1959 (based on Anna Seghers’s radio play; The Trial of Jeanne d’Arc at Rouen, 1431, 1972); Coriolan, wr. 1952-1953, pb. 1959 (adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus; Coriolanus, 1972); Don Juan, pr. 1953, pb. 1959 (based on Molière’s play; English translation, 1972); Pauken und Trompeten, pb. 1956 (adaptation of George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer; Trumpets and Drums, 1972) Other literary forms • Bertolt Brecht experimented with several literary forms, and his output in all genres was considerable. He wrote novels, short fiction, nonfiction, and screenplays. His novel Der Dreigroschenroman (1934; The Threepenny Novel ) was translated in 1937; his short fiction is collected in Geschichten von Herrn Keuner (1930, 1958; Stories of Mr. Keuner, 2001); and many of his essays appeared in his three-volume Arbeitsjournal, 1938-1955 (1973; Bertolt Brecht Journals, 1993). Kuhle Wampe (1932; English translation, 1933) is an example of his fine work in film. An exhibit of Brecht’s works, on display in his final residence, includes more than thirty dramatic works, about thirteen hundred poems and songs, three novels, numerous screenplays, and more than 150 works of nonfiction. Achievements • Bertolt Brecht’s influence on the contemporary theater—especially on the development of political drama—extends worldwide. In Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, his plays are the most frequently performed after William Shakespeare’s. Translated into many languages, they are included in the repertoire of theater companies throughout both Western and Eastern Europe and the United States. Among the prizes that Brecht received for his works are the Kleist Prize in 1922, the East German National Prize in 1951, and the International Stalin Peace Prize in 1954. Brecht formed the Berliner Ensemble in 1949 and made it into one of the best acting companies in Europe. In 1954, Brecht’s production of Mother Courage and Her Children was awarded first prize at the International Theater Festival in Paris. In the following year, his production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle received second prize at the same festival. These two productions contributed to Brecht’s international reputation as a director as well as a playwright. Biography • Bertolt Brecht was born in Augsburg in southern Germany on February 10, 1898. Between 1908 and 1917, Brecht attended Realgymnasium (high school) in his hometown, but he was almost expelled in 1916 for writing a pacifist essay (pacifism is a constant theme in his works). After leaving high school in 1917, he enrolled at the University of Munich to study medicine. In 1918, he was called for military service and worked as an orderly in the venereal disease ward of the Augsburg military hospital. After the war, he lived in Munich as a freelance writer. In 1922, he married Marianne Zoff but was later divorced from her in 1927. Brecht established himself in Berlin at the Deutsches Theater in 1924, where he worked under Max Reinhardt until 1926. That year marked the turning point in Brecht’s career: He began studying Marxism and economics, and his subsequent conversion to Marxism decisively shaped his life and works. Brecht’s contacts with Erwin Piscator’s political theater at this time also had an impact on his dramatic theory. As the Nazis gained power, Brecht found it increasingly difficult to have his works performed. The Nazis had long harbored resentment against Brecht. At the time of the Munich Putsch, Brecht was the fifth person on their list of people to be arrested be-

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cause of his poem “Legende vom toten Soldaten” (“Legend of the Dead Soldier”), which tells how the kaiser has a dead soldier disinterred, declared fit, and sent off to the front again. In January, 1933, a performance of The Measures Taken in Erfurt was broken up by the police. On February 28, 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire, Brecht and his family (in 1929, he had married the actress Helene Weigel) fled from Germany. They went to Prague, Vienna, Lugano, and Paris, and finally settled in Denmark. On May 10, 1933, Brecht’s works were burned in Germany. During his exile, Brecht campaigned energetically against Fascism, contributed to anti-Fascist exile journals, wrote anti-Fascist works, and maintained close contacts with other exiles. In 1935, the Nazis revoked Brecht’s German citizenship. In 1939, when Denmark became unsafe, Brecht and his family moved to Sweden. From there, they went to Finland, and in 1941, they fled to California by way of Moscow and Vladivostok, settling in Santa Monica, where they remained for six years. Brecht worked occasionally for the film industry, but the only project that was actually carried out was his script for Hangmen Also Die (1943), which he wrote in 1942. The film, which was directed by Fritz Lang, concerns the assassination of the notorious Nazi Reinhard Heydrich by the Resistance in Czechoslovakia. On October 30, 1947, Brecht was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He managed to outsmart the committee, which exonerated him of procommunist activities. The next day, Brecht left for Zurich. In 1948, Brecht and his wife returned to East Berlin, where Brecht was put in charge of the Deutsches Theater. In the following year, he and his wife (considered one of the most effective interpreters of his work) formed the Berliner Ensemble with the help of generous subsidies from the state. Together they received Austrian citizenship in 1950. In 1954, the Berliner Ensemble moved to the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. Brecht’s last years in Berlin were devoted mostly to directing the Berliner Ensemble. He adapted plays for the ensemble and produced model stagings of his plays. Although Brecht had an uneasy relationship with the East German government, which often criticized his plays for what it perceived to be formalism and pacifism, he did not take a public stand against the regime. In fact, during the worker uprising in June, 1953, Brecht refused to support the workers and sent a letter to Walter Ulbricht expressing his loyalty, an action that the playwright Günter Grass later criticized strongly in his play Die Plebejer proben den Aufstand (pr., pb. 1966; The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, 1966). Brecht died in East Berlin of a coronary thrombosis on August 14, 1956. Analysis • Bertolt Brecht’s early dramas are anarchic, nihilistic, and antibourgeois. In them, he glorifies antisocial outsiders such as adventurers, pirates, and prostitutes; the tone of these works is often cynical. In the years after his conversion to Marxism, Brecht wrote didactic plays, similar in many respects to late medieval morality plays, whose style is austere and functional. These plays were intended to be performed in schools and factories by nonprofessional actors. In his later plays, Brecht combined the vitality of his early period with his Marxist beliefs to create plays that are dramatically effective, socially committed, and peopled with realistic characters. To the end of his life, Brecht thought of the theater as both a place of entertainment and of learning. By making people aware of social abuses, he believed, literature can help make the world a better place; it can help bring the Marxist goal of a classless Utopia closer to realization. Epic theater • Brecht is well known for his theories on epic theater. Although this concept did not originate with Brecht, he developed it into a revolutionary form of drama. (Toward the end of his life, Brecht wanted to change the name of his theater

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from “epic” to “dialectical,” to stress the central role of argument in his plays.) Brecht summarizes his theories of epic theater in his notes to Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny; he later recapitulated and revised his theories in Kleines Organon für das Theater (1948; A Little Organum for the Theater, 1951) and in other theoretical writings. In his notes to Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Brecht lists the differences he perceives between his epic theater and the Aristotelian (or dramatic) theater. Unlike dramatic theater, in which the tightly constructed plot creates suspense, epic theater uses loosely connected scenes that are set off against one another. The loose narrative structure helps to break the suspense and makes the audience focus on the course of the play, not on how the play will be resolved at the end. Brecht is extremely critical of dramatic theater: According to him, it is static; it shows universally human, that is, fixed and unchangeable, traits. Epic theater depicts the world as it changes and shows how it can be changed. It shows that human behavior can be altered. Therefore, epic theater should make people aware of social abuses and provoke them to change social evils. Instead of activating its spectators, dramatic theater, in Brecht’s view, numbs the audience by making it identify with the characters and become involved in the action. When spectators attend such plays, he remarks caustically, they hang up their brains with their coats. Brecht satirically describes the typical audience at a dramatic play, sunk into a peculiarly drugged state, wholly passive. Brecht comments that the worst gangster film shows more respect for its audience as thinking beings than does the conventional dramatic play. If people are to learn from the theater, they should be alert, rational, and socially concerned. Instead of identifying with the characters, they should remain critically aloof—certainly a necessary attitude if they are to come to grips with the ideas that Brecht presents. In his notes to The Threepenny Opera, Brecht expresses his wish to create a theater full of experts like those in sporting arenas. To prevent empathy, he says, theaters should allow people to smoke: He suggests that people who are puffing on cigars (Brecht himself was an inveterate cigar smoker) would be less easily carried away by events onstage. Nevertheless, while epic theater stresses reason, it does not dispense with all emotions. In a discussion with playwright Friedrich Wolf in 1949, Brecht noted that his theater actually tries to reinforce certain emotions such as a sense of justice, the urge for freedom, and righteous anger. Although Brecht believed that the theater should teach, he stressed that it should be entertaining as well. This emphasis is apparent in his early theoretical writings such as in “Mehr guten Sport” (1926; “Emphasis on Sport”), but it becomes even more pronounced in later writings such as A Little Organum for the Theater, in which he notes that if the theater were turned into a purveyor of morality, it would run the risk of being debased. The function of epic theater is not to moralize but to observe and to entertain the “children of the scientific age.” Brecht uses many so-called alienation devices to prevent the audience from becoming involved in the action. Verfremdung (alienation) is a term that Brecht probably borrowed from Viktor Shklovsky, the leader of the Russian formalists. Alienation makes familiar things strange. In A Little Organum for the Theater, Brecht describes why alienation is important: Alienation effects are designed to free socially conditioned phenomena from the stamp of familiarity that protects them from being grasped. Brecht argues that when conditions have not been changed for a long time, they begin to seem impossible to change. One must therefore present the status quo in a new light in order to provoke understanding and change. Brecht admired the Chinese theater, with its stylized acting, masks, and antiillusionist staging; his theater is similarly anti-illusionist. Narrators, film projections,

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and titles comment on the action and break the suspense by indicating what is going to occur in each scene. Brecht stresses that the titles must include the social point of a particular scene. The songs that Brecht includes in his plays are not an integral part of the action, as in an opera; rather, they comment on the action. When a character is about to sing, he steps forward to the front of the stage and the lighting changes. The songs thus interrupt the course of the action and change the mood of the play. The music itself serves as an alienation device, featuring jazz rhythms and ballad forms that are not congruent with the stage action. In epic theater, the sources of lighting and scene changes are visible to the audience, and scenes are often played simultaneously to heighten the audience’s awareness that it is watching a play. The use of historical material also plays an important part in Brecht’s epic theater. Brecht believed that the distancing effect of history (or geography) can make the audience more aware of the modern world: It can show that there are no universal values, that life is impermanent, that the world can be changed. Brecht notes that historical events are unique and transitory. The conduct of people in them is not fixed and universal; rather, it includes elements that have been or may be overtaken by the course of history, and it is subject to criticism from the viewpoint of the period immediately following. As a Marxist, Brecht believed in the ultimate goal of a classless Utopia, however far in the future it may be, and this belief made him optimistic about humankind’s potential and about the possibility of changing society. Brecht also focused attention on the most effective way of acting in epic theater. He rejected Konstantin Stanislavsky’s method of having the actor identify with the character that he is portraying. Brecht likens the actor to a witness at an accident: The witness explains to passersby what has happened; he does not try to cast a spell but demonstrates; he alternates imitation and commentary and acts so that the bystanders can form an opinion about the accident. The actor should be a teacher; he should make the audience understand. Brecht writes that for a scene to qualify as epic, it must have socially practical significance. Through gestic acting, social attitudes can be conveyed. Brecht’s theater is realistic, although not in conventional terms. Realism, Brecht writes, lays bare society’s causal network. The realistic writer shows that the dominant viewpoint is the viewpoint of the dominators; he writes from the standpoint of the class that has prepared the broadest solutions for the most pressing problems afflicting human society—that is, from the standpoint of the proletariat. Realism, as Brecht understands it, is a Marxist critique of society. His anti-illusionist theater depicts the social problems of his age. Brecht argues that literature should give the working masses a truthful representation of life. Indeed, the notion that art should appeal to wide audiences, rather than solely to an intellectual elite, is central to Brecht’s theater. For Brecht, to be popular means to be intelligible to the masses, which can be accomplished by taking over their forms of expression and enriching them. For this reason, Brecht uses folk sayings, parables, street ballads, and other folk forms in his plays. Brecht’s plays also abound in biblical allusions—Martin Luther’s German translation of the Bible, he confesses, was the single most important influence on his work; he admired Luther’s vigorous prose. Many of Brecht’s plays were either stimulated by existing plays or parody them. Through his parodies of classical works, Brecht hoped to make his audience question middle-class values. Brecht did not believe that classical works were sacrosanct; he wanted to reshape classical works to make them relevant to present-day society, taking over verbatim what he thought was useful and then rewriting the remainder of the play. An example of such an adaptation is Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (pr. c. 1607-1608),

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which Brecht changed from a personal tragedy to a history play that reflected the viewpoint of the common individual—a change of focus that he accomplished mostly by giving the plebeians a larger role. Brecht’s dramatic theories were not intended to be dogmatic. They evolved out of his practical work in the theater, and he constantly tested them, discarding them if they were not workable. This method was typical of Brecht’s writing: He was always prepared to change, to adapt, to incorporate suggestions from others—even from stagehands—into his plays. The actual staging of his plays always made Brecht aware of changes that were needed to make his works dramatically effective. Life of Galileo • Brecht’s use of historical materials to illuminate contemporary problems is exemplified in one of his finest plays, Life of Galileo. When Brecht first became interested in Galileo, he was concerned about the fate of friends and comrades who remained in Nazi Germany and who nevertheless managed somehow to continue working. Brecht wrote three versions of the play: The first was written in 1938-1939; the second, which was an English version for the actor Charles Laughton, was written in 1945-1947; and the third was written in 1955-1956. The major difference is between the first and second versions, during which time Brecht’s attitude toward Galileo changed. As in his other plays, Brecht uses many alienation devices to ensure that the audience does not identify with Galileo. He uses titles at the beginning of each scene to comment on the action. The plot is not tightly constructed. Instead, Brecht shows typical scenes in Galileo’s life, beginning when Galileo is middle-aged and ending when he is an old man. Brecht’s treatment of this celebrated historical figure (he sees Galileo as a pioneer of the scientific age) is intended to make his spectators see the modern world, their own world, from a critical perspective. Like many of Brecht’s characters, Galileo is a contradictory figure: He is a great scientist with a passion for the truth as well as a man with human frailties. Galileo cherishes the consolations of the flesh. He loves eating, drinking, and living a comfortable life, and he defends these habits by saying that he cannot help it if he gets his best ideas over a good meal and a bottle of wine. The pope later says that Galileo cannot refuse an old wine or a new thought. In A Little Organum for the Theater, Brecht remarks that Galileo thinks out of self-indulgence. Galileo’s love of good living contributes to his subsequent problems. At the beginning of the play, he is living in Venice, which pays its scientists badly but leaves them free to conduct research. To earn money, Galileo must take rich private pupils, most of whom are not intelligent. Ludovico, for example, only wants to learn about science because his mother thinks that such knowledge is necessary for conversation. Teaching such students takes away valuable time from Galileo’s research. Because Galileo’s request for money for his work has been refused (the Venice republic values only practical inventions), he tries to fool the government. Ludovico tells Galileo about a new invention, a telescope, that he has seen in Holland, and Galileo then pretends that the device is his own invention. Members of the government of Venice are immediately interested in the telescope because of its military implications. Galileo soon forgets about the financial rewards for his “invention” because he suddenly grasps the value it will have for his own research in astronomy. Galileo decides to move to Florence, where scientists are better paid, but where, because of the Inquisition, he will not have the freedom to publish his findings. Galileo is excited about the dawn of a new age that, he believes, his research will make possible. For centuries, people had believed that the Sun revolved around the

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earth; now Galileo can tell them the truth. His new cosmology will, however, have farreaching social effects: It will destroy the old hierarchy of power. The old cosmology, as interpreted by the Church (which, in the play, represents authority in general), taught that people had to be satisfied with their destined places in society. The stars can no longer be used to justify some people exploiting others. Galileo predicts that astronomy will become the gossip of the marketplaces, and the sons of fishwives will pack the schools. To make his findings accessible to the common people, Galileo writes in the vernacular, not in the Latin of the elite. Because the Church recognized the revolutionary nature of Galileo’s work, it banned his research. In the first version of the play, Galileo is seen more positively than in the later versions. After he has recanted, he still manages to continue working. He outsmarts his inquisitors by pretending to be blind and works secretly on his major work, the Discorsi, which his disciple Andrea later smuggles out of the country under his coat: For Brecht, cunning is necessary for disseminating the truth in repressive societies. Through his cunning, Galileo has defended the truth and caused light to dawn in an era of superstition. As Brecht was working on the second version of the play, the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and this event radically changed Brecht’s attitude toward Galileo. He no longer viewed Galileo’s recantation as a cunning plan to defend the truth but as a betrayal, as a shameful capitulation to reactionary forces. In his notes to the second version, Brecht describes Galileo as practicing his science secretly, like a vice, without any obligation to society. Instead of ushering in a new age, science has become allied with the forces of oppression. According to Brecht, Galileo’s crime was the original sin of modern science. Out of a new astronomy that had revolutionary implications, he made a sharply limited special science, a pure science, and he was not concerned about the practical applications of his findings. The atom bomb, Brecht notes, as a technical and social phenomenon, is the result of Galileo’s social failings and his scientific accomplishment. In the second version of the play, when Andrea praises Galileo for deceiving those who perpetrated the Inquisition, Galileo denounces himself. He insists that he recanted only because he was afraid of physical pain (he was threatened with torture). Now, he says, he sees that he has betrayed his profession. He argues that in his day astronomy emerged into the marketplaces. If someone had stood and fought then, that stand could have had wide repercussions. Instead, Galileo surrendered his knowledge to the authorities—to use, or rather misuse, as they saw fit. The revolutionary impact of Galileo’s teachings is particularly evident in the carnival scene. In this scene, the ballad singer relates how Galileo’s work will destroy the social hierarchy and free people. The last scene of the play, however, contrasts with the hope and excitement of the carnival scene and shows the consequences of Galileo’s cowardice. Andrea is smuggling the Discorsi across the border. Some children are pointing to a house where they see a grotesque shadow that looks like a witch stirring something in a cauldron. They sing “Old Marina is a witch.” Andrea lifts up a boy so that he can look through the window and see that the “witch” is only an old woman cooking porridge. He tries to teach him, as Galileo had taught Andrea, to rely on observation, not superstition. Nevertheless, superstition proves to be stronger; the boy cries out that Marina is a witch, even after he has seen her with his own eyes. This scene shows that the dark ages of superstition, which Galileo’s science could have changed, will be difficult to overthrow. Galileo’s recantation has delayed the dawn of a new age.

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Mother Courage and Her Children • Mother Courage and Her Children also took its inspiration from contemporary events, seen from the perspective of history. Brecht finished this play in 1939 just before the outbreak of World War II. The play was loosely based on the seventeenth century novelist Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’s depiction of the Thirty Years’ War, Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus (1669; The Adventurous Simplicissimus, 1912). One of Grimmelshausen’s characters is also called Courage, and Brecht takes from him Courage’s name, her numerous husbands and lovers, and her business dealings. The play criticizes both war and business. Brecht meant to show that war is a continuation of business by other means and that it makes human virtues deadly; therefore, no sacrifice is too great to fight against war. As her name indicates, the protagonist, Anna Fierling, is both mother and businesswoman. She is named Courage not because of an act of real courage but because she drove through the bombardment at Riga. She had to do this because she had fifty loaves of bread that she needed to sell quickly because they were becoming moldy. Mother Courage tries unsuccessfully to protect her three children, Eilif, Swiss Cheese, and Kattrin (each of whom has a different father), from the war, but her motherly instincts often conflict with her business instincts—her wagon, which is both a home and refuge for herself and her children, as well as her place of business, shows how inextricably her roles of businesswoman and mother are intertwined. Yet she does not always consider profit first. Toward the end of the play, when her fortunes are at a low point, she refuses the cook’s offer to escape from the war to a small inn that he has inherited because he will not let her take her daughter Kattrin with her. In this case, Mother Courage acts against her own best interests. One by one, Mother Courage loses her children. In the first scene, her oldest son, Eilif, is taken away by the recruiting officer, who tempts him with tales of the glory of war while Mother Courage’s attention is diverted by the sergeant, who says that he wants to buy a buckle. When Swiss Cheese is arrested by the Roman Catholic soldiers, who try to make him surrender the regimental cash box entrusted to him by the Protestants, Mother Courage bargains to free him. She is willing to pawn her wagon, hoping to find the cash box and redeem it. After she discovers that Swiss Cheese has thrown it into the river, she is faced with a dilemma: How can she and Kattrin survive without the wagon? She is actually prepared to sacrifice her wagon, but she haggles too long, and Swiss Cheese is shot. When Eilif is arrested, she is away on business and cannot help him. Kattrin is sent into town to fetch supplies for her mother and is attacked on the way back. When Kattrin is killed, Mother Courage is away at the market, taking advantage of those who are fleeing and selling their possessions cheaply. In each of these cases, she loses her children because she is involved in business activities. Although Brecht intends the audience to be critical of Mother Courage, she is still, in many respects, a sympathetic figure, despite her negative qualities. She is cunning and tenacious and has an earthy sense of humor. Throughout the play, she debunks heroism. When Eilif is praised by his commander for his heroic deed of stealing cattle, she boxes Eilif’s ears: She tells him that he should have surrendered and not exposed himself to danger, as the peasants who owned the cattle were in the majority. Later, she argues that only poor commanders need to demand heroism of their men: Good commanders can manage without it. To survive in this world, she believes, one must be unobtrusive, not heroic. Mother Courage also sees clearly why the war is being fought. The commanders speak as though they are fighting for religion, but Mother Courage remarks that they are not so stupid; they are actually fighting only for profit.

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Mother Courage’s wagon symbolizes her waning fortunes: At the beginning of the play, the wagon looks prosperous and is pulled by Eilif and Swiss Cheese; at the end, it is dilapidated and pulled by Mother Courage alone. Brecht emphasizes that Mother Courage does not learn from her experiences. Only in the scene in which Kattrin is attacked does she curse the war. Usually, however, she is worried that the war could end when she has just bought supplies, which would bring about her financial ruin. After the Zurich premiere in 1941, Brecht changed parts of the play to make Mother Courage’s disagreeable traits more emphatic, since the Zurich audience had seen her as a tragic figure who was simply trying to survive. In a conversation with the playwright Friedrich Wolf, Brecht defended his portrayal of Mother Courage. (He had been criticized for depicting her as unable to learn from her mistakes.) Brecht told Wolf that he was a realist, that he was not convinced that people would learn from the war he saw coming when he was writing the play. He hoped, however, that the audience could learn from watching Mother Courage. According to Brecht, Mother Courage is free to choose whether to take part in the war, yet the scope of the war, which seems to fill the whole world, suggests that she really has no viable alternative—she can either wait for the war to reach her, or she can try to earn her living from it. There seems to be no place where she could be safe to lead a peaceful life. The deaths of her children show that virtue is dangerous. The heroic Eilif is executed for stealing cattle and killing, deeds for which he was praised in wartime. Ironically, he is executed when the war has broken out again and when his action would again have been considered heroic, but the soldiers who execute him are unaware that the war is on again. Swiss Cheese is executed for his honesty in trying to save the cash box. Kattrin is killed because she is humane. Even though Kattrin is dumb, according to Brecht she should not be played as though she were an idiot. She is perfectly normal; it is the world that surrounds her that is abnormal. Kattrin desperately wants children but will never be able to marry because of the disfiguring scar that remains from her having been attacked. The war also made her dumb, since a soldier shoved something in her mouth when she was a child. Because of her motherliness, she is in constant danger. In the scene in which “the stone begins to speak,” soldiers are preparing to attack a town where people are asleep and unaware of danger. To save the children in the town, Kattrin takes a drum and climbs up onto a roof where she beats the drum loudly to alert the town to the danger. She is shot, but she saves the town. Her positive action is contrasted with the futile actions of the peasants, whose only thought is to pray to God for help. Brecht did not choose World War I for his setting—he thought that the war was still too recent for an audience to observe the events on the stage dispassionately and to learn from the play. The Thirty Years’ War was the most destructive war in German history before World War I; in his notes to the play, Brecht writes that this was the first large-scale war that capitalism had brought to Europe. Brecht was not interested in the history of “important” people such as kings, princes, and generals (no historical character appears on the stage) but in the perspective of the common person, whom history usually ignores. Throughout the play, Brecht satirizes those who are in charge of conducting the war. The commander Tilly, who is given a hero’s funeral, actually died, Mother Courage says, because he lost his way in the mist and went to the front by mistake. Brecht also shows that victory and defeat for the commanders does not always mean victory and defeat for the common people—for example, Tilly’s victory at Magdeburg costs Mother Courage four shirts.

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In addition to the historical setting, Brecht used several other alienation devices in the play. The titles before each scene break the suspense and are intended to encourage a critical attitude in the audience. As in The Life of Galileo, the scenes are loosely connected and the time span is long (twelve years). Brecht includes songs to comment on the action: The song that Mother Courage sings at the beginning and at the end of the play is an ironic commentary on this war of “religion,” while her “Song of the Great Capitulation” describes life as full of broken hopes and dreams. The mood of the play is basically pessimistic. Even after she has lost her family, Mother Courage still believes in the war: Neither she nor anyone else has learned anything by the play’s end. Instead, the war continues, people continue to be killed, and some (though not Mother Courage) make profits. The Caucasian Chalk Circle • The Caucasian Chalk Circle, which was written in 1944-1945, was based on the story of Solomon in the Bible and on a thirteenth century Chinese drama by Li Xingdao, which was adapted as Der Kreidekreis by the playwright Klabund in 1925. As in his other plays, Brecht includes many alienation effects. The play consists of three stories: The first takes place in the twentieth century; the other two stories, those of Grusche and Azdak, take place in medieval Russian Georgia (Grusinia). Brecht also used a singer/narrator to comment on the play-within-a-play, and the actors wear masks. The first scene takes place in Russian Georgia just after the defeat of Adolf Hitler. The owners of the land, a collective that raises goats, fled from Hitler’s soldiers, while the neighboring collective stayed and fought. The members of this neighboring collective now want the land formerly used for goat-raising; they intend to grow fruit trees there and have designed an irrigation scheme for that purpose. The old owners, however, want the land returned to them. Together, the two collectives discuss the conflict peacefully and rationally and decide that the fruit growers should have the land. Goats can be raised anywhere, but only here is the topography of the land suitable for the irrigation plans. To celebrate this decision, the members of the fruit-growers’ collective act the play of the chalk circle. The first part of this play-within-a-play tells of the shrewd and good-hearted servant girl Grusche. In medieval Georgia, she works for the governor and his wife, who have an infant son Michel. At first, the mother seems to be overly solicitous about her child’s welfare. She is worried when he coughs or is exposed to drafts, and she is always accompanied by two doctors. When the Revolution breaks out, however, she is so busy deciding which dresses she should take on her flight that she forgets to take her son. At first, Grusche is reluctant to take the baby—it is too dangerous to do so because the soldiers are seeking to kill him. As the singer says, however, she is overcome by the terrible temptation to goodness, and she flees with the child. Through her work and sacrifice for the child, Grusche gradually becomes more and more a mother to him. In her flight from the soldiers with him, she faces danger and hardship. She seeks refuge in her brother’s house, where she claims that the child is hers and invents a husband who is fighting in the war. When the husband does not arrive to fetch her, her brother’s wife, a “pious” person (always a term of criticism in Brecht’s works), begins to become suspicious that the child is illegitimate; she fears that Grusche will become the object of gossip and shame the family. Grusche’s brother arranges a marriage for her with a supposedly dying man, but once the “deathly ill” man hears that the war is over, he revives—he had pretended to be ill to avoid fighting. For the sake of the child, Grusche is now tied to a disagreeable husband. When Grusche’s

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fiancé, Simon, returns from the war, Grusche again claims that the child is hers, preferring Simon to believe that she has been unfaithful to him than have the soldiers take away the child. The Grusche story is interrupted at this point, and the Azdak story is begun. Azdak is a sort of Lord of Misrule, one of Brecht’s cunning rogues. During a time of revolution, he has unwittingly given refuge to a beggar, who turns out to be the fleeing grand duke. Through an improbable series of events, Azdak is made a judge. During his tenure, he proves to be corrupt, licentious, and contemptuous of the law, yet often he turns the law upside down to help the poor. In one case, Azdak acquits a doctor who has operated free of charge on a poor patient: Despite the doctor’s professional incompetence (he operated on the wrong leg), his motives were good. In another case, a landlord brings an action against a stable boy for raping his daughter-in-law. Azdak takes one look at the voluptuous daughter-in-law and declares that the stable boy is innocent—he is the one who has been raped. Another case concerns a poor widow who is accused of receiving stolen goods. She claims that Saint Banditus has given her the goods. Azdak fines the rich farmers who brought the suit against her: They do not believe in miracles; they are impious. It must be a miracle, Azdak reasons, if the poor are helped. In these decisions, Azdak intentionally disregards the actual law in order to administer a rough justice that helps the poor. The last part of the play brings together the Azdak and the Grusche stories in a trial scene in which both Grusche and the governor’s wife claim to be the mother of the child (Brecht had a predilection for trial scenes because of the central role of argument in them). The governor’s wife has assembled lawyers to fight for her child, and Grusche and Simon represent themselves. It turns out that the governor’s wife is only interested in her child because of what he will inherit. Without him, she is poor. Azdak listens to the arguments on both sides, berates Simon and Grusche for not having money to bribe him, and, finally, draws a chalk circle on the floor. He puts Michel in the middle and orders the two women to hold the child by the hand. The real mother, he tells them, will have the strength to pull the child out of the circle. Both times, Grusche lets go for fear of hurting the child, while the real mother pulls him out of the circle with all her strength. In a reversal of the Solomon story, Azdak decides that Grusche should have the child because she, and not the real mother, actually cares for the child. In his last action as judge, Azdak decides the case of an old couple who want a divorce. By “mistake” he divorces Grusche from her husband so that she can marry Simon, justifying his action by saying that because the old people have lived together for so long, they would be better to continue living together. Unlike most of Brecht’s plays, this play-within-a-play ends happily. Grusche is reunited with Simon and keeps the child. To be a biological mother alone is not enough, according to Azdak; one must actually love and make sacrifices for a child, as Grusche has done. In his notes to the play, Brecht mentioned that there is an American expression “sucker,” and that this is what Grusche is when she takes the child: The more she does for the child, the more her own life is endangered. The biblical allusions in the Grusche story (the birth of Christ and the flight into Egypt, for example), together with Azdak’s wise and humane judgments, indicate that a new age is dawning. Azdak’s decision to give Grusche the child because she is good for him brings the play-within-aplay back to the peacefully resolved dispute in the first scene. In a similar manner, the fruit growers are given the land because they will make it more productive. The promise of a new age has been fulfilled in the first scene—a Socialist Utopia has been reached.

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Other major works long fiction: Der Dreigroschenroman, 1934 (The Threepenny Novel, 1937, 1956); Die Geschäfte des Herrn Julius Caesar, 1956. short fiction: Geschichten von Herrn Keuner, 1930, 1958 (Stories of Mr. Keuner, 2001); Kalendergeschichten, 1948 (Tales from the Calendar, 1961); Me-ti: Buch der Wendungen, 1965; Prosa, 1965 (5 volumes); Collected Stories, 1998. poetry: Hauspostille, 1927, 1951 (Manual of Piety, 1966); Lieder, Gedichte, Chöre, 1934 (Songs, Poems, Choruses, 1976); Svendborger Gedichte, 1939 (Svendborg Poems, 1976); Selected Poems, 1947; Hundert Gedichte, 1951 (A Hundred Poems, 1976); Gedichte und Lieder, 1956 (Poems and Songs, 1976); Gedichte, 1960-1965 (9 volumes); Bertolt Brecht: Poems, 19131956, 1976 (includes Buckower Elegies); Bad Time for Poetry: 152 Poems and Songs, 1995. screenplays: Kuhle Wampe, 1932 (English translation, 1933); Hangmen Also Die, 1943; Das Lied der Ströme, 1954; Herr Puntila und sein Knecht, Matti, 1955. nonfiction: Der Messingkauf, 1937-1951 (The Messingkauf Dialogues, 1965); Kleines Organon für das Theater, 1948 (A Little Organum for the Theater, 1951); Schriften zum Theater, 1963-1964 (7 volumes); Brecht on Theatre, 1964; Arbeitsjournal, 1938-1955, 1973 (3 volumes; Bertolt Brecht Journals, 1993); Tagebucher, 1920-1922, 1975 (Diaries, 1920-1922, 1979); Letters, 1990; Brecht on Film and Radio, 2000. Bibliography Bodek, Richard. Proletarian Performance in Weimar Berlin: Agitprop, Chorus, and Brecht. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1997. A study of proletarian theater and agitprop theater in Berlin, with emphasis on Brecht. Fuegi, John. Brecht and Company: Sex, Politics, and the Making of the Modern Drama. New York: Grove, 1994. Fuegi is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Maryland and founder of the International Brecht Society and has published two previous books on Brecht. According to Fuegi, his newest work, dealing at great length not only with Brecht but also with a wide circle of his associates and collaborators, is the result of twenty-five years of research. Giles, Steve, and Rodney Livingstone, eds. Bertolt Brecht: Centenary Essays. Atlanta, Ga.: Rodopi, 1998. A collection of essays on Brecht written one hundred years after his birth. Bibliography. Jameson, Fredric. Brecht and Method. New York: Verso, 1998. A major neo-Marxist literary theorist assesses the position of one of the twentieth century’s central figures in dramatic literature as a modernist and postmodernist thinker. Thomson, Peter. Brecht: “Mother Courage and Her Children.” Plays in Production series. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. An examination of the stage history and dramatic production of Mother Courage and Her Children, the conclusion of which was written by Viv Gardner. Bibliography and index. Thomson, Peter, and Glendyr Sacks, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Brecht. Cambridge Companions to Literature series. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. This extensive reference work contains a wealth of information on Brecht. Bibliography and index. Willett, John. Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches. Rev. ed. London: Methuen, 1998. A comparative analysis of the works of Brecht. Bibliography and index. Jennifer Michaels

George Gordon, Lord Byron George Gordon, Lord Byron

Born: London, England; January 22, 1788 Died: Missolonghi, Greece; April 19, 1824 Principal drama • Manfred, pb. 1817, pr. 1834; Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice, pr., pb. 1821; Sardanapalus: A Tragedy, pb. 1821, pr. 1834; The Two Foscari: A Tragedy, pb. 1821, pr. 1837; Cain: A Mystery, pb. 1821 (with Sardanapalus and The Two Foscari); Heaven and Earth, pb. 1822 (fragment); Werner: Or, The Inheritance, pb. 1823, pr. 1830; The Deformed Transformed, pb. 1824 (fragment) Other literary forms • George Gordon, Lord Byron, is considerably better known as a poet than as a dramatist, and the relative importance of the poetry is quickly evident in any review of Byron’s literary career. His first book, Fugitive Pieces, was printed at his own expense in November of 1806, and though it consisted primarily of sentimental and mildly erotic verse, it also contained hints of the satiric wit that would be so important to Byron’s later reputation. The volume is also notable for having inspired the first accusations that Byron lacked poetic chastity; at the urging of some of his friends, he withdrew the book from private circulation and replaced it with the more morally upright Poems on Various Occasions, printed in Newark in January of 1807 by John Ridge, who had also printed Fugitive Pieces. In his first attempt at public recognition as a man of letters, Byron published Hours of Idleness in June of 1807. The volume shows the obvious influence of a number of Augustan and Romantic poets, but despite its largely derivative nature, it received several favorable early reviews. Fortunately for Byron’s development as a poet, however, the praise was not universal, and subsequent critical attacks, notably by Henry Brougham of The Edinburgh Review, helped inspire the writing of Byron’s first poetic triumph, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). In the tradition of Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad (1728-1743) but written under the more direct influence of Baviad (1794) and Maeviad (1795), by William Gifford, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers is the earliest significant example of Byron’s satiric genius. Three more satiric poems soon followed, but none of these–Hints from Horace (1811), The Curse of Minerva (1812), and Waltz: An Apostrophic Hymn (1813)—attracted as much admiring attention as English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. During this same period, Byron was composing the poem with which he would be most closely associated during his lifetime and which would make him the most lionized literary figure of his day, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cantos I-IV (1812-1818, 1819). The first two cantos of the poem, an imaginative meditation loosely based on two years of travel on the Continent, were published on March 10, 1812, and produced an immediate sensation. In his own words, Byron “awoke one morning and found myself famous.” Cantos III and IV were greeted with equal excitement and confirmed the identification of Byron in the popular mind with his poem’s gloomy protagonist. In the meantime, Byron published a series of poetic tales that further exploited the knowledge derived from his Eastern travels and that continued the development of the Byronic hero, the brooding, titanic figure whose prototype within Byron’s canon is Childe Harold. These tales include The Giaour (1813), The Bride of Abydos (1813), The 116

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Corsair (1814), Lara (1814), Parisina (1816), and The Siege of Corinth (1816). Illustrative of the diversity of Byron’s poetic output is the publication, during this same period, of Hebrew Melodies Ancient and Modern (1815), short lyrics based largely on passages from the Bible and accompanied by the music of Isaac Nathan. Although Byron lacked the lyric mastery of a number of his extraordinary contemporaries, he produced well-crafted lyrics throughout his literary career, none of which is more admired or more often quoted than the first poem of Hebrew Melodies Ancient and Modern, “She Walks in Beauty.” Also published in 1816 was “The Prisoner of Chillon,” a dramatic monologue on the theme of human freedom, which Byron was inspired to write after a visit to the castle where François de Bonivard had been imprisoned during the sixteenth century. The Lament of Tasso (1817), written during the following year, is a less successful variation on the same theme and, more important, an early manifestation of Byron’s fascination with the literature and history of Italy. This fascination is also seen in The Prophecy of Dante (1821), “Francesca of Rimini” (inspired by Canto V of Dante’s Inferno), and the translation of Canto I of Luigi Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore (1483), which were produced in the years 1819 and 1820. The importance of Pulci to Byron’s poetic career is immeasurable. Through Whistlecraft (1817-1818), by John Hookham Frere, Byron became indirectly acquainted with the casual, facetious manner of the Morgante Maggiore and adapted the Pulci/Frere style to his own purposes in his immensely successful tale of Venetian dalliance, Beppo: A Venetian Story. Written in 1817 and published in 1818, Beppo is the direct stylistic precursor of Don Juan, Cantos I-XVI (1819-1824, 1826), the seriocomic masterpiece whose composition occupied Byron at irregular intervals throughout the last six years of his life. Although the final years of Byron’s literary career are important primarily for the writing of Don Juan, several of Byron’s other works deserve passing or prominent mention. Mazeppa (1819) is a verse tale in Byron’s earlier manner that treats heavy-handedly a theme that the first cantos of Don Juan address with an adroit lightness: the disastrous consequences of an illicit love. The Island (1823) is a romantic tale inspired by William Bligh’s account of the Bounty mutiny, a tale that possesses some affinities with the Haidée episode of Don Juan. The years from 1821 to 1823 produced three topical satires, The Blues: A Literary Eclogue (written in 1821 but first published in The Liberal in 1823), The Vision of Judgment (1822), and The Age of Bronze (1823), the second of which, a devastating response to Robert Southey’s obsequious A Vision of Judgment, is one of Byron’s undoubted masterworks. Finally, no account of Byron’s (Library of Congress) nondramatic writings would be com-

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plete without making reference to his correspondence, among the finest in the English language, which has been given its definitive form in Leslie A. Marchand’s multivolume edition, Byron’s Letters and Journals (1973-1982). Achievements • In his The Dramas of Lord Byron: A Critical Study (1915), Samuel C. Chew, Jr., makes it abundantly clear that George Gordon, Lord Byron, was simultaneously fascinated with the theater and contemptuous of the accomplishments of contemporary dramatists. He was frequently to be found in the playhouses, especially during his days as a student and during the period immediately following his Eastern travels, and on at least two occasions, he acted, with considerable success, in amateur theatrical productions. His comments on the stage suggest, however, that he was appalled by the reliance of early nineteenth century playwrights on melodramatic sensationalism and visual spectacle. Byron’s letters mention the scarcity of fine plays, and his poetry castigates modern dramatists for their tastelessness. English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, for example, calls contemporary drama a “motley sight” and deplores the “degradation of our vaunted stage.” It cries out to George Colman and Richard Cumberland to “awake!” and implores Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who had achieved a recent success with Pizarro: A Tragedy in Five Acts (pr. 1799), an adaptation of a play by August von Kotzebue, to “Abjure the mummery of the German schools” and instead to “reform the stage.” It asks, in indignant mockery, “Shall sapient managers new scenes produce/ From Cherry, Skeffington, and Mother Goose?” and makes sneering reference to the extravagances of Matthew Gregory “Monk” Lewis’s The Castle Spectre (pr. 1797). It suggests, on the whole, that the once glorious English theater is in woeful decline. Despite Byron’s sense of the theater’s decay, or perhaps because of it, evidence exists, in epistolary references to destroyed manuscripts and in a surviving fragment or two of attempted drama, that, as early as 1813-1814, he had ambitions of becoming a playwright, but he had completed nothing for the stage when, in 1815, he was appointed a member of the Drury Lane Committee of Management. Although he found his committee work “really good fun,” it did nothing to improve his opinion of the taste of contemporary dramatists and their audiences, and when he finally finished a dramatic work, it was not intended for popular presentation. Like the rest of his completed drama, Manfred was written during Byron’s final, selfimposed exile from England. Begun in Switzerland and finished in Venice, the play is psychosymbolic rather than realistic and may have been inspired, as any number of commentators have pointed out, by Byron’s acquaintance with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust: Eine Tragödie (pb. 1808, pb. 1833; The Tragedy of Faust, 1823, 1828). Byron appears to have known of Goethe’s masterpiece through translated passages in Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne (1810) and through an extensive oral translation by Monk Lewis during a visit to the poet in August of 1816. Considerable controversy has occurred, however, over the extent of Faust’s influence on Manfred, the consensus now being that Faust is simply one of many sources of the play’s intricate materials, albeit an important one. Chew makes mention of Vicomte Françoise Auguste-René de Chateaubriand’s René (1802, 1805; English translation, 1813), Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and The Mysterious Mother (1768), Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Remorse (1813), John Robert Maturin’s Bertram: Or, The Castle of St. Aldobrand (1816), William Beckford’s Vathek (1782), and Lewis’s The Monk (1796) as other works with which Manfred has affinities and from which borrowings may have occurred. More impor-

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tant, however, Manfred is a cathartic projection of Byron’s own troubled psyche, an attempt, which some critics have called Promethean rather than Faustian, to cope with the seemingly unconquerable presence of evil in the world, to deal with his frustrated aspirations toward an unattainable ideal, and, on a more mundane level, to come to terms with his confused feelings toward his half sister Augusta. With respect to Manfred ’s place in theatrical history, Malcolm Kelsall, in The Byron Journal (1978), has made an excellent case for grouping Byron’s play both with Faust and with Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (pb. 1867; English translation, 1892). Kelsall states that “the new kind of stage envisaged” in these plays is unfettered by any kind of limitation of place, and that assault, which is as much upon the conceived possibilities of stage allusion as upon unity of place, demands of the imagination that it supply constantly shifting visual correlatives for the inner turmoil of the hero’s mind. Byron’s next play, Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice, is of an entirely different sort and ushers in a period in which Byron attempted to return to classical dramatic principles to produce plays whose themes are essentially political. He sought to counteract the undisciplined bombast and sprawling display of the drama with which he had become familiar in England by making use, without becoming anyone’s slavish disciple, of theatrical techniques exploited by the ancient Greeks and Romans, the neoclassical French, and the contemporary Italians, notably Conte Vittorio Alfieri. Because Byron did this during a time when his involvement in Italian political intrigue was beginning to develop, Byron’s decision to center his play on Marino Faliero, the fourteenth century doge of Venice who was executed for conspiring to overthrow the oppressive aristocratic class to which he himself belonged, is hardly surprising. He wrote the play as a closet drama—to be read rather than staged—considering its classical regularity an impossible barrier to its popular success, and he was furious when he learned of Drury Lane’s intention of producing it. As he summarized the matter in a journal entry of January 12, 1821, how could anything please contemporary English theatergoers that contained “nothing melodramatic—no surprises, no starts, nor trapdoors, nor opportunities ‘for tossing of their heads and kicking their heels’—and no love—the grand ingredient of a modern play”? In Sardanapalus, Byron extended his experimentation with classical regularity and continued his exploration of political themes while at the same time appealing in two particular ways to popular taste. The play’s setting, ancient Nineveh, accorded well with popular interest in Eastern exoticism, an interest that Byron’s own Eastern tales had intensified, and the devotion of the slave Myrrha to Nineveh’s troubled ruler satisfied the public’s desire to witness pure, selfless love. The Two Foscari, the third of the classically constructed political plays, again makes use of Venice for its setting. Although generally considered to be less successful than the earlier of the Venetian dramas, The Two Foscari contains autobiographical elements, embodied in Jacopo Foscari, that give a certain fascination to the play. Jacopo, after a youth of aristocratic gaiety, has been unjustly exiled from his native land. He had been the boon companion of the city’s most promising young men, had been admired for his athletic vigor, particularly in swimming, and had drawn the attention of the city’s most beautiful young women. Then the powerful had intrigued against him, and his banishment had begun. Byron’s contemporaries could hardly have missed the personal significance of this situation or have overlooked the note of defiant anguish in such an exchange as the following:

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Jacopo’s persecution is carried out as an act of vengeance by an enemy of the Foscari family, an act that corrupts its perpetrator, but unlike Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (pb. 1819), whose theme is much the same, The Two Foscari is not effective theater. Cain was published as part of a volume that also contained Sardanapalus and The Two Foscari, but it ought instead to be grouped with Heaven and Earth, which was written at about the same time but whose publication was delayed because of the controversy inspired by Cain. In Cain and Heaven and Earth, Byron returned to the style of Manfred, but he derived his materials from biblical lore and from previous literary treatments of these same stories. He called the plays “mysteries,” a reference both to the medieval mystery plays and to the mystified response Byron was expecting from the general public. Cain is a reinterpretation of the tale of the primal murder, a reinterpretation in which Cain is clearly the superior of his brother Abel and kills his brother, as Chew observes, in an “instinctive assertion of freedom against the limitations of fate.” Heaven and Earth is based on the passage in Genesis that states that “the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.” Its plot culminates in the nearly total destruction of the flood, a destruction so general and arbitrary that the play becomes, in Chew’s summary, “a subtle attack on the justice of the Most High.” Werner was much more in keeping with the literary tastes of the time than Byron’s other plays, a fact that can be at least partially explained by its having been begun in 1815, during the period of Byron’s closest association with Drury Lane. A surprisingly faithful rendering of “The German’s Tale” from Sophia and Harriet Lee’s The Canterbury Tales (1797-1805), Werner centers on the title character and his perfidious son, Ulric, an ambitious villain of the deepest dye. Making no pretense of adhering to the classical unities, the play moves with gothic ponderousness toward its dark conclusion, in which Ulric is revealed to be the cold-blooded murderer of his own fiancée’s father, Stralenheim, the one man who stood between Ulric’s family and their return to hereditary wealth and power. The Deformed Transformed is one of Byron’s two dramatic fragments (the other being Heaven and Earth). As its prefatory “Advertisement” states, Byron based it on Joshua Pickersgill’s novel The Three Brothers (1803) and on Goethe’s Faust. Chew points out the autobiographical significance of Byron’s adding lameness to the other deformities from which his central character, Arnold, escapes by dealing with the Devil, but the play’s incompleteness and incoherence make it difficult to comment further on Byron’s dramatic intention. The fragment was composed in 1822 and published in February of 1824 by John Hunt. The history of Byron’s plays in theatrical production appears largely to be a tale of creative misinterpretation in the twentieth century and commercial adaptation and exploitation in the nineteenth. Margaret Howell’s 1974 account in The Byron Journal of Charles Kean’s June 13, 1853, production of Sardanapalus is particularly instructive. Reduced from its full length of 2,835 lines to 1,563, the play was presented almost solely as spectacle and required the approval of the local fire inspectors, because of one of its more impressive effects, before it could be performed. The

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production seems to have embodied everything that most disgusted Byron about London theater. Biography • Born in London, England, on January 22, 1788, George Gordon, Lord Byron, who, from birth suffered from a deformed foot, was the son of Captain John Byron, nicknamed “Mad Jack” because of his wild ways, and the former Catherine Gordon. On his mother’s side, the poet claimed descent from James I of Scotland and on his father’s, with less certainty, from Ernegis and Radulfus de Burun, estate owners in the days of William the Conqueror. Newstead Abbey, which the poet would inherit at age ten as the sixth Lord Byron, had been granted to Sir John Byron by King Henry VIII, though the title of lord was first held by General John Byron, follower of Charles I and Charles II, the latter of whom is said to have seduced the general’s wife. The poet received the title on the death, in 1798, of his great-uncle, William Byron, nicknamed “the Wicked Lord.” Because the poet’s grandfather, Admiral John Byron, himself something of a rake, had disinherited Mad Jack for his even greater irresponsibility and because his father, before his death at age thirty-six, had squandered nearly all the wealth of both of the heiresses he had married, the poet’s earliest years were spent in genteel poverty in his mother’s native Aberdeen, Scotland, where he attended Aberdeen Grammar School. During these years, he developed his lifelong interests in both athletics and reading and was imbued, under the influence of his nurse, Agnes Gray, and his Presbyterian instructors, with the sense of predestined evil that marked so much of his later life. After coming into his inheritance in 1798, Byron and his mother moved to Nottinghamshire, the location of Newstead Abbey, in which the young lord proudly took up residence despite the warning of John Hanson, the family attorney, that the abbey was in such disrepair that it ought not to be lived in. During 1799, Byron’s clubfoot was incompetently treated by a local quack physician, Dr. Lavender, and Byron was physically and sexually abused by his new nurse, May Gray, events that left the poet with permanent emotional scars. Later in the same year, Byron was taken to London to be treated by a more reputable physician. He was also placed in the Dulwich boarding school of Dr. Glennie, who was to prepare young Byron for admission to Harrow. Byron entered Harrow in April of 1801, and despite an occasional period of haughty aloofness, he soon became a favorite of his schoolmates. Some of his most intense friendships dated from his Harrow days, friendships the intensity of which was probably an expression, as his biographers have pointed out, of his fundamentally bisexual nature. Nevertheless, the instances of Byron’s overt amatory passion, especially early in his life, more often involved women than men. He had become infatuated with a cousin, Mary Duff, perhaps as early as age seven; had written his first love poetry for another cousin, Margaret Parker, at age twelve; and had fallen so deeply in love with Mary Chaworth during a hiatus in Nottinghamshire in 1803 that he at first refused to return to Harrow. Nevertheless, he did return, and after completing his course of studies, he enrolled in Trinity College, Cambridge, during the fall of 1805. During his Cambridge days, Byron formed romantic attachments with two male friends, won acceptance by the university’s liberal intellectual elite, kept a bear in his living quarters, and became thoroughly acquainted with the distractions of London, including the theater. He also assembled his first books of poetry, most notably Hours of Idleness, and, almost incidentally, earned a Cambridge master’s degree, which was

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granted in July of 1808. After a short retirement to Newstead Abbey, during which he worked on English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, Byron left for London, where he became a member of the House of Lords on March 13, 1809, and where English Bards and Scotch Reviewers was anonymously published several days thereafter. The authorship of the scathing satire was soon discovered, and Byron had the satisfaction of being lauded for his poem by Gifford and others before his departure on July 2, 1809, for his Continental tour. Traveling with John Cam Hobhouse and several retainers, Byron disembarked in Lisbon and made the journey to Seville and later to Cádiz by horseback. The frigate Hyperion then took them to Gibraltar, after which they sailed for Malta, where he managed a romantic interlude with the fascinating Mrs. Constance Spencer Smith. The brig Spider next delivered them to Patras and Prevesa in Greece, then ruled by the Turks, from which they set out for Janina, capital of the kingdom of the barbarous Ali Pasha, sovereign of western Greece and Albania and prototype of Don Juan’s piratical Lambro. Ali Pasha’s court was located seventy-five miles away, in Tepelene, where Byron arrived on October 19, 1809, and where the colorful ruler flattered the young poet with an audience. The Tepelene adventure was one of the most memorable of Byron’s memorable life, and when he returned to Janina, he began Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in an attempt to capture the poetic essence of his travels. Following his perilous return to Patras by way of Missolonghi, where he was to die fifteen years later, Byron journeyed on to Athens, stopping first at Mount Parnassus and writing several stanzas to commemorate the event. In Athens itself, he and Hobhouse lived with the Macri family, whose twelve-year-old Theresa was immortalized by Byron as “the Maid of Athens.” The two travelers explored the city and its historic surroundings from Christmas Day, 1809, through March 5, 1810. The sloop Pylades then carried them to Smyrna, where they took a side trip to Ephesus, after which they embarked for Constantinople aboard the frigate Salsette. On May 3, 1810, during a pause in the voyage, Byron swam the Hellespont from Sestos to Abydos, an accomplishment about which he would never tire of boasting. Byron’s stay in Constantinople brought him further invaluable knowledge of the decadent splendors of the East and also involved him in several petty disputes over matters of protocol, disputes in which Byron’s aristocratic arrogance, one of his least attractive traits, came repulsively to the fore. Such matters appear to have been smoothed over, however, by the time Byron left Constantinople on July 14, 1810. Hobhouse returned directly to England, but Byron spent the next several months in Greece, where he added to his sexual conquests, contracted a venereal disease, saved a young woman from threatened execution, and continued his exploration of a country for whose freedom he was eventually to offer up his life. On April 22, 1811, he sailed from Greece for Malta, where he temporarily renewed his affair with Mrs. Smith, and then returned home to England, stepping ashore on July 14, 1811. Within a month of his landing, Byron’s mother died, an event that caused him considerable distress despite the uneasy relationship that had long existed between them. The year also brought news of the deaths of three of Byron’s closest friends. The poet dealt with his grief as best he could and continued preparations for the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cantos I and II. He also resumed his place in the House of Lords, delivering his maiden speech on February 27, 1812, an effective denunciation of a bill requiring the execution of frame breakers (workers who violently resisted the mechanization of the weaving trade). Byron delivered two more parliamentary speeches, on April 21, 1812, and June 1, 1813, but the sudden fame that Childe Harold’s

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Pilgrimage brought him after its appearance on March 10, 1812, drew his attention away from politics and changed his life forever. The immediate effect of Byron’s renown was that he became the most sought-after guest in London society and the most avidly pursued of handsome bachelors. In particular, Lady Caroline Lamb, despite being already married, descended on him with extraordinary enthusiasm. She found him “mad—bad—and dangerous to know,” a description that might, with equal or greater justice, have been applied to Lady Caroline herself. Their tempestuous liaison occupied much of Byron’s attention during the spring and summer of 1812 and involved indiscreet meetings, plans of elopement, threats of suicide, and a great deal of public scandal. Although they parted in September, to Byron’s infinite relief, occasional storms broke out in the months thereafter. During the years 1812 and 1813, Byron began the series of Oriental tales that would solidify his literary fame and involved himself in affairs with various other women, most peculiarly and most deeply with his half sister, Mrs. Augusta Leigh. He spent much of the summer of 1813 with Augusta, and Elizabeth Medora Leigh, born on April 15, 1814, has always been assumed to be the poet’s daughter. Though Byron never publicly acknowledged her, various passages in his letters, especially those to his close confidante, Lady Melbourne, suggest his paternity. Lady Melbourne’s brilliant niece, Annabella Milbanke, also figured prominently in Byron’s life during this period. Although he despised “bluestockings” (intellectual women), Byron was unaccountably drawn to Annabella, whose intelligence and wide reading distinguished her so completely from the impulsively romantic Lady Caroline and the passively maternal Augusta. Perhaps as a means of escaping the chaos of his unstable love life, Byron proposed to Milbanke on two occasions, in September of 1812 and again in September of 1813. Unfortunately for both of them, Byron’s second proposal was accepted. After various delays, apparently involving visits to Augusta, Byron and Annabella Milbanke were married on January 2, 1815. The several months of Byron’s marriage were marked by continuing literary activity (especially work on the later Oriental tales and on Hebrew Melodies Ancient and Modern), by visits to and from Augusta, by Byron’s association with the Drury Lane Committee of Management, and by fits of temper, related to the poet’s marital and financial problems, which terrified both his wife and his half sister. The birth of the poet’s only legitimate child, Augusta Ada Byron, in December of 1815, did nothing to improve the situation, and when mother and daughter left on January 5, 1816, for what was purportedly a temporary visit to Annabella’s parents, the marriage was effectively at an end. By March of 1816, a separation had been agreed on, and Byron affixed his signature to the necessary legal documents on April 21, 1816. A week earlier, he had spoken for the last time to his beloved Augusta, and on April 25, still experiencing financial difficulties and being roundly denounced by the press for his marital problems, Byron left England forever. Once more on the Continent, Byron visited the Waterloo battlefield, journeyed up the Rhine Valley, crossed into Switzerland, and began looking for accommodations near Lake Geneva. Along the lakeshore, he and his traveling companion, Dr. John Polidori, were approached by Claire Clairmont, who, as a result of an affair earlier in the spring, was pregnant with Byron’s child. Clairmont was accompanied by her stepsister, Mary Godwin (later to become Mary Shelley), and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The poets soon became fast friends and by early June had established households very near each other and within two miles of Geneva. Their animated conversations deeply influenced the lives of both poets, with the inspiration of their contact communicating it-

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self, on one particular evening, to two other members of the group. During a gathering at the Villa Diodati, where Byron had taken up residence, a challenge to compose ghost stories resulted in the eventual publication of Dr. Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), the first English vampire tale, and Mary Shelley’s classic gothic novel, Frankenstein (1818). During the several weeks of his almost daily talks with Shelley, Byron himself wrote “The Prisoner of Chillon” and worked diligently on Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III. Although Claire had at first kept her relationship with Byron a secret from Mary and Percy, they inevitably became aware of Claire’s pregnancy, after which Percy and Claire approached Byron in an attempt to resolve matters. Because Byron did not feel the same affection for Claire that she felt for him, it was decided that they should not live together. It was further decided that the child should be cared for by Byron, with Claire being addressed as its aunt. The child, Allegra Byron, was born in Bath, England, on January 12, 1817, and died in Ravenna, Italy, on April 20, 1822. John Cam Hobhouse arrived at the Villa Diodati with another of Byron’s friends, Scrope Davies, on August 26, 1816, and following the departure for England of the Shelley household on August 29, the two toured the Alps with Byron and Polidori. Another tour, with Hobhouse only, began on September 17. Byron’s combined impressions of the Alps helped inspire Manfred, whose composition was well advanced when the poet gave up the Villa Diodati on October 5 and journeyed with Hobhouse to Milan. After a sojourn of less than a month in Milan, during which he met the Italian poet Vincenzo Monti and the French novelist Stendhal, rescued Polidori from an encounter with the local authorities, and came under the surveillance of the Austrian secret police, Byron left with Hobhouse for Venice, where they arrived on or about November 10. Hobhouse soon departed to see other areas of Italy, but Byron, having fallen in love with Venice and with Marianna Segati, his landlord’s wife, settled in for an extended stay. In the several months of this first Venetian interlude, he completed Manfred and overindulged during the Carnival period. On April 17, 1817, Byron set out, by way of Arqua, Ferrara, and Florence, for Rome, where Hobhouse showed him the local antiquities. He returned on May 28 with the completed The Lament of Tasso and with vivid impressions that would be incorporated in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV. Soon thereafter, he and Marianna established themselves at the Villa Foscarini in La Mira, outside Venice. There, Byron formed another liaison, this time with the beautiful Margarita Cogni; worked at what was to become the final canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage; and began the precursor of Don Juan, the charming Beppo. Late in 1817, he returned to Venice with the visiting Hobhouse and, on January 7, 1818, said goodbye to his friend after a last ride together. Byron entrusted Hobhouse with the manuscript of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV, whose publication in April brought the poet further literary fame during a time when his personal life had rendered him infamous. In 1818, Byron’s Venetian dissipations reached a level of obsessive frequency that threatened his health. Nevertheless, he continued to write, producing Mazeppa and Canto I of Don Juan and beginning Canto II. He was showing signs of physical exhaustion by April of 1819, when he became reacquainted with a woman whom he had casually encountered during the previous year. With this woman, the nineteen-year-old Countess Teresa Guiccioli, he was soon involved in one of the most long-lasting and passionate relationships of his life. In June, he followed her to Ravenna, in August to Bologna, and in September back to Venice, where they spent some of their time at By-

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ron’s quarters in the Palazzo Mocenigo and longer periods at the Villa Foscarini in La Mira. At the end of the year, when Teresa’s husband cajoled her to return to Ravenna, Byron followed again. The continuation of Don Juan had been one of Byron’s primary literary projects in 1819, and further material was written in 1820. The year was significant for other reasons, too, including the writing of Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice, Byron’s increasing entanglement in the revolutionary Carbonari movement, and Teresa’s formal separation from Count Guiccioli. When the Carbonari movement collapsed in 1821 and Teresa’s family was exiled from Ravenna, Byron accepted Shelley’s invitation to move himself, his lover, and her banished relatives to Pisa, where Shelley had taken up residence. Despite this political and personal upheaval, Byron completed three plays during 1821 (Sardanapalus, The Two Foscari, and Cain) and wrote the magnificent The Vision of Judgment. Byron became part of the Pisan Circle in November of 1821, and he remained a resident of the general Pisa area until September of 1822. These months witnessed the writing of much of Don Juan, which Byron had previously ceased composing on the request of Teresa and which he now resumed with her permission. The period also saw the beginnings of Byron’s acquaintance with the colorful Edward John Trelawny and the less satisfactory relationship between Byron and the improvident Hunt family. Most sadly, however, these were the months in which Byron’s daughter, Allegra, died in a convent at Ravenna and in which Shelley, with Edward Williams, was drowned off the Italian coast. What ultimately drove Byron from Tuscany, however, was the latest banishment of Teresa’s family, this time to Genoa, where Byron joined them in late September. In Genoa, Byron wrote his last Augustan satire, The Age of Bronze, and a romantic verse narrative, The Island, while continuing Don Juan. He also began making serious plans to leave for Greece, where a war of independence had recently broken out. After a traumatic parting with Teresa, he set sail from Italy aboard the Hercules in July of 1823, accompanied by Trelawny and Teresa’s brother, Pietro Gamba. In early August, they reached Cephalonia, and in late December, they left for Missolonghi, where Byron arrived on January 4, 1824, to be greeted the next day by Prince Alexandros Mavrocordatos, the Greek military leader. During the previous August, Byron had been taken ill after an excursion to Ithaca. At Missolonghi, on February 15, he became ill once again. His recovery was slow and was hampered by terrible weather, the disunity of the Greek leadership, and their constant demands that he supply them with money. After riding through a rainstorm on April 9, he experienced a relapse. His condition worsened during the following days, and after being bled by his physicians until his strength was gone, he died on April 19, 1824. His remains were returned to England, where they were denied burial in Westminster Abbey. Instead, he was interred on July 16, 1824, in Hucknall Torkard Church, near his ancestral home of Newstead Abbey. Analysis • Although a number of George Gordon, Lord Byron’s, plays are more easily approached as dramatic poetry than as theatrical drama, the political tragedies are readily accessible to dramatic analysis. His political tragedies are literary explorations of the relationship, in an unregenerate world, of the extraordinary individual to the state. They examine the place of the almost superhumanly proud and passionate man within corporate humanity. They express the fascination with the link between earthly power and individual freedom and fulfillment that manifested itself in Byron’s first

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speech before Parliament and that would lead him, finally, to his death at Missolonghi. The following discussion centers on three such works, the classically constructed Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice and Sardanapalus, and the gothic, melodramatic Werner. Werner • Of Byron’s dramatic works, Werner most closely resembles the popular theater of his day. Despite being the last play that Byron completed, Werner is the earliest of the plays in terms of initial composition, having been begun during the year preceding Byron’s final exile from England. Byron’s fascination with the story on which the play is based dates from an even earlier period. As he explains in the play’s preface, he had read “The German’s Tale” from the Lees’ The Canterbury Tales at about age fourteen, and it had “made a deep impression upon” him. It “may, indeed, be said to contain the germ of much that” he wrote thereafter, an admission that suggests the importance of the play within the Byron canon, despite the play’s obvious literary deficiencies. The play’s title character embodies many of the traits of the Byronic hero and has much in common, too, with Byron’s father, “Mad Jack” Byron. As the play begins, Werner is a poverty-stricken wanderer, who, like Mad Jack, has been driven out by his father because of various youthful excesses resulting from the indulgence of his overly passionate nature. Although a marriage that his father considered improvident was the immediate cause of this estrangement, Werner was guilty of other, unstated transgressions before this, transgressions that prepared the way for the final severing of the parental tie. Since then, Werner has been a proud exile, burdened by a sense of personal guilt and too familiar with the weaknesses of human nature to rely on other people for consolation. His love for Josephine, herself an exile, partially sustains him, but his realization that her sufferings are a product of his own foolish actions exacerbates his gloom. The one embodiment of hope for Werner and Josephine is their son, Ulric, who has been reared by Werner’s father, Count Siegendorf, after Werner’s banishment. Ulric, however, possesses his father’s passions without possessing the sense of honor that would prevent those passions from expressing themselves in hideous crimes. As the play begins, Ulric is missing from his grandfather’s court, disturbing rumors are circulating concerning his possible whereabouts, and the nobleman Stralenheim, a distant relation, is poised to usurp the family inheritance in the event of Werner’s father’s death. The play’s elements of gothic melodrama are obvious from the opening of the first scene. The play begins at night during a violent thunderstorm, and act 1 is set in “The Hall of a decayed Palace” in a remote section of Silesia. The palace is honeycombed with secret passages, which receive considerable use during the course of the play’s action. The Thirty Years’ War has just ended, rendering the profession of soldier superfluous and lending glamour to professional thievery, that favorite occupation of many a Sturm und Drang hero-villain. Ulric, as we eventually discover, is himself the leader of a band of soldiers turned marauders. Ulric, another avatar of Byronic heroism, is something of a superman, possessing traits that render him capable of great good and great evil. One of the play’s characters, the poor but honorable Gabor, describes him as a man Of wonderful endowments:—birth and fortune, Youth, strength and beauty, almost superhuman, And courage as unrivall’d, were proclaim’d

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His by the public rumour; and his sway, Not only over his associates, but His judges, was attributed to witchcraft, Such was his influence. Ulric’s dual nature expresses itself most clearly in his treatment of the potential usurper, Stralenheim. When Ulric is unaware of Stralenheim’s identity, he courageously rescues him from the floodwaters of the River Oder, but later, when he learns that Stralenheim is a threat to his family’s wealth and power, he cold-bloodedly murders him. He then conceals his responsibility for the crime and hypocritically questions his father about his possible role in Stralenheim’s death. Werner has compromised his honor by stealing gold coins from Stralenheim’s room, a crime that suggests the family’s moral weakness, but he is incapable of murder. Freed of restraint by one additional generation of moral decay, Ulric, by contrast, is capable of almost anything. Because of Stralenheim’s murder and the nearly simultaneous death of Werner’s aged father, Werner becomes Count Siegendorf and Ulric his heir apparent. All goes well for a year, although Werner, troubled by his possession of the tainted gold and by the mysterious circumstances of his rise to power, is plagued by a guilty conscience. There are manifestations of guilt in Ulric’s behavior, too, but that strength of will that allowed him to rescue Stralenheim from the flood and later to cut his throat sustains him through subsequent unsavory deeds. He continues his clandestine command of the marauders who threaten the fragile peace and accepts betrothal to the loving and innocent Ida, daughter of the murdered Stralenheim. The ultimate proof of Ulric’s reprobate nature occurs when Gabor, who had witnessed the hideous crime and had been unjustly branded as its likely perpetrator, comes forward to accuse Ulric. In an attempt to silence this threat to everything he has striven to accomplish, Ulric sends his minions in pursuit of the innocent man, at the same time uttering a defiant confession of his guilt before the startled Ida, who immediately falls dead in shocked disbelief. Werner deviates from classical restraint in both content and form. In addition to relying on melodramatic plot devices, Werner violates the unities of place and time, a major shift in location and period occurring between acts 3 and 4. Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice and Sardanapalus, on the other hand, are much more regular, with only slight changes in setting and time taking place from one scene to the next. Like Werner, however, both plays center on the consequences of having men of powerful but uncertain character in positions of responsibility. Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice • The tenuous thread on which the plot of Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice hangs is the apparent historical fact that the title character, while he was doge of Venice, conspired against the tyrannous Venetian oligarchy partly because he found their rule unjust and, more important, because they failed to punish one of their number severely enough for a scrawled insult to the doge’s wife. When Faliero discovers that Michel Steno is to receive one month of imprisonment instead of death for an unsavory comment inscribed on the ducal throne, he becomes furious, although his wife, Angiolina, counsels restraint. His rage is motivated by his disgust that the oligarchy, with its facelessly diffused and inflexibly selfish power, refuses, on the one hand, to recognize the rights of the common people and neglects, on the other, to show the deference due superior spirits. His rebelliousness (like Byron’s own) is simultaneously an assertion of individual, proud will and a genuine concern for democratic principles. He detests the oppressive rule of the privileged few and joins a conspiracy

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against them, but he maintains an aristocratic haughtiness among the “common ruffians leagued to ruin states” with whom he throws in his lot. Ultimately, his joining the conspirators is an expression of that irrepressible, restless pride that he shares with Byron’s other heroes. He exhibits not simply the temporal pride of a Coriolanus but also the everlasting, self-assertive pride of a Lucifer. Indeed, his is the same sin that overthrew the angels, And of all sins most easily besets Mortals the nearest to the angelic nature: The vile are only vain: the great are proud. In addition to treating, with considerable complexity, the frequently self-contradictory motivations of the rebel, Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice explores the moral ambiguities of instigating violent actions to achieve just ends. Like the French revolutionaries, the Venetian conspirators are about to sweep away the old order in a bath of blood, but one of their number, Bertram, refuses to abandon his humanity and warns an aristocratic friend that his life is in danger. The ironic result of this humane gesture is that the rebellion is discovered and the conspirators themselves, including the proud doge, are put to death. Victory belongs to those whose ruthlessness wins out over their compassion, and he who would be kind becomes a Judas. Sardanapalus • In Sardanapalus, this conflict between humanity and harsh political reality is again examined. Sardanapalus is a lover of life whose mercy and whose desire for peace, love, and pleasure bring down a dynasty. As a descendant of Nimrod and the fierce Semiramis, he is expected to conduct the affairs of state by means of bloodshed and unrelenting conquest. Instead, he allies himself with the forces of vitality against those of death and thereby earns a reputation for weakness. He knows the harem and the banquet hall better than the battlefield and is judged effeminate because he prefers the paradisiacal celebration of life to the ruthless bloodletting of war and political persecution. Even when he knows that two of his most powerful subjects, the Chaldean Beleses and the Mede Arbaces, have plotted against him, he refuses to have them killed and thereby opens the way to successful rebellion. After merely banishing the two from Nineveh, he finds himself, during a symbolically appropriate banquet, beset by a usurping army. Despite his seeming weakness, Sardanapalus, like Byron’s other heroes, possesses unquenchable pride and courage. Assuming the weapons of the warrior but refusing to wear full armor, so that his soldiers will recognize and rally to him, he enters battle and temporarily staves off defeat. His lover, Myrrha, a character added to the play, significantly enough, at the suggestion of Teresa Guiccioli, shows an equally fierce courage, as do Sardanapalus’s loyal troops, and for a time, victory seems possible. Still, the kingly worshiper of life is troubled in his dreams by the image of the worshiper of death, Semiramis, and there are dark forebodings of approaching catastrophe. When it finally becomes clear that defeat is inevitable, Sardanapalus expresses regret that the fallen world in which he found himself was unwilling to accept the temporary renewal that he attempted to offer: I thought to have made mine inoffensive rule An era of sweet peace ’midst bloody annals,

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A green spot amidst desert centuries, On which the future would turn back and smile, And cultivate, or sigh, when it could not Recall Sardanapalus’s golden reign. I thought to have made my realm a paradise, And every moon an epoch of new pleasures. When the world refuses his great gift, he turns to the only paradisiacal sanctuary available in a universe of spiritual disorder. He unites himself with the one individual who most loves him. He has his last loyal subjects build a funeral pyre, symbolic of his and Myrrha’s passion, and the lovers die amid its flames. Other major works poetry: Fugitive Pieces, 1806; Poems on Various Occasions, 1807; Hours of Idleness, 1807; Poems Original and Translated, 1808; English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 1809; Hints from Horace, 1811; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cantos I-IV, 1812-1818, 1819 (the four cantos published together); The Curse of Minerva, 1812; Waltz: An Apostrophic Hymn, 1813; The Giaour, 1813; The Bride of Abydos, 1813; The Corsair, 1814; Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, 1814; Lara, 1814; Hebrew Melodies Ancient and Modern, 1815; The Siege of Corinth, 1816; Parisina, 1816; Poems, 1816; The Prisoner of Chillon, and Other Poems, 1816; Monody on the Death of the Right Honourable R. B. Sheridan, 1816; The Lament of Tasso, 1817; Beppo: A Venetian Story, 1818; Mazeppa, 1819; Don Juan, Cantos I-XVI, 1819-1824, 1826 (the sixteen cantos published together); The Prophecy of Dante, 1821; The Vision of Judgment, 1822; The Age of Bronze, 1823; The Island, 1823; The Complete Poetical Works of Byron, 1980-1986 (5 volumes). nonfiction: Letter to [John Murray] on the Rev. W. L. Bowles’s Strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope, 1821; “A Letter to the Editor of ‘My Grandmother’s Review,’” 1822; The Blues: A Literary Eclogue, 1823; The Parliamentary Speeches of Lord Byron, 1824; Byron’s Letters and Journals, 1973-1982 (12 volumes; Leslie A. Marchand, editor). Bibliography Brewer, William D., ed. Contemporary Studies on Lord Byron. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001. A collection of essays on the works of Byron. Bibliography and index. Chew, Samuel C., Jr. The Dramas of Lord Byron: A Critical Study. 1915. Reprint. New York: Russell and Russell, 1964. The first sustained analysis of Byron’s plays, Chew’s book is one of the best single introductory examinations of Byron’s dramatic works and his career as a dramatist. Foot, Michael. The Politics of Paradise: A Vindication of Byron. New York: Harper and Row, 1988. Foot’s analysis of Byron’s poetics as it relates to his dynamic life, which Foot divides into formative periods linked to Byron’s place of residence, includes incisive analyses of Cain, Manfred, and Sardanapalus. The book also includes a pithy select bibliography that would serve as a good starting point for in-depth research on Byron. Also included are two appendices. Franklin, Caroline. Byron: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. A study of Byron’s career, with some attention to the poet’s neglected playwriting. Garrett, Martin. George Gordon, Lord Byron. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. A basic biography of the writer Byron that examines his life and works. Bibliography and index.

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Gross, Jonathan David. Byron: The Erotic Liberal. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001. A study of Byron that focuses on his political and social views. Bibliography and index. Martin, Philip. Byron: A Poet Before His Public. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1982. This fine biographical-historical analysis of Byron’s plays, with chapters on Manfred, Cain, and Sardanapalus, places Byron’s work within the context of his contemporaries of the second generation of Romantic poets. Bibliography. Peters, Catherine. Byron. Stroud, Gloucestershire, England: Sutton, 2000. A concise biography of Byron that covers his life and works. Bibliography. Robert H. O’Connor, updated by Gregory W. Lanier

Pedro Calderón de la Barca Pedro Calderón de la Barca

Born: Madrid, Spain; January 17, 1600 Died: Madrid, Spain; May 25, 1681 Principal drama • Amor, honor y poder, pr. 1623, pb. 1634; El sitio de Breda, pr. 1625, pb. 1636; El príncipe constante, pr. 1629, pb. 1636 (The Constant Prince, 1853); La dama duende, wr. 1629, pr., pb. 1936 (The Phantom Lady, 1664); Casa con dos puertas, mala es de guardar, wr. 1629, pr., pb. 1636 (A House with Two Doors Is Difficult to Guard, 1737); Los cabellos de Absalón, wr. c. 1634, pb. 1684 (The Crown of Absalom, 1993); La devoción de la cruz, pb. 1634, pr. 1643 (The Devotion to the Cross, 1832); El gran teatro del mundo, wr. 1635, pr. 1649, pb. 1677 (The Great Theater of the World, 1856); El mayor encanto, amor, pr. 1635, pb. 1637 (Love, the Greatest Enchantment, 1870); La vida es sueño, pr. 1635, pb. 1636 (Life Is a Dream, 1830); El médico de su honra, pb. 1637 (The Surgeon of His Honor, 1853); A secreto agravio, secreta venganza, pb. 1637 (Secret Vengeance for Secret Insult, 1961); El mágico prodigioso, pr. 1637, pb. 1663 (The Wonder-Working Magician, 1959); El pintor de su deshonra, wr. 1640-1642, pb. 1650 (The Painter of His Dishonor, 1853); El alcalde de Zalamea, pr. 1643, pb. 1651 (The Mayor of Zalamea, 1853); La hija del aire, Parte I, pr. 1653, pb. 1664 (The Daughter of the Air, Part I, 1831); La hija del aire, Parte II, pr. 1653, pb. 1664 (The Daughter of the Air, Part II, 1831); El laurel de Apolo, pr. 1659, pb. 1664; La púrpura de la rosa, pr. 1660, pb. 1664; Hado y divisa de Leonido y Marfisa, pr. 1680, pb. 1682 Other literary forms • Although Pedro Calderón de la Barca is remembered primarily as a verse dramatist, he is also noted for his lyric poetry, some of which was not incorporated into his plays. The sonnet was the most prevalent poetic form used by Calderón. The collection Los sonetos de Calderón en sus obras dramáticas (1974) contains his nondramatic sonnets, those included in his plays, and the one sonnet from his long poem, Psalle et sile (1741). Achievements • Pedro Calderón de la Barca, whose death in 1681 marks the end of Spain’s great period of literary and artistic excellence known as its Golden Age, is generally recognized as one of the most accomplished Spanish dramatists of all time. His plays differ from the plays of his predecessor Lope de Vega Carpio (the “father of Spanish theater”) in several ways. Calderón’s dramas are generally regarded as more polished than Lope de Vega’s, and their complex structure contrasts with the seeming naturalness of Lope de Vega’s works. Although Lope de Vega often seems primarily interested in capturing the essence of seventeenth century Spanish life, Calderón’s dramas demonstrate the author’s concern with more universal—and often abstract— questions of human existence. It is probably because of his more universal focus that Calderón’s work has had a wider appeal than Lope de Vega’s. Life Is a Dream, his most famous drama, ranks as one of the unquestioned masterpieces of world theater. Calderón is particularly noted for his religious theater. He is the undisputed master of the auto sacramental—the one-act, allegorical, religious drama performed as part of Spain’s celebration of Corpus Christi. This genre accounts for 74 of the 182 works included in the standard Spanish edition of his complete works, and many of his full131

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length plays are also about religious topics. Surprisingly, even these works continue to enjoy a wide appeal in an age in which religious faith is declining. The Devotion to the Cross, for example, was much admired by the agnostic philosopher Albert Camus, who translated this play into French in 1953. Biography • Pedro Calderón de la Barca was born in Madrid on January 17, 1600, to an aristocratic family. Little is known about his childhood. His mother died when Calderón was ten, and his father died five years later. Calderón was educated in the Jesuit Colegio Imperial in Madrid and later in the University of Alcalá de Henares and the Uni(Library of Congress) versity of Salamanca, where he prepared himself for the priesthood. He did not, however, embark immediately on an ecclesiastical career, but preferred instead to dedicate himself to literary pursuits, participating in various poetry contests in which he won some recognition—including praise on two occasions from Lope de Vega, who at the time was Spain’s leading dramatist. In 1623, Calderón’s first datable play, Amor, honor y poder (love, honor, and power) was performed in Madrid. At approximately the same time, the poet embarked on a military career and may have participated in the surrender of Breda, which he dramatized in his play El sitio de Breda (the siege of Breda). For a time, he continued to involve himself with both the theater and the military. Following the death of Lope de Vega in 1635, Philip IV appointed Calderón court dramatist and director of the newly constructed and lavish court theater at Buen Retiro. In 1637, the king named him a knight in the Order of Santiago. In 1638, he fought against the French in the Battle of Fuenterrabía, and in 1640, he helped suppress a rebellion in Catalonia (northeastern Spain). Finally, in 1642, ill health—perhaps resulting from a wound received in battle—put an end to his military career. Little is known of Calderón’s personal life during these years, but his involvement in an altercation in 1629 affords a brief glimpse into a side of his personality not revealed by his military and artistic triumphs. In that year, one of his brothers was seriously wounded in a fight with an actor who took refuge in a Trinitarian convent, and Calderón was among the crowd that, with the legal authorities, forced its way into the convent and, when they were unable to find the man they were pursuing, subjected the nuns to insults and rough treatment. When the court chaplain, Hortensio Paravicino, later protested this conduct in a sermon, Calderón included in his play The Constant Prince a passage ridiculing the priest—lines that the authorities, acting on Paravicino’s instigation, ultimately forced the dramatist to expunge. Sometime after the end of his military career, Calderón became involved in a love affair and fathered an illegitimate son, Pedro José, whom he treated initially as his

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nephew. Following this affair and his mistress’s death (perhaps as a result of it), he finally realized his ambition of becoming a priest and was ordained in 1651. In an ironic reversal of customary practice, he acknowledged after his ordination that his “nephew” was actually his son. For two years following his ordination, Calderón remained in Madrid. In 1653, he became chaplain of the Capilla de Reyes Nuevos in Toledo. During this time, he continued to provide plays for the court and also busied himself composing autos sacramentales for Madrid’s annual celebration of Corpus Christi. In 1663, Calderón returned to Madrid to become honorary chaplain to Philip IV, and for the rest of his life, he remained in that city, where he continued to write secular dramas for the court as well as the autos sacramentales. His last full-length play, Hado y divisa de Leonido y Marfisa (the destiny and design of Leonido and Marfisa), was written and performed before the court of Charles II in 1680. Calderón’s death occurred a year later on May 25, 1681, while he was working on an auto sacramental. The circumstances of his death caused a friend to comment that Calderón had died singing “like a swan.” Analysis • Initially, Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s theater seems most defined by its varied nature. The topics of his dramas are diverse, ranging from religious faith and revenge to mythological fantasy and marital fidelity. The tone of his works likewise varies from frivolity to gravity. In many respects, Calderón’s theater continues to conform to the norms established by his predecessor Lope de Vega. Like Lope de Vega, he violates the classical sense of decorum by mixing humorous and tragic elements in the same play and by including in highly serious works a stock character known as the gracioso (funny one), usually a servant, whose lack of dignity provides occasion for laughter. Calderón also follows Lope de Vega’s practice of disregarding the classical unities of time and place, which sought to limit a play’s setting to a single place and decreed that its action should occur in a single day. Also, like Lope de Vega’s, his plays are written in polymetric verse. Calderón’s cultured, baroque language, however, gives his plays a noticeably different tone from those of his predecessor. Because most of his plays were written for the court, he adopted a style designed to appeal to his educated audience. Thus, his characters often speak a highly complex language, rich in poetic conceits, parallelism, and classical allusions, which is intentionally artificial. A recurrent theme in Calderón’s plays is the confusion between reality and appearances. The theme is, like his style, characteristic of the baroque, and it had already been treated in various other literary works of the period, including Miguel de Cervantes’s famous novel El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615; The History of the Valorous and Wittie Knight-Errant, Don Quixote of the Mancha, 1612-1620; better known as Don Quixote de la Mancha,1605, 1615). With Calderón, however, this theme is so consistently present that it could be considered a constant that gives unity to his diverse corpus. Another characteristic of Calderonian drama is the author’s insistence—rare in Spanish Golden Age theater—on carefully “finished” pieces. Often the originality of Calderón’s plays lies in the polished form in which they are presented rather than in the material treated. More than any other Golden Age dramatist, he reworked material that had already been used, and he often succeeded in transforming a mediocre work into a quite memorable one. The Constant Prince • One of Calderón’s early plays, The Constant Prince, is already illustrative of much that is characteristic of his later work. The Constant Prince is a re-

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working of an earlier play attributed to Lope de Vega, La fortuna adversa del Infante Don Fernando de Portugal (n.d.; the adverse fortune of Prince Fernando of Portugal). Both plays dramatize the legendary faith of a historic Portuguese prince who, when captured by the Arabs, allegedly chose to die as a martyr rather than order the surrender of the Portuguese-held city of Ceuta in order to gain his freedom. The changes that Calderón made in Lope de Vega’s treatment of this story—the reduction of the cast of characters from thirty-six to fourteen and the transformation of Prince Fernando from a pious weakling to a dynamic and determined fighter, for example—illustrate the author’s concern to present the material in the most effective manner. Calderón’s most significant modification of the original play, however, is his introduction of the Moorish princess Fénix (Phoenix), the daughter of Fernando’s captor, the King of Fez. By incorporating into the play a subplot dealing with Fénix’s persistent love for the Arab general Muley in spite of her father’s wish that she marry Tarudante, the King of Morocco, Calderón establishes a parallel between Fernando and her. Like him, she is constant—in her love for Muley. Moreover, the competition between Muley and Tarudante for the beautiful Fénix mirrors the competition between Fernando and the King of Fez for the city of Ceuta (whose name corresponds to the Hebrew word for “beauty”). These parallels allow Calderón to evoke poetically the question of the true nature of beauty. When, at the end of the play, Fénix is captured by the Portuguese and returned to her people (with the stipulation that she is to marry Muley) in exchange for Fernando’s dead body, it is evident that Calderón, establishing a baroque contrast between appearance and reality, wishes to communicate that the beauty of Fernando’s faith is more real than Fénix’s physical beauty. Nowhere is the contrast between Fernando and Fénix more evident than in a muchdiscussed scene toward the end of the second act in which the two of them recite to each other sonnets on the impermanence of flowers and of stars. Fénix, who had ordered Fernando to bring her a bouquet of flowers, is horrified by the thought that their beauty is only transitory. Fernando, on the other hand, can face even the knowledge that the stars (which at the time the play was written were believed to influence human destiny) are not permanent. Unlike Fénix, he has learned to penetrate beyond appearances. Thus, he is neither captivated nor disturbed by temporary things; he recognizes that both physical beauty and misfortune will become lost in eternity, which he believes to be ordered according to a divine plan. Thus, Calderón has used Fernando’s constancy in order to teach a moral lesson concerning the Christian virtue of fortitude. Cape and sword plays • The theme of appearance versus reality, which is handled seriously in The Constant Prince, is also present in The Phantom Lady and A House with Two Doors Is Difficult to Guard, two Calderonian plays typical of a genre referred to as comedias de capa y espada, or cape and sword plays. The name for this genre, which was seventeenth century Spain’s equivalent of a situation comedy, derives from the costume worn by the actors playing the leading male roles. Cape and sword plays have complicated plots revolving around the courtship of one or more sets of middle-class youths who devise ingenious measures to overcome the obstacles to their love. The obstacles are usually presented by a domineering father or brother, anxious to protect the honor or reputation of a daughter or sister, and the young people frequently resort to disguises and other forms of deception, which often backfire with comic results. Duels are a frequent ingredient of these plays, but they never have grave consequences; cape and sword plays invariably have happy endings involving at least one wedding.

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The Phantom Lady • The Phantom Lady dramatizes the ingenuity of Angela, a bright and attractive young widow, whose brothers Don Juan and Don Luis, in a desire to protect her reputation, have confined her first to their home and then—during the visit of Don Juan’s friend Don Manuel—to her room. Because the room Don Manuel is occupying is next to her own, Angela makes use of a secret door (concealed by a glass cabinet) joining the two rooms to enter their guest’s quarters and play pranks on him and frighten his servant, who believes she is a ghost. As he is unaware of her existence, Don Manuel is also puzzled by Angela, but he refuses to believe that she is a phantom and eventually follows her into her room, where the two of them are discovered by Don Luis. Following a duel, which Don Manuel wins (sparing Luis’s life), everyone receives an explanation of what has been happening, and Don Manuel and Angela agree to be married. The use of illusion in the play is obvious. As a result of deceits, disguises, false entrances, and so on, all the play’s male characters remain utterly confused until the final scene. As is typical of many cape and sword plays, only the female characters—Angela and her cousin Beatriz—realize what is really happening. Also typical is that the would-be deceivers (the two brothers who conceal Angela’s presence from their guest) are themselves the most deceived. This is especially true of Don Luis, who, on an occasion when Angela has left the house in disguise, follows her and endeavors to seduce her, believing that she is another woman. A House with Two Doors Is Difficult to Guard • The stereotyped plots and characters of all cape and sword plays bear a certain resemblance to one another—though Calderón somehow manages to endow most of his with a fresh quality which makes them appealing long after his death. Thus, many of the elements of The Phantom Lady— the unknown entrance, disguises, a tyrannical brother, a mysterious and beautiful lady who appears and disappears—are also present in A House with Two Doors Is Difficult to Guard. In this play, the appearance-versus-reality theme is even more noticeable, as when Fénix, describing (in typically baroque language) to his friend Lisardo his first encounter with the beautiful Marcela in the gardens of Aranjuez, remarks on the difficulty of distinguishing her from the carved statutes of nymphs in the garden’s fountains. The Surgeon of His Honor • Appearances produce tragic consequences in The Surgeon of His Honor, a play that dramatizes Don Gutierre Alfonso’s murder of his wife, Mencía, because of his belief that she has been unfaithful. In the eyes of a modern audience, at least, Mencía seems to be an innocent victim of misfortune. At the beginning of the play, she is a happily married woman whose happiness is seriously threatened when a former suitor, Prince Enrique, is thrown from his horse (a typical occurrence in Golden Age drama with men who are unable to control their passions) and is brought to her house to recover. When he awakens and discovers his former fiancée, Mencía, Enrique—even after learning that she is now married—persists in efforts to resume his former relationship with her. That night, when her husband is absent, he bribes a servant to gain entry to her house. Although she rejects all Enrique’s advances, Mencía does commit various indiscretions. When her husband returns unexpectedly, for example, she conceals Enrique in her room and later arranges a diversion so that he may leave. In his hasty departure, however, Enrique leaves behind a dagger, which Gutierre discovers and which causes him to suspect his wife of infidelity. After gathering additional misleading evidence

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that convinces him of his wife’s guilt, Gutierre arranges a bloody and startling denouement that is typical of the Senecan tragic style then popular in Spain: He engages a bloodletter, brings him to the house blindfolded, and orders him to bleed his wife to death. The Surgeon of His Honor is thus typical of a peculiarly Spanish genre that is referred to informally as the wife-murder play. These plays have plots based on Spain’s old and infamous honor code, which gave a husband (or father or brother) the legal and moral right to kill a wife (or daughter or sister) whose sexual misconduct had threatened the family’s reputation. Although the plots of these plays resemble that of William Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor of Venice (pr. 1604), there are notable differences. In The Surgeon of His Honor, Gutierre—unlike Othello, who becomes aware of Desdemona’s innocence and of his own blindness—remains convinced that what he did (though lamentable) was right, and the play concludes with the announcement of Gutierre’s engagement to a former fiancée, an engagement arranged by King Pedro (Enrique’s brother). Because the king has been informed by the bloodletter (who surreptitiously left a bloody handprint by the door of Gutierre’s house so that it could be identified) of all that has happened, the king’s arrangement of a new marriage for Gutierre seems puzzling. Basing their interpretation of the play on this ending, critics assumed for many years that Calderón—and other Spanish authors of similar plays—actually approved of the bloody honor code that was the basis of their dramas. Recent Calderón scholars have become convinced that this is not the case. Various elements of the play—the bloody handprint by the door (recalling the biblical account of the Passover) and the crucifix hanging above Mencía’s bed when her dead body is discovered—invite the audience to examine the play’s plot in a religious context and to compare the sacrifice of the innocent Mencía to the sacrifice of the innocent Christ. In this light, it is clear that Calderón has wished to show his audience how easily one may be deceived by appearances. Thus he structured the play in a way that makes the viewer participate initially in Gutierre’s error, but he provided enough evidence so that further reflection would correct this initial illusion. The Great Theater of the World • Calderón’s most famous auto sacramental, The Great Theater of the World, again emphasizes the theme of illusion. Based on the idea that, quite literally, “all the world’s a stage,” this play dramatizes the production of a play in which a theater manager (an allegorical representation of God) assembles a set of characters (a rich man, a king, a peasant, a poor man, Beauty, Discretion, and a child) in order to represent human life. Because the purpose of the autos sacramentales was to instruct the public concerning the meaning of the Eucharist, at the end of the play, the theater manager issues an invitation for some of the characters (those who have behaved appropriately) to join him at his table for a feast, but only after the audience has had ample opportunity to observe how easily some of the actors were seduced into confusing their fictional roles with reality. The Devotion to the Cross • Often, Calderón’s full-length plays also appear to be religious allegories. It has been suggested, for example, that one must view The Devotion to the Cross as an allegorical representation of the fall and redemption of humankind. The play dramatizes the fate of Eusebio, a child of unknown parents who has been reared by a shepherd and who refers to himself as “Eusebio of the Cross” because his only clue to his identity is a cross-shaped birthmark. Eusebio wins the affection of a

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wealthy girl, Julia, but Julia’s brother Lisardo—resentful of his sister’s lowly suitor— challenges Eusebio to a duel and is killed by him. Pursued by Julia’s father, Curcio, Eusebio then becomes the leader of a band of outlaws. He behaves erratically, however, when he captures a priest and sees a book entitled The Mystery of the Cross, for he continues to be tormented by the mystery of his own origin and by the meaning of his birthmark. The mystery of his identity is resolved at the end of the play when he and the other characters discover that he is Julia’s twin, Curcio’s own son. In a sense, all the principal characters of this play are as confused about their identities as is Eusebio. Like the actors of The Great Theater of the World, they have been trapped into playing illusory roles. In The Devotion to the Cross, the roles are antagonistic ones, which belie the characters’ true identity as a family, and it is clear that Calderón believes that their dilemma is shared by humanity in general. He thus invites his audience to view Eusebio as a kind of Everyman—born into a confused world, uncertain of his identity. Protected by a shepherd (evoking Christ the Good Shepherd), he finally discovers the secret of his existence in the sign of the cross. Life Is a Dream • Unanimously recognized as Calderón’s outstanding masterpiece, Life Is a Dream is again an expression of the author’s favorite theme of reality and illusion, and of the almost inescapable human tendency to confuse them. Set in Poland, the play dramatizes the destiny of Prince Segismundo, who is imprisoned in a forest by his father, King Basilio, immediately after his birth. Basilio is motivated to imprison his son because—as an astrologer—he has become convinced that Segismundo will become a tyrant who will conquer his father. As is usually the case in drama, Basilio’s very efforts to avoid a prophesied destiny actually cause the prophecy to be realized. Because he grows up isolated from humanity and surrounded only by animals, Segismundo quite naturally becomes a savage himself. Thus, when his father—wishing to test the accuracy of his astrological deductions before declaring his Russian nephew Astolfo heir to the Polish throne—has his son drugged, brought to the palace, and informed that he is King of Poland, Segismundo does indeed behave as a tyrant by seeking to violate an attractive woman and by throwing from the palace window a servant who gets in his way. Convinced of the accuracy of the prophecy, Basilio has Segismundo drugged again and returned to prison and proceeds with his plan to have Astolfo declared heir to the throne. The people of Poland, however, are unwilling to accept a foreign king, and, discovering the location of Segismundo’s prison, they proclaim him their leader in an insurrection against Basilio. The prophecy that Segismundo would conquer his father is thus fulfilled. Its fulfillment has a rather odd twist, however, since Segismundo—who was indeed a tyrant in his first visit to the palace—is now changed. He has been told by his jailer that all that happened to him in his father’s court was only a dream, that one can never distinguish between dreams and reality, but that even in dreams one has the opportunity to do good. Having learned this lesson, he pardons his father and is thus prepared at the play’s close to become a wise and benevolent ruler. Initially, it may appear that Segismundo’s conversion derives from an illusion, but Calderón makes it clear that this is not really the case. Segismundo, like Fernando of The Constant Prince, has seen through the illusion of life and has glimpsed the reality of eternity. The soliloquy in which he proclaims that life itself is a dream is an excellent example of Calderón’s poetic talent at its finest. Probably the most famous soliloquy in the Spanish language, it is as well known in Hispanic countries as Hamlet’s question of existence is in English-speaking ones.

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Indeed, it is clear that, in Calderón’s view, Segismundo is one of the few characters of the play who has freed himself from illusion. In the author’s mind, the greatest illusion of which humans are capable is the belief that they may autonomously control their destiny. It was because Basilio was a victim of this illusion at the beginning of the play that he had Segismundo imprisoned, but in the course of the drama, he also learns the nature of reality and thus kneels before his son at the play’s end to ask his forgiveness. Another character, the gracioso Clarín, is not so fortunate. He tries cynically to manipulate each situation for his own gain and, during the battle between Segismundo’s and Basilio’s forces, hides to protect himself from harm until it is over. Ironically, an arrow lands in the very spot where he is hiding and kills him, illustrating once again Calderón’s conviction that those who cling to the illusory beauty of life are inviting destruction. Secret Vengeance for Secret Insult • Like The Surgeon of His Honor, Secret Vengeance for Secret Insult dramatizes a husband’s murder of his wife (and her suspected lover) in order to defend his honor, and the later play repeats many elements of the earlier one. Shortly before her wedding, Doña Leonor, like Mencía in The Surgeon of His Honor, is surprised by the sudden appearance of a former suitor, Don Luis. Like Mencía, she resists her former suitor’s advances, but also like her, she makes the mistake of granting him an interview and is forced to hide him when her husband returns unexpectedly. Her husband, Don Lope, becomes suspicious and resolves to protect his honor by killing both Leonor and Luis. Because his goal is to protect his reputation and he believes that no one else suspects his wife’s supposed infidelity, he arranges for both murders to look like accidents, but again recalling The Surgeon of His Honor, King Sebastián learns the true nature of what has happened and gives it his approval. It is clear again, however, that Calderón does not endorse what his protagonist has done, and he communicates his disapproval to the audience by ironically undermining Don Lope’s character. From the beginning of the play, he portrays Don Lope as an arrogantly self-centered individual who is blindly proud of his ability to control his destiny. When a friend, Don Juan, confides his sorrow at having been forced (in order to protect his honor) to kill a man who insulted a lady he was courting, Don Lope replies that Don Juan should be happy because there is no greater joy than having one’s honor unstained. When Don Juan is obliged to kill yet another man (who, aware of the earlier duel, refers to him as the “offended” rather than as the “avenged” party), Don Lope decides confidently to avoid such complications by making his own vengeance a secret one. With this same air of confidence, he prepares at the end of the play to embark with King Sebastián on an expedition against the Moors in Africa—an expedition that the seventeenth century audience knew had ended in disaster. Therefore, at the conclusion of the play, Don Lope is a fine example of a tragedy about to happen—of hubris before a fall—and the audience is fully aware that the same blind pride that led him to murder two people is now leading him to his own destruction. The Mayor of Zalamea • The Mayor of Zalamea, which is considered by Calderón scholars to be second only to his Life Is a Dream, is in many ways an atypical Calderonian play. Because its protagonist, Pedro Crespo, is a wealthy peasant (unlike most of Calderón’s principal characters, who are noble) and because the theme of the play is a peasant’s right to defend his honor, this work bears a certain resemblance to Lope de Vega Carpio’s famous “peasant plays” such as Fuenteovejuna (wr. 1611-1618,

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pb. 1619; The Sheep Well, 1936), Peribáñez y el comendador de Ocaña (wr. 1609-1612, pb. 1614, Peribáñez, 1936), and El mejor alcalde, el rey (wr. 1620-1623, pb. 1635; The King, the Greatest Alcalde, 1918); indeed, The Mayor of Zalamea is a reworking by Calderón of another play by the same name attributed to Lope de Vega. Initially, the plot of this play may appear to contradict Calderón’s implied criticism of the honor code in The Surgeon of His Honor and Secret Vengeance for Secret Insult, for The Mayor of Zalamea dramatizes Pedro Crespo’s utilization of his authority as the newly elected Mayor of Zalamea to order the death of Don Alvaro, a captain who, when quartered in Crespo’s house, abducted and raped Crespo’s daughter Isabel. Moreover, Crespo’s use of this authority is of questionable legality because, as the offended party, he can scarcely be considered an impartial judge, and because the offender is a nobleman. Nevertheless, Crespo is neither blind nor arrogant. He orders Don Alvaro’s death reluctantly and only after first imploring him to marry Isabel in order to repair the damage done to the family’s honor. He likewise shows compassion for his daughter. A typical Golden Age father might have felt constrained by the honor code to murder a dishonored daughter, and Isabel actually expects her father to do so. Crespo arranges instead, after his efforts to have her honorably married have failed, for her to enter a convent. Even in this play, however, Calderón makes it clear that the honor code allows no occasion for rejoicing. At the end of the play, the widowed Crespo is bereft of both his children. Isabel is in a convent, and he has reluctantly given his consent for his only son, Juan, to join the military. Although he has been honored by King Pedro II, who exonerated his execution of Don Alvaro by naming Crespo mayor for life, he faces a lonely future filled with sad memories. The Wonder-Working Magician • Because of its resemblance to the Faust legend, The Wonder-Working Magician has received considerable attention and praise—exciting, for example, the admiration of the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who enthusiastically compared it to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s famous treatment of the same legend. Calderón’s play dramatizes the fourth century martyrdom of two saints. The protagonist Cipriano (Saint Cyprian) is enamored of the young and beautiful Justina and, like Faust, signs a pact with the devil so that he may learn black magic in order to seduce her. Though he does acquire spectacular powers, they are unable to prevail against Justina’s virtuous will, and Cipriano—after embracing a skeleton that he has mistaken for Justina—recognizes, like all Calderonian heroes, that the seemingly impressive powers of evil are an illusion. The play concludes as he and his beloved, united at last, suffer death as martyrs. Ironically, the devil, who initially approached Cipriano in order to distract him from his study of theology, has been an instrument in his martyrdom and salvation. The purposes of evil have been thwarted by the purposes of good. Los cabellos de Absalón • Of all the Calderón plays based on his reworking of earlier material, the best-known is Los cabellos de Absalón. Its source, Tirso de Molina’s La venganza de Tamar (wr. 1621, pb. 1634), dramatizes the biblical story of King David’s daughter Tamar’s rape by her half-brother Amnon and her brother Absalom’s murder of Amnon in order to avenge her honor. Calderón’s play condenses Tirso’s into two acts (the second of which is an almost word-for-word copy of Tirso’s act 3) and adds an original third act that dramatizes Absalom’s own death when, in his revolt against his father, his hair becomes entangled in the low branches of a tree as he is riding through a forest.

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Although Calderón’s appropriation of Tirso’s material may appear questionable in an age that has become accustomed to copyright laws, one should note that in the seventeenth century such practices were considered entirely legitimate. Indeed, it is quite possible that Calderón composed his play at the request of a theater manager who instructed him to write a new final act for Tirso’s material. Obviously, both dramatists found in the biblical account of David’s tragic family an echo of the nefarious Spanish honor code, and both of them implicitly criticize this code by reminding their audiences that the vindication of honor may—as in the case of Absalom—be only a disguise for self-serving motives. Calderón’s arrangement of the material to emphasize Absalom’s hair (of which Absalom was so proud that he mistakenly understood a prophecy that he would be “elevated by his hair” to mean that his physical beauty would cause him to become king) is typical of the author’s penchant for showing his villains captivated by illusion. The Painter of His Dishonor • Calderón’s last famous wife-murder play, The Painter of His Dishonor, is perhaps his best contribution to the genre. In its rapid action, which shifts from Italy to Spain and back again, the author achieves a perfect synthesis of the themes of illusion and revenge. Many elements of its plot are familiar from The Surgeon of His Honor and Secret Vengeance for Secret Insult. The young and beautiful Serafina consents to marry Juan Roca, an old artist who attempts vainly to capture her beauty on canvas, only because she believes her former suitor, Don Alvaro, has perished at sea; Alvaro returns and, ignoring Serafina’s protests that she wishes to be faithful to her husband, abducts her and hides her in his father’s country house near Naples. The Prince of Naples, who has also been captivated by Serafina’s beauty, discovers her presence and engages a traveling artist to paint her portrait. Ironically, the artist is Serafina’s husband, who has returned to Italy to locate his wife and avenge his honor. In an action-packed final scene, Juan manages at last to capture his sleeping wife’s likeness on canvas; when Serafina awakens, frightened by a dream in which she imagined her husband was killing her, she rushes for the first time to seek comfort in her abductor’s arms. Alvaro and Serafina’s embrace convinces Juan of his wife’s guilt, and he rapidly fires two pistols, leaving both his wife and her suitor dead inside the “frame” provided by the windows that served as the standard background for the seventeenth century Spanish stage. The painting motif that is the context for this drama suggests a number of conclusions. By emphasizing art’s ambiguity, Calderón clearly suggests that Juan Roca has fallen victim to his own artistic imagination. At the same time, however, Serafina’s own conduct seems equally ambiguous. While on the conscious level she remains faithful to her husband, it is clear that unconsciously she is indeed guilty of an adulterous love for Alvaro. Indeed, Serafina and Juan are similar in that both struggle in vain to exercise conscious control over a deeper self that is more real than their illusory social masks; both are examples of the inevitable human subjection to sin. Calderón’s solution to this human dilemma, which is a basic theme of his work, is found in an auto sacramental also entitled The Painter of His Dishonor, in which the offended husband, Christ, pardons his wife, Human Nature, and fires instead on guilt and Lucifer. Other major works poetry: Psalle et sile, 1741; Poesías, 1845; Obra lírica, 1943; Sus mejores poesías, 1954; Poesías líricas en las obras dramáticas de Calderón, 1964; Los sonetos de Calderón en sus obras dramáticas, 1974.

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Bibliography Acker, Thomas S. The Baroque Vortex: Velázquez, Calderón, and Gracián Under Philip IV. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Acker compares and contrasts the works of Calderón, Diego Velázquez, and Baltasar Gracián y Morales, examining the baroque influence. Bibliography. De Armas, Frederick A. The Prince in the Tower: Perceptions of “La vida es sueño.” Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1993. Various perspectives on Calderón’s Life Is a Dream. Bibliography and index. Delgado Morales, Manuel, ed. The Calderonian Stage: Body and Soul. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1997. An analysis of the staging and production of the dramas of Calderón. Bibliography and index. Levin, Leslie. Metaphors of Conversion in Seventeenth Century Spanish Drama. Rochester, N.Y.: Tamesis, 1999. This study examines the concept of religion and conversion in the dramas of Calderón as well as those of Tirso de Molina. Bibliography and index. Rupp, Stephen James. Allegories of Kingship: Calderón and the Anti-Machiavellian Tradition. University Park.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. An examination of Calderón’s portrayal of the monarchy in literature and of his political and social views. Bibliography and index. Currie K. Thompson

Karel Capek Karel Capek

Born: Malé Svatonovice, Bohemia, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Czech Republic); January 9, 1890 Died: Prague, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic); December 25, 1938 Principal drama • Lásky hra osudná, wr. 1910, pb. 1916, pr. 1930 (with Josef %apek); Loupezník, pr., pb. 1920 (The Robber, 1931); Ze zivota hmyzu, pb. 1920, pr. 1922 (with Josef %apek; The Insect Play, 1923; also known as And So Infinituam: The Life of the Insects, 1923); V0c Makropulos, pb. 1920, pr. 1922 (The Macropulos Secret, 1925); R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots, pb. 1920, pr. 1921 (English translation, 1923); Adam Stvoritel, pr., pb. 1927 (with Josef %apek; Adam the Creator, 1929); Bílá nemoc, pr., pb. 1937 (Power and Glory, 1938; also known as The White Plague, 1988); Matka, pr., pb. 1938 (The Mother, 1939) Other literary forms • Karel %apek was essentially a thinker who used a variety of forms to express his philosophical and political ruminations. Aside from his dramatic writing, %apek’s work falls into three categories: political and philosophical writing, tales, and novels. Among his political and philosophical publications are Pragmatismus (1918), a direct outgrowth of work he did in his doctoral program at Charles University. This was followed in 1920-1921 by Musaion, a collection of essays on modern art, in part an outgrowth of his doctoral dissertation, “Objective Methods in Aesthetics.” In 1928, %apek published the first of the three volumes of Hovory s T. G. Masarykem (President Masaryk Tells His Story, 1934; also as Masaryk on Thought and Life, 1938). This extensive work, completed in 1935, grew out of %apek’s close friendship with his former university professor, Tomas G. Masaryk, who served as Czechoslovakia’s president from 1918 until 1935. Out of this same period appeared a closely related collection of essays, O v0cech obecných: %ili, Zóon politikon (on public matters), published in 1932. A posthumous collection of essays Veci kolemnás (the things around us) was published in 1954. %apek, sometimes in collaboration with his brother Josef, liked to write tales and sketches, often of the fantastic. Many of these tales and sketches were collected and published, beginning with Zárivé hlubiny (1916; The Luminous Depths, 1916), Bozí muka (1917; wayside crosses), and Krakonošova zahrada (1918; the garden of Krakonoš)—all these pieces written with Josef. In 1929, %apek published on his own two collections of tales, Povídky z jedné kapsy (tales from one pocket) and Povídky z druhé kapsy (tales from the other pocket), translated into English and published together as Tales from Two Pockets in 1932. %apek’s novels combine political philosophy with a strong sense of the fantastic. The first, Továrna na absolutno, appeared in 1922 and is variously known in English as The Absolute at Large (1927), Factory for the Absolute, and Manufacture of the Absolute. %apek then began the ambitious project of writing a trilogy that consisted of Hordubal (1933; English translation, 1934), Pov0tron (1934; Meteor, 1935), and Obycejný zivot (1934; An Ordinary Life, 1936). These three novels, coming just as Adolf Hitler’s ascendancy in Germany was being noted widely, led to %apek’s fifth novel, Válka s mloky (1936; The War with the Newts, 1937), which was openly anti-Fascist and specifically anti-Hitler. První parta (1937; The First Rescue Party, 1939) continued to develop the political philosophies found in the early novels. 142

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Achievements • Karel %apek is remembered today for his popularization of the word “robot,” actually first used by his brother Josef in his short story “Opilec” (1917) and used by Karel in R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots, which was first produced in Prague in January, 1921. The word is from the Czech robota, meaning compulsory service or work. Popularizing this word, however, was certainly not %apek’s most notable professional achievement. A deeply philosophical man, professionally trained as a philosopher, %apek was the first Czech writer to attract a broad international audience for his works, particularly for his expressionist drama, which has been translated into many languages and has been performed all over the world. A versatile intellectual, %apek, during his years on the staff of Lidové noviny, the most influential Czech newspaper, demonstrated by the excellence of his writing that journalism can be an art. He wrote on a broad range of subjects, from Persian rugs to gardening to drama and art. %apek was also an incisive political thinker who wrote stirring political essays, but his political sentiments achieve a more universal expression in his plays and novels, particularly in such plays as R.U.R., The Insect Play, and Power and Glory and in the novels of his trilogy comprising Hordubal, Meteor, and An Ordinary Life. His novel most familiar to English-speaking audiences is The War with the Newts, which builds directly on much of the social criticism found in R.U.R. and in The Insect Play and which presents one of the earliest direct literary attacks on Hitler. His trilogy has attracted considerable interest for its manner of dealing with the infinite diversity of the human personality. %apek, who was deeply involved in the arts and in the cultural life of Prague, served from 1921 to 1923 as director of Prague’s City Theatre, where he directed thirteen plays. He was less comfortable as a playwright than he was as a journalist or a novelist because he believed that in drama the author has too little control over his own product: The actors and the director, by imposing their own interpretations on a play, wrest from it much of the authorial control that writers in other genres are able to preserve. It was perhaps this feeling that led him to directing for a short period of time. %apek’s own plays show a concern with the man in the street, with the face in the crowd. He was a champion of such people, and he wrote allegorically, particularly in R.U.R. and The Insect Play, about the relationship of such people to a modern, mechanized society. The Insect Play is particularly medieval in its conception, with each figure in the play representing some vice or virtue, clearly defined and unilaterally depicted. In a sense, this play was a prelude to the more fully expanded consideration of human personality that one finds in his later trilogy. %apek often wrote parody in his early work, attacking conventions indirectly but forcefully, taking the particular and turning it into an allegorical generalization, as he did even in his earliest play, Lásky hra osudná (the fateful game of love), written in collaboration with his brother, Josef, in 1910, though not staged until a decade and a half later, when a small company in Prague gave it a limited run. It was not given a professional performance until it was presented by Prague’s National Theatre in 1930 along with a number of other short dramatic works by a variety of Czech playwrights. %apek, although not philosophically comfortable with the subjectivism of expressionism, used many of the conventions of expressionist drama in his writing. His staging was often expressionistic, as was his use of characters who performed like overgrown puppets, particularly the automatons of R.U.R. He also departed with considerable dexterity from his philosophical stance that literature should report on the basis of objective, virtually scientific observation rather than be subjective. Although he was a

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deliberate and indefatigable observer, as is made clear in his essays, he could not exclude from his writing the fruits of his own careful introspection. From the time that Czechoslovakia was established as a separate political entity by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, %apek worked continually for the democratization of the country. Much influenced by Western culture, particularly that of France and England, %apek believed firmly in representative government. His political views were much influenced by his extensive study of the pragmatism of William James during his days as a doctoral student at Charles University in Prague. His close and early friendship with Tomas G. Masaryk grew steadily throughout %apek’s lifetime, and when Masaryk rose to the presidency of Czechoslovakia, he and %apek were in weekly contact with each other. Through Masaryk, %apek became an informal force in Czech politics and government. His political influence persisted until the end of his life, which was clearly shortened by his deep distress about Hitler’s rise to power. It is speculated that %apek’s attack on Hitler in The War with the Newts was responsible for his not being awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature, for in the mid-1930’s, Sweden was still trying to appease Hitler and was quite unwilling, presumably, to bring to Stockholm to receive the world’s highest award in literature someone who had taken a political stand against the German tyrant. Biography • Born on January 9, 1890, Karel %apek was the youngest of three children. His sister, Helene, after whom a major character in R.U.R. is named, was born in 1886 and also became a writer. Josef, who was Karel’s closest lifelong friend as well as his brother, was born in 1887. The %apek family was living at that time in the idyllic country town of Malé Svatonovice, close to what later became Czechoslovakia’s border with Austria and Germany. The town, situated in the Krakonoše Mountains, was essentially bilingual, so that %apek and his siblings grew up with equal fluency in German and Czech. %apek’s father, Antonín, was a country doctor, but his interests encompassed a wide range of topics. Always intrigued by theater, he headed an amateur theatrical group in his town. He enjoyed painting, was a poet although he remained unpublished, and was an enthusiastic gardener who passed on this enthusiasm to both of his sons. %apek’s mother, Bozena %apková, was extremely cultivated, having a particular interest in the folklore of her area and in the music and tales that had grown out of this folklore. She told and read many tales to her children when they were very young, and she sang to them the songs of their region. The later work of both %apek brothers reflects directly these early influences. Until his final days, Karel was more devoted to fairy tales than to any other form of literature, save, perhaps, mystery stories, to which he was addicted. Bozena %apková was basically quite neurotic. Abused by her father, she quickly developed a resentment for and distrust of her husband. Their marriage was not a happy one. Her hypochondria manifested itself in an overconcern for the health of her children, particularly for the health of Karel, who was very small at birth and who suffered early from weak lungs, an affliction with which he lived throughout his life and which ultimately brought about his death in 1938. %apek was exposed to a broad range of people as he was growing up, partly because his father’s patients came from all walks of life and levels of society and partly because his mother surrounded herself with the people who best knew the folklore of the region, the peasants who lived in the environs in which %apek was reared. The closeness that developed between Karel and his brother Josef is largely attributable to the fact that Josef was expected as a small child to look after his sickly brother.

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The two were virtually inseparable until 1910, at which time Karel went to Berlin to study and Josef went to Paris. By this time, Karel had studied at the gymnasium in Brno in the province of Moravia for two years, from 1905 to 1907; had completed secondary school in Prague, where his father, by then retired from his medical practice, had come with his wife to live; and had spent one year, 1909-1910, as a student of philosophy at Charles University, where he presumably first came under the strong influence of Tomas G. Masaryk, also a philosopher. When Karel went to Berlin and his brother to Paris, the collaboration of their early days was interrupted. Lásky hra osudná had been completed, but it was still to be eight years before the two brothers published Krakonošova zahrada, a collection of their earlier sketches, and twelve years before they were to engage in the thoroughgoing collaboration of which The Insect Play was the product. %apek, who had an early interest in the writing of H. G. Wells, now developed a considerable and deep interest in the pragmatic and earlier philosophy of William James. During the summer of 1911, which he spent in France with his brother Josef, %apek began to expand his interest in art and in aesthetics. He was introduced to the writing of Henri Bergson, whose concept of the élan vital was to become fundamental in the conscious vitalism found in much of %apek’s important writing. It was probably this exposure to Bergson that led %apek in 1915 to complete a doctoral dissertation in the area of aesthetics. The title of his study, “Objective Methods in Aesthetics,” clearly indicates the direction in which his thought was moving and suggests his philosophical, if not his actual, approach to art. From this period of his life, also, comes the seminar paper on pragmatism that was to result in the publication of Pragmatismus in 1918. %apek’s spinal problems persisted, so that when he had completed his formal education he had to find a means of livelihood that would not overtax him. He suffered agonizing pain, which he is said to have borne with stoicism. In 1916, he found employment, which was to last for less than a year, as tutor to the son of Count Vladimír Lazanský. The count, on whose estate in western Bohemia %apek resided during the term of his employment, was quite democratic in his outlook, and %apek found his brief respite in residence with the count and his family congenial. In 1917, however, %apek returned to Prague to become a journalist, working for Národní listy, where he rose to the position of literary and art editor before resigning in 1921 to become a journalist for Lidové noviny. His brother Josef also worked as a member of the paper’s staff. This work in journalism exposed %apek to a broad variety of writing experiences and served to make him a sure and versatile writer. It was at about this time that %apek met Olga Scheinpflugová, an actress, who in 1920 played understudy to the lead in the Prague production of his play The Robber. Although their romance blossomed, %apek believed that his health was not good enough for him to contemplate marriage, and it was not until 1935 that he and Olga, who was twelve years his junior, were finally married. Meanwhile, Karel and Josef built a double house sharing a common wall in Prague. They lived in the close proximity that this house provided them from 1925 until Karel’s death in 1938. In this house, they gardened together, worked together on their artistic endeavors, and held constant discussions. The “Friday Circle,” established by %apek in 1924, met weekly at this house and attracted the leading artistic and political figures of Prague, including President Masaryk, to its discussions. In 1925, %apek was elected president of Prague’s PEN Club, but his tenure was short-lived because he did not wish to speak as an official. He resigned, craving the freedom and independence to speak as an individual artist rather than as the chief rep-

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resentative of a large group of writers. Again, in 1935, %apek was drawn into PEN when, at H. G. Wells’s prodding, he agreed to succeed Wells as international president of the organization. %apek, however, was unable to attend the annual meeting of the international society, which that year was held in Latin America, so he was not to serve. Politically, %apek was a liberal of the Masaryk variety, deploring fascism and finding the representational governments of Great Britain and the United States far preferable to communism. He tried to solidify the Czech people, overcoming his inherent shyness in order to reach the citizenry by radio. If he succeeded at all politically, it must be said that he did so more fully through the indirect methods found in his literature than through his direct attempts to persuade his countrymen. His support of the presidency of Edvard Beneš brought livid outcries from many a Czech, as did his attempts to bring about some sort of peaceful concord between the Czechs and the southern Germans in the mid-1930’s. As the Nazi sphere of influence grew, %apek became increasingly disheartened. The Munich agreement in 1938 between Germany and Great Britain in a way dealt %apek a death blow. His disillusionment was ever with him for the remaining months of his life. His lungs, always weak, became inflamed, and on Christmas Day, 1938, less than a year before the beginning of World War II, he died. When Nazi troops entered Prague less than three months after his death, his widow, Olga, destroyed all his papers because she feared that his correspondence might incriminate the people named in it. The Nazis, apparently unaware of %apek’s death, came to this house with a warrant for his arrest. They succeeded in arresting Josef, who spent the rest of his life in the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, where he died shortly before the war ended. Analysis • Karel %apek was concerned with the natural order of things, a theme that pervaded much of his work. His allegorical approach to expressionism linked his deep philosophical concerns to striking and often disturbing human situations. Artistically, politically, and socially, %apek dealt with the human personality and with the fate of humankind. He attacked not only the conventions of the day but also human beings’ general lack of awareness of their place in nature and in the continuum of events that demands their attention to foster the perpetuation of values and ideals as well as the survival of the human race itself. Lásky hra osudná • Lásky hra osudná, %apek’s early dramatic collaboration with his brother Josef, is a one-act play that was not given a major premiere until twenty years after it was written, although it was produced by an amateur group in the mid-1920’s. The play has neoclassical overtones, but only inasmuch as it establishes them to parody neoclassical form. The play is technically in the tradition of the commedia dell’arte, and it satirizes this tradition by its own artificial form. Each of the characters in the play is the clear representative of some single aspect of human character: Scaramouche, the obvious madman; Gilles, unwell and emotionally vulnerable, largely because of his own self-indulgence; Isabella, the agent of consternation, whose skirts are lifted by Brighella, thereby enflaming the emotions of the two rival suitors, Trivalin and Gilles. The two fight a duel over Isabella, thereby enabling the opportunistic Brighella to whisk Isabella away and to steal money from her rival suitors. This is the stuff of which operas are made. The plot is thin and contrived. Still, the play is rescued from the banality that such a plot would suggest by the well-controlled wit of the brothers %apek, who used the dialogue as a means of ridiculing and poking

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fun at the theater itself. Particularly engaging is a love scene in which Scaramouche announces that the theater is on fire, tacitly suggesting that the audience might flee and leave him alone with his ladylove, Isabella. The play begins with a verse prologue that continues until Gilles interrupts in prose. He refuses to speak in verse, although reminded of his obligation to do so, and the play proceeds with an intermixture of versified dialogue and prose, as suits the satiric nature of the production. Although not a notable artistic achievement, this play shows two significant wits working harmoniously to produce a delightful entertainment with a cutting edge of irony throughout. The Robber • %apek’s first full-length play, The Robber, was begun in Paris in 1911, when the author was visiting his brother for the summer. The play apparently passed through a number of distinct versions before it was finally produced by the Prague National Theatre in 1920. The drama moves from realism to Symbolism and back again; it also moves from prose to verse, often without adequate preparation. The story is an old one: Mimi is dominated by her overly protective parents, who already have lost one daughter to an elopement with a man who quickly abandoned her. The father, a stuffy professor, and his wife have to go away on a trip, but the father fortifies the house against intruders and leaves Mimi in the capable hands of their trusted erstwhile servant, Fanka. The robber is a rather typical hero: His background is unknown; he appears on the scene briefly, bringing about significant changes in the action; and he disappears almost as suddenly as he appeared in the first place. As soon as the parents have left, he makes his move. While Mimi tells him of her troubles, his understanding of and sympathy for her plight lead the hapless Mimi to lose her heart to him. He responds by instigating a fight with Mimi’s suitor, a local bumpkin, who, being quicker on the draw than the robber, wounds him. The injured interloper leaves Mimi, promising to return, and being only slightly wounded, he returns that very night, meeting Mimi, who tiptoes past the sleeping Fanka, outside into the moonlight. The parents, who have premonitions of trouble, hurry home unexpectedly and send the robber off. Mimi’s parents exact from her a promise that she will never speak to the robber again, but as soon as he returns in the morning, she violates her promise. In a scene that is almost slapstick, Fanka and the parents come out to try to drive the robber away from outside the fortified dwelling, but he slips past them and into the house, locks the door, and takes to the balcony, gun in hand, ready to fight to the death if necessary to defend Mimi’s right to make her own decision about whom she will marry. By this time, Mimi is hopelessly in love with the robber, although there is no suggestion that he reciprocates this love. After one false start, the professor and his cohorts retake the house and the robber runs off to escape injury at the hands of Fanka, who is shooting at him. He does not leave, however, until the audience learns that Mimi’s parents suffered through eight years of courtship before they married and that Mimi’s father, the professor, assumes that such deprivation and suffering are what love is all about. Mimi’s mother, though, questions the wisdom of their having been forced to wait so long. Mimi’s sister returns, her face covered with a veil, to tell Mimi her tale of being deceived by the man she loved. Though the play is somewhat lacking in substance, it provided a pleasantly diverting evening for audiences. It presents essentially several faces of love and the contrast between youth and age in matters related to the heart. It attacks the question of the

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rights of the young over the rights of their elders and examines several sets of rights quite closely. The setting had about it certain gothic elements that were well suited to the romantic tone of the play. The Insect Play • %apek is often at his best dramatically when he is not writing about human beings, who often turn out to be unconvincing in his plays. In his collaboration with his brother Josef on The Insect Play, %apek wrote a virtual medieval morality play. The insects are presented allegorically, and the whole action is unified by the tramp, who, in his role as stranger, serves the function of seer. The play is divided into three acts, the first called “Butterflies,” the second called “Creepers and Crawlers,” and the last called “The Ants.” Through these sets of characters, and through their notable characteristics, the brothers %apek depicted a coherent and quite pessimistic view of human beings. Questions of family organization are central to each act, as are questions of greed, pride, vanity, and other deadly sins. In the first act, two aging butterflies compete for the affections of the youthful poet, Felix, also a butterfly, who has the reputation of being a Lothario but who is really shy at heart. The butterflies, ethereal and lovely, are subject to the same whims as anyone else. They experience rivalry in love, and their actions are misinterpreted. They contrast sharply with the beetles in the next act, whose family exclusivity is limiting and ultimately cruel. The natural order of things is presented without comment in the cricket scene, in which two crickets looking for shelter rejoice at finding the nest of another cricket who has fallen victim to a hungry bird that has gobbled him whole. Their good fortune is short-lived because they are barely installed in their new habitat before a cuckoo fly attacks and paralyzes them. The tramp ruminates on the cruelty and rapacity that he sees here. The cuckoo fly kills; the parasite eats the crickets and their larvae. In accord with %apek’s philosophy that drama should be objective rather than subjective, the authors present the facts of what has happened and leave the audience with these facts, although the tramp represents a subjective intrusion on the scene, somewhat in violation of %apek’s philosophy of objective realism in drama. In The Insect Play, the brothers balance the actions of their three allegorical groups, using the tramp as a conscience, a representative of those who view the play. In the end, the tramp, begging for just a little more life, dies, his body left in a fen where slugs begin to feast on it. It finally is discovered by a woodcutter, and nearby, a group of schoolgirls on holiday, oblivious to the tramp’s death, play in the lustrous sunshine. The natural order is irresistible. Life goes on, with all its cruelty and suffering. R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots • %apek’s reputation as a dramatist of international stature was assured by R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots, first performed in Prague early in 1921. The play was rapidly translated into many European and some Oriental languages. Foreign productions were staged as far away as the United States and Japan. The play is concerned with the fate of humankind in the face of mechanization. The robots produced by the Rossum factory look and feel like human beings. They can experience pain, because were they not able to, they would soon be destroyed accidentally. They have no souls, not because souls are not manufacturable but because to give them souls would increase their price tremendously. They are good servants because they cannot feel fear, hatred, love, and sorrow, emotions that weaken human beings and divert them from their tasks.

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%apek’s concerns in R.U.R. are broadly human and neither focus on any one nation nor point an accusing finger at the industrialized world; neither is R.U.R. a nostalgic looking back to more simple times. Rather, it is a quite objective statement of many of the problems brought on by industrialization, exaggerated just enough to make it seem slightly fantastic, yet based sufficiently in truth that its central message is not lost on audiences. At first, the robots seem a great convenience. Soon there is no need for anyone to work. Robots do all the tasks, having been developed so successfully that they can perform in specialized, highly advanced occupations as well as in the menial occupations to which the early robots were consigned. Robots can typewrite and converse, and they provide specialized information in conversational tones. They are ever obedient, yet they have the ability finally to make discriminating responses. Ultimately, however, the human race is threatened, first because it begins not to reproduce and then because the robots rebel and threaten to conquer the humans. The only advantage the humans have when the attack comes is that the robots do not know how to reproduce, how to make more robots, and their typical life span is only thirty years. This bargaining chip is lost, however, because Helena has burned the papers in which Rossum details how robots are made. With this act, all hope is lost. R.U.R. harks back to the suggestion in The Insect Play of the specialized function of all creatures. In seeing the robots going about their specialized duties, one thinks back to the ants, beetles, and butterflies of the earlier play. %apek is dealing conceptually with the whole question of purpose—not human purpose alone, but the purpose of all life. In R.U.R., %apek the philosopher achieved an ideal harmony with %apek the dramatist. The play is filled with philosophical portents, yet it is good theater. If it avoids preaching, it probably does so because %apek employed literary techniques that he learned as a child listening to fairy tales. The fact that Helena Glory, when she appears early in the play, cannot distinguish between robots and humans suggests that %apek thought the dehumanization of humankind was already well advanced. He sensed distant, indistinct rumblings on the international scene that were to spring full-blown on the world when Hitler began to take over Eastern Europe. It is not surprising that %apek died shortly before the Nazi invasion of his own country. In some ways, the macabre fantasies that his plays had presented were now being acted out in ways more horrible than he could ever have imagined they would be. His spirit broken by the certainty of impending conflict, %apek could no longer face the struggle, and his health, never very robust, failed utterly. By the end of the second act, the robots in R.U.R. have killed all the humans except for Alquist, a construction engineer who may be their only hope. Alquist tries to unlock the secret of making robots, but he cannot. Finally, it is suggested that he dissect living robots to see how they are put together. He has trouble doing this. He then notes that two of the robots who serve him, Primus and Helena, have fallen in love, a contention he confirms by suggesting that he dissect one of them, only to have the other volunteer to be dissected instead. Alquist gives the two his blessing, and presumably there is some distant hope that a new race will come into being. The play is structurally interesting. Its prologue is comic, while the rest of the play is solidly dramatic in a serious sense. The main action is over by the end of the first act. The two succeeding acts are anticlimactic and need dramatic alternatives. The Macropulos Secret • In The Macropulos Secret, first produced in Prague in November, 1922, %apek created perhaps his most memorable character, Emilia Marty.

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This protagonist is more than three hundred years old when the play opens, having been given a secret formula to ensure longevity by her father, physician to Emperor Rudolph II. This formula assures not only long life but also continuing youth, so that Emilia, who has now lived many lifetimes, all under different names, is not decrepit. She is merely bored at having been around too long. Life has lost all interest for her. The excitement is gone from it, and the audience is led to the inevitable conclusion that too long a life is far worse than death. Indeed, %apek wrote, “A short life is better for mankind, for a long life would deprive man of his optimism.” As The Macropulos Secret develops, Emilia Marty tries to give the secret formula away. Various people want it, some for selfish and others for generous purposes. None, however, is to have it, because Kristina grabs the formula and burns it in a candle’s flame, much as Helena in R.U.R. burns Rossum’s formula for making robots. Adam the Creator • In 1927, Karel and Josef %apek again engaged in a collaboration, Adam the Creator, which, although promising dramatically, was not successful. The play’s basic idea is an intriguing one. Adam, not pleased with the world as his God has made it, destroys it with the Cannon of Negation when humankind fails to listen to him. In his haste to do away with an unsatisfactory world, however, Adam has forgotten to include himself in the destruction, so that now he alone exists in a solipsistic state. God calls on Adam to rebuild the world he has destroyed, and he gives him a heap of dirt with which to accomplish his task. Adam fails utterly to accomplish his deed and in desperation creates someone in his own likeness, Alter Ego. As similar as they first seem, the two are not compatible, and they quarrel bitterly and often. Alter Ego has an accountant’s mentality. He wants his share of everything, including the Clay of Creation. When he and Adam set about remaking the world, Adam creates individuals, whereas Alter Ego creates nothing but hordes of undistinguished and undistinguishable beings, products of a mechanistic and materialistic mind. Alter Ego’s creations are all the same; Adam’s, on the other hand, are all different. As might be predicted, the world that Adam and Alter Ego create is unbearable, and the two, now wholly discredited by their fellows, seek refuge in the hole from which the Clay of Creation originally came. Just a smidgen of earth remains in the hole. Alter Ego kicks it, and there being too little clay to make a whole man, the pile produces an unsightly dwarf, Zmeten, whose name means monster. Adam and Alter Ego decide to destroy the world they have created, but Zmeten, who now has six children, will not hear of such a thing. He threatens them with their own Cannon of Negation, which he has now turned into a cookpot. As the play ends, a shrine marks the spot in which creation began, and the Cannon of Negation has been melted down and made into a bell. As the bell clangs, God speaks to Adam, who responds by saying that he will not tamper further with God’s creation. In other words, he accepts things as they are, settling for the status quo. The play leaves little cause for hope. In fact, it ends with the sort of encompassing ennui found in Emilia Marty in The Macropulos Secret, with the important difference that the people living in the world Adam and Alter Ego have created are mortal and are only serving a term. Nothing is perfect; life, rather than being good or bad, just is. Power and Glory • Power and Glory, written in 1937, was openly anti-Nazi in its original form. The Nazis had already infiltrated the Czech hierarchy by that time, and they

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refused to allow the play to be produced until it was made antiseptic by their standards. The title of the play refers to a horrible disease that decimates people past forty years of age by eating away at their flesh. Significantly, it is those over forty who conduct, but do not actively fight in, wars. A brilliant physician, appropriately named Galén, has come up with a cure for the dreaded scourge, but he withholds his secret formula, demanding that in return for it the world must agree to live peacefully. The world is not ready to meet such a demand until the dictator, who, like Hitler, is preparing for an offensive war, develops the disease and is mortally ill with it. He concedes to Dr. Galén’s demands, but as Dr. Galén is rushing with his cure to the dictator’s bedside, he is waylaid by the mob and killed. The pessimism of the play presages the utter futility that was building in %apek and in many other European intellectuals in the years of Hitler’s rise to power. The Mother • %apek’s last play, which was his favorite, is an estimable one. The Mother, written in 1938, the year in which %apek died, revolves around a mother, presented as the prototype of motherhood, who has stirred her five sons by telling them stories of their dead father’s heroism in dying for his country. The father was the typical patriot, and the sons each represent a different category of person. One is a physician who loses his life in the practice of his profession. The twins are Petr, a liberal, and Kornel, a conservative, who fight in different armies in the same war and die on opposite sides. Another son is a pilot who dies while flying his plane to altitudes not previously reached. The youngest son, the only survivor, aspires to be a poet. In the course of the play, each of the dead sons returns as a spirit and engages in dialogue with the mother. It is she who has made these youths, she who has shaped their values and ideals. Without her encomiums about the heroism of their father, her four dead sons might not have made the sacrifices they did and might still be alive. Her motherly love makes her wish that they were, and she cannot understand why they have sacrificed as each has. Having lost four sons, she first hides her youngest, trying to save him. Finally, however, she gives him a rifle and sends him off to fight. %apek, never a pacifist, was not a warmonger either. The events through which he was living in Czechoslovakia in 1938 led him to the inevitable conclusion that under some sets of circumstances, people must fight. Kornel and Petr seem like offshoots respectively of Alter Ego and Adam in Adam the Creator. Kornel, in rearranging a room, would keep everything as it had been, whereas Petr would arrange things as they should be. The mother represents the synthesis of these two opposing stands and would put things where they belong, where they can prosper. Other major works long fiction: Továrna na absolutno, 1922 (The Absolute at Large, 1927); Krakatit, 1924 (English translation, 1925); Hordubal, 1933 (English translation, 1934); Pov0tron, 1934 (Meteor, 1935); Oby5ejný zivot, 1934 (An Ordinary Life, 1936); Válka s mloky, 1936 (The War with the Newts, 1937); První parta, 1937 (The First Rescue Party, 1939); Mivot a dílo skladatele Foltýna, 1939 (The Cheat, 1941). short fiction: Zárivé hlubiny, 1916 (with Josef %apek; The Luminous Depths, 1916); Bozí muka, 1917; Krakonošova zahrada, 1918 (with Josef %apek); Trapné povídky, 1921 (Money and Other Stories, 1929); Povídky z jedné kapsy and Povídky z druhé kapsy, 1929 (Tales from Two Pockets, 1932); Devatero pohádek, 1931 (Fairy Tales, 1933); Kniha apokryfu, 1946 (Apocryphal Stories, 1949).

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nonfiction: Pragmatismus, 1918; Kritika slov, 1920; O nejblizších vecech, 1920 (Intimate Things, 1935); Musaion, 1920-1921; Italské listy, 1923 (Letters from Italy, 1929); Anglické listy, 1924 (Letters from England, 1925); Hovory s T. G. Masarykem, 1928-1935 (3 volumes; President Masaryk Tells His Story, 1934; also as Masaryk on Thought and Life, 1938); Zahradníkuv rok, 1929 (The Gardener’s Year, 1931); Výlet do Špan0l, 1930 (Letters from Spain, 1931); Marsyas, 1931 (In Praise of Newspapers, 1951); O v0cech obecných: %ili, Zóon politikon, 1932; Obrázky z Holandska, 1932 (Letters from Holland, 1933); Dášenka, 1933 (Dashenka, 1940); Cesta na sever, 1936 (Travels in the North, 1939); M0l jsem psa a ko5ku, 1939 (I Had a Dog and a Cat, 1940); Obrázky z domova, 1953; Veci kolemnás, 1954; Poznámky o tvorbe, 1959; Viktor Dyk-S. K. Neumann-bratrí %.: Korespondence z let 19051918, 1962. translation: Francouzská poesie nové doby, 1920 (of French poetry). Bibliography Bradbrook, Bohuslava R. Karel %apek: In Pursuit of Truth, Tolerance, and Trust. Portland, Oreg.: Sussex Academic Press, 1998. A critical analysis of the works of %apek. Bibliography and index. Makin, Michael, and Jindrich Toman, eds. On Karel %apek: A Michigan Slavic Colloquium. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1992. A group of papers presented at a colloquium on %apek. Bibliography. Pynsent, R. B., ed. Karel Matel %apek-Chod: Proceedings of a Symposium Held at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies 18-20 September, 1984. London: The School, 1985. A collection of papers presented at a symposium on %apek. Index. Schubert, Peter Z. The Narratives of %apek and Cexov: A Typological Comparison of the Authors’ World Views. Bethesda, Md.: International Scholars Publications, 1997. A comparison of the philosophical views of %apek and Anton Chekhov as expressed in their works. Bibliography and index. R. Baird Shuman

Anton Chekhov Anton Chekhov

Born: Taganrog, Russia; January 29, 1860 Died: Badenweiler, Germany; July 15, 1904 Principal drama • Platonov, wr. 1878-1881, pb. 1923 (English translation, 1930); Ivanov, pr., pb. 1887, revised pr. 1889 (English translation, 1912); Medved, pr., pb. 1888 (A Bear, 1909); Predlozheniye, pb. 1889, pr. 1890 (A Marriage Proposal, 1914); Leshy, pr. 1889 (The Wood Demon, 1925); Svadba, pb. 1889, pr. 1890 (The Wedding, 1916); Yubiley, pb. 1892 (The Jubilee, 1916); Chayka, pr. 1896, pb. 1897, revised pr. 1898, pb. 1904 (The Seagull, 1909); Dyadya Vanya, pb. 1897, pr. 1899 (based on his play The Wood Demon; Uncle Vanya, 1914); Tri sestry, pr., pb. 1901, revised pb. 1904 (The Three Sisters, 1920); Vishnyovy sad, pr., pb. 1904 (The Cherry Orchard, 1908); The Plays of Chekhov, pb. 19231924 (2 volumes); Nine Plays, pb. 1959 Other literary forms • Within the ten-volume edition of his works published in 1901, Anton Chekhov included 240 of the hundreds of stories he had written for dozens of newspapers and magazines. Many of these stories were collected and published in hardcover form as Chekhov progressed in his career: Pystrye rasskazy (1886; motley stories), Nevinnye rechi (1887; innocent tales), V sumerkakh (1887; in the twilight), and Rasskazy (1888; stories). Some of his most famous stories are “Gore” (“Sorrow”), “Toska” (“Misery”), “Step’” (“The Steppe”), “Skuchnaya isoriya” (“A Dreary Story”), “Palata No. 6” (”Ward No. 6”), “Chorny monakh” (“The Black Monk”), “Tri goda” (“Three Years”), “Muzhiki” (“Peasants”), “Kryzhovnik” (“Gooseberries”), “Dushechka” (“The Darling”), “Dama s sobachkoi” (“The Lady with the Dog”), and “Nevesta” (“The Betrothed”). In addition, Chekhov wrote a work of reportage on conditions on the island penal colony of Sakhalin: Ostrov Sakhalin (1893-1894). Achievements • Anton Chekhov began writing as a means of earning an income, and in doing so he built up a large audience for his comic tales, which he wrote at a rate of more than one per week. At the same time, he attracted the attention and approval of a broad range of writers and critics. As his career progressed and his literary efforts grew more serious, his appeal never wavered, and his popularity and reputation continued to grow as he expanded into drama. In 1900, he became one of the first ten literary members of the Russian Academy of Sciences, inducted at the same time as Leo Tolstoy, and during his life he influenced many younger writers, including Maxim Gorky. Since his death, his reputation has grown steadily, and now he is universally recognized as one of the founders of modern drama and one of the greatest of short-story writers. Biography • Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in the provincial town of Taganrog, Russia, on January 29, 1860. The grandson of a serf, Chekhov was the third of seven children. Chekhov said of his early days, “There was no childhood in my childhood,” largely because of his father, Pavel, who frequently forced Chekhov to tend the family’s unheated food and hardware store until late at night. Chekhov’s father beat his children and taught them how to cheat customers, yet he was in his own eyes a religious man. He forced his children into a religious choir that rehearsed frequently and sang at various 153

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churches. Chekhov disliked these duties. It is not surprising that in later life he was not a religious man, that he spent his life trying to “burn the slave” out of himself and become a man of culture, and that he became convinced that work was useless unless it improved humankind’s lot. Chekhov’s home life was disrupted in 1876 when his father’s business went into bankruptcy and his father fled to Moscow to escape debtors’ prison. His mother sold the house, took the younger children, and joined her husband. Chekhov stayed behind to finish his schooling and became, at sixteen, the main support of the family, providing income by tutoring. He finished school in 1879, rejoined his family, and tried to provide material and moral support, lecturing at times on the need to avoid lies, affirm human worth, and be fair, all values that would be of great importance in his later work. In Moscow, Chekhov studied medicine and supported the family by writing stories in humorous magazines under the name Antosha Chekhonte. His first story was published in 1880 in the magazine Strekoza (dragonfly), and in 1881, he finished his first full-length play, Platonov, though it was not performed or published in his lifetime. In October of 1882, he met Nicolai Leikin, the owner of the weekly magazine Oskolki (fragments); they became friends, and soon scarcely a week went by without a Chekhov story appearing in the magazine. These early ventures saw him through medical school, and in 1884, Chekhov finished his medical studies and took up practice. By December 10 of that year, however, Chekhov became ill, coughing up blood, his first attack of tuberculosis, the disease that would kill him twenty years later. For the rest of his life, no year would go by without similar attacks. Chekhov recovered rapidly and managed to ignore the implications of his symptoms, resuming his normal life. In December, 1885, he accompanied Leikin to St. Petersburg, the literary center of Russia at the time, meeting Aleksei Suvorin, owner of the powerful daily newspaper Novoye vremya (new times), and Dimitry Grigorovich, a noted novelist. After his return to Moscow, he received a letter from Grigorovich urging him to respect his talent and write seriously; Chekhov responded that Grigorovich’s letter was “like a thunderbolt,” making him believe in his talent for the first time. Suvorin also wrote, inviting Chekhov to contribute to Novoye vremya. Chekhov accepted, beginning a long relationship with the newspaper and with Suvorin. In 1887, Chekhov completed the full-length play Ivanov, which was a popular success. In 1888, he experimented with longer prose forms and produced the much-acclaimed novella “The Steppe”; he was also awarded the Pushkin Prize for the (Library of Congress) best literary work of the year for his

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collection of stories V sumerkakh. In drama, he achieved financial success with two popular one-act comedies, A Bear and A Marriage Proposal. In June, 1889, Chekhov’s brother Nicolai died of tuberculosis as Chekhov tended him, and late in the year, his full-length play The Wood Demon, at first rejected as “too tedious,” was finally performed but was an almost complete failure. Chekhov began to doubt his dramatic ability, and, except for the one-act comedy The Jubilee, he abandoned drama until 1896. Indeed, Chekhov underwent a crisis of self-examination in 1889, doubting his literary and medical abilities and even his own worth. Until this time, Chekhov’s writing had been extraordinarily fluent. He wrote quickly, and almost everything he wrote was successful. Critics had begun to complain, however, that he had no purpose, no aim, and Chekhov was troubled with the same thought. Tolstoy’s moral philosophy, advocating an ascetic search for selfperfection, influenced him for a time. In 1890, Chekhov startled his friends but lifted himself out of what he described as a “spiritual stagnation” by undertaking a long and arduous trip to the prison colony of Sakhalin, located on an island off the eastern coast of Russia, to make study of conditions there. It may be that this trip crystallized Chekhov’s belief that a person must not be content merely to see everything; he must also do something about what he sees. There is ample evidence of Chekhov’s activity after he returned from Sakhalin. In 1891, a famine year, he devoted himself to collecting food and money for starving farmers. In 1892, he bought Melikhovo, an estate of 675 neglected acres, and poured his efforts into planting, pruning, and improving. He planted thousands of trees, including an apple and a cherry orchard. At Melikhovo, he led medical efforts to forestall threatened cholera epidemics. He also took on the tasks of constructing rural schools, stocking the Taganrog library, and providing constructive criticism for many aspiring writers, displaying the energy and purpose lacking in so many of his dramatic creations. By 1896, Chekhov was again tempted by the theater, and The Seagull opened on October 17 of that year. The Seagull failed, and its author vowed never again to write drama. In 1898, however, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and Konstantin Stanislavsky created the Moscow Art Theater and received permission to use The Seagull in its repertory. The theater’s first few productions failed, and by the time that the company was ready to stage The Seagull, it needed a success. The opening on December 17, 1898, exceeded everyone’s hopes; it was an enormous success, and the theater adopted the seagull as its permanent emblem. The success of The Seagull was shadowed by a deterioration in Chekhov’s health. A severe pulmonary hemorrhage in 1897 forced him away from Moscow to temperate Nice, Italy, during the winter of 1897-1898, and in 1898, he settled outside Yalta and gave up the practice of medicine. On October 26, 1899, the Moscow Art Theater performed the second of Chekhov’s great plays, Uncle Vanya. This play was followed by The Three Sisters on January 31, 1901, and then by The Cherry Orchard on January 17, 1904. All three plays were only moderate successes at first but gained in favor as audiences and actors grew to understand them. Chekhov met Olga Knipper, an actress, through the Moscow Art Theater. They were married on May 25, 1901, but most of their married life was spent apart, Olga’s career demanding that she live in Moscow and Chekhov’s health preventing him from living there except during the summer. Chekhov’s belief in purposeful work made him content with this situation.

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Throughout 1903 and 1904, Chekhov’s health declined steadily, and in June of 1904, he went with Olga to a German health resort in Badenweiler. He seemed to respond to treatment at first, but he died early in the morning on July 15. He was buried a week later in Moscow. Analysis • Anton Chekhov was talking about other writers when he said, “The best of them are realists and depict life as it is, but because every line they write is permeated, as with a juice, by a consciousness of an aim, you feel in addition to life as it is, also life as it should be, and it is that that delights you.” These very qualities that Chekhov praises in other great writers are the qualities in his greatest plays, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard, plays that continue to delight audiences throughout the world, though that delight is sometimes expressed in tears. Chekhov has been called a depressing writer, one who bring tears to an audience’s eyes, but he rejected that view adamantly, saying that he had never wanted tears: I wanted something else. I wanted to tell people honestly: “Look at yourselves. See how badly you live and how tiresome you are.” The main thing is that people should understand this. When they do, they will surely create a new and better life for themselves. Audiences will continue to be moved to tears by Chekhov’s plays, but his words give his audience a way of understanding the main ingredients of his greatness. His powers of observation and his honesty permitted him to create characters readily recognizable as human, characters sharply individualized yet representative. He was convinced of the need for unceasing striving, a belief that pervaded his life and work; and he had a faith that the future would bring a better life for humankind. Chekhov’s exceptional powers of observation, no doubt sharpened by his scientific training, enabled him to bring to the stage living characters. This was the single guiding purpose of Chekhov’s early writing, to show “life as it is.” This purpose, however, could not sustain him for long, and especially after his crises in 1889 and his trip to Sakhalin in 1890, he came to believe that “A work of art should express a great idea.” If Chekhov’s plays can be said to have a great idea, it must be that human beings must work ceaselessly and that their labor must be accompanied by a faith in the usefulness of that work, a faith in the future. In all his best plays, the themes of work, faith, and purpose are present, and in all there is a stab of pain and pity at the recognition of how often humans are idle, how many there are who do no work, how many who work to no end, how few who possess faith, how difficult it is to persevere in one’s faith, how often dreams are not fulfilled, and how transient is all human happiness. Chekhov’s purpose, however, went beyond the pain of recognition. He hoped that when people recognized themselves in his characters, they would go on to “create a new and better life.” Chekhov did not begin his dramatic career with the happy mixture of observation, purpose, and knowledge of the stage that was to characterize his later work. His earliest play, untitled by Chekhov but commonly referred to as Platonov, is a long and rambling work, full of dramatic stereotypes and heightened, exaggerated scenes, with little of the flavor of his later works. His next full-length play, Ivanov, was staged and was a popular success, but Chekhov was not satisfied with it, for good reason. It, too, was stilted and did not in Chekhov’s view reflect the truth about human life. By the end of the 1880’s, Chekhov had already formed the opinion that “A play ought to be written in which people come and go, dine, talk of the weather, or play cards . . . because that is

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what happens in real life. Life on the stage should be as it really is and the people, too, should be as they are and not stilted.” Chekhov would need a new kind of drama to embody such perceptions, and he was not successful at creating it until 1896. His first attempt at a new drama, The Wood Demon, first performed in 1889, failed so badly that Chekhov turned away from drama for six years. During this time, he achieved fame for his fiction. As fame brought more money and therefore allowed him more time to work on each piece, he wrote longer and longer pieces, and so was gradually led back to full-length drama. Ultimately, Chekhov found a way to fulfill his dream of capturing real life on the stage by rejecting the dramatic conventions of his time. Although the drama of his contemporaries focused on action, often melodramatic action, Chekhov’s last plays are primarily works of inaction, works in which the needed action takes place offstage. Chekhov prevents the audience from being distracted by activity, focusing attention on the inner lives of his characters. These inner lives are often both painful and ridiculous. It has long been a difficulty for critics that Chekhov called The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard comedies and insisted that they were not tragic. In truth, many of the characters in his plays are absurd: Their concerns are ridiculous, and the detached observer must confess that they are silly. It is a rare viewer, however, who can be detached about Chekhov’s characters. The audience simultaneously recognizes the foolishness and the humanity of the characters, touched by the recognition of how real the characters’ problems are to them, how impossible the characters find it to extricate themselves from their problems. Some of their dreams are absurd, but they do not know how to help themselves, and so their lives pass them by without teaching them how to live. Chekhov shows convincingly “what fools these mortals be,” but the audience, being mortal, is moved to pity, not laughter. The Seagull • The Seagull was partially inspired by events in Chekhov’s life. Chekhov had for years known a woman named Lydia, or “Lika,” Mizinova, who was apparently in love with him; he was seemingly less in love with her. They were very close, but Chekhov was not interested in marriage, and Lika turned her attention to another man, I. N. Potapenko, a married friend of Chekhov. The two had an affair that resulted in Lika’s pregnancy and her abandonment by Potapenko. She went to Europe to deliver the baby, but the baby died soon after Lika’s return to Russia. The episode no doubt disturbed Chekhov, and there is some indication that he felt a degree of guilt in the matter. Nina, a central character in the play and the only one who finds an answer for her life, is based on Lika, whose true experience provides the central theme of The Seagull. The play opens at the country estate of Sorin, a retired justice. His sister, Arkadina, an actress, is making a visit to her brother’s home with her lover, the writer Trigorin. Living with Sorin is Arkadina’s twenty-five-year-old son, Konstantin Trepliov, who, as the play begins, is about to stage a play that he has written for the benefit of his mother and the other guests on the estate. The play features Nina, whom Trepliov loves. Also attending the performance are Dorn, a doctor; Medvedenko, a schoolmaster; Shamrayev, Sorin’s bailiff; his wife, Polena, and their daughter Masha. Masha sets the tone of Chekhov’s play with her first lines. When Medvedenko asks her why she always wears black, she replies that she is “in mourning for my life.” Medvedenko loves Masha and wants to marry her, but Masha feels nothing for him and loves Trepliov instead. In turn, Trepliov cares nothing for Masha and focuses all

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his dreams on Nina. As Trepliov’s play gets under way, strain is plainly seen in the relationship between Arkadina and her son. Trepliov wants very much to impress his mother with the play, but she interrupts it several times with her comments. Arkadina claims that her son has no talent, but Dorn sees some power in the play, though he thinks it lacks a “definite idea.” Nina complains that the play has no living characters, but the novice playwright defends himself by claiming that plays ought not to show things as they are, or as they ought to be, but rather as they appear to us in our dreams, an attitude that would get little sympathy from Chekhov. Chekhov would certainly sympathize, however, with the most prevalent problem in the play: unrequited love. Trepliov yearns for the love of his mother but does not receive it, Nina becomes enamored of Trigorin and ends up running off to meet him in Moscow, and Arkadina also wants the love of Trigorin but must settle for dominance over him: He loves no one. Dorn comments on the situation at the end of act 1 with the lines, “How distraught they all are! And what a quantity of love about! . . . But what can I do, my child?” One can almost hear Chekhov directing these words to Lika Mizinova. Acts 2 and 3 develop Nina’s infatuation with Trigorin and the relationship between Arkadina and Trepliov. Nina is impressed by Trigorin’s fame and occupation and thinks only of him. Trepliov sees that he has lost his mother to Trigorin and that he is losing Nina as well. He is wrought up enough to kill a seagull and present it to Nina, telling her that he will soon kill himself as well. Trigorin comes on the scene shortly after Trepliov leaves, and the scene gives him an idea for a story, as he tells Nina in a speech that foreshadows their future affair: “A young girl, like you, has lived beside a lake since childhood. She loves the lake as a seagull does . . . but a man comes along, sees her, and having nothing better to do, destroys her, just like this seagull here.” This “idea” is of great symbolic importance because it is the first example of a perspective that will come up again and again in Chekhov: The greatest destruction is casual, ignorant, rooted in idleness. Nina understands nothing of the implications of the speech and, by the end of act 3, the affair is arranged. Trepliov, true to his word, shoots himself but suffers only a grazed head. Nina is “casual” about the injury, and Arkadina, though maternal for a few moments, soon begins to argue with her son again. In act 4, which opens two years later, Trigorin and Arkadina return to visit Sorin, who is ill. In the two-year interval, Masha has married Medvedenko in an attempt to put Trepliov out of her mind, and they now have a child but essentially nothing has changed: Medvedenko still spends all his time worrying, either about his daughter or about money, and Masha, still yearning for Trepliov, is cruel to her husband and has virtually abandoned her child. Trepliov has succeeded in publishing but has found no contentment. Nina, after running away with Trigorin, became pregnant. He abandoned her, she lost her child, and her acting career is floundering. While the rest of the company go to a late supper, Nina comes on the scene, drawn by the news that Arkadina and Trigorin have returned. She converses with Trepliov, and clearly he still loves her. Of all the characters in the play, only Nina has changed. She has suffered greatly, but she has learned from her trials; as she tells Trepliov, “what really matters is not fame, or glamour . . . but knowing how to endure things.” Nina then leaves to pursue her acting career in an obscure village; she still loves Trigorin, but that does not stop her from living. Trepliov, however, does not have Nina’s faith. With the final realization that she is gone from his life and that his mother has no need of him, he has no use for himself, and he goes offstage and shoots himself. The rest of

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the characters, playing cards as they hear the shot, send Dorn out to investigate. They accept his explanation that the noise was just a bottle of ether exploding; as the curtain falls, Dorn takes Trigorin aside to give him the news of the shooting and to tell him to take Arkadina back to the city lest she find out. Thus the audience hears of the shooting as the card game continues, and really nothing is changed. The play ends on the same note on which it began. If Masha started the play mourning her life, she has not stopped mourning during the two years of the play’s action, and though she has a husband and a child, she cannot be said to live. Trepliov, too, has spent his time mourning rather than living, and if his death brings about no change, that is not surprising, for his death is no different from his life. Arkadina starts the play wrapped in her idleness, incapable of feeling or understanding her son’s misery, and it is not at all surprising that she plays cards as he shoots himself. Change can be seen only in Nina, who has learned not to fear life, and who works toward a future goal with faith and dedication. Uncle Vanya • The exact date of composition of Uncle Vanya is unknown, but it is known that it had been performed for some time in rural theaters before it was performed by the Moscow Art Theater. In fact, though Chekhov claimed that it was a totally new play, acts 2 and 3 are taken almost completely from his earlier failure, The Wood Demon. Although Uncle Vanya had its beginnings in The Wood Demon, it is in fact a very different play. While the earlier play was a failure, Uncle Vanya is a convincing, deeply moving work, perhaps Chekhov’s most touching play. Uncle Vanya is subtitled “Scenes from Country Life in Four Acts,” and all the action of the play takes place on the estate of Serebryakov, who has recently come there to live with his young, beautiful second wife, Yelena, after retiring from his university position. Their arrival proves a disturbance to those who have been living on or about the estate, especially Sonya, Serebryakov’s daughter; Vanya, Sonya’s uncle, the brother of Serebryakov’s first wife; and Astrov, a doctor who is Vanya’s friend. Both Serebryakov and Yelena have a hand in the crisis. Vanya and Sonya have devoted their lives to managing the estate, saving and scrimping to send every spare ruble to Serebryakov, thinking him talented, even brilliant. When he arrives on the estate, however, he is seen to be another sort of man. He suffers from gout, is perpetually in a bad mood, thinks of no one but himself, and disturbs the routine of the estate, staying up late at night writing and then not rising until late in the day. For Vanya, Serebryakov’s arrival is even more disturbing; his routine and his illusions are shattered. He realizes that all of Serebryakov’s work has been shallow, commonplace, and that his writing will not outlive him. Vanya believes he has lost his life and has worked for the last twenty-five years for nothing. More disturbing yet is the presence of Yelena, for she is young, beautiful, and idle. She draws the attention of all who see her. Vanya falls in love with her, and his love is made more painful by his jealousy of Serebryakov. Astrov, hardworking and idealistic, has been a friend of the family for years and has paid monthly visits to the estate; his work as a doctor and his efforts to preserve the ecology of the region have exhausted him, and while his intelligence is still sharp, he complains that his feelings have become deadened, leaving him incapable of love. Even he, however, is susceptible to Yelena’s charms, and before long he is ignoring his work and making daily visits to the estate. Sonya, a good-hearted, hardworking, but plain woman, has been cherishing a love for Astrov for some time, and it is agony for her to see him attracted to Yelena instead.

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The crisis comes to a head when Serebryakov calls a family meeting, expresses his discontent with life on the estate, and presents his plan to sell the estate so that he can live more comfortably. Vanya goes into a rage because Serebryakov’s plan would leave Vanya and Sonya homeless, and Serebryakov backs down from his plan, after which Vanya twice tries to shoot him, missing both times. He gives up in disgust, and the third act ends. In act 4, Serebryakov and Yelena return to the city, where they will be mailed money by Vanya and Sonya. In short, things return to their original state, except that illusions have been stripped away. Vanya knows that his efforts have been wasted, and Sonya knows that her love for Astrov has been in vain. Astrov leaves also, and while he will return, his visits will be less frequent than before. In the final scene, Sonya and Vanya sit down to their work again, and while Vanya might not be able to endure on his own, Sonya’s strength and faith in the future enable them to continue. In the long closing monologue, she voices her resolve to endure: “Well, what can we do? We must go on living. We shall go on living. . . . We shall live through a long, long succession of days and tedious evenings.” It is not difficult to see the resemblance between Sonya and Nina in The Seagull. Both possess what Chekhov called “iron in the blood,” a strength that keeps them living and working, a strength born of faith in the future. There are also resemblances among other characters in the two plays. The idleness of Yelena and selfishness of Serebryakov have their parallels in Arkadina, Masha, and Trigorin. Indeed, the general atmosphere of the two plays is similar: Life is hard, and work and faith are needed to endure it well. Few have such faith, and thus, few are able to endure and still live vitally. As Vanya says, “When people have no real life, they live on their illusions.” In Astrov, the audience sees Chekhov’s complex human vision. In many ways, Astrov is like Chekhov: He is a dedicated doctor and takes delight in the planting of trees. He suffers, however, for his efforts; they exhaust and deaden him, and his exhaustion threatens him with loss of faith and leaves him incapable of love. Yet he is a man of ideals, respected by all in the play except the self-centered Serebryakov. Yelena sees his excellence clearly and speaks movingly when she says, “He plants a tree and wonders what will come of it in a thousand years’ time, and speculates on the future happiness of mankind. Such people are rare, and we must love them.” The symbol of tree planting is particularly apt in communicating Chekhov’s vision, for it is an act which yields no instant gratification. Astrov sees that the casual destruction of forests will create a dismal future, but deliberate efforts to restore them will bring hope for a better life. In contrast, Yelena is an object of present beauty. She represents a human physical ideal, less than ideal in other ways. She does no work, has no thoughts of the future, and lives her life in idleness and boredom. Her threat is that she infects others with her ennui and self-indulgence. If there is no work for the future, Chekhov asks in this play, how is human life to improve? The Three Sisters • Chekhov had always prided himself on the speed and ease with which he wrote, but The Three Sisters was different. Numerous letters testify to the difficulty with which the play progressed; it was pulled out of him slowly, no doubt a result in part of his declining health, but probably also because it is his most searching, introspective play. It looks long and deeply at its characters, and it is no accident that it is the only one of his major works that he referred to as a “drama.” Chekhov might have claimed that The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard were comic in their vision, but in The

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Three Sisters, his sympathy for the plight of his characters outweighs all other considerations: The play is a choral lament over the loss of life. At the center of the chorus are the three Prozorov sisters: Olga, an unmarried teacher; Masha, married to Kuligin; and Irina, the youngest sister, who is twenty as the play begins. These characters are supplemented by a considerable supporting cast. Of greatest importance are Andrey, the brother of the three sisters; Vershinin, the battery commander of the military garrison in the provincial town where the sisters live; and Tuzenbakh, a lieutenant who is in love with Irina. Others are Chebutykin, an army doctor; Natalya, Andrey’s fiancée and then his wife; Kuligin, a teacher; and Solyony, a suitor for Irina. Each of the characters takes on a life of his or her own, all come together in the complex harmony that makes the work so compelling. The three sisters, though the details of their dreams are different, sing the same refrain: “To Moscow.” Eleven years before the action of the play, the family lived in Moscow, and each of the sisters yearns for Moscow as the fulfillment of her dream. Olga thinks that she would be happy if she were married, and Masha thinks that she would be happy if she were not. Irina thinks that happiness lies in working, but when she goes out to work she resents it. Andrey thinks that he would be happy if he were a professor in Moscow, but he does nothing to realize that dream; he spends his time making picture frames and playing the violin. The play’s action spans four years, beginning on the celebration of Irina’s name day, at which Vershinin, the new battery commander, presents himself. He is from Moscow and was a friend of the sisters’ late father; the sisters immediately are interested in him. They envy his recent life in Moscow, though he claims to prefer the provincial town. Masha takes a special interest in him, and, though both are married, an affair develops as the play proceeds. Also in the first act, Andrey proposes to Natalya; they are married by the time act 2 begins, and by the play’s end, they have two children, though by then, Natalya (not, like the other characters, part of the aristocracy, but rather a member of the rising middle class of Chekhov’s time) is having an affair with the head of the local council and has virtually driven the Prozorovs from their home. Another love theme concerns Irina. Tuzenbakh is in love with her and remains devoted to her throughout the four-year span of the play. Irina gives him little encouragement, for he is not handsome, and she has always dreamed of meeting her husband in Moscow. Tuzenbakh has a dangerous rival in Solyony, an eccentric, morbid character who insults everyone but Irina and is determined that he will have “no happy rivals.” The dream of going to Moscow remains unfulfilled. As the play ends, Vershinin and his men are transferred to another city, ending his affair with Masha, who returns in misery to her spineless but kind husband. Irina, finally convinced that her dream of going to Moscow will never be realized, consents to marry Tuzenbakh, though she does not love him. Before they marry, however, Solyony kills Tuzenbakh in a duel, and Irina is left alone. Olga has gone through the play hoping for some change in her burdensome life, a husband perhaps, or a rest from the constant demands of her teaching, but no husband is forthcoming, and by the end of the play her teaching chores are multiplied, because she has been made headmistress. Andrey has spent four years regretting his marriage and dreaming of great academic triumphs in Moscow, yet by the play’s end, he is reduced to baby-sitting while his wife entertains her lover. All the dreams of the sisters have been crushed, four years of life have been lost, and the play ends with the courageous but tragic spectacle of the sisters trying to cope, trying to live, though they suffer and do not know why. While Sonya in Uncle Vanya believes that the

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future will bring her rest, the three sisters try to believe that the future will bring them life. Though the sisters arrive at no answers, the questions of happiness and the future are raised often in the play. These questions are debated by Vershinin and Tuzenbakh several times; the most important of the debates takes place in act 2, when Masha joins in. Vershinin poses the question, “What will life be like in two or three hundred years?” and leaves the floor open for speculation. Tuzenbakh responds that the superficial details of people’s life will change, but their essential situation will not: “. . . man will be sighing much the same as before, ‘Ah, how difficult life is.’ And yet he will be afraid of death and as unwilling to die as he is nowadays.” Vershinin’s views are different; he believes that somewhere in the future “a new, happy life will appear.” He believes that the present generation sacrifices happiness now so that future generations can be happy—indeed, that such altruism is the meaning of life—but Tuzenbakh denies that people know anything about meaning. At this point, Masha breaks in, claiming that “man must have faith, or he must look for faith. Otherwise, his life is empty, empty. . . . Either you know the reason why you are living, or else everything is nonsense.” In this debate lies all the suffering of humankind. Masha seeks to know why she exists, but who is to tell her? While she waits for an answer, life passes her by. Tuzenbakh denies that there is an answer or rather denies that there is any way to find the answer and so does not trouble himself overmuch with the question. Vershinin defines his own answer, his own explanation for his sufferings, one very similar to Chekhov’s own beliefs, and it helps him to carry on. What makes the difference, Chekhov suggests, is faith in the future. Faith is belief without proof, and only such faith can enable a person to work with confidence for the future happiness of the race while recognizing its present misery. This was Chekhov’s situation. He could see that most people were miserable and dissatisfied, that they frittered their lives away on trivial concerns, and so he postulated a movement toward perfection and tried with his plays to contribute to it. Though many around him did nothing, he viewed them more with pity than with disdain, as Tuzenbakh views Solyony: “I’m both sorry for him and annoyed, but I’m more sorry.” The Cherry Orchard • The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov’s last play, caused considerable disagreement between Chekhov and Stanislavsky over questions of staging, for Chekhov contended that it was a comedy while Stanislavsky claimed it was a tragedy. One must feel sympathy for Stanislavsky, for, despite many farcical elements in the play, it moves the audience to a complex sadness rather than to laughter. Most of the characters, though silly, even hilariously so, fail to understand their lives, fail to live meaningfully, and therefore lose their lives. Still, Chekhov was at least partially right, for, in the character of Anya, who at seventeen is the youngest character in the play, the audience can see some hope for the future, for a new life beginning, as in the character of Nina in The Seagull. The action of the play takes place on the estate of Madame Lyubov Ranevsky. She has been absent from her estate for some time, having run off to Paris with her lover to escape the grief she felt over the loss of her young son. She returns virtually penniless, confronted with the problem of what to do to save the estate and its beautiful cherry orchard. With her on the estate are her brother Gaev; Varya, her adopted daughter; Anya, her natural daughter; and their servants Sharlotta, Yepihodov, Dunyasha, Firs, and Yasha. This group is supplemented by Trofimov, a young student who keeps getting expelled from the university for his revolutionary views, and Lopakhin, a wealthy

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merchant and former peasant. As the action opens, the problem to be solved is how to pay all the money owed on the estate; this question remains unresolved throughout the play. Indeed, Lyubov and her clan seem incapable of any kind of action. She and her kind, like the Prozorovs, are a dying breed. Although they recognize the fact, they seem helpless to do anything about it. They are fast being replaced by the rising merchant class, Lopakhin and his kind, as the Prozorovs were gradually replaced by Natalya and her lover in The Three Sisters. The play is full of comic touches: Yepihodov’s shoes squeak, Trofimov falls down a flight of stairs (without hurting himself), Varya gives Lopakhin a swat on the head meant for Yepihodov, Lopakhin teases Varya, Gaev speaks nonsense and talks to bookcases, and Sharlotta gives demonstrations of parlor magic. The play is kept from farce, however, by Chekhov’s delineation of character. The audience comes to know the characters too well to laugh at them, instead feeling a sense of profound pity for their pain and helplessness. Only Lopakhin has a plan to “save” the estate, but his plan is to destroy the orchard, build little villas on the property, and rent them out, thus providing a steady income. He suggests this solution to Lyubov, but she has lived on the estate since she was a child; she loves the orchard and does not seriously consider Lopakhin’s plan. Instead, the family debates grand schemes and hopes for aid from distant relations but proves incapable of taking any action. Lyubov has grown so used to squandering her money that she cannot stop, and during the play, she gives gold to a beggar, though Varya is forced to feed the servants nothing but soup. The audience waits for the inevitable to happen, as it does when the estate is sold at auction, bought by Lopakhin, who proceeds with his original plan. The final act shows the Ranevsky family leaving their beloved home with the sound of axes in the background as their cherry orchard becomes a thing of the past. The play’s plot is simple; there are no surprises. Chekhov brings forth the inner lives of his characters so that the audience can understand them, see their foolishness, and yet pity them. Gaev is an excellent example. He has deep feelings and the urge to express them, but no one wants to listen to him. No one protests when he speaks in meaningless billiard terms, but when he speaks what is really in his heart, everyone protests. Perhaps it would be better for Gaev to remain silent, as Anya suggests he should, for no one listens to him; he does not even listen to himself, for though he hears the “call” to work, he has never heeded it. Therein lies the problem of the play: No one combines the qualities necessary for a meaningful life. Some, such as Varya and Lopakhin, are workers, and some—such as Trofimov, Lyubov, and Gaev—have beautiful ideas, but no one works in behalf of worthy ideas. Lopakhin labors only for money, without any vision of the future, so he is able to destroy the orchard without even recognizing what he is doing, what is being lost. Trofimov makes compelling speeches about the need for work, the need to build for the future, but he only listens to the sound of his voice; he does not work. Varya spends every moment working, caring for the estate, but she labors only so that she will not have time to lament her fate. She hates her work but cannot bear idle time, for when idle, she weeps. Lyubov herself has compelling ideas, centering on her love for the man in Paris and for the orchard, but she does not know what to do for the things she loves. She loves the cherry orchard and idly watches it pass from her hands. Each of the characters speaks of his or her innermost anxieties, and yet each remains alone, for while they speak their anguish the others go about their lives, never

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listening, caught up only in their own struggles. This failure to listen, this obliviousness, is the most distinctive element of the play, for it isolates the characters from one another and makes any individual effort fruitless. The final image of the play is that of Firs, the oldest character, who is left behind, forgotten by the family he has served all his life. Left alone after his years of service, he comments to himself that “Life has slipped by as though I hadn’t lived.” The last sounds of the play are the mournful sound of a breaking string and the sound of an ax chopping down a tree in the orchard. Much that is beautiful goes to waste and is destroyed in this play, and the orchard stands as a symbol for all. It was beautiful, but it had no purpose, and so it must be reduced to nothing. The same can be said of Lyubov, Gaev, and others. The one bright spot is Anya, still young enough to put her life to some purpose, as she plans to do as the play ends. She does not mourn the loss of the orchard, for she plans to make all Russia her orchard, a plan of which Chekhov would approve. In this last play, Chekhov included a bit of dialogue that goes a long way toward explaining his purpose in writing for the theater. Lopakhin tells Lyubov that he went to see a play (a conventional comedy) the day before that was very funny. Lyubov answers with a speech that could not have defended Chekhov’s drama more eloquently: “And most likely there was nothing funny in it. You shouldn’t look at plays, you should look at yourselves a little oftener. How gray your lives are. How much nonsense you talk.” That is why Chekhov has, and will continue to have, so secure a place in the world of drama: He shows his audiences the triviality, the grayness of their lives, so that they will change themselves, working with faith toward a greater future for humankind. Other major works short fiction: Skazki Melpomeny, 1884; Pystrye rasskazy, 1886; Nevinnye rechi, 1887; V sumerkakh, 1887; Rasskazy, 1888; The Tales of Tchehov, 1916-1922 (13 volumes); The Undiscovered Chekhov: Forty-three New Stories, 1999. nonfiction: Ostrov Sakhalin, 1893-1894; Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics, 1924; The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov, 1955. miscellaneous: The Works of Anton Chekhov, 1929; Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy i pisem A. P. Chekhova, 1944-1951 (20 volumes); The Portable Chekhov, 1947; The Oxford Chekhov, 1964-1980 (9 volumes). Bibliography Allen, David. Performing Chekhov. New York: Routledge, 2000. A look at the production of Chekhov’s dramatic works on the stage. Bibliography and index. Bloom, Harold, ed. Anton Chekhov. Philadelphia, Pa.: Chelsea House, 1999. A critical assessment of the literary works of Chekhov. Bibliography and index. Callow, Philip. Chekhov, the Hidden Ground: A Biography. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998. A biography of Chekhov that covers his life and works. Bibliography and index. Gilman, Richard. Chekhov’s Plays: An Opening into Eternity. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995. A scholarly study of the dramas of Chekhov. Bibliography and index. Gottlieb, Vera, and Paul Allain, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. A guide to the life and works of the playwright. Malcolm, Janet. Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey. New York: Random House, 2001. A critical analysis of the works of Chekhov. Bibliography.

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Rayfield, Donald. Anton Chekhov: A Life. 1998. Reprint. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2000. A detailed biography of Anton Chekhov including material about his relationship with various members of his family and his antecedents, his literary friendships, and the literary environment of prerevolutionary Russia. Index. _______. Understanding Chekhov: A Critical Study of Chekhov’s Prose and Drama. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999. A critical examination of the writings of Chekhov. Index. Senelick, Laurence. The Chekhov Theatre: A Century of the Plays in Performance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. A look at the stage history and production of Chekhov’s works. Hugh Short

Chikamatsu Monzaemon Chikamatsu Monzaemon

Sugimori Nobumori Born: Fukui, Echizen Province, Japan; 1653 Died: Sakai, Japan; January 6, 1725 Principal drama • Yotsugi Soga, pr. 1683, pb. 1896; Shusse Kagekiyo, pr. 1686, pb. 1890; Semimaru, pr. 1686 (English translation, 1978); Sonezaki shinjw, pr. 1703 (The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, 1961); Yomei Tenno Shokunin Kagami, pr. 1705; Horikawa nami no tsuzumi, pr. 1706 (The Drum of the Waves of Horikawa, 1961); Shinjw Kasaneizutsu, pr. 1707; Tamba Yosaku, pr. 1708 (Yosaku from Tamba, 1961); Shinjw Mannenso, pr. 1708 (The Love Suicides in the Women’s Temple, 1961); Keisei Hangoko, pr. 1708; Meido no hikyaku, pr. 1711 (The Courier for Hell, 1961); Yugiri Awa no Naruto, pr. 1712; Kokusenya kassen, pr. 1715 (The Battles of Coxinga, 1951); Yari no Gonza, pr. 1717 (Gonza the Lancer, 1961); Nebiki no kadomatsu, pr. 1718 (The Uprooted Pine, 1961); Soga kaikeizan, pr. 1718 (The Soga Revenge, 1929); Heike nyogo no shima, pr. 1719 (English translation, 1979); Hakata Kojoro Namimakura, pr. 1719 (The Girl from Hakata: Or, Love at Sea, 1961); Futago sumidagawa, pr. 1720 (Twins at the Sumida River, 1982); Tsu no kuni meoto-ike, pr. 1721 (Lovers Pond in Settsu Province, 1992); Shinsu kawa-nakajima kassen, pr. 1721 (Battles at Kawa-nakajima, 1992); Shinjw ten no Amijima, pr. 1721 (The Love Suicides at Amijima, 1953); Onnagoroshi: Abura jigoku, pr. 1721 (The Woman-Killer and the Hell of Oil, 1961); Shuju Yoigoshin, pr. 1722 (Love Suicides on the Eve of the Koshin Festival, 1992); Kanhasshu tsunagi-uma, pr. 1724 (Tethered Steed and the Eight Provinces of Kanto, 1992); Major Plays of Chikamatsu, pb. 1961; Chikamatsu: Five Late Plays, pb. 2001 Other literary forms • Chikamatsu Monzaemon is known primarily for his plays. Achievements • Chikamatsu Monzaemon took the joruri puppet theater, the leading popular theatrical form of his day, and through his own dramatic and poetic skill lifted a plebeian art form to the heights of serious drama. In this accomplishment, he brought changes to the theater of his age as significant as those achieved by Zeami Motokiyo in the medieval No theater several centuries earlier. The range of his writing, from political dramas on Chinese and Japanese themes to intimate stories about the domestic life of his contemporary society, has given him the nickname of the Japanese William Shakespeare. The two societies were sufficiently different that the appellation cannot hold; nevertheless, the comparison does suggest the power of Chikamatsu’s theatrical creations to hold the attention of audiences down to the present day. Widely admired and often copied, Chikamatsu remains the most important figure in the Japanese theater from the seventeenth century to modern times, when his works have been adapted for the modern stage and for films as well with great success. Biography • Despite Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s enormous popularity, few details about his life are clear that do not relate directly to his theatrical activities. Born Sugimori Nobumori, his exact place and date of birth and death are still contested, and little is known of his early education, except from the internal evidence of the plays, 166

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which reveals his real familiarity with Chinese philosophical writings and Japanese Buddhist texts, as well as a love of Japanese classical prose and poetry. Chikamatsu began writing plays for both the puppet theater and then later for live actors (in Kabuki), but he spent the major part of his career working in the puppet theater, particularly at the Takemotoza in Osaka; a number of his great plays were written for that performing group. When his patron Takemoto Gidayw died in 1714, Chikamatsu, by then an experienced writer of sixty-one, decided to help the new head of the troupe to continue and, putting forth his best efforts, wrote a half dozen of his greatest plays in the next and final decade of his active life. The exact circumstances of his last years are unknown, and details about his domestic life are few and contradictory. What is known of the man is derived from his art. Analysis • Although Western writers tend to use the world “play” or “drama” in describing the work of Chikamatsu Monzaemon, some explanation of the word joruri will be helpful in understanding Chikamatsu’s accomplishments, as well as his inevitable limitations. When Chikamatsu began his career, there were no troupes of live actors performing any kind of real dramatic spectacle. Rather, chanters of various sorts of stories, usually historical accounts of the Japanese medieval wars, considerably embellished, began to use musical accompaniment, simple puppets (worked by multiple handlers from below), and scenery to illustrate their accounts. The very name joruri, which defines the genre, is taken from the name of one of those historical embellishments, a fictional princess who supposedly fell in love with Yoshitsune, the celebrated general who died during the civil wars in 1185 and who remained one of the great cultural heroes of the Japanese tradition. During the period prior to Chikamatsu’s ascendancy, various chanters (all of whom wrote their own texts) tried adapting certain features from the elegant medieval No theater in order to give their popular stories more shape and substance. When Takemoto Gidayw himself decided to commission the young Chikamatsu to compose a text for him to perform, a new tradition was begun, for up until that time, no “playwright” as such had ever been used. This new division of labor helped increase enormously the potential for literary expression. Reading a translation of a Chikamatsu play, Westerners will find the structure of dialogue plus narrator relatively familiar, yet it must be remembered that in Chikamatsu’s time, one performer chanted all the roles and created all the voices. This bravura aspect of the performance was an important consideration in the planning and organization of the texts and gives joruri a resemblance to Western opera, where certain conventions are also embedded in the text. This is one limitation placed on Chikamatsu’s art, and yet, on the whole, it was one with which he could live comfortably as he was in control of the script. Chikamatsu also experimented at various points in his career with writing for Kabuki actors, theatrical groups that had begun to perform dramas in the large cities. Actors had a tendency to change Chikamatsu’s lines, however, and so he returned to writing for the puppet theater and continued to do so for most of his career. The Kabuki theater, indeed, grew up in the shadow of the joruri puppet theater and imitated its style in many important respects, including the stylization of physical movement. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Kabuki had become more popular than the joruri; efforts were made in the early nineteenth century to win back audiences to the puppet theater (by then called Bunraku), but the actor’s theater continued in its ascendancy. By that time, the actors often performed Chikamatsu’s dramas as though

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they had been written for them, but, in fact, virtually all of Chikamatsu’s great works were composed for the puppet stage. During the early years of his career, Chikamatsu tended to write dramas on historical themes, adapted from various chronicles or from medieval No dramas. In 1703, he wrote a play about contemporary life, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, and after the success of that experiment, his writings began to encompass both styles. Chikamatsu’s audiences in his mature years were almost completely made up of the merchant class in Osaka, the center of protobourgeois culture in Japan during that period. Because of strict social class barriers imposed by the Tokugawa shoguns since shortly after 1600, the merchants were cut off from higher forms of culture, yet came to have the money, the leisure, and, eventually, the cultivation to pursue artistic interests and pastimes. Therefore, both types of plays written by Chikamatsu appealed greatly to them: The history plays ( jidaimono) served as a means to teach them about the glories and complexities of the Japanese past, both in the court and in military circles, and the domestic dramas (sewamono) provided them with a powerful glimpse into the intimacies of the world that they themselves inhabited. For modern audiences as well, these domestic dramas, which deal with the vicissitudes of the personal lives of the townspeople, still possess an emotional reality that is compelling. For all the differences between the urban society at the time of Chikamatsu and now, there are certain powerful similarities, which make the domestic dramas both appealing and poignant even today. In fact, Chikamatsu may have been the first major dramatist to make ordinary men and women, with all their foibles and weaknesses, the protagonists of tragic drama. A dramatist such as George Lillo in eighteenth century England attempted to do the same sort of thing in his play The London Merchant: Or, The History of George Barnwell (pr., pb. 1731), but it was not until much later that such characters were regularly portrayed in a sympathetic fashion on the European stage. For a modern reader, Chikamatsu may often seem closer to an Arthur Miller than to a Shakespeare. As the historical dramas of Chikamatsu were always drawn from actual events in the past, so the domestic dramas, too, were taken from real events in Japanese society, often dramatized as soon after the fact as possible. In a special way, these domestic plays served as living newspapers, which presented accounts of lurid or sensational events adapted for their theatrical effectiveness. The attraction for the audience of such plays thus lay far less in the “plot” of the events portrayed, which they knew at least in outline, than in experiencing the art with which Chikamatsu reworked his material. Much ink has been spilled over the question as to whether Chikamatsu was a “realist,” in a contemporary sense of the world. The playwright himself put these questions to rest in an eloquent statement he made during the course of an interview that was published after his death. When asked about the need to create an art that would resemble reality closely, he replied that art and reality were not the same. Pure realism “does not take into account the real methods of art. Art is something which lies in the slender margin between the real and the unreal . . . and entertainment lies between the two.” To a modern reader, it is clear that both the artifice of the puppets and the beauty of Chikamatsu’s language (and here he most resembles Shakespeare) could lift the most banal, even sordid, “reality” to great heights of genuine pathos. The Battles of Coxinga • Of the history plays, the only drama available in full translation is Chikamatsu’s most successful effort, The Battles of Coxinga, first performed in

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1715 and undoubtedly his most popular work. The play concerns the exploits of Coxinga, a famous hero in Japanese history who was involved in the battles surrounding the fall of the Ming Dynasty in China, about a century or so before the composition of the play. His exploits had become legendary, and the play contains a number of incidents from his complex career juxtaposed and embellished to make as brilliant a series of effects as possible. Read on the page, the text seems full of bombast and arbitrary confrontations, but seen in performance, The Battles of Coxinga provides a series of striking vignettes that exploit the possibilities of the puppet stage to their fullest. It has often been said that audiences were particularly excited by The Battles of Coxinga because it dealt with the exotic Chinese scenes at a time when, because of the policies of the Tokugawa shogunate, the Japanese themselves were no longer allowed to travel abroad. Whatever the reason, the scenes of China and Chinese life presented make up in color and fantasy what they may lack in historical veracity. The play opens at the court of the Ming emperor in Nanking. He is portrayed as a weak man, surrounded by corrupt ministers; only one, Go Sankei, argues for justice, but he cannot stop the rout of the imperial forces by the enemy Tartars. The emperor is murdered. Go Sankei manages to escape with the empress, who is pregnant with the child who will carry on the imperial line; when she in turn is killed, he exchanges his own newborn child for hers, so that the imperial line may continue. Go Sankei then sends the imperial princess off on a boat so that she can escape the battle and, he hopes, reach Japan. This first act, like the rest of the play, is filled with devices that call to mind the most outrageous Jacobean tragedies: Eyes are gouged out; babies are torn from the womb. With actors, the effect would be merely grotesque; with puppets, the results seem larger than life and quite heroic. In the second act, Coxinga (who is half Japanese and half Chinese) is quietly fishing and thinking on the fate of the Ming court, where his father had been a high-ranking minister. When the princess drifts to shore in her boat, Coxinga and his Japanese wife decide that he should travel to China to attempt to keep the Ming Dynasty from collapse. In this section of the play, Coxinga’s speeches are a model of powerful eloquence, indeed, grandiloquence. The subsequent scenes contain a combination of battles and adventures, including a fight with a tiger that must have taxed the original producers considerably. Coxinga now begins to gather around him brave Chinese who wish to fight the Tartars as well. In act 3, Coxinga meets his half sister, and after a complex series of maneuvers, he manages to win both her and her husband, a general, to his side. Again, the actions are, like the language employed, far larger than life. In act 4, Go Sankei, still attempting to escape the Tartar soldiers, leads the young imperial prince to a mystical mountain summit where the Nine Immortals of China look out over the destinies of the nation. Coxinga appears, and the two unite for a final victory, helped by the Immortals, who build a sort of rainbow bridge to help them escape from the attacking enemy. When the villainous soldiers rush across, the bridge dissolves and they are crushed below at the foot of the mountain. The final act of the play brings all the contending forces together. The evil minister is captured, and Coxinga and his allies are triumphant. Described in such a fashion, the play may seem merely bombastic, but it possesses a beauty and excitement in the original that in some fashion may call to mind the effect of a play such as Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (pr. c. 1587). As noted above, the play is meant to be larger than life, both in its language and as a theatrical event. At the same time, even within this heroic framework, Chikamatsu manages moments of humor and whimsy that are on a wholly human scale. In terms of high enter-

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tainment, the play is unsurpassed. Indeed, Chikamatsu’s formula for success—a mixture of the nationalistic, the exotic, and the poetic—is one that has succeeded in most cultures. Other historical dramas • Most of Chikamatsu’s other historical dramas deal with events in earlier Japanese history, with stories taken either from the world of the Heian court in the eleventh century or from the medieval war period that followed. Again, bombastic generals and sophisticated courtiers are brought to life in complicated plots that allow for a full range of fantasy in setting, action, and language. Some plays use earlier dramas and expand on them. A notable case in point is that of Chikamatsu’s Semimaru, which uses the No drama of Zeami by the same title as a centerpiece and then extends the story backward and forward until a full evening of intrigue and adventure is created. Again the audience, doubtless familiar with the original drama, took pleasure less from the tale of the blind prince than from the variations that Chikamatsu played on a legend already known. Modern audiences often find these historical dramas somewhat unsatisfying because of their general and diffuse nature, in which plots and subplots often relate to each other in only the most general way. Then too, the cultural knowledge on the part of spectators that could bind these elements together has been lost, so that modern Japanese audiences are practically at as much of a loss as Western spectators or readers in catching the subtle implications of Chikamatsu’s juxtapositions. Domestic dramas • It is perhaps for reasons such as these that Chikamatsu’s reputation has shifted from his historical to his domestic plays, which now have taken on new value. Original audiences could take much for granted in these plays. Now, because of Chikamatsu’s faithful renderings of certain details of Tokugawa life and culture, modern viewers can savor the atmosphere of a quite different time through the means of these dramas, which, although often melodramatic and arbitrary in plot structure, contain the kind of elegant language and emotional commitment on the part of the author that make the situations powerfully touching. The Love Suicides at Sonezaki • The first of the domestic plays, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, was written twelve years before The Battles of Coxinga. The play was evidently written to serve as a kind of interlude for a longer historical drama, and in its three brief scenes, Chikamatsu portrayed a highly poetic version of the suicide of the two young lovers. In Tokubei, the shop attendant, Chikamatsu created what may be the first modern hero—weak, vacillating, yet capable of being aroused to righteous fury. He is in love with a courtesan from the licensed quarters, Ohatsu, who works in a teahouse, actually a kind of elegant brothel sanctioned by the Tokugawa authorities. Forced to part from her by the machinations of the evil Kuheiji, Tokubei decides to “show all Osaka the purity at the bottom of my heart,” and the couple vow to commit suicide together. The couple’s parting moments in the teahouse, filled with little touches of realism provided by the minor servants and other characters, are nicely portrayed, and the final scene, when the lovers journey to their death at the Sonezaki Shrine, is one of the most sustained examples of lyric writing in the Japanese theater. Through the device of the narrator, Chikamatsu solves the problem that has plagued all writers of realistic theater who have sought for a way for characters of limited education and insight to speak with eloquence. The great poetry is here provided by the narrator, who takes the

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audience both inside the thoughts of the characters (who actually say very little) and then back into the realm of philosophical, in particular Buddhist, speculation. The death of the lovers is both touching and convincing. With this play, Chikamatsu successfully created a new genre of drama, and, at least in the final scene, achieved a standard of poetic excellence that he later equaled, but never surpassed. As his career continued, Chikamatsu went on to develop the genre of the domestic play, adding new elements and more complex plots, so that, rather than serving as interludes during longer performances of historical dramas, the domestic plays came to stand as independent and complete works in themselves. Quite often the plays were written about incidents that took place in the licensed quarters, such as The Uprooted Pine, but others dealt with adultery, murder, and piracy, even life in a Buddhist monastery. The Love Suicides at Amijima • Chikamatsu’s greatest achievement in this genre, however, is surely his play The Love Suicides at Amijima, written in 1721, just at the end of his career. Performed countless times by puppet troupes and by Kabuki companies as well, the play has both been adapted for the modern stage and made the subject of a famous film. The Love Suicides at Amijima is often considered to be the greatest single work written for the traditional Japanese stage. Like Chikamatsu’s first domestic play, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, The Love Suicides at Amijima builds its complex plot on a simple story of a weak but good-hearted man who falls in love with a courtesan and decides to die with her. In the later play, however, which is in three acts, the playwright has provided a whole network of minor characters and situations that flesh out the action and render the outcome all the more moving and inevitable. As with the other plays of this sort, Chikamatsu based his drama on a series of actual events and evidently went to considerable trouble to learn certain details of the incident before composing his text. The earlier play, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, shows poetic excellence, but The Love Suicides at Amijima is graced as well with a certain elegiac tonality that can only be described as religious. Even the title itself in the original Japanese contains a hint of Buddhist salvation, since the place-name Amijima can be rendered as the “island of nets,” a reference to the image that depicts Buddha catching the innocent and the sinful alike in his nets to haul them up to paradise. In the first act, Jihei, the paper merchant, is in love with the courtesan Koharu, in defiance of his wife and her relatives. There is also a villain who vies for Koharu’s affections, Tahei. Within this simple basic structure, Chikamatsu weaves a number of new elements to add emotional complexity. A mysterious samurai, who remonstrates with Jihei about his debauchery, later turns out to be his brother. Later, in the second act, Jihei learns that his wife, Osan, has been instrumental in attempting to separate him from Koharu, but in a stunning twist, he manages to persuade his wife to allow him to ransom Koharu to save her from the advances of Tahei. Jihei’s parents-in-law suddenly arrive and, shocked by his behavior, decide to take their daughter Osan back home with them. In the final act, Jihei decides to commit suicide with Koharu. He pays his debts and leads her away. As in The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, the language of this last act is particularly powerful. The lovers lament their fate, and, by implication, the power of the society that has forced them to part. Through the power of his language and imagery, Chikamatsu allows the pair to make a kind of transcendental spiritual pilgrimage to a realm where obligations can be cast aside, and where the two can live as Buddhist

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priest and nun, “to escape the inconstant world.” As the priests at a nearby temple begin their chant at dawn, Jihei puts Koharu to death, then does away with himself. His body, washed out to sea, is picked up by the fishermen in their nets. In terms of consistency of characterization and power of imagery, The Love Suicides at Amijima remains a superb example of the possibilities of joruri. For a modern reader, the form certainly has limitations. Characters are seldom ambiguous, since the heads used for the puppets have fixed expressions which reveal the general nature of the character being portrayed. Then too, since the puppets are lifeless, the text prepared for the chanter must be strong, even strident, in order to make up for the lack of interior life in the dolls themselves. The social mores of the time, particularly those pertaining to the licensed quarters, are sufficiently removed from those of modern life to make the passions of the various characters seem overwrought and, occasionally, downright outlandish. Nevertheless, a play like The Love Suicides at Amijima still rings true, whatever the problems of historical distance, because of the power of Chikamatsu’s language and his commitment to an understanding of what were, for him, situations of genuine dignity and pathos within the context of his own society. Bibliography Brazell, Karen, ed. Traditional Japanese Theater: An Anthology of Plays. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Includes one of Chikamatsu’s love suicide plays as well as introductions describing the genre and the specific play. Gerstle, C. Andrew. Circles of Fantasy: Convention in the Plays of Chikamatsu. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. A study of the plays of Chikamatsu, focusing on literary conventions. Bibliography and index. _______. “Heroic Honor: Chikamatsu and the Samurai Ideal.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 57, no. 2 (December, 1997): 307-381. A look at the samurai in the play Kanhasshu tsunagi-uma (Tethered Steed and the Eight Provinces of Kanto). Heine, Steve. “Tragedy and Salvation in the Floating World: Chikamatsu’s Double Suicide Drama as Millenarian Discourse.” The Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 2 (May, 1994): 367. Chikamatsu’s dramas are examined in the light of Buddhist and Confucian theology regarding double suicide. Kominz, Laurence R. Avatars of Vengeance: Japanese Drama and the Soga Literary Tradition. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1995. An examination of the story of the Soga brothers’ failed vendetta through its retelling in No, Kabuki, and Bunraku. Chikamatsu wrote thirteen plays about the Soga brothers. Pringle, Patricia, ed. An Interpretive Guide to Bunraku. Honolulu: University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1992. Essays examine various aspects of the puppet theater, particularly Chikamatsu’s The Love Suicides at Sonezaki. Sakamoto, Edward. “The Ancient Artistry of Bunraku: A Japanese Puppet Theater Keeps a Four-Hundred-Year-Old Tradition Alive.” Los Angeles Times, September 25, 1988, p. 3. An introduction to Bunraku and Chikamatsu written on the occasion of the Bunraku Puppet Theatre of Osaka performing one of Chikamatsu’s works in Los Angeles. Sasayama, Takashi, J. R. Mulryne, and Margaret Shewring, eds. Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Contains a comparison of Chikamatsu and William Shakespeare. J. Thomas Rimer

Frank Chin Frank Chin

Born: Berkeley, California; February 25, 1940 Principal drama • The Chickencoop Chinaman, pr. 1972, pb. 1981; The Year of the Dragon, pr. 1974, pb. 1981 Other literary forms • In addition to his plays, Frank Chin has published a collection of short stories, the novels Donald Duk (1991) and Gunga Din Highway (1994), and numerous articles on Asian American literature and culture, some of which have been collected in Bulletproof Bandits and Other Essays (1998). He also co-edited a pioneering anthology of Asian American writing titled Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers (1974), substantially revised in 1991 as The Big Aiiieeeee! Achievements • Frank Chin is the first Chinese American playwright to have had serious drama produced on the New York stage (at the American Place Theater) and on national television (by the Public Broadcasting Service). Having come into prominence in the 1960’s and 1970’s, he represents the consciousness of Americans of Chinese descent—those born and reared in the United States, who thus have only tenuous ties to the language and culture of China. In addition to his achievements as a playwright, Chin has garnered attention as an editor of Asian American literature, a fiction writer, and an essayist. His work has been recognized with many awards, among them the American Book Award for lifetime achievement, and several prizes and grants from organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Place Theater (New York), and the National Endowment for the Arts. Biography • Frank Chew Chin, Jr., was born a fifth-generation Californian of Chinese American parentage on February 25, 1940, in Berkeley, California, near Oakland, where his parents lived and worked. During World War II, his family sent him to the Sierras, where he was cared for by a retired vaudeville acrobat and a silent-film bit player. After the war, he rejoined his family and grew up in the Chinatowns of Oakland and San Francisco, attending Chinese as well as English schools. During these years, he identified closely with his father, who was prominent in Chinatown governance and who became the president of the Six Companies (roughly the Chinatown equivalent of being elected mayor). Chin was graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, where he won several prizes for fiction writing; during his student years, he undertook the adventure of traveling to Fidel Castro’s Cuba. In 1961, he was awarded a fellowship at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. After leaving Iowa, Chin spent some time with the Southern Pacific Railroad, becoming the first Chinese American to work as a brakeman on the rails laid by his forefathers. Chin left the railroad company to become a writer-producer for KING-TV in Seattle, and several of his shows were aired by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and on Sesame Street. Chin left Seattle to teach Asian American studies at San Francisco State University and the University of California, Davis. With a group of scholars, he organized the 173

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(Corky Lee)

Combined Asian American Resources Project (CARP), which collected literary, documentary, and oral history materials now kept in the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. CARP has since been responsible for the publication of key Asian American texts by the University of Washington Press. In 1972, Chin founded the Asian American Theater Workshop in San Francisco with the support of the American Conservatory Theater (where he has been a writer-in-residence). In 1971, Chin married Kathleen Chang, daughter of a prominent intellectual Chinese family; the marriage ended in divorce after five years, and Chang later became haunted by visions that drove her to commit suicide in 1996 on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. In the last decades of the twentieth century, Chin maintained his residence in the Los Angeles area (living with his third wife and third child), where he channeled his energies toward the writing of fiction, essays, and children’s literature rather than drama. Meanwhile, his continuing research in Asian American folklore and history was supported by several grants (including a Rockefeller Fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles) and bore fruit in several important exhibitions. Analysis • It may be said that Frank Chin has pioneered in the field of Asian American literature. His daring and verbally exuberant theater has asserted the presence of the richly unique and deeply human complexities of Chinese American life, and his work has brought this presence to the attention of the American public. Chin has sometimes been considered the John Osborne—the “angry young man”—of his generation of Chinese Americans. His plays turn on themes of identity—anguished and indignant probings into ethnic identity, gender identity, and self-identity. In them, Chin mirrors the issues and realities of Chinese American life and history as lived in Chinatown ghet-

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tos; they seek to expose and explode generally held stereotypes of Chinese Americans as an emasculated model minority with a quaintly exotic culture. Painful truths told with exuberant verbal pyrotechnics are trademarks of Chin’s theater, and the characteristic gamut of his language ranges from black ghetto dialect to hipster talk to authentic Chinatown Cantonese (not Hollywood’s “Charlie Chanese”). He has criticized the false myths and the deadening stereotypes of self and ethnicity held by Asians and whites alike. At a time when it was ripe and necessary to do so, Chin proclaimed and proved that there is such an entity as Asian American literature. American literary history must henceforth reckon with that claim if it is to be true to itself. Since the initial mark made by his two plays written in the 1970’s, Chin has not had any new plays published or staged. Chin has instead turned his very considerable creative literary energies toward writing novels, short fiction, juvenile literature, and essays of cultural criticism. Chin’s turn away from drama is in part due to a disappointment that an authentic Asian American theater (as he sees it) has not emerged. When he wrote his first plays, he had hoped that a genuinely Asian American theater would come into being, a theater that would resemble Dublin’s Abbey Theater of the early 1900’s and that would nurture genuinely Asian American dramatic talents just as the Abbey nurtured a crop of distinctively Irish playwrights such as Sean O’Casey, John Millington Synge, and William Butler Yeats. Chin’s two plays, nevertheless, are considered classics of Asian American literature, and they continue to be studied in the academy and to attract analytical commentary and debate. There have been many revivals of these plays, especially in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Chin’s plays center on a protagonist’s confrontation with the problematics of identity. The Chickencoop Chinaman is the more experimental in technique, with an almost cinematic use of montage, flashbacks, symbolic stage sets, and surrealistic, dreamlike sequences. The Year of the Dragon is more conventional, a drama of family and psychological conflict set in a San Francisco Chinatown apartment. The Chickencoop Chinaman • The Chickencoop Chinaman is a play that treats the theme of identity through dispelling stereotypes and myths. The play is divided into two acts. Each act has a scene in Limbo (a surreal transitional time-space located between realistic time-spaces), a sequence recollecting a past obsession with a mythic figure (for example, the miracle-working Helen Keller in act 1, the popular-culture hero the Lone Ranger in act 2), and scenes set in the realistic location of 1960’s Pittsburgh, where the problem of the protagonist’s identity is worked out. The play’s action centers on Tam Lum, a Chinese American filmmaker who is making a documentary about a black boxing champion named Ovaltine Jack Dancer, a boyhood idol with whom he once shared a moment of mystic brotherhood urinating in unison in a roadside bush. Tam comes to Pittsburgh from San Francisco in search of Dancer’s father, Charley Popcorn, who was a quintessential formative figure for Dancer and who now runs a Pittsburgh theater. Allegorically, Tam’s creation of a film about Dancer is an effort to express an identity for himself, and his search for Charley is his search for a father figure. Before arriving in Pittsburgh, Tam is introduced in a Limbo scene on his airliner from San Francisco. The flight attendant is transformed into a Hong Kong Dream Girl clad in a drill team uniform and twirling a baton (hence an American dream girl, too). Indeed, the woman represents the American stereotype of Asian women—attractive, compliant, trained to give pleasure. Although Tam scoffs at the Hong Kong Dream

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Girl’s stereotypical identity, it becomes apparent that his own identity is problematic. For example, when asked what his mother tongue is, Tam can speak no Chinese, but instead begins speaking in tongues, using a startling array of American dialects. Tam also points out that Chinese American identity is not one ordained by nature; Chinese Americans are not born to an identity but must synthesize one out of the diverse experiences of living in crowded Chinatown tenements, metaphorical chicken coops. This opening sequence, then, poses the play’s central theme: the problem of stereotyping and identity. In Pittsburgh, Tam stays with a boyhood friend, a Japanese American dentist named “Blackjap” Kenji. Kenji’s apartment in Pittsburgh’s black ghetto, Oakland, ironically underlines the circularity of Tam’s search (since the San Francisco Bay area has its Oakland, too), and its location within earshot of a railroad yard is a symbolic reminder of the Chinese American contribution to American history. Tam and Kenji, who grew up in the black ghetto of Oakland, California, talk in exuberant black dialect and express themselves by slapping skin; they have, to a great degree, adopted the style and expressiveness of a black identity. Kenji’s ménage includes Lee, a part-Chinese woman who is passing for white. She has a young son, Robbie, by a previous liaison or marriage. Lee has a love-hate relationship with men of color, men whom she collects and then uses her whiteness and sexuality to dominate and intimidate. Thus, Lee lives platonically and parasitically with Kenji, in fact reducing him to a sexless host. During their reunion scene in act 1, Tam and Kenji reenact a past obsession that they had with the figure of Helen Keller, imitating and parodying her. This may seem pointlessly cruel until one realizes that, in Chin’s play, Keller symbolizes the myth of the disadvantaged person who overcomes all handicaps and pulls herself up by her own bootstraps. In other words, she epitomizes what American society fondly thinks that every disadvantaged minority group can do for itself. When Tam and Kenji mock and demythologize the figure of Helen Keller, they are, in particular, rejecting the popular American myth that Asian Americans are a model minority capable of miracles of self-help. Act 2 opens with another scene in which Tam and Kenji again recollect a mythic figure, this time the Lone Ranger. As a boy, Tam had fantasized that, behind his mask, the Lone Ranger was Chinese, and Tam had therefore identified with him as a heroic role model who represented the possibility that a Chinese American could become an idol of the American public. As Tam reenacts his past fantasy in his adulthood, however, he realizes that the Lone Ranger is a racist, as is clear in his treatment of Tonto, and that he is not by any means a Chinese. In fact, the Lone Ranger is an obese white man who sadistically shoots Tam in the hand (symbolically handicapping him physically), then lays on him the curse of being an honorary white (handicapping him psychologically with this false identity). This episode, then, demythologizes the private fantasies of any Chinese American who might believe that he can easily achieve heroic status in the American imagination; it also shows the wounding consequences of the Chinese American fantasy that they can be accepted as honorary whites. Tam and Kenji then track down Charley Popcorn. They are crushed, however, when Charley reveals that he is not, in fact, Dancer’s father—that Dancer had constructed a myth around his memories of their association. Thus Tam’s search for a surrogate and idolized father figure in a black man ends in disillusionment. Returning to the apartment, Tam and Kenji undergo another identity crisis, this time precipitated by Lee’s former husband, Tom. His name suggests the stereotype of

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the subservient minority, “Uncle Tom,” and he is the very model of the minority that has attained middle-class success. Tom has heard of Kenji’s decent but sexless relationship with Lee and wants to take Lee and Robbie back. Yet, now Kenji authoritatively stands his ground, sends Robbie to bed, and asserts that he wants Lee to stay and that he will father children with her. Tam, too, appears to recover from his shattering disillusionment with Charley. In the surrealistic penultimate scene, he is shown being borne to Kenji’s apartment on Charley’s back, and in this position, Tam recalls the unmanning events when his wife left him on his birthday. In the play’s last scene, however, Tam makes a great effort and stumbles into Kenji’s apartment carrying Charley on his back. This reversal of position symbolically denotes Tam’s freedom from his past reliance on an identity borrowed from the blacks and a new determination to find the wherewithal for a future identity from sources within himself. He is thus able to keep his integrity despite the needling of Lee and the allurement of Tom’s imitation whiteness. Just as Kenji and Lee are united in a new relationship, so Tam is shown coming to terms with an identity grounded on his own ethnicity. Before the curtain falls, Tam is shown in the kitchen unashamedly practicing the craft of his ethnic group par excellence. As he prepares the food, he reminisces about the Chinese American legend of the Iron Moonhunter, a mythic train that the Chinese railroaders supposedly created out of parts stolen from the railroad companies, and which wanders the West searching out the souls of dead Chinese to bear them home to their families. Chin seems to understand that people need myths, and in the end, his protagonist, disillusioned with the black myth that is unavailable to him and rejecting a white myth that he finds contemptible, shapes his own myth of identity in the heroism and craft of Chinese America. The Year of the Dragon • Chin’s second play, The Year of the Dragon, is more conventionally structured than its predecessor and was accorded a national audience in a television production on the Public Broadcasting Service’s “PBS Theatre in America” in 1975. This play also treats the theme of identity, but it focuses more sharply and poignantly on the question of self-worth: the worth of an individual self to loved ones (family) and the worth of a minority ethnic group to the majority society (whitedominated America). Again, stereotypes form the chief factor that obscures individual worth and identity—stereotypes about family relationships, stereotypes about ethnicity. These thematic strands are worked out in the exposition of the many psychological conflicts and confrontations in the well-established Eng family of San Francisco’s Chinatown. The exposition, and exposé, of ethnic stereotypes is presented chiefly through two elements of the play: the family business of providing tours of Chinatown and the new Anglo son-in-law whom their daughter has brought from Boston. The family owns Eng’s Chinatown Tour and Travel agency, and the eldest son, forty-year-old Fred, conducts tours of San Francisco’s Chinatown. For the sake of business, however, Fred cannot show Chinatown as it really is; rather, he must pander to the stereotypes of Chinatown held by the American public—that it is an exotic place of delicious foods, mysterious (but safe) goings on, and incomprehensible (but happy) inhabitants composed of attractively available women, complaisant men, and harmonious families with above-average children. Fred knows that he is being false to himself and his people when he gives his happy tour-guide’s spiel, and he mutters curses at his customers under his breath beneath his patter. In reality, Fred would like to tell the truths of Chinatown, which he sets down in short stories, but no one will publish his

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work. Through Fred’s situation, then, Chin portrays the stifling effects of ethnic stereotypes. The other element in the play that deals with ethnic stereotypes is presented through the character Ross, the Eng family’s Boston-bred son-in-law on a honeymoon visit from the East. He is portrayed as a well-meaning but oafish Sinophile who has studied Chinese (although in a dialect different from the Eng family’s), admires Chinese culture and customs, and thinks of Chinese Americans as the only minority group that does not dislike white dominance. Such stereotypes prevent him from seeing the Chinese American realities that trip him up constantly. His type of cultural voyeurism is subtly captured in the play’s final scene, in which he is appointed photographer to take posed pictures of the Eng family. In this technically effective scene, Chin uses spatial form as adroitly as did Gustave Flaubert in the “agricultural fair” scene of Madame Bovary (1857; English translation, 1886). Through a kind of auditory montage, Chin creates an ironic counterpoint commenting on Ross’s photography by interspersing the scene with the sounds and spiel of a tour guide describing a Chinese New Year’s parade offstage. Just as the tourists are gawking at the Chinatown parade, so is Ross ogling his new Chinese American family. In probing the stereotypes of familial relationships, Chin makes a painful but necessary criticism of stereotypes held by his own ethnic group. He also dispels the Charlie Chan-esque stereotype held by many Americans, that Chinese families are uniformly harmonious and hierarchical. Much of the conflict in the family swirls around its patriarch, Pa Eng, who came to the United States in 1935 accompanied only by his infant son Fred, for he was forced to leave his wife in China because United States immigration laws excluded Chinese women from entering America. Pa Eng soon married a fifteen-year-old Americanborn Chinese girl (Ma Eng), who risked losing her American citizenship by marrying the man she loved (her citizenship was at risk not because she married a bigamist but because another American anti-Chinese law forbade American-born women to marry Chinese men on pain of forfeiting their citizenship). Ma Eng bore and reared two children, meanwhile pampering Pa Eng in his stereotypical Chinese view of the patriarch as a kind of semidivinity. When the play opens, Pa Eng has prospered, to the point that he has been elected mayor of Chinatown. Yet he is now old and ill, and he believes that his days are numbered. He wants to die in the bosom of his family, so he has sent for his first wife (China Mama). This he has done without communicating his intent to his family. (In fact, throughout the play, the family members can hardly be said to communicate; they never bother to listen to what others have to say.) China Mama’s arrival, as can be expected, precipitates several crises during which Pa Eng appears an inconsiderate, uncomprehending, ego-bound patriarch. He commands Ma Eng, who is unnerved by this presence in her household, either to relinquish her home or to be subservient to China Mama and begin teaching her English. It is in his relationship with Fred, however, that Pa Eng’s authoritarian role becomes most apparent. Pa Eng’s patriarchal dominance and his Chinese values have acted as longstanding denials of Fred’s identity and self-worth. Fred had aspired to be a writer, but his father scoffed at this: According to stereotypes he holds, if one is not a doctor or a lawyer, one is nothing at all. Pa Eng gives his mayoral speech to Ross to edit, not to Fred, who majored in English. Nevertheless, Fred is a dutiful son, nursing his father when he spits blood and even going through a daily ritual of accompanying him to the toilet and wiping him after a defecation, a viscerally affecting scene to stage. Fred has also sacrificed

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his own college career to work and provide for his sister’s college expenses, but his father does not appreciate that, probably because his stereotypical values do not accord much importance to daughters. Fred also is aware that his younger brother, Johnny, is deteriorating into a gun-wielding Chinatown mobster and wants him to leave his environment and go to college in the East. This Johnny resists. Fred knows that Johnny will go to college if Pa Eng orders him, but Pa Eng refuses. Instead, Pa Eng wants Fred to accompany him as he delivers his mayoral speech. In this speech, he plans to acknowledge Fred as his heir, but he will do it in such a way that Fred will always be fitted with the stereotypical identity of a Number One Son, a person who has no self-worth beyond that which derives from his father. This is unacceptable to Fred, who refuses to go with his father as long as he refuses to order Johnny to leave Chinatown. In attempting to impose his will on his son, Pa Eng resorts to violence and slaps him repeatedly. Yet the physical exertion is too much for the sick old man, and he dies in this pitiable moment of futile tyranny. Tragically, Pa Eng’s death does not free Fred. The closing tableau of the play shows Fred being submerged by his milieu as he slips into the spiel of the Chinatown tour guide, and as the spotlight singles him out, Fred is shown dressed glaringly in white, the Chinese symbol of death. Other major works long fiction: Donald Duk, 1991; Gunga Din Highway, 1994. short fiction: The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R.R. Co., 1988. teleplays: S.R.T., Act Two, 1966; The Bel Canto Carols, 1966; A Man and His Music, 1967; Ed Sierer’s New Zealand, 1967; Seafair Preview, 1967; The Year of the Ram, 1967; And Still Champion . . . , 1967; The Report, 1967; Mary, 1969; Rainlight Rainvision, 1969; Chinaman’s Chance, 1971. nonfiction: Bulletproof Buddhists and Other Essays, 1998. edited texts: Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers, 1974 (with others; Asian American writing); The Big Aiiieeeee!, 1991. Bibliography Barnes, Clive. “Theater: Culture Study.” The New York Times, June 3, 1974, p. 39. A balanced review of The Year of the Dragon in performance at the American Place Theater in New York City. Barnes notes that the play has “gaps” and “lacks energy at times” but is still “interesting.” He praises the “absolutely fascinating . . . insights” that Chin provides while dispelling stereotypes about Chinese Americans, investigating Chinese American identity, and exploring generational differences. Chua, C. L. “The Year of the Dragon, by Frank Chin.” In A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature, edited by Sau-ling Wong and Stephen Sumida. New York: Modern Language Association, 2001. Intended for students and teachers, this essay provides an overview of the play, historical contexts, pedagogical suggestions, and intertextual linkages. Kim, Elaine H. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. In chapter 6 of this essential and pioneering study of Asian American literature, Kim discusses Chin together with other writers of his generation. Kim’s focus is on Chin’s short fiction and The Chickencoop Chinaman. She analyzes the play as a forum for Chin’s ideas on Chinese American culture, identity, and manhood, ideas that are darkened by a pervading sense of futility, decadence, and alienation. Kim also faults Chin for the use of “unbalanced” dialogue (that is, monologic lectures) and stereotyped women characters.

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_______. “Frank Chin: The Chinatown Cowboy and His Backtalk.” Midwest Quarterly 20 (Autumn, 1978): 78-91. This essay by the doyenne of Asian American literary critics is an earlier version of the previous bibliographic entry. The essay, however, is more acerbic than the book chapter; it finds that The Chickencoop Chinaman conveys “contempt for the Asian American identity” and portrays the “pathetic futility of the male protagonist.” Kroll, Jack. “Primary Color.” Newsweek, June 19, 1972, 55. Extols The Chickencoop Chinaman as “the most interesting play of the American Place Theater” that year. Compares Chin with John Osborne and Chin’s protagonist to Lenny Bruce, sees Chin’s thematic concerns as his generation’s search for identity, and characterizes Chin’s language as “rogue poetry of deracination” enlivened by the “beat and brass, the runs and rim-shots of jazz.” Ling, Jinqi. Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. This book devotes a complete chapter to the plays of Frank Chin, discussing their ethics and poetics. It also comments on issues of masculinity, the effects of commercialization, and the postmodern nature of Chin’s theatrical art. McDonald, Dorothy Ritsuko. Introduction to “The Chickencoop Chinaman” and “The Year of the Dragon”: Two Plays by Frank Chin. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981. This extensive introduction provides information on Chin’s background and his views on Chinese American history. Makes an intelligent thematic commentary on Chin’s plays. Sees Chin’s intent as attempting to dispel stereotypes about Chinese Americans and to recover mythic archetypes (such as Kwan Kung, patron deity of war and letters) to validate the Chinese American male. A valuable essay marred by some errors of detail. Oliver, Edith. “Off Broadway.” The New Yorker 48 ( June 24, 1972): 46. An enthusiastic response to The Chickencoop Chinaman that hails its historical importance for bringing “the first news (theatrically speaking) of the Chinese Americans in our midst.” Characterizes the play as “moving, funny, pain-filled, sarcastic, bitter, ironic . . . in a furious and dazzling eruption of verbal legerdemain.” Notices a “few paltry things that are wrong” with it but finds that these “hardly matter,” given the play’s theatrical inventiveness. Wong, Sau-ling. Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. Contains a brilliant chapter analyzing theme and imagery in Chin’s drama. Yin, Xiao-huang. Chinese American Literature Since the 1850’s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. This study contains a section dealing with the debate between Maxine Hong Kingston and Frank Chin when Chin had accused her of inauthenticity. C. L. Chua

Caryl Churchill Caryl Churchill

Born: London, England; September 3, 1938 Principal drama • Downstairs, pr. 1958; Easy Death, pr. 1962; Owners, pr. 1972, pb. 1973; Moving Clocks Go Slow, pr. 1975; Objections to Sex and Violence, pr. 1975, pb. 1985; Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, pr. 1976, pb. 1978; Vinegar Tom, pr. 1976, pb. 1978; Traps, pr. 1977, pb. 1978; Cloud Nine, pr., pb. 1979; Three More Sleepless Nights, pr. 1980, pb. 1990; Top Girls, pr., pb. 1982; Fen, pr., pb. 1983; Softcops, pr., pb. 1984; Plays: One, pb. 1985; A Mouthful of Birds, pr., pb. 1986 (with David Lan); Serious Money, pr., pb. 1987; Ice Cream, pr., pb. 1989; Hot Fudge, pr. 1989, pb. 1990; Mad Forest: A Play from Romania, pr., pb. 1990; Churchill Shorts: Short Plays, pb. 1990; Plays: Two, pb. 1990; Skriker, pr. 1993; Blue Heart, pr., pb. 1997; Hotel: In a Room Anything Can Happen, pr., pb. 1997 (libretto). This Is a Chair, pr. 1997, pb. 1999; Plays: Three, pb. 1998; Far Away, pr. 2000, pb. 2001; A Number, pr., pb. 2002 Other literary forms • Although Caryl Churchill is known primarily as a playwright, her writing career actually began with radio plays in the early 1960’s, when The Ants was broadcast in 1962. The Ants was followed by other radio plays, including Lovesick (1967), Identical Twins (1968), Abortive (1971), Not, Not, Not, Not, Not Enough Oxygen (1971), Schreber’s Nervous Illness (1972), Henry’s Past (1972), and Perfect Happiness (1973). Churchill has also written several teleplays: The Judge’s Wife (1972), Turkish Delight (1974), The After-Dinner Joke (1978), The Legion Hall Bombing (1978), and Crimes (1981). Achievements • Caryl Churchill is claimed by several political and artistic constituencies: She is hailed as a major voice for English socialists; is cited frequently by feminists; is the darling of proponents of workshops, or group construction, of plays; and is clearly a postmodern voice. Certainly, Churchill is each of these things, but, above all, she is a writer of the human presence and a champion of the individual choice. Her particular achievement is not to experiment but to experiment with a difference. Her unusual use of theatrical structure always aims to reveal the value of the eccentric individual over the concentricities of an exploitive social order. She is an established playwright whose work, though highly unusual in structure, is widely and well received in the English-speaking world, having been successfully produced both in London and in New York. Churchill won the Obie Award for best Off-Broadway play in 1982, 1983, and 1988. In 1988, she also won London’s Society of West End Theatre Award. Biography • Caryl Churchill was born in London, England, on September 3, 1938. She lived in Montreal, Canada, from 1948 to 1955, and there attended the Trafalgar School. From 1957 to 1960, she studied English literature at the University of Oxford and took her bachelor of arts degree from that institution in 1960. Her first dramatic works were produced at the University of Oxford, but many of her early plays remain unpublished. In 1961, she married David Harter; she is the mother of three sons. As his wife’s career developed, Harter gave up his lucrative private law practice so that his wife could spend more time writing. A prolific playwright, Churchill received her first professional stage production in 181

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1972 when Owners was performed at the Royal Court Theatre. From that point on, she became closely associated with that theater. She has been a member of the Joint Stock Theatre Group, an organization dedicated to collective creation of theatrical work, and has worked with the Monstrous Regiment, a feminist theater union. Churchill has contributed frequently to the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) radio and television broadcasts. In an incident now notorious, she and her director, David Lan, insisted that their names be left off the credits of the BBC’s 1978 television production of The Legion Hall Bombing because the producers had censored the work. As her reputation spread, Churchill’s works were brought to the United States and were staged by Joseph Papp in New York. She is a playwright of considerable international importance. Analysis • Caryl Churchill has become well known for her willingness to experiment with dramatic structure. Her innovations in this regard are sometimes so startling and compelling that reviewers tend to focus on the novelty of her works to the exclusion of her ideas. Churchill, however, is a playwright of ideas, ideas that are often difficult and, despite her bold theatricality, surprisingly subtle and elusive. Her principal concern is with the issues attendant on the individual’s struggle to emerge from the ensnarements of culture, class, economic systems, and the imperatives of the past. Each of these impediments to the development and happiness of the individual is explored in her works. Not surprisingly for a contemporary female writer, many times she makes use of female characters to explore such themes. Churchill has openly proclaimed herself a feminist and a socialist. She is also emphatic in her position that the two are not one and the same. Indeed, her plays do not attempt to confound the two issues, although Top Girls does investigate the influence that capitalism can have on women and their willingness to forsake their humanity for economic gain. Churchill has examined with great sympathy, in works such as Fen and Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, the plight of the male, or of both genders, caught up in the destructiveness of inhuman economic forces. Churchill herself has argued that both issues are so important to her—the plight of women and the need for a socialist world—that she could not choose between them and would not have one problem alleviated without a concurrent solution to the other. In another sense, Churchill is interested in the greater issues of gender and the games of power played with gender at stake. Just so, she is equally committed to considering the individual and the power drained from that individual by the forces of modern economic and social systems. Whatever her politics and philosophy, Churchill brings a fire and an energy, a special eye and ear, to the postmodern English drama. She is an inspiration to the feminist movement and to women intellectuals around the world. She remains a force crying out for the release of the individual of either gender from the oppressive imperatives of past practices and present expectations. To her art, she contributes an inventive mind and a willingness to invest great energies in wedding the play to the performance. She has continuously rejected linear structure and the use of the master narratives of socialist realism to present her themes. She has also rejected the Brechtean epic theater in favor of using “found objects,” such as various couples in a hotel room or snatches of everyday speech, and re-contextualizing these found objects into new situations that emphasize new meanings. In this way she is much like the famous avant-garde artist Gaston Duchamp who made a fountain of a toilet bowl. An important factor in Churchill’s proclivity for structural experimentation is her long and close association with workshop groups, whose aim is the collective creation

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of theater pieces through the interaction of actors, writers, directors, choreographers, and other artists. Two such groups have been especially influential on Churchill’s artistic development: The first is the Monstrous Regiment, a feminist theater union that helped Churchill create Vinegar Tom; the other is the Joint Stock Theatre Group, with whose help she fashioned several important works, including Cloud Nine, Fen, and A Mouthful of Birds. The Joint Stock Theatre Group, with directors such as Max Stafford-Clark, Les Waters, and David Lan, and choreographer Ian Fink, operates with suggestions that come from any group member. For example, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Churchill’s first venture with the group, began with a member’s suggestion concerning the motives for the mass immigration of villagers in seventeenth century England. After the initial proposal of the idea, the group set out to research the topic, following it with a theatrical workshop in which the group improvised scenes based on that research. These workshop scenes were interrupted by a “writing gap” during which Churchill wrote the script. Rehearsals came next, with more group interaction and improvisation on the script. Fen followed virtually the same process and was based on a suggestion to explore what it must have been like, in a rural English village, to have the social and agricultural habits of centuries suddenly overturned by the intrusion of modern capitalism, brought in the persona of a Japanese businessman who buys all the village’s farmland. In another example, the group’s director, Lan, was interested in the politics of possession, while Churchill was interested in the theme of women becoming violent and rebellious rather than submitting to their traditionally assigned, passive role. The Joint Stock Theatre Group went to work with these ideas, and A Mouthful of Birds was born. This creative method, which gives a privilege to experimentation and outright and frank theatricalism, seems to serve Churchill well. Churchill also has a special relationship with London’s Royal Court Theatre, where she was resident dramatist in 1974-1975 and where she has had many of her plays performed in the main playhouse and the experimental Upstairs Theatre. Churchill’s radio and television works are often broadcast by the BBC, and her plays are frequently staged outside Great Britain, especially in the United States, where she was first introduced by Joseph Papp at the Public Theatre of New York City. Churchill has also worked with educational institutions such as the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. She and school director Mark Wing-Davey took a group of ten graduate students to Bucharest, where they worked with students at the Romanian Institute of Theatre and Cinema on the creation of Mad Forest. Woman as cultural concept • In four of her best-known works–Cloud Nine, Top Girls, A Mouthful of Birds, and Vinegar Tom—Churchill presents woman as a cultural concept and displays the power of that concept to submerge and smother the individual female. In Cloud Nine, a parallel is suggested between Western colonial oppression and Western sexual oppression. This oppression is seen first in the family organization and then in the power of the past to demand obligations from the present. Although her characters use geographical distance and literally run away from the past, no one in Cloud Nine can exorcise the ghosts of established practices and traditions. Top Girls is a depiction of the exploitation of women by women, a technique well learned through generations of women being exploited by men. The play portrays a group of friends, all successful women in the fields of literature and the arts, who gather for a dinner to celebrate Marlene’s promotion to an executive position in the

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Top Girls employment agency. Viewers are introduced to scenes of Marlene’s workplace and to her working-class sister and niece, Angie. In a painful end to Top Girls, Churchill reveals how one woman character is willing to sacrifice her very motherhood to maintain her position in the world of business, a world that the play shows to be created by and for men. Following a bitter argument between Marlene and her lower-class sister, it is also revealed that Marlene’s “niece” is actually her illegitimate daughter. The issues in Top Girls and Cloud Nine, however startlingly presented, are ones commonly addressed in modern culture, even if usually addressed with an attitude different from that of Churchill. A Mouthful of Birds, however, is altogether different, for it addresses the most sensitive and most taboo of all matters concerning women: sex and violence. Furthermore, in A Mouthful of Birds, Churchill turns the tables and considers sex and violence as perpetrated not by men on women but by women on men, thereby taking one more step into the forbidden matters of gender. The theme of society’s oppressed females is perhaps most powerfully presented in one of Churchill’s earlier works, Vinegar Tom, a piece created especially for the Monstrous Regiment. Vinegar Tom is a play about witches, but there are no witches in it, only four women accused of being witches. Set in seventeenth century England, the play depicts four women accused by society of the vaguest of crimes: sorcery. Their only crime, however, has been to follow an individual impulse. Joan Nokes is simply poor and old, two conditions that are not supposed to happen simultaneously to Western women. Her daughter, Alice, understands sex as an individual matter and is inclined to enjoy a man if he suits her fancy. When Alice asserts her right to have an illegitimate child, she is labeled a “whore,” since she is neither a virgin nor a wife. Betty, the play’s third woman, is called a witch for refusing to marry the man picked out for her, and Susan, the fourth, is seen as a witch for choosing life over death: When put to the water test (witches float, the innocent sink), Susan elects to swim, thus saving herself but forcing society to find a way to kill her. All four women are emerging, strong-willed individuals whose only crime is to be themselves in an oppressive and conservative society. Because they will not carry out their assigned female roles, they are cast as witches and hanged as a logical consequence of their chosen lifestyles. Unique dramatic structure • It is virtually impossible to discuss thematic issues in Churchill’s work without simultaneously considering her special treatment of dramatic structure. Each of her pieces is a unique construction, innovatively assembled and using unconventional and highly theatrical devices. Furthermore, Churchill’s plays remain compelling, mysterious, and, at the same time, refreshingly accessible. Cloud Nine presents, in part 1, an English family living in colonial Africa. The father, Clive, though far from home, “serves the Queen.” He is father not only to his children but to the natives as well. Churchill has a special device for underscoring this maledominated world. She calls for Billy, Clive’s wife and the mother of the children, to be played by a male. To reinforce her statement, Churchill asks that the black servant, Joshua, be played by a white performer. Thus both characters, despite the race and gender of the performers, become whatever the white father wishes them to be. When a lesbian nanny, Ellen, appears, homosexual orientation is suspected in the children and the “perfect” family is created. Part 2 has additional surprises. The colonial family returns to England without the father. In England, the grown-up children seek to realize their separate identities, but the freedom to be fully choosing individuals still eludes them. They fret over not hav-

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ing the father to tell them what to do, and the traditions of the past weigh heavily on them, keeping them in their assigned roles. One of the daughters, Lin, a diminutive for Ellen, the lesbian nanny of part 1, had married to fulfill social expectations. Now divorced and having custody of her child, Lin openly lives with a female lover. Even that important change in sexual orientation, however, is not sufficiently liberating, for as Lin remarks, she can change whom she sleeps with but she cannot change everything. In a wistful scene, she attempts to conjure up a goddess, one she knows will never materialize, begging the deity to give her the history she never had, make her the woman she cannot be. In Cloud Nine, Churchill reverses the traditional immigration pattern. Often parents settle in a new land but bring the past and its old ways with them; in Cloud Nine, however, the children flee their past by returning to the old land, but they are still smothered by ancient habits, expectations, and icons. This preoccupation with the ghosts and hauntings of the past, indeed with the very nature of time itself, is further explored by Churchill in the unusual pieces Traps and Moving Clocks Go Slow. A recurring structural device in Churchill’s dramaturgy is to have one actor play several roles. Most of her better-known works–Serious Money, Top Girls, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, and Cloud Nine—make use of multiple role playing. Although the device may be considered merely idiomatic with her, Churchill usually has a point to make in employing multiple role playing. In Serious Money, for example, the actors are assigned a series of roles that may be summed up in a single universal type, so that one actor, for example, plays a stockbroker or a financier while another plays various women who pander their bodies or their souls to men of high finance. Even more idiosyncratic in structure is the powerful A Mouthful of Birds, in which the stories of seven contemporary personas are interwoven with the ancient ritualistic events of Euripides’ Bakchai (405 b.c.e.; The Bacchae, 1781). Dionysus, the Greek God of wine, appears throughout the piece dancing in a modern woman’s petticoat. Amid ancient scenes of ecstasy and emotional and physical violence, the modern characters appear in their normal daily activities. They each present a monologue in which they attempt to explain why they have failed to meet their obligations. Secret and mysterious problems of possession emerge. The atmosphere of the play is charged with the sensuality of accepted violence, violence intermingled with the irresistible quality of sex. One woman character, for example, who is stereotypically squeamish about skinning a dead rabbit for supper, calmly tells her husband to go to the bathroom, where he will find their baby drowned. Churchill juxtaposes this modern violence against the culminating terror of The Bacchae, the gruesome moment when Agave, in a Dionysian ecstasy, tears apart the body of her son Pentheus. Hotel represents yet another structural experimentation for Churchill. It is an opera, with music by Orlando Gough, set in eight identical hotel rooms superimposed together on stage, with actors playing multiple roles. A number of different couples occupy the rooms at one time or another, including a couple having an adulterous affair and another couple who are homosexual. A television set also figures as a major character. By doubling and tripling the actors in various roles, Churchill subtly emphasizes the commonality of human oppression and pain. Typical of Churchill, the story is not linear, but rather occurs in fragments. The dialogue is also presented in fragments. As Churchill points out in the introduction to the play, she has constructed the work in the way we perceive opera in performance, especially classic opera in languages other than English. We hear snatches of dialogue, but the requirements of the music often overshadow the entire line. The use of fragmented dialogue and non-linear story development is also found in plays such as This Is a

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Chair, where a series of domestic scenes is compared to events about the world through the use of placards naming each scene. Churchill’s use of fragments of dialogue suggests that language can often fail as a means of communication, especially when those using language take little care in its employment. This suggestion is further emphasized in that the fragments are always realistic bits of everyday conversation used in a surrealistic manner. Other major works teleplays: The Judge’s Wife, 1972; Turkish Delight, 1974; The After-Dinner Joke, 1978; The Legion Hall Bombing, 1978; Crimes, 1981. radio plays: The Ants, 1962; Lovesick, 1967; Identical Twins, 1968; Abortive, 1971; Not, Not, Not, Not, Not Enough Oxygen, 1971; Schreber’s Nervous Illness, 1972; Henry’s Past, 1972; Perfect Happiness, 1973. translation: Thyestes, 1994 (of Seneca). Bibliography Betsko, Kathleen, and Rachel Koenig, comps. Interviews with Contemporary Playwrights. New York: Beech Tree Books, 1987. In this provocative interview, the playwright discusses her concept of feminism and compares the London and New York productions of Cloud Nine. Bigsby, C. W. E., ed. Contemporary English Drama. London: Edward Arnold, 1981. This collection of essays about the British theater provides a key to locating Churchill among her contemporaries. The essay by Christian W. Thomsen, “Three Socialist Playwrights: John McGrath, Caryl Churchill, Trevor Griffiths,” is informative about contemporary socialist thought in England and the way in which it is revealed in the plays of Churchill and her peers. Cousin, Geraldine. Churchill, the Playwright. London: Methuen Drama, 1989. An excellent general study of Churchill’s drama. All the issues present in Churchill’s work are examined as they are found in the plays themselves. Fitzsimmons, Linda, comp. File on Churchill. London: Methuen Drama, 1989. This brief volume is a compilation of “file material” on Churchill, including lists of sources to consult, quotations from articles about the playwright, biographical data, production information, and reviews of productions. An excellent and dependable source book. Kaysser, Helen, ed. Feminism and the Theatre. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1988. As the title suggests, this volume is a collection of essays on feminists in theater, and includes an excellent essay on Churchill by a leading feminist critic in the United States, Sue Ellen Case. The volume is useful not only for the Case essay but also for aiding those interested in placing Churchill in the context of contemporary feminist thinking. It is also instructive in the uses of feminist thinking in Churchill’s work. Kieburzinka, Christine Olga. Intertextual Loops in Modern Drama. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001. Contains excellent chapter on the construction of Mad Forest, revealing how Churchill cooperated with various workshop groups in the writing and structuring of her plays, in this case a group of students from London and Romania. Randall, Phyllis, ed. Caryl Churchill: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1989. A collection of essays pertaining to Churchill as a working dramatist. August W. Staub

Jean Cocteau Jean Cocteau

Born: Maisons-Laffitte, France; July 5, 1889 Died: Milly-la-Forêt, France; October 11, 1963 Principal drama • Antigone, pr. 1922, pb. 1928 (libretto; English translation, 1961); Orphée, pr. 1926, pb. 1927 (Orpheus, 1933); Oedipus-Rex, pr. 1927, pb. 1928 (libretto; English translation, 1961); La Voix humaine, pr., pb. 1930 (The Human Voice, 1951); La Machine infernale, pr., pb. 1934 (The Infernal Machine, 1936); L’École des veuves, pr., pb. 1936; Les Chevaliers de la table ronde, pr., pb. 1937 (The Knights of the Round Table, 1955); Les Parents terribles, pr., pb. 1938 (Intimate Relations, 1952); Les Monstres sacrés, pr., pb. 1940 (The Holy Terrors, 1953); La Machine à écrire, pr., pb. 1941 (The Typewriter, 1948); Renaud et Armide, pr., pb. 1943; L’Aigle à deux têtes, pr., pb. 1946 (The Eagle Has Two Heads, 1946); Bacchus, pr. 1951, pb. 1952 (English translation, 1955); Théâtre complet, pb. 1957 (2 volumes); Five Plays, pb. 1961; L’Impromptu du Palais-Royal, pr., pb. 1962; The Infernal Machine and Other Plays, pb. 1964 Other literary forms • Jean Cocteau took considerable delight in working on the borderlines separating various literary genres and those traditionally dividing literature from the other arts. As a result, his artistic output is both extraordinary and difficult to classify. Le Potomak (1919), his first important work, moves freely among verse, prose, dialogue, and drawing. His novel Les Enfants terribles (1929; Children of the Game, 1955), generally considered to be his masterpiece, is as much autobiography as fiction. He wrote magnificent poems, such as La Crucifixion (1946), but he also insisted that his novels, his criticism, in fact, all his works, are poetry. Many of his works for the stage can be called drama in only the broadest sense of the term: An example of such works is the scandalous ballet scenario Parade (1917), created in collaboration with Eric Satie and Pablo Picasso, and performed by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. In 1921, Cocteau collaborated with six composers of the group known as “Les Six” (they included Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Germaine Tailleferre, Georges Auric, and Francis Poulenc) and the Swedish Ballet Company in creating Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel (1921; The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower, 1937), this time contributing to the choreography as well as the dialogue. Cocteau created a number of original and highly regarded films, beginning with La Sang d’un poète (1930; The Blood of a Poet, 1932), and including, among others, La Belle et la bête (1946; Beauty and the Beast, 1947) and Orphée (1950; Orpheus, 1950). He also wrote many witty, incisive nonfiction works, often autobiographical in nature; Opium: Journal d’une désintoxication (1930; Opium: Diary of a Cure, 1932) and La Belle et la bête: Journal d’un film (1946; Beauty and the Beast: Journal of a Film, 1950) are examples of his work in this area. Much of his work was experimental and often designed to shock, to break new ground and redefine the old. Achievements • Neal Oxenhandler eloquently sums up the current image of Jean Cocteau by entitling a study of the latter’s theater Scandal and Parade: Only time and cautious scholarship will be able to reveal the worth of the artist and his work buried beneath the “scandal and parade.” There can be little doubt that he was an important in187

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novator on the stage. If one judges by what has frequently been the twentieth century artist’s basis for self-evaluation—that is, if one judges Cocteau as experimenter and innovator—then one can consider him a leader in the arts of his time. That he reveals in his dramas dark corners of the human condition, particularly that of the twentieth century, is an aspect of his work that is too little understood. Because Cocteau was not a partisan, as were George Bernard Shaw or Bertolt Brecht, critics have too often overlooked the importance of his social and, in the broad sense, political worldview. Indeed, Cocteau shows throughout his best works the uncanny and incisive perception of an outsider. Biography • It could be argued that Jean Maurice Eugène Clement Cocteau was born and bred to be an outsider. Reared by a family of stockbrokers, diplomats, and admirals, he was a product of the grande bourgeoisie française, neither entirely of the middle class nor entirely of the aristocracy. His parents, Georges and Eugénie Lecomte Cocteau, a couple who were no strangers to the arts, introduced Jean, his brother Paul, and his sister Marthe to music, theater, architecture, indeed, all the fine arts. Georges died when Jean was nine years old, and his mother, with whom he had a long and close relationship, had difficulty keeping the boy at the Petit Lycée Condorcet, where he was a poor student. Instead, Cocteau preferred to follow his own interests at home and to attend the theater regularly. His birthplace, Maisons-Laffitte, allowed Cocteau easy access to Paris, where he involved himself in the various avant-garde movements that followed hard on one another in the early part of the twentieth century, finding comradeship in unconventional undertakings with fellow outsiders. His friends included such writers as Edmond Rostand, Catulle Mendès, Leon Daudet, Marcel Proust, and the Comtesse Anna de Noailles. By 1909, he had published his first book of poems, La Lampe d’Aladin. Soon afterward, he met the director of the Ballets Russes, Sergei Diaghilev, a man who influenced Cocteau immensely, inspiring him to write a number of ballet scenarios. Diaghilev’s remonstrance to “Astonish me!” is claimed to have set Cocteau on his lifelong aesthetic course to surprise and shock his audiences. Cocteau’s homosexuality was another factor that contributed to his outsider’s perspective, placing him outside conventionality and impressing itself on his life, outlook, and art. He formed pivotal mentor-student-love relationships that would shape his artistic endeavors. His friendship with Raymond Radiguet, which had much to do with Cocteau’s movement toward a more simple, classical style, and that with actor Jean Marais were two such important unions. With the outbreak of World War I, Cocteau, rejected for active service because of his poor health, joined a civilian ambulance unit on the Belgian front. His experiences during this time formed the basis for his novel Thomas l’imposteur (1923; Thomas the Impostor, 1925), which was later made into a film. Toward the end of the war, Cocteau began his association with Pablo Picasso. Along with Satie and Diaghilev, they collaborated to create the ballet Parade, whose atonal music and radical set and costumes caused a sensation. (This production marked Cocteau’s break with Igor Stravinsky, with whom he had been closely associated, and his alignment with Les Six.) With Radiguet’s death in 1923 from typhoid fever, Cocteau, inconsolable, became addicted to opium yet continued his prodigious artistic production. During this period, Orpheus and Oedipus-Rex, an opera-oratorio, were produced. In the 1930’s, Cocteau turned his attention to film, creating a number of highly original works in that medium. The late 1930’s marked the beginning of Cocteau’s long

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collaboration with Jean Marais, during which he designed many roles especially for the young actor; the result was a series of masterpieces for screen and stage. Cocteau took a pacifist stand during World War II, and his nonconformity during the German Occupation nearly cost him his life. Several of his stage works were banned for being “immoral,” and he was beaten by members of a French Fascist group for refusing to salute their flag. Somewhat later, he braved official disapproval by testifying on behalf of criminal-turned-novelist Jean Genet. Cocteau continued to write, paint murals, direct films, design fabrics, and travel until 1953, when his health began to fail. In 1955, he was elected to the Académie Française and the Royal Belgian Academy. In 1956, he was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters from Oxford University. Cocteau died at Milly-la-Forêt, outside Paris, on October 11, 1963. Analysis • Early in his career, during and after World War I, Jean Cocteau wrote scenarios for ballets and adaptations of Greek myths. His plays of the late 1920’s and early 1930’s were highly original and brought him much attention. Cocteau gave the Oedipus legend a lasting form in his opera-oratorio Oedipus-Rex, and Antigone bears historical significance beyond its considerable intrinsic merits. In the late 1930’s and the 1940’s, under the influence of Jean Marais, Cocteau turned to contemporary problems, creating taut psychological dramas in the style of Boulevard drama; Intimate Relations is the most highly regarded of these middle works. Cocteau’s later plays reflect his interest in reaching back into the past for both subject and form. Renaud et Armide and L’Impromptu du Palais-Royal appeal, respectively, to Jean Racine and Molière for models. The Eagle Has Two Heads returns to the nineteenth century romantic melodrama for conventions and to the period’s history for plot elements. Bacchus combines historical drama and the Erasmian colloquy to create a mood-picture of the early Reformation. In these plays of his final years, Cocteau created works of transcendent stature. Of these, The Eagle Has Two Heads is the most beautifully crafted and most often performed. Although it can be claimed that Cocteau’s plays fall into distinct groups, or periods, the essential unity of all of Cocteau’s plays must be noted. That he consistently chose a perverse or inverted vantage point, in order to astonish his audience with the unexpected, reflects the essential relation of his art to society. Cocteau added immensely to the arsenal of modern stage techniques; he had a keen ability to pick a subject to pieces and, in the process, demonstrate the absurdity of the whole. Always ready to draw out those elements that another playwright might have omitted, Cocteau, at his best, could also pare down to a mini(National Archives) mum what was to be included.

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In Bacchus, a dramatic masterpiece from Cocteau’s late period, the playwright has a character speak a line that might be taken as a summation of the standard view of critics that he had produced too many works: “You speak too much to say one memorable word.” Yet while it is true that Cocteau poured forth so many volumes of plays, as well as so many other works, brevity and conciseness are the hallmarks of the works just treated. Moreover, in these plays, Cocteau combines the quality of a subtle artist who elusively moves by indirection with that of the “astonisher” of the bourgeoisie—that of the social and political satirist completely without partisan dogma. Few twentieth century writers have succeeded in being scandalous to the extent of being persecuted, even beaten, and having their works banned, and yet without ever having taken a clear partisan position. In this trait Cocteau recalls an earlier French iconoclast: Voltaire succeeded in fighting the Church without being an atheist; Cocteau, in lambasting the establishment without being a Marxist. Antigone • Antigone clearly demonstrates this capacity, at once, to draw out and to pare down the elements of the original drama, so much so that Sophocles would have found Cocteau’s version, if not unrecognizable, at least, un-Sophoclean and un-Greek. The play was a significant contribution to the neoclassical movement in the arts of the 1920’s. Igor Stravinsky and Les Six were setting forth the aesthetic of the pared-down and the streamlined in music. Picasso, who did the scenery for Antigone, was making thin-lined sketches of classical subjects; indeed, it is commonly believed that he adopted this style under the direct inspiration of Cocteau’s own drawing style. Cocteau’s thin single line in ink, which captures the essentials of form and meaning, graphically embodies, not only the style of Cocteau’s neoclassical works, but also the aesthetic underlying all his works. In all the arts of this avant-garde neoclassicism, Greco-Roman subjects are used wherever possible; they are rendered, however, with a style and for a purpose that is modern. Sometimes a small touch in the dialogue of Antigone, more often, in the stage directions, makes it clear that the work is about modern France, indeed, about the modern experience. Cocteau heavily underlines those elements in Creon the Tyrant that would be found in any twentieth century ruler. Like his modern counterparts, he lives in constant fear that the opposition is secretly plotting his downfall. Above all, Creon mistakenly believes that money is the wellspring of everyone’s deeds. He even accuses the obviously irreproachable seer Tiresias of taking foreign bribes. Money, which is but one element among many in the work by Sophocles, is heavily underscored by Cocteau in his delineation of Creon. The supreme irony of Creon’s tragedy is that his downfall results not from a group of paid subversives, motivated by worldly considerations of money and power; rather, he receives justice from someone who is inspired by moral sanctions. Yet the agent of Creon’s undoing has a further irony—it is a young woman, Antigone. When Antigone tells her sister that they must jointly act according to higher ethical demands and bury their brother in spite of Creon’s law forbidding it, Ismene replies that she cannot, because women are helpless in the face of male power. Although Ismene proves unable to take action with her sister, she desires, in accordance with her conception of women, to partake of the martyr role that grows out of Antigone’s act. Female submission in the face of male domination is the essence of Creon’s conception of political power in the largest sense. He says that disorder is his greatest fear and that nothing would strike at the primal basis of his order with more certainty than the revolt of the women. “City,” “family,” and even the army depend on keeping women

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in their place within the patriarchal structure, and consequently, nothing is more deadly than should it happen that “the anarchist is a woman.” Creon puts the matter even more brutally to his son Haemon, saying that the city is but a wife to its leader. In a patriarchal structuring of both family and city, both a wife and the people must be kept subordinate to the male in power. Cocteau’s choice of lines for Creon cuts even deeper: As he believes that money is the motivating force of those who resist power, so, too, does he believe that women are instruments of propagation and nothing more. Concerning Haemon’s deep love for Antigone, his intended wife, Creon says that “he will find another womb.” These elements are in Sophocles’ play, but Cocteau has selected them out from other elements, brought them to the fore, and underscored them in a way that renders them modern. Cocteau’s Antigone was the first in a series of Greek dramas adapted by twentieth century French writers to shed light on the modern human situation—a series culminating in Jean Anouilh’s Antigone (pr. 1944; English translation, 1946) and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mouches (pr., pb. 1943; The Flies, 1946). Cocteau constantly reminds the viewer through subtle touches in the mise en scène that he is viewing the present indirectly through the past. He instructs the actors to speak in very high-pitched voices as though they were reciting from a newspaper article. In another stage direction, he tells the actors playing the guards to stand on either side of Antigone and hold each end of a spear before her so that she will resemble a prisoner in a courtroom dock between two policemen. Cocteau’s Antigone represents the eternal spirit of disorder that eats away at the social structure on all levels—a structure that Cocteau finds inevitably repressive of the best in the human spirit. The fact that Antigone is a woman gives an added impact to the symbol: She has the capacity to deconstruct not only the obvious political system at the top but also the institution of the family. Cocteau’s drama presents an outsider who gives her life to reveal the hypocrisy and rottenness of the social fabric. Antigone, although possibly influenced by the first wave of the feminist movement as it broke around Cocteau at the time he was writing the play, is not a tract for the stage as is George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession (wr. 1893, pb. 1898), but it is still no less important socially or politically, and it is in some ways, perhaps, more profound. Intimate Relations • In his second dramatic period, Cocteau set out to grapple with modern situations directly. Intimate Relations is the most highly valued and frequently performed of Cocteau’s dramas about contemporary life. This play is most remarkable for its objective, detached view of the family as a structure of emotional relations and the neuroses stemming from them. One might term it a sociopolitical work even though, on the one hand, it avoids the underlying support of middle-class morality of the Boulevard dramas and the overt left-wing preachments of the pièce a thèse, on the other. Although it could be argued that the family relations of the characters in Intimate Relations are unusual, the truths revealed in the play still have general relevance. Cocteau has structured the characters and their relations in what might be described as a pentangle: A mother inordinately loves a son, who loves a young woman, who was the mistress of the son’s father, who, in his turn, is loved by the sister of his wife. Cocteau has made the family an unusual one for the purpose of making the dynamics of such a group all the more painfully apparent. The two sisters, Yvonne, the wife, and Lèo, the unmarried sister, form the symbolic crux of the play. Lèo’s presence has a certain ambiguity. It is she who saves Yvonne’s

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life in act 1, but it is her series of attempts to salvage the family from shipwreck that leads to Yvonne being emotionally jettisoned from the family, resulting, then, in her suicide. At first, Lèo hatches a plot to separate the young couple (Madeleine and Michel); then, growing to like Madeleine, she hatches another plot to bring the young people back together again, thereby separating mother and son (Yvonne and Michel). Lèo’s will to rule is a double-edged sword that saves and kills. The stage directions for Intimate Relations make clear the polarity between Lèo, on the one hand, and Yvonne and Madeleine, on the other: Cocteau observes that Yvonne’s room represents chaos and Madeleine’s, cosmos. It is one of the beautiful subtleties of Intimate Relations that Cocteau does not make it emphatically apparent that his sympathies are with the figure of disorder, Yvonne. It is only by viewing Intimate Relations in the context of Cocteau’s other plays that this attitude becomes clear. Antigone, the emblem of disorder, must die to bring tragic selfawareness to Creon, the emblem of order. Yvonne must also die a martyr’s death. Yet, in Intimate Relations, the martyrdom has little effect because, at the play’s end, a sinister order has been restored: Michel has found a new and more solid mother figure in Madeleine. This inevitability moves toward its tragic end in a real coup de théâtre. The Eagle Has Two Heads • Equally exciting in dramatic structure is The Eagle Has Two Heads, which is perhaps the most theatrically viable of all the plays of Cocteau’s last period, during which he experimented with past forms and conventions. Indeed, considered formalistically, this play is both a literary and a theatrical tour de force. Cocteau has compared the three-act structuring of this drama to a fugue: The first act, he says, is devoted to the queen; the second act, to Stanislas. In the last act, the two themes jointly culminate in a double suicide. This literary structure, however, had less a musical than a theatrical inspiration: Marais requested from Cocteau a play in which he could remain mute in the first act, have moments of ecstatic vocalizing in the second, and mime a melodramatic death in the third act. Cocteau set out to write an actor’s play much like the singer’s opera of the bel canto style and, then, to combine this style with elements of the romantic dramas of Victor Hugo. The miracle is that Cocteau succeeded in creating a complexly formulated, but no less moving, drama. In essence, the play is a carefully concerted interchange between the queen and Stanislas, the would-be assassin, then her lover, and, finally, her assassin in fact. The first act is pervaded by the queen’s monologues: The first of these is addressed to the imagined presence of her husband, an assassinated king; later, when Stanislas, the king’s Doppelgänger, appears, she addresses him—mute as he is with exhaustion and defiance. From his appearance up to the finale of the play, however, Stanislas, and not the queen, is the motive force of the action—the poet-playwright, as it were. Indeed, in a moment of authorial reflexivity, Cocteau has the queen say that Stanislas has been the “author” of the three-act structure, “the drama.” In act 1, he is the assassin who breaks into her stuffy existence like a romantic storm; in act 2, he inspires her to true queenship; finally, he poisons himself in order not to stand in the way of the queen’s new will to power. The queen then becomes the author of her own destiny, paradoxically, by rejecting temporal power and by driving the poet mad with anger so that he will carry through with her assassination. Within the realm of the drama, then, the tragic finale is the queen’s creation—in the end, she plays poet-playwright. The play is also structured around symbols of contradiction and paradox. Ten years before the action of the play, the assassin of the king used a dagger concealed in a bouquet of flowers. In act 1, the queen saves the life of her own would-be assassin; but, in

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act 2, the assassin, paradoxically, brings her back to life, at least for a temporary respite, from the living death of her ten-year state of mourning for the king. The doubleheaded eagle of the title represents contradiction and tension; yet, as the queen says, if one of the heads is cut off, the eagle dies. By means of this emblem, Cocteau seems to be saying that contradiction is needed if the spirit of a ruler, of a poet, or of a lover is to soar beyond the mundane. As Stanislas, the poet and lover, tells the queen, he does not offer her banal “happiness,” but rather a joint alliance—“an eagle with two heads.” During a dangerous horseback ride she takes in the mountains, the queen comes to realize that without the tension of life and death, there can be no beauty, no poetry in living. Only by loving her would-be assassin does she become a ruling queen; only by ruling does she discover the tragic desperation of life; only by discovering this desperation does she prepare herself for death. Few directors have ever shown the keen sense for the psychological aptness of mise en scène that Cocteau does in this play—particularly in act 1. This play draws heavily on the Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (pr. c. 1600-1601) archetype; the relationship between Stanislas, who looks like the dead king, and the queen corresponds to that between Hamlet and his mother. The queen even describes Stanislas’s sudden appearance through the open windows with poetic images used in William Shakespeare’s scenes involving the ghost of Hamlet’s father. To add point to the subtext, Cocteau has Stanislas, in his newly acquired capacity as court reader, recite the scene between Hamlet and his mother, the queen. It is no surprise, then, that the first act of the play is to be staged exactly like the traditional bedroom setting for Hamlet—complete even to the portrait of the king on the wall (an important touch in productions of Hamlet into the twentieth century, when it was replaced by a miniature in a locket). The stage directions call for the queen to make her first entrance from beyond the portrait, which pivots around; Cocteau thereby creates a concise metaphor for the ten years of the queen’s life of mourning before the time of the play. The queen is a strange composite of Elizabeth of Austria, Ludwig II of Bavaria, and Queen Victoria. In creating the queen and her environment, Cocteau has admirably captured the sense of the hothouse atmosphere of fin de siècle Europe, the country waiting for a great war to cut through the oppressiveness of emperors, kings, and aristocrats. The queen, as much as Stanislas, is an anarchist. She is an amateur of storms: She speaks of lightning that will destroy her genealogical tree and of the storm that will scatter the leaves of the book of court etiquette; she calls on Stanislas to destroy—to be a storm. In the end, she (herself) must be the anarchistic agent of the queen’s (her own) assassination: Thereby, she becomes Cocteau’s most complete symbol of self-sacrifice in celebration of disorder. Other major works long fiction: Le Potomak, 1919; Le Grand Écart, 1923 (The Grand Écart, 1925); Thomas l’imposteur, 1923 (Thomas the Impostor, 1925); Le Livre blanc, 1928 (The White Paper, 1957); Les Enfants terribles, 1929 (Enfants Terribles, 1930; also known as Children of the Game); Le Fantôme de Marseille, 1933; La Fin du Potomak, 1939. poetry: La Lampe d’Aladin, 1909; Le Prince frivole, 1910; La Danse de Sophocle, 1912; Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance, 1919; L’Ode à Picasso, 1919; Poésies, 1917-1920, 1920; Escales, 1920; Discours du grand sommeil, 1922; Vocabulaire, 1922; Plain-Chant, 1923; Poésie, 19161923, 1924; Cri écrit, 1925; Prière mutilée, 1925; L’Ange Heurtebise, 1925; Opéra, 1927; Morceaux choisis, 1932; Mythologie, 1934; Allégories, 1941; Léone, 1945; Poèmes, 1945; La Crucifixion, 1946; Anthologie poétique, 1951; Le Chiffre sept, 1952; Appogiatures, 1953;

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Clair-obscur, 1954; Poèmes, 1916-1955, 1956; Gondole des morts, 1959; Cérémonial espagnol du phénix, 1961; Le Requiem, 1962. screenplays: Le Sang d’un poète, 1932 (The Blood of a Poet, 1949); Le Baron fantôme, 1943; L’Éternel retour, 1943 (The Eternal Return, 1948); La Belle et la bête, 1946 (Beauty and the Beast, 1947); L’Aigle à deux têtes, 1946; Ruy Blas, 1947; Les Parents terribles, 1948 (Intimate Relations, 1952); Les Enfants terribles, 1950; Orphée, 1950 (Orpheus, 1950); Le Testament d’Orphée, 1959 (The Testament of Orpheus, 1968); Thomas l’Imposteur, 1965. ballet scenarios: Le Dieu bleu, 1912 (with Frédéric de Madrazo); Parade, 1917 (music by Erik Satie, scenery by Pablo Picasso); Le Boeuf sur le toit, 1920 (music by Darius Milhaud, scenery by Raoul Dufy); Le Gendarme incompris, 1921 (with Raymond Radiguet; music by Francis Poulenc); Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel, 1921 (music by Les Six; The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower, 1937); Les Biches, 1924 (music by Poulenc); Les Fâcheux, 1924 (music by George Auric); Le Jeune Homme et la mort, 1946 (music by Johann Sebastian Bach); Phèdre, 1950 (music by Auric). nonfiction: Le Coq et l’Arlequin, 1918 (Cock and Harlequin, 1921); Le Secret professionnel, 1922; Lettre à Jacques Maritain, 1926 (Art and Faith, 1948); Le Rappel à l’ordre, 1926 (A Call to Order, 1926); Opium: Journal d’une désintoxication, 1930 (Opium: Diary of a Cure, 1932); Essai de la critique indirecte, 1932 (The Lais Mystery: An Essay of Indirect Criticism, 1936); Portraits-souvenir, 1900-1914, 1935 (Paris Album, 1956); La Belle et la bête: Journal d’un film, 1946 (Beauty and the Beast: Journal of a Film, 1950); La Difficulté d’être, 1947 (The Difficulty of Being, 1966); The Journals of Jean Cocteau, 1956; Poésie critique, 1960. translation: Roméo et Juliette, 1926 (of William Shakespeare’s play). Bibliography Griffith, Alison Guest. Jean Cocteau and the Performing Arts. Irvine, Calif.: Severin Wunderman Museum, 1992. This museum catalog includes critical analysis of Cocteau’s work as well as information on his contribution to the performing arts. Bibliography. Lowe, Romana. The Fictional Female: Sacrificial Rituals and Spectacles of Writing in Baudelaire, Zola, and Cocteau. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. Lowe compares and contrasts the works of Cocteau, Charles Baudelaire, and Émile Zola, especially their treatment of women. Bibliography and indexes. Mauriès, Patrick. Jean Cocteau. London: Thames and Hudson, 1998. A biography of Cocteau that covers his life and works, including details of his work in films. Saul, Julie, ed. Jean Cocteau: The Mirror and the Mask: A Photo-Biography. Boston: D. R. Godine, 1992. This compilation from an exhibit celebrating the one-hundred year anniversary of his birth, with an essay by Francis Steegmuller, provides insights into the life of Cocteau. Tsakiridou, Cornelia A. Reviewing “Orpheus”: Essays on the Cinema and Art of Jean Cocteau. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1997. Although this work focuses on the screenplays and film work of Cocteau, it also sheds light on his dramatic works. Rodney Farnsworth

William Congreve William Congreve

Born: Bardsey, Yorkshire, England; January 24, 1670 Died: London, England; January 19, 1729 Principal drama • The Old Bachelor, pr., pb. 1693; The Double-Dealer, pr. 1693, pb. 1694; Love for Love, pr., pb. 1695; The Mourning Bride, pr., pb. 1697; The Way of the World, pr., pb. 1700; The Judgement of Paris, pr., pb. 1701 (masque); Squire Trelooby, pr., pb. 1704 (with Sir John Vanbrugh and William Walsh; adaptation of Molière’s Monsieur de Pourceaugnac); Semele, pb. 1710 (libretto), pr. 1744 (modified version); The Complete Plays of William Congreve, pb. 1967 (Herbert Davis, editor) Other literary forms • Although William Congreve is remembered today as a dramatist, his first publication was a novella, Incognita: Or, Love and Duty Reconcil’d, which appeared in 1692. He also published a translation of Juvenal’s eleventh satire and commendatory verses “To Mr. Dryden on His Translation of Persius” in John Dryden’s edition of The Satires of Juvenal and Persius (1693), as well as two songs and three odes in Charles Gildon’s Miscellany of Original Poems (1692). Later, Congreve reprinted these odes, together with translations from Homer’s Iliad (c. 750 b.c.e.; English translation, 1616), in Examen Poeticum (1693). Congreve’s other translations from the classics include Book III of Ovid’s Ars amatoria (c. 2 b.c.e.; Art of Love, 1612) in 1709 and two stories from Ovid in the 1717 edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. His original poetry was first collected with his other writings in The Works of Mr. William Congreve (1710) and frequently reprinted throughout the eighteenth century. After 1700, Congreve abandoned serious drama in favor of social and political interests, although he did write a masque and an opera after that date and collaborated with Sir John Vanbrugh and William Walsh on a farce. In response to Jeremy Collier’s attacks on Restoration playwrights, Congreve wrote a short volume of dramatic criticism, Amendments of Mr. Collier’s False and Imperfect Citations (1698). Congreve’s letters have been edited by John C. Hodges and are available in William Congreve: Letters and Documents (1964). Achievements • William Congreve’s first play, The Old Bachelor, was an instant success; its initial run of fourteen days made it the most popular play since Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved (pr., pb. 1682). The Double-Dealer was not as instantly successful, but Love for Love was so popular that Congreve was made a manager of the theater. The Mourning Bride was still more successful; in 1699, Gildon said of the work that “this play had the greatest Success, not only of all Mr. Congreve’s, but indeed of all the Plays that ever I can remember on the English Stage.” Congreve’s last comedy, The Way of the World, though now universally regarded as his best and arguably the best Restoration comedy as well, met with little support at the time, and its cool reception drove Congreve from serious drama. Throughout the eighteenth century, Congreve’s reputation remained high, both for his poetry and his plays. Edward Howard, in his Essay upon Pastoral (1695), said that Congreve possessed the talent of ten Vergils. Dryden, who equated Congreve to William Shakespeare on the stage, declared that in his translations from the Iliad, Congreve 195

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surpassed Homer in pathos. Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad (1715-1720) was dedicated to Congreve, as were Sir Richard Steele’s Poetical Miscellanies (1714) and his 1722 edition of Joseph Addison’s The Drummer: Or, The Haunted House. In the nineteenth century, Congreve’s reputation declined, along with the public’s regard for Restoration comedy in general, because of the sexual licentiousness depicted in the plays. With the twentieth century, however, came a reevaluation. When The Way of the World was revived at Cherry Lane Theatre in New York in 1924, it ran for 120 performances. That work and Love for Love remain among the most frequently acted of Restoration plays, and Congreve’s other two comedies are also occasionally staged. Although Congreve’s one tragedy has not worn as well, he may be today the most popular and most highly regarded English dramatist between William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. Biography • William Congreve was born on January 24, 1670, at Bardsey, Yorkshire, England. In 1674, his father, also named William, received a lieutenant’s commission to serve in Ireland, and the family moved to the garrison of Youghal. In 1678, the elder William was transferred to Carrickfergus, another Irish port, and again, the family accompanied him. Congreve’s knowledge of port life may have contributed to his depiction of the sailor, Ben, in Love for Love; Ben’s use of nautical terms demonstrates the playwright’s familiarity with this jargon. When the elder Congreve joined the regiment of the duke of Ormond at Kilkenny in 1681, his son was able to enroll in Kilkenny College, which was free to all families who served the duke. There, Congreve received his first formal education and his first exposure to the high society that gathered around the wealthy duke of Ormond. After spending four and a half years at Kilkenny, Congreve entered Trinity College, Dublin (April 5, 1686), where he had the same tutor as Jonathan Swift, Saint George Ashe. The theater in Smock Alley, Dublin, was at this period being run by Joseph Ashbury, who, like Congreve’s father, served under the duke of Ormond. Congreve may already have known Ashbury before coming to Trinity College, and Congreve’s frequent absences from college on Saturday afternoons suggest that he was spending his time at the theater. Here, he would have seen a fine sampling of contemporary drama and could have begun to learn those dramatic conventions that he perfected in his own works. In 1688, James II fled to Ireland. Perhaps fearing a massacre of Protestants in retaliation for their support of William of Orange against the Roman Catholic Stuart king, the Congreves left Ireland for their family home in England. Congreve went first to Staffordshire to visit his grandfather at Stretton Manor; there, he wrote a draft of The Old Bachelor before coming to London to enroll in the Middle Temple to study law. Congreve was not, however, an ideal law student. Like Steele’s literary Templar in The Spectator, he frequented the Theatre Royal in nearby Drury Lane and Will’s Coffee House rather than the Inns of Court. At Will’s, Dryden held literary court; by 1692, Congreve had become sufficiently friendly with the former laureate that he was asked to contribute a translation of Juvenal’s eleventh satire to Dryden’s forthcoming edition of the satires of Juvenal and Persius. Together with Arthur Manwayring and Thomas Southerne, Dryden was helpful to Congreve in revising The Old Bachelor. (In 1717, Congreve partially returned the favor, editing and writing an introduction to a posthumous edition of Dryden’s Dramatick Works.) The play opened at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane on March 9, 1693, with a brilliant cast, including Anne Bracegirdle as Araminta. Congreve was

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soon in love with Bracegirdle, who would play the heroine in each of his succeeding works and who may have been his mistress. In December, 1693, Congreve’s second comedy, The Double-Dealer, was performed. Though Dryden praised it profusely, the play was not initially well received. After Queen Mary requested a special performance, however, its popularity increased. Love for Love needed no royal sponsorship for its success. The first play to be performed in the restored Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre (April 30, 1695), it ran for thirteen nights. Congreve was made one of the managers of the theater in return for a promise of a play a year, if his health permitted. Congreve needed two years to complete The Mourning Bride, which opened on February 27, 1697. The tragedy was worth the wait, for it was eminently successful. Three more years elapsed before Congreve’s next play. Meanwhile, in 1698, Jeremy Collier attacked the Restoration stage in general, and Congreve in particular, for immorality. Congreve replied with his Amendments of Mr. Collier’s False and Imperfect Citations. Between ill-health and the controversy with Collier, Congreve was unable to stage The Way of the World until March, 1700. Dryden recognized its genius, writing to Mrs. Steward on March 12, “Congreve’s new play has had but moderate success, though it deserves much better.” Coupled with Collier’s attacks, the poor reception of The Way of the World persuaded Congreve to abandon serious drama, but he continued to write and remain interested in the theater. On March 21, 1701, The Judgement of Paris, an elaborate masque, opened at Dorset Garden with Bracegirdle as Venus. With Vanbrugh and Walsh, Congreve adapted Molière’s Monsieur de Pourceaugnac as Squire Trelooby, which was performed in March, 1704. He also wrote the libretto to an opera, Semele, which was not performed in his lifetime. For a brief time, too, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Walsh managed a theater in the Haymarket. Although Congreve held a variety of government posts throughout his life—the type of minor posts with which men of letters were often rewarded in that era—he did not have a lucrative position until 1705, when he was made a commissioner of wines, with an annual salary of two hundred pounds. Congreve was an ardent Whig, but he had so agreeable a personality that when the Tories came to power, Jonathan Swift and Lord Halifax (to whom Congreve had dedicated The Double-Dealer) intervened to help him retain this income. Dryden was not merely flattering when he wrote, “So much the sweetness of your manners move,/ We cannot envy you, because we love.” Not until almost a decade later, when the Hanoverians came to power, did Congreve enjoy a substantial income, receiving the post of secretary of the Island of Jamaica. He discharged his duties by a deputy, continuing to lead a placid, retired life in London during the winter and in various country houses during the summer. As he wrote to Joseph Keally, “Ease and quiet is what I hunt after. If I have not ambition, I have other passions more easily gratified.” One passion was for Henrietta, duchess of Marlborough, whom he met in 1703. In 1722, Congreve went to Bath for his health, and Henrietta accompanied him, even though she was married to the son of Lord Treasurer Godolphin. The following year, when she gave birth to her second daughter, Mary, it was assumed that Congreve was the child’s father. Henrietta was by his side when he died on January 19, 1729, and when she died four years later, she was buried near him in Westminster Abbey. Analysis • William Congreve began writing some thirty years after the Restoration, yet his plays retain many of the concerns of those written in the 1660’s and 1670’s. Foremost among these concerns is what constitutes a gentleman; that is, how one should act

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in society. The seventeenth century, particularly after 1660, was very interested in this matter; some five hundred conduct books were published during the century, the majority of them after the Restoration. The response that Congreve gives, which is identical to that of Sir George Etherege, William Wycherley, and other Restoration dramatists, may be summed up in a single word: wit. This wit encompasses far more than mere verbal facility. By the time Sir Richard Blackmore attacked wit as suitable “only to please with Jests at Dinner” (“A Satyr Against Wit,” 1700), the term had lost much of its significance. For Congreve, Dryden’s definition is more relevant than Blackmore’s: “a propriety of thoughts and words”— and, he might have added, of con(Library of Congress) duct. As Rose Snider wrote in Satire in the Comedies of Congreve, Sheridan, Wilde, and Coward (1937), “Decorum (true wit) might be defined simply as a natural elegance of thought and conduct, based on respect for sound judgment, fidelity to nature, and a due regard for beauty.” What constitutes propriety and fidelity to nature is subject to varying interpretation. To the nineteenth century, Restoration comedy was at best “the Utopia of gallantry, where pleasure is duty, and the manners perfect freedom” (Charles Lamb, “On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century”), at worst the height of immorality. Chastity was not a requirement for the late seventeenth century gentleman, though it was for the lady. Charles de Saint-Denis de Saint-Évremond expressed well the age’s sexual ethics: “As for the Hatred of villainous Actions, it ought to continue so long as the World does, but give leave to Gentlemen of refin’d Palates to call that Pleasure, which gross and ill-bred People call Vice, and don’t place your Virtue in old musty Notions which the primitive Mortals derived from their natural Savageness.” In keeping with this genial libertinism is a rejection of prudence, financial as well as sexual. Money is not to be saved but spent, and spent on pleasure. Business is rejected as an improper pursuit. In the first scene of The Old Bachelor, Congreve presents in the dialogue between Bellmour and Vainlove a catalog of unworthy occupations for the genteel and indicates that the proper pursuits are witty conversation and love. To a certain extent, this hedonism was a reaction to the restraints imposed by the Puritan Protectorate. After the Restoration, playwrights, who had lost their occupation under Cromwell, continued to portray the final victory of Cavalier over Roundhead. The Puritan cleric is a standard butt of Restoration satire. So, too, is the “cit,” the merchant—not only because he was likely to be a Dissenter rather than an Anglican but also because mercantile London supported Cromwell while in general the country squires remained loyal to the Crown. Those who suffered the most under the Protec-

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torate, the Court party, took their revenge in their plays when they returned to power. Restoration comedy does not, however, restrict itself to negatives, nor to rejecting conventional morality and ridiculing its followers. The Truewit is indeed a libertine and often a spendthrift and freethinker, but he espouses positive values that offset these signs of youthful exuberance. Bravery, for example, is highly prized. The wit will not tolerate an insult; a sign of wit is a willingness to defend one’s honor. A character such as Captain Bluffe (in The Old Bachelor), who draws his sword only when all danger is past, or Fainall (in The Way of the World), who draws his sword on a woman, shows himself to be no true wit. Urbanity is another attribute of the Truewit. He must be able to engage in brilliant repartee; his conversation must never be dull, vulgar, overly serious, or abstruse. A wit must never lose his temper, for reason should always control emotion. He must be aware of the latest fashions and observe them. Excesses in dress, manner, or speech are scorned, as are rusticity and bad taste. Because the wit must fit into polite society, the rustic is a butt of humor on the stage even though his political views probably harmonized with those of the playwrights who were mocking him. Yet another virtue is intelligence, of which one outward sign is again brilliant conversation. A further indication is the ability to outsmart those who would thwart the wit’s desires—generally comic villains who try to prevent his attaining a suitable wife and estate. Although these villains make a pretense of being clever and urbane, their speeches and action expose their flawed nature, which leads to their punishment at the end of the play. Selflessness is also a Restoration ideal. Prodigality is not a vice but rather a manifestation of generosity. Fondlewife (The Old Bachelor) leaves his wife to secure five hundred pounds and is almost cuckolded during his absence. By contrast, Valentine (Love for Love) is willing to give money to a discarded mistress (though not to a creditor). When wits scheme, they are trying to secure what should rightfully be theirs; when fools and Witwouds plot, they are trying to secure what should belong to another. The latter are greedy and so are frustrated. Restoration comedy is thus moral in its intent, punishing those who deviate from societal values and rewarding those who are faithful to those norms. These values are not Victorian, nor are they the values of religious fanatics, Puritans, or nonjurors such as Jeremy Collier—hence the repeated charges of immorality brought against Congreve and his contemporaries. In emphasizing intelligence, generosity, urbanity, and bravery, though, these dramatists were drawing on a tradition that went back to Aristotle’s Ethica Nicomachea (335-323 b.c.e.; Nicomachean Ethics, 1797), and their view of comedy is Aristotle’s as well. Defending himself against Collier, Congreve conceded that he portrayed vice on the stage, but he did so because comedy, according to Aristotle, depicts “the worst sort of people.” It portrayed such people, Congreve continued, because “men are to be laugh’d out of their Vices in Comedy; the Business of Comedy is to delight, as well as to instruct: And as vicious People are made asham’d of their Follies or Faults, by seeing them expos’d in a ridiculous manner, so are good People at once both warn’d and diverted at their Expense.” Collier and his successors did not find this response persuasive; they saw little to choose between Bellmour and Heartwell (The Old Bachelor) or between Mirabell and Fainall (The Way of the World). On the other hand, Congreve’s appreciative audiences have always understood the important distinction. At the same time that Congreve’s plays are the artistic consummation of the traditions of Restoration comedy, they also reveal a breaking away from those traditions.

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Though these plays accept societal norms, and though the hero and heroine must be able to conform to societal expectations, they recognize the flaws of society also. Instead of trying simply to blend into society, the true wits seek to establish a private world beyond it. They recognize that beneath the glittering costumes and language lurk hypocrisy and brutality. Marriages are more often made in countinghouses than in heaven; a wedding is often the beginning of a domestic tragedy rather than the end of a social comedy. Life does not always proceed smoothly, and even when it does, it leads to a loss of youth, beauty, and attractiveness. Congreve reaffirms the carpe diem spirit—eat, drink, and be merry—but he does not blink from the rest of the refrain— for tomorrow we die. The sadness beneath the surface of Congreve’s plays also derives from his refusal to dehumanize the targets of ridicule. Restoration comedy is social rather than psychological, and Congreve’s plays are primarily concerned with how one should act in society. For the first time in the period, though, those who do not conform are not simply dismissed as fools. In fact, Pope wondered whether Congreve actually portrayed any fools, and in his dedication of The Way of the World, Congreve noted that audiences had difficulty distinguishing “betwixt the character of a Witwoud and a Truewit” in that work. Congreve probes beneath action to motivation to reveal what Heartwell, Fondlewife, Lord Plyant, and Lady Wishfort are thinking. These characters recognize their weaknesses; they are not merely two-dimensional types but three-dimensional people capable of suffering. By granting humanity to would-be wits and fools, Congreve was unconsciously moving away from the purely satiric toward sentimental comedy. His one tragedy, which is actually a tragicomedy, similarly uses many of the conventions of the period while showing significant variations. The diction is inflated, as is typical of heroic tragedy. The action is remote in time and place, the characters of noble birth and larger than life, the conflict Hobbesian as rivals ruthlessly contend. Unlike earlier heroic tragedy, however, the resolution to the conflict comes not through a Leviathan, not through some divinely ordained ruler, but rather through a Glorious Revolution that overthrows unjust, though otherwise legitimate, authority in favor of a benign, popularly proclaimed monarch as exponents of power yield to advocates of love. The influence of John Locke and the deposition of James II echo in the play, especially when contrasted with Dryden’s tragedies, which espouse the divine right of kings. The Old Bachelor • Congreve may have begun The Old Bachelor as early as 1689, at the age of nineteen. Although Dryden proclaimed it the best first comedy he had ever seen, it shows in many ways evidence of being an apprentice piece. It is the only one of Congreve’s comedies that lacks dramatic tension. There is no reason why Bellmour and Belinda could not marry in the first scene because there are no blocking characters to prevent the match. Another flaw is Congreve’s ambiguous attitude toward Belinda. In the dramatis personae, he describes her as “an affected Lady,” and in his Amendments of Mr. Collier’s False and Imperfect Citations, he indicates that she is not intended to be admirable. Anne Bracegirdle, who always played the heroine in Congreve’s works, took the role of Araminta; Belinda was played by Susanah Mountfort, who performed as the obviously foolish Lady Froth in The Double-Dealer. Because role and performer blended with each other in Restoration drama, audiences would expect that Belinda/ Mountfort was intended as a butt of ridicule for her affectation and that Araminta would be the ideal to be admired. Yet at the end of the piece, Belinda is rewarded with marriage, while Araminta remains single.

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The Old Bachelor also suggests its author’s youth in its close adherence to the conventions of Restoration drama. It is, for example, the only one of Congreve’s comedies that has for its hero a practicing, rather than a reformed, rake. It introduces, somewhat gratuitously, standard butts of Restoration satire: a rustic boor (Sir Joseph Wittol), a pretender to valor who is in fact a coward (Captain Bluffe), a Puritan merchant (Fondlewife), and an old man who, according to the dramatis personae, while “pretending to slight Women, [is] secretly in love.” Aside from the treatment of Belinda, the play does show a sure hand in exposing these various pretenders and in providing suitable punishment for them. Sir Joseph Wittol is tricked out of one hundred pounds and married to Vainlove’s discarded mistress. Captain Bluffe is shown to be aptly named; he is valorous only in the absence of danger. He is beaten and kicked by Sharper and married off to Silvia’s maid, Lucy, who had been Setter’s mistress. Heartwell, who pretends to misogyny and candor, is punished by being made to believe that he has married Silvia and then being informed that she is not as chaste as he had assumed. Though he is again unmarried, he is tormented and mocked for his folly. Fondlewife has married a woman too young and sprightly for his years; additionally, he devotes himself to business, which Bellmour calls “the rub of life [that] perverts our aim, casts off the bias, and leaves us wide and short of the intended mark.” Fondlewife narrowly escapes cuckolding, and one senses that the escape is only temporary. As Vainlove notes, “If the spirit of cuckoldom be once raised up in a woman, the devil can’t lay it, ’till she has done ’t.” Congreve shows great skill in handling the dialogue. Bellmour and Belinda exemplify the witty couple of Restoration comedy; as is typical of duels between the witty man and woman, Belinda has the better of their exchanges. Vainlove and Araminta, too, engage in witty debate, and again the woman proves the wittier; in one dialogue, Araminta reduces Vainlove to a defeated “O madam!,” at which point she dismisses the conversation—and her suitor—with a call for music. The men and women also engage in repartee among themselves, deftly leaping from one topic to another, devising fresh and apt similes, coining paradoxes, brilliantly sketching a character in a line. The play abounds in the sheer joy of words, as when Barnaby tells Fondlewife, “Comfort will send Tribulation hither.” Restoration audiences attended comedies less for their plots than for their wit, and the success of The Old Bachelor shows that Congreve did not disappoint them in this regard. While Congreve was offering largely conventional fare in his first comedy, even here one finds hints of sadness beneath the comic surface. John King McComb argues (in his essay “Congreve’s The Old Bachelor: A Satiric Anatomy”) that Bellmour, Vainlove, Heartwell, Fondlewife, and Spintext are stages in the rise and fall of the lover— from rake, to fop, to gull, and finally, to cuckold. The “cormorant in love,” as Bellmour describes himself in the first scene, admits that “I must take up or I shall never hold out; flesh and blood cannot bear it always.” Vainlove has been a cormorant in love, too, but now contents himself with arousing desire and leaving to others the task of satisfying it. Heartwell, too, was a rake in his youth, but his passion has ebbed; unlike Vainlove, he no longer can excite women at those rare instances when he wishes to and so must attempt to purchase love. At the last stage are Fondlewife and Spintext; the latter never appears in the play but is mentioned as being a cuckold, while the audience sees Fondlewife first almost suffering the same fate and then refusing to believe the ocular proof. Bellmour, too, will age, Congreve seems to suggest; he will lose his looks and gaiety and perhaps be reduced to the state of a Heartwell or Fondlewife. The last

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speech of the play, which Congreve gives to Heartwell, projects such a fate for the youth. Restoration satire is also muted in the play through the humanization of Heartwell and Fondlewife, both of whom show more sense than the typical comic butt. Heartwell’s pretended aversion to “the drudgery of loving” must be exposed, since love is the chief concern of the Truewit and thus not to be slighted. Neither can pretense go unpunished. Yet Heartwell himself understands his dilemma as he is caught between reason and desire. Standing before Silvia’s house he declares, “I will recover my reason, and begone.” He is, however, fixed to the spot; his feet will not move: “I’m caught! There stands my north, and thither my needle points.—Now could I curse myself, yet cannot repent.” After Heartwell is caught and exposed, Congreve does not mask his real anguish. In a speech reminiscent of Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew eyes,” Heartwell turns on his mockers: “How have I deserved this of you? any of ye?” Vainlove urges Bellmour to stop ridiculing Heartwell—“You vex him too much; ’tis all serious to him”—and Belinda agrees: “I begin to pity him myself.” Similarly, Fondlewife, Puritan, banker, old man that he is—and any one of these characteristics would suffice in itself to render him ridiculous in a Restoration comedy— has moments of self-knowledge that grant him a touch of humanity. When he discovers Bellmour with his wife, he, too, speaks with dignity. Though Bellmour kisses Laetitia’s hand at the very moment she is being reconciled to her husband, Fondlewife’s tears and professions of kindness take some of the edge off the satire. If one must choose between the world of Bellmour and that of Fondlewife, one will certainly prefer the former; even so, Congreve understands that with all its admirable qualities, its wit, grace, youth, and intelligence, that world, too, is not devoid of faults. The Double-Dealer • Congreve’s second play, The Double-Dealer, demonstrates much greater control over his material; it also contains a more fully developed negative portrayal of society. In A Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage (1698), Jeremy Collier noted, “There are but Four Ladys in this Play, and Three of the biggest of them are Whores. A Great Compliment to Quality to tell them there is not above a quarter of them Honest!” Despite Congreve’s efforts to dismiss Collier’s observation, Congreve does indeed indict the fashionable world, and his epigram from Horace—“Sometimes even comedy raises her voice”—suggests that he intended to go beyond the conventional butts of Restoration satire. Small wonder that fashionable society returned the favor with a cool reception of the piece. Artistically, The Double-Dealer is much more coherent than The Old Bachelor. As Congreve wrote in the dedication, “I made the plot as strong as I could, because it was single; and I made it single, because I would avoid confusion.” This single plot revolves around the love between Cynthia and Mellefont, who wish to marry, and the efforts of Maskwell and Lady Touchwood to prevent the match. The intrigues of these blocking figures, though conventional in comedies of the period, provide dramatic tension lacking in Congreve’s earlier piece. Congreve’s handling of this central conflict, however, is less conventional. Typically, the Truewit defeats the Witwoud through his greater intelligence and so proves himself worthy of the witty heroine. When Mellefont proposes that he and Cynthia elope and thereby end the plotting and counterplotting, she rejects so simple a solution, demanding “a very evident demonstration of” her lover’s wit. Until Maskwell overreaches and betrays himself, though, Mellefont is powerless to direct the action of the play; instead, he acts as Maskwell directs.

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The conversation is not as sprightly as in Congreve’s other plays or in Restoration comedy generally. Mellefont and Cynthia are too good-natured to take verbal advantage of the follies of those around them. While their benevolence makes them likable, it also tends to make them dull. They seem to anticipate the comedies of Steele rather than looking back to those of Etherege and Wycherley. Like Maskwell, the Witwouds are left to expose themselves: Lady Froth attempts a heroic poem on “Syllabub,” for which Brisk provides inane commentary; Lord Froth claims that the height of wit is refraining from laughing at a joke, yet he laughs incessantly; Lady Plyant thinks herself a mistress of language but contrives such convoluted sentences that her lover, Careless, is driven to exclaim, “O Heavens, madam, you confound me!” These Witwouds are as vain as they are foolish. In a telling piece of byplay, Lord Froth takes out a mirror to look at himself; Brisk takes it from him to admire himself. This sign of vanity is repeated when Lady Froth hands her husband a mirror, asking him to pretend it is her picture. Lord Froth becomes so enamored of the image he sees that his wife declares, “Nay, my lord, you shan’t kiss it so much, I shall grow jealous, I vow now.” Like false wit, vanity is left to mock itself. Even sex, treated so cavalierly in other comedies of the period, is here largely a disruptive rather than a regenerative force. Each of the married women in the play is false to her husband. Lord Froth and Sir Paul Plyant are old and foolish and so “deserve” to be cuckolded, but the same cannot be said of Lord Touchwood. Lady Touchwood’s passion for her nephew Mellefont threatens to upset Cynthia’s marriage as well as her own and to subvert, through incest, proper familial relationships. Her passion for Maskwell, meanwhile, threatens to allow a member of the servant class to become a lord, as she contrives to have Maskwell supplant Mellefont as her husband’s heir. The seriousness of this sexual promiscuity is manifest at the end of the play; Lady Touchwood is to be divorced and so lose her position in society. Surrounded by vanity, infidelity, folly, and knavery, Cynthia has good reason to wonder whether she and Mellefont should continue to participate in the social charade. “’Tis an odd game we are going to play at; what think you of drawing stakes, and giving over in time?” she asks Mellefont. She understands that marriage is not a great improver: “I’m thinking, though marriage makes man and wife one flesh, it leaves them still two fools.” The song that concludes this conversation with Mellefont warns of yet another threat: “Prithee, Cynthia, look behind you,/ Age and wrinkles will o’ertake you;/ Then, too late, desire will find you,/ When the power must forsake you.” To become like her stepmother, Lady Plyant, or Mellefont’s aunt, Lady Touchwood, may be the fate reserved for Cynthia. The melancholy implicit in The Old Bachelor here rises to the surface. Mellefont remains cheerful, but his optimism seems misplaced. He has grossly misjudged Maskwell; he may be misjudging all of reality. Though the true lovers marry, and though Maskwell and Lady Touchwood are banished at the end of the play, Congreve had not yet found, as he did in his last play, a way to reconcile the private world of virtue with the public world of folly, sham, and pretense. Cynthia and Mellefont remain apart from society; they do not control their actions, nor do they appear much in the play. The implication is that one can preserve one’s innocence only by avoiding the fashionable world. The play thus foreshadows the gloom of the Tory satirists as well as the sentimental comedy of the next age. Love for Love • Congreve was stung by the cool reception of his bitingly satiric The Double-Dealer. Although he believed that satire is the aim of comedy, in his next play,

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Love for Love, he disguised his attacks on fashionable society and offered a more traditional Restoration comedy. As he notes in the prologue: “We hope there’s something that may please each taste.” Much of the satire of Love for Love is confined to Valentine’s mad scenes in the fourth act. By putting these comments into the mouth of a seeming madman, Congreve can be harsh without offending; it is as if he were stepping outside the world of the play to deliver these observations. Valentine in his madness is utterly Juvenalian, railing against all aspects of the fashionable world. There is more truth than wit in such observations as, “Dost thou know what will happen to-morrow?—answer me not—for I will tell thee. Tomorrow, knaves will thrive through craft, and fools through fortune, and honesty will go as it did, frostnipped in a summer suit.” Scandal, Valentine’s friend, is also harsh in his analysis of society: “I can shew you pride, folly, affection, wantonness, inconstancy, covetousness, dissimulation, malice, and ignorance, all in one piece. Then I can shew you lying, foppery, vanity, cowardice, bragging, lechery, impotence and ugliness in another piece; and yet one of these is a celebrated beauty, and t’other a professed beau.” Beneath the surface, the way of the world is vicious and foul. By the end of the play, though, Valentine abandons his feigned madness, and Scandal is willing to take a kinder view of the world than that expressed in the song: “He alone won’t betray in whom none will confide;/ And the nymph may be chaste that has never been tried.” Although society in Love for Love has its faults, these spring more from folly than from vice; the world here is closer to that of The Old Bachelor than to that of The Double-Dealer. There are no villains such as Maskwell or Lady Touchwood, no divorce, no banishment from society. As in The Old Bachelor, there is considerable pretense that must be exposed and, to an extent, punished. Tattle pretends to be a great rake, a keeper of secrets, and a wit. Foresight pretends to be wise, to be able to foretell the future, and to be a suitable husband for a “young and sanguine” wife. Sir Sampson Legend pretends to be a good father and a fit husband for Angelica. Each of these pretenders is exposed and punished. Tattle is married off in secret to Mrs. Frail, a woman of the town. Fondlewife is cuckolded. Sir Sampson’s plan to cheat his son of his inheritance and his fiancée is frustrated. These characters are Witwouds because they fail to adhere to the ideals of Restoration society. Sir Sampson is greedy; Foresight has failed to acquire wisdom with age; Tattle seeks a fortune rather than pleasure. They all want to be Truewits, but they are unable or unwilling to conform to the demands of wit. Below them are Ben and Miss Prue, respectively a “sea-beast” and a “land monster.” Neither has had the opportunity to learn good manners, Ben because he has spent his life at sea and Prue because she has been reared in the country rather than the town. They are no match for even the pretended wits. Tattle quickly seduces Prue; Mrs. Frail seduces Ben. Society has no place for these characters, who return to their element at the end of the play. Above the fools and would-be wits are Valentine and Angelica. She is the typical Restoration witty lady, able to manipulate Foresight and Sir Sampson and control Valentine to attain her goal, which is a suitable marriage. Valentine has many of the characteristics of the wit—he is generous, he prefers pleasure to prudence, he is a clever conversationalist—but Angelica will not marry him until she is certain that he really is a proper husband. At the beginning of the play, there is some question as to his suitability, not because he has been a rake, not because he has spent money recklessly—these are actually commendable activities—but because he has been trying to buy Angelica’s love. Val-

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entine’s lavish entertaining has been to impress her; he seems to regard her as mercenary and must learn her true character. Having failed to purchase her with his wealth, Valentine next tries to shame her with his poverty; here, again, he fails. Then he tries to trick her into expressing her love by feigning to be mad. As a Truewit, Angelica is able to penetrate this disguise also. Only when Valentine abandons all of his tricks and agrees that Angelica should have free choice of a husband does she accept him. Marriage for her is a serious business; she must be certain she is not submitting to tyranny or being pursued solely for her large fortune. The blocking figure in Love for Love is, then, Valentine himself, and the plot of the play concerns his learning how to interact in society. Ben and Miss Prue do not learn how to do so, in part because of their previous experiences, in part because their teachers are would-be instead of true wits, in part because they lack intelligence and so are easily deceived. Foresight, Tattle, and Sir Sampson fail to learn because their characters are flawed. Foresight thinks he will learn from astrology, while Sir Sampson and Tattle think so highly of themselves that they are not even aware that they need to be taught anything. Congreve indicates in Love for Love that one must live within a society that is less than perfect but that one can do so pleasantly enough if one adheres to the ideals of Restoration comedy. The despair in The Double-Dealer yields here to a happier vision. Valentine and Angelica, unlike Mellefont and Cynthia, understand their society and have shown their ability to survive in it. Because Congreve recognizes the limitations of the fashionable world, he is sympathetic to characters who do not quite fit in. Ben is not simply a butt of ridicule because he is an outsider. Whereas Tattle is punished with Mrs. Frail, Ben escapes that fate. Because he does not share society’s viewpoint, Ben is also able to make some telling comments. He speaks his mind, shuns pretense, is generous, and understands that he will be happier at sea than in London. Prue, too, is honest; though she is Tattle’s willing pupil, she does escape marrying him. The innocent fools suffer less than do the Witwouds. With Love for Love, Congreve has found his true voice—a combination of satire, compassion, and wit. His hero and heroine understand both the attractions and faults of society and therefore are able to skate deftly on the surface of their world without succumbing to its folly, as Bellmour and Belinda may, or being overwhelmed by its viciousness, as Mellefont and Cynthia may be. It is a shorter step from Love for Love to The Way of the World than from The Old Bachelor to this comedy. The Mourning Bride • Before making that step, however, Congreve turned to tragedy, though The Mourning Bride resembles Congreve’s other plays, for, like the comedies, it explores the questions of how the individual should act in society and what constitutes a proper marriage. On the one hand are Zara and Manuel, who rely on royal birth and power. They believe that power can command even love; Manuel wants to compel his daughter to marry Garcia, the son of the king’s favorite, and Zara seeks to force Osmyn to marry her. Manuel is therefore another version of Sir Sampson Legend, who would have his child act as he himself wishes, regardless of the child’s desires. Zara is a tragic rendition of Lady Touchwood, who would rather murder the man she loves than see a rival marry him. Significantly, Elizabeth Barry played both Lady Touchwood and Zara. Zara and Manuel serve as blocking figures, much like Maskwell and Lady Touchwood, but with more power to do evil. Contrasted to these two are Osmyn and Almeria. They, too, are of royal birth, but

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instead of using power to create love, they use love to get power. They are generous, brave, intelligent, like their comic counterparts. Like them, too, they are young, confronting a harsh world controlled by their elders. As in the comedies, the values of the young triumph, but in the process the villains are not simply exposed but, as befits a tragedy, killed. The true lovers wed; Zara and Manuel also “marry”—at the end of the play, Zara drinks to her love from a poisoned bowl, embraces him, and dies by his side exclaiming, “This to our mutual bliss when joined above.” Like Tattle and Mrs. Frail, the unworthy characters are joined. The analogy is strengthened by the masked wedding each undergoes. Just as Tattle and Mrs. Frail do not recognize their partners until it is too late, so Zara believes she is dying beside Osmyn rather than Manuel. The deposition of the old by the young marks a triumph of love over power. It also addresses the question of what constitutes legitimate power. The older generation believes that birth and rank alone are sufficient; Manuel and Zara sense no obligation to anyone but themselves. Theirs is the belief in the divine right of kings to govern wrongly. Osmyn and Almeria have a different view. Though of royal birth, Osmyn is elevated to the throne by the people, who rebel against Manuel’s tyranny. Congreve, staunch Whig, is portraying the Glorious Revolution, in which the hereditary monarch, because he has abused his power, loses his crown to a more worthy, because more benevolent, successor. The Way of the World • In the first scene of the fourth act of The Way of the World, Congreve directly addresses the issue of how two people can live harmoniously with each other while retaining personal autonomy and dignity on the one hand and remaining part of the social world on the other. This famous “Proviso” scene has a long theatrical history. A scene that first gained prominence in Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astrée (1607-1628, 1925; Astrea, 1657-1658), versions appear in four of Dryden’s comedies– The Wild Gallant (pr. 1663), Secret Love: Or, The Maiden Queen (pr. 1667), Marriage à la Mode (pr. 1672, pb. 1673) and Amphitryon: Or, The Two Socia’s (pr., pb. 1690)—in James Howard’s All Mistaken: Or, The Mad Couple (pr. 1667), and Edward Ravenscroft’s The Careless Lovers (pr. 1673) and The Canterbury Guests (pr. 1694). As he did so often, Congreve used a well-established convention but invested it with new significance and luster. The proviso in The Way of the World is not only the wittiest of such scenes but also the most brilliantly integrated into the theme of the play. Indeed, the scene illuminates the plight of every witty heroine who had appeared on the Restoration stage and summarized the hopes and fears of all fashionable couples to that time. Millamant does not want to “dwindle into a wife”; Mirabell does not want to “be beyond measure enlarged into a husband.” She wishes to be “made sure of my will and pleasure”; he wants to be certain that his wife’s liberty will not degenerate into license. In the Hobbesian world of self-love, rivalry, and conflicting passions, these two therefore devise a Lockean compact, creating a peaceful and reasonable accommodation between their individual and mutual needs. They will not act like other fashionable couples, “proud of one another the first week, and ashamed of one another ever after.” They will act more like strangers in public, that they may act more like lovers in private. Millamant will remain autonomous in her sphere of the tea table, but she will not “encroach upon the men’s prerogative.” She will not sacrifice her health or natural beauty to fashion or whim; otherwise, she may dress as she likes. Together the lovers create a private world divorced from the follies and vices of the society around them while retaining the freedom to interact with that society when they must.

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In contrast to this witty couple are Fainall and Marwood. As the names suggest, Fainall is a pretender to wit, and his consort, Marwood, seeks to mar the match between Mirabell and Millamant because of her love—and then hate—for Mirabell. She, too, is a pretender, a seeming prude who in fact is having an affair with Fainall. Whereas the witty couple seek to preserve their private world inviolate, Fainall and Marwood attempt to exploit private relationships. Fainall has married for money, not love, and once he has secured his wife’s fortune, he intends to divorce her, marry Marwood, and flee society. Later, he and Marwood conspire to secure half of Millamant’s and all of Lady Wishfort’s estate by threatening to expose Mrs. Fainall’s earlier affair with Mirabell, hoping that Lady Wishfort will pay to keep secret her daughter’s indiscretion and prevent a public divorce. On yet another level are Lady Wishfort, Petulant, and Witwoud, who have no private life at all. Lady Wishfort cannot smile because she will ruin her carefully applied makeup; the face she presents to society must not be disturbed by any unexpected emotion. All of her efforts are directed to appearing fashionable—hence her fear of Mrs. Fainall’s exposure. Hence, too, her inflated rhetoric when she tries to impress the supposed Sir Rowland. Petulant wishes to appear the true Restoration wit and so hires women to ask for him at public places. He will even disguise himself and then “call for himself, wait for himself; nay, and what’s more, not finding himself, sometimes [leave] a letter for himself.” Witwoud, as his name indicates, seeks to pass himself off as a wit but must rely on his memory rather than his invention to maintain a conversation. His cowardice or stupidity prevents his understanding an insult, and he mistakes “impudence and malice” for wit. He will not acknowledge his own brother because he believes it unfashionable to know one’s own relations, thus surrendering private ties to public show. Sir Willful, Witwoud’s half brother, is the typical rustic. Like Ben and Prue in Love for Love, he has no place in society. He withdraws from social interaction first by getting drunk and then by returning to his element, leaving the urban world entirely. Congreve thus offers four ways of coping with the demands of society. One may flee completely, as Sir Willful does and as Marwood, Fainall, and Lady Wishfort talk of doing. Mirabell and Millamant could adopt this solution, too. If they elope, Millamant will retain half of her fortune, enough to allow the couple a comfortable life together, but they would lose the pleasures of the tea table, of the theater, of social intercourse— of all the benefits, in short, that society can offer. One can also submit one’s personality completely to society and abandon any privacy (Petulant and Witwoud). One can use private life only to serve one’s social ends (Fainall and Marwood), or one can find a suitable balance between them. Presented with these choices, Mirabell and Millamant wisely choose the last. The question posed here is not only one of surfaces, of how best to enjoy life, although that element is important. Additionally, Congreve here explores differing ethical stances. The opening conversation between Mirabell and Fainall establishes the moral distinction between them. Fainall states, “I’d no more play with a man that slighted his ill fortune than I’d make love to a woman who undervalued the loss of her reputation.” Mirabell replies, “You have a taste extremely delicate, and are for refining on your pleasures.” Fainall’s may be the wittier comment, but it is also the more malicious. True wit in The Way of the World embraces morality as well as intelligence. Mirabell does prove more intelligent than Fainall, outwitting him “by anticipation” just as he has cuckolded Fainall by anticipation. Even so, in their conversations the difference in cleverness is not as apparent as it is between Witwoud or Mirabell or Lady

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Wishfort and Millamant. Congreve once more is moving toward sentimental comedy by creating an intelligent hero who is also sententious. He is foreshadowing Addison’s attempt in the Spectator “to enliven Morality with Wit, and to temper Wit with Morality.” The tone is bittersweet—another anticipation of the next age. Like Belinda in Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1712, 1714), Millamant must grow up. Just as she cannot be a coquette forever, so Mirabell must put aside his rakish past. One has a sense of time’s passing. Even amid the witty repartee of the proviso scene, Mirabell looks ahead to Millamant’s pregnancy, and to the time beyond that when she will be tempted, as Lady Wishfort is now, to hide her wrinkles. Her maid will one day say to her what Foible tells her lady: “I warrant you, madam, a little art once made your picture like you; and now a little of the same art must make you like your picture.” With this new sense of the future coexists a new sense of the past, a sense that one’s earlier actions have consequences. Valentine is able to dismiss a former mistress with a gift of money and to redeem his earlier extravagances through an inheritance and a good marriage. Mirabell is not so fortunate. His previous affair with Mrs. Fainall is not immoral—no one condemns Mirabell for it—but neither is it a trifle to be quickly forgotten. Because of that affair, Mrs. Fainall has had to marry a man she dislikes and who hates her; she is not merely asking for information when she inquires of Mirabell, “Why did you make me marry this man?” Nor has Mirabell escaped all consequences, for this affair gives Fainall the opportunity to seize half of Millamant’s—and thus half of Mirabell’s—estate. The artificial world and golden dreams of The Old Bachelor have essentially vanished in The Way of the World. The form remains—the witty couple contending successfully against the Witwouds and the fools; the young struggling against the old; the flawed but brilliant urbane society opposing vulgarity and rusticity. Congreve has elevated this form to its highest point; there is no more lovable coquette than Millamant, no Restoration wit more in control of his milieu than Mirabell. Yet the substance, the sense of passing time, of the sadness of real life, is undermining the comedy of wit. Alexander Pope called Congreve ultimus Romanorum (the ultimate Roman). He is truly the greatest of the Restoration dramatists, but he is ultimus in its other sense as well— the last. Other major works long fiction: Incognita: Or, Love and Duty Reconcil’d, 1692 (novella). poetry: “To Mr. Dryden on His Translation of Persius,” 1693; Poems upon Several Occasions, 1710. nonfiction: Amendments of Mr. Collier’s False and Imperfect Citations, 1698; William Congreve: Letters and Documents, 1964 ( John C. Hodges, editor). translations: Ovid’s Art of Love, Book III, 1709; Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 1717 (with John Dryden and Joseph Addison). miscellaneous: Examen Poeticum, 1693; The Works of Mr. William Congreve, 1710; The Complete Works of William Congreve, 1923, reprint 1964 (Montague Summers, editor; 4 volumes). Bibliography Bartlett, Laurence. William Congreve: An Annotated Bibliography, 1978-1994. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1996. A bibliography of works concerning Congreve. Index. Hoffman, Arthur W. Congreve’s Comedies. Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria, 1993. A critical study of Congreve’s comedic dramas. Bibliography.

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Lindsay, Alexander, and Howard Erskine-Hill, eds. William Congreve: The Critical Heritage. New York: Routledge, 1989. These essays trace Congreve’s critical reception from the immediate acclaim that greeted his first comedy to the emergence of modern academic criticism in the twentieth century. The editors include a generous selection of dramatic reviews, particularly from the eighteenth century, when all five of his plays were a standard part of the repertory. Bibliography. Sieber, Anita. Character Portrayal in Congreve’s Comedies: “The Old Batchelor,” “Love for Love,” and “The Way of the World.” Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996. An examination of the characters in three of Congreve’s best-known comedies. Bibliography. Thomas, David. William Congreve. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. A critical analysis of the works of Congreve, along with details of his life. Bibliography and index. Young, Douglas M. The Feminist Voices in Restoration Comedy: The Virtuous Women in the Play-worlds of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1997. A look at female characters in the Restoration comedies of Congreve, George Etherege, and William Wycherley. Bibliography and index. Joseph Rosenblum, updated by Genevieve Slomski

Pierre Corneille Pierre Corneille

Born: Rouen, France; June 6, 1606 Died: Paris, France; September 30, 1684 Principal drama • Mélite: Ou, Les Fausses Lettres, pr. 1630, pb. 1633 (English translation, 1776); Clitandre, pr. 1631, pb. 1632; La Veuve: Ou, Le Traîte trahi, pr. 1631, pb. 1634; La Galerie du palais: Ou, L’Amie rivale, pr. 1632, pb. 1637; La Suivante, pr. 1633, pb. 1637; La Place royale: Ou, L’Amoureux extravagant, pr. 1634, pb. 1637; Médée, pr. 1635, pb. 1639; L’Illusion comique, pr. 1636, pb. 1639 (The Illusion, 1989); Le Cid, pr., pb. 1637 (The Cid, 1637); Horace, pr. 1640, pb. 1641 (English translation, 1656); Cinna: Ou, La Clémence d’Auguste, pr. 1640, pb. 1643 (Cinna, 1713); Polyeucte, pr. 1642, pb. 1643 (English translation, 1655); La Mort de Pompée, pr. 1643, pb. 1644 (The Death of Pompey, 1663); Le Menteur, pr. 1643, pb. 1644 (The Liar, 1671); La Suite du menteur, pr. 1644, pb. 1645; Rodogune, princesse des Parthes, pr. 1645, pb. 1647 (Rodogune, 1765); Théodore, vierge et martyre, pr. 1645, pb. 1646; Héraclius, pr., pb. 1647 (English translation, 1664); Don Sanche d’Aragon, pr. 1649, pb. 1650 (The Conflict, 1798); Andromède, pr., pb. 1650; Nicomède, pr., pb. 1651 (English translation, 1671); Pertharite, roi des Lombards, pr. 1651, pb. 1653; Œdipe, pr., pb. 1659; La Toison d’or, pr. 1660, pb. 1661; Théâtre, pb. 1660 (3 volumes); Sertorius, pr., pb. 1662 (English translation, 1960); Sophonisbe, pr., pb. 1663; Othon, pr. 1664, pb. 1665 (English translation, 1960); Agésilas, pr., pb. 1666; Attila, pr., pb. 1667 (English translation, 1960); Tite et Bérénice, pr. 1670, pb. 1671; Pulchérie, pr. 1672, pb. 1673 (English translation, 1960); Suréna, pr. 1674, pb. 1675 (English translation, 1960); The Chief Plays of Corneille, pb. 1952, 1956; Moot Plays, pb. 1960 Other literary forms • Although Pierre Corneille is known principally for his plays, he wrote a number of poems and at least one ballet libretto. Of his poetry there remain approximately one hundred pieces in French and a small number in Latin. Outside the theater, however, his best-known literary work is a long religious poem of thirteen thousand lines, the Imitation de Jésus-Christ, published in its entirety in 1656. A free translation of Saint Thomas à Kempis’s Latin work, it enjoyed an immediate success; four editions were published in 1656 alone. Another adaptation of a Latin religious work into a lengthy French verse, Office de la Sainte Vierge, published in 1670, was a relative failure, for it was not reedited. To accompany a three-volume edition of his plays, Corneille published in 1660 a series of essays in which he formally presented his critical theories: three Discours and the Examens (one for each play). While some critics refer to Corneille’s theory of drama as evidence that he misunderstood his own plays, the Discours and Examens can nevertheless be very helpful in understanding French classical theater. There exist twenty-four letters by Corneille, of little general interest. Achievements • Generally hailed as the originator of French classical tragedy, Pierre Corneille is recognized as a master dramatist whose work founded a theater admired and envied by the rest of Europe throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ever the innovator, Corneille attempted many types of drama during his long career. 210

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Although he is known mainly as a tragedian, his thirty-three plays include heroic comedy, comedy of manners, comedy of intrigue, sacred plays, machine plays, and ballet librettos. His career met with both dazzling success and abysmal failure. He was praised as the greatest French dramatist during the first half of his career, but the changing tastes of the Parisian audience and the popularity of Corneille’s younger rival Jean Racine marred the latter part of his life. Although his later plays were for the most part critical and financial failures, recent critics have rehabilitated a number of these mature works. Corneille’s lasting influence on the French theater is perhaps his most noteworthy achievement. Most commentators agree that he fixed the genre of tragedy, separating it from its Greek origins and giving it an entirely new character. With Corneille, tragedy presents to its audience a precise moral and emotional conflict which is thoroughly analyzed and finally resolved through the interactions of a limited number of characters. Many have noted that Corneille’s drama is not tragic in the Aristotelian sense. It was in essence a modern conception based not on the emotions of terror and pity but rather on admiration. Although destiny plays a role in Corneillian tragedy, the Greek tragic hero, a plaything of fate, becomes for Corneille a being confronted by an apparently irresolvable—and thus tragic—conflict, but who prevails, guided by an essential freedom enlightened by sound judgment and supported by will. Derived from tragicomedy, Corneille’s tragedies, with the exception perhaps of his last play, Suréna, end on a note of hope and even joy. In general terms, it is a theater of optimism. Biography • Pierre Corneille was born to a prosperous bourgeois family. His father and grandfather were lawyers in the parliament of Rouen, and, after studying Latin at the local Jesuit school (where he won prizes for Latin verse composition), Corneille took a law degree in 1624. In 1628, his parents bought for him a position as king’s counselor in the Rouen office of the departments of waterways and forests and of the admiralty, posts that he conscientiously filled until 1650. Corneille lived for many years in Rouen, moving to Paris only in 1662 in order, perhaps, to satisfy a promise made to the French Academy on his election in 1647, which required that its members reside in Paris. His younger brother Thomas, also a popular dramatist, with whom Corneille had a long and close relationship, may also have influenced the decision to move to the capital. Corneille had six children with Marie de Lampérière, whom he married in 1641 and whose family background was similar to his own. Corneille met with immediate success as a dramatist. His first play, the comedy Mélite, submitted to the famous actor Montdory while his theatrical troupe was performing in Rouen in 1629, was a triumph when Montdory performed it in Paris in the following year. Seven more plays (of which six were comedies) made Corneille a wellknown young author when, in early 1637, probably the most significant play in the history of French drama, The Cid, scored an unheard of popular success. Historians have made much of the three-year silence following The Cid (pique at the critics who condemned the play? or pressing legal burdens in Rouen?), yet three more resounding successes followed: Horace, Cinna, and Polyeucte. During the “Corneillian decade,” the 1640’s, Corneille consolidated his status as the premier French playwright. In 1651, the dismal failure of Pertharite, roi des Lombards precipitated a second “silence.” From 1651 to 1656, Corneille devoted most of his time to the Imitation de Jésus-Christ. Finally, encouraged by the powerful financial secretary Nicolas Fouquet, Corneille returned to the theater with Œdipe, presented in 1659 to a

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delighted Parisian audience. The remainder of his productions did not equal the popular acclaim of the earlier plays. Although he continued to write, Corneille’s inability to adapt to changing tastes most likely explains his decline. Almost unnoticed by the public, Suréna, produced in 1674, marks his definitive retirement. Corneille was considered passé, although the performance of six of his tragedies at Versailles in 1676 is evidence of the dramatist’s continuing reputation. Very little is known of Corneille’s private life. Literary historians have emphasized, however, the duality of his life. The creator of heroic and majestic characters designed to elicit the public’s admiration, a dramatist with worldwide fame, Corneille was apparently a good bourgeois family man, a minor magistrate who led an uneventful life. Contemporary accounts indicate that he was a shy, retiring man who cut a very poor figure in Parisian society. As a writer, nevertheless, Corneille was a proud man, very conscious of his merit. Analysis • The concept of the Corneillian hero, although it is somewhat misleading because it tends to oversimplify a vast and varied body of plays, has fired the imagination of generations. Seen in purest form in the earlier plays, this hero, torn between the dictates of duty, honor, and patriotism and the demands of love, achieves, through the strength of reason and will, an absolute realization of self. Often surrounded by mediocrity or by relative values, the hero is concerned solely for his gloire, which might be defined as an extreme form of aristocratic honor and self-respect, providing selfdefinition. Love in the hero is not an irrational, all-consuming emotion but rather is based on reason and respect for the beloved’s merit, or gloire. It is not surprising that Pierre Corneille has historically enjoyed periods of popularity before and during wars: His work has been the source of heroic inspiration and energy in France’s spiritual heritage. L’Illusion comique • Corneille’s first eight plays, all but one of them comedies, combine obvious influences from contemporary drama with the playwright’s search for greater independence. The most remarkable of his early plays is L’Illusion comique, which Corneille in 1660 called a “strange monster.” It is clear that he wrote the play without the slightest regard for the dramatic unities then being promulgated by literary theorists. Called a Baroque drama because of its emphasis on illusion, instability, and metamorphosis, the play is the culmination of Corneille’s early period and contains an effective apology of the theater, and, perhaps, of the career that Corneille had chosen for himself. Act 1 is a kind of prologue: Pridamant has spent years searching for his son Clindor, who was alienated from his father ten years earlier. Having found no trace of his son, Pridamant is brought by his friend Dorante to the grotto of the magician Alcandre. With a sweep of his magic wand, Alcandre shows to Pridamant some of his son’s varied adventures during the last ten years. Thus, in act 2 a play-within-a-play begins in which Clindor is valet to the cowardly military captain Matamore, a farcical character who boasts of fantastic military and amorous exploits. Both men love Isabelle, who in turn loves Clindor. Adraste, another rival for the love of Isabelle, fights Clindor, who, though wounded, kills Adraste. Clindor is condemned to execution for murder. Isabelle’s servant, Lyse, who is loved by Clindor’s jailor, succeeds in freeing Clindor. He, Lyse, and the beloved Isabelle flee. At the end of each act, there is a brief return to the grotto, where Pridamant records his reactions to his son’s adventures. At the end of act 4, Pridamant breathes easily after his son’s es-

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cape, but Alcandre promises him more tense moments. Suddenly, in act 5, a transformation in Alcandre’s show occurs: Clindor, richly dressed, courts another woman. He has forsaken Isabelle, who, dressed as a princess, complains of Clindor’s infidelities to Lyse. The jealous husband of the woman whom Clindor is courting, Prince Florilame, has Clindor killed and kidnaps Isabelle. Pridamant, who believes that he has witnessed the murder of his son, is inconsolable until Alcandre reveals yet another scene: Clindor, Isabelle, and the others are counting and dividing money. It turns out that (Library of Congress) they are actors, and the last scene was a fragment of a tragedy that they had just performed. Pridamant, relieved but scandalized by the idea that his son has chosen such a “degrading” profession, is finally convinced by Alcandre’s eloquent defense of the theater and of Clindor’s honorable profession. Built on levels of illusion, L’Illusion comique contains a play-within-a-play-within-aplay. The notion of theatricality is central to the play. The magician Alcandre takes on the role of director and author while Pridamant represents the dazzled and deceived audience. Within the levels of illusion, there is a hierarchy. On the lowest and least effective level, Matamore and his swashbuckling boasts create “illusions” that fool no one. On the highest level, Alcandre creates superbly effective, magical, supernatural illusions that occur in a secret place (the grotto) and are inaccessible to the vast majority of people. Between these two extremes lies the theater, a remarkable source of illusion accessible to all, a “magical” place presided over by “magicians”—actors, directors, and, above all, playwrights. L’Illusion comique reflects the generally high esteem in which the theater was held in the period. In 1641, a royal decree affirmed the dignity of the actor’s profession; only toward the end of the century did the prestige of the stage begin to decline. The extraordinary renown of Corneille’s next play attests the popularity of drama in the 1630’s. The Cid • For The Cid, by far his most successful and well-known play, Corneille drew his inspiration from a contemporary Spanish work, Guillèn de Castro y Bellvís’s Las mocedades del Cid (1621). It was necessary to adapt this long and diffuse foreign play to the tastes of the French audience. Corneille simplified and condensed, keeping the essential Romanesque theme of an aristocratic hero who accepts the tragic burden of opposing moral obligations and thus transcends the contingencies of the human condition. The two major characters are Rodrigue and Chimène, who are betrothed at the beginning of the play. The rivalry between Rodrigue’s aging father, Don Diègue, and

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Don Gomès, father of Chimène, initiates the conflict. Furious after the king’s appointment of Don Diègue as tutor to the prince, the younger Don Gomès slaps and thus mortally insults Rodrigue’s father. Too old to avenge this affront, Don Diègue asks his son to preserve the family honor. Rodrigue must choose between his family and his love, and in a famous soliloquy (the “Stances du Cid,” act 1 scene 6), decides to challenge the more experienced Don Gomès. In arriving at this decision, Rodrigue realizes that failure to uphold the family honor would inevitably result in the loss of Chimène because inaction would make him unworthy of her. Though steeped in emotion, the decision is thus both logical and necessary. In act 2, Rodrigue kills Don Gomès in a duel. The act’s last scene stages a confrontation before the king between Chimène, who demands that her father’s murderer be punished, and Don Diègue, who justifies his son’s honorable action. Chimène thus undergoes a conflict similar to that of Rodrigue: She is torn between two passions, family honor and love, and she chooses honor. Act 3 contains the poignant scene in which Rodrigue confronts Chimène, asking that she personally end his life and thereby avenge her father. This she cannot do: She demands that he leave her house yet gives him to understand that she loves him still. Her true feelings are expressed with marvelous economy in a famous line often cited as an example of Corneille’s use of litotes (a figure of speech in which an affirmative is expressed by the negation of its contrary): “Va, je ne te hais point ” (“Go, I do not hate you”). This emotional duel is said to have provoked great admiration and emotion in contemporary audiences. This scene of interior conflict accompanies an exterior threat: The infidel Moors are massing to attack the city of Seville. Exhorted again by his father, Rodrigue leads a force that, in the course of a nocturnal battle, defeats the Moors and saves the realm. Now a great hero, the right arm of the king, Rodrigue receives the title of le Cid, or Lord, from his vanquished foes. This turn of events obliges Chimène to assert an even greater force of will: For honor’s sake, she must persist in seeking vengeance on the new and acclaimed hero of Spain. Although knowing that Chimène still loves Rodrigue, the king allows her to choose a champion. Don Sanche, rejected lover of Chimène, will uphold her cause in single combat with Rodrigue, after which Chimène will marry the victor. In the last act, Rodrigue bids farewell to Chimène: He is resigned to his death. After the duel, Don Sanche enters the scene, and Chimène believes that he has triumphed. Cursing Don Sanche, she admits publicly her undying love for Rodrigue. The king reveals the truth: that Rodrigue had won, spared his adversary, and sent him to Chimène as messenger. Asking that she forgive Rodrigue, the king declares that a year’s delay will temper Chimène’s desire for revenge, after which she and Rodrigue will marry. During this time, Rodrigue will be able to accomplish greater exploits, thus increasing his gloire and making him even worthier of Chimène’s noble hand. The concept of rivalry informs the action of The Cid. The king’s decision at the outset exacerbates the rivalry between the proud fathers. The inevitable conflict then falls on the children: Both Rodrigue and Chimène must equal the aristocratic resolve of the other. Products of a feudal ethic that places honor above all else, the young couple are heroic yet sensitive. Each suffers, yet neither’s strength of will weakens. The seemingly irresolvable conflict is reconciled by the couple’s submission to higher authority. The king, who has the last words in the play, imposes his will on a younger generation, which accepts the idea of monarchical order. Represented by the fathers, the less-sympathetic older generation exhibits the intransigent feudal mentality of kill or die.

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Corneille’s emphasis on youth, on young lovers who provoke the pity but above all the admiration of the audience, is a keystone in his drama. It is important to note that the play traces the development of Corneillian heroism in Rodrigue. An inexperienced young man at the opening of the play, albeit with much potential because of his illustrious blood, Rodrigue becomes the “Cid.” There is an upward movement in which Rodrigue and Chimène are apotheosized. The Cid remains perhaps the best example of the ethical values of Corneillian drama: a noble idealism oriented toward the glorification of the passions and the self. The huge popularity of The Cid touched off a debate famous in French literary history—“la querelle du Cid.” This quarrel is significant, reflecting a period in which the “baroque” and the “classical” styles were at odds. One of Corneille’s major rivals, Georges de Scudéry, wrote in 1637 Observations sur le Cid, in which he condemned the choice of subject as being inappropriate in a genre whose subjects should have ancient sources; he also attacked Corneille’s “plagiarism,” the play’s stylistic defects, and its inattention to the rules of drama. The last criticism is perhaps the most interesting. Scudéry declared that The Cid‘s many plot elements could never occur within the prescribed twenty-four-hour time limit; the play’s action is therefore not verisimilar. The concept of vraisemblance—verisimilitude—was a fundamental tenet of the classical theoreticians. Scudéry also complained of the play’s apparently unnecessary characters, in particular the Infante, the princess who also loves Rodrigue. Much emphasis was placed on act 1 scene 3, in which the overweening Don Gomès insults and slaps the older Don Diègue onstage. Critics condemned the incident as shocking: It violated the dictum of bienséance—decorum—a moral and social principle that required propriety of representation and satisfaction of the tastes and mores of the public. The debate became so bitter that the powerful minister Cardinal Richelieu, wishing to establish the authority of the newly formed French Academy, ordered it to arbitrate the dispute. The Sentiments de l’Académie sur Le Cid, issued in October, 1637, praised the playwright yet confirmed Scudéry’s criticisms concerning Corneille’s neglect of the rules. Disturbed by the Academy’s judgment, Corneille corrected certain verses condemned by his critics; not until the author’s preface in the 1648 edition and in the play’s Examen, published in 1660, did Corneille attempt detailed self-justification. At any rate, the public acclaim accorded the play must have mitigated Corneille’s chagrin. Horace • That Corneille was affected by academic criticism seems to be confirmed in his next play, Horace, first performed in 1640. After the depiction of Castilian honor, Corneille chose a subject taken from Roman history, thus apparently bowing to one of Scudéry’s criticisms of The Cid. Although Corneille is still somewhat cramped by the unities of time, place, and action—there are many incidents and a complex plot structure in Horace—they are well observed, and many critics regard the play as the first true French classical tragedy. The action opens on the eve of the decisive battle between Alba and Rome, two historically linked cities engaged in fratricidal war. These links are manifest in the play’s major characters. The Roman hero Horace is married to Sabine, from Alba, while Horace’s sister Camille is fiancée to Curiace, brother of Sabine. The atmosphere of foreboding before the battle yields to hope when, to limit bloodshed, Curiace announces the decision to allow three champions from each side to determine the war’s

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outcome. This initial hope, however, is disappointed when Rome reveals its choice. Horace and his two brothers are designated to champion their city’s cause. Fate strikes another blow when Alba reveals its choice: Curiace and his two brothers will defend Alba’s honor and independence. An intimate conversation between Horace and Curiace, who are friends, discloses their characters. Horace demonstrates an inhuman resolve, renouncing all former ties of love and friendship, while Curiace tempers his patriotism with emotion and regret. The two armies share Curiace’s sentiments, for the play’s fourth coup de théâtre offers renewed hope. Each side refuses to allow the two families to destroy each other, and a decision to consult the gods is made. Destiny is irresistible: The gods confirm the initial choice. Act 3 concludes with the outcome of the battle seemingly decided, for the news from the field of combat is that Horace’s two brothers are dead and that he has fled. Another dramatic surprise ensues in act 4: A messenger reveals that Horace’s flight was simply a ruse to separate his opponents, a trick that has given him the victory. Despite the death of two sons, Horace’s father is ecstatic at his news, while Camille, overcome with grief, curses both Rome and her brother when he returns, glorious, from the field. Provoked beyond endurance, Horace kills his sister. Act 5 presents the trial of Horace, presided over by King Tulle. Although Valère, who loved Camille, pleads passionately for swift and harsh punishment of the fratricide, Old Horace eloquently declares that his son’s act was virtuous, for he punished a traitor, and that Horace should be permitted to continue to uphold the strength and honor of Rome. Tulle pronounces judgment: Horace will live to serve the state, but he must submit to an expiatory ceremony. Curiace and Camille will be interred in the same tomb. Like The Cid, Horace presents a hero who overcomes an emotional conflict and accepts a painful obligation. His victory, like that of Rodrigue, accords him the status of national hero, but whereas Rodrigue’s star continues to rise at the play’s close, Horace’s gloire is apparently overshadowed by his crime. For him, his act is reasonable. Just before dispatching his sister, he declares: “. . . ma patience à la raison fait place” (“my patience yields to reason”), yet his wife, Sabine, Valère, and Tulle consider it a brutal, inhuman act. Perhaps not a Corneillian ideal, Horace fails to maintain the balance of tender sentiments and an impulse to heroic action that Rodrigue attained. Critics hold divided opinions concerning Horace’s culpability. The traditional view sees him as a “ferocious brute,” an unrepentant fanatic. This judgment, however, ignores Corneille’s idea, expressed in the third Discours, that Horace is indeed a hero. Under Horace’s apparent insensitivity is a young man who suffers a cruel destiny. His barbarous yet necessary act reveals his strength of will. As a Roman conscious of Rome’s destiny, Horace believes that his act is patriotic and religious: He destroys an individual, his own sister, who has refused to accept the gods’ decree of Roman supremacy. His blind acceptance of this fateful decree isolates him and thus constitutes a tragic situation par excellence. Despite differing interpretations of Horace, the Corneillian formula obtains in this play: a series of ordeals that the hero must overcome at the peril of his life, reputation, and personal happiness. The political overtones of Horace should not be ignored. The play was produced in a time of an almost fratricidal war between France and Spain and was dedicated to Cardinal Richelieu. In addition, its themes corresponded to a governmental policy based on authority and national unity. Horace is the hero of a totalitarian regime at war. The

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play seems to acknowledge a political doctrine supporting unquestioned submission to the public interest in a time of national danger, a doctrine promulgated by Richelieu. Corneille’s vision of Roman history is thus reflected in and supported by the political realities of 1640. A modern viewpoint has seen in Horace a powerful message: In a totalitarian state, in which total obedience is demanded, war dehumanizes. Horace, at the beginning of the play a sympathetic, humane young man, becomes, in his loyalty to the state, a fanatic who will destroy all dissenters. Cinna • Corneille’s interest in the political becomes more apparent in his next play, Cinna, produced also in 1640. A play of vengeance pursued and clemency achieved, Cinna, set in ancient Rome, pits the young couple Emilie and Cinna, in league with a coconspirator, Maxime, against the emperor Auguste. Emilie, whose father was murdered by Auguste, has promised to marry Cinna if he succeeds in assassinating the emperor. Just as Cinna and Emilie exult in the conspirators’ well-conceived plans for the assassination set for the following day, Auguste summons Cinna and Maxime. This occurs at the end of act 1, thus creating great suspense, a trademark of Corneille’s dramaturgy. Act 1 immediately reveals Auguste’s purpose. Tired of maintaining his power, he asks for advice: Should he continue to rule or step down? Cinna, fearful of losing the opportunity to assassinate Auguste and thus lose Emilie, advises the emperor to keep his power, advice that dumbfounds Maxime, who had counseled the alternative. After this fateful interview, Cinna confides to Maxime the true reason for the plot: It is merely a means by which he will win Emilie. Maxime, a secret lover of Emilie, is devastated, and he arranges for Auguste to discover the plot. Meanwhile, Cinna’s initial resolution yields to doubt. He is torn between his love for Emilie and his rekindled loyalty to a trusting Auguste. However he acts, he will lose self-esteem, a major component of Corneillian gloire. In act 4, Auguste learns of the conspiracy. He too is torn: Should he punish severely those whom he trusted, or—his political lassitude comes into play here—should he forgive? Auguste’s wife, Livie, advises clemency. While clemency appears to be the most expedient political solution, Auguste vacillates, thus increasing suspense. Isolated and insecure, wishing to be free of the burden of rule yet conscious of his duty to Rome, Auguste grants forgiveness to the plotters. This heroic change from the murderous tyrant described in the beginning of the play to a magnanimous ruler effects a change in the others; it appears that the seemingly endless cycle of revenge and suppression has ended. Demonstrating his ability to overcome personal feelings of anger and revenge, Auguste, inspired by the gods, has abandoned a rule based on fear and founded a new order of justice and humanity. Many commentators have seen in Cinna echoes of the political climate in France in 1640. Numerous plots had sprung up against Richelieu, who was consolidating the central authority of the crown against the threatened and powerful nobility. The play has been judged an appeal to both the Cardinal and the French people: National interest demanded a renunciation of revenge for past wrongs. To accomplish this, both sides must exercise the heroic restraint exemplified in the play. He who reigns must take the initiative. It would be wrong, however, to insist on this aspect of the play. Contemporary audiences appeared to have been moved more by the love of Cinna and Emilie than by Auguste’s clemency. To see the play as a study of the motives and behavior of conspirators in general is perhaps a more valid political interpretation.

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Polyeucte • Whereas Horace depicted monarchical Rome at the beginning of its ascent to world power, and Cinna treated a restless Rome under its first emperor, Polyeucte, Corneille’s next play, focuses on Rome later in its history, when mystical Christianity began to make inroads into pagan Rome’s supremacy. Here Corneille deals with the psychology of the early Christians, ready and willing to endure martyrdom for their faith. The drama is played out on three broad levels: sentimental and familial, political, and religious. Polyeucte, an Armenian prince, is married to Pauline, the daughter of the ambitious Roman governor of Armenia, Félix, who has forced this marriage for political ends. Polyeucte’s friend Néarque has persuaded him to be baptized, but Polyeucte hesitates because of Pauline’s protests. In act 1 scene 3, Pauline reveals to her confidante a dream in which she has seen her husband killed among a group of Christians and in the presence of Sévère, a Roman hero whom she loved and whom she believes dead. The play thus opens with Pauline’s fears of impending disaster made manifest in a dream. In the following scene, a key piece of information emerges: Sévère, very much alive, is on his way to Armenia to celebrate his recent victories; Pauline is extremely disturbed by this news. Pauline and Polyeucte are each torn by an emotional conflict: Polyeucte’s love for Pauline competes with his love for God, while Pauline’s emotions are divided between Sévère and her husband. This rivalry produces not jealousy and revenge but rather sacrifice and ultimate reconciliation. In an interview with Sévère, Pauline recalls her love for him but affirms her fidelity to Polyeucte. During a public ceremony in honor of Sévère, the recently baptized Polyeucte has resolved to break the pagan idols, thereby demonstrating his new faith and assuring martyrdom. The effect of divine grace after his baptism explains this sudden transformation from the fearful and hesitant Polyeucte of act 1. Between acts 2 and 3, Polyeucte commits this daring act; unrepentant, he is immediately imprisoned, while Néarque is summarily executed by order of Félix. There follows a series of entreaties to Polyeucte, who refuses to recant. Pauline’s feelings for her husband grow as she realizes the strength of his will and his faith. Still somewhat hesitant when he thinks of his beloved Pauline, Polyeucte finally sacrifices his terrestrial love, entrusting Pauline to Sévère. Although Félix is torn between fear of Rome, whose policy is to put to death Christian dissidents, and his affection for his daughter, who implores her father to forgive Polyeucte, Polyeucte is, indeed, executed. Before his death, Polyeucte declared that he would “obtain” divine grace for Pauline and Félix when he sees God face to face. This wish is granted after his death: Pauline, then Félix, miraculously convert to Christianity at the end of the play. Sévère marvels at this sudden turnabout and promises to do his utmost to prevent further persecutions. Polyeucte resembles the archetypal Corneillian hero: He undergoes and overcomes a series of ordeals in which friendship, love, and passion combat a higher ideal. He attains genuine apotheosis; his death not only has brought about the blessed conversion of his wife and father-in-law but also has benefited many other converts. This is confirmed by Sévère’s reaction at the play’s close. Polyeucte, however, does not aim for worldly glory as do Rodrigue, Horace, and Auguste. He strives for an otherworldly glory that far transcends the heroism of other plays. As in other plays, reconciliation and union reign at the end. On the sentimental level, the marriage of Polyeucte and Pauline, never truly united in life, has been transformed into a union divinely consecrated through Polyeucte’s martyrdom. Politically, the conversion of Félix marks the end of the ancient pagan order and inaugurates the rise of the Christian era of the Roman Empire. Finally, on the religious level, divine grace has proven its efficacy; Polyeucte’s militant faith will serve as an illustrious example to others.

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The Death of Pompey • With Polyeucte, Corneille had reached the summit of his success. The tragedies written and produced between 1643 and 1651 bear witness to his ambition to produce plays that were at once innovative and entertaining. The Death of Pompey, in which Pompée does not appear (although Corneille called him the “principal actor), is a political play that opposes two sets of characters: César and Pompée’s widow, Cornélie, who strive to be worthy of the heroic Pompée’s memory; and the youthful Egyptian king Ptolomée and his Machiavellian advisers. Unlike the protagonists of earlier plays, however, no character here undergoes a heroic ascension. The Liar • Also during the 1643 theatrical season, Corneille returned to comedy with The Liar, considered by some scholars a self-parody. A complex comedy of intrigue, The Liar presents Dorante, who, after confusing the names of two young ladies, finds himself in an amusing imbroglio. Parodic elements are occasionally quite specific: Dorante’s father, Géronte, chiding his dishonest son in act 5 scene 3, for example, parodies Don Diègue challenging Rodrigue in act 1 scene 5 of The Cid. The liar’s constant self-transformations also recall the heroic metamorphoses of the tragedies. Motivated no doubt by the success of the play, Corneille composed a sequel, La Suite du menteur, his last true comedy, presented in 1644. Nicomède • Corneille’s last great success before the failure of Pertharite, roi des Lombards and his subsequent retreat from the theater in the 1650’s was Nicomède. After exploiting the Romanesque and the melodramatic in Rodogune, Héraclius, and The Conflict, Corneille returned to political and familial tragedy in Nicomède. Arisonoé, the stepmother of Nicomède, who is the son of King Prusias of Bithynia, plots to destroy her proud and courageous stepson. Encouraging Nicomède to defy the Roman conquerors of Bithynia, she hopes that Rome will kill him, leaving the throne empty for her own son, the docile Attale, whom the Romans favor as the next king. Nicomède scorns the political machinations of his weak father and of Rome’s ambassador, Flaminius, who use Laodice, loved by both Nicomède and Attale, as political blackmail. After Nicomède’s arrest for refusing with disdain and contempt Prusias’s ultimatum, Attale is named king, but he immediately realizes that the Romans will never permit him to marry Laodice. In a sudden turnabout, Attale, aided by a popular uprising in support of Nicomède, saves his half brother. Nicomède, ever generous and strong, returns the throne (which the populace wished for him) to Prusias. Touched by Nicomède’s magnanimity, all are reconciled at the play’s close. Inasmuch as the hero in Nicomède suffers no true inner conflict, the play differs fundamentally from the earlier tragedies. The “happy” denouement does not project an optimistic vision of an ever more glorious future for the hero but suggests rather the political reality of a dominant Rome which has the power and the will to control the individual liberty so essential to Corneillian gloire. Personal choice is thus limited, for Nicomède succeeds only temporarily in safeguarding his own independence and that of the state. The last words in the play belong to the politically astute Prusias: “Let us ask the gods . . . for the friendship of the Romans.” Œdipe • Corneille ended his retirement in 1659 with Œdipe, a popular success, the subject of which had been suggested to the author by the influential finance minister Fouquet. There followed a series of plays that did not enjoy the success of the earlier works. It is apparent that Corneille’s continued emphasis on the political and his appeal to the intellect did not meet with favor among a new generation of

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theatergoers who craved, according to a contemporary observer, only “sorrow and tears.” Although Corneille attempted to respond to the public’s changing tastes, his theater continued to depict large historical and political tableaux; they had become anachronisms. Suréna • His last play, Suréna, met the same fate as most of the later plays. Recent critics have rehabilitated this unjustly ignored masterpiece. Eurydice, the daughter of the king of Armenia, is betrothed to Pacorus, the son of Orode, king of Parthis. Although she dutifully accepts this political engagement, she loves Suréna, a famous Parthian general who has defeated the Romans and who returns Eurydice’s affection. Orode, fearful of Suréna’s reputation and power, offers his daughter Mandane to Suréna in order to assure his loyalty. Suréna, having made a vow of fidelity to Eurydice, refuses to marry Mandane. In vain, Suréna attempts to conceal the true reason for his refusal. After discovering that Suréna loves Eurydice, Orode gives an ultimatum: Suréna will either marry Mandane or die. The unshakable Suréna refuses to yield despite the entreaties of his sister Palmis. Just as Eurydice has decided to prevail on Suréna as well, grave news arrives: He has been assassinated. On hearing the news, Eurydice collapses, dying of grief. Some commentators have judged this play a substantial modification of Corneille’s earlier heroic manner: They emphasize that Suréna sacrifices all to love, that he is indifferent to gloire, thus in a mold different from Rodrigue, and so on. Despite his assertion that worldly fame does not equal one moment of happiness, Suréna does, however, demonstrate a strength of character not unlike that of earlier Corneillian heroes. He affirms his essential liberty and individual rights by not submitting to Orode’s ultimatum. Moreover, the political situation, in which a king feels threatened by a more noble subject, recalls other plays, most notably Nicomède and Agésilas. Like other Corneillian heroes, Suréna is the right arm of the king and a courageous warrior. That Eurydice—a princess—loves him bears witness to his inherent merit. Suréna elicits pity by his unjust death and admiration, the touchstone of Corneille’s drama, by the grandeur of his resolve. Corneillian glory, for Suréna a “cold and vain eternity,” is opposed to an inner freedom that provides protection against the vagaries of destiny. Suréna dies faithful to himself: He is perhaps the supreme expression of Corneillian psychology. Other major works nonfiction: Discours, 1660; Examens, 1660. translations: Imitation de Jésus-Christ, 1656; Office de la Sainte Vierge, 1670. Bibliography Auchincloss, Louis. La Gloire: The Roman Empire of Corneille and Racine. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. A study of the dramas of Corneille and Jean Racine that dealt with the Roman Empire. Carlin, Claire L. Pierre Corneille Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1998. A basic biography of Corneille that examines his life and works. Bibliography and index. _______. Women Reading Corneille: Feminist Psychocriticisms of “Le Cid.” New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Corneille’s The Cid from a feminist perspective. Bibliography and index. Clarke, David. Pierre Corneille: Poetics and Political Drama Under Louis XIII. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. An examination of the political aspects of Corneille’s dramatic works. Bibliography and index.

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Goodkin, Richard E. Birth Marks: The Tragedy of Primogeniture in Pierre Corneille, Thomas Corneille, and Jean Racine. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. A study of the tragedies of Pierre Corneille, Thomas Corneille, and Jean Racine with emphasis on primogeniture. Bibliography and index. Longstaffe, Moya. Metamorphoses of Passion and the Heroic in French Literature: Corneille, Stendhal, Claudel. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1999. An examination of the hero as portrayed in the works of Corneille, then Stendhal and Paul Claudel. Bibliography and index. Lyons, John D. The Tragedy of Origins: Pierre Corneille and Historical Perspective. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996. A look at history in the tragedies of Corneille. Bibliography and index. Robert T. Corum, Jr.

Noël Coward Noël Coward

Born: Teddington, England; December 16, 1899 Died: Port Royal, Jamaica; March 26, 1973 Principal drama • I’ll Leave It to You, pr. 1919, pb. 1920; Sirocco, wr. 1921, pr., pb. 1927; The Better Half, pr. 1922 (one act); The Young Idea, pr. 1922, pb. 1924; London Calling, pr. 1923 (music and lyrics by Noël Coward and Ronald Jeans); Weatherwise, wr. 1923, pb. 1931, pr. 1932; Fallen Angels, pb. 1924, pr. 1925; The Rat Trap, pb. 1924, pr. 1926; The Vortex, pr. 1924, pb. 1925; Easy Virtue, pr. 1925, pb. 1926; Hay Fever, pr., pb. 1925; On with the Dance, pr. 1925; The Queen Was in the Parlour, pr., pb. 1926; This Was a Man, pr., pb. 1926; Home Chat, pr., pb. 1927; The Marquise, pr., pb. 1927; This Year of Grace!, pr., pb. 1928 (musical); Bitter Sweet, pr., pb. 1929 (operetta); Private Lives, pr., pb. 1930; Some Other Private Lives, pr. 1930, pb. 1931 (one act); Cavalcade, pr. 1931, pb. 1932; Post-Mortem, pb. 1931; Words and Music, pr. 1932, pb. 1939 (musical); Design for Living, pr., pb. 1933; Conversation Piece, pr., pb. 1934; Point Valaine, pr., pb. 1936; Tonight at 8:30, pb. 1936 (3 volumes; a collective title for the following nine plays, which were designed to be presented in various combi- nations of three bills of three plays: We Were Dancing, pr. 1935; The Astonished Heart, pr. 1935; Red Peppers, pr. 1935; Hands Across the Sea, pr. 1935; Fumed Oak, pr. 1935; Shadow Play, pr. 1935; Family Album, pr. 1935; Ways and Means, pr. 1936; and Still Life, pr. 1936); Operette, pr., pb. 1938; Set to Music, pr. 1939, pb. 1940 (musical); Blithe Spirit, pr., pb. 1941; Present Laughter, pr. 1942, pb. 1943; This Happy Breed, pr. 1942, pb. 1943; Sigh No More, pr. 1945 (musical); Pacific 1860, pr. 1946, pb. 1958 (musical); Peace in Our Time, pr., pb. 1947; Ace of Clubs, pr. 1950, pb. 1962; Island Fling, pr. 1951, pb. 1956; Relative Values, pr. 1951, pb. 1952; Quadrille, pr., pb. 1952; After the Ball, pr., pb. 1954 (musical; based on Oscar Wilde’s play Lady Windermere’s Fan); Nude with Violin, pr. 1956, pb. 1957; South Sea Bubble, pr., pb. 1956; Look After Lulu, pr., pb. 1959; Waiting in the Wings, pr., pb. 1960; High Spirits, pr. 1961 (musical; based on his play Blithe Spirit); Sail Away, pr. 1961 (musical); The Girl Who Came to Supper, pr. 1963 (musical; based on Terence Rattigan’s play The Sleeping Prince); Suite in Three Keys: Come into the Garden Maude; Shadows of the Evening; A Song at Twilight, pr., pb. 1966; Cowardy Custard, pr. 1972, pb. 1973 (also as Cowardy Custard: The World of Noël Coward); Oh! Coward, pr. 1972, pb. 1974 (also as Oh Coward! A Musical Comedy Revue); Plays: One, pb. 1979; Plays: Two, pb. 1979; Plays: Three, pb. 1979; Plays: Four, pb. 1979; Plays: Five, pb. 1983 Other literary forms • Noël Coward was an extraordinarily prolific playwright, lyricist, and composer, writing more than fifty plays and musicals during his lifetime. He did not limit his literary endeavors solely to drama but ventured into other genres as well. These diversions into the realm of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry proved equally successful for him. In addition to his plays, Coward wrote three novels (two unpublished), several collections of short stories, satires, a book of verse, and several autobiographical works, Present Indicative (1937), Middle East Diary (1944), and Future Indefinite (1954). Coward’s versatility is also apparent in his original scripts for five films, his screenplays and adaptations of his hit plays, and his several essays on the modern theater that 222

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appeared in popular journals and in The Times of London and The New York Times. Like his plays, Coward’s other works reveal his distinctive satiric style, sharp wit, and clever wordplay. Achievements • In 1970, Noël Coward was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for “services rendered to the arts.” The succinct phrasing of this commendation is as understated as some of Coward’s best dialogue, considering his long and brilliant career in the theater. Coward wrote plays specifically designed to entertain the popular audience and to provide an amusing evening in the theater. Few of his plays champion a cause or promote a social issue. His most noteworthy achievement came in the writing of scores of fashionable comedies, revues, and “operettes” that were resounding successes on the English, American, and Continental stages and continue to enjoy success today. For this insistence on writing light comedy, he received substantial criticism, and several of his works were brusquely dismissed as “fluff” by critics. These same plays, however, never wanted for an audience, even during the most turbulent, politically restless years. Coward came to be associated with the 1920’s in England in much the same way that F. Scott Fitzgerald was identified with the Jazz Age in the United States. Whereas Fitzgerald seriously examined the moral failings of his prosperous characters, however, Coward treated them lightly. His plays chronicle the foibles, fashions, and affairs of the English upper class and provide satirical vignettes of the social elite. Coward’s life and work reflect the same urbane persona; indeed, he wrote his best parts for himself. Coward’s world was that of the idle rich, of cocktails, repartee, and a tinge of modern decadence; this image was one he enjoyed and actively promoted until his death. For all their popularity, most of Coward’s plays are not memorable, save for Private Lives, Blithe Spirit, Design for Living, and possibly one or two others, yet his song lyrics have become part of the English cultural heritage. “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” from Words and Music, achieved immortality when its famous line “Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the mid-day sun” was included in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Coward’s reputation rests less on the literary merits of his works and more on the man, who as an accomplished actor, entertainer, and raconteur displayed enormous resilience during his five decades in the public eye. One of the obvious difficulties in producing a Coward play (Library of Congress) is finding actors who are able to han-

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dle the dialogue with the aplomb of “the master.” What made Coward’s plays successful was not so much a strong text, but virtuoso performances by Gertrude Lawrence, Jane Cowl, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, and Coward himself. The public continues to be amused by his works in revivals, especially when performed by actors, such as Maggie Smith, who can transmit Coward’s urbane humor to today’s audiences. Biography • Noël Pierce Coward was born December 16, 1899. He was the child of Arthur Sabin Coward and Violet Agnes Veitch, who married late in life after meeting in a church choir. Coward’s family on his father’s side was very talented musically. They helped nurture the natural virtuosity of the child, instilling in him a lifelong love of music. Because his birthday was so close to Christmas, Coward always received one present to satisfy both occasions, but on December 16, his mother would take him to the theater as a special treat. He first attended a matinee at the age of four, never realizing he would spend the next seventy years of his life in service to the dramatic muse. As he grew older, he found these junkets to the theater more and more fascinating, and after returning home would rush to the piano and play by ear the songs from the production he had just seen. Coward made his first public appearance, singing and accompanying himself on the piano, at a concert held at Miss Willington’s School. Though obviously a very talented child, Coward’s precocity did not carry over to his formal education. At best, his schooling was sporadic. For a time, he attended the Chapel Royal School at Clapham in hopes of becoming a member of the prestigious Chapel Royal Choir. Failing his audition as a choir member, he was taken from school and did not attend any educational institution for six months, at which time he was sent to school in London. He was ten years old. Coward was an incorrigible, strong-willed child, given to tantrums when he did not get his way. These traits, inherited from both sides of his argumentative family, are evident in his characters, and each of his plays contains a rousing altercation scene. He was indulged by his mother, who became the stereotypical stage mother during his early years, and it was at his mother’s insistence that he began attending Miss Janet Thomas’s Dancing Academy in addition to his regular school in London. Soon, Miss Thomas’s school usurped the position of importance held by traditional academic fare, and Coward became a child performer. Coward’s first professional engagement, and that which launched his long career, was on January 28, 1911, in a children’s play, The Goldfish. After this appearance, he was sought after for children’s roles by other professional theaters. He was featured in several productions with Sir Charles Hawtrey, a light comedian, whom Coward idolized and to whom he virtually apprenticed himself until he was twenty. It was from Hawtrey that Coward learned comic acting techniques and playwriting. He worked in everything from ballets to music halls and made it a point to study the more experienced performers to learn to “catch” the audience quickly. This skill was one he actively drew on in the writing of his plays. At the tender age of twelve, Coward met one of the actresses who would help contribute to his overwhelming success, Gertrude Lawrence; she was then fifteen and a child performer as well. The occasional acting team of Coward and Lawrence would become synonymous with polished, sophisticated comedy during the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s.

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When he was fifteen, Coward was invited to stay at the country estate of Mrs. Astley Cooper. This stay, and subsequent visits, influenced his life markedly in two ways: He grew to know intimately the manners and mores of the upper class, and through Mrs. Cooper, he came to meet Gladys Calthrop, who was to become his lifelong friend and the designer for his productions. Coward began his writing career when he was sixteen by writing songs and selling them for distribution. He turned his hand to playwriting when he was seventeen and found that he was very good at writing dialogue. Success came quite early to Coward. He was already accepted as an accomplished actor on the London stage when he began writing. By 1919, his play I’ll Leave It to You was produced in the West End with Coward in the leading role. One of the idiosyncrasies of Coward’s writing is that often he wrote “whacking good parts” for himself or for people he knew. Some of his best plays are essentially vehicles for his own talents or those of Gertrude Lawrence and later of the Lunts. I’ll Leave It to You met with moderate success, and Coward received great praise from critics for his playwriting abilities, although Sir Neville Cardus, writing in the Manchester Guardian, faulted the play for its narrow focus on the world of the idle rich. This criticism dogged Coward throughout his career. Coward went to New York for the first time in 1921 and arrived virtually penniless. He sold three satires to Vanity Fair in order to support himself. Though he may have begun the 1920’s in penury, Coward’s position as the most popular playwright in the English theater became secure during this decade. In 1924, The Vortex was produced in London. Coward’s most important serious play, The Vortex broke with English theatrical tradition in its choice of subject matter: drug addiction. This Ibsenesque approach to a problem created quite a sensation. It was hailed by many critics as an important play but also found dissenters who labeled it “filth” and “dustbin drama.” In late 1927, Coward purchased 139 acres in Kent called Goldenhurst Farm. This was the first residence he used as a retreat to escape the glitter of the stage. Eventually, he would own others in Jamaica, Paris, Geneva, and London. The years from 1928 to 1934 are regarded by many as Coward’s “golden years.” His string of successes during this period include some of his best and most famous plays and revues: This Year of Grace!, Bitter Sweet, Private Lives, Cavalcade, Words and Music, Design for Living, and Conversation Piece. According to Coward in a letter written to his mother, Bitter Sweet was the only show that played to capacity houses in New York during the stock market crash of 1929. By the 1930’s, the opening of a Coward play in London was regularly attended by royalty and other prominent socialites. Coward took his success and the responsibility of fame seriously. When asked to aid the Actors’ Orphanage, he did so willingly and subsequently became president of the organization, a position he retained from 1934 to 1956. After World War II, Coward fell from grace with many critics, who regarded him as being past his literary prime. The year 1949-1950 proved the lowest point in his career as he received poor reviews for his plays and scathing reviews for his film The Astonished Heart. The drama was changing during these restless years that would produce playwrights such as John Osborne, and Coward was momentarily out of step with the times. He turned to the writing of fiction and produced several short stories and his autobiographical work Future Indefinite. By the late 1950’s, audiences were once again in love with Coward. His plays, revues, and nightclub appearances were extremely successful. The critics, however, remained vitriolic, but their rancor failed to dim the enthusiasm of the general theater-

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going public, who clamored for more Coward plays. In 1969, there was a seventieth birthday tribute to Coward in London that lasted a full week. On January 1, 1970, Coward’s name appeared on the Queen’s New Year’s list as a Knight Bachelor, for services rendered to the arts. For the remaining years of his life, he was Sir Noël Coward. In the same year, he was awarded a special Tony Award by the American theater for Distinguished Achievement in the Theatre. In 1972, he received an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Sussex. Coward died of a heart attack in Jamaica on March 26, 1973, bringing to an end a career of more than sixty years in the theater. The most lasting tribute awarded to Coward is the continued success that meets revivals of his plays and musicals. Coward created a mystique about himself during his lifetime, and this intangible quality of wit and sophistication has become part of the Coward legend, which has become a part of the colorful heritage of the theater. Analysis • As a playwright, composer, lyricist, producer, director, author, and actor, Noël Coward spent his life entertaining the public. This he did with a flair, sophistication, and polish that are not readily found in current drama. He wrote farce, high comedy, domestic and patriotic melodramas, musical comedies, and revues. His plays were popular fare in England and the United States for years because Coward recognized that the “great public” for which he wrote his plays wanted, above all, to be entertained. All of Coward’s plays fall into easily recognizable stylized patterns. Essentially, Coward wrote modern comedies of manners that are as reflective of twentieth century mores and sentiments as their Restoration forebears were of those in the seventeenth century. For the most part, his plays are set in drawing rooms and usually have a couple involved in a love relationship as the central characters. He draws heavily on his theatrical background and populates his plays with theatrical and artistic characters. These temperamental personages allow Coward to involve them easily in the constant bickering and verbal fencing that came to be the trademarks of a Coward play. Each of his characters vies to get the upper hand over the others. Arguments are central to his work, and much of his humor relies on sophisticated insults. Coward’s dialogue bitingly exposes hypocrites and the petty games played by the upper class; his plays parody Mayfair society mercilessly. Unfortunately, his plays involve little else. There is little motivation of character, less development of theme, and what thin remnant of plot remains is swept along in the incessant bantering of the characters. Robert Greacen, referring to Fumed Oak, remarked that “an observant foreigner might sit through the entire play . . . and simply hear people talking and believe that no action was taking place at all.” Such statements apply to most of Coward’s plays. This criticism reveals both the strongest and the weakest aspects of Coward’s theater. He was capable of writing brilliant, naturalistic dialogue with an astonishing economy. In spite of this enormous talent for writing dialogue, however, little happens in his plays to advance the plot. Most of his plays remain structurally flawed, relying heavily on the use of deus ex machina and coincidence for plot resolutions. Thematically, Coward’s comedies examine true love, adulterous affairs, and domestic upheavals. His more serious plays focus on a variety of topics, including drug addiction, infidelity, and patriotism. The few patriotic plays he attempted strongly support solid middle-class values and promote a stereotyped image of the stoical Englishman.

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Though his works appear to have identifiable themes, they lack a thesis. Coward’s plays realistically depict modern characters in absorbing situations, but the characters are not as fully developed as the situations in which they find themselves. Their motivations remain obscure. Even in the serious plays, his position on his subject is never clearly revealed. Most of his serious dramas fail because he never brings the moment to a crisis, and so his plays end anticlimactically. According to Milton Levin, Coward’s plays “raise no questions, they provide few critical footholds, they simply ask to be praised for what they are, sparkling caprices.” Generally, the success of Coward’s plays depended on the ability of the actors to carry his rapier-sharp dialogue. He freely admitted tailoring choice roles to his talents and those of his friends. Coward and Lawrence in Private Lives, Coward and the Lunts in Design for Living, Coward with Beatrice Lillie in Blithe Spirit mark legendary moments in theatrical history that cannot be replicated. When criticizing drama, one must consider the text in production. It is this consideration that elevates the relatively weak scripts of Coward’s plays to modern classics. Embodied in Coward is a theatrical trinity of actor, playwright, and producer. The inability to separate completely one from the other in studying his works contributes to the mystique that surrounds the man. Rarely are his works found in academic anthologies of the genre, but the imprint of his productions is still discernible in the theater today. Coward was a highly developed product of the 1920’s and the 1930’s and of the social milieu he frequented, and, to a not inconsiderable extent, the current popularity of his work originates in the nostalgic hunger of contemporary audiences for an age more verbally sophisticated and carefree than their own. Nevertheless, at their best, Coward’s plays continue to sparkle with their author’s lively sense of wit, talent for dramatic dialogue and construction, and genius for the neat twist in dramatic action. These significant talents make Coward’s theater instructive as well as delightful. Design for Living • Design for Living was the end result of a plan by Coward, Alfred Lunt, and Lynn Fontanne to act in a play together, written specifically for them. They originally conceived of this idea in the early 1920’s, and the gestation period required for Coward actually to write and produce the play lasted eleven years. Design for Living scrutinizes a free-spirited and occasionally painful ménage à trois comprising Gilda, an interior decorator, Otto, a painter, and Leo, a playwright. The most striking quality of the play is its completely amoral stance on marriage, fidelity, friendship, and sexual relations. Pangs of conscience are fleeting in these characters as their relationships as friends and lovers become apparent to one another and to the audience. It is the amorality of the characters, rather than a perceived immorality, that has provoked criticism of this play. Coward forms no conclusions and passes no judgment: The play ends with the three characters embracing and laughing wildly on a sofa, and the audience is provided no clue as to how they should judge these amorous individuals. They are asked to watch and accept without being given a resolution to the plot. Most of the criticism directed at the production resulted from a misunderstanding of the title on the part of the critics. Coward intended his title to be ironic. It was taken to be an admonition that the Bohemian lifestyle depicted onstage was not merely acceptable but was actually preferable to conventional ways as a “design for living.” Design for Living was a vehicle for the formidable talents of Coward and the Lunts. The dialogue is quick and sharp as the three characters alternately pair off, argue, and reunite. The theme stressed most strongly in this play, and the one that offers its most

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redemptive qualities, is that of friendship. Gilda, Otto, and Leo value their mutual companionship, but their active libidos complicate their relationships. Design for Living was judged to be “unpleasant” by the critics, but it enjoyed a phenomenal success with audiences in England and the United States. Private Lives • Private Lives, considered one of Coward’s best plays, “leaves a lot to be desired,” by the author’s own admission. The protagonists, Amanda and Elyot, are divorced and meet again while both are honeymooning with their new spouses. Their former affection for each other is rekindled, and they abandon their unsuspecting spouses and escape to Paris. Here, they are reminded of what it was in their personalities that prompted them to seek a divorce. The scene is complicated by the arrival of the jilted spouses, who come seeking reconciliation, but who eventually are spurned as Amanda and Elyot, after arguing violently, leave together, presumably to lead a life of adversarial bliss. Amanda and Elyot are interesting, fairly well-drawn characters; these roles were written with Lawrence and Coward in mind. The secondary characters, the spouses, Victor and Sibyl, are two-dimensional and only provide a surface off which to bounce the stinging repartee of the reunited couple. Coward himself has described Private Lives as a “reasonably well-constructed duologue for two performers with a couple of extra puppets thrown in to assist the plot and to provide contrast.” Other major works long fiction: Pomp and Circumstance, 1960. short fiction: Terribly Intimate Portraits, 1922; Chelsea Buns, 1925; Spangled Unicorn, 1932; To Step Aside, 1939; Star Quality: Six Stories, 1951; The Collected Short Stories, 1962; Pretty Polly Barlow and Other Stories, 1964; Bon Voyage and Other Stories, 1967; The Complete Stories of Noël Coward, 1985. poetry: Not Yet the Dodo, 1967; Noël Coward: Collected Verse, 1984. screenplays: Bitter Sweet, 1933; In Which We Serve, 1942; This Happy Breed, 1944; Blithe Spirit, 1946; Brief Encounter, 1946; The Astonished Heart, 1949. nonfiction: Present Indicative, 1937; Australia Visited, 1941; Middle East Diary, 1944; Future Indefinite, 1954; The Noël Coward Diaries, 1982; Autobiography, 1986. miscellaneous: The Lyrics of Noël Coward, 1965; The Noël Coward Song Book, 1980; Out in the Midday Sun: The Paintings of Noël Coward, 1988. Bibliography Briers, Richard. Coward and Company. London: Robson Books, 1987. A short, wellillustrated biography of the English actor, playwright, composer, director, producer, and bon vivant. Castle, Terry. Noël Coward and Radclyffe Hall: Kindred Spirits. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Contains a comparison of Coward and Hall as well as of homosexuality and literature. Bibliography and index. Citron, Stephen. Noël and Cole: The Sophisticates. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. A comparison of Coward and Cole Porter as composers. Bibliography and index. Fisher, Clive. Noël Coward. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. A biography of the multitalented Coward. Bibliography and index. Hoare, Philip. Noël Coward: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. A biography of the dramatist that covers his life and works. Bibliography and index.

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Kaplan, Joel, and Sheila Stowell, eds. Look Back in Pleasure: Noël Coward Reconsidered. London: Methuen, 2000. A study of the dramatic works of Coward and his influence. Bibliography and index. Levin, Milton. Noël Coward. Boston: Twayne, 1989. This short but updated biography of the playwright contains a useful bibliography. Morella, Joe. Genius and Lust: The Creative and Sexual Lives of Noël Coward and Cole Porter. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1995. Morella compares and contrasts Coward and Porter, examining their works and lives. Index. Susan Duffy, updated by Peter C. Holloran

John Dryden John Dryden

Born: Aldwinckle, England; August 19, 1631 Died: London, England; May 1, 1700 Principal drama • The Wild Gallant, pr. 1663, pb. 1669; The Indian Queen, pr. 1664, pb. 1665 (with Sir Robert Howard); The Rival Ladies, pr., pb. 1664; The Indian Emperor: Or, The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards, pr. 1665, pb. 1667; Secret Love: Or, The Maiden Queen, pr. 1667, pb. 1668; Sir Martin Mar-All: Or, The Feign’d Innocence, pr. 1667, pb. 1668 (adaptation of Molière’s L’Étourdi; with William Cavendish, duke of Newcastle); The Tempest: Or, The Enchanted Island, pr. 1667, pb. 1670 (adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play; with Sir William Davenant); An Evening’s Love: Or, The Mock Astrologer, pr. 1668, pb. 1671 (adaptation of Thomas Corneille’s Le Feint Astrologue); Tyrannic Love: Or, The Royal Martyr, pr. 1669, pb. 1670; The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards, Part I, pr. 1670, pb. 1672; The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards, Part II, pr. 1671, pb. 1672; Marriage à la Mode, pr. 1672, pb. 1673; The Assignation: Or, Love in a Nunnery, pr. 1672, pb. 1673; Amboyna: Or, The Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants, pr., pb. 1673; Aureng-Zebe, pr. 1675, pb. 1676; The State of Innocence, and Fall of Man, pb. 1677 (libretto; dramatic version of John Milton’s Paradise Lost); All for Love: Or, The World Well Lost, pr. 1677, pb. 1678; The Kind Keeper: Or, Mr. Limberham, pr. 1678, pb. 1680; Oedipus, pr. 1678, pb. 1679 (with Nathaniel Lee); Troilus and Cressida: Or, Truth Found Too Late, pr., pb. 1679; The Spanish Friar: Or, The Double Discovery, pr. 1680, pb. 1681; The Duke of Guise, pr. 1682, pb. 1683 (with Lee); Albion and Albanius, pr., pb. 1685 (libretto; music by Louis Grabu); Don Sebastian, King of Portugal, pr. 1689, pb. 1690; Amphitryon: Or, the Two Socia’s, pr., pb. 1690; King Arthur: Or, The British Worthy, pr., pb. 1691 (libretto; music by Henry Purcell); Cleomenes, the Spartan Hero, pr., pb. 1692; Love Triumphant: Or, Nature Will Prevail, pr., pb. 1694; The Secular Masque, pr., pb. 1700 (masque); Dramatick Works, pb. 1717; The Works of John Dryden, pb. 1808 (18 volumes) Other literary forms • If one follows the practice of literary historians and assigns John Milton to an earlier age, then John Dryden stands as the greatest literary artist in England between 1660 and 1700, a period sometimes designated “the Age of Dryden.” In addition to his achievements in drama, he excelled in poetry, translation, and literary criticism. He wrote some two hundred original English poems over a period of more than forty years, including the best poetic satires of his age, memorable odes, and a variety of verse epistles, elegies, religious poems, panegyrics, and lyrics. His prologues and epilogues, attached to his dramas and those of his contemporaries, stand as the highest achievements in English in that minor poetic genre. For every verse of original poetry Dryden wrote, he translated two from another poet. Moreover, he translated two long volumes of prose from French originals—in 1684, Louis Maimbourg’s Histoire de la Ligue (1684) and, in 1688, Dominique Bouhours’s La Vie de Saint François Xavier (1683)—and he had a hand in the five-volume translation of Plutarch’s Bioi paralleloi (c. 105-115; Parallel Lives, 1579) published by Jacob Tonson in 1683. The translations were usually well received, especially the editions of Juvenal and Persius (1693) and Vergil (1697). 230

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Dryden’s literary criticism consists largely of prefaces and dedications published throughout his career and attached to other works. His only critical work that was published alone was An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668). As a critic, Dryden appears at his best when he evaluates an earlier poet or dramatist (Homer, Vergil, Ovid, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Fletcher), when he seeks to define a genre, or when he breaks new critical ground, as, for example, in providing definitions of “wit” or a theory of translation. Achievements • In a period of just over thirty years (1663-1694), John Dryden wrote or coauthored twenty-eight plays, an output that made him the most prolific dramatist of his day. His amplitude remains even more remarkable when one considers the amount of poetry, criticism, and translation he produced during the same period. This prolific production is equaled by the variety of the plays: heroic plays, political plays, operas, heroic tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies. In his prefaces and other prose works, Dryden commented at some length on the various types of plays, seeking to define and to clarify the dramatic forms in which he wrote. Yet Dryden himself recognized that his dramas were not likely to wear well, and his literary reputation today rests largely on his poetry and criticism. The operas King Arthur and The State of Innocence (which was not produced during his lifetime) survive primarily in their lyrics. Like other operas of the time, they were somewhat primitive, judged by modern standards, with relatively little music—something more akin to the masque or to modern musical comedy than to grand opera. The heroic plays are too artificial to appeal to any but the most devoted scholars of the period, and Dryden’s comedies and tragicomedies suffer in comparison with those of his contemporaries, Sir George Etherege, William Wycherley, and William Congreve, not to mention his predecessors in English drama. As an index to the taste of the Restoration, however, the plays remain valuable and instructive, reflecting the levels of achievement and prevalent values of dramatic art of the time. Further, a study of Dryden reveals much about both aesthetic and intellectual influences on the drama of his period and the development of the dramatic genres of his age.

(Library of Congress)

Biography • John Dryden was the eldest of fourteen children in a landed family of modest means whose sympathies were Puritan on both sides. Little is known of his youth in Northamptonshire, for Dryden, seldom hesitant about expressing his opinions, was reticent about details of his personal life. At about age fif-

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teen, he was enrolled in Westminster School, then under the headmastership of Dr. Richard Busby, a school notable for its production of poets and bishops. Having attained at Westminster a thorough grounding in Latin, he proceeded to Cambridge, taking the B.A. in 1654. After the death of his father brought him a modest inheritance in the form of rents from family land, Dryden left the university and settled in London. Although little is known of Dryden’s early years in London, he served briefly in Oliver Cromwell’s government in a minor position and may have worked for the publisher Henry Herringman. He produced an elegy on the death of Cromwell, yet when Charles II ascended the throne, Dryden greeted the new ruler with a congratulatory poem, Astraea Redux (1660). After the Restoration, he turned his main interest to the drama, producing an insignificant comedy, The Wild Gallant, and collaborating with Sir Robert Howard on a heroic play, The Indian Queen. He married Lady Elizabeth Howard, Sir Robert’s sister, a marriage that brought him a generous dowry and, eventually, three sons in whom he took pride. Throughout his career, Dryden was no stranger to controversy, whether literary, political, or religious; in fact, he seemed all too eager to seize an occasion for polemics. In literature, he challenged Sir Robert Howard’s views on drama, Thomas Rymer’s on criticism, and the earl of Rochester’s and Thomas Shadwell’s on questions of literary merit and taste. After receiving encouragement from Charles II, Dryden entered the political controversy over succession to the throne with Absalom and Achitophel (part 1, 1681; part 2, with Nahum Tate, 1682). Later, he explained his religious views by attacking Deists, Roman Catholics, and Dissenters in Religio Laici: Or, A Layman’s Faith (1682); then, he shifted his ground and defended Roman Catholicism in The Hind and the Panther (1687). For a variety of reasons, Dryden was the most often assailed among major poets in his time, a fact attributable in some measure to envy. In an age when almost everyone prized his own wit, Dryden attained eminence without obviously possessing more of that quality than many others. Yet his willingness to plunge into controversy won him a host of enemies, and his changes of opinions and beliefs—literary, religious, political—made him vulnerable to criticism. Examining Dryden’s changes of allegiance and point of view one by one, a biographer or critic can provide a logical explanation for each. This task is perhaps most difficult in literary criticism, where Dryden defended a position with enthusiasm only to abandon it later for another, which he advocated with an equal enthusiasm. To his contemporaries, some of his changes were to be explained by self-interest, and, rightly or wrongly, the charge of timeserving became a potent weapon in the hands of his critics. In 1668, Dryden was appointed poet laureate, a position he held for twenty years, and he also signed a lucrative contract with the Theatre Royal to produce three new plays each year. Though he was unable to produce this stipulated number over the decade of the contract, he nevertheless received his share of theater revenues. During his term as laureate, he received a two-hundred-pound annual stipend, an amount that was later increased to three hundred pounds when he became historiographer royal, but irregularly paid. He was active as a dramatist throughout the 1670’s, though he gradually turned his interest to poetic satire, beginning with Mac Flecknoe: Or, A Satyre upon the True-Blew-Protestant Poet, T. S. (1682). With events surrounding the Popist Plot (1678) posing a threat to the government of Charles II, Dryden all but abandoned the theater, writing instead satires, translations, and then his religious poems. Initially, he carried the field for the king, but after the fall

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of James II and the loss of his political cause, he also lost the laureateship and its accompanying pension. During the final period of his life, 1688-1700, Dryden made a brief return to the theater, producing an additional five dramas, but he devoted most of his considerable energy and talent to translations of poetry, achieving success with his patrons and public. Analysis • John Dryden was a prolific playwright, creating heroic plays, political plays, operas, heroic tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies; however, he is best remembered for his poetry and criticism, as many of his plays did not stand the test of time. Marriage à la Mode • Dryden’s best comedy is generally considered to be Marriage à la Mode. His others rely heavily on farcical situations and double entendre and, at times, inept licentiousness that makes comedies such as The Assignation and The Kind Keeper seem unnecessarily coarse even by the standards of his time. Marriage à la Mode combines in its two distinct plot lines the conventions of the romantic tragicomedy and the Restoration comedy of manners, a genre not fully established when Dryden produced his play. The tragicomic plot involves the theme of succession, perhaps Dryden’s most frequent dramatic theme after love and honor. Polydamas, having usurped the throne of Sicily, discovers two young persons of gentle birth but unknown parentage who have been living among fisher folk under the care of Hermogenes, a former courtier. When Hermogenes tells the usurper that Leonidas is his son, born after his wife had fled from him, the king accepts this as correct, even though Leonidas is actually the son of the king he had deposed. When Polydamas insists that Leonidas marry the daughter of his friend, Leonidas refuses because of his love for Palmyra, the girl with whom he had been discovered. To frustrate this passion, Polydamas seeks to banish her, whereupon Hermogenes declares that Palmyra is the king’s daughter and claims Leonidas as his own son, for he cannot risk revealing the truth about Leonidas, in reality the rightful successor. Polydamas then seeks to have Palmyra marry his favorite, Argaleon, and banishes Leonidas, later changing the sentence to death. Facing execution, Leonidas manages to proclaim his right to the throne, to bring his captors over to his side, and to oust Polydamas, whom he generously forgives as the father of his beloved Palmyra. The tragicomic characteristics are all present—the unusual setting; the usurper; the long-lost noble youth; the faithful servant; the idealization of romantic love, struggling successfully against the odds and triumphing. To heighten the tone, Dryden uses blank verse rather than prose and, in the most serious passages, employs rhymed heroic couplets. The tragicomic plot, in the manner of John Fletcher, reveals a significant debt to Elizabethan and Jacobean tragicomedies. Whereas in the main plot, the attitude toward love is idealistic, the subplot represents a sharp contrast in the value placed on both love and marriage. Dryden creates two witty couples—Rhodophil and Doralice, Palamede and Melantha—the first pair married and the second engaged by arrangement of their parents. Their attitudes toward marriage and love are as cynical and sophisticated as is standard in the comedy of manners. Palamede hopes before marriage to carry off an affair with his friend Rhodophil’s wife, while Rhodophil hopes to make Melantha his mistress. They freely satirize Puritans and country folk, and the prevailing attitude of society toward marriage is indicated by Rhodophil when he speaks of his wife, “Yet I loved her a whole half year, double the natural term of any mistress; and I think, in my conscience, I

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could have held out another quarter, but then the world began to laugh at me, and a certain shame, of being out of fashion, seized me.” Disguises, masked balls, and assignations keep Dryden’s plot lively and suspenseful, though the couples’ goals are never realized because all plans either are intercepted or go awry, and at the end, they part still friends. Throughout, the dialogue sparkles with repartee unequaled in any of Dryden’s other plays. It includes Melantha’s affected French expressions along with much double entendre and innuendo, yet it is never brutally licentious in tone, as is true of dialogue in comedies such as The Kind Keeper. Though the two plots are loosely connected, Rhodophil does bring the newly found gentlefolk to the court, and both he and Palamede unite to support Leonidas in the final act. Further, the attitudes of parents who arrange marriages are condemned in both plot lines. For the most part, however, the plots occur in two separate worlds—the witty and sophisticated world of the comedy of manners and the idealistic and sentimental world of tragicomedy. Heroic plays • During the period from 1663 to 1680, Dryden wrote, entirely or in part, twenty-one plays. His initial success came with his heroic plays from The Indian Queen to Aureng-Zebe, by which time the genre had almost run its course. The heroic play was influenced by a variety of sources, including the English dramas of John Fletcher, the French tragedies of Pierre Corneille, and the French poetic romances of Madeleine de Scudéry and Gautier de Costes de La Calprenède. The most prominent feature that set the genre apart from the usual tragedy was the dialogue in heroic couplets, attributed to the playwrights’ efforts to please Charles II, who, it was said, had come to enjoy the rhymed French drama he saw during his years in exile. Dryden defended the artificiality of rhymed dialogue on the grounds that the plays dealt with conflicts and characters above the commonplace; thus, the stylistic elevation provided by rhyme was appropriate. The characters, however, engage in lengthy rhymed speeches, usually with two characters confronting each other, and the result has seemed in a later time excessively artificial. The plays frequently employ spectacle, enhanced by songs, dances, and elaborate costumes. The settings are usually exotic rather than English, thus heightening their romantic appeal. The Indian Queen and The Indian Emperor, for example, are set in Mexico, whereas both parts of Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards are set in Spain. Warfare, conquest, and striving dominate the plays. The characters belong to a set of types that include as the protagonist the lovehonor hero, who finds himself involved in intrigues and power struggles that put those virtues to the test. Like the other characters, he does not change; the tests the characters encounter are intended to show the strength of their virtue or the depth of their depravity. The hero is surrounded by such Fletcherian types as the sentimental maiden, whom he loves; the evil woman, who shamelessly attempts to gain him for herself; the weak king, whom others are attempting to topple from the throne; the faithful friend; and an antagonist who is almost but not quite a Machiavellian villain motivated solely by ambition. The hero is sometimes fortunate and prevails over all of the obstacles he encounters; at other times, he dies without any success other than preserving his love and honor. The romantic excesses of heroic plays were satirized by George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, in his burlesque The Rehearsal (pr., pb. 1672), which has as its major character John Bayes, a brilliant satiric depiction of Dryden. Villiers parodies many of the

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absurd and inflated lines of Dryden and others who wrote in the form, yet The Rehearsal failed to drive the heroic drama from the stage. The genre remained viable for nearly two decades, until the late 1670’s, when the playwrights began shifting their efforts to a less flamboyant form of tragedy. Aureng-Zebe • Aureng-Zebe, the last of Dryden’s heroic plays, was judged by him to be his best, though in the prologue he announced that he had grown weary of rhyme, an indication of his imminent shift to blank verse as the appropriate meter for serious drama. By comparison to Dryden’s earlier heroic dramas, Aureng-Zebe makes less use of song and dance and includes less rant and bombast, yet it clearly preserves the major elements of the genre. Set in India at the time of the Mogul Empire, it derives events and characters from history, though Dryden freely alters the sources. The aging emperor, a stereotypical weak king, finds his throne challenged by several of his sons, the loyal Aureng-Zebe being an exception. Aureng-Zebe is depicted by his friend Arimant, governor of Agra, as “by no strong person swayed/ Except his love,” a hero of unshakable loyalty who hopes that he will attain the hand of the captive queen Indamora for his support of the emperor. While Aureng-Zebe is tame by earlier standards of the heroic play, echoes of the swashbuckling, superhuman hero remain. In armed conflict, the hero defeats two rebellious brothers, Darah being the first, “Darah from loyal Aureng-Zebe is fled,/ And forty thousand of his men lie dead.” The threat represented by Morat, the ambitious villain of the play, is not so easily parried, for he has raised an immense force thus described by Abbas: “The neighb’ring plain with arms is coverd o’er;/ The vale an iron harvest seems to yield/ Of thick-sprung lances in a waving field.” The hyperboles, typical of the genre, suggest the physical threat posed by Morat; his character also serves as a foil to that of Aureng-Zebe, for he does not properly control his passions. Primarily motivated by a desire for power, he also wishes to abandon his faithful wife, Melesinda, for Aureng-Zebe’s beloved Indamora, who finds him repulsive. Further complications arise when the emperor falls passionately in love with Indamora, and the Empress Nourmahal, Aureng-Zebe’s stepmother and the “evil woman” of the play, conceives a strong passion for her stepson. Confronted with news of his father’s love for Indamora and his placing her under arrest, the hero accepts the challenge involving both his love and honor. Aureng-Zebe finds himself threatened from many directions when he intercedes with the emperor and attempts to prevent the emperor’s petulant imprisonment of Nourmahal. No sooner has the emperor seen Nourmahal taken away than he summons the rebellious Morat with the intent of making him his heir, all because of Aureng-Zebe’s love for Indamora. Boldly entering unannounced, Aureng-Zebe attempts to end the alliance between the emperor and Morat by offering to disband his army if Morat will withdraw his forces from the city, leaving the emperor in control. Despite these peace-making efforts, the emperor orders Aureng-Zebe’s arrest when he will not renounce his love for Indamora. When Indamora pleads for Morat to spare the life of Aureng-Zebe, he demands her love in exchange, which she curtly refuses. The alliance between the emperor and Morat is broken when the emperor learns of Morat’s passion for Indamora. After Aureng-Zebe has been released through the efforts of Indamora and Arimant, Indamora finds great difficulty in convincing the jealous hero that she has remained faithful and has not betrayed him with Morat. Meanwhile, having lost the favor of the emperor, Morat rebels against him.

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The outcome is obscured when Arimant, in a disguise that results in his being mistaken for Aureng-Zebe, is killed and Morat has to break off a long seductive speech to Indamora to quell an uprising. In the final battle, Aureng-Zebe leads the emperor’s forces to victory, and Morat, mortally wounded, manages to prevent his mother from murdering Indamora. Her violent passion frustrated, Nourmahal poisons herself, and the Emperor grants Aureng-Zebe both the state and Indamora. In Aureng-Zebe, the characters who retain their honor reap the rewards of both love and honor, whereas those who do not control their passions and ambition encounter misfortune. The abruptness and violence of passions are appropriately accompanied by abrupt and violent actions in the play. A major difference between good and evil characters becomes the measure of control over passions, not the violence of the passion itself. Dryden’s characters, both the good and the bad, express themselves blatantly where sexual passions are concerned, a phenomenon not limited to the characters of the heroic plays. All for Love • Of All for Love, his tragedy based on Shakespeare’s earlier great work Antony and Cleopatra (pr. c. 1606-1607), Dryden himself commented that he had never written anything “for myself but Antony and Cleopatra.” The drama reflects Dryden’s vision of tragedy, sometimes designated by critics as “heroic tragedy” to indicate certain similarities to the heroic play. The chief among Dryden’s works in the type include Oedipus, Troilus and Cressida, Don Sebastian, King of Portugal and Cleomenes, the Spartan Hero. Unlike the heroic plays, these are written in blank verse and their sources are Shakespearean or classical. They demonstrate fewer of the epic dimensions of the heroic play, and the heroes are more nearly realistic characters. Although Dryden succeeds more fully in presenting human emotions in these dramas, in part because the medium of blank verse is more suited to emotional expression, he achieves the effects of pathos and sentiment rather than pity and fear. In All for Love, Dryden follows the dramatic unities of time, place, and action, which he regarded as ornaments of tragedy, though not indispensable. The hero, Antony, is presented on the final day of his life, which happens to be his birthday. Facing imminent defeat at the hands of Octavius, he encounters temptations to abandon the great passion of his life, Cleopatra, in order to prolong the contest or to minimize the consequences of the loss. Restrictions inherent in the dramatic unities result in characters that are not nearly so complex as those of the source, Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Cleopatra neither wavers in her devotion to Antony nor reflects at length on her role as queen, as she does in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Dryden’s Ventidius shares qualities drawn from Shakespeare’s character of the same name but also from Shakespeare’s Enobarbus, the devoted adviser who abandons Antony. Ventidius strives to deliver Antony from his passion for Cleopatra, while, at the same time, her servant Alexas is scheming with Cleopatra to keep Antony’s devotion. Caught in the struggle between love and duty, Antony appears a weak hero. Ventidius first offers Antony, then under attack by Octavius, the support of twelve legions if he will abandon Cleopatra, pointing to this as a necessary condition since the legionnaires refuse to come to Egypt and insist that Antony join them to assume command. Seizing on this chance for victory, Antony agrees, only to change his mind when he receives a parting gift, a bracelet, from Cleopatra, who unexpectedly arrives to put her gift on his arm. Ventidius next arranges for Antony to make an honorable peace with Caesar, leaving him with limited power, if he will return to his wife Octavia. When Octavia appears

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with their two daughters, Antony is unable to withstand their pleas and agrees to return to her, dispatching Dolabella to deliver a farewell to Cleopatra. This episode reveals the flaws in Alexas’s and Ventidius’s calculations. Alexas reasons that Cleopatra may win Antony back by arousing his jealousy through Dolabella, whereas Ventidius assumes that jealousy will convince Antony that Cleopatra was worthless. Thus, both adversaries steer Antony in the same direction for different ends. The result is that Octavia becomes so distressed at Antony’s obvious jealousy over their reports that she leaves him. In return for Antony’s hostility and anger and after the loss of a battle at sea, Cleopatra sends word of her death, which Antony cannot bear. Following his selfinflicted mortal wound, he is taken to Cleopatra, whose death following his brings a sense of triumph. Although scenes such as that between Antony and Octavia involve a generous amount of sentimentality, Dryden achieves in All for Love an intensity that is lacking in most of his plays, one whose emotional effects are not dissipated through digressions or loosely related subplots. The play reveals a tightly unified plot line in which characters’ motives and actions are influenced primarily by strong romantic love. Don Sebastian, King of Portugal • Dryden’s tragedy Don Sebastian, King of Portugal, written after the Glorious Revolution, is his longest drama and, in the view of critics from Sir Walter Scott to Bruce King, his finest dramatic achievement. In the play’s preface, Dryden acknowledges that the players cut more than twelve hundred lines from the acted version. Though the play’s themes are universally appropriate for tragedy, it includes a closely related comic subplot, and it ends not with the death of the hero or heroine but with their retirement from the world of affairs. The play incorporates numerous qualities and dramatic techniques that Dryden employs elsewhere in his work and may be the most fruitful play to examine for clarifying his dramatic art. The play is set in North Africa, where Don Sebastian, king of Portugal, and his allies have been defeated and captured after warring against the Moors. Sebastian’s chief desire is to marry the woman he loves, Almeyda, Christian queen of Barbary, also held captive. This he manages to do after the emperor Muley-Moluch has given him a measure of freedom so that Sebastian can attempt to win Almeyda’s hand for the emperor. Sebastian and Almeyda escape the emperor’s retribution for their marriage, because he is slain in a rebellion, but they do not escape fate. In the final act, they learn from the old counselor Alvarez, who has just been freed from captivity, that they are half brother and sister, having had the same father. The incestuousness of their relationship, unknowing though it was, forces them to part, with each retiring to a separate religious house. The Moors are portrayed throughout the play as riven by factions, the chief threat being the effort of the emperor’s favorite, Benducar, to topple him from the throne, ostensibly in favor of the emperor’s brother, Muley-Zeydan, but in reality for himself. In this attempt, he involves the populace, the religious leader Mufti Abdalla, and Dorax, a Christian who has turned against Sebastian and has joined the Moors. Dorax later joins Sebastian, after the fall of the emperor, to defeat the uprising and restore worthy leaders to their places. A comic subplot involves the efforts of the Christian captive Don Antonio to flee the household of the Mufti with his daughter Morayma and his treasure, in much the same way that Lorenzo and Jessica flee Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (pr. 1604). The exotic setting, the theme of heroic love, the stock characters, and the broils and warfare represent familiar themes and situations of Dryden’s dramas. Occasionally,

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one also finds in the dramas some exceptional improbabilities. In this play, for example, Dorax, having lost the confidence of the Moors, is poisoned by two of them, Benducar and the Mufti, but survives because each poison neutralizes the effect of the other. Yet Don Sebastian, King of Portugal illustrates other characteristics of Dryden’s dramatic art that are less obvious but more influential and significant: the theme of incest, actual or suppressed; anticlericalism; political satire and allusions; and scenes of reconciliation. In Don Sebastian, King of Portugal, unwitting incest occurs between Sebastian and Almeyda after they are married, and such is their consternation when they discover they have violated the taboo that Sebastian believes suicide the only escape until Dorax dissuades him. The situation resembles somewhat that of Oedipus in the version of the old Greek drama that Dryden and Nathaniel Lee produced for the Restoration stage. It is as though love in Dryden is so exalted, wrought up to such a pitch, that introduction of the taboo acts to heighten it and make the plight of the lovers more poignant. In Don Sebastian, King of Portugal, the theme is counterbalanced by the story of Violante, who denied affection to the husband Sebastian had chosen for her and awaited for many years her beloved Dorax. It is unclear why anticlericalism becomes such a prominent theme in the works of Dryden, though it seems plausible that his profound distrust and dislike of Puritan influence on political affairs may in part explain it. The Mufti represents the typical clergyman in Dryden, usually the object of satire in both the poems and the plays. He is ambitious, avaricious, sensual, officious, and usually hypocritical. The Mufti appears ridiculous in both political and personal affairs, becoming the object of humor and scorn. Dryden does not ridicule clergymen of the Church of England, but wherever he introduces a pagan, a Muslim, or a Roman Catholic religious figure, the character becomes the object of satire. In its political theme, the play concerns betrayal and misappropriation of power. The emperor, having usurped the throne, discovers that he can trust no one, least of all Benducar, his closest adviser. Benducar incites the mob to rebellion, and they manage to defeat and kill the emperor, barbarously showing his head on a pike as that of a tyrant. Like a true Machiavellian, Benducar muses on the thesis that might makes right: “And I can sin but once to seize the throne; all after-acts are sanctified by power.” Such passages as this in Dryden’s plays, poems, and translations following the Glorious Revolution usually serve as oblique satire of the new monarchs, and his distrust of the judgment of the common people where political affairs are concerned is a recurring theme throughout his work. A final characteristic of Dryden’s theater is evident in act 4, scene 3, often considered the most successful scene of the play. It depicts the intense quarrel of the two friends, Dorax and Sebastian, and their reconciliation. Dryden may have based this scene on the quarrel of Brutus and Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (pr. c. 1599-1600); similar scenes occur in other works of Dryden, notably in Troilus and Cressida and Cleomenes, the Spartan Hero. Although Dorax has fought on the side of the Moors, he defends and spares the life of Sebastian—so that he can kill him to exact his own revenge. He holds a powerful grudge because Sebastian did not adequately reward him for his prior service and awarded the hand of Violante to another courtier, Henriquez. Facing an imminent fight to the death with Dorax, Sebastian explains that Henriquez had sought the hand of Violante first, that Henriquez had died defending Sebastian, and that Violante now waits for Dorax. Accepting Sebastian’s explanation,

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Dorax submits, is restored to favor, and promises that he will serve Sebastian as faithfully as Henriquez had done. In the final act, Dorax helps Sebastian bear manfully his sense of guilt and loss. Scenes of intense confrontation permit the dramatist to display a range of emotions in a brief space, as well as a heightening and diminution of passions. Dryden’s ability to capture such a range of tones compensates to a degree for his lack of a greater gift as a dramatist—the ability to show growth and development of his characters. Other major works poetry: Heroic Stanzas, 1659; Astraea Redux, 1660; “To My Lord Chancellor,” 1662; Prologues and Epilogues, 1664-1700; Annus Mirabilis, 1667; Absalom and Achitophel, Part I, 1681; Absalom and Achitophel, Part II, 1682 (with Nahum Tate); The Medall: A Satyre Against Sedition, 1682; Mac Flecknoe: Or, A Satyre upon the True-Blew-Protestant Poet, T. S., 1682; Religio Laici: Or, A Layman’s Faith, 1682; Threnodia Augustalis, 1685; The Hind and the Panther, 1687; “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day,” 1687; Britannia Rediviva, 1688; Eleonora, 1692; “To My Dear Friend Mr. Congreve,” 1694; Alexander’s Feast: Or, The Power of Music, an Ode in Honor of St. Cecilia’s Day, 1697; “To My Honour’d Kinsman, John Driden,” 1700. nonfiction: Of Dramatic Poesie: An Essay, 1668; “A Defence of An Essay of Dramatic Poesy,” 1668; “Preface to An Evening’s Love: Or, The Mock Astrologer,” 1671; “Of Heroic Plays: An Essay,” 1672; “The Author’s Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic License,” 1677; “Preface to All for Love,” 1678; “The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy,” 1679; “Preface to Sylvae,” 1685; A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire, 1693; “Dedication of Examen Poeticum,” 1693; “A Parallel of Poetry and Painting,” 1695; “Dedication of the Aeneis,” 1697; “Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern,” 1700; “Heads of an Answer to Rymer,” 1711. translations: Ovid’s Epistles, 1680; The History of the League, 1684 (of Louis Maimbourg’s Histoire de la Ligue); The Life of St. Francis Xavier, 1688 (of Dominique Bouhours’s La Vie de Saint François Xavier); The Satires of Juvenal and Persius, 1693; The Works of Vergil, 1697. Bibliography Archer, John Michael. Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001. Contains a scholarly examination of Dryden’s Aureng-Zebe, along with Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and the works of John Milton. Bibliography and index. Bywaters, David. Dryden in Revolutionary England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. This book describes the rhetorical stages by which Dryden, in his published works between 1687 and 1700, sought to define contemporary politics and to stake out for himself a tenable place within them. The study reveals much about the relationship between Dryden’s politics, polemics, and art. Contains an epilogue and extensive notes. Hammond, Paul. John Dryden: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. This study of Dryden’s life examines the texts that he produced and the relationship of these texts to the society they reflect. The work consists of chapters on different aspects of Dryden’s works. They are arranged approximately chronologically to suggest the shape of his career and to explore his own developing sense of his role as the premier writer of Restoration England, both dominating and detached from the world in which he moved. Select bibliography and extensive notes.

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Hammond, Paul, and David Hopkins, eds. John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays. Oxford, England: Oxford, 2000. A collection of twelve essays that place Dryden in the context of his time and suggest a more elevated place for the poet in literary history. Owen, Susan J. Restoration Theatre and Crisis. New York: Clarendon Press, 1996. A look at theater in England in the seventeenth century, focusing on Dryden and Aphra Behn. Bibliography and index. Winn, James Anderson. John Dryden and His World. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987. Examines the man, his work, and the world in which he lived. Considers the subtle relations linking this world’s religious beliefs, its political alliances, and the literary styles it favored. Views Dryden’s work as a product of his particular historical situation. Includes illustrations and appendices on Dryden’s family history. _______, ed. Critical Essays on John Dryden. New York: G. K. Hall, 1997. A collection of essays on the literary works of Dryden. Bibliography and index. Stanley Archer, updated by Genevieve Slomski

Christopher Durang Christopher Durang

Born: Montclair, New Jersey; January 2, 1949 Principal drama • The Greatest Musical Ever Sung, pr. 1971; The Nature and Purpose of the Universe, wr. 1971, pr. 1975 (radio play), pr. 1979 (staged), pb. 1979; Better Dead than Sorry, pr. 1972 (libretto, music by Jack Feldman); I Don’t Generally Like Poetry but Have You Read “Trees”?, pr. 1972 (with Albert Innaurato); The Life Story of Mitzi Gaynor: Or, Gyp, pr. 1973 (with Innaurato); The Marriage of Bette and Boo, pr. 1973, pb. 1976, revised pr. 1979, pb. 1985; The Idiots Karamazov, pr., pb. 1974, augmented pb. 1981 (with Innaurato, music by Feldman); Titanic, pr. 1974, pb. 1983; Death Comes to Us All, Mary Agnes, pr. 1975, pb. 1979; When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth, pr. 1975 (with Wendy Wasserstein); ’dentity Crisis, pr. 1975, pb. 1979; Das Lusitania Songspiel, pr. 1976 (with Sigourney Weaver, music by Mel Marvin and Jack Gaughan); A History of the American Film, pr. 1976, pb. 1978; The Vietnamization of New Jersey (An American Tragedy), pr. 1976, pb. 1978; Three Short Plays, pb. 1979; Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, pr. 1979, pb. 1980; The Actor’s Nightmare, pr., pb. 1981; Beyond Therapy, pr. 1981, pb. 1983; Christopher Durang Explains It All for You, pb. 1983; Baby with the Bathwater, pr., pb. 1983; Sloth, pr. 1985; Laughing Wild, pr. 1987, pb. 1988; Naomi in the Living Rkoom, pr. 1991, pb. 1998; Media Amok, pr. 1992; Durang/Durang, pr. 1994, pb. 1996 (6 short plays; Mrs. Sorken, For Whom the Belle Tolls, A Stye of the Eye, Nina in the Morning, Wanda’s Visit, and Business Lunch at the Russian Tea Room); Collected Works, pb. 1995-1997 (2 volumes; volume 1, Twenty-seven Short Plays; volume 2, Complete Fulllength Plays, 1975-1995); Sex and Longing, pr. 1996; Betty’s Summer Vacation, pr. 1998, pb. 2000 Other literary forms • Although Christopher Durang is known primarily for his plays, he has written a screenplay, Beyond Therapy (1987). Achievements • Christopher Durang belongs to a tradition of black humorists and fabulists who first emerged in the 1950’s with the novelists Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Berger. His plays are ridiculous comedies that agitate the audience without propagating a particular political viewpoint, attacking every “great idea” of Western literature and philosophy merely because it is assailable. His writing centers on the enduring questions of human suffering and authority. His most popular play, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, was hotly debated by theologians and theater critics alike and won an Obie Award as the best new Off-Broadway play of 1980. Durang’s other honors include grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Lecomte du Nuoy Foundation, fellowships from Guggenheim and the Columbia Broadcasting System, a Tony nomination for his musical A History of the American Film, the Sidney Kingsley Playwriting Award, and an Obie Award for distinguished playwriting for Betty’s Summer Vacation. He co-chairs the playwriting program at the Julliard School in Manhattan. His work is characterized by energy and a sense of the ridiculous in life and art, sustained by anger and despair. The targets of his abusive wit are the sacred cows of contemporary American society: religion, family life, hero worship, law and order, and success. 241

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Biography • Christopher Ferdinand Durang was born in Montclair, New Jersey, on January 2, 1949. A humorous autobiographical sketch is given in the introduction to his plays in Christopher Durang Explains It All for You, beginning with his conception and ending with the reviews of Beyond Therapy. His parents, Francis Ferdinand and Patricia Elizabeth Durang, were devout Roman Catholics who fought constantly until they were divorced, when Durang was still in grade school. Durang’s interest in theater and playwriting became evident early in life. He wrote his first play while in the second grade in a Catholic elementary school. He subsequently attended a Catholic preparatory high school run by Benedictine priests. He continued to write plays, and though a fairly conservative and conventional student, he often inserted hints of sex for their shock effect. In high school, Durang was overcome with religious zeal and the desire to enter a monastery after graduation, but soon afterward he lost his faith and his interest in the Roman Catholic religion. He attended Harvard University with the hope and expectation of discovering a more intellectual and less conservative dimension of Catholicism but was disappointed. In his second year at Harvard, he entered psychoanalysis with a priest. He became obsessed with motion pictures and neglected his academic studies. Although he had been a prodigious writer in high school, he wrote almost nothing in college until his senior year, when he wrote (as a form of therapy for his feeling of religious guilt) a musical-comedy version of the life of Christ called The Greatest Musical Ever Sung, which included such irreverent show-tune lampoons as “The Dove That Done Me Wrong” and “Everything’s Coming up Moses.” The play stirred up a local religious controversy but was well received by audiences, encouraging the young playwright to write more. His next effort, the ambitiously titled The Nature and Purpose of the Universe, was eventually produced in New York and, following Durang’s graduation from Harvard in 1971, was submitted as part of his application to the Yale School of Drama. At Yale, Durang met and worked with a number of actors and playwrights who were, along with him, to make their marks in the American theater. Among his classmates were Albert Innaurato (with whom Durang collaborated on several plays), Meryl Streep (who appeared in a Durang play in college), Wendy Wasserstein (with whom Durang wrote When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth), and Sigourney Weaver (who appeared in several Durang plays in New York and with whom he wrote Das Lusitania Songspiel). His chief supporter at Yale and later in New York was Robert Brustein, who was dean of the drama school while Durang was enrolled there and artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theater. Durang received his M.F.A. in 1974 but remained in New Haven for an extra year, performing and writing at Yale, teaching drama at the Southern Connecticut College in New Haven, and working as a typist at the medical school. Durang moved to New York in 1975. Titanic, which he wrote for a class at Yale, and The Nature and Purpose of the Universe were produced in Off-Broadway theaters. In 1976, his musical play A History of the American Film was produced in Waterford, Connecticut, as part of the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference, and in 1977 it was produced simultaneously on both coasts at the Hartford Stage Company in Connecticut, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, California, and the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. In 1978, the play opened on Broadway at the American National Theatre. The play’s subsequent failure on Broadway precipitated a period of depression that climaxed with the death of Durang’s mother in March, 1979. Watching his mother die of incurable bone cancer and reassessing his Catholic upbringing, Durang started writing the play on which his reputation as a playwright would be secured, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You.

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The play was first produced in December, 1979, by Curt Dempster’s Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York, along with one-act plays by David Mamet, Marsha Norman, and Tennessee Williams. Two years later, Andre Bishop’s Playwrights Horizons produced the play Off-Broadway with two members of the original cast of six, along with Durang’s The Actor’s Nightmare, which he wrote as a curtain raiser. In 2000, the play was adapted for cable television under the title Sister Mary Explains It All, with Diane Keaton in the title role. Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You brought Durang to the public’s attention, not only through the show’s popularity but also through several battles against censorship when various Catholic organizations attempted to close down the play. The Phoenix Theatre commissioned Durang to write Beyond Therapy, which opened in 1981 and then, almost a year and a half later, was rewritten and produced on Broadway at the Brooks Atkinson Theater. Later, Durang revised and expanded two plays he originally wrote at Yale, Baby with the Bathwater and The Marriage of Bette and Boo, which also were produced in New York. A 1987 film version of Beyond Therapy directed by Robert Altman was a box-office failure, and Durang expressed his unhappiness with the experience. Nevertheless, he subsequently expressed his disenchantment with the New York theater scene and his intention to pursue work in film, which, he stated, offers more permanence and reaches a larger audience than live drama. Analysis • Christopher Durang belongs to the postmodernist wave of American playwrights who emerged during the 1970’s, including A. R. Gurney, Jr., Tina Howe, and Sam Shepard. These writers fused the experimental techniques of the structuralist theater experiments of the 1960’s with the “traditional” domestic drama of the early twentieth century American realists, creating a new form of theater that is simultaneously naturalistic and self-consciously theatrical. Evolving as it did from collegiate travesties and comedy sketches, Durang’s drama violates many of the established principles of the well-made play. However sloppily constructed and politically unsophisticated his plays may be, Durang’s genius is to create comedies out of existential anger and to infuse them with energy, thought, and an unbounded sense of liberty. Durang’s plays are remarkable for their absurdist approach to the important questions of modern philosophy, for their hilarious disregard for social conventions and traditional sexual roles, and for their uncompromisingly bleak assessment of human politics and society. As early as the satirical travesties he produced in college, Durang’s abiding themes have been suffering and paternalism. The cutting edge of his humor is his insistence on the commonplaceness of suffering in the world. His plays are populated by archetypal sadists and victims, and the comedy is usually cruel (as the audience is made to laugh at the exaggerated and grotesque misery of the characters) and nearly always violent; death, suicide, disaster, and murder are never too far away in typical Durang slapstick. In a note accompanying the publication of The Nature and Purpose of the Universe, the writer explains that the violence of the play must appear simultaneously vicious and funny, demanding that performers make the audience sympathize with the victim and yet feel sufficiently “alienated” (in the sense of Bertolt Brecht’s “alienation effect”) from the theatrical action to be able to laugh at it. Presiding over the sufferers is a figure of authority, always coldly detached and frequently insane, who “explains” the suffering with banal truisms taken from philosophy, religion, and pop psychology, while in fact he or she acts as the instrument of the oppression and mindless malice. Fear and insecurity are the principal components of Durang’s comedy of paranoia.

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While his plays are repeatedly criticized for not being positive and for not suggesting any remedy to the problem of human evil, they are in fact relentlessly moral, fueled by a profound sense of outrage at the crimes against human dignity. Like Eugène Ionesco, Joe Orton, and Lenny Bruce, Durang attempts to shock the audience out of its complacency through the use of vulgarity, blasphemy, violence, and other forms of extremism. If his endings seem less than perfectly conclusive, and if his characters seem to be no more than cartoons, still, underneath all the madcap and sophomoric nonsense is a serious and humane plea for tolerance, diversity, and individual liberty. The object of the writer’s most satirical attacks is the incompetent guardian, a sometimes wellintentioned but always destructive figure of patriarchal authority who appears in many different guises: parent, husband, teacher, analyst, hero, nanny, doctor, author, and even deity. This figure embodies for Durang all the evil elements of human nature and social hierarchy. The Idiots Karamazov • Durang’s drama of the mid-1970’s, the plays that grew out of his college exercises at Yale, is chiefly parodic and yet contains kernels of the preoccupation with suffering characteristic of his later works. The Idiots Karamazov, which he wrote with Innaurato, is a musical-comedy travesty of the great Russian novelists of suffering, Fyodor Dostoevski and Leo Tolstoy. The principal character, Constance Garnett, is the translator, an older woman who uses a wheelchair and is attended by a suicidal manservant, Ernest. In Durang and Innaurato’s version of Dostoevski’s The Brothers Karamazov, the holy innocent and idiot savant Alyosha becomes a pop music star, and the “Great Books,” along with other academic pretensions to cultural importance, are thus trivialized as commodities in a money-and-glitter-oriented enterprise. A History of the American Film • Durang ridiculed Hollywood and motion pictures in A History of the American Film, a 1976 musical that opened on Broadway in 1978. The five principal characters are caricatures based on familiar Hollywood types. Loretta (as in Loretta Young) is the long-suffering and lovingly innocent heroine. Jimmy (as in James Cagney) is the tough guy, part hoodlum and part romantic hero. Bette (as in Bette Davis) is the vamp, a vindictive but seductive figure who enjoys nothing more than making Loretta suffer. Hank (as in Henry Fonda) is the strong and silent all-American good guy, who eventually turns psychotic. Eve (as in Eve Arden) is the ever-present true friend, who covers up her own sexual frustration with dry witticisms and hard-boiled mottoes. True to its title, the play satirizes the gamut of Hollywood kitsch, including jabs at Birth of a Nation (1915), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Psycho (1960), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), and Earthquake (1974). On a deeper level, the play exposes the American film industry as a manufacturer of glamorous façades for real-life misery and fear. The Vietnamization of New Jersey • In The Vietnamization of New Jersey, Durang takes on the legitimate theater itself. Using David Rabe’s controversial Vietnam-era satire Sticks and Bones (pr. 1969, pb. 1972) as a starting place, Durang makes the social and political pretensions of “serious theater” seem silly, while castigating the various “isms” of contemporary culture: liberalism, consumerism, racism, militarism, and sexism. The play treats the horrors of war, mental illness, inflation, unemployment, and suicide with chilling comedy.

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’dentity Crisis • In the late 1970’s, when Durang wrote ’dentity Crisis, The Nature and Purpose of the Universe, and the phenomenally successful Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, the playwright challenged the idea of authority or expertise itself. Inspired by R. D. Laing’s controversial theories about schizophrenia, ’dentity Crisis is an oddly moving comedy in one act and two scenes. The action centers on a young, depressed woman named Jane and her mother, Edith. The play opens as Edith returns from the dry cleaner with Jane’s bloodstained dress, which has been ruined after an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Despite the initial impression, it soon appears that Jane is the only character in the play who is “sane.” Edith manufactures and discards versions of reality with breathless speed, and Robert, the other occupant of the house, manifests four distinct personalities, alternately Jane’s brother, father, and grandfather, as well as the Count de Rochelay, a foreign suitor of the perversely promiscuous Edith. Even Jane’s psychoanalyst, Mr. Summers, is bizarrely inconsistent. In scene 1, the role is played by a man, and in scene 2, after a sex-change operation, by a woman (the actor who plays Mr. Summers in the first scene plays his wife in the second). Jane reveals the motive behind her suicide attempt in a poignant and surrealistic monologue concerning a production of Peter Pan she had seen as a girl. Life is not worth continuing, she says, if it only leads to death in the end. The play ends with the daughter’s loss of her identity, but the audience’s sympathy remains with her because it has entered her version of reality and regards the others as mad. The Nature and Purpose of the Universe • The authoritative Mr. and Mrs. Summers in ’dentity Crisis are remarkably similar to Ronald and Elaine May Alcott, the two “agents of God” who borrow various guises in The Nature and Purpose of the Universe. Like its glib title, the play pokes fun at those who would offer easy explanations of the mysteries of existence and evil. It is a play in thirteen “chapters,” each chronicling a different aspect of the tragicomic downfall of the hapless Eleanor Mann. Presiding over the events of the drama are Ronald and Elaine, who pretend to render meaningful the random catastrophes that they inflict on the Job-like Eleanor. Every now and then they enter the action of the play, purportedly to offer heavenly guidance and solace but actually to intensify the poor woman’s suffering. Durang’s comedy springs from the characters’ absurdly cool responses to horror. When Eleanor is knocked to the kitchen floor and kicked by her drug-peddling son, her husband chides the boy, saying, “Donald, have a little patience with your mother.” The play ends as, in a parody of Old Testament piety, Ronald and Elaine bind and gag Eleanor and sacrifice her to a distant and passively vicious God. Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You • Sister Mary Ignatius, teacher at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow and the menacingly maternal protagonist of Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, is the writer’s classic realization of the banality and willful ignorance of human evil. The play falls into three sections. In the first, Sister Mary catechizes the audience on basic doctrines and practices of the Roman Catholic Church. As Durang noted in several interviews, the humor of this section stems from the unexaggerated reportage of the irrational but devoutly held beliefs of certain Christians: the existence of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory within the physical universe; the supernatural births of Jesus Christ and Mary; the efficacy of Christ’s suffering and death on a cross; the exclusively procreative function of sex; and God’s everlasting vengeance

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against wrongdoers such as Zsa Zsa Gabor, Brooke Shields, and David Bowie. Repeatedly, however, Sister Mary dodges the more interesting issue of God’s responsibility for the existence of evil and suffering in the world. The second section presents a Nativity play performed by four of Sister Mary’s former students. More than anything else, the play demonstrates the triumph of dogma over narrative in traditional Christianity and portrays an absurdly abbreviated life of Christ. With only three characters, Mary, Joseph, and Misty the camel (two actors impersonate separate humps), and a doll as the infant Jesus, the play spans the time from the Immaculate Conception (of Mary) to the Ascension (of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and Misty). The third section of the play involves the Nativity-scene actors’ disclosure to Sister Mary of the courses their lives have taken after leaving Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow. Philomena (Misty’s front end) has borne a daughter out of wedlock. Aloysius (Misty’s back end) has become a suicidal alcoholic who regularly beats his wife. Gary ( Joseph) has had homosexual relationships. Diane (Mary), whom Sister Mary especially detests, has had two abortions. Diane engineers the climactic confrontation in order to embarrass Sister Mary and then reveals her intention to kill her, much to the surprise of her three cohorts. Victorious in the end, Sister Mary whips out a gun and kills Diane; then, after assuring herself that he has made a recent confession of his sexual sins, she kills Gary as well. The play ends with a recitation of the catechism by Thomas, a boy currently enrolled in the parochial school. Beyond Therapy • In the 1980’s, Durang turned his attention to other kinds of oppression in society, specifically the normalization of sexuality and family relationships. In Beyond Therapy, he again attacks psychoanalysis from a Laingian perspective, portraying the analysts in the play as more bizarre versions of Mr. Summers and his wife in ’dentity Crisis. Their clients are a heterosexual woman and a bisexual man who meet through an advertisement in the personals column of a newspaper. The complex relationship they form is played mainly for laughs, but the butt of most of the jokes is pop psychology, as well as the notion of anyone’s being an expert about how other people ought to live their lives. Baby with the Bathwater and The Marriage of Bette and Boo • Both Baby with the Bathwater and The Marriage of Bette and Boo have their origins in plays Durang wrote while in college and pertain to American family life. Baby with the Bathwater is a grim but humorous indictment of the science of child-rearing. Born as a boy but reared as a girl, Daisy, the baby of the title, is the victim of two inept parents and a manipulative nanny. In the last act he appears in his analyst’s office wearing a dress, clearly suffering from a sexual identity crisis. The Marriage of Bette and Boo takes the form of a college student’s memories of his parents, both of whom are emotionally unbalanced and (for their son Matt, the narrator) unbalancing. The play is a parody of the family dramas of American dramatists Thornton Wilder and Eugene O’Neill. The mother, Bette, idolizes babies but is able to produce only one living descendant because her blood type is incompatible with her husband’s. The several stillborn infants she produces she names after animal characters in Winnie the Pooh storybooks. The father, Boo, is an alcoholic whose life is a cycle of a reformation and backsliding. Though a comedy, the play touches on serious philosophical questions concerning God, suffering, death, the absurdity of life, and the meaning of love. It is also the most autobiographical of Durang’s plays.

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Later plays • In the late 1980’s, tired of New York and the theater, Durang began touring as a cabaret act, Chris Durang and Dawne. He soon returned to the theater, however, with Media Amok, a satire on the sensationalism of television talk shows. Durang/Durang contained six sketches lampooning playwrights Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepard, and David Mamet, with titles such as For Whom the Belle Tolls. A more serious and disturbing play followed. Sex and Longing tells of Lulu, a nymphomaniac whose roommate is a sexually compulsive homosexual. Lulu is attacked by a serial killer; her savior, a fundamentalist preacher, first converts her, then later rapes her. Betty’s Summer Vacation begins as a comedic farce but soon spins out of control to an explosive ending. Betty is spending her vacation at a time-share by the beach with five bizarre strangers, one of whom is a serial killer. The American fascination with sensationalism on television is a theme again, with such targets as Fox network specials and coverage of the trials of Lorena Bobbit and O. J. Simpson. Other major work screenplay: Beyond Therapy, 1987. Bibliography Brustein, Robert. “The Crack in the Chimney: Reflections on Contemporary American Playwriting.” Theater 9 (Spring, 1978): 21-29. A discussion of The Vietnamization of New Jersey, set against the more serious examination of the work of David Rabe, in Sticks and Bones. Durang, Christopher. Introduction to Christopher Durang Explains It All for You. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990. The introduction to this collection of six plays is a tongue-in-cheek autobiography, written in 1982, that includes anecdotes about playwriting classes under Howard Stein and Jules Feiffer and early psychiatric counseling. _______. “Suspending Disbelief: An Interview with the Playwright by Himself.” American Theater 16, no. 10 (December 1999): 37. A sardonic “interview” in which Durang discusses the writing of Betty’s Summer Vacation, recurrent themes in his work, and future plans. Includes the full text of Betty’s Summer Vacation. Flippo, Chet. “Is Broadway Ready for Christopher Durang?” New York 15 (March 15, 1982): 40-43. “I was very depressed about how depressed I got,” says Durang in this chatty, readable conversation. Discusses his early revues at Harvard University and cabaret pieces for the Yale School of Drama, his collaboration with Sigourney Weaver, and his development as a “fearless satirist.” Savran, David. In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988. A brief overview is followed by a protracted interview, centering on biographical history, the development of The Marriage of Bette and Boo, and Durang’s writing habits. Durang sees advantages to filmmaking (if the playwright’s script is not desecrated as with Beyond Therapy), including reaching a larger audience and enjoying more permanence. Weales, Gerald. “American Theater Watch, 1981-1982.” The Georgia Review 36 (Fall, 1982): 517-526. Weales offers insightful comments on Durang’s comic style, but he is not impressed by his structure or depth. Drawn from interviews in The New York Times, this article summarizes critics’ first reactions to this new voice. Joseph Marohl, updated by Thomas J. Taylor and Irene Struthers Rush

Friedrich Dürrenmatt Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Born: Konolfingen, Switzerland; January 5, 1921 Died: Neuchâtel, Switzerland; December 14, 1990 Principal drama • Es steht geschrieben, pr., pb. 1947 (revised as Die Wiedertäufer, pr., pb. 1967; The Anabaptists, 1967); Der Blinde, pr. 1948, pb. 1960; Romulus der Grosse, pr. 1949, second version pr. 1957, pb. 1958, third version pb. 1961 (Romulus the Great, 1961); Die Ehe des Herrn Mississippi, pr., pb. 1952, second version pb. 1957 (The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi, 1958); Ein Engel kommt nach Babylon, pr. 1953, pb. 1954, second version pb. 1957 (An Angel Comes to Babylon, 1962); Herkulus und der Stall des Angias, wr. 1954, pr., pb. 1959 (radio play), pr., pb. 1963 (staged; Hercules and the Augean Stables, 1966); Der Besuch der alten Dame, pr., pb. 1956 (The Visit, 1958); Komödien I-III, pb. 19571972 (3 volumes); Frank der Fünfte: Opera einer Privatbank, pr. 1959, pb. 1960 (libretto; music by Paul Burkhard); Die Physiker, pr., pb. 1962 (The Physicists, 1963); Four Plays, pb. 1964; Der Meteor, pr., pb. 1966 (The Meteor, 1966); König Johann, pr., pb. 1968 (adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play King John); Play Strindberg: Totentanz nach August Strindberg, pr., pb. 1969 (adaptation of August Strindberg’s play The Dance of Death; Play Strindberg: The Dance of Death, 1971); Porträt eines Planeten, pr. 1970, revised version pr., pb. 1971 (Portrait of a Planet, 1973); Titus Andronicus, pr., pb. 1970 (adaptation of Shakespeare’s play); Urfaust, pr., pb. 1970 (adaptation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s play); Der Mitmacher, pr. 1973, pb. 1976 (The Conformer, 1975); Die Frist, pr., pb. 1977; Achterloo, pr., pb. 1983 Other literary forms • Friedrich Dürrenmatt was a versatile and prolific writer. In addition to his dramas, he wrote radio plays, stories, novels, detective novels, prose sketches, film scripts, and essays on dramatic theory and on a variety of literary, political, and social topics. He also adapted plays by William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Georg Büchner. Achievements • Friedrich Dürrenmatt was the best-known dramatist writing in the German language of his day. In productions of German-language playwrights in West Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, his plays were consistently among the most frequently performed. They have also been widely translated and are a standard part of the repertoire in theaters in the United States and in the other countries of Western Europe. Dürrenmatt was awarded many prizes for his works, including the literature prize of the city of Bern in 1954, the Schiller Prize in 1959, and the Grillparzer Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1968. He received honorary doctorates from Temple University, Philadelphia, in 1969, from the University of Nice in 1977, and from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1977. A thirty-volume German-language edition of his works was published in 1980 by Diogenes in Zürich. Dürrenmatt helped to compile this edition, for which he also wrote new versions of some of his plays. Biography • Friedrich Dürrenmatt was born in Konolfingen in the Canton of Bern, Switzerland, on January 5, 1921. His father, Reinhold, was a Protestant minister. In 1935, the family moved to Bern, where Dürrenmatt was graduated from the Hum248

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boldtianum (a high school) in 1941. In 1941 and 1942, Dürrenmatt studied philosophy, literature, and the natural sciences at the universities of Zürich and Bern, but he did not complete his studies. At this time, he wanted to be a painter, not a writer. During these years, Dürrenmatt read works by Franz Kafka (whose influence is evident in Dürrenmatt’s early works) and Søren Kierkegaard. He said that his greatest literary experience was reading Aristophanes, whose comedies helped shape Dürrenmatt’s own views of comedy. In 1946, Dürrenmatt moved to Basel; he married the actress Lotte Geissler in 1947. For a time, he tried to earn his living as a theater critic for the Bern newspaper Die Nation and later, between 1951 and 1953, for the Zürcher Weltwoche. In 1948, Dürrenmatt and his family moved to Ligerz on Lake Biel, where they stayed until 1952, when Dürrenmatt bought a house in Neuchâtel and settled there with his family. He died there on December 14, 1990. Analysis • The world in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s plays is an enigma, peopled by executioners and victims, tyrants and the oppressed, and persecutors and the persecuted. It defies all rational attempts to change it and is dominated by accident and chance. Dürrenmatt believed that the world is indeed ruled by chance—a chance short circuit could launch the nuclear weapons that would destroy the world. The individual feels helpless: Those individuals in Dürrenmatt’s works who do try to change the world are doomed to failure. Dürrenmatt was preoccupied with the question of justice (hence his fascination with the detective novel), but justice in his works is an unattainable, distant ideal. Dürrenmatt believed that comedy is the only form of drama that can express adequately the situation of modern humanity; it alone can reproduce the formless contemporary world. Like his model, Aristophanes, Dürrenmatt was attracted to the social criticism inherent in the comic form. (Satire, he believed, is the only weapon that those in power fear.) In the essay Theaterprobleme (1955; Problems of the Theater, 1958), he writes that tragedy is no longer possible because it needs a fixed, moral order that does not exist today. In the modern world, tragedy is produced, in Dürrenmatt’s view, by universal butchers and acted out by mincing machines. Tragedy presupposes acceptance of responsibility for guilt; without personal responsibility there can be no tragedy. Today, he said, people are no longer individually guilty; rather, they are collectively guilty. Dürrenmatt wrote, however, that the tragic is still possible within comedy; a comic plot for him was concluded only when it has taken the worst possible turn. Through his comedies, Dürrenmatt lures the audience into confronting reality. He did not provide answers to the problems he depicted in the plays. Instead, he likened his role to that of a midwife—that is, he helps people find their own answers. In his comedies, Dürrenmatt emphasized Einfälle (ingenious plots). His plays are not intended to be faithful representations of reality. In all his plays, even when they are set in the past, the focus is on modern-day problems. Dürrenmatt believed that comedy creates the distance that enables people to view the present objectively. An essential part of his comedies is the grotesque. Dürrenmatt said that the logical contradiction of the grotesque makes the spectator laugh, while its ethical contradiction outrages him. He used the grotesque to portray the monstrous, the abyss concealed beneath the veneer of civilization. Despite his gloomy view of the world, Dürrenmatt always stressed the importance of humor. His plays abound in grotesque and absurd situations, puns, slapstick, gags, verbal ingenuity, and parodies, all of which reflect his vital comic imagination. Humor, according to the playwright, does not mean to approve of the world, but rather to

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accept it for what it is, as something dubious, and not to despair; it means to accept this dubiousness and carry on. In “Dramaturgische Überlegungen zu den Wiedertäufern” (1967; “Dramaturgical Considerations to The Anabaptists”), Dürrenmatt gives possible models of how the English antarctic explorer Robert Scott could be portrayed, and these models aptly summarize his theories of the drama. William Shakespeare, he said, would have shown Scott’s downfall to be caused by a tragic flaw in his character. Ambition would have made him blind to the dangers of the region, and jealousy and betrayal by the other members of the expedition would have done the rest to bring about the catastrophe. Bertolt Brecht would have shown the expedition failing because of economic reasons and class thinking. An English education would have prevented Scott from making use of huskies, and in a style befitting his social class, he would have used ponies. Because of the higher cost of the ponies, he would have had to save on the rest of the equipment, which would have caused his downfall. Samuel Beckett would have concentrated only on the end. Changed into a block of ice, Scott would be sitting opposite other blocks of ice, talking without getting an answer from his comrades, not even sure whether he could be heard. Another possibility, which Dürrenmatt would prefer, would be to show Scott buying provisions for the expedition. While putting the provisions into the cold storage chamber, he would be locked in accidentally, where he would freeze to death. Scott dying far from all help among the glaciers of the Antarctic is a tragic figure; Scott locked into a cold storage chamber through mishap and dying in the middle of a city only a few yards from a busy street is transformed into a comic figure. Dürrenmatt concluded that the worst possible turn that a story can take is the turn to comedy. Although Dürrenmatt’s comedies depict a world ruled by chance in which the individual is powerless, they are not utterly despairing. There are still courageous individuals such as Romulus and Graf Bodo von Übelohe-Zabernsee who try to change the world, even though they ultimately fail. As Dürrenmatt writes in Problems of the Theater, one has to accept the world for what it is and keep on living, refusing to give up. His vital comic imagination, evident in all his plays, alleviated his otherwise gloomy view of the world. In an interview with Horst Bienek in 1961, Dürrenmatt stressed the importance of humor in his plays; he said that he can be understood only from the point of view of humor taken seriously. Common to most of Dürrenmatt’s essays on dramatic theory is an emphasis on the practical problems of the theater. He was rarely satisfied with his plays, as the various versions of the plays demonstrate. Each time one of his plays was produced, he said, he saw new possibilities. Many of the problems he encountered in writing his plays could be solved only when he saw his play on the stage. Dürrenmatt protested against dramatic rules formulated by critics; such rules, he said, are of no use to the artist. He wanted his plays to be judged by their theatrical quality, not by how well they fit into some theory of drama. Romulus the Great • Dürrenmatt’s belief that the individual is powerless to change events is shown clearly in Romulus the Great, his first Swiss success, which had its premiere on April 25, 1949, in the Stadttheater in Basel. There are five versions of the play. The major change occurs in the second version and is kept in the remaining versions. In the first version, Romulus is portrayed as a cunning, successful politician who realizes his goals. In the subsequent versions, he is no longer victor but victim, a failed and tragic figure who sees that his life has been senseless.

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The play depicts the destruction of the Roman Empire by the Germans. The time is the Ides of March, 476 c.e. (another change from the first version), by which Dürrenmatt parodies Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (pr. c. 1599-1600) and mocks heroic ideals. The action takes place on Romulus’s chicken farm, a grotesque incongruity, because the spectator has entirely different expectations of what the Roman court should be like. Dürrenmatt employs the classical dramatic unities as an ironic contrast to the chaotic world of hens on the stage. The play is called an “unhistorical-historical comedy.” The real Romulus was sixteen when he became emperor and was seventeen when he was forced to abdicate. Dürrenmatt’s Romulus is an older man. The many anachronisms in the play—the capitalist Cäsar Rupf, for example, who manufactures trousers—show that Dürrenmatt is using the fall of the Roman Empire to analyze modern problems. Initially, Romulus appears to be lazy and disagreeable. Instead of trying to defend his empire, he sits comfortably eating and drinking. His only concern appears to be the fate of his beloved chickens, whom he has named after different Roman emperors. Yet there are indications that he is not as foolish and despicable as he appears. When Cäsar Rupf demands his daughter Rea’s hand as the price for saving Rome, Romulus is the only one who refuses to sell off his daughter in this way. Romulus is also fully aware of the hopelessness of the situation. He deduces that the Germans will conquer Rome because the chicken named after the German leader Odoaker lays a lot of eggs. Only in the third act does Romulus appear as a wise man who is passionately concerned with justice and humaneness. He has become emperor of Rome only to liquidate his empire. His role, as he sees it, is to judge Rome: Rome has been tyrannical and brutal, and Romulus intends to punish it for its crimes by destroying it. His plan to punish Rome and thereby make the world more humane rests on a delusion: He assumes that the Germans are more humane than the Romans, yet the future ruler Theoderich is just as brutal as the Romans, if not more so. Odoaker, Theoderich’s uncle (a man who, like Romulus, is a passionate chicken-raiser), did not come to conquer Rome but to surrender to Romulus in order to save the world from his nephew. Despite their well-intentioned plans, Romulus and Odoaker are helpless; they cannot prevent the rise of another brutal empire under Theoderich. Most of the other characters are comic figures. They swear that they will fight to the last drop of blood, but they actually flee in haste once the Germans approach. The empress Julia speaks of heroism and sacrifice, but when she flees she is concerned only with saving the imperial dinner service. Her marriage to Romulus has been loveless, since they only married each other for political reasons, to become emperor and empress. Their daughter Rea draws her notions of heroism from the tragic roles she rehearses under the guidance of the actor Phylax, notions that are far removed from the real world. The cynical art dealer Apollyon has no respect for art; for him it only means money. Cäsar Rupf parodies the political and economic power of the capitalist in the modern world (ironically, the capitalist, not the emperor, is called Caesar, an indication that the capitalist is the real power in the state). Zeno, the Byzantine emperor, is a would-be Machiavelli who has even intrigued against his own family. He is the only one who does not drown during the flight from the Germans: types such as Zeno, Dürrenmatt believed, are indestructible. Only Ämilian, Rea’s fiancé, is not a comic figure. Ämilian is captured by the Germans and suffers from their brutality; Romulus sympathizes with him but thinks that his patriotism, heroism, and readiness to sacrifice himself for

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Rome are senseless. Romulus is suspicious of all such concepts, since they can be so easily misused by the state to encourage people to commit crimes. The play is a mixture of tragic and comic elements. The comic aspects include the setting, plot, and characterizations. Dürrenmatt also uses sight gags, such as the chickens that are always underfoot and the comical hiding places of the plotters who want to murder Romulus. Dürrenmatt’s mixture of different levels of language—jargon, mercantile language, empty clichés, slang, and extremely formal diction—also has a comic effect. The tragic part of the play is the conclusion. With the best intentions in the world, Romulus has dedicated his life to trying to make the world more just and humane. He believes that he can change the course of history and is willing to sacrifice his own life for this illusion, yet the world under Theoderich will be just as repressive as the Roman Empire, if not more so. At the end, Romulus is not even allowed to die but is pensioned off, thus forced to live with the bitter realization that his whole life has been senseless. The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi • In The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi, Dürrenmatt shows his distrust of all ideologies. The play, which had its premiere in the Münchner Kammer-spiele on March 26, 1952, contributed significantly to establishing Dürrenmatt’s reputation in Germany. Like Romulus the Great, the play has gone through five versions, and it has also been filmed. The main difference between the first version and subsequent versions is that the earliest version is more surrealistic and contains more religious symbolism while the later versions are more political. The play takes place in one room. Through one window, a southern landscape with a temple and a cypress tree can be seen; through the other, a northern landscape with a Gothic cathedral and an apple tree. This indicates that Western culture has not managed to synthesize its classical and Christian heritage. The room contains a hodgepodge of furniture from different periods and thereby parodies Western culture. The play (which is structured epically) is not divided into acts and scenes but is broken up by the monologues spoken by the protagonists, who step out of their roles and address the audience. Dürrenmatt uses many exaggerated alienation effects (the characters even step out of their roles to comment on their own behavior). These alienation effects contribute to the play’s comic effect and also suggest a parody of Bertolt Brecht. The circular structure of the play (which actually begins with the last scene) indicates that nobody has learned anything—future ideologists will be just as fanatical as the present-day ones. Three of the main characters represent particular ideologies. The state prosecutor Mississippi believes in absolute justice, which he thinks he has found in the law of Moses (he tries to reintroduce this law in the twentieth century). He is a fanatical reformer who in his search for justice has had 350 executions carried out. Because Mississippi’s first wife committed adultery, he poisoned her—a just punishment, he believes, according to Mosaic law. He then sentences himself (as he says) to marry Anastasia, who has poisoned her husband, who was having an affair with Mississippi’s wife. Through this loveless marriage, Mississippi hopes to change Anastasia for the better. To accomplish this, he forces her to attend executions. At the end of the play, he wants to know whether she has become a better person; his marriage to her would otherwise be senseless. Through her lie that she has been faithful to him, he is able to preserve his conviction that punishment improves people. Like Mississippi, Saint-Claude is idealistic and fanatical. He wants to change the world through Marxism, but he is liquidated because his communism differs so radi-

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cally from the party dogma. Like Mississippi, Saint-Claude believes that the end justifies the means—he does not even know how many people he has killed in his search for a better world. The third ideologist is Graf Bodo von Übelohe-Zabernsee, who is a Christian. To help people, he has sacrificed his fortune and become a beggar. Although his goals of changing the world are praise-worthy, he is a laughable figure: Everything he tries to do fails. At the end of the play, he appears as Don Quixote, who fights senselessly, if courageously, against the windmills; he refuses, despite his failures, to give up his search for a better world. In contrast to these ideologues, Anastasia and the politician Diego are pragmatic opportunists. Dürrenmatt said that Anastasia is supposed to symbolize the world. She has no morals or ideals, and she adapts easily to any situation. If it is to her advantage, she cold-bloodedly betrays her lovers. Through her, Dürrenmatt mocks the protagonists’ attempts to change the world; like Anastasia, the world is impervious to change. Diego, who adeptly gains power during the play, is a cunning opportunist, like most of the politicians in Dürrenmatt’s works. Dürrenmatt’s characteristic humor is especially evident in this play, which is filled with satiric depictions of murders and revolutions. The characters are exaggerated caricatures; through them, Dürrenmatt ridicules ideologies. In addition to the action, setting, and characterizations, Dürrenmatt employs other devices for comic effect. The language of the play is bombastic, and the betrayed husband is a staple of comedy. As in his other plays, Dürrenmatt delights here in using gags: A character jumps suddenly out of a grandfather clock; there is the frequent ritual of coffee drinking, and one never knows whether the coffee is poisoned. Sudden surprises, such as Mississippi’s unexpected marriage proposal to Anastasia, also contribute to the comic effects. Despite the comic elements, the atmosphere of the play is basically gloomy. At the end, Mississippi and Anastasia die (they have poisoned each other’s coffee) and SaintClaude is killed by the party. Yet they all rise up from the dead, and the play could start over again. As in Romulus the Great human life is depicted as a senseless, repetitive cycle that can never be changed. The Visit • The central theme of The Visit is the problem of justice. Considered to be Dürrenmatt’s masterpiece, The Visit had its premiere on January 29, 1956, at the Zürich Schauspielhaus. It is Dürrenmatt’s most frequently performed play, and it established his reputation in the United States. The Visit takes place in the small town of Güllen (in Swiss dialect, Güllen means liquid manure); the time is the present. The town has stagnated economically: The local industries are ruined, the town is bankrupt, and the citizens live on welfare, while the neighboring towns are flourishing. The townspeople blame their misfortunes on Jews, Freemasons, communists—on anyone but themselves. Their town has a cultural heritage, they think, because Goethe stayed the night there, Johannes Brahms composed a quartet there, and Berthold Schwarz invented gunpowder there. For them, culture is merely a series of clichés. As the play opens, the community is hoping that Claire Zachanassian, the richest woman on earth, who used to live in Güllen, will help them. The festivities to welcome her are, however, hypocritical. When she lived in the town forty-five years ago, they despised her; now their exaggerated praise of her is calculated to manipulate her into giving the town money. Her former lover Alfred Ill is designated to appeal discreetly for her charity; as a reward for this job, he will be made the next mayor. Because Claire comes early, the effects of the welcome are lost. The mayor’s speech at the railroad sta-

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tion is drowned by the noise of the trains, and the choir has to be assembled hurriedly. At the dinner, the mayor’s speech shows that he knows nothing whatsoever about Claire. Ill must keep on correcting him and, at the end of the speech, even Claire points out that he is wrong. Claire is a grotesque figure whose right arm and left leg are prostheses to replace the limbs that she lost in accidents. Her retinue is equally grotesque: It consists of her butler; Toby and Roby, gumchewing gangsters whom she has saved from the electric chair; Koby and Loby, who are blind eunuchs; her seventh husband (she marries two more during the play); a black panther in a cage; a large amount of luggage; and a coffin. When she arrives, she asks strange and chilling questions: She asks the gymnast whether he has strangled anyone, the doctor whether he prepares death certificates, the policeman whether he can close his eyes, and the priest whether he consoles those who are condemned to death. At the meal in her honor, Claire drops her bombshell: She will give five hundred million to the town and five hundred million to be divided evenly among the town’s families, on one condition: Someone must kill Alfred Ill. She has come, she says, to buy justice. Forty-five years before, she was expecting Ill’s child. Ill refused to acknowledge that he was the father; instead, he bribed two witnesses with schnapps to say that they had slept with her. Claire was forced to leave Güllen; she then became a prostitute, and her child died. Becoming a prostitute, however, made Claire rich because it was in the brothel that she met Zachanassian, a rich oilman. Ill did not want to marry Claire because she was poor; instead, he married Mathilde because she owned a store. Claire’s retinue consists, in part, of those connected with the paternity suit; the butler is the former judge, and Koby and Loby are the witnesses who committed perjury, whom she has relentlessly tracked down and then blinded and castrated. Claire is an emotional cripple whose life has been dedicated to revenge (the local teacher likens her to Medea). It turns out that Claire is responsible for the town’s misfortunes: She has bought everything and let it stagnate. The mayor proudly refuses her money. He declares that the community is humane, that it is better to be poor than stained with blood. Claire knows better: She sits on her balcony and waits. As she expects, the Gülleners cannot withstand temptation. All of them, including the leaders of the community to whom Ill vainly appeals for help, begin to spend freely and incur debts. They all buy yellow shoes; the policeman has a new gold tooth, the mayor a new typewriter; and even the priest has bought a new church bell. The priest tells Ill to flee so that he does not lead them into temptation. Even Ill’s family joins in the spending spree: His wife buys a fur coat, his son a new car, and his daughter new clothes. His daughter also starts taking English and French lessons and plays tennis. The townspeople incur debts thoughtlessly, but as their debts mount, their attitude toward Ill changes. They no longer think of him as the most beloved member of the community, as they did when they thought he could persuade Claire to give the town money. Instead, they say that he is guilty of the crime and deserves punishment. When Claire’s black panther escapes (Claire used to call Ill her panther), the citizens hunt and kill it, a foreshadowing of Ill’s death. Inevitably, they decide that Ill must die for the “well-being” of the community. A town meeting is called to decide Ill’s fate. Before the meeting, the mayor tries to persuade Ill to commit suicide out of love for his community and thus spare the town the guilt of his death. Ill refuses. He says that he has been through hell, watching the debts of the community grow; if they had spared him this fear, he might have killed himself for them. On the surface, the town meeting seems a model of democracy (the press en-

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thusiastically interprets it in that way). The teacher speaks of justice and honor; his noble words are used to mask the common agreement to kill Ill. At the end of the meeting, Ill is killed, presumably by the most muscular member of the gym club in the midst of the Gülleners. His death is termed a heart attack caused by the joy of learning about Claire’s gift. The Gülleners refuse to accept the fact that they killed Ill for money; instead, they see his death as just punishment for his earlier crime. The townspeople are not particularly evil—they had intended to protect Ill. As the teacher notes, however, the temptation was too great. The teacher himself tries hard to resist, yet he tells Ill that he feels himself turning into a murderer; his humanistic training cannot avert this. At the end, Claire has her revenge on the town whose citizens had looked on coldly when she was forced to leave in the midst of winter, forty-five years ago. During the play, Alfred Ill grows in stature until he almost becomes a tragic figure. At the outset, he is not concerned in the least about his former treatment of Claire. When he is confronted with his past behavior, he begins to see that he was wrong. He gradually accepts his guilt and realizes that he has made Claire what she is. Dürrenmatt remarked that Ill becomes great through his death. He noted that Ill’s death is both meaningful and meaningless: Meaningful, because Ill accepts his guilt and grows as a human being; meaningless, because it achieves no moral redemption for the community. In a tragedy by Sophocles, Dürrenmatt said, such a death would have saved the community from the plague. In Güllen, however, Ill’s death marks the beginning of the plague—that is, of moral corruption. Dürrenmatt called his play a tragic comedy. The comedy stems in part from the characters and their actions (the hypocritical welcome prepared for Claire, and the way in which the press misunderstands the town meeting, for example). Dürrenmatt mocked religious and cultural clichés. He satirized the manner in which language disguises meaning (the press thinks that the teacher’s speech shows “moral greatness” when in reality the teacher is justifying Ill’s murder). The “romantic” meeting of Claire and Ill in the forest parodies German romanticism (the townspeople play the part of trees, and the noise of the woodpecker is made by a citizen tapping on his pipe with a rusty key). Dürrenmatt’s parody of the Greek chorus at the end shows his conviction that tragedy is no longer possible. There are, however, tragic elements in the play. Ill’s fate is tragic. He is made into a scapegoat and is sacrificed for money. Dürrenmatt depicts vividly the moral and spiritual corruption of a community in which everything, including “justice,” can be bought. The Gülleners do not accept responsibility for Ill’s death but enjoy their new wealth, undisturbed by a guilty conscience. In his notes to the play, Dürrenmatt stresses that the Gülleners are people like all of humankind, who would, he implies, act as they did. Other major works long fiction: Der Richter und sein Henker, 1950 (The Judge and His Hangman, 1954); Der Verdacht, 1953 (The Quarry, 1961); Grieche sucht Griechin, 1955 (Once a Greek . . . , 1965); Die Panne, 1956 (Traps, 1960, pb. in England as A Dangerous Game); Das Versprechen: Requiem auf den Kriminalroman, 1958 (The Pledge: Requiem for the Detective Novel, 1959); Der Sturz, 1971; Justiz, 1985 (The Execution of Justice, 1989). short fiction: Die Stadt, 1952; Der Auftrag, 1986 (The Assignment, 1988). radio plays: Der Doppelgänger, wr. 1946, 1961; Der Prozess um des Esels Schatten, wr. 1951, 1958 (based on Christoph Martin Wieland’s Die Abderiten; The Jackass, 1960);

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Stranitzky und der Nationalheld, 1952; Das Unternehmen der Wega, 1955; Die Panne, 1956 (adaptation of his novel; The Deadly Game, 1963); Gesammelte Hörspiele, 1961. nonfiction: Theaterprobleme, 1955 (Problems of the Theater, 1958); Theater-Schriften und Reden, 1966 (Writings on Theatre and Drama, 1976). miscellaneous: Stoffe I-III, 1981; Werkausgabe in 30 Bänden, 1982 (30 volumes); Plays and Essays, 1982. Bibliography Arnold, Armin. Friedrich Dürrenmatt. New York: F. Ungar, 1972. A biography of Dürrenmatt, covering his life and works. Bibliography. Chick, Edson M. Dances of Death: Wedekind, Brecht, Dürrenmatt, and the Satiric Tradition. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1984. A study of satire in German drama, focusing on the works of Dürrenmatt, Bertolt Brecht, and Frank Wedekind. Bibliography and index. Crockett, Roger A. Understanding Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. A biography and critical analysis of Dürrenmatt that includes analysis of his dramatic works. Bibliography and index. Jenny, Urs. Dürrenmatt: A Study of His Plays. London: Eyre Methuen, 1978. A profile of the dramatist along with critical analyses of his plays. Index. Tiusanen, Timo. Dürrenmatt: A Study in Plays, Prose, Theory. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977. A critical study of the works and theory of Dürrenmatt. Bibliography and index. Whitton, Kenneth S. Dürrenmatt: Reinterpretation in Retrospect. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. An examination of the works and life of Dürrenmatt. Bibliography and indexes. _______. The Theater of Friedrich Dürrenmatt: A Study in the Possibility of Freedom. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1980. An analysis of the dramatic works of Dürrenmatt, with special emphasis on the subject of liberty. Bibliography and index. Jennifer Michaels

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Born: St. Louis, Missouri; September 26, 1888 Died: London, England; January 4, 1965 Principal drama • Sweeney Agonistes, pb. 1932, pr. 1933 (fragment); The Rock: A Pageant Play, pr., pb. 1934; Murder in the Cathedral, pr., pb. 1935; The Family Reunion, pr., pb. 1939; The Cocktail Party, pr. 1949, pb. 1950; The Confidential Clerk, pr. 1953, pb. 1954; The Elder Statesman, pr. 1958, pb. 1959; Collected Plays, pb. 1962 Other literary forms • In addition to being a successful liturgical dramatist, T. S. Eliot was an editor, an essayist, and a poet of great distinction. He became assistant editor of The Egoist in 1917 and founded The Criterion in 1922, serving as editor of the latter from then until its demise in 1939. As an essayist, Eliot explored the place of modern literature with regard to tradition, discussed the relationship between literature and ethics, and emphasized the need for a modern idiom. Among his extremely influential collections of essays are The Sacred Wood (1920) and After Strange Gods (1934), both dealing with the individual’s debt to tradition, the latter propounding a moral standpoint; The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933); and On Poetry and Poets (1957). In For Lancelot Andrewes (1928) and The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), the impact of his 1927 confirmation in the Church of England on his life and letters is particularly evident. Eliot’s poetry has had a greater influence, not only in England and the United States but also in world literature, than that of any of his contemporaries. Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Poems (1919; printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf), and The Waste Land (1922) illustrate his growing despair over personal problems as well as modern social trends. Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943), produced following his confirmation, are meditations concerning spiritual illumination. In Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), Eliot demonstrated his talent for writing comic verse with equal success. That work has been reprinted widely in many formats and even, in 1983, provided the basis for a Tony Award-winning musical, Cats. Achievements • Any assessment of T. S. Eliot’s achievements as a dramatist must be made in the light of his own comments about the relationship between past and present, between “tradition and the individual talent.” For Eliot, a new work of art causes a rearrangement of the ideal, preexisting order. As Carol Smith points out, his comments about “historical perspective” are not innovative; what is new is his idea that the “given” order defines the artist, whose chief responsibility is to subsume his individual talent as part of the progress of literary history. Eliot’s dramatic works are therefore “classical” in the altered sense of his attempting to employ a modern idiom in the service of the imperatives of history, both literary and religious. One of Eliot’s achievements was the presentation of liturgical drama on the modern stage to a commercial audience. His endeavor in this regard began with his writing both a pageant, The Rock, and a ritual drama, Murder in the Cathedral, for the limited audiences provided respectively by a benefit to promote church building in London and the Canterbury Festival, audiences preconditioned to dramas of redemption. (Sweeney Agonistes, an experimental fragment, was not produced until 1933.) With his later 257

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plays, however, Eliot undertook the task of convincing secular audiences that traditional ideas about redemption were viable within a modern framework. The Family Reunion, his first full-length experiment in turning drawing-room comedy into religious fable, was not immediately successful; as his close friend and adviser Elliott Martin Browne reports, critics found the work mixed—the most negative reviews said that the play was characterized by “lifeless smoothness” and “difficulty” and was guaranteed to leave the audience “vexed and exhausted.” Some modern critics, however, such as Eliot’s biographer T. S. Matthews, find the play “extraordinary, . . . far superior to his later, ‘better made’ plays.” The Cocktail Party, on the other hand, was better received; even those who wrote negative reviews acknowledged that the production bordered on greatness. Browne notes that similar comments were made about The Confidential Clerk, although critical reception was influenced by the general belief that Eliot’s attempt “to combine the esoteric with the entertaining” was no longer innovative. The Elder Statesman, Browne believes, was overinterpreted by gossipmongers intent on reading the play in the light of Eliot’s marriage to his secretary, Valerie Fletcher, the previous year. Quite aside from their mixed commercial appeal, Eliot’s plays illustrate his critical theories not only about the connection between drama and poetry but also about the failure of realistic theater. Eliot’s Aristotelian viewpoint prompted him to criticize modern drama for its lack of rhythm. For Eliot, poetry was more than a distraction, more than an attempt to prettify dramatic diction. Never extrinsic to the action, poetry provides an underlying musical pattern that strengthens the audience’s response. The presence of such an abstract pattern suggests, as Eliot says in “Four Elizabethan Dramatists” (written in 1924), that the great vice in English drama is realism, for it detracts from the unity of the play. As his large essay Poetry and Drama (1951) makes clear, such unity is more than a technical matter of form and content, for the literary is handmaiden to the religious. Eliot’s ideal vision of verse drama is one in which “a design of human action and of words” is perpetuated in such a way that the connection between the everyday world and the universal design is illustrated; such a drama, Eliot believed, would provide the proper feeling of “reconciliation” to lead the audience to a spiritual awakening. Biography • Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri. His celebrated statement of his allegiances in For

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Lancelot Andrewes—“classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion”—ran counter to the family tradition of Unitarianism; his grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, descendant of a pastor of Boston’s Old North Church, established the Unitarian Church of the Messiah in St. Louis. Eliot’s father himself was a renegade, refusing the ministry for what was eventually the presidency of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company. His mother, Charlotte Stearns, was a descendant of one of the judges in the Salem witch trials. An intellectual woman, Stearns began a career as a schoolteacher and eventually became active in children’s causes. As Matthews notes, the family saying “Tace et fac (‘Shut up and get on with it’)” suggests a household in which indulgence gave way to duty. As a child, Eliot was considered delicate but precocious. At Smith Academy, he took the Latin prize and excelled in English. Deemed too young at seventeen to enter Harvard, he was sent first to Milton Academy. At Harvard, he was conservative and studious. He became an editor of the Advocate, a literary magazine, but his decision to accelerate his undergraduate work to pursue a master’s degree left him small leisure for friends, such as Conrad Aiken. Important influences during his college years included his discovery of Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), a book that led him to imitate the verse of Jules Laforgue; his love for Elizabethan drama; and, finally, his acquaintance with Irving Babbitt, the leader of the New Humanism, an anti-Romantic movement that stressed the ethical nature of experience. Certainly, Babbitt’s influence led Eliot to spend one of his graduate years in France, where, resisting the attractive Bohemianism open to a writer of his talents, he decided to pursue a degree in philosophy at Harvard, where he came under the influence of Bertrand Russell. The fellowship that Harvard awarded Eliot in 1914 proved to alter the course of his life. Enrolled in Merton College, at Oxford, he began his long friendship with Ezra Pound, under whose aegis Eliot published “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in Poetry magazine in 1915. In England, Eliot met and married his first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood. Described as a beautiful and entrancing individual, she nevertheless suffered from a nervous disability that had devastating emotional effects. In increasing financial difficulty, Eliot worked as an usher at a boys’ school, an employee at Lloyd’s Bank, a freelance journalist, and an assistant editor of The Egoist. Eliot enjoyed many fruitful friendships, among them those with Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf, and I. A. Richards. From 1921 to 1925, when he was publishing reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, Eliot’s health deteriorated; the unforeseen result of an enforced vacation was The Waste Land. In 1922, he founded The Criterion, a literary quarterly that was sponsored financially by Lady Rothermere. After a long period of ill health and self-doubt, he joined the Anglican Church. His biographer suggests a number of reasons for the decision, including certain social and “aesthetic” attractions of this particular denomination, the authoritarian cast of the Church, and the long Church “pedigree” that satisfied Eliot’s belief in the importance of tradition. His decision to become a British citizen followed soon thereafter, partly, Matthews believes, because Eliot felt that in the United States “the aristocratic tradition of culture was dead.” Eliot’s 1932 return to his native land was, like his first journey away, a new start, for it began his separation from Vivienne, for whom he had become more nurse than husband. To be sure, the attempt to escape from her neurotic persecution made his middle years unhappy ones, years complicated further by the exigencies of World War II. Despite such distractions, however, these were the years in which Eliot began his career as a playwright.

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Quite clearly, Eliot’s religious conversion provided the themes not only for his poetry but also for his plays. Events in Eliot’s personal life, including the death of his estranged wife in 1947, are also reflected in his plays. Conceivably, his sense of alienation and guilt found its way into the portrait of Harry, the putative wife-killer in The Family Reunion, as well as into the depiction of the dreary marriage faced by the Chamberlaynes in The Cocktail Party. Other elements are identifiable, such as the figure of Agatha in The Family Reunion; the only one to understand Harry’s spiritual search thoroughly, Agatha is said to be based on Emily Hale, Eliot’s longtime friend, who had been a schoolmistress at Scripps College, Smith College, and Abbot Academy. Emily was as shocked by Eliot’s second, clandestine, marriage as she was by his first; at the age of sixty-nine, Eliot married Valerie Fletcher, his secretary. Before the arrival of that emotional security, however, Eliot had achieved other triumphs. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948, and, in the same year, received the British Empire’s Order of Merit. While he was drafting The Cocktail Party, he traveled to Princeton, New Jersey, to accept a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study. His last two plays–The Confidential Clerk and The Elder Statesman—were not as popular as The Cocktail Party; they do, however, show an increasing understanding of the way in which human relationships may be ameliorated. Indeed, in The Elder Statesman, the love experienced by Monica and Charles seems a reflection of the happiness that Eliot himself found with his second wife. For the first time in his dramatic writing, the possibility of redemption through human love is adequately broached. Indeed, for the first time, human love seems a model of divine love rather than, as Celia observes in The Cocktail Party, a distraction or a second-best choice. On January 4, 1965, Eliot died in London. At his request, his ashes repose at East Coker, the birthplace of his ancestors and the titular locale of one of the Four Quartets; the memorial plaque in the Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey was placed on January 4, 1967. Analysis • T. S. Eliot’s conservative dramaturgy is clearly expressed in his 1928 essay “Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry” in which he suggests that “genuine drama” displays “a tension between liturgy and realism.” To be sure, Eliot differed sharply from the advocates of Ibsenite realism, maintaining throughout his career that untrammeled realism operating outside the limitations of art did not produce classic harmony. In consequence, Eliot relied on a number of traditional forms, including the Mass and Greek drama. On the other hand, he created new verse forms, convinced that traditional forms such as Shakespearean blank verse would be inadequate to express modern experience. In Sweeney Agonistes, he made use of the rhythms of vaudeville, believing that such robust entertainment contained the seeds of a popular drama of high artistic quality, comparable to the achievements of the great Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights. Modern religious drama, Eliot believed, “should be able to hold the interest, to arouse the excitement, of people who are not religious.” Redemption is the theme of all of his plays, a theme explored on different levels. For example, Becket’s understanding, in Murder in the Cathedral, that salvation is a willing submission to a larger pattern is developed and tempered in the later social comedies. In almost all of his plays, Eliot presents characters on a continuum of spiritual understanding, including the martyr or saint figure, the “guardians” (the spiritual advisers), the common folk (capable of limited perception or at least of accommodation), and the uncomprehending. In The Family Reunion and The Cocktail Party, respectively,

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Harry and Celia experience a sense of having sinned and the desire to atone. Celia’s illumination is also characterized by a sense of having failed another person. Her martyrdom is correspondingly more moving, not because it is graphically described, but because it seems inexorable. In The Confidential Clerk, Colby, whose search for a human father parallels his desire for a divine one, experiences his éclaircissement as a private moment in a garden and works out his salvation as an organist. In the aforementioned plays, guardian figures abound. Agatha councils Harry to follow attendant Eumenides if he wishes to expiate the family curse; Julia, Alex, and Reilly not only show Celia the way to enlightenment but reinstate the Chamberlaynes’ marriage; the retired valet Eggerson offers Colby a job as an organist and predicts his eventual entry into holy orders. Eliot’s last play, The Elder Statesman, is the only one in which human love is an adequate guide to divine love; in that sense, Monica, in her affection for her fiancé and in her unwavering love for her father despite his faults, is a guardian figure. A development in the characterization of the common people may be seen as well. Because of their foolishness or their attempt to dominate, all of Harry’s relatives seem lost to perceptiveness, except, perhaps, for his Uncle Charles, who begins to feel “That there is something I could understand, if I were told it.” A wider hope is held out in The Cocktail Party, for while not all may follow Celia’s path, the Chamberlaynes learn to accept the “good life” that is available to them, and even Peter, in love with Celia, may learn to “see” through the same qualities that make him a film producer. Again, while Colby withdraws from the family circle, those who remain—no matter how superficially mismatched—engage in a communion characterized most of all by a desire to understand and to love. Finally, in The Elder Statesman, Eliot achieves a balance in his continuum of characters, for he presents the salvation of the Calvertons by love as well as the possibility that, through Monica, Michael might return to find his self-identity, while both Gomez and Mrs. Carghill become lost souls as they pursue their revenge. Murder in the Cathedral • Although originally produced for the Canterbury Festival, Murder in the Cathedral has achieved the most lasting interest of all Eliot’s plays. It is a psychological and historical exploration of martyrdom that speaks directly not only to current disputes about the interconnection between church and state but also to the ever-present contemporary threat of assassination. It is Eliot’s most successful attempt to adapt verse forms to drama, particularly in the speeches of the Chorus, whose function, Eliot believed, was to interpret the action to the viewers and to strengthen the impact of the action by reflecting its effects. In the speeches of the Knights and Tempters (characters doubled when the play is staged) as well, attitudes are mirrored by poetic cadence—a fine example of form following content. As Grover Smith notes, the title itself, while commercially attractive, is somewhat misleading, as were other possibilities Eliot considered, among them “The Archbishop Murder Case” and “Fear in the Way,” for Murder in the Cathedral is less a whodunit than an attempt to startle the unimpassioned believer into percipience and the nonbeliever into understanding. Like Eliot’s first venture into ritualistic drama, The Rock, Murder in the Cathedral is based on an actual event, the martyrdom of Thomas à Becket in the year 1170 in the chapel of Saint Benedict in Canterbury Cathedral. Unlike The Rock, however, which is a spectacle play delineating the history of the Church, Murder in the Cathedral is focused on a dramatic event of great intensity. The play traces the spiritual education of Thomas, whose greatest temptation is self-aggrandizement; the education of the Cho-

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rus, who seek to escape both suffering and salvation; and the education of the Knights and the audience, whose worldliness implicates them jointly in the assassination. Eliot’s addition of a Fourth Tempter to Becket’s “trial” in part 1 is crucial. The first three tempters are expected and easily rejected. The first, who offers sensual pleasures, resigns Becket to “the pleasures of [his] higher vices.” One such vice is offered by the Second Tempter: “Temporal power, to build a good world,” power that requires submission to secular law. Becket, who rejects this exercise in intelligent self-interest, also rejects the Third Tempter’s offer of a coalition with the barons to overthrow the King; such an action would bestialize Becket, make him “a wolf among wolves.” The Fourth Tempter is, however, not so easily answered, for he brings the temptation of spiritual power through martyrdom. Counseling the archbishop to seek death, he offers as its rewards the joy of wielding power over eternal life and death, the adulation of the masses, the richness of heavenly grandeur, and, finally, the sweetness of revenge, for Becket will then be able to look down and see his “persecutors, in timeless torment.” For Becket, the only way to escape the damning effects of his own spiritual pride is to give up self-will so that he may become part of a larger pattern. As Grover Smith notes, the counsel that Becket gives to the Chorus (ironically quoted to him by the Fourth Tempter) has its roots in Aristotle’s image of the still point—on a wheel, for example—as the source of action: You know and do not know, that acting is suffering, And suffering action. Neither does the actor suffer Nor the patient act. But both are fixed In an eternal action, an eternal patience To which all must consent that it may be willed And which all must suffer that they may will it, That the pattern may subsist, that the wheel may turn and still Be forever still. In theological terms, Eliot is suggesting that the nature of the relationship between action and suffering depends on the conception of God as the first mover, just as the still point is centered in the wheel. Becket, in willing martyrdom, has substituted his will for God’s will. When he understands that he was doing the right deed for the wrong reason, he enters the ideal relationship between human beings and God—one of submission, of a person’s consent to be an instrument. In that condition of bringing one’s will into conformity with that of God, one paradoxically does not suffer, for one acts as an instrument; neither does one act, for one gives up will. For the women whose barren lives are spent among small deeds, Becket becomes a new center; with their wills in conformity to his, they too become the instruments of God’s will, even as the Knights are in the murder of Becket. For Grover Smith, whereas Becket’s language is abstract and passionless, his decision hidden in difficult, paradoxical words, that of the women is overtly sensual; for Carol Smith, such language shows that the women have accepted their “Christian responsibility.” The women’s unwilling participation in the event is a violent disturbance of their willed attitude of noninterference; through Becket, they are touched not only by life but also by death. The key is in the homily delivered by Becket as an interlude in the play, a sermon in which he speaks of an attitude of mourning and rejoicing in martyrdom. Before his death, he

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warns the women that their joy will come only “when the figure of God’s purpose is made complete”—when, in other words, they understand that his martyrdom is the answer to their despair. The prose in which the Knights speak after the murder has taken place is to some critics jarring, but Eliot deliberately made it so; a far graver criticism is that it is either amusing, or misleading, insofar as the emphasis on the “contest . . . between brute power and resigned holiness” is shifted to an argument about Church and State. Jones disagrees; for him, the prose shakes the audience’s sanctimonious complacency. The arguments offered by the Knights are familiar rationalizations. The Second Knight pleads disinterested duty as his reason for the murder, the Third that “violence is the only way in which social justice can be secured,” and the Fourth that, since Becket’s overweening egotism prompted the murder, the correct “verdict” is “Suicide while of Unsound Mind.” The final words of the Chorus, spoken to a Te Deum in the background, serve as a corrective to any distorted view, for they, the “type of common man,” not only accept responsibility for “the sin of the world” but also acknowledge that human consciousness is an affirmation of the ultimate design, of which they have willingly become a part. The Family Reunion • Produced in March, 1939, The Family Reunion was considerably less successful than Eliot’s first full-length play, partly because he was attempting to appeal to a secular audience; moreover, his evocation of the Aeschylean Eumenides—the Furies—as a group of well-dressed aunts and uncles and his deliberate blurring of the hero’s motives and fate contribute to the weakness of the play. Various critics have traced the antecedents of The Family Reunion, including Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner” (1908), William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (pr. c. 1600-1601), and Aeschylus’s Oresteia (458 b.c.e.; English translation, 1777), sources discussed thoroughly by Grover Smith and David Jones. Eliot attempted to wed the classical and the modern, believing that poetry brought into the audience’s world would help to heal social disintegration. The two levels of the play—the realistic and the spiritual—are not always mutually illuminating. On the surface, the play depicts the homecoming of Harry, Lord Monchensey, to Wishwood, the family mansion that his mother, Amy, has maintained, unchanged, for his benefit. Harry, convinced that he murdered his wife a year ago, is unable to agree with the conventional wishes of his mother or of his featherheaded aunts, Ivy and Violet, or of his blundering uncles, Gerald and Charles. On another level, he arrives convinced that he is pursued by the Furies, only to learn from his Aunt Agatha that to follow the “bright angels” is the way to redemption through suffering. The Family Reunion reflects Eliot’s recurring preoccupation with original sin. Although Harry’s own uncertainty about his responsibility for his wife’s death may be unsettling to the audience, the point is surely that for Eliot the fact is irrelevant; what is important is that Harry (and Eliot, because of his own marital situation) feels guilty about the wish itself. Indeed, Harry seems to be burdened with a family curse that he must expiate. As Agatha tells him, his father wanted to murder Harry’s mother but was prevented from doing so by Agatha, who loved him; Harry has lived to reenact his father’s will. Harry’s guilt thus is shifted to the larger framework of the felix culpa, or fortunate fall. Again, Harry’s character is so unappealing that to call him, as Agatha does, “the consciousness of your unhappy family,/ Its bird sent flying through the purgatorial

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fire,” is not acceptable on the metaphoric level. His rudeness and abrupt repudiation of his mother (which leads to her death) conspire against the suggestion that he is to become a Christian mystic or saint—that, as Agatha says, he is destined for “broken stones/ That lie, fang up” or that, as he says, he is headed for “A stony sanctuary and a primitive altar” or “A care over lives of humble people.” The transformation of the Eumenides from “hounds of hell” to “bright angels” is justified not only by the Oresteia of Aeschylus but also by the idea, developed in Murder in the Cathedral, that suffering precedes atonement; on a psychological level, however, the idea poses problems. As the evocation of the watchful eyes possessed by both mother and wife, the Eumenides suggest a developing Oedipus complex; interpreted by Agatha as helpful guardians, they suggest a childish transference of affection to Agatha, an affection that is at once incestuous and spiritual. Mary, Harry’s childhood sweetheart, simply presents the desired but now impossible fulfillment of human love. For Agatha, however, and eventually for Harry, the Eumenides posit a frontier beyond which all experience is private, save that it is a confrontation between the human spirit and the divine, a purgatorial confrontation under “the judicial sun/ Of the final eye.” In the final analysis, the play is not a triumph of comedy—or of tragedy. With Amy dead, Harry’s father has ironically gotten his wish; Wishwood is to be ceded to Harry’s brother John, about whom Harry says brutally, “A minor trouble like a concussion/ Cannot make very much difference to John.” In the ritualistic chorus performed by Agatha and Mary at the end of the play, Eliot emphasizes the inexorability of the curse around which he has built his plot as well as the possibility of salvation. What is lacking is an explanation of the nature of expiation. The Cocktail Party • First produced for the 1949 Edinburgh Festival, The Cocktail Party is, like The Family Reunion, an attempt to express modern concerns in the guise of ritualistic drama. In this case, however, Eliot depends on Euripides’ Alk4stis (438 b.c.e.; Alcestis, 1781) as his classical antecedent, wisely eliminating the embodiment of the Furies that proved to be so dramatically disruptive. In one view, he effectively reproduced the sophisticated patois of cocktail-party chatter to distract his secular audience from the play’s theological “underpattern.” Some critics suggest that the comic approach was a deliberate attempt at a reversal in which “surfaces” become “depths” and the comic resolution an indication of divine order. A number of this play’s themes are taken from Eliot’s earlier plays. There is a reunion, although not in the sense of Harry Monchensey’s mythopoeic experience, for the Chamberlaynes literally as well as figuratively re-create their marriage; again, there is the figure of the mystic, this time, however, a more convincing one, in Celia; moreover, there is a guardian, Reilly, who achieves expressed validity in his role as a psychologist. Finally, and perhaps most important, there is a sense that spiritual illumination is not restricted, except in its intensity, to martyr figures. Superficially, the plot is familiar drawing-room comedy, entailing a series of love affairs. Edward’s wife, Lavinia, has inexplicably left him; Peter Quilpe, a filmmaker, is in love with Celia Coplestone, Edward’s mistress, while Lavinia is in love with Peter. Comic relief is provided by the scatter-brained Julia Shuttlethwaite, the peripatetic Alexander MacColgie Gibbs, and Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, an enigmatic, gin-swilling psychologist. As in the well-made play, the plot revolves around a secret: Julia and Alex have conspired with Reilly to reinvigorate the Chamberlaynes’ marriage, in an association called variously “the Christian conspiracy” or, as Jones puts it, “the Community of Christians.”

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The marital difficulties would be familiar to the audience, but not Eliot’s interpretation of them. Having confused desire with affection in his attachment to Celia, Edward must face the fact that he is essentially unloving, whereas Lavinia is by nature unlovable: Thus, Eliot suggests, they are perfectly matched. In addition, Edward, who is indecisive, must learn to face the consequences of making a decision—in this case, the decision that Lavinia should return to him. What he realizes is that her return is tantamount to inviting the angel of destruction into his life. Possessed by the belief that he is suffering “the death of the spirit,” that he can live neither with the role Lavinia imposes on him nor without it, Edward goes to Reilly for help. The language that this counselor uses indicates his role of spiritual guardianship. He speaks of Edward’s “long journey” but refuses to send him to his “sanatorium,” for to do so would be to abandon him to the “devils” that feast on the “shadow of desires of desires.” Instead, he brings him face to face with Lavinia to convince him that the unloving and the unlovable should make the best of a bad job—or, in terms of the blessing he administers, must “work out [their] salvation with diligence.” Carol Smith’s review of Christian mysticism as a background to the play makes clear that Reilly encourages the Chamberlaynes to follow the “Affirmative Way,” in which “all created things are to be accepted in love as images of the Divine,” rather than the “Negative Way,” which is characterized by detachment from “the love of all things.” Reilly’s interview with Celia is substantially different, for while she, like Edward, complains of an awareness of solitude, she focuses less on herself than on a perception that loneliness is the human condition and that communication is therefore illusory. She also complains, unlike Edward, of a sense of sin, of a feeling that she must atone for having failed “someone, or something, outside.” She attributes her failure to a selfwilled fantasy: In Edward, she loved only a figment of her imagination. Unlike Edward, she has had a vision of the Godhead, an ecstatic exaltation “of loving in the spirit.” It is this vision that she chooses to follow, although Reilly emphasizes that it is an unknown way, a blind journey, a way to being “transhumanized,” the “way of illumination.” Her way, the “Negative Way” of mysticism, culminates in her crucifixion “very near an ant-hill” in the jungles of Kinkanja. What Eliot offers in The Cocktail Party is a series of gradations of spiritual understanding, gradations that were not presented adequately in The Family Reunion. Celia’s way of illumination is undoubtedly more believable because her developing perceptions are not expressed in sibylline pronouncements; likewise, the guardians are given authenticity by the comic role their very eccentricity engenders. The common way, represented by the Chamberlaynes, is not appealing but understandable, and, as Reilly says, “In a world of lunacy,/ Violence, stupidity, greed . . . it is a good life.” Finally, Peter Quilpe, shocked by the news of Celia’s death, comes to understand that he had been loving only the image he had created of her. As Grover Smith comments, “the kind of comedy Eliot devised has been compared generically by some critics to Dante’s Commedia, for in it the characters either fulfill their greatest potentialities or else are set firmly on the way toward doing so.” The Confidential Clerk • In Eliot’s sixth major play, The Confidential Clerk, the theme of redemption is again explored, this time through a dependence on Euripides’ Ifn (c. 411 b.c.e.; Ion, 1781), a play that deals with hidden paternity. Eliot examines the sense of aloneness expressed so effectively by Celia, and the human penchant for recreating other individuals to conform with one’s own desires. In addition, Eliot shows the path that a mystical vocation may take.

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Denis Donoghue pertinently remarks that Eliot solved the “false tone” occasioned by Celia’s death by shifting his terms: Illumination becomes Art, and the worldly way, Commerce, both terms that avoid doctrinal problems. Metaphorically, an escape into Art (illumination) becomes an escape into a garden, one in which real communication is possible. So it is for the musical Colby Simpkins, about whom Lucasta Angel, Sir Claude Mulhammer’s illegitimate daughter, notes that he has his “own world.” Taken in by Sir Claude as his presumptive son, Colby is immediately claimed by Lady Elizabeth Mulhammer, a fashionable reincarnation of Julia Shuttlethwaite, as the lost son of her former lover, a poet. Each character imagines Colby in terms of personal wish-fulfillment. To Colby, the failed musician, Sir Claude reveals his early yearnings to be a sculptor and his decision to follow in the family business. For Sir Claude, the act of creation is “a world where the form is the reality” and an “escape into living” from an illusory world. Indeed, for Sir Claude, life is a constant compromise, just as it is for the Chamberlaynes, a constant coping with two worlds, neither of which offers perfect fulfillment. It is, as he says, a substitute for religion. Despite this analogy, Colby is unwilling to accept Sir Claude as a father. Colby expresses his yearning for an ideal father in words that may be read for their religious connotation. He wishes, as he says, to have a father “Whom I had never known and wouldn’t know now/ . . . whom I could get to know/ Only by report, by documents,” a father, he continues, “whose life I could in some way perpetuate/ By being the person he would have liked to be.” The analogues to Christ are unmistakable. The revelation that Colby is actually the son of Herbert Guzzard, a “disappointed musician,” suggesting a harmony between the mystical and the commonplace that is seldom achieved in The Family Reunion, adds to the success of The Confidential Clerk. Like Celia, Colby chooses a life of service, if one more prosaic than joining a nursing order and perishing in Kinkanja. He acknowledges his inheritance by becoming the organist at a small church (rather than continuing to live on Sir Claude’s generosity, for Sir Claude is eager to think of Colby as one with whom he shared disillusionment); Eggerson, the retired confidential clerk—who, as Jones notes, was for Eliot “‘the only developed Christian in the play’”—suggests that Colby will enter the ministry. The play presents a succession of individuals who are reaching out after Colby, essentially as a way of gratifying their own expectations. It is only, however, when the audience knows the secret of Colby’s birth that many of the early conversations make sense; consequently, the play is weak in its early acts. Despite this criticism, The Confidential Clerk offered Eliot’s most convincing and optimistic treatment to that time of the possibility of human communion, pointing the way to his hopeful treatment of human love in his last play, The Elder Statesman. It seems less important that Lady Elizabeth’s upto-date spiritualism, her substitute for religion, fails her in her perception that Colby is her son than that she is willing to accept as her real offspring B. Kaghan, a brash, successful businessman, a diamond in the rough. Again, it seems less important that Sir Claude has lost his desired son than that, in the end, he emotionally accepts Lucasta as a daughter. Indeed, the note that Eliot strikes—that, as the Mulhammers say, they are “to try to understand our children” and that both Lucasta and B. Kaghan desire to “mean something” to their newfound parents—is exceptionally conciliatory and suggestive of greater amelioration in the “good life” than is posited in the earlier plays. The Elder Statesman • Eliot’s final play, The Elder Statesman, is an extension not only of the idea that one must come to terms with his past, just as Harry Monchensey

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and the Mulhammers attempt to do, but also that this is, indeed, the only way to redemption. Such atonement on the part of Lord Claverton is presented in words that are less mystical than prosaic; indeed, his past is populated by the blackmailers Federico Gomez, who seeks to capitalize on his knowledge that Lord Calverton had run over a dead man after a drinking party, and Mrs. Carghill, who, as the actress Maisie Montjoy, possesses incriminating love letters. Certainly Calverton’s immediate problem—that of being a terminally ill, newly retired man of consequence, suffering from the loneliness of “sitting in an empty waiting room”—is one with which the audience can quickly identify. As Jones points out, The Elder Statesman has a “naturalistic surface”: The more plays Eliot wrote, the more muted the spiritual enlightenment became, so that eventually the social relationships became primary. Carol Smith, on the other hand, sees the play as a culmination of Eliot’s development of the “dramatic fable” that serves as a “transparent mask” for permanent, religious meanings. The corollary to Calverton’s loneliness takes on sinister (and existential) connotations when it is present in Gomez, who has adopted a new name and a new country after a prison sentence. As he says, he has returned to face Lord Calverton in order to find the self he left behind. Gomez charges Calverton with “creating him,” with engineering his tastes and altering his career. In revenge, he threatens to make others see Calverton for what he really is—a murderer and a hypocrite. Calverton, in fact, has created his own ghosts by dominating the lives of others. The lesson that he must take responsibility for meddling in others’ lives is reinforced by his realization that he is no better than those he created. Both Jones and Carol Smith point out that Calverton’s and Gomez’s careers parallel each other in that their ethical standards merely mirror the society of which they are a part and in that both have changed identities, the “statesman” Dick Ferry having adopted his wife’s name for its impressiveness and the Oxford student having changed his name to blend into his new country. Gomez’s desire to amalgamate his two personalities and his desire for revenge are satisfied when he meets Calverton’s ne’er-do-well son Michael, to whom he offers the lure of easy money and a new identity. Gomez is, in short, reenacting Calverton’s earlier role of tempter. The other ghost that Calverton must face—Maisie Montjoy, known as Mrs. Carghill—has also been “created” by him. As his mistress, who sued him for breach of promise, she was irrevocably affected by his offer of and withdrawal of love. Indeed, their relationship is a parody of the fruitful, redeeming love that comes to Monica Calverton and Charles Hemington. Like Gomez, Mrs. Carghill has gone through a series of name changes reflecting a progressive confusion in identity. Like him, she resorts to blackmail to gain companionship, insisting on what Jones calls the “uncomfortable Christian conception of a man and a woman becoming the inseparable unity of ‘one flesh,’” and like him, she seeks revenge by encouraging the weak-willed Michael to emigrate to South America. The cure that Eliot proposes for Calverton’s loneliness, for his series of facades, and for his discomfort with the past—love—also exorcises his ghosts by allowing him to face them. Accompanying that love is the relinquishment of power; understanding that Michael is a free agent, Calverton recognizes that he has been trying to dominate his son’s choice of friends, lifestyle, and career. If Michael is a free agent, then Gomez and Carghill’s revenge has lost its sting, because Calverton is no longer responsible for his son’s actions. The model for the cure is the love shared by Monica and Charles, a love that creates

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a new, viable personage out of the you and the me. Unlike the kind of false images projected by Calverton’s desire to dominate, the new individual is created by a submission of wills, a voluntary merging of the selves. It is, in short, a model of divine love. Eliot thus points to an achievable salvation unspoiled by artificial dramatic techniques such as the evocation of the Eumenides or the awkward ritualistic libation in The Cocktail Party. Although Jones notes that for one reviewer, at least, the language of the lovers is abstract and lacking in evocative details, Calverton’s illumination is clearly expressed: As Calverton says, if an individual is willing to confess everything to even one person—willing, that is, to appear without his mask—“Then he loves that person, and his love will save him.” Calverton further realizes that his wish to dominate his children arises not from love but from the desire to foist on them an image so that he “could believe in [his] own pretences.” At peace with himself and with Monica, who has promised to remember Michael as he really is so that he may one day shed his mask and return to his real self, Calverton approaches death with serenity: “It is worth dying,” he says, “to find out what life is.” Other major works poetry: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” 1915; Prufrock and Other Observations, 1917; Poems, 1919; Ara Vos Prec, 1920; The Waste Land, 1922; Poems, 1909-1925, 1925; Ash Wednesday, 1930; Triumphal March, 1931; Sweeney Agonistes, 1932; Words for Music, 1934; Collected Poems, 1909-1935, 1936; Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, 1939; Four Quartets, 1943; The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, 1954; Collected Poems, 1909-1962, 1963; Poems Written in Early Youth, 1967; The Complete Poems and Plays, 1969. nonfiction: Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry, 1917; The Sacred Wood, 1920; Homage to John Dryden, 1924; Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca, 1927; For Lancelot Andrewes, 1928; Dante, 1929; Thoughts After Lambeth, 1931; Charles Whibley: A Memoir, 1931; John Dryden: The Poet, the Dramatist, the Critic, 1932; Selected Essays, 1932, new edition, 1950; The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 1933; After Strange Gods, 1934; Elizabethan Essays, 1934; Essays Ancient and Modern, 1936; The Idea of a Christian Society, 1939; The Music of Poetry, 1942; The Classics and the Man of Letters, 1942; Notes Toward the Definition of Culture, 1948; Poetry and Drama, 1951; The Three Voices of Poetry, 1953; Religious Drama: Medieval and Modern, 1954; The Literature of Politics, 1955; The Frontiers of Criticism, 1956; On Poetry and Poets, 1957; Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, 1964; To Criticize the Critic, 1965; The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume I, 1898-1922, 1988. Bibliography Childs, Donald J. From Philosophy to Poetry: T. S. Eliot’s Study of Knowledge and Experience. London: Athalone Press, 2001. Childs analyzes Eliot’s literary works with emphasis on how he expressed his philosophy through his poetry. Bibliography and index. Davidson, Harriet, ed. T. S. Eliot. New York: Longman, 1999. A collection of literary criticism regarding Eliot and his works. Bibliography and index. Donoghue, Denis. Words Alone: The Poet T. S. Eliot. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000. Donoghue, having discovered Eliot’s poetry in 1946 when he left his native Warrenpoint to attend University College in Dublin, writes autobiographically about the experience and offers a close reading of Eliot’s major poems and essays. Gordon, Lyndall. T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. A heavily revised and updated edition of the two-volume biography that made Gordon one of Eliot’s most sensitive interpreters.

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Habib, Rafey. The Early T. S. Eliot and Western Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. A look at the philosophical beliefs held by Eliot and how they found their way into his literary works. Bibliography and index. Jones, David E. The Plays of T. S. Eliot. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1960. This first book-length study to deal exclusively with Eliot’s plays remains one of the best. In addition to separate sections on each of the plays, Jones includes general criticism relating them to Eliot’s poetic and critical writings. Malamud, Randy. T. S. Eliot’s Drama: A Research and Production Sourcebook. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992. A close look at the production of Eliot’s dramatic works. Bibliography and indexes. _______. Where the Words Are Valid: T. S. Eliot’s Communities of Drama. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. A critical analysis and interpretation of Eliot’s plays. Bibliography and index. Moody, A. David, ed. The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. A comprehensive reference work dedicated to Eliot’s life, work, and times. Bibliography and index. Schuchard, Ronald. Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. An analysis of Eliot’s work from a psychological perspective. Bibliography and index. Smith, Carol H. T. S. Eliot’s Dramatic Theory and Practice: From “Sweeney Agonistes” to “The Elder Statesman.” Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963. Unlike most studies of Eliot’s drama, this book makes full use of Eliot’s own statements on dramatic theory in his critical essays to help illuminate his own plays. Patricia Marks, updated by John R. Holmes

Euripides Euripides

Born: Phlya, Greece; c. 485 b.c.e. Died: Macedonia, Greece; 406 b.c.e. Principal drama • Of the 66 tragedies and 22 satyr plays Euripides wrote, the following survive: AlkTstis, 438 b.c.e. (Alcestis, 1781); MTdeia, 431 b.c.e. (Medea, 1781); HTrakleidai, c. 430 b.c.e. (The Children of Herakles, 1781); Hippolytos, 428 b.c.e. (revision of an earlier play; Hippolytus, 1781); AndromachT, c. 426 b.c.e. (Andromache, 1782); HeklabT, 425 b.c.e. (Hecuba, 1782); Hiketides, c. 423 b.c.e. (The Suppliants, 1781); Kyklfps, c. 421 b.c.e. (Cyclops, 1782); HTrakles, c. 420 b.c.e. (Heracles, 1781); Trfiades, 415 b.c.e. (The Trojan Women, 1782); IphigeneiaT en Taurois, c. 414 b.c.e. (Iphigenia in Tauris, 1782); $lektra, 413 b.c.e. (Electra, 1782); HelenT, 412 b.c.e. (Helen, 1782); Ifn, c. 411 b.c.e. (Ion, 1781); Phoinissai, 409 b.c.e. (The Phoenician Women, 1781); OrestTs, 408 b.c.e. (Orestes, 1782); Bakchai, 405 b.c.e. (The Bacchae, 1781); IphigeneiaT en Aulidi, 405 b.c.e. (Iphigenia in Aulis, 1782) Other literary forms • Like Aeschylus and Sophocles, Euripides wrote elegies and lyric poems, none of which has survived intact. The poet is said to have been commissioned by his fellow Athenians to write a funeral epitaph for the dead at Syracuse in 413 b.c.e., but the lines handed down in Plutarch’s Life of Nicias (in Bioi paralleloi, c. 105-115 c.e.; Parallel Lives, 1579) are not usually accepted as Euripidean. Several lines exist of an epinician, or victory, ode said to have been dedicated by Euripides to the Athenian politician Alcibiades after an Olympic victory, but even in antiquity, this ode was attributed to others as well. Achievements • The ancient Bios Euripidou (third century b.c.e.; life of Euripides) by Satyrus assigns to the playwright innovations in the following areas: prologues, scientific dissertations on nature, oratorical pieces, and recognitions. This vague statement requires considerable qualification. Although the extant plays show little of the interest in natural science suggested by the anonymous author of the Life of Euripides and confirmed by several fragments from lost plays, Euripides’ dramatic application of set speeches and rhetorical devices is a common feature of his plays, as in the legal debate between Hecuba and Helen in The Trojan Women. These scientific and rhetorical features reveal Euripides’ place in the intellectual mainstream of late fifth century b.c.e. Athens, a position that it is difficult for a modern reader to appreciate fully because so much of the existing nondramatic evidence is fragmentary. Euripides very well may have been the first tragedian to highlight these contemporary trends in his drama. Euripides certainly did not invent anagnorisis, or recognition, which existed in Greek literature as early as Homer’s Odyssey (c. 800 b.c.e.; English translation, 1616) and in drama as early as Aeschylus’s ChoTphoroi (458 b.c.e.; Libation Bearers, 1777), but Euripides uses these recognition scenes frequently and with a novelty and skill much admired by Aristotle in his De poetica (c. 334-323 b.c.e.; Poetics, 1705). Indeed, it is Euripides’ focus on recognition and intrigue in his later dramas, such as Ion, Helen, and Iphigenia in Tauris, that has led him to be called a father of the New Greek Comedy of Menander in the late fourth century b.c.e. Although these recognition dramas were 270

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technically produced by Euripides as tragedies, they are not necessarily “tragic” in the modern sense, but are more “tragicomic” and have sometimes been labeled as tyche dramas, or dramas of “chance.” Alcestis deserves special mention. Technically not a tragedy, it is rather a pro-satyr play because it was produced in place of a satyr play. Euripides is known to have experimented with such pro-satyr plays several other times, and the pro-satyr play may have been a Euripidean innovation. Knowledge of the Greek satyr play tradition is generally scanty as Euripides’ Cyclops is the only complete drama of this type to survive, along with significant papyrus fragments of two Sophoclean satyr plays, but two special features of satyr plays were known to have been choruses of satyrs and scenes of buffoonery. While Alcestis lacks the former, its links with the satyr play can be seen in the comic scene with Heracles. Euripides’ Alcestis and his tyche dramas thus serve as a caution against making general statements about the genre of Greek “tragedy” or about “Euripidean tragedy” in particular. The definition of “tragedy” in fifth century b.c.e. Athens was clearly much broader than it is today. The Life of Euripides notwithstanding, Euripides definitely did not invent the tragic prologue, which, by Aristotelian definition in Poetics was “that part of a tragedy which precedes the parodos or chorus’s entrance song.” Several extant plays of Aeschylus have such prologues, but Euripides, like Sophocles, added his own distinctive feature: a scene, often called expository, in which a character, usually a mortal but sometimes a god, identifies himself and outlines the characters and background of the plot. Every extant Euripidean tragedy has such an expository prologue, which cannot always be dismissed as a mere nondramatic playbill. The expositions spoken by gods (in Alcestis, Hippolytus, The Trojan Women, Ion, and The Bacchae) are particularly significant in that the dramatic events generally do not evolve exactly as predicted by the gods in the prologues. In each of these five prologues, the playwright makes his deity more or less misleading as to subsequent dramatic events. At the least, such “deceptive” prologues serve to create interest in the story without giving away the plot. At the same time, such prologues may reveal the gods’ inability to control human action and to move it along their preordained plans. The expository prologue has also been called an archaizing element in Euripidean drama, but too little is known of Greek tragedy in its infancy to say with certainty that such scenes were a common early feature. Euripides’ plays, however, do exhibit several traits that could be labeled archaisms in that they can be traced back to Aeschylean elements. The dramas of Aeschylus, first produced in Euripides’ youth and revived throughout his lifetime, seem to have been a particular source of dramatic inspiration to the younger playwright. Euripidean imitation of Aeschylean techniques can be seen in several areas: Euripides’ altar scenes, such as those in The Suppliants and Ion, may be based on similar scenes in such plays as Aeschylus’s Hiketides (463 b.c.e.?; The Suppliants, 1777) and Eumenides (458 b.c.e.; English translation, 1777). Luring speeches, such as those in Hecuba and Electra, are probably derived from the carpet scene in Aeschylus’s Agamem nfn (458 b.c.e.; Agamemnon, 1777). The pathetic ghost of Polydorus in Hecuba can be traced back to the ghosts in Persai (472 b.c.e.; The Persians, 1777) and Eumenides. The mad scene of Heracles may possibly be modeled on the last scene of Libation Bearers. Aeschylus’s Eumenides and The Suppliants are the probable prototypes for Euripides’ subsidiary choruses in Hippolytus and The Suppliants, and Euripides’ The Suppliants is almost certainly following its predecessor in the use of the chorus as the main character. It has also been suggested that the model for the “bad women” of Euripides, such as

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Medea and Phaedra, was Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra, and that Euripides’ “unhappy women,” such as Hecuba, were modeled on Aeschylus’s Atossa. Also like Aeschylus, Euripides was a master of stage machinery, including the eccyclema, a device used to show interiors, which Euripides employs in daring ways in Alcestis, Hippolytus, and other plays. For Euripides, however, stage machinery means especially the mechane, a crane used to swing an actor into the orchestra. Euripides has a mechane, which is the origin of the term deus ex machina, at the end of ten of his extant plays, almost always to enable a god to make an appearance and resolve dramatic difficulties. By (Library of Congress) contrast, the mechane is used in only one of Sophocles’ surviving plays, PhiloktTtTs (409 b.c.e.; Philoctetes, 1729), and in none of Aeschylus’s, except perhaps Prometheus desmftTs (date unknown; Prometheus Bound, 1777). Euripides himself makes brilliant original use of the technique in Medea, in which it is Medea herself who escapes in a crane dramatically transformed into the magic chariot of the sun. A final Aeschylean dramatic feature that is often linked with Euripides is the connected trilogy. T. B L. Webster is the most prominent proponent of this view, which has had remarkable tenacity despite meager evidence. The most that can be said about the possibility of Euripidean-connected trilogies is that neither of the most likely trilogic candidates, Euripides’ production of 415 b.c.e. (including the lost Alexander and Palamedes, as well as the surviving The Trojan Women), often called his “Trojan Trilogy”; his production of c. 410-409 b.c.e. (Antiope and Hypsipyle, now lost, and The Phoenician Women), a “Theban Trilogy,” appear to have been connected in the closely knit thematic and chronological way that is notable in the Oresteia (458 b.c.e.; English translation, 1777), Aeschylus’s only surviving trilogy. It is possible that Euripides may have linked plays within a dramatic group through a sort of meaningful variation, but such connections do not necessarily make a trilogy. Like his contemporary, Sophocles, Euripides was an artistic master of the single play rather than of the connected trilogy. Euripides was an acknowledged virtuoso of Greek tragic language in all its forms. In the iambic or spoken portions of his plays, his elaborate agons, or debates, and his carefully detailed messenger speeches, such as the famous report of Hippolytus’s death in Hippolytus are particularly noteworthy. In the lyric, or sung, portions of his plays, Euripides was in the vanguard of the late fifth century b.c.e. trend toward more song by actors and less by the chorus alone. Thus, Euripidean plays tend to have more monodies, or solo songs by actors, and kommoi, or duets between the chorus and one or more actors, as well as fewer and shorter choral odes than in earlier tragedy. Kommostic parodoi, or choral entrance songs sung by both chorus and actor(s), are a special favorite of Euripides (as in Medea and The Trojan Women).

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Under the influence of the contemporary poet Timotheus of Miletus, Euripides also moved in his later plays toward a New Lyric form marked especially by astrophic, or stanzaless, songs and polymetria, or the use of more than one meter in a single song (as in Iphigenia in Tauris, Helen, and The Phoenician Women). Late Euripidean tragedy only sporadically reflects another trend of New Lyric, that toward choral odes that are apparently unconnected to dramatic events. In general, even such a well-known Euripidean ode as the “Demeter Ode” (in Helen), which is difficult to relate to the plot, is not so much detached from the play as it is a more indirect, mythological exemplum of dramatic events. New Lyric, connected, as it was, with a new school of emotional music, was an ideal medium for Euripides’ dramatic art, which is preeminently a study of human psychology and emotion. The playwright, noted for his studies of the feminine psyche in such diverse characters as Alcestis, Medea, Phaedra, and Hecuba, created character studies filled with psychological insight. Unlike the Sophoclean hero, who never changes or loses his resolve, the Euripidean character is more unstable. Like Medea or Phaedra, the character may waver at length between several courses of action or, like Ion, who is transformed in the course of the action from a boy into a man, may exhibit significant growth of personality. The persona of Euripides often lacks that nobility of character that Aristotle believed to be essential to real tragedy, and which the seventeenth century French dramatist Jean Racine tried to restore in his imitation of Euripides’ characters. Euripides’ contemporary, Sophocles, demonstrated uncanny insight when he stated that he “made men as they ought to be; Euripides as they are.” Euripides’ innovations in the mythical background to his plays are often the result of his realistic psychology as well as his desire for dramatic shock effect. His most noteworthy mythical changes are the marriage of Electra, the reversal of the traditional sequence of Heracles’ madness and the hero’s labors, and, probably, the murder of her own children by Medea. Euripides may also have been the inventor of scenes of voluntary self-sacrifice, of which the “Cassandra scene” of The Trojan Women is a noteworthy example. Other such scenes can be found in Iphigenia in Aulis, The Children of Herakles, Hecuba, and The Phoenician Women. It is the rare Euripidean play that does not include at least one deity among its dramatis personae, but these divine appearances are generally restricted to the prologues and exodoi, or last scenes, and serve as a frame for the central, “human” part of the drama. Much has been read into Euripides’ beliefs from the role of the gods in his plays, but it is also significant to note that the Euripidean gods serve an important dramatic function as causes of events independent of human motivation. In general, the gods place Euripides’ psychological studies in their appropriate mythical background. Biography • The manuscript tradition of Euripides contains an ancient Life of Euripides, clearly a composite of several sources, including Philochorus, a fourth century b.c.e. Attic historian, and Satyros, a third century Peripatetic biographer, fragments of whose own Life of Euripides exist on papyrus. Unfortunately, however, much of the ancient biographical tradition about Euripides is derived from ancient comedy, especially from that of Aristophanes, whose Thesmophoriazousai (411 b.c.e.; Thesmophoriazusae, 1837) and Batrachoi (405 b.c.e.; The Frogs, 1780) both contain caricatures of Euripides and who is therefore suspect as a historical source. The problem of source reliability starts with Euripides’ parentage. The comic tradition that Euripides’ father, Mnesarchus (or Mnesarchides), was a shopkeeper and his mother, Clito, a greengrocer, is apparently contradicted by ancient statements that Eu-

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ripides’ mother belonged to a noble family and that Euripides himself was granted honors worthy of high rank, including those of dancing at Athens in the sacred dance to Delian Apollo and of being a fire bearer in another cult of Apollo. Euripides is said to have been born on the island of Salamis, but he was a member of the Athenian deme of Phlya, where he may have held a local priesthood of Zeus. His date of birth is variously given as either 485 or 480 b.c.e., the later date being based on the persistent ancient tradition that the playwright was born on Salamis on the very day of the battle in which Aeschylus may have fought and after which Sophocles as a youth is said to have danced in the victory celebration. Apparently, Euripides’ ties with Salamis were strong, for he is said to have composed many of his plays in a solitary cave on the island. The ancient Life of Euripides states that, as a youth, Euripides studied painting and was trained as an athlete because of a misinterpretation of an oracle stating that he would someday win “crowns in contests at Athens.” Although Euripides may, as some sources suggest, have won some early athletic victories at Athens, his real victories were to be won in the dramatic competitions at Athens’ Greater Dionysia. Euripides is linked intellectually with many of the great thinkers of his day. The ancient Life of Euripides lists among his teachers Anaxagoras, whose doctrines can be seen in Hippolytus, The Trojan Women, and elsewhere; Protagoras, who is said to have read his treatise “On the Gods” in Euripides’ house; the Sophist Prodicus; and even Socrates, who was at least fifteen years Euripides’ junior and whom Aristophanes called a collaborator in Euripides’ dramatic compositions. As a fifth century b.c.e. Athenian, Euripides certainly came in contact with all these men, but none of them is likely to have a formal student-teacher relationship with Euripides. The influence of the tragedian Aeschylus and the poet Timotheus on Euripides’ dramatic development has already been mentioned. The poet may also have had some connections with the historian Thucydides. A memorial inscription dedicated to Euripides is ascribed to Thucydides, although it is sometimes attributed to Timotheus. The story of Euripides’ two unhappy marriages, first to Melito and then to a Choerile or Choerine, daughter of Mnesilochus, is too clearly entangled in comic tradition to be historical. According to the Life of Euripides, the second wife committed adultery with a certain Cephisophon, who is described both as a house slave and as a literary collaborator with Euripides. The playwright is said to have written his scandalous first Hippolytus in reaction to his wife’s infidelity. Actually, both unhappy marriages and his traditional misogyny may be a comic exaggeration of Euripides’ depiction of evil women in such plays as the first Hippolytus and Medea. Euripides had three sons: Mnesarchides, a merchant; Mnesilochus, an actor; and Euripides the younger, a tragic poet who produced Iphigenia in Aulis and The Bacchae posthumously for his father. Euripides appears to have led a very quiet life except for his dramatic career. The only public duty attributed to him, an ambassadorship to Syracuse, is generally discounted today. Euripides may have been friendly with the Athenian politician Alcibiades. An epinician ode to Alcibiades is perhaps attributable to the dramatist, and unmistakable strains of Athenian patriotism are notable in such plays as Medea and The Suppliants, in which the Athenian heroes Aegeus and Theseus are used as symbols of Athens’s role as savior of the oppressed. On the other hand, intense hatred of war can be seen in such plays as Hecuba and The Trojan Women, and much of the exotic in late Euripidean plays such as Helen and Iphigenia in Tauris can be explained as dramatic escapism from the horrors of the Peloponnesian War. Criticism of the Athenian massacre

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of the Melians, described by Thucydides, can be read into Euripides’ The Trojan Women, produced in 415 b.c.e., the year after the massacre. More specific political allusions have been sought in the extant corpus but are very difficult to document. Euripides’ first dramatic competition was in 455 b.c.e., when he placed with Peliades, now lost. He did not win a first prize until 442 or 441. In contrast to Sophocles’ numerous dramatic victories, Euripides won first prize only five times (including one posthumous victory) out of twenty-two productions. Although Euripides’ dramatic career began in 455, he produced very few plays in the next twenty-five years. Only six Euripidean productions are known before 431 b.c.e. The remaining sixteen productions fall in the period 431-406 b.c.e., roughly coinciding with the Peloponnesian War. In the last decade of the poet’s life, 415-406 b.c.e., he competed every year but two. In 438 b.c.e., Euripides placed second to Sophocles with a group composed of the lost tragedies Cretan Women, Alcmaeon at Psophis, and Telephus and the extant pro-satyr play Alcestis. Sometime in the period 437-432 b.c.e., Euripides produced a Hippolytus, later identified by the subtitle Kalyptomenos, or “veiled,” to distinguish it from the extant play on the same theme, Hippolytus Stephanophoros, or “Hippolytus the wreathbearer.” Apparently, this first Hippolytus, now lost, received harsh criticism for its depiction of a scandalous Phaedra, who revealed her love to her stepson. In his revised Hippolytus, produced in 428 b.c.e., Euripides was more careful to preserve Phaedra’s reputation and was awarded first prize over the tragedians Iophon, son of Sophocles, and Ion. Medea, produced in 431 b.c.e. with the lost Philoctetes and Dictys, was beaten by the works of both Euphorion, son of Aeschylus, and Sophocles. Andromache, while not firmly datable, is significant in that the play apparently was not performed at Athens, but the actual place of production is unknown. Euripides is said to have made several other productions outside Athens. In 415 b.c.e., Euripides came in second place to a certain Xenocles with his lost Alexander and Palamedes and the surviving The Trojan Women. In 408 b.c.e., after the production of Orestes in Athens, the septuagenarian Euripides left his native city, never to return. The poet went first to Magnesia, where he received several honors, and then to Macedonia, to the court of Archelaus, whose patronage of the arts also attracted the tragic poet Agathon and Euripides’ friend, the poet Timotheus. In Macedonia, Euripides produced Archelaus, now lost, which was a play about an ancestor of his royal host, and wrote the extant Iphigenia in Aulis and The Bacchae and the lost Alcmaeon in Corinth, which were produced posthumously in Athens by Euripides’ son of the same name and which won first prize. After Euripides’ death in Macedonia in early 406, Sophocles dressed a chorus in mourning for his fellow tragedian at the proagon, or preview, to the Greater Dionysia of that year. That Euripides died by sparagmos—that is, by being torn apart either accidentally by Archelaus’s hunting dogs or by women angered by the poet’s depiction of their sex—must be dismissed as comic apocrypha because of the legend’s similarity to the fate of Pentheus in The Bacchae. The most disturbing result of all these biographical data tarnished by the comic tradition is the cloud that has enveloped Euripides’ popularity in fifth century b.c.e. Athens. Like his contemporary, Socrates, Euripides was a favorite butt of comedy, both while he was alive (as in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae) and after his death (as in Aristophanes’ The Frogs of 405 b.c.e.), and according to the ancient Life of Euripides, this comic ridicule was so intense that it was the cause of Euripides’ departure from Athens in 408 b.c.e. There are also several noncomic hints of Euripides’ unpopularity:

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the failure of the first Hippolytus, as well as the small number of first prizes that he won. On the other hand, this tradition of unpopularity may be the result of comic exaggeration misunderstood by later critics. That Euripides was a prolific playwright, with sixteen productions in the last twenty-five years of his life, is itself strong evidence for sustained contemporary enthusiasm for his plays, as competition for permission to perform at the Greater Dionysia was stiff, and only three poets were chosen annually. There is also an attractive notice in Plutarch’s Life of Nicias that some Athenian prisoners in Sicily were granted better treatment by their captors if they could recite Euripides’ poetry, which was held in great esteem by the Sicilian Greeks. Nor must Euripides’ sojourn in Macedonia be interpreted, as it is in the ancient Life of Euripides, as only a self-imposed exile from his Athenian critics. Rather, it may also be seen as the result of the attraction that royal patrons often held toward ancient Greek poets, including Anacreon and Ibycus to the court of the Samian tyrant Polycrates, Aeschylus and Pindar to the court of Hieron in Sicily, and Agathon and Timotheus to the court of Archelaus. A more likely interpretation of the evidence is that Euripides’ plays were often controversial in his lifetime because of their depiction of realistic characters in a traditional myth but were still generally admired for their dramatic and poetic force. As time passed, the sensationalism of Euripides’ character development has worn off, and the poet has come to be admired for his masterful studies of human psychology, so that the funeral inscription written in Euripides’ memory by either the historian Thucydides or the poet Timotheus is even more valid today than it was in the fifth century b.c.e. All Greece is the tomb of Euripides, whose bones rest In Macedonia where he met his end. His native city, Athens, is the Greece of Greece And he has earned much praise for the delights of his Muse. Euripides’ plays were certainly in demand after his death. Revivals of Euripidean plays occurred throughout the fourth century b.c.e. (a performance of Orestes is documented in 341 b.c.e.) and were a direct influence on the New Comedy of Menander (late fourth century b.c.e.) and, through Greek New Comedy, on Roman Comedy, including Plautus and Terence (second century b.c.e.). Enthusiasm for Euripides was maintained throughout antiquity, as is evidenced by the larger number of plays that survive and by the great number of papyrus fragments of Euripides that have been discovered in Egypt and that are second in quantity only to Homeric papyri. Adaptations of Euripidean plays include Seneca’s Phaedra (c. 40-50 c.e.; English translation, 1581), modeled on Euripides’ first Hippolytus; Racine’s Phèdre (pr., pb. 1677; Phaedra, 1701), a seventeenth century version of Hippolytus; Eugene O’Neill’s twentieth century version of Mourning Becomes Electra (pr., pb. 1931); and the contemporary Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka’s unique adaptation of The Bacchae (pr., pb. 1973), with its blending of Dionysus with the Yoruba deity Ogun. Analysis • Euripides wrote eighty-eight dramas, including sixty-six tragedies and twenty-two satyr plays. Nineteen plays survive in the manuscript tradition, but one of these, the tragedy Rhesus (written sometime between 455 and 441 b.c.e.), is generally considered to be spurious. Cyclops, the only complete extant satyr play, is not precisely datable. In addition to the pro-satyr play Alcestis, seven tragedies are securely dated:

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Medea, Hippolytus, The Trojan Women, Helen, Orestes, Iphigenia in Aulis, and The Bacchae, these last two produced posthumously. The other tragedies can be only approximately dated, based on metrical evidence and contemporary allusions. In addition, considerable fragments from lost plays survive on papyrus. The large number of extant Euripidean plays (compared to only seven each for Aeschylus and Sophocles) is attributable to a combination of conscious selection and chance. When the Athenian orator Lycurgus established the texts of Aeschylus and Sophocles in the late fourth century b.c.e., he also made the first edition of Euripides, but not before numerous actors’ interpolations had crept into the text. The number of plays contained in the Lycurgan edition is unknown, but only seventy-eight dramas, including four considered apocryphal by the editor, were included in the definitive Alexandrian edition by Aristophanes of Byzantium in the second century b.c.e. Another important edition was made by Didymus of Chalcedon in the first century b.c.e. Didymus’s edition included scholia, or marginal notes, on which are based the scholia in the surviving manuscripts. Sometime after the second century c.e., school anthologies were made of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, but although only seven each were chosen for Aeschylus and Sophocles, Euripides’ great popularity in antiquity caused ten plays to be included in his selection: Hecuba, Orestes, The Phoenician Women, Hippolytus, Medea, Alcestis, Andromache, Rhesus, The Trojan Women, and The Bacchae. Although this school group was narrowed in the Byzantine period to Hecuba, Orestes, and The Phoenician Women, all ten plays of the original selection reached the West in the fourteenth century, together with a group of nine other Euripidean plays, preserved by chance from an edition (perhaps that of Aristophanes) arranged alphabetically: The Suppliants, Cyclops, The Children of Herakles, Heracles, Helen, Ion, Iphigenia in Tauris, Iphigenia in Aulis, and Electra. The first printed edition of Euripides was the Aldine edition of Venice, 1503. Although certain dramatic features, such as the expository prologue and the appearance of a god in the mechane, tend to recur in play after play of Euripides, the overall impression made by his corpus, when viewed as a whole, is one of remarkable diversity. Euripides is a poet of stark contradictions. A single production, such as Hippolytus, can display both bitter misogyny and a sensitive portrayal of a woman such as Phaedra. One play, such as Medea, may sink to the depths of tragedy; another, such as Ion, will float from those depths, buoyed on comic resolution. Certain plays, it is true, can be said to form subgroups, such as the so-called political plays, including The Children of Herakles, The Suppliants, and Andromache, or the tyche dramas Ion, Helen, and Iphigenia in Tauris, but the dramatic gulf that spans a career including Alcestis, Hippolytus, Ion, and The Bacchae cannot be easily bridged. There are too few neat generalizations comparable to the Aeschylean concept of justice or the Sophoclean hero on which to establish a poetic or intellectual unity within the Euripidean corpus. Perhaps if as many plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles had survived, more variety would be found in those dramatists as well, but one has the impression after reading Euripides that for this playwright, at least, variety is almost an organizing feature. Most often, generalizations about Euripides have centered on his portrayal of the gods and his apparent disbelief in Greek deities and traditional myths, but then one is forced by The Bacchae, with its intense religious mood, either to see the play as an end-of-life palinode, a refutation of the earlier works, or to put aside the generalization entirely. Variety within the Euripidean corpus is caused, to a great extent, by the playwright’s focus on the particular psychology of each character.

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Like the Sophists of his age, who operated on an ethical system of amoral pragmatism, Euripides is a practical stage manager who is willing to thwart theatrical convention and traditional beliefs for dramatic effect. In general, the goal of Euripidean drama is not the development of a theological system or an ideal code of conduct, but rather the depiction of human emotions under strain. The dramas of Euripides are thus not really concerned with the gods or superheroes, but with ordinary people trying to deal, in their own personal ways, with real-life situations including love, jealousy, divorce, and death. This is the source of Euripides’ diversity and of his appeal. His psychological studies, as diverse and as complex as the human mind itself, are at the heart of his plays, which fluctuate in form, mood, and tone to suit particular dramatic and psychological situations. Unlike Sophocles, who depicted people as they ought to be, Euripides depicted people as they are (according to Aristotle’s Poetics). This Euripidean realism accounts for the differences among Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus, Ion, The Bacchae, and his other plays. Euripidean tragedy is, above all, a drama of life itself. Alcestis • In Alcestis, Euripides presents a study of the loyal, self-sacrificing wife. That Alcestis would die for her husband, Admetus, is easy to accept after Alcestis’s touching and revealing speech in the second episode, but the character of Admetus is more difficult to understand and easier to condemn as selfish and self-centered. Interpretation of his character and of the play as a whole is widely debated, but Admetus’s salvation, if it occurs at all, must be sought in xenia, the ancient Greek custom of guestfriendship. Xenia is Admetus’s chief—and perhaps his only—virtue. In the typically Euripidean expository prologue, the god Apollo explains how he will save Admetus’s life because the latter was a good host to him while he, Apollo, was on earth, and, in the central portion of the fourth episode, Heracles is willing to get Alcestis back from Death because of the hospitality his friend Admetus has shown to him even at a time of deep mourning. The Third Choral Ode is filled with glowing praise for Admetus’s xenia. On the other hand, Admetus comes off quite badly both in an agon with his father Pheres, in which the aged father explains his refusal to die for his selfish son, and in the exodos, in which Admetus accepts in marriage an unidentified woman from Heracles, despite his earlier promise to the dying Alcestis never to remarry, even before it becomes clear that the veiled woman might be Alcestis. Perhaps some of this play’s difficulty is attributable to its position as a pro-satyr play, a fact that helps explain the pathetic comedy of the drunken scene with Heracles and especially the tragicomic ambiguity of the exodos. Through it all, however, Euripides’ depiction of Alcestis as a loving wife and mother is a constant on which the variables of Admetus’s character and the play’s denouement are based. Whether Admetus in the exodos is rewarded for his virtuous xenia or punished for his selfishness, neither could have occurred without the remarkable and loving selflessness of his wife. Euripides’ emphasis on a human situation and human emotion is paramount. Medea • Medea is one of the few extant plays of Euripides that function without the gods. Instead, Euripides has taken two superhuman figures from Greek mythology, Medea and Jason, and placed them in a very human situation: the breakdown of a marriage. Especially in their bitter agon in the second episode, Medea is clearly the wronged woman who has sacrificed everything for her husband and does not want the divorce, and Jason is shown to be heartless, calculating, and ambitious. Euripides achieves his most brilliant dramatic stroke, however, by complicating his psychological study of Medea with an emphasis on the exotic side of her character. Not

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only is she depicted in her traditional role as a witch and as a foreigner and therefore a barbarian, but there is an implicit suggestion that Medea is also unnatural because of her love for Jason, because of her uncontrollable passion. Medea’s emotional imbalance, caused by Jason’s desertion, is therefore the heart of the play and leads inevitably to her murder of Jason’s intended second wife and then of her own children, whose death, she realizes, will wound Jason more than would any other act of revenge. Yet Medea is not completely unnatural; she is rather a woman caught between her jealous passion for Jason and her maternal instincts. That she does not lose all her sympathy by yielding in the end to her passion speaks highly of Euripides’ character development of his heroine. The chorus is particularly significant in the play for this reason. From their arrival, the women of the chorus are sympathetic to Medea and convinced that she has been wronged by Jason. Their First Ode is a bitter condemnation of the perfidy of men toward women, and during Medea’s intrigue, the chorus actually serve as Medea’s confidante. The Fifth Choral Ode is about the sorrows of childbearing, and the chorus’s last song is a terrified prayer to the Sun, Medea’s grandfather, to stop Medea’s unnatural act. The chorus members therefore are an important dramatic foil to Medea. As women, they are sympathetic to Medea, but they cannot understand or condone the murder of her own children. The chorus are a psychological scale by which Medea’s passion is measured and found imbalanced. Compared to the tragicomedy Alcestis, the dramatic effect of Medea can be nothing less than complete emotional exhaustion. In a memorable section of Poetics, Aristotle criticizes the emotional effect of Medea as miaron, moral revulsion, which inhibits the development of a true tragic feeling for Medea, who, fully conscious of the horrors of her act, murders her children. Yet this awareness that she is caught between Jason and her children is the emotional key to Medea’s psychology and enables her to construe her act as both revenge against Jason and protection against further harm for her children. In Medea, Euripides has developed the illogical conclusions of a mind crazed by spurned love. Hippolytus • Passion is also the subject of Hippolytus, but here, the heroine Phaedra struggles in vain to control her illicit love for her stepson Hippolytus. The gods play a much a greater role in this play. In the prologue, Aphrodite announces that she has caused Phaedra’s love in vengeance against Hippolytus, who scorns her worship, and Artemis appears in the exodos to restore the good name of her dying devotee Hippolytus. This drama, often praised for its structural and thematic balance between Aphrodite and Artemis, between Phaedra and Hippolytus, between passion and chastity, is another brilliant Euripidean study of emotional stress, of Phaedra striving desperately to maintain her good name, first by keeping secret her uncontrollable love and then by accusing Hippolytus of rape and committing suicide, and of Hippolytus, at first horrified when he learns of Phaedra’s infatuation and then nobly faithful to his oaths of secrecy even when falsely accused of violating his stepmother. The tension between the two sides is maintained by well-developed hunting and sea imagery, which Euripides manipulates for meaningful character development. For example, Hippolytus’s “untouched meadows” can be applied not only to nature and to the speaker’s virtuous chastity but also to a sense of spiritual smugness, a holier-than-thou attitude against which Hippolytus is warned by his own servant. Phaedra’s wish to “drink fresh water from a running spring” is a repressed sexual desire, especially when she couples this desire with one to “lie in the grassy meadow.”

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It would have been a useful guide for an interpretation of this play to know exactly how these characterizations of Hippolytus and Phaedra compared with those in Euripides’ unsuccessful first version of the theme. How much less virtuous was the first Phaedra? Was the first Hippolytus as spiritually superior or as bitterly misogynistic? Satisfactory answers to these questions can probably never be found, however, and the extant Hippolytus must be interpreted on its own evidence. As such, Hippolytus can be seen to depict a passion that neither Phaedra nor Hippolytus is able to control. Both are engulfed in a powerful force, which, in this play at least, with its appearance of Aphrodite in the prologue, is more than human; it is divine. The Second Choral Ode, poised dramatically between Phaedra’s accidental confession of love to the nurse in the second episode and the nurse’s disastrous conversation with Hippolytus in the third episode, is a lyric statement of love’s power in which the chorus describe love’s destructive force and add the stories of Deianira and Semele as mythological exempla. Although violent passions are the subjects of both Medea and Hippolytus, the former play is perhaps more devoted to the depiction of the horrible effects of Medea’s passion. Hippolytus places more emphasis on the inevitability not only of Phaedra’s love, which Euripides expresses in theological, mythological, and, above all, human terms, but also of Hippolytus’s intractable, passionless nature, which is developed in the same powerful terms as Phaedra’s. In Hippolytus, Euripides thus demonstrates an astute awareness of the complexities of human psychology. Ion • Ion is one of several Euripidean dramas that revolve around anagnorisis, or recognition. This play, in fact, has two recognitions: a false recognition by Xuthus, king of Athens, that Ion is his son, and a true recognition by Creusa, Xuthus’s wife, that Ion is really her son, conceived by the god Apollo and abandoned in infancy. Ion was reared as an orphan at Apollo’s temple at Delphi, where the action of the drama takes place. Although the major dramatis personae are all illustrious figures from the Athenian past, the events that they experience were not that extraordinary in fifth century b.c.e. Greece. Many Athenians would have gone to Delphi, as Xuthus and Creusa did, to consult the oracle and to visit Apollo’s temple, which the chorus as sightseers describe in the parodos. The rituals preceding a request for a Delphic oracle would also have been familiar to Euripides’ audience. Further, the reliability of Apollo’s shrine as an oracular seat is an issue that haunts Ion and that very much concerned Euripides’ contemporaries. Apollo’s reputation in this play is especially tarnished by Creusa’s claim that the god raped and then abandoned her to deal alone with an unwanted pregnancy. These concerns about Apollo are directed toward the character of Ion, whose idealistic view of Apollo at the beginning of the play is repeatedly challenged, first by Creusa’s story of Apollo’s rape and later by the story of his true identity. The inevitable result of these intellectual challenges is Ion’s transformation from a simpleminded boy into an intelligent, questioning adult. In the end, Ion accepts Apollo’s story on trust, but this leap of faith, Ion’s statement of implicit faith and trust in the god, can also be interpreted as ironic, as a cynical acceptance of his fate to be the son of Xuthus “by gift” and of Creusa “by Apollo.” On an understanding of Ion’s intent hinges the interpretation not only of Ion’s character development but also an understanding of the play itself. On the one hand, if Ion is transformed into a skeptic, the play becomes a serious condemnation of Apollo. On the other hand, if Ion’s belief in Apollo matures from childlike acceptance into the faith of an adult, the play is a more optimistic statement concerning the role of deity in human life. There is no answer to this ambiguity, just as there is none for the ambiguity of Alcestis.

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It is perhaps significant that Athena’s appearance in the mechane occurs, not at the very tense dramatic moment when Ion nearly kills Creusa without knowing that she is his real mother, but rather at the point when Ion turns to ask the truth of his identity from Apollo in an oracle. Athena prevents Ion from querying the oracle because Ion is searching for a direct answer to a question that cannot be answered directly. Rather, he must be content with the ambiguity of the situation, with the contradiction that he is the son both of Xuthus and of Apollo. The dramatic emphasis is thus on Ion’s intellectual growth rather than on the veracity of Apollo. The dramatic tone of Ion is in strong contrast to that of Medea or Hippolytus. The horrid deaths of the earlier plays are avoided in this drama. Both Creusa and Ion are brought in the play to the point of committing the crime of Oedipus—that of unwittingly killing a blood relation—but both murders are thwarted by the dramatic circumstances. This is a tragicomedy, a tyche drama, in which Euripides has approached the human situation and human psychology from a completely different, and less serious, direction. The Bacchae • The Bacchae is, in several ways, Euripides’ most unusual work. It is the only extant Greek tragedy based on a Dionysian story, despite the cultic association of Greek tragedy with that god. Unlike many of Euripides’ works, The Bacchae displays a religious intensity that complicates any discussion of the gods in Euripides. Further, this religious fervor is most completely developed by the chorus of bacchants, who achieve in this play a dramatic centrality lacking in other choruses, even those, such as the chorus in Euripides’ The Suppliants, which are meant to be main characters. Even more than Dionysus himself, who is one of the dramatis personae, his chorus of female followers project the meaning of the Dionysian religion and its complete psychological dependence on the god. The parodos is an especially vivid example of such Dionysiac ecstasy. However, there are important points of intersection between The Bacchae and Euripides’ earlier plays. Most notable are the expository prologue, spoken by Dionysus, with its deceptive features; the bawdy scene between Teiresias and Cadmus in the first episode; the vivid messenger speeches; and the appearance of Dionysus in the mechane in the exodos. The Bacchae is not simply about Dionysus and his religion; it also concerns Pentheus, king of Thebes, and his opposition to the new religion. The conflict between Dionysus and Pentheus and the eventual death of Pentheus at the hands of the gods’ followers make possible another superb Euripidean psychological study, this one of a human mind in deterioration. Dramatic events depict the progressive insanity of Pentheus, which, on a religious level, is imposed as a punishment for opposing Dionysus. On the level of imagery, the chorus emphasize Pentheus’s irrationality by describing the king as a “wild beast” in the Second Choral Ode. Bibliography Allan, William. The “Andromache” and Euripidean Tragedy. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2000. A thorough analysis of the play, which the author asserts deserves a greater degree of critical appreciation than it has received historically. Bloom, Harold, ed. Euripides. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2001. Part of a series on dramatists meant for secondary school students, this book contains essays examining the work and life of Euripides. Includes a bibliography and index. Croally, N. T. Euripidean Polemic: The Trojan Women and the Function of Tragedy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Croally argues that the function of Greek

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tragedy was didactic and that The Trojan Women educated by discussing Athenian ideology. He also looks at Euripides’ relation with the Sophists. Dunn, Francis M. Tragedy’s End: Closure and Innovation in Euripidean Drama. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. In this study of closure in Euripides’ works, Dunn argues that the playwright’s innovative endings opened up the form of tragedy although his artificial endings disallowed an authoritative reading of his plays. Gounaridou, Kiki. Euripides and “Alcestis”: Speculations, Simulations, and Stories of Love in the Athenian Culture. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1998. Gounaridou examines the ambiguity and indeterminancy in Alcestis, analyzing about eighty scholarly attempts to interpret the play and adding her own interpretation. Lloyd, Michael. The Agon in Euripides. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Lloyd examines the works of Euripides, focusing on the concept of agon. Rabinowitz, Nancy Sorkin. Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993. Rabinowitz looks at the prominence of women in Euripides’ plays and concludes that he was neither a misogynist nor a feminist. She sees him establishing male dominance while attributing strength to women. Sullivan, Shirley Darcus. Euripides’ Use of Psychological Terminology. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2000. Sullivan uses psychology to dissect the works of Euripides. Thomas J. Sienkewicz

George Farquhar George Farquhar

Born: Londonderry, Ireland; 1677 or 1678 Died: London, England; late May, 1707 Principal drama • Love and a Bottle, pr. 1698, pb. 1699; The Constant Couple: Or, A Trip to the Jubilee, pr. 1699, pb. 1700; Sir Harry Wildair, Being the Sequel of a Trip to the Jubilee, pr., pb. 1701; The Inconstant: Or, The Way to Win Him, pr., pb. 1702 (adaptation of John Fletcher’s play The Wild Goose Chase); The Twin Rivals, pr. 1702, pb. 1703; The Stage Coach, pr., pb. 1704 (with Peter Anthony Motteux; adaptation of Jean de La Chapelle’s play Les Carosses d’Orléans); The Recruiting Officer, pr., pb. 1706; The Beaux’ Stratagem, pr., pb. 1707 Other literary forms • George Farquhar wrote a few short poems, one long occasional poem entitled Barcellona (1710), numerous prologues and epilogues for plays, a short novel called The Adventures of Covent Garden (1698), and one miscellany entitled Love and Business (1702), besides contributing letters to two other miscellanies. Achievements • George Farquhar was one of the most popular dramatists at the end of the Restoration period. His success is illustrated by the number of prologues and epilogues he was asked to write for other plays and by his contributions to popular miscellanies such as Familiar and Courtly Letters (1700) and Letters of Wit, Politicks, and Morality (1701). The popularity of his plays with actors, particularly The Beaux’ Stratagem and The Recruiting Officer, accounted in no small measure for their survival during the eighteenth century and has played a large part in their continued visibility in modern times. Farquhar’s skill in modifying typical Restoration themes and characters accounted for much of the success of his work. He reintroduced a significant degree of realism into drama and used topical issues for comic effect. Although classed among the Restoration playwrights, he stands somewhat apart from them in his craftsmanship and his philosophy of drama, showing greater variety of plot and depth of feeling. In his later work, he sought to reconcile the liberal sexual attitudes of early comedy of manners with the more severe, increasingly moralistic tone of the early eighteenth century. He thus produced a type of comedy that stands between the traditional Restoration comedy of wit and the later sentimental comedy. The influence of Farquhar’s approach to comedy is most apparent not in the work of succeeding dramatists (although Oliver Goldsmith reveals an indebtedness to Farquhar, particularly in She Stoops to Conquer, pr., pb. 1773), but in the novels of Henry Fielding, in both terms of sense of humor and breadth of social milieu. Oddly enough, Farquhar was to exert a considerable influence on the development of eighteenth century German drama, mainly as a result of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s great enthusiasm for him. His continued influence on the history of German theater is displayed in the work of a major twentieth century dramatist, Bertolt Brecht. Biography • Many traditions and legends have developed around the sparse facts known about the life of George Farquhar. The earliest documented evidence is con283

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tained in the records of Trinity College, which list him as entering in July, 1694, at the age of seventeen, establishing his year of birth as either 1677 or 1678. These records also note Londonderry, Ireland, as his place of birth, and Walker as the name of his previous teacher. Farquhar entered Trinity College, presumably to study for the Church, with a sizarship that entitled him to an allowance of bread and ale in return for serving duties. He won a scholarship less than a year after entering. This four pounds a year was suspended for a time, however, because of his riotous behavior at the Donnybrook Fair. Sometime after February, 1696, he left Trinity without taking a degree. Not long after, Farquhar became an actor at the Smock Alley Theatre, the only theater in Dublin. His not particularly successful career as an actor ended after he wounded a fellow player in a duel scene, having forgotten to use a blunted foil. It was supposedly on the advice of his friend Robert Wilks, who was later to become one of the most popular actors on the London stage, that Farquhar went to London, probably in 1697, to write plays. Love and a Bottle, his first play, was produced at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane in December, 1698. It reportedly ran for nine nights, a successful debut for the young playwright. That same month, a pamphlet entitled The Adventures of Covent Garden appeared anonymously. It has been attributed with some certainty to Farquhar on the basis of hints in the preface, the technique of the writer, and the fact that one of the poems appears in a later text, this time signed by Farquhar. About a year later, again at Drury Lane, The Constant Couple was performed, which Farquhar later described as drawing some fifty audiences in a five-month period. Robert Wilks, who had probably joined the company at Farquhar’s request, was immensely popular as Sir Harry, and another actor gained the lifelong nickname of “Jubilee Dicky” as a result of the play. Suddenly, Farquhar had become the most popular dramatist in London. Between 1700 and 1703, three more plays appeared, all relatively unsuccessful: Sir Harry Wildair, a sequel to The Constant Couple; The Inconstant, an adaptation of John Fletcher’s The Wild Goose Chase (pr. 1621, pb. 1652); and The Twin Rivals. Sometime between the fall of 1700 and the spring of 1702, a date earlier than the once-proposed 1704, Farquhar—in collaboration with Peter Anthony Motteux—adapted Jean de La Chapelle’s Les Carosses d’Orléans into a farce entitled The Stage Coach. The authors probably did not make much money from it because one-act plays could not stand alone on a program. Adding to his increasing financial difficulties, Farquhar was married, probably in 1703, to Margaret Pemell, a widow by whom he was to have two daughters. Knowing that Farquhar needed money, Pemell tricked him into marriage by having rumors spread that she was an heiress. During the period from 1704 to 1706, Farquhar did not stage any plays. In 1704, he received a lieutenancy from the earl of Orrery’s Regiment of Foot, which was sent for service in Ireland. This commission assured him of a small yearly income of about fifty pounds. He was soon sent into western England on a recruiting campaign. In 1705, he wrote his poem Barcellona on the occasion of the taking of that city by the earl of Peterborough; the poem was not published until after his death. It was also in 1705, supposedly during a stay at the Raven Inn while recruiting at Shrewsbury, that The Recruiting Officer was written. In the spring of 1706, this play was an overwhelming success, first at Drury Lane, then at the Queen’s Theatre when some of the Drury Lane players moved to the new rival company. Despite this success, Farquhar still seems to have had financial difficulties. In the fall or winter of 1706, he sold his commission to pay his debts, reportedly after a promise by the duke of Ormonde that he would obtain for him another commission. This

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promise apparently came to nothing. In the meantime, Farquhar became ill. Wilks, seeking him out after an absence from the theater, advised him to write a new play and loaned him twenty guineas. The result was The Beaux’ Stratagem, written in six weeks during his continued illness. The new play, produced in March, 1707, proved to be another success. The register of St. Martin’s in the Fields lists Farquhar’s funeral, paid for by Wilks, on May 23, 1707, although his death must have occurred a few days earlier, rather than on the traditionally accepted date, that of the third performance of The Beaux’ Stratagem in April. He may have died of tuberculosis. Analysis • In general, past criticism of George Farquhar’s plays has centered on two basic areas: finding possible autobiographical references in both characters and settings and comparing Farquhar’s moral attitudes to those of previous Restoration dramatists. In fact, many critics view Farquhar as the harbinger of the eighteenth century sentimental comedy. Both these views fail to deal adequately with Farquhar’s artistic development of comedy. Unlike the writers of previous Restoration drama and subsequent sentimental comedy, Farquhar presents a balanced view of humanity and an equal appeal to the intellect and the emotions. His notion of the proper function of comedy, as expressed in a letter entitled “A Discourse upon Comedy” from Love and Business, includes the responsibility to portray the times accurately. The playwright’s diversions must be realistic if he is also to carry out his task of instruction. Following these ideas, Farquhar produced drama that rests at some point of balance between the earlier cynical, witty comedy of manners and the later melodramatic sentimental comedy. Thematic development, dramatic conflict, and sources of comedy in Farquhar’s three most popular plays–The Constant Couple, The Recruiting Officer, and The Beaux’ Stratagem—illustrate his philosophy of comedy. In these three plays, the treatment of theme, dramatic conflict, and sources of comedy contributes to an increased realism. The stiff, artificial characters of early Restoration drama have no place in Farquhar’s theater. The audience at the turn of the eighteenth century was mainly a middle-class audience with an awakening sense of social consciousness. Farquhar opened the window to a blast of fresh air for English comedy. By placing his characters in the world of innkeepers, military recruits, and highwaymen, Farquhar directed attention to humor rather than wit, and, in so doing, broadened the scope for comedy. His plays may well be less sharp-tongued than those of the dramatists who preceded him, but his work displays a greater naturalness and a deeper sense of life. His is the more human view of the world. The Constant Couple • The Constant Couple is characterized by a light, often farcical atmosphere centered on situational comedy that instructs both by positive and by negative example. The efforts of several of the characters to attend the Jubilee in Rome gave the play a topical flavor. Farquhar’s habit of sustaining dramatic tension by action rather than by dialogue is a primary characteristic of The Constant Couple. The main actions center on Lady Lurewell, Colonel Standard, Sir Harry Wildair, and Angelica Darling, whose names alone suggest positive and negative examples. Angelica virtuously rejects a hypocritical suitor in the beginning, quickly establishing her character. In revenge, this suitor, appropriately named Vizard, tells Sir Harry that Angelica is a prostitute. Sir Harry, who has followed Lady Lurewell from Europe in hopes of a conquest, makes several

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humorous attempts to solicit Angelica’s services; the best he can do is to look foolish and to hum when he discovers his mistake. Meanwhile, Lady Lurewell is involved in making all of her would-be lovers pay for the trickery of a man who seduced her at a young age. Her revenge takes the form of getting her suitors into foolish, farcical situations. Sir Harry finally abandons his wooing of Lady Lurewell to marry Angelica, and Standard is revealed as Lady Lurewell’s seducer, who has been faithful to his previous engagement with her. All potentially sentimental situations, such as the reconciliation of Lady Lurewell and Standard, are short and factual rather than long and emotional. Another aspect of The Constant Couple that is typical of Farquhar’s plays is his modification of the usual Restoration characters. Sir Harry is not the stereotyped rake, cool and polished, living by his wit alone. Above all, he is good-natured and full of contradictions. He has been a good soldier, but he avoids a duel. He loves fashion as well as French phrases. The Recruiting Officer • In The Recruiting Officer, typical Restoration characters and themes are similarly modified. The action centers on recruiting antics and the difficulties of the relationships of two couples: Plume and Silvia, and Worthy and Melinda. At the play’s end, both couples plan to be married. This theme of marriage, a typical Restoration theme, is a common motif in the play, but marriage is no longer a loveless relationship with both parties finding pleasure in affairs. Much of the play is devoted to the growing companionship between Plume and Silvia. This marriage, unlike the marriages in earlier Restoration drama, is not for money alone. Farquhar’s characters are also modified from the previous extremes of the Restoration. Farquhar’s fop figure, Brazen, who has hopes of marrying Melinda, represents a fragmentation of the usual Restoration fop. Brazen has none of the typical clothes and affectations of the Restoration fop and much less of the foolish gullibility. Farquhar instead takes the social qualities of a fop, exaggerates them, and fits them into a military atmosphere. Brazen’s bragging, traditional for the fop, encompasses the world of battle and the world of the beau. The social memory and name-dropping tendency of a fop are exaggerated. It is precisely these characteristics of Brazen that leave him open to ridicule by other characters within the play. The rake figure also undergoes modification in The Recruiting Officer. Plume asks the country girl, Rose, to his lodging not to debauch her but to get her to aid in his recruiting, his main area of manipulation. Plume has a definite share of kindness and good nature. He provides for the subsistence of his bastard and provides a husband for the mother. He releases the disguised Silvia from her enlistment because he values an obligation to her father above money. Plume’s dialogue has its share of wit, but it also reveals his fundamentally kind nature. Although wit is used to produce comedy in The Recruiting Officer, the dialogue also features puns, farce, and comical treatment of social issues. The greater use of the latter as one of the major sources of comedy distinguishes Farquhar from other Restoration dramatists. The recruiting issue underlies a large part of the comedy in The Recruiting Officer and often provides for major dramatic conflict. The light atmosphere is set in the prologue, when the action is foretold and ironically compared to heroic times. The recruiting tricks of Kite play on possibilities, however improbable, of military advancement and even on the superstitions of the people when he dons his fortunetelling disguise. Less gentle is the comedy of Plume’s entering his bastard as a recruit and wanting no one in his company who can write or who is a gentleman.

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The Beaux’ Stratagem • In Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem, social issues and modification of traditional Restoration themes and characters again play a prominent role. The Beaux’ Stratagem is regarded by most critics as Farquhar’s finest achievement. Its great sense of naturalness, of fidelity to life, continues to make it a great favorite with actors and audiences alike. The action centers on Aimwell’s courtship of Dorinda, first of all for her money but later for love. Archer, Aimwell’s friend disguised as a servant, also courts Cherry, the innkeeper’s daughter, and Mrs. Sullen, an unhappily married woman. In the meantime, a series of scenes alternates between the inn, whose owner is a highwayman, and the manor, in which a robbery and a midnight love scene occur. Farquhar’s use of the social issue of the recent war against France and the resulting anti-French sentiment pervades all levels of the play. In the inn, Frenchmen pay double the regular fee. Scrub, Mr. Sullen’s servant, parodies the French, while Aimwell quips that he would not like a woman who was fond of a Frenchman. Count Bellair, Mrs. Sullen’s suitor, and Foigard, Bellair’s chaplain, both come in for a large portion of the anti-French comedy. The concept of social equality also becomes a major source for comedy, including the financial inequality created by primogeniture. Gibbet, the highwayman, excuses himself because he is a younger brother. Aimwell initiates dramatic conflict because of his status as a younger brother. In The Beaux’ Stratagem, Farquhar stresses the fact that class differences do not correspond to levels of virtue. He achieves this emphasis by showing the same goodness in Cherry and Lady Bountiful, and the same corruption in Boniface and Sullen. In the robbery scene, Archer himself is cleverly associated with the thieves by Mrs. Sullen’s cry of “Thieves, Murder.” The same fundamental human qualities are thus shown to exist both in the inn and in the country mansion. As in The Recruiting Officer, the plot of The Beaux’ Stratagem deals with a modified marriage theme. The subject of marriage is not discussed using the common gaming imagery of the earlier Restoration drama, and the only slave imagery is used to describe Mrs. Sullen’s marriage. In this instance, the marriage conflict is a conflict between law and nature. Sullen lies with his wife because of the law, and the natural differences between them do not come within the bounds of divorce law. In the conclusion, however, the maxim of nature as the first lawgiver is upheld. The roster of traditional figures, as in The Recruiting Officer, is again modified. Count Bellair in The Beaux’ Stratagem is a different variety of fop. He is obviously less foolish than the traditional fop because Mrs. Sullen chooses the Count to be part of her manipulations. Bellair shows extraordinary intelligence, for a fop, in initiating his own manipulation to get into Mrs. Sullen’s closet. In creating Count Bellair, Farquhar took one aspect of the traditional fop, the beau, and exaggerated it. Bellair functions exceedingly well in this role, but he is also ridiculed because of his French qualities and becomes emblematic of the deeper conflict of social ideas in Farquhar. Other major works short fiction: The Adventures of Covent Garden, 1698. poetry: Barcellona, 1710. miscellaneous: Love and Business, 1702; The Complete Works of George Farquhar, 1930 (Charles Stonehill, editor); The Works of George Farquhar, 1988 (Shirley Strum Kenny, editor).

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Bibliography Bull, John. Vanbrugh and Farquhar. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Bull compares and contrasts the comic dramatists Sir John Vanbrugh and George Farquhar. Includes bibliography and index. James, Eugene Nelson. The Development of George Farquhar as a Comic Dramatist. The Hague: Mouton, 1972. After a brief introduction, “The Traditions in Farquhar Criticism,” James marches through the plays a chapter at a time. The Recruiting Officer is judged “climactic” for its form, and The Beaux’ Stratagem is the “fulfillment of a promise.” Rich source notes. Milhous, Judith, and Robert D. Hume. Producible Interpretation: Eight English Plays, 1675-1707. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985. “By ‘producible interpretation’ we mean a critical reading that a director could communicate to an audience in performance,” the authors note. The Beaux’ Stratagem is “an effective stage vehicle,” and the authors devote twenty-seven pages to discussing possibilities of stage interpretation. An insightful essay. Rothstein, Eric. George Farquhar. New York: Twayne, 1967. This volume in the Twayne series is an excellent introduction to and overview of both Farquhar’s life and his work. Stafford-Clark, Max. Letters to George: The Account of a Rehearsal. 1990. Reprint. London: N. Hern Books, 1997. These letters look at Farquhar’s Recruiting Officer and the production of Farquhar’s dramas. Includes bibliography. Eril Barnett Hughes, updated by Frank Day

Horton Foote Horton Foote

Born: Wharton, Texas; March 14, 1916 Principal drama • Wharton Dance, pr. 1939; Texas Town, pr. 1941; Out of My House, pr. 1942; Only the Heart, pr. 1942, pb. 1944; Homecoming, pr. 1944; The Chase, pr., pb. 1952; The Trip to Bountiful, pr. 1953, pb. 1954; The Traveling Lady, pr. 1954, pb. 1955; Horton Foote: Three Plays, pb. 1962; Gone with the Wind, pr. 1972 (based on Margaret Mitchell’s novel); The Orphans’ Home, pr. 1977-1997, pb. 1987-1988 (a cycle of nine plays); Night Seasons, pr. 1978, pb. 1993; Harrison, Texas, pr. 1985 (three one-act plays: The One-Armed Man, The Prisoner’s Song, and Blind Date); The Habitation of Dragons, pr. 1988, pb. 1993; Dividing the Estate, pr. 1989; Selected One-Act Plays of Horton Foote, pb. 1989; Four New Plays, pb. 1993; The Young Man from Atlanta, pr., pb. 1995; Laura Dennis, pr. 1995, pb. 1996; Collected Plays, pb. 1996; Getting Frankie Married—And Afterwards, pb. 1998, pr. 2002; “Getting Frankie Married—And Afterwards” and Other Plays, pb. 1998; The Last of the Thorntons, pr., pb. 2000; The Carpetbagger’s Children, pr. 2001 Other literary forms • Horton Foote’s best-known works are the screenplays for such successful films as To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Tender Mercies (1983), and The Trip to Bountiful (1985). Beginning in the early fifties, he also wrote numerous scripts for various television programs. His novel The Chase came out in 1956. In 1999, he published Farewell: A Memoir of a Texas Childhood, which was followed in 2001 by a sequel, Beginnings: A Memoir. Achievements • Along with the Academy Awards he received for his screenplays of To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies, Horton Foote won a Pulitzer Prize for his play The Young Man from Atlanta (1995). He was also nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay of The Trip to Bountiful and received an Emmy in 1997 for his adaptation of the William Faulkner story Old Man. His work has received numerous other awards, and in 1996, Foote was named to the Theater Hall of Fame. Biography • Albert Horton Foote, Jr., was born in Wharton, Texas, on March 14, 1916. His family had significant connections in Texas history, his great-great-grandfather having been the first elected lieutenant governor of Texas. While attending high school in Wharton, Foote developed an interest in drama and played parts in several school plays. He decided to study acting, and though the Depression was well under way, he was given enough assistance by members of his family to take classes at an acting school in Dallas, and a year later, his father sent him to California to study at the Pasadena Playhouse. During his two years in Pasadena, Foote worked on his acting skills, and after seeing Eva Le Gallienne in a memorable performance of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (pb. 1890; English translation, 1891), Foote resolved to pursue a career in the theater. After completing his second year in Pasadena, he accepted a friend’s offer of summer work associated with a drama company in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. After two months in Massachusetts, Foote moved to New York City, where he survived by getting occasional acting parts. A chance encounter with an old acquaintance led to his 289

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meeting Tamara Daykarhanova, Andrius Jilinsky, and Vera Soloviova, Russian exiles who taught acting, and from whom Foote began taking classes. Later, Foote joined several other students in forming the American Actors Company. In 1939, Agnes de Mille suggested to Foote that he write a play. He wrote a one-act play titled Gulf Storm, which was produced as Wharton Dance by the American Actors Company and favorably reviewed by Robert Coleman. This production marks a significant milestone in the career of Foote, whose career as playwright was to last more than sixty years and to include, by his own estimate, some sixty plays. He continued to play various theatrical parts with the American Actors and wherever else he could find work, but as his desire to write plays grew, his desire to act in plays diminished. He had already realized that in writing drama he could combine the world of his own past with the cosmopolitan world of the theater, and it is significant that he went home to Wharton, Texas, to write his second play, Texas Town. Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, Foote’s third play Out of My House was produced, and Foote prepared himself for the military draft. Somewhat to his shock, he was found by the medical examiners to have a hernia, which disqualified him. Foote found a job as a night-shift elevator attendant, which gave him time to write. His play Only the Heart was produced in both 1942 and 1943. While working as manager of a bookstore, he met his future wife, Lillian Vallish, and the two were married in 1945. Foote continued to write, and, in the year of his marriage, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he was a principal figure in the formation of a new acting school and theater company. While in Washington, Foote taught drama and directed four of his own new plays, and he directed plays by Ibsen, Federico García Lorca, and Tennessee Williams. By 1949, however, he came to realize that he preferred to write as he had done before going to Washington. As he explains in Beginnings, “I felt I was a storyteller, and that I wanted to write plays simply and directly.” In the fall of 1949, Horton and his wife returned to New York, where he found a position teaching at the American Theater Wing. By this time, the development of television was producing new opportunities for actors and writers, and Foote’s growing reputation led to his employment as writer for the new medium. He began writing for The Gabby Hayes Show in 1950 and soon was asked to write nine onehour plays for television. He remained a writer of stage plays during this period. In 1956, he completed his first screenplay, an adaptation of Clinton Seeley’s novel Storm Fear, and the film appeared that same year. Also in 1956, the Footes moved to Nyack, New York. Although Foote remained busy (Marion Ettlinger) in the 1950’s, his next major career

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achievement was his successful screen adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), which had won a Pulitzer Prize. When the film was released in 1962, it won Oscars for both Foote and leading actor Gregory Peck. In 1971, Foote’s stage adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind (1936) was produced in London. By 1974, he had begun the composition of what would eventually be a nine-play cycle collectively titled The Orphans’ Home. By the late 1970’s, Foote was again fully engaged with the stage, and though he wrote two television adaptations of short stories by Flannery O’Connor (“The Displaced Person”) and William Faulkner (“Barn Burning”) during this time, he was also teaching, directing, and writing. In the early 1980’s, his plays continued to be produced, and Foote won his second Academy Award for his screenplay of Tender Mercies (1983). His 1985 screenplay for The Trip to Bountiful was also nominated for an Oscar. Foote began producing independent films based on some of his earlier plays, with 1918 appearing in 1985, On Valentine’s Day in 1986, and Courtship in 1987. In 1988, he directed The Habitation of Dragons in its first version, with his daughter Hallie and his son Horton, Jr., among the cast. Foote remained productive and professionally active through the 1990’s, despite the death in 1992 of his beloved wife. In 1995, he not only received a Pulitzer Prize for his play The Young Man from Atlanta but also was honored by Brigham Young University, which held a festival of his works. In 1999, he published his first volume of memoirs, dealing mainly with his family’s past, the local history of Wharton, Texas, and the events that led to his departure to Pasadena to study acting. The second volume, which describes his life in Pasadena, New York, and Washington, appeared in 2001. Also in 2001, Foote’s play The Carpetbagger’s Children, with Jean Stapleton, Hallie Foote, and Roberta Maxwell, had its world premiere in Houston, Texas. Analysis • Like fellow southern fiction writers William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, Horton Foote derives much of his inspiration from his strong identification with a region he knew intimately. Also like Faulkner and O’Connor, Foote draws from his knowledge of local information a powerful sense of larger truths, particularly that of the human potential for spiritual nobility in the face of suffering. Unlike these authors, however, Foote does not allow the intensity of his perception to shape his art into the macabre, and he achieves his best effects with a certain lightness of touch that never reduces his work to triviality but instead magnifies the significance of casual things. Foote’s mastery of the rhythms of conversation must be to some extent a product of his years of studying the art of acting, but many of those rhythms come from the endless conversations of his Wharton childhood. Because most of Foote’s plays are set in Harrison, Texas, a fictional version of Wharton, the playwright’s preoccupation with the past constitutes a significant element of his dramaturgic vision. A descendant of families who had established themselves in Texas in the nineteenth century, Foote was thirteen when the Great Depression struck. His father, a diehard Democrat, became an ardent supporter of Franklin Roosevelt, who was one of the principal advocates of political reform. Thus Foote, who, given his ancestry, might have joined many of his fellow southerners in resisting change, saw in his father an example of openness to change. His experience in California and in New York also gave him a better sense of some of the less laudable aspects of southern life in the middle third of the century. Combined with this wider perspective, however, was an abiding sympathy for the ordinary people who live in a town whose economy is at the mercy of

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the notoriously unreliable cotton harvest. Always important to Foote is the relation of the individual to family, to the community, to hardship, and to death. Only the Heart • Originally titled Mamie Borden, this play explores the relationships among the members of the Borden family. Mamie Borden, the central character, copes with life by controlling others, orchestrating a marriage for her daughter so as to maintain power over her. Mamie’s machinations, however, only estrange Julia, who departs with her new spouse. Because Mamie’s schemes of power have already alienated her husband, who has become unfaithful to her, Mamie finds herself finally isolated. This play bears an odd resemblance to Sophocles’ AntigonT (441 b.c.e.; Antigone, 1729), if one considers the similarity of Mamie and Creon, each of whom allows a domineering spirit to annihilate the possible effect of good intentions. Foote’s play, however, emphasizes the danger of dissociation of heart and mind in personal relationships. The Trip to Bountiful • An early play that Foote later adapted for the screen, The Trip to Bountiful embodies many of the themes and qualities essential to his best writing. The main character is Mrs. Watts, who lives with her son and his wife in an apartment in Houston. Her son, Ludie, is a hangdog loser who loves his mother but is dominated by his selfish and rude wife, who only tolerates her mother-in-law’s presence because of her pension check. Mrs. Watts’s dream is to escape to her old home place at Bountiful, a few miles from Harrison. The dynamics of this household are disturbing. Mrs. Watts shows occasional ominous signs of losing mental clarity, suggesting that the days of her life (and pension check) are numbered. Ludie realizes that he needs to make more money, but his helplessness is not promising. He cannot even defend his mother from the abusive comments of his wife. Jessie Mae herself would like to see Ludie bring in more money, but she is generally satisfied with the situation because she controls the pension check once it arrives. Her complaints mainly have to do with the inconvenience of having Mrs. Watts around. She particularly dislikes Mrs. Watts’s habit of singing hymns. When Mrs. Watts, who has hidden the month’s pension check away for the purpose, escapes on the bus to Harrison, she finds that the friend with whom she has planned to stay, and who was the last person living in Bountiful, has died. The sheriff arrives, having received word of Mrs. Watts’s escape from her family, and, moved by her despair, eventually drives her to her old home, where they await the arrival of Ludie and Jessie Mae from Houston. When the two arrive in a car Ludie has borrowed from a friend, Mrs. Watts and her son reminisce privately in front of the house. At first Mrs. Watts is made desperate by the imminent prospect of returning to Houston, but as she looks into her son’s agonized face she puts her own grief aside, telling him: “I’ve found my dignity and my strength.” Calmly accepting Jessie Mae’s new rules for her future behavior, Mrs. Watts quietly says good-bye to Bountiful and walks away. In this final scene, a number of themes come together. Ludie (whose name suggests that he is something of a joke) is the last of the family, and the play strongly suggests that he and his wife are to have no children. The neglected old family home, it is noted, will soon fall into the river. Ludie’s predicament, like that of the house and of his mother, results from the country’s shift from a rural, agricultural economy to the industrial economy of the city, where car brakes squeal at all hours and country people have trouble sleeping. Yet compassion exists, and Mrs. Watts’s love for her son is still such that she renounces her own claims to happiness to end his suffering. In addition, there

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is the compassion of the sheriff, and that of Thelma, the young woman with whom Mrs. Watts rides the bus from Houston to Harrison. Despite the annihilation of Mrs. Watts’s fantasy of a return to the past, the end of the play finds her with a new resolve that makes her more admirable than the confused and desperate person she was earlier in the play, and it can even be argued that Ludie, who has after all come up with the gumption to ask for a raise and to borrow a car, is showing signs of resolve, particularly when he speaks very firmly to Jessie Mae at the end of the play. The Orphans’ Home • This cycle of nine plays represents Foote’s engagement of creative imagination with the specific history of his family and region. Resulting to some extent from his meditations on the deaths of his parents, this cycle of plays explores and develops various dimensions of the cycle of birth and death, elaborating, as always, the potential of personal relationships to fulfill or frustrate those involved in them. Roots in a Parched Ground, the first in the sequence, had been written before Foote decided to write the cycle, but the other plays were written in what seems to be an expanded variation of the early Athenian trilogy or the Shakespearian tetralogy. Other major works long fiction: The Chase, 1956 (adptation of his play). screenplays: Storm Fear, 1956 (adaptation of Clinton Seeley’s novel); To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962 (adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel); Tomorrow, 1972 (adaptation of William Faulkner’s short story); Tender Mercies, 1983; The Trip to Bountiful, 1985 (adaptation of his play); Of Mice and Men, 1992 (adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel). teleplay: The Shape of the River, 1960. nonfiction: Farewell: A Memoir of a Texas Childhood, 1999; Beginnings: A Memoir, 2001. Bibliography Briley, Rebecca. You Can Go Home Again: The Focus on Family in the Works of Horton Foote. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Based on Briley’s 1990 doctoral dissertation from the University of Kentucky, this study provides useful information about the importance of family in Foote’s plays. However, Briley was not able to obtain access to some important resources that are now available, and her work, though helpful, suffers somewhat from excessive reiteration of her thesis. Dawidziak, Mark. Horton Foote’s “The Shape of the River”: The Lost Teleplay About Mark Twain with History and Analysis. New York: Applause, 2003. Contains the complete script of Foote’s 1960 teleplay about Mark Twain’s last years, with extensive additional material about the production and Foote’s television writing. Moore, Barbara, and David G. Yellin, eds. Horton Foote’s Three Trips to Bountiful. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1993. This work compares the alterations and revisions made in the successive versions of The Trip to Bountiful between the first 1953 version and the film version of 1985. Changes in the texts are set forth in a chart, and there is a useful bibliography. Porter, Laurin R. “An Interview with Horton Foote.” Studies in American Drama, 1945Present 6, no. 2 (1991): 177-194. A 1988 interview with Foote, covering his tastes in literature, his development and training as actor and playwright, and the background of The Orphans’ Home cycle. This interview gives the reader a good sense of Foote’s conversational style, his humor, and his modesty.

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Wood, Gerald C. Horton Foote and the Theater of Intimacy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. Wood argues that Foote’s dramas reflect his characters’ struggles against fear, struggles that are often made victorious by the achievement of a personal intimacy made possible by a spiritual feminine presence. Well written and persuasive, this work also includes a splendid bibliographical appendix of materials for those working on Foote’s plays, screenplays, and teleplays. Wood, Gerald C., ed. Horton Foote: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1998. Contains twelve articles by various critics, divided into three main categories: “Biographical/ Contextual Essays,” “Perspectives on Style/Themes,” and “The Signature Theater Series.” Includes a chronology of Foote’s life, a bibliography of his works, an annotated critical biography, and an index. Robert W. Haynes

Brian Friel Brian Friel

Born: Killyclogher, near Omagh, Northern Ireland; January 9, 1929 Principal drama • A Doubtful Paradise, pr. 1959 (also pr. as The Francophile); The Enemy Within, pr. 1962, pb. 1979; The Blind Mice, pr. 1963; Philadelphia, Here I Come!, pr. 1964, pb. 1965; The Loves of Cass Maguire, pr. 1966, pb. 1967; Lovers, pr. 1967, pb. 1968; Crystal and Fox, pr. 1968, pb. 1970; The Mundy Scheme, pr. 1969, pb. 1970; The Gentle Island, pr. 1971, pb. 1973; The Freedom of the City, pr. 1973, pb. 1974; Volunteers, pr. 1975, pb. 1979; Living Quarters, pr. 1977, pb. 1978; Faith Healer, pr. 1979, pb. 1980; Aristocrats, pr. 1979, pb. 1980; Translations, pr. 1980, pb. 1981; Three Sisters, pr., pb. 1981 (adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s play); The Communication Cord, pr. 1982, pb. 1983; Selected Plays of Brian Friel, pb. 1984; Fathers and Sons, pr., pb. 1987; Making History, pr. 1988, pb. 1989; Dancing at Lughnasa, pr., pb. 1990; The London Vertigo, pb. 1990, pr. 1992 (adaptation of Charles Macklin’s play The True Born Irishman); A Month in the Country: After Turgenev, pr., pb. 1992; Wonderful Tennessee, pr., pb. 1993; Molly Sweeney, pr., pb. 1994; Plays, pb. 1996-1999 (2 volumes); Give Me Your Answer, Do!, pr., pb. 1997; Uncle Vanya, pr., pb. 1998 (adaptation of Chekhov’s play); The Yalta Game, pr., pb. 2001 (adaptation of Chekhov’s short story “The Lady with the Lapdog”); Afterplay, pr., pb. 2002; The Bear, pr., pb. 2002 (adaptation of Chekhov’s play); Three Plays After, pb. 2002 (includes The Yalta Game, The Bear, and Afterplay) Other literary forms • Brian Friel has published two collections of short stories, The Saucer of Larks (1962) and The Gold in the Sea (1966). Two selections from these works have appeared: The Saucer of Larks: Stories of Ireland (1969) and Selected Stories (1979), reprinted as The Diviner (1982). The short stories in these collections are gentle, wellturned tales of ordinary people caught, largely, in the coils of personal circumstances. They belong firmly in the tradition of pastoral frustration, to which the majority of modern Irish short stories belong. The narrative tone of Friel’s stories is genial, quizzical, and often humorous, and it anticipates the affection and dignity that Friel’s plays typically accord the common person. Achievements • After a modest but assured beginning as short-story writer, Brian Friel has grown, thanks to his plays, into one of the most important figures in the cultural phenomenon that will surely come to be known as the Ulster Renaissance. Like many other artists from the North of Ireland, Friel has had his work deepened and darkened by the history of his native province, yet it is also true that his willingness to face that history and its web of cultural subtexts has thrown into bolder relief the innate humanity of all of his work, rendering it all the more estimable. Throughout his plays, Friel has persistently exposed stereotype, cliché, and narrowness of various kinds. In their place, he has substituted joy, openness, and individuality, qualities that enhance the human lot and for which his birthplace has not been noted. A deep sense of division informs both his characters and his dramatic practice, yet acknowledgment of division is an avenue to sympathy, not a recipe for impairment. Emphasizing with increasing vigor, range, and sophistication 295

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the value of spontaneity and the necessity of love, Friel’s work is a moving—and stirring—statement of human solidarity in a dark time. This statement is constantly renewed by the author’s formal innovations. Friel’s technical brilliance, however, does not permit him to break faith with the heritage of twentieth century Irish drama: its attachment to a sense of locale, its concern for the common lot, and its resistance to institutionalized modes of thought. In fact, Friel makes these elements interrelate fruitfully and unexpectedly by subjecting them to the clear, unblinking light of his moral intelligence. Historically and artistically, Friel’s place as Ulster’s most important dramatist ever and as one of Ireland’s most significant modern dramatists is secure. Friel’s achievements have been acknowledged with numerous drama awards on both sides of the Atlantic, and in 1981, Translations received the Ewart Biggs Memorial Prize, instituted to recognize outstanding contributions to Anglo-Irish understanding. In 1992, Friel’s play Dancing at Lughnasa won a New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play of the 1991-1992 theater season. Also in 1992, Dancing at Lughnasa received a Tony Award for best play in addition to two other Tony Awards: for featured actress (Brid Brennan) and for director (Patrick Mason). The American staging of Molly Sweeney in 1996 received both the Outer Critics Circle Award and the Lucille Lortel Award for outstanding Off-Broadway play of the season. Friel was elected to Aosdana, a national association of Irish artists, in 1982. He received an Honorary Doctorate of Literature from the National University of Ireland in 1983 and was elected to the Irish senate in 1987. The Irish Times awarded him its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999 for his contributions Irish literature and theater. He is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters. Biography • Order, industry, fixity, and quiet are the hallmarks of Brian Friel’s life. He was born in Killyclogher, near Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, on January 9, 1929, the son of a teacher. The family lived in Omagh for ten more years before moving to Derry, the second city of Ulster and the place that, along with its County Donegal hinterland, may be properly considered to be Friel’s homeland. Friel was educated at St. Columb’s College, Derry, and at Maynooth, the Irish national seminary, where he was graduated in 1948, though it was not his intention to study for the priesthood. He attended St. Joseph’s Teacher Training College, Belfast, from 1949 to 1950, and for the next ten years taught in various schools in Derry. In 1954, he married Anne Morrison, with whom he would have four daughters and a son. During this period, Friel began to write in his spare time, and from the mid-1950’s, he was a regular contributor of short stories to The New Yorker. During this period, he also turned to drama as a form, beginning with two radio plays, which were broadcast in 1958, and at the end of the 1950’s, he branched out into staged drama. In 1960, Friel resigned from teaching to devote himself to writing. The wisdom of that decision has been confirmed by the continuing string of international successes that has ensued. English and, particularly, American audiences have greeted his plays at least as enthusiastically as have Irish ones. Friel’s rapid development as a playwright was decisively influenced by the celebrated director Tyrone Guthrie, at whose theater in Minneapolis Friel spent some months in 1968, in his words, “hanging around.” Beginning in 1980, a more public Friel has been in evidence as the moving spirit behind Field Day Productions, a theater company formed in collaboration, chiefly, with the actor Stephen Rea. Based in Derry, the company’s objective is to renew the theatri-

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cal life of provincial Ireland by means of touring productions. Friel has also been instrumental in establishing Field Day Publications. This imprint has issued, most notably, an important series of pamphlets on Irish cultural matters by leading contemporary Irish poets and critics. In 1991, the three-volume The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, edited by Seamus Deane, was published, extending and consolidating much of the range and interest of the Field Day pamphlet series and creating a landmark in the development of Ireland’s conception of its literary culture. This publication coincided with the international success of Friel’s play Dancing at Lughnasa, which played to packed theaters not only in Dublin but also in London’s West End and on Broadway, and which brought its author a large number of theater awards. Friel resigned from Field Day in 1994. That same, year he debuted as a director with the premiere of Molly Sweeney at the Gate Theater in Dublin. Since 1998, his work for the theater has been dominated by his treatments and interpretations of the stories and plays of Anton Chekhov, with whose work his own has been favorably compared. Afterplay, which debuted at the Gate Theatre in Dublin in 2002, is an original play based on an imagined meeting between characters from Chekhov’s plays Dyadya Vanya (pb. 1897, pr. 1899; Uncle Vanya, 1914) and Tri sestry (pr., pb. 1901, revised pb. 1904; The Three Sisters, 1920), both of which Friel adapted. Analysis • Brian Friel’s dramatic output, wide-ranging in subject matter though it is, possesses a notable consistency of theme, tone, and attitude to the stage. Whether a Friel play’s pretext is the mission of St. Columbia, Derry’s patron saint, to the island of Iona in the sixth century (The Enemy Within), or the living room of decaying gentlefolk (Aristocrats), a hedge school in nineteenth century rural Ireland (Translations), or the encampment of a traveling show (Crystal and Fox or rather differently, Faith Healer), familiar themes recur. Their recurrence, however, is invariably fresh, given new life by the author’s unfailing sympathy and the suppleness with which he shapes unexpected cultural nuances. Such flexibility and control may be seen as an expression of the author’s essential good nature. In Friel’s plays, one can also see one of his work’s most consistent traits, his daring use of theater itself. Friel’s work shows a marked flair for dramaturgical experimentation, but the experiments themselves are exclusively in the service of broader human concerns, revealing how hollow yet how inevitable ritualized behavior can be, for example, or economically contrasting characters’ public and private spaces. A consummate orchestrator of theatrical space and (as is increasingly evident from his later work) the possessor of a light, though commanding, touch with ensemble work, Friel’s is preeminently a writer’s theater rather than a director’s or a star’s. Foremost among Friel’s broad human preoccupations is love—its persistence, its betrayal, its challenge. Few of Friel’s characters manage to rise fully to the challenge of loving adequately. Their inadequacy is transmitted from one play to another, like a cynosure of frailty. What is significant, however, is not success but the apparent inevitability of exposure to a sense of human limitation and imperfection. Love generates many other important Friel themes. The affection for common people—uneducated, shrewd street-folk—which is unsentimentally present in all of his plays, has a sympathetic loving kindness in it that his characters themselves generally decline to embody. The destructiveness of family life, particularly the unhappy effects that parents may have on children—in Friel’s world an unredeemable original sin—is also a feature of

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the author’s preoccupation with love. Love likewise informs such concerns as fidelity to place and to cultural inheritance. A marked sharpness in attitude toward behavior that is determined by cultural institutions rather than by the vigor of the individual psyche is, again, motivated by Friel’s concern with love. In fact, love has developed in Friel’s work from being, in early plays, a matter of impossible romance, family bitterness, or sexual buoyancy to being the finely calibrated optic of a worldview. Friel’s manipulation of the optic in later plays reveals love as a saving grace, not only personally but also culturally—and usually both, interdependently, offering at once the tolerance of charity and the zest of passion, a healing ethic and a moral force. Philadelphia, Here I Come! • Yet division, symptomatic of love’s failure, is very much in evidence in Friel’s work. In Philadelphia, Here I Come!—his first and major international success—the dichotomy between self and world is given novel dramaturgical embodiment through the device of having two actors play different aspects of the protagonist, Gar O’Donnell: Public Gar and his alter ego, Private Gar. The world sees only the former, while the audience readily perceives that it is the latter who has the greater authenticity, by virtue of his ability to satirize Public’s gaucherie and emotional timidity. (Gar O’Donnell is the most winning representative of the naïve, ardent youth, a type beloved of Friel, first seen as the novice in The Enemy Within.) The action takes place on the night before, and early morning of, Gar’s emigration to the United States, and consists less of a plot than of a tissue of what Friel in later plays calls “episodes.” In effect, Gar’s past life passes before him. The passage takes place in two dimensions—the public, by means of farewells, and the private, by means of Private’s somewhat manic and mordantly witty analysis of that life’s nugatory achievements. The only thing which will relieve life at home in Ballybeg of his abiding sense of depletion, as far as Gar is concerned, is an expression of affection by his father. It is never made; Gar is obliged to carry his incompleteness with him. In that case, staying or going becomes moot. As in The Enemy Within, the conclusion is inconclusive. The difference is that in the earlier play, inconclusiveness was enacted in a condition; here, rather more satisfyingly, it is embodied in a character. Philadelphia, Here I Come! also benefits from having its cultural resonances localized, as well as having its treatment of division given clever dramatic form. This play launched Friel’s mature playwriting career. It contains an affectionately critical characterization of restlessness and brio, as well as failed love and a lament for it, and longings for a fuller life and a fear of it. Crystal and Fox • Friel’s preoccupation with love, familial relations, and romance is offered in a delicate, bittersweet blend in Crystal and Fox, one of his most effective works. Crystal and Fox, a man-and-wife team, own a traveling show of no particular distinction. At first, audience response is poor, and Fox, in a typical fit of recklessness, fires some of the players. The company is now reduced to four, one of whom is Crystal’s ailing and incompetent father, who is soon hospitalized. The traveling show, for so long an expression of Fox’s restlessness, now attains a stasis, a condition that makes Fox mean and destructive. All that can save the situation is the unwavering romantic attachment, tantamount to worship, that Crystal and Fox have for each other. Into their impoverished encampment comes Gabriel, their son. Gabriel has spent years in England, like Cass in The Loves of Cass Maguire, the victim of a family row. Now, however, all is forgiven, and Gabriel is seen as an embodiment of renewal. He soon tells Fox that he is on the run from the English police, having, in des-

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peration, committed robbery with violence. This information is kept from Crystal until Gabriel is arrested before her eyes. Crystal and Fox sell the show’s remaining properties to help Gabriel, but en route to Gabriel’s trial, Fox lies, telling Crystal that he informed on his son for the sake of the police reward. A demented Crystal leaves her husband, allowing the play to conclude with a statement from Fox about the motivation for his destructiveness. He wanted the whole of life to be reduced to one ardent form—namely, his romantic love of Crystal. Such a love, he believes, expresses the best in him. Everything else is tainted with contingency, incompleteness, and mortality. Yet the finality and totality of his love for Crystal is what prompts treachery and ruin. The play is satisfying on a number of levels. Its spare language complements its essentially violent action. Friel’s metaphoric use of playing and roles is deeply ingrained in the piece’s fundamental texture. Bleakness and joy are communicated with great clarity and economy. The need for romance—the desire that there be something more to life than the mere role one plays in it—is boldly established and subjected to an impressively unsentimental critique. In all, Crystal and Fox is a fitting culmination of Friel’s early phase. From this point onward, his work, while not forsaking love as a theme or the family setting as its representative focus, has engaged more public issues and has placed less emphasis on individual destiny than on collective experience, a departure that has meant the virtual elimination of the often stereotyped minor characters present in his early work. The Freedom of the City • With The Freedom of the City, Friel began his major phase. Innovative dramaturgy, a marriage of private and public themes, and a major renovation of the part played by love in human affairs, all make this play a work of notable theatrical events. The city in question is Derry, and the play is inspired by, though it does not mimic, the events of Bloody Sunday, January 30, 1972, when British forces killed thirteen civil rights demonstrators. Friel opens the play’s action by having his three protagonists flee from the violent disruption by army and police of a banned civil rights demonstration. They seek refuge successfully in the mayor’s parlor of the Guildhall (the ease with which they do so being one of the play’s many ironies about “security”), and with nothing better to do, they have a party. They drink the mayor’s liquor, smoke his cigars, dress up in ceremonial robes, and parody official ceremonies, including the conferring of the freedom of the city. Skinner, the most restless, deprived, and anarchistically inclined of the threesome, does a minimal amount of damage to property, stabbing a city father’s portrait with a ceremonial sword. His opposite is Michael, a clean-cut embodiment of civil rights aspirations, who, without skepticism, wants nothing more than a fair chance to better himself. Between them stands Lilly, a blowsy mother of eleven, who approves of Michael’s respectability yet is stimulated by Skinner’s vitality. Eventually, summoned by military bullhorn to emerge, the three (now thought of, thanks to rumor, as forty) emerge from the circumscribed freedom of their refuge, to be shot in cold blood on the Guildhall steps. The play’s action, however, is only one of its levels. It is surrounded by frameworks of judicial and intellectual evaluation. Thus, from the outset, the audience is privy to the findings of the court of inquiry, which examines and distorts the protagonists’ actions and characters. The audience is also periodically subjected to an analysis of the culture of poverty voiced by an American sociologist. These two framing devices—

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sophisticated revisions of an ironic use of omniscience, introduced in Lovers and used most tellingly in Living Quarters—help the audience appreciate the informal, living texture of the trio’s activities, as it is that very quality that the processes of evaluation and formal discourse are unable to admit. Perhaps the play is overloaded with framing devices. In addition to the two central ones mentioned, there are also two that derive from the trio’s own cultural constituency, represented by the Roman Catholic Church and by a ballad singer. These two also distort what the characters embody. The aim to be comprehensive is no doubt laudable, and the resultant verbal range is an impressive feature of the play, but the ensuing emphasis on the distorting effects of objectification is overdone. At the same time, however, such an emphasis also draws attention to The Freedom of the City as a hymn to the theater, both in the value it implicitly locates in the spontaneous antics of the three victims and in the sense that the stage is large enough for spontaneity and formality to play opposite each other. Volunteers • In Volunteers, Friel also uses an event and a set of issues from contemporary Irish history. The matter in question is the Wood Quay, Dublin, excavation, where, during groundbreaking for a new office block, invaluable remains of Viking Dublin were unearthed. Efforts to preserve the site on the part of local bien-pensants led to ugly clashes with the developers, the law, and Dublin’s city fathers and also, ultimately, to frustrating defeat for the preservationists. Out of this volatile material, Friel fashioned a marvelous play. His volunteers are jailed social activists of a not very well-defined variety; inasmuch as they have a social philosophy, it generally seems to speak in favor of a more abundant life. (The play’s one ideologue, a student radical who is one of the supervisors, in the end lets down the volunteers rather seriously.) The play is set in a hole in the ground, and the action takes place on the last day of the dig, a closing date that has been peremptorily hurried forward and that will leave the work unfinished. When this state of affairs is brought to the attention of Keeney and his fellow volunteers, it increases the audience’s appreciation of the magnitude of their contribution as well as exposes the sterility of orthodox socially instituted planning. Indeed, the spontaneous gesture of volunteering has placed Keeney and his mates in danger of their narrow-minded fellow prisoners. Those who give freely, it seems, will be regarded with the most suspicion. This conclusion is reinforced by the attitude of George the foreman. Superior to the volunteers in social status alone, his inability to have anything other than a masterservant relationship with them expresses insufferable moral smugness on the part of one who watches but does not dirty his hands. The only figure with whom the volunteers can feel kinship is the skeleton they have disinterred and named Lief, and who seems to have been the victim of a ritual execution. Lief is the authentic representative of a past common to all in the play, a past that is only properly visible to the volunteers. Thus, Lief is to be cherished much more than the vase that George has assembled out of fragments rescued by the volunteers, and when one of them deliberately breaks the vase, the symbolic resonance is as great as that provided by their ceremonial reburial of Lief. The volunteers, then, are those who come in closest contact with the texture of the past, its earthbound treasures and human blemishes—and this contact is all the more estimable for being freely given. Prisoners of the state, menaced by their own kind and by their masters, the volunteers give unlikely expression to pietas, which is in cultural terms what love is in personal affairs. Yet all this is communicated in anything but sol-

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emn terms; the breezy satire of The Mundy Scheme is here deepened and tightened almost beyond recognition. Finally, in Keeney, Friel has created a character who is in total command of himself and prepared to face whatever comes, a character whose abundant energies, verbal pyrotechnics, and keen mind equip him superbly to be the onstage director of what Seamus Heaney has memorably called “a masque of anarchy.” Translations • Friel’s Translations is among his finest achievements, as well as being, both intellectually and culturally speaking, his most ambitious. Set in the 1830’s among the Irish peasantry, it discourses wittily, economically, and profoundly on the clash between the English and the Irish cultures, on language and its imprecision, on violence and its distortions. The play opens with young adult peasants entering the hedge school of Hugh O’Donnell for their evening class in Latin, Greek, and arithmetic. In itself, such a scene is replete with noteworthy cultural resonances, being both a far cry from the stage Irishman and a vivid introduction to contemporary peasant life, down to the aging “infant prodigy” in the background who relishes Homer in the original. Hugh’s son, Manus, takes the class this particular evening, because of his father’s inebriation. One of the students is Manus’s sweetheart, ambitious Maire, who is anxious for a fuller life for both of them. She plans to emigrate to the United States, while Manus, to some extent his father’s prisoner, possesses a fierce loyalty to the local native life he loves so well. In a sense, Maire resembles Manus’s brother, Owen. He, too, desires a wider arena for himself, as is clear from his entry into the schoolroom with two well-disposed British soldiers, Captain Lancey and Lieutenant Yolland. These two are members of a detachment of troops engaged in an ordinance survey of Ireland, an enterprise that has as one of its features the translation of Irish place names into English. Owen is employed in this work, under Yolland’s supervision, and he is painfully aware of the offense against pietas constituted by the effective divorce of native tongue from native place that will inevitably result. His awareness is ironically contrasted with Yolland’s onset of a vague, fashionable, romantic attachment to the locals, and Owen’s situation is further underlined by the deft trick of showing that when the native characters speak among themselves, the soldiers do not understand them. In other words, at certain points, the audience must accept English to be Irish. In the hope that the cultural conflict will not come to a head, Owen arranges for Yolland to attend a local dance. There, Yolland meets Maire, and despite linguistic barriers, hilarious at the time (Friel’s flair for representing gaucherie is brilliantly displayed here), she seduces him. Having seen Maire home, however, Yolland is never seen again, and the play ends with peasant hegemony broken beyond repair by the threat of dire reprisal by Lancy, and by Manus’s flight from the place whose main hope he was. The situation is left in the hands of Hugh, who is impotently eloquent about its linguistic implications, and Jimmy, the “infant prodigy,” whom language has deluded to the extent of his announcing his impending marriage to Homer’s glaukopis Athene. The play’s effectiveness is not solely derived from the novelty and richness of its cultural scenario: In addition, this scenario enabled Friel to marshal areas of interest that had hitherto existed separately in his works. Here one finds the intersection of public and personal history, the suffocation of love by unpromising family circumstances, the destructiveness and inevitability of passion, the author’s devotion to the common people and to that sense of Ireland that Ballybeg connotes. The coalescence

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of these themes certainly makes Translations, in the words of the review in The Times of London, “a national classic.” The play also sets the seal on Friel’s reputation as the most resourceful, most engaging, and most serious voice in postwar Irish drama. Dancing at Lughnasa • Friel’s plays in the 1990’s mark a return to the more intimate dramas of personal lives in conflict and private emotional turmoil that distinguish his early career. Political and social issues are not absent but usually appear as components of a backdrop that includes small-town life, extended families, occupational ambitions, and other ordinary influences on the personalities of his characters. Dominating the foregrounds of these plays are characters challenged by the circumstances of their lives, and ennobled by their ability to meets those challenges with courage and grace, if not success. Dancing at Lughnasa is a quiet memory play set in 1936 in the home of the Mundy family two miles outside of the town of Ballybeg. Michael, its narrator, recalls a summer when he was seven years old, at home with his mother (who bore him out of wedlock), his three maiden aunts, and his uncle Jack, a clergyman recently returned home from missionary work in Africa for apparent health reasons. Virtually plotless, the play unfolds through exchanges and interactions between the Mundy sisters, each of whom plays a role in sustaining the family and endures the deprivations and hardships of life with stoic good nature. The sympathy and gentle bemusement Friel shows for common people is tinged with pathos because, as Michael reveals, within a year of the time of the play’s events, the household will be irreparably sundered: His uncle will die, two of his aunts will seek employment in the city and become lost in its hopeless underclass, and he will never again see his loving but irresponsible father, who periodically returns to visit his mother. Unknown to any of the characters, this moment, no matter how bittersweet, is the last happy moment the Mundys will know as a complete family. Dance is a recurring theme in the play, and Friel uses it as a central metaphor to give structure and significance to the play’s events. The play takes place during the feast of the pagan god Lugh, which is celebrated in modern times with a harvest dance that the Mundy sisters used to attend but are now unable to because of their strained finances. In one of the play’s most memorable moments, the women break into spirited spontaneous dancing to a traditional Celtic song on the radio, briefly expressing a passion and freedom that rarely manifests in the household. Michael’s father is a dance teacher, and Michael sees the dance steps he and his mother share when they meet clandestinely as a ritual tantamount to a marriage ceremony. Dance even plays a role in Jack’s missionary experiences: Recalling dance-based rituals he participated in during his years in Uganda, he arouses very strong suspicions that he was sent home because he had begun to “go native.” No matter what form it takes in the play, dance evokes a simple, natural order that the characters are drawn to but allowed to enjoy only momentarily. The dance of their lives, as choreographed by Friel, is unpredictable and erratic, and puts them out of step with their world and each other. Wonderful Tennessee • An implicit subtext of Dancing at Lughnasa—that happiness is either transient or ephemeral and must be lived in for the moment—is made explicit in Wonderful Tennessee. Like Dancing at Lughnasa, it is a nearly plotless play, centered around the interactions and relationships between six characters in a brief twentyfour-hour period. Also like Dancing at Lughnasa, it evokes a paradisiacal realm, compared with which the world the characters inhabit is fallen and compromised.

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The six characters are three married couples celebrating the birthday of small-time entrepreneur Terry Martin, who has brought them to Ballybeg Pier to be ferried across to the island of Oelian Draiochta (which translates roughly as “island of mystery”). The island has a mystical history: It was a spectral island that appeared only once every seven years until sailors landed on it and dispelled its enchantment. Terry tells his party that he has bought the island sight unseen, based on cherished memories he has of it from a story his father told him in childhood. However, once their bus has departed, the six are unable to rouse the ferryman to take them across the water, and they are left to spend their time stranded on the shore, looking across at an island they cannot reach and can barely even see. Typical of Friel’s plays, the island symbolizes an ideal the characters live in hope for but cannot attain. The reality of their lives supports this. Private and group conversations reveal that each is wrestling with unhappiness. Terry’s wife Berna knows that Terry preferred her sister Angela, and she feels guilty that she has not been able to bear him children. Angela’s husband Frank is desperate to publish a book that he hopes will succeed financially and free him from his tedious job as a clerk. Terry’s sister Trish is married to George, who is dying of cancer. Despite their hardships and disappointments, they manage to stay friends and muddle through, bearing out Berna’s contention that “Maybe that’s how most people manage to carry on—‘about to be happy’; the real thing almost within grasp, just a step away . . . but there are periods—occasions— when just being alive is unbearable. . . .” The island is thus emblematic of their very lives, its idyllic aspect fleeting and intangible. Although a work of theatrical realism, Wonderful Tennessee verges at some points on allegory. The ferryman is named Carlin, surely a play on Charon, who ferries souls to Hades in Greek mythology, and in the closing moments, the characters enact a farewell ritual that symbolically parallels pagan ceremonies rumored to have taken place on the island. Furthermore, the play calls for an intentionally ceremonial staging. It is punctuated at many points with snatches of popular song that the characters sing as a natural part of the festivities and also to express their feelings of the moment. The blending of song and dialogue, somewhat in the manner of classic Greek drama, suggest Friel’s attempt to create a unique vocabulary for expressing the otherwise inarticulable, much as he did with dance in Dancing at Lughnasa. The challenging staging this requires did not meet with universal approval, however, and may have contributed to the play’s premature closing on Broadway after a successful run in London. Nevertheless, New York Times theater critic Frank Rich praised the play as that rare theatrical experience that transported the audience, “however briefly, to that terrifying and hallowed place beyond words.” Molly Sweeney • In Molly Sweeney, Friel approaches the theme of fleeting happiness from a different angle. The title character is a woman who lives in as close to a state of joy as any of Friel’s characters do. Molly has been blind since shortly after her birth, yet she does not feel handicapped or disabled. Her inability to see has sharpened her other senses to the point where she apprehends much of the world around her, albeit in a way vastly different from sighted people. An excellent swimmer, she feels pity for sighted people, because she thinks that seeing somehow qualifies the sense of total immersion in the activity that she experiences. Molly is drawn very much in the spirit of idealized characters evoked in Friel’s other plays, who are vessels for a kind of mystic wisdom that transcends normal routes of expression. All of this is stripped away from her when her husband Frank, a man whose zeal for

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self-improvement and noble causes exceeds his common sense, makes it his mission to restore Molly’s sight. At his urging, Molly has eye surgery. The operation is a success, but the results are devastating. Wrenched from her familiar world into one of new and alien perceptions, she finds herself cut off from the comfort and peace she knew. Unable to return to the world of blindness, she retreats into “blindsight,” a psychological blindness that leaves her in a world her physician describes as “neither sighted nor unsighted, somewhere she hoped was beyond disappointment; somewhere, she hoped, without expectation.” The play is very much about the difference between “seeing and understanding,” as one character describes it, and it is staged with its the three characters—Molly, Frank, and the ophthalmologist, Mr. Rice—posed at different spaces onstage, reciting their parts in monologues that intersect though they themselves never interact with one another. This novel approach to staging reinforces the sense that the characters talk without communicating, and see without understanding one another. It is yet another example of Friel’s continuing efforts to experiment and seek inventive dramaturgic vehicles suitable to both the form and content of his plays. Molly Sweeney‘s blend of introspective drama, compassionate characterization, and provocative staging is characteristic of Friel’s plays throughout the 1990’s, which treat the personal struggles of characters in emotionally challenging situations with the same gravity and grace as his more politically conscious stage work of the 1970’s and 1980’s. Though Friel continues to evolve as a playwright, he remains a champion of the common person who bears up with dignity under the burden of a world indifferent to his or her right to happiness. Other major works short fiction: The Saucer of Larks, 1962; The Gold in the Sea, 1966; The Saucer of Larks: Stories of Ireland, 1969; Selected Stories, 1979 (reprinted as The Diviner, 1982). radio plays: A Sort of Freedom, 1958; To This Hard House, 1958. nonfiction: Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews, 1964-1999, 1999 (Christopher Murray, editor); Brian Friel in Conversation, 2000 (Paul Delaney, editor). Bibliography Dantanus, Ulf. Brian Friel: A Study. London: Faber and Faber, 1988. A condensation and updating of the author’s Brian Friel: The Growth of an Irish Dramatist (1985), which discusses Friel’s career up to, and including, the production of Fathers and Sons. Through close readings of Friel’s work, Dantanus focuses on the broad cultural and social issues that arise from it. Kerwin, William, ed. Brian Friel: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1997. A selection of essays by leading critics covering most of Friel’s major plays, providing a variety of critical perspectives on themes that range from Friel’s use of history, myth, religion, comedy, and language to his depiction of women. McGrath, F. C. Brian Friel’s (Post)Colonial Drama: Language, Illusion, and Politics. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1999. An accessible study by one of Friel’s more ambitious critics that views him working in the same tradition as Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, Sean O’Casey, and other authors who blend historical and factual and personal memoir to a create a new national mythology that breaks with that of Ireland’s colonial past. Murray, Christopher. Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews, 1964-1999. London: Faber and Faber, 1999. Chronologically ordered culling of Friel’s own thoughts on the

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playwright’s craft and specific works. Includes his seminal autobiographical essay, “The Theatre of Hope and Despair.” O’Brien, George. Brian Friel. Boston: Twayne, 1989. An introductory survey of Friel’s stories and plays up to Making History. The primary emphasis is on the character and quality of Friel’s artistic vision. Surveys the whole of the Friel canon, including the early, unpublished stage and radio plays. Contains an extensive bibliography. O’Connor, Ulick. Brian Friel: Crisis and Commitment. Dublin: Elo, 1989. A pamphlet by a well-known playwright and biographer. Addresses the problems of the writer’s social and cultural responsibilities in times of civic crisis, using as its focus the work of Friel in the context of the crisis of authority in Northern Ireland. Pine, Richard. Brian Friel and Ireland’s Drama. London: Routledge, 1990. The most comprehensive, intellectually sophisticated, and theoretically ambitious reading of Friel’s output up to and including Dancing at Lughnasa. Numerous stimulating and challenging connections are made between Friel and other Irish and international dramatists, and Friel is used as a means of focusing on the status and significance of drama in contemporary Irish culture. George O’Brien, updated by Stefan Dziemianowicz

Max Frisch Max Frisch

Born: Zurich, Switzerland; May 15, 1911 Died: Zurich, Switzerland; April 4, 1991 Principal drama • Nun singen sie wieder: Versuch eines Requiems, pr. 1945, pb. 1946 (Now They Sing Again, 1972); Santa Cruz, pr. 1946, pb. 1947; Die chinesische Mauer, pr. 1946, pb. 1947, second version pr., pb. 1955, third version pr. 1965, fourth version pr. 1972 (The Chinese Wall, 1961); Als der Krieg zu Ende war, pr., pb. 1949 (When the War Was Over, 1967); Graf Öderland, pr., pb. 1951, second version pr. 1956, third version pr. 1961 (Count Oederland, 1962); Don Juan: Oder, Die Liebe zur Geometrie, pr., pb. 1953 (Don Juan: Or, The Love of Geometry, 1967); Biedermann und die Brandstifter, pr. 1953 (radio play), pr., pb. 1958 (staged; The Firebugs, 1959, also as The Fire Raisers, 1962); Die grosse Wut des Philipp Hotz, pr., pb. 1958 (The Great Fury of Philip Hotz, 1962); Andorra, pr., pb. 1961 (English translation, 1963); Three Plays, pb. 1962; Biografie, pb. 1967, pr. 1968 (Biography, 1969); Three Plays, pb. 1967; Four Plays, pb. 1969; Triptychon: Drei szenische Bilder, pb. 1978, pr. 1979 in French, pr. 1981 in German (Triptych, 1981); Jonas und sein Veteran, pr., pb. 1989; Three Plays, pb. 1992 Other literary forms • Max Frisch was a versatile writer whose reputation was founded on both his dramas and his novels. He also wrote diaries, radio plays, short stories, film scenarios, and essays. His essays include discussions of literature, drama, society, architecture, town planning, and travel. There is a six-volume German edition of his works up to 1976, published by Suhrkamp in Frankfurt. Achievements • In West Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, Max Frisch’s dramas are consistently among the most frequently performed works by German-language playwrights. They are also regularly performed in other European countries and in the United States. Frisch’s international reputation was established in 1954 with the publication of the novel Stiller (I’m Not Stiller, 1958), which is still considered his most important work. In 1951, Frisch received a Rockefeller grant to study in the United States. He was awarded numerous prizes for his works. These include the Georg Büchner Prize, the literature prize of the city of Zurich in 1958, and the prize of the city of Jerusalem and the Schiller Prize in 1965. His works have been translated into most European languages and are often best-sellers. Biography • Max Frisch was born in Zurich on May 15, 1911, the son of a self-made architect. After attending gymnasium in Zurich between 1924 and 1930, he began studying German literature at the university of Zurich in 1931, at which time he also heard lectures on art history, philosophy, law, and theology. When his father died in 1933, Frisch had to leave the university to earn a living. He became a freelance journalist and wrote for such newspapers as the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. In 1933, Frisch traveled to Prague, Budapest, Dalmatia, Istanbul, and Greece, experiences that he used in his first novel, Jürg Reinhart (1934). In 1936, thanks to the financial support of a friend, Frisch began studying architecture at the Institute of Technology in Zurich; he was awarded his diploma in 1941. Between 1939 and 1945, Frisch had to serve periodically in the 306

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Swiss army. In 1942, Frisch opened his own architect’s office in Zurich. The highlight of his architectural career was winning a competition to build an open-air swimming pool in the Zurich suburb of Letzigraben, a project that was completed in 1949. In 1948, Frisch became acquainted with Bertolt Brecht, whose theories were to have an important impact on his dramas. Frisch, an inveterate traveler, wrote in Tagebuch, 1946-1949 (1950; Sketchbook, 19461949, 1977) that a man travels for two reasons: to meet people who do not think that they know him once and for all, and to experience once again what is possible in life. Frisch traveled extensively in Europe and the United States and visited the Middle East, Mexico, Cuba, the Soviet Union, Japan, and China. His experiences in the United States were reflected especially in the novels I’m Not Stiller and Homo Faber (1957), and in the novella Montauk (1975). After 1954, when he gave up his architect’s office, Frisch earned his living as a writer. After living in Rome between 1960 and 1965, Frisch returned to live in Tessin, Switzerland. Analysis • Max Frisch’s admiration for the playwright Bertolt Brecht was an important stimulus in formulating his own dramatic theories. Frisch disagreed with Brecht’s theories in several ways. Unlike Brecht, Frisch was skeptical that the theater can bring about social and political change, but he did believe that it can change a person’s relationship to the world—it can make him more aware of himself and of the society in which he lives. Frisch was convinced of the power of the theater. In Sketchbook, 19461949, Frisch related how he was once sitting unobserved in an empty theater. He saw a workman come onto the stage and grumble. Then an actress walked across the stage and greeted the workman briefly. Because this very humdrum scene took place on the stage, its impact was greater than it would have been in ordinary life. To illustrate how the theater functions, Frisch used the analogy of an empty picture frame. If it is hung on the wall, it focuses a person’s attention on the wall for the first time and forces him to see it. Like the picture frame, the box stage focuses a person’s attention; it points out and demonstrates. Ordinary events are turned into exemplary ones on the stage. Unlike Brecht, Frisch did not believe that the real world can be portrayed effectively on the stage; the stage can only show models of experience. In an early essay titled “Theater ohne Illusion” (1948; theater without illusion), Frisch praises Thornton Wilder for discarding realistic theater and stressing the theatrical again. According to Frisch, the theater should never try to create the illusion that it is real life on the stage. For this reason, Frisch used many alienation effects to break the suspense and to prevent the audience from thinking that it is seeing a “slice of life.” In addition, Frisch, unlike Brecht, had no ideology to impart to his audience. His function as a dramatist, he said, is to raise questions, not provide answers. Frisch wanted to make people more aware, to provoke them into finding their own solutions to the problems that he depicted. An example of such provocation can be found in The Firebugs when Biedermann steps out of his role and addresses the members of the audience directly, asking them what they would have done in his place. Although Frisch was not convinced that the theater can bring about social change, he nevertheless thought that the author has a responsibility to address social and political questions. In an interview with Horst Bienek in 1961, Frisch criticized the Theater of the Absurd. If he were a dictator, he said, he would allow only the plays of Eugène Ionesco to be performed. Because such plays are fun to watch, they make the audience forget political conditions in the real world outside the theater. Frisch’s dramas focus mostly on personal questions, but some address social problems such as anti-Semitism

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and prejudice (Andorra) and the moral weakness of the middle class (The Firebugs). Yet even in those works that deal mostly with the individual, Frisch still criticizes modern society, especially for its hypocrisy and for the limits it places on the individual. In most of Frisch’s dramas, the quest for identity is a central theme. Frisch believed that most people either invent roles for themselves or else have roles imposed on them by others. Such role-playing prevents people from growing and realizing their potential as human beings—the role reduces them to fixed and known entities, a theme that Frisch develops in particular in Andorra and Don Juan: Or, the Love of Geometry. Frisch shows how difficult it is to escape from roles. Because society wants to preserve the status quo, it is hostile to any notion of change; it expects people to conform to certain socially acceptable roles that consist for the most part of deadening routine. Frisch portrays those who conform to society without any struggle as smug and self-righteous (a good example of such a character is Biedermann in The Firebugs). Most of Frisch’s protagonists fight for the freedom to be themselves, but the social restrictions they confront are often so overwhelming that they are forced to capitulate. Don Juan • Don Juan had its premiere on May 5, 1953, at the Zurich Schauspielhaus and at the Berlin Schillertheater. Don Juan appears in Frisch’s works for the first time in the play The Chinese Wall, where he protests against his literary portrayal as a seducer. In the play named for him, Don Juan is the polar opposite of the legendary Don Juan. Far from being the seducer, he is actually the seduced. The first three acts show how Don Juan is forced into the role of seducer; the last two, how, like Stiller in the novel I’m Not Stiller, he tries to escape from the image that people have formed of him. To those familiar with the legend, the picture of Don Juan as the play opens is startling. Don Juan’s father, Tenorio, is worried about his son because, at the age of twenty, he avoids women. To try to remedy this, Tenorio sends Don Juan to a brothel; while there, however, Don Juan plays chess. Frisch’s Don Juan is an intellectual who loves geometry because it is clear, exact, and “manly.” Like Walter Faber in the novel Homo Faber, he distrusts feelings because they are too unpredictable and chaotic. Don Juan’s love of geometry is, however, responsible for his present involvement with Donna Anna. When he is sent to measure the walls of the enemy stronghold in Córdoba, he returns unharmed with the information, is named hero of Córdoba, and is given Donna Anna as his bride. Don Gonzalo, the commander, does not realize that Don Juan has used simple geometry to arrive at the measurements and has not exposed himself to danger. The play opens on the night before Don Juan is to marry Donna Anna. The erotic festivities of this night stem from a pagan custom that the Christians have adopted. In the original custom, everyone was supposed to wear a mask. Through the power of love, the bride and groom could find each other despite the masks they were wearing. Because there were so many instances of mistaken identity, the custom was changed. Now the bride and groom do not wear masks because love can obviously err. Don Juan is drawn into the stifling eroticism of this night and sleeps with Donna Anna. He does not know that she is his bride because he has not met her before. Don Juan’s experiences on this night make him suspicious of love. When he suddenly realizes at the wedding ceremony that he has slept with Donna Anna, he refuses to marry her. He cannot promise to be faithful to her because he thinks that people are interchangeable when the biological urge to mate is aroused. The cries of the peacock seeking a mate, which are a motif in the first part, stress this biological nature of love. Like most of Frisch’s intellectuals, Don Juan is basically self-centered. In fact, he holds

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a grudge against heaven for separating people into two sexes; he protests that the individual alone lacks wholeness. It is not surprising that Don Juan repudiates love, because the society that surrounds him treats love cynically. Celestina, the brothel owner, turns the prostitute Miranda away because she has fallen in love with Don Juan: Such “sentimentality,” Celestina believes, is bad for business. Don Gonzalo and Donna Elvira, the parents of Donna Anna, supposedly have a model marriage, yet Donna Elvira thinks nothing of deceiving her husband by sleeping with Don Juan. When the captured Arab prince tells Don Gonzalo to take and enjoy his harem, Don Gonzalo curses the seventeen years of faithful marriage that prevent him from enjoying the proffered sensual delights. The only positive concept of love is held, ironically, by the prostitute Miranda, whose love for Don Juan remains constant. Don Juan’s refusal to marry Donna Anna and the subsequent events give rise to his reputation as a seducer. To help him escape from the family that is thirsting for revenge, Donna Elvira gives Don Juan refuge in her room, where she seduces him. From her, Don Juan goes to Donna Inez. He is curious to see whether she will sleep with him even though she is engaged to his friend Don Roderigo. When she does, this seems to confirm his belief that love is indiscriminate and merely biological. At the end of act 3, Don Juan is surrounded by people whose deaths he has unwittingly caused: His father dies of a heart attack because of his son’s behavior, Donna Anna drowns herself because of Don Juan’s rejection, Don Roderigo kills himself because Don Juan has slept with his fiancé, and Don Juan unintentionally kills Don Gonzalo with his sword. The fourth act takes place thirteen years later and depicts Don Juan’s descent into Hell, famous from the legend—but with a new twist. It is no longer an example of divine retribution but is actually staged by Don Juan himself to escape from his role as a seducer and from his financial problems. Don Juan seeks to persuade the bishop that his “descent into Hell” will provide the Church with proof of divine justice; the husbands of the seduced wives will have their revenge; and finally, youth will not be corrupted by following Don Juan’s example as a seducer. In return, Don Juan wants the Church to give him a cell in a monastery in which he can devote his time to his beloved geometry. Don Juan invites thirteen of the women he has seduced to witness the event, and arranges for Celestina to play the part of Don Gonzalo’s statue, which comes to life to punish him. Before the company arrives, Miranda, now the widow of the Duke of Ronda, offers Don Juan refuge in her castle, which he abruptly refuses. Don Juan’s plan goes awry because the bishop turns out to be a disguised husband in search of revenge. Even though he reveals Don Juan’s deception, the legend proves stronger than the truth—nobody believes that Don Juan has not been taken off to Hell. In the intermezzo that follows this act, Celestina tries to tell Donna Elvira (who is now a nun) about the role she played in the “descent into Hell,” but Donna Elvira prefers to believe in “miracles.” In the last act, Don Juan has been forced to accept Miranda’s offer of refuge and has married her. He is sitting at the table, waiting for her to come. Outside the castle, his literary legend is being created on the stage. He is a virtual prisoner in the castle because, after his spectacular “descent into Hell,” he cannot return to the world. To return as a husband would also make him the laughingstock of everyone. Yet the intellectual Don Juan who despised love is beginning to love Miranda (he confesses that he misses her when she is away). Before, Don Juan could not reconcile love and intellectual pursuits. When he was drawn into erotic adventures, he felt as if he were a piece of nature while

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he wanted to be an intellectual; he thought that heaven scorned him as a man of the spirit. He had not treated women as individuals but as members of the female sex; his affairs with them were unimportant episodes. At the end of the play, Don Juan is beginning to grasp that a relationship with a woman can be meaningful and through it he can gain the wholeness that, as an individual, he lacks. When Miranda breaks the news to him that she is expecting his child, she tells him that she does not expect him to be pleased at first, but she is convinced that he will be pleased about it in the future. The play ends with a question mark: It is not clear whether the relationship will continue to grow or whether it will deteriorate into the dullness of everyday routine that Don Juan fears. Throughout the play, Frisch shows how damaging preconceived images are to the individual. In contrast to the legend in which Don Juan appears as a fixed entity, Frisch shows him evolving from a naïve twenty-year-old, to a bored seducer, to a husband, and finally to a father-to-be (in the legend, Don Juan is never a father). Don Juan fights against his reputation, which does not fit him in the least. In the notes that follow the play, Frisch claims that Don Juan is more related to Icarus and Faust than to Casanova; despite his reputation, Don Juan, like Icarus and Faust, is a man of the spirit who thirsts for knowledge. The Firebugs • The Firebugs had its premiere on March 29, 1958, at the Zurich Schauspielhaus. A prose sketch titled “Burlesque” that appears in Sketchbook, 19461949, right after Frisch has mentioned the fall of the Beneš government in Czechoslovakia in 1948, forms the basic plot for the later play. The sketch tells how a stranger comes to a man’s house. The man wants to win the stranger’s friendship to demonstrate how humane he is. He gives the stranger shelter, storage for his gasoline, and even the matches with which the stranger and his friend incinerate him. Frisch developed this into a radio play in 1953 and finally into The Firebugs, in which the satire is sharper. The play was intended to share a theatrical evening with a companion play that Friedrich Dürrenmatt was to write. Later, Frisch added an epilogue to fill out the theatrical evening, but the epilogue does not add anything important to the play. Frisch is sharply critical of the middle class and capitalism in this play. The protagonist, Biedermann, is an Everyman of the middle class (the name implies a philistine; a respectable, unimaginative bourgeois). Biedermann has become rich by manufacturing a worthless hair tonic—as he tells his wife Babette, his customers might just as well put their own urine on their scalps for all the good his hair tonic does. Unlike most of Frisch’s protagonists, Biedermann does not question his identity but is smugly satisfied with himself. Above all, he wants to enjoy his rest and well-being. His appearance of bonhomie, however, serves to mask an inner ruthlessness. As the play opens, Biedermann is sitting comfortably at home reading about arsonists in the newspapers. He proclaims that they should all be hanged. Although he has been forewarned, he still lets Schmitz stay in his attic because he wants to appear humane. His humaneness is, however, a facade, as his treatment of his former employee Knechtling demonstrates. Because Knechtling (who has invented the hair tonic) wants to share in its profits, Biedermann fires him. When Knechtling comes to ask for help for his sick wife and three children, Biedermann refuses to see him and callously says that he should put his head in the gas oven—which he subsequently does. Biedermann is morally responsible for Knechtling’s death because he has driven him to suicide. The reign of terror in Biedermann’s house grows. Because Biedermann is afraid of Schmitz, he asks his wife to turn him out the next morning. Schmitz’s accomplice, the

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former waiter Eisenring, arrives, and together they bring barrels of gasoline into the attic at night. Biedermann again is too cowardly to throw them out. In fact, when the policeman arrives with the news of Knechtling’s suicide, Biedermann tells him that the barrels contain hair tonic—he is afraid to tell the truth because Schmitz has heard him say that Knechtling should gas himself. To win the friendship of the arsonists—and thus (he hopes) be spared—Biedermann prepares a festive meal for them. He even gives them the matches with which they start the fire. Although he knows that they are arsonists, he deliberately closes his eyes because he is afraid of them. The arsonists are adept at manipulating Biedermann. When Schmitz, a former heavyweight wrestler, arrives, he first alludes to his strength, in that way intimidating Biedermann. Then he flatters him by telling him how humane he is. Schmitz later manipulates Babette by telling her stories of his disadvantaged childhood. In this way, he arouses her compassion so that she will not have the heart to throw him out. Later, Eisenring describes how the arsonists use language to disguise their intentions. One disguise is joking about their intentions; another is using sentimentality (for example, when Schmitz describes his childhood); but the best disguise of all is telling the truth because nobody believes it. The arsonists do not hide the fact that they are arsonists. They tell Biedermann that the barrels contain gasoline and that they have chosen his house because of its strategic location—when his house burns, the whole town will go up in flames. Yet Biedermann insists on thinking that they are joking. It is not exactly clear why the arsonists want to burn down the town. Their accomplice, Dr. Phil, who has joined them because he wants a revolution, claims that they set fires merely for the love of setting fires, and he leaves them because they do not have a political reason for their actions. They could represent anarchy or the principle of evil (in the epilogue, the arsonists are the devils in Hell). Yet they also administer justice by punishing Biedermann for Knechtling’s death. On one level, the play seems to allude to certain political events in the twentieth century. The original prose sketch could allude to the takeover of the Beneš government by the communists because it appears in Sketchbook, 1946-1949 right after Frisch has mentioned this. There are also allusions to the rise of Nazism—like the arsonists, Adolf Hitler never concealed his intentions, as is shown in his autobiography Mein Kampf (1925-1926). Yet, it is a mistake to think that the play applies to a specific event. Frisch was concerned about the vulnerability of middle-class democracy to terrorism because of its inner weakness and moral corruption. Frisch himself noted that this play in particular was influenced by Bertolt Brecht, an influence that is most evident in the form. The six scenes are broken up by a chorus of firemen that comments on the situation, interprets the action, and warns of danger. The chorus is, however, helpless to avert the catastrophe—firemen can only put out fires, not prevent them. Another Brechtian device is the lack of suspense. From the outset, it is clear to everyone (except Biedermann) that the strangers are arsonists. The attention of the audience is thus focused not on how the play will end but on how Biedermann causes his own destruction. In the play, Frisch parodies the dramas of fate; what happens to Biedermann is not fate (as he would like to believe) but could have been avoided. Frisch called his parable a “morality play without a moral,” an indication of Frisch’s belief that people cannot be taught. Like Brecht’s Mother Courage, Biedermann does not learn from his experiences. This is especially evident in the epilogue, which takes place in Hell. Hell here is on strike because Heaven has pardoned too many criminals,

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in particular those who have obeyed orders to kill while they were in uniform (an allusion to the Nazi war trials). Biedermann refuses to believe that he is in Hell. He protests that he has always obeyed the Ten Commandments. To the end, Biedermann is convinced that his only failing was that he was too good-natured; he refuses to see that he acted wrongly. He even demands restitution for his damaged property. Because of the strike in Hell, Biedermann and Babette are saved. As the play closes, there is a vision of a new town arising out of the ashes of the old, but the chorus suggests that people have already forgotten the lesson of how the old town burned. Like Biedermann, people do not learn from their experiences, a pessimistic conclusion about the middle class. Andorra • Andorra had its premiere in November, 1961, at the Zurich Schauspielhaus. Like The Firebugs, the plot is derived from a prose sketch, written in 1946, in Sketchbook, 1946-1949. The sketch, titled “The Andorran Jew,” tells of a young man who everyone thinks is Jewish. Some criticize him for his supposedly Jewish traits, while others admire him for these same qualities. When he is killed, it turns out that he was an Andorran like the others. After this sketch, Frisch quotes the commandment “Thou shalt make no graven image.” In Andorra, Frisch shows how the protagonist Andri becomes a Jew simply by being told that he is Jewish. The action takes place in the fictional country of Andorra (Frisch stated emphatically that he was not alluding to the tiny country in the Pyrenees). Frisch intended the play to be a model: Such events, he believed, could happen anywhere. The characters are two-dimensional because Frisch was not interested in them as people but only in their attitudes to Andri. The Andorrans are convinced that their country is a model of all human virtues—it is a haven of peace, freedom, and human rights. To be an Andorran, they think, means to be moral and humane. As the image of whitewashing shows, their moral superiority is only a facade. When there is a storm, the whitewash is washed off the church, showing the red earth beneath. As the soldier comments, this makes the church look as if a pig has been slaughtered close by, an image that indicates that the virtuous appearance of the Andorrans masks brutality. Although nobody knows it, Andri is in fact an Andorran, the illegitimate son of the teacher Can and a woman from the neighboring country of the Blacks. Instead of telling the truth, Can told everyone that he had rescued a Jewish child from the savage anti-Semitism of the Blacks, and wins praise for this “courageous” act. The Andorrans’ treatment of Andri shows, however, that they cannot tolerate anyone who they think is different. The cabinetmaker is unwilling to take Andri as an apprentice; he thinks Andri should become a salesperson instead because he cares only for money. Later, the cabinetmaker assumes that the faulty chair is Andri’s, and the other apprentice (whose chair it is) lets Andri take the blame. The soldier accuses Andri of cowardice, a supposedly Jewish trait. The doctor criticizes the Jews because they are ambitious. Yet these are traits of the Andorrans themselves. The cabinetmaker demands an exorbitant price for Andri’s apprenticeship; the doctor is overly ambitious; and when the Blacks invade, the soldier gives up without a fight. At first, Andri desperately tries to be an Andorran, but when this fails, the priest persuades him to accept the fact that he is different. When Can finally tells Andri the truth about his origins, Andri refuses to believe him; he thinks that it is only a pretext to prevent him from marrying Barblin, Can’s daughter (his half-sister), whom he loves. When Andri’s mother, who inexplicably comes to see him for the first time, is killed, the innkeeper, himself the culprit, accuses Andri of the crime. Because he is different,

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he is made the scapegoat. Andri’s acceptance of his “Jewishness” causes his death. When the Blacks invade, everyone has to walk barefoot over the square, their heads covered by black cloths—a grotesque scene. Although Andri is in no way different from the others, the Jew Inspector selects him as a Jew, and Andri is taken away and murdered. Can, who belatedly has tried to tell the truth about Andri, hangs himself in remorse. As the play ends, Barblin is whitewashing—a futile gesture because the guilt of the community can only be covered up, not erased. Like Biedermann, most of the characters do not learn from their experiences. After some of the scenes, the characters who are responsible for Andri’s fate step forward to the witness box and try to justify their behavior. With the exception of the priest, no one accepts any responsibility for Andri’s death; each proclaims his innocence and no one feels remorse. Despite Andri’s death, the Andorrans’ prejudice against people who are different is as strong as ever. These plays (which are among his most successful) are typical of Frisch’s concerns. Frisch protested against the roles that people assume, either by choice or because they are forced into assuming them because such roles limit people’s potential to lead fulfilling lives. In most of his works, Frisch examined the consequences to the individual of such role-playing. In Andorra, however, he shows that people form preconceived images not only of individuals but also of different groups of people and of nationalities, which leads to prejudice and racism. Frisch pessimistically concludes that most people do not learn from their experiences. In a society consisting of conformists, Frisch’s protagonists vainly try to free themselves from their imprisoning roles. Such failure causes their progressive alienation from society, family, and friends—and ultimately from themselves. Other major works long fiction: Jürg Reinhart, 1934; J’adore ce qui me brûle: Oder, Die Schwierigen, 1943; Stiller, 1954 (I’m Not Stiller, 1958); Homo Faber, 1957 (Homo Faber: A Report, 1959); Mein Name sei Gantenbein, 1964 (A Wilderness of Mirrors, 1965); Montauk, 1975 (English translation, 1976); Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän, 1979 (Man in the Holocene, 1980); Blaubart, 1982 (Bluebeard, 1983). short fiction: Bin: Oder, Die Reise nach Peking, 1945; Wilhelm Tell für die Schule, 1971. nonfiction: Tagebuch, 1946-1949, 1950 (Sketchbook, 1946-1949, 1977); Tagebuch, 1966-1971, 1972 (Sketchbook, 1966-1971, 1974); Dienstbüchlein, 1974; Der Briefwechsel: Max Frisch, Uwe Johnson, 1964-1983, 1999; Die Briefwechsel mit Carl Jacob Burckhardt und Max Frisch, 2000. miscellaneous: Gesammelte Werke in zeitlicher Folge, 1976 (6 volumes); Novels, Plays, Essays, 1989. Bibliography Butler, Michael. The Novels of Max Frisch. London: Macmillan, 1985. Provides criticism and interpretations of Frisch’s works up to the mid-1970’s. Index and bibliography. Köpke, Wulf. Understanding Max Frisch. Understanding Modern European and Latin American Literature series. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. Explores the themes and dramatic approaches of Frisch. Bibliography and index Lob, Ladislaus. “’Insanity in the Darkness’: Anti-Semitic Stereotypes and Jewish Identity in Max Frisch’s Andorra and Arthur Miller’s Focus.” Modern Language Review 92 ( July, 1997): 545-558. Compares the depiction of the plight of Jews in a hostile environment in both playwrights’ works.

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Pickar, Gertrud Bauer. The Dramatic Works of Max Frisch. New York: Peter Lang, 1977. Explores themes and approaches of Frisch’s plays. Bibliography. Probst, Gerhard F., and Jay F. Bodine, eds. Perspectives on Max Frisch. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982. Offers criticism and interpretations of Frisch’s life and works. Bibliography. Reschke, Claus. Life as a Man: Contemporary Male-Female Relationships in the Novels of Max Frisch. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. Examines the psychology of gender roles in Frisch’s works. Weisstein, Ulrich. Max Frisch. New York: Twayne, 1967. Provides biographical discussion of Frisch and interpretations of his works. White, Alfred D. Max Frisch, the Reluctant Modernist. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995. Offers a biography and criticism of Frisch’s life and works. Yang, Peter. Play is Play: Theatrical Illusion in “The Chinese Wall” by Frisch and Other “Epic” Plays by Brecht, Wilder, Hazelton, and Li. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2000. Discusses dramatic techniques of Frisch and his contemporaries. Bibliography and index. Jennifer Michaels

Athol Fugard Athol Fugard

Born: Middelburg, South Africa; June 11, 1932 Principal drama • No-Good Friday, pr. 1958, pb. 1977; Nongogo, pr. 1959, pb. 1977; The Blood Knot, pr. 1961, pb. 1963; People Are Living There, wr. 1962, pr. 1968, pb. 1969; Hello and Goodbye, pr. 1965, pb. 1966; The Coat: An Acting Exercise from Serpent Players of New Brighton, pr., pb. 1967 (with Serpent Players); The Occupation, pb. 1968 (one act); Ten One-Act Plays, pb. 1968 (Cosmo Pieterse, editor); Boesman and Lena, pr., pb. 1969; Friday’s Bread on Monday, pr. 1970 (with Serpent Players); Orestes: An Experiment in Theatre as Described in a Letter to an American Friend, pr. 1971, pb. 1978; Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act, pr. 1972, pb. 1974; Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, pr. 1972, pb. 1973 (with John Kani and Winston Ntshona); The Island, pr. 1973, pb. 1974 (with Kani and Ntshona); Three Port Elizabeth Plays, pb. 1974 (includes The Blood Knot, Hello and Goodbye, and Boesman and Lena; revised pb. 2000 includes “MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys); Dimetos, pr. 1975, pb. 1977; A Lesson from Aloes, pr. 1978, pb. 1981; The Drummer, pr. 1980 (improvisation); “MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys, pr., pb. 1982; The Road to Mecca, pr. 1984, pb. 1985; A Place with the Pigs, pr. 1987, pb. 1988; My Children! My Africa!, pr., pb. 1990; Blood Knot and Other Plays, pb. 1991; Playland, pr., pb. 1992; My Life, pr. 1994, pb. 1996; Valley Song, pr. 1995, pb. 1996; The Captain’s Tiger, pr., pb. 1997; Plays: One, pb. 1998; Sorrows and Rejoicings, pr., pb. 2001 Other literary forms • Although Athol Fugard has written in a variety of literary forms, he is known primarily for his plays. Tsotsi, a long-lost novel written between 1959 and 1960 and abandoned until its publication in 1979, displays characterization, graphic language, and sardonic humor that foreshadow much in Fugard’s later drama. Of Fugard’s screenplays–The Occupation (1964), Boesman and Lena (1973), The Guest (1977), and Marigolds in August (1982)—the last three, under the superb direction of Ross Devenish, have been filmed and released. A post-apartheid version of Boesman and Lena starring Danny Glover and Angela Bassett was released in 2000. Fugard also wrote Mille Miglia (1968), a television script for the British Broadcasting Corporation, which explores in flashback the relationship between race drivers Stirling Moss and Denis Jenkinson, who won the last Italian one-thousand-mile race in 1955, and their preparations for the race. Fugard’s Notebooks, 1960-1977 (1983) testify to the breadth of the influences on him and his influence on others. The notebook entries reflect his political engagement as well as his practical concerns as a dramatist. His Cousins: A Memoir (1994) relates the playwright’s early-life experiences with two influential relatives: his older cousins Johnnie and Garth. Johnnie’s love of music and performance and Garth’s adventurous wanderlust were important elements in shaping Fugard’s personality. Achievements • Athol Fugard—playwright, director, and actor—is South Africa’s most widely produced dramatist abroad. His plays, though rooted in one nation, have earned international acclaim. Fugard meticulously details life in a remote corner of the globe yet raises compelling issues of general interest. Using social realism, linear plot development, and naturalistic language graced by metaphor and symbol, Fugard has 315

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forged an impressive body of work for the theater, ranging from full-length plays to improvisational exercises. Theatrically sparse, with small casts and little, if any, reliance on elaborate sets, costumes, or props, Fugard’s plays have been read easily on radio and adapted frequently for television and film. On December 4, 1984, Fugard received the Commonwealth Award for Distinction in Dramatic Arts, an award which he shared with Stephen Sondheim. Fugard’s distinction as a playwright is inseparable from his contributions to and influences on South African theater, as well as on the Yale Repertory Theatre. He has radically affected both the practice and purpose of serious drama in his native land. His interpretation of his world, his use of “poor theater” for its maximum effect, and his dedication to his actors, both black and white, have earned for him a critical respect accorded few modern playwrights. Early in his career, Fugard chose to be a witness against what he called a “conspiracy of silence” about South Africa’s apartheid legislation. Fugard considers theater to be no more—and no less—than a civilizing influence, one that may sensitize, provoke, or anger. He deplores the label “political playwright.” He believes that if a playwright tells a story, a good one, the larger implications will take care of themselves. Because they are set in South Africa, Fugard’s plays cannot ignore apartheid, but Fugard’s plays are not agitprop. Critics and actors alike commend Fugard’s craft, especially his attention to what he calls “carnal reality” and his ability to develop resonant images that merit repeated readings or performances. Fugard’s plays—and his actors—have been honored often. The New York Times voted The Blood Knot Best Play of the 1964 season. Fugard was elected Man of the Year in the Arts in South Africa in 1969. Boesman and Lena received an Obie Award for Distinguished Foreign Play from the Village Voice in 1971. Janet Suzman won the London Evening Standard Award for Best Actress in 1973 for her portrayal of Hester Smit in Fugard’s Hello and Goodbye. Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, devised by Fugard with actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona, was chosen Play of the Year in 1974 by the London Theatre Critics. Kani and Ntshona went on to share Tony Awards for Best Acting in the 1974-1975 New York season for The Island, another Fugard play devised with their help. In 1975, Fugard was commissioned by the Edinburgh Festival to write a new play, Dimetos, and in 1980 the Actors Theatre of Louisville (Kentucky) commissioned an improvisational work, The Drummer. (These works, along with Mille Miglia, a 1968 British Broadcasting Corporation television play, are not set in South Africa.) A Lesson from Aloes was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best New Play of the 1980-1981 season, while “MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys won both the Drama Desk Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Play of 1982, as well as a Tony Award for Zakes Mokae as Outstanding Featured Actor and the Evening Standard Award for Best Play of 1983. The play also won South Africa’s largest cash award for theater: the AA Mutual Life/Vita Award for Best New South African Play, 1983-1984. In 1986, Fugard was also the recipient of the Drama League Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and Helen Hayes Award for Direction followed in 1988 and 1990, respectively. Fugard has been given honorary doctorates by three South African universities: the University of Natal, Durban, in 1981; Rhodes University, Grahamstown, 1983; and the University of Cape Town, in 1984. Yale University in 1983 and Georgetown University in 1984 also honored Fugard with doctorates. Fugard is also a gifted director who exhibited a wide range of his interests through

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the plays he chose to direct at The Rehearsal Room in Johannesburg in the late 1950’s and to stage with the Serpent Players in New Brighton from 1963 to 1973, including Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter (pr. 1960) in Johannesburg and Niccolò Machiavelli’s La mandragola (pr. c. 1519; The Mandrake, 1911), Sophocles’ AntigonT (441 b.c.e.; Antigone, 1729), and August Strindberg’s Fadren (pr., pb. 1887; The Father, 1899) in New Brighton. Fugard’s talents as an actor have enabled him to perform in many of his own plays when they were first staged. Biography • Harold Athol Lannigan Fugard (pronounced fewgard ) was born June 11, 1932, in Middelburg, a town in the Great Karoo, a semidesert region of Cape Province, South (Richard Corman) Africa. The son of an Anglo-Irish father and an Afrikaner mother, Fugard is an ethnic hybrid. English is his first language, but because of his mother’s dominant personality, Afrikaner culture profoundly affected him. Fugard simultaneously honors and excoriates his Afrikaner roots. The two major abstractions of Fugard’s work—love and truth—he saw fleshed out as he grew up in Port Elizabeth, a multiracial, industrial, windswept town on the eastern Cape to which his family moved when he was three. Fugard’s father lost a leg in a shipboard accident as a child, and in spite of successfully leading a series of jazz bands, he retired early, when Fugard was young, to a life of unemployment and alcoholism. Fugard’s ambivalent feelings about his father color much of his work, especially Hello and Goodbye and “MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys. His mother supported the family, first by running a boardinghouse, the Jubilee Hotel, and then by operating the St. George’s Park Tea Room, the scene of “MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys. Early in life, Fugard thus learned about failed expectations, a major theme in his work, and about hard times. As a schoolboy, Fugard, then known as Hally, shunned his peers and spent his free time with his mother’s waiters, Sam Semela and Willie Malopo. (These men appear in “MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys under their real names.) Sam, in particular, though middle-aged, became Fugard’s friend and the most influential adult in his life. Fugard looked up to Sam as a man in the fullest sense of that word; while Sam taught Fugard about being a man, Fugard shared his schoolroom experiences and books with him. For some inexplicable reason, one day Fugard insulted Sam; he did not expiate his guilt for this act until he wrote “MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys. In real life, Sam Semela forgave Fugard almost immediately, and they remained friends until Sam died in 1983, shortly before the play in his honor opened in Johannesburg.

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Fugard studied philosophy at the University of Cape Town from 1950 to 1953, but he quit immediately before his final examinations to hitchhike through Africa with a poet friend, deciding that the academic life was not for him. From 1953 to 1955, he traveled around the world on a merchant ship on which he was the only white crew member. He was married in 1956 to Sheila Meiring, who introduced him to the theater. When they moved to Johannesburg in 1958, Fugard was employed for three months as a clerk in the Fordsburg Native Commissioner’s Court; then he began working with amateur black actors in Sophiatown, then Johannesburg’s black ghetto. He also worked as a stage manager for the National Theatre Organization before he and his wife went to England and Europe in 1959. The Fugards returned to South Africa in 1960, and the initial production of The Blood Knot in 1961 and its six-month tour around South Africa were crucial to Fugard’s development as a playwright. In 1962, Fugard instigated a boycott of South Africa’s segregated theaters by British playwrights, but by 1967 he had decided that even in such compromising circumstances, voices were preferable to silence. Fugard visited the United States briefly in 1964 and returned to England in 1966; both trips involved productions of The Blood Knot. The South African government withdrew his passport from 1967 to 1971. From 1963 to 1974, he directed and produced European plays as well as collaborating on indigenous South African material with the New Brighton actors known as the Serpent Players; many of these actors were arrested between 1965 and 1967. Since 1977, Fugard’s reputation has been such that he divides his time between South Africa and the rest of the globe: the United States, Europe, Asia, and India. The United States, however, is the only place he could live, he claims, if he could not live in South Africa. Fugard has singled out several early incidents in his life as being of particular importance. For example, he said that his experience as a sailor cured him of any racial prejudice he might have had. His wife’s prodding him into helping her establish a theater workshop in Cape Town, the Circle Players, in 1956 and 1957 led to the evolution of his lean, one-room dramaturgy. The move to Johannesburg and his work in the Commissioner’s Court caused him to see the worst of apartheid legislation; there, an African was sent to jail every two minutes. Fugard turned this ugly nightmare to dramatic use when he devised Sizwe Bansi Is Dead with actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona in 1972; the play is an exposé of the passbook law, which required every African over sixteen to carry an identity book that restricted both his employment opportunities and his movements inside South Africa. The rejection of Fugard’s scripts by the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1960, the hand-to-mouth existence the Fugards shared there, and Fugard’s sense of isolation from his roots convinced him that he was a regional writer. Before the Fugards’ return to South Africa in 1960, in response to the Sharpeville Massacre, they helped form—with Tone Brulin, David Herbert, and Clive Farrell—the short-lived New Africa Group, dedicated to the staging of original South African plays in Europe. Fugard played Okkie, the Greek who tries to pass for white, in Herbert’s A Kakamas Greek (pr. 1960), which was set in the Karoo, Fugard’s birthplace. This production won the Best Entry Award at the Festival of Avant-garde Theatre in Brussels in 1960 and toured thereafter in the Flemish part of Belgium, Holland, and Germany—performed in English. The question of racial identify in A Kakamas Greek also haunts Fugard’s first critical success, The Blood Knot. While he was writing, in solitude, The Blood Knot, People Are Living There, Hello and Goodbye, and Boesman and Lena, which detail claustrophobic relationships, Fugard was also experimenting with adapting European plays to South African life and with im-

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provising from the raw material of his actors’ lives. The Coat in 1967 and Orestes in 1971, which actress Yvonne Bryceland considers “the most important single thing” in Fugard’s career, are examples of improvisations from life. The “Statements” plays (Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act, Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, and The Island), which secured Fugard’s reputation outside South Africa, also evolved from collaborative theater. These plays together constitute Fugard’s most outspoken indictment of apartheid. An early version of Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act was the inaugural production in 1972 of The Space, an “open” theater in Cape Town that evaded audience segregation rulings. Sizwe Bansi Is Dead was next, followed by an early version of The Island in 1973. These two plays did not exist in written form until Fugard and actors Kani and Ntshona were safely in London, later in 1973, for the South African Season at the Royal Court Theatre. In 1977 and 1978, Kani and Ntshona performed Sizwe Bansi Is Dead and The Island in Johannesburg at the Market Theatre, an “open” venue. In 1974, after Fugard’s success in London, Three Port Elizabeth Plays—including The Blood Knot, Hello and Goodbye, and Boesman and Lena—was published by Oxford University Press, with a detailed introduction by Fugard of excerpts from his notebooks. This introduction, combined with that to Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act, constituted the clearest summary of Fugard’s aesthetics—as well as a biographical gloss on his plays—before 1984, when Notebooks, 1960-1977 appeared. In 1978, the “Statements” plays were performed and published in German; in 1979, The Island was translated and performed in French, and Boesman and Lena was translated and presented in Afrikaans in Cape Town. Fugard returned to solo composition when Dimetos was commissioned by the Edinburgh Festival in 1975, but in spite of rewriting and a cast headed by Paul Scofield for the London West End run in 1976, Dimetos failed with critics and audiences alike. Its poetic allegory and nonregional setting are atypical of Fugard, yet the play remains one of his favorites. Like Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act, another play that Fugard cherishes, Dimetos attempts to use prose musically and frequently becomes too elliptical and ambiguous. Between 1978 and 1984, Fugard produced three major plays: A Lesson from Aloes, “MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys, and The Road to Mecca. Fugard’s tenure at Yale, with which these plays are associated, began in January, 1980, and he later bought a house in rural New York State so that he could continue his hobby of birdwatching when he was not at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Fugard’s plays are frequently revived and produced and have become staples of nonprofit professional theater in the United States and Great Britain. Fugard has continued to direct his own plays, both in the commercial British and in the nonprofit professional American theaters, such as his production of My Children! My Africa!, which enjoyed several venues, including the Lyttelton Theatre in London, the Perry Street Theatre in New York, the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, and the La Jolla Playhouse in California. He also continued to act in his own plays on occasion, starring in A Lesson from Aloes in Los Angeles in 1991. Throughout the 1990’s Fugard continued his multifarious participation in live theatre through acting and directing as well as writing. After Playland in 1992, Fugard directed and acted in the 1995 and 1996 productions of Valley Song. Most extraordinarily, Fugard played two characters in Valley Song, the white Author and black grandfather ( Jonkers), and specified that in future productions only one actor could continue to play both parts. In 2001 and 2002 Fugard directed his Sorrows and Rejoicings, first at the

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McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, then in Cape Town, South Africa, and finally Off-Broadway. Analysis • Athol Fugard’s plays satisfy a major criterion of good drama: the creation of vivid, lifelike characters. His characterization is immature in his early plays, No-Good Friday and Nongogo—with their black-ghetto gangsters, hustlers, musicians, whores, pimps, dreamers, and even a white priest—but these stereotypes foreshadow such fully developed characters in the 1960’s plays as the half brothers in The Blood Knot, the landlady in People Are Living There, the siblings in Hello and Goodbye, and the destitute couple Boesman and Lena, in the play of that title. In the 1970’s, Fugard created such powerful characters as the miscegenational lovers in Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act, the urban and country blacks in Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, the prisoners in The Island, and the isolated Anglo-Afrikaner couple and their “colored” friend in A Lesson from Aloes. In his later plays, Fugard presents two black waiters and a teenage schoolboy (“MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys) and an elderly, reclusive sculptor, her young friend, and a local pastor (The Road to Mecca). Fugard’s characters, who seem so specific and concrete as to personify South Africa, are at the same time universal in their humanity. Most of these characters do little or nothing except validate their existence through words that cry out to be heard. Their language ranges from the harshly naturalistic to the eloquently poetic; their rhythms are acutely South African, yet they cross linguistic barriers. Fugard’s Notebooks, 1960-1977 records the South African images from which his plays come: two brothers in a shack; a landlady who stays in her nightclothes for a whole day; a woman arriving with a suitcase and a man on crutches; a couple with their worldly possessions on their backs; six police photographs of two naked lovers; a selfconfident black with a cigarette in one hand, a pipe in the other; two prisoners putting sand into wheelbarrows; and a lonely man studying an aloe plant. Program notes for “MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys and The Road to Mecca provide images of ballroom dancing and a magical room of light and color. From such images, Fugard has crafted works of art as solid as steel, as fragile as china. Sturdy yet delicate, his plays wear well—the ultimate tribute to a master artist. Fugard has long acknowledged his debt to Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett. In Camus, he found a kindred spirit for his worldview and his role as an artist; in Beckett, he found a dramaturgy of maximum import with minimum theatrical outlay. Confined to one room or space, two or three characters recollect, recriminate, role-play, and resign themselves to their existence in a world without meaning and with little hope for change. They delude themselves with false hopes and dreams, amuse themselves with games to pass the time; such nobility as they possess comes in the fleeting, lucid moments when they acknowledge their condition—and their dependence on each other. As does Camus, Fugard opts for a “courageous pessimism” born of the clear-sighted recognition of modern human beings’ plight—trapped in a world as capricious as Ariadne’s web and as mazelike as the Cretan Minotaur’s labyrinth. In his 1957 Nobel address at the University of Uppsala, Camus said, “To create today is to live dangerously”; he continued, “The suffering of mankind is such a vast subject that it seems no one could touch it unless he was like Keats so sensitive . . . that he could have touched pain itself with his hands.” In an interview with Barrie Hough in 1977, prompted by The Guest, Fugard’s film about Eugène Marais, Fugard commented that “one of the major Marais statements was that all living, survival, is grounded on pain. . . . It’s really a theme that has gone through all my work; it’s the string that holds all the beads together to make a necklace.” Fugard has touched pain in his plays, as

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much as he has touched love and truth. He revels in the palpable, the tangible. In the realities of daily living—sore feet, tired bodies, arthritic hands, mounting stress, and cruel insults—Fugard reminds people that they are the sum of their pain. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but their interdependence is undeniable. Fugard forces us to recognize this interdependence preeminently in The Blood Knot, Boesman and Lena, The Island, A Lesson from Aloes, and “MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys, the most representative of his plays, as well as in The Road to Mecca. The Blood Knot and Boesman and Lena • The two plays that began and ended Fugard’s work in the 1960’s, The Blood Knot and Boesman and Lena, illustrate his talent for full-bodied characterization, as well as his progression toward structural sparseness and multileveled, resonant language. The half brothers of The Blood Knot, bound inextricably in a union of opposites, reveal themselves completely in a long play of seven scenes that builds to a harrowing climax. The Nomadic outcasts and mixed breeds, or “Coloreds,” Boesman and Lena, hover on the edge of life and death in what appears to be a cyclic pattern of eviction, of breaking and making camp, of Boesman’s beating Lena, and of Lena’s manic search for her identity, in two acts that are half as long as The Blood Knot. However, unlike Beckett’s tramps in En attendant Godot (pb. 1952, pr. 1953; Waiting for Godot, 1954), whose essence is not to change, Fugard’s characters do change in the course of the play. Superficially, more happens in The Blood Knot ’s shanty over a much longer period of time than the one cold evening under the stars of Boesman and Lena, but the latter’s reduction in plot and stage business results in a thematic and symbolic complexity that allows for greater character revelation as well as greater character development. In both plays, two characters diametrically opposite in temperament and goals explode in words and acts when confined in a small space. Such conflicts are the heart of Fugard’s drama, beginning with The Blood Knot. Morris, the light-skinned brother, suffers from agoraphobia—fear of open spaces—after wandering ten years trying to pass for white, while Zach, the dark-skinned brother, has suffered from claustrophobia ever since Morris returned to minister to him by ordering his life. In his notebook entry on the brothers, Fugard wrote, “Morris, if anything, hates himself. Zach hates the world that has decided his blackness must be punished. . . . Morris is the better equipped mentally for this last fight—also, weakened by thought and sympathy. Zach has the physical strength and impetus of hate. Zach wins.” The tyrannical alarm clock that regulates the brothers’ lives rings just in time to keep Zach’s violence at bay. When Zach asks Morris for an explanation of why their game of blackwhite domination has gone awry, Morris responds, “I’ll keep the clock winded, don’t worry. One thing I’m certain is sure, it’s a good thing we got the game. It will pass the time. Because we got a lot left, you know! Almost a whole life . . . stretching ahead. . . . I’m not too worried at all. . . . I mean, other men get by without a future. In fact, I think there’s quite a lot of people getting by without futures these days.” Condemned at birth to have no future, the brothers reconstructed a brief childhood reprieve in which they took an imaginary, wild, car ride—stopped only by a flock of butterflies—chased donkeys in the veld, climbed trees, teased girls, stole fruit, and caught birds. In contrast, the humor of their adult games is sardonic and menacing, their laughter double-edged. They are two particular South African brothers, yet avatars of Cain and Abel. Like Morris and Zach, Boesman and Lena are locked in an intimate love-hate relationship as mates—one they have fallen into years before the play opens, and one that

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Lena chooses to reassert as the play ends, in spite of her open rebellion throughout. Motifs that recall The Blood Knot ’s birds, donkeys, and aimless walking recur in the later play, while staccato, contrapuntal speeches are interleaved with poetic monologues in both. Lena’s frenzied songs and dances on the mud flats parallel the brothers’ childhood games, but the violence talked about in The Blood Knot actually happens in Boesman and Lena. Lena’s bruises are real, and the old African whom she befriends dies before dawn. He literally becomes the white man’s refuse that Boesman has said he and Lena are, and because they cannot dispose of him, they must resume walking. Although she threatens to remain behind, Lena prepares to follow Boesman; in response, he tells her the correct sequence of their journeys, which she had so desperately tried to get straight throughout the play—as if that knowledge would explain how she got where she is. “It doesn’t explain anything,” she says, but her parting shot, “I’m alive, Boesman. There’s daylights left in me,” is believable because she has demonstrated repeatedly her will to live. Suicide is out of the question for Boesman and Lena. As absurd as their existence is, they endure it; they even tried to perpetuate it, but only one of Lena’s babies was born alive, and it lived only six months. In recounting her past to the old African, who cannot understand her language any more than Boesman and Lena can understand his, Lena defines pain: “Pain? Yes! . . . One night it was longer than a small piece of candle and then as big as darkness. Somewhere else a donkey looked at it. . . . Pain is a candle entjie [end] and a donkey’s face.” Such metaphoric language typifies Fugard, as it does Beckett. Moreover, both have been accused of writing plays of despair or bitter comedy. Fugard defends Beckett against such charges, as many critics defend Fugard. Fugard finds Beckett’s humor, combined with his love and compassion for humanity’s “absurd and bruised carnality,” positive and life-affirming; describing Beckett’s humor to his wife, Fugard once said, “Smile, and then wipe the blood off your mouth.” Boesman and Lena is Fugard’s most pessimistic play, in mood and theme, but it is not morbid or maudlin; it is his most profound response to the world as he sees it, a world in which endurance and survival alone may be the only card human beings hold in a stacked deck. The Island • In The Island, collaborative and improvisational in origin, Fugard experimented with the theories of Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, as he did in the unpublished Friday’s Bread on Monday, in 1970, and Orestes, whose 1971 performance is described only in a letter. The Island is a tribute to actors’ theater, but once written, it has stood on its own merits as a strong play for actors other than John Kani and Winston Ntshona, Fugard’s original performers and collaborators. It reads as well as it plays. Unified structurally and centrally focused, it demonstrates Fugard’s mastery of the one-act form. Its companion piece, Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, another virtuoso play for actors, comes closer to a stream-of-consciousness novella than to a drama built on the classical unities of time, space, and action that Fugard observes in Boesman and Lena and his three subsequent critical successes. Yet Fugard has always practiced what he calls “actors’ theater.” As early as 1962, Fugard defined the pure theater experience: “the actor and the stage, the actor on the stage. Around him is space, to be filled and defined by movement and gesture; around him is also a silence to be filled with meaning. . . .” The actor, space, and silence—Fugard continued exploring these dramatic requisites after a reading of Grotowski’s Towards a Poor Theatre (1969) that validated the use of the actor as a creator, not simply as an interpreter.

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The Island could not have been written without Kani and Ntshona’s experiences as South African blacks or without what they and Fugard knew of the Serpent Players, who had been sent to Robben Island, South Africa’s hard-labor, maximum-security prison primarily as political prisoners; some returned to tell their stories. (Kani and Ntshona were never imprisoned on Robben Island, though they were arrested in 1976 before a performance of Sizwe Bansi Is Dead and imprisoned briefly until an international actors’ protest secured their release.) Fugard credits Grotowski with giving him the courage to “write directly into . . . space and silence via the actor,” using the basic device of “challenge and response”; he also credits Brian Astbury, the founder of The Space in Cape Town, for his “vision and tenacity of purpose” in providing the venue for the “Statements” plays. The Island, like The Blood Knot and Boesman and Lena, features two characters who are polar opposites in every sense. John and Winston (both the actors’ actual names and the names of the characters) wrestle with fundamental questions of identity and purpose. The play opens and closes with the two convicts miming the futile labor of putting sand into wheelbarrows, pushing a barrow to where the other has been digging, and emptying the sand into that hole; the piles of sand therefore remain the same. A whistle blows, and the prisoners mime being handcuffed together and shackled at the ankles before the whistle blows again to send them off on a torturous three-legged run. They do not run fast enough to avoid being beaten. Bruised and bleeding, they collapse in their cell before uttering a word. After the prisoners nurse their wounds and curse their sadistic warder, John gives a news broadcast and weather report: “Black domination was chased by White domination. . . . Conditions locally remain unchanged—thunderstorms with the possibility of cold showers and rain. Elsewhere, fine and warm!” Soon, John begins to rehearse Antigone for a prison show. Winston does not want to play a woman, and his reluctance to appear as such is comic until the very end, when his identification with Antigone becomes complete. Condemned to life in prison, he faces the audience and cries, “Brothers and Sisters of the Land! I go now to my last journey”; he tears off his wig and confronts them with, “I go now to my living death, because I honoured those things to which honour belongs.” ( John had been sentenced for burning his passbook in front of a police station.) The Island is more, however, than an anguished cry of defiance. Like all of Fugard’s plays, it focuses on close human relationships; John and Winston are linked in a bond almost as indissoluble as that of Morris and Zach or Boesman and Lena—almost, because midway through the play, John discovers that he will be free in three months, while Winston must remain for life. Before receiving that news, they talked on an imaginary telephone to their friends in New Brighton, another funny game of the many that Fugard’s characters play; after John’s news, Winston re-creates John’s release and welcome home. Ultimately, Winston recovers from his agony and, like Antigone, comes to terms with his fate. The Island is as compelling as Fugard’s earlier plays because, once again, its particulars are transcended in a work of universal significance, a study of humanity’s inhumanity to humanity and people’s capacity to endure entrapment through a joy in embracing ideals—regardless of their consequences. A Lesson from Aloes • In A Lesson from Aloes, isolation, neurosis, and exile are the cost that Fugard’s characters must pay for their fidelity to the ideals of love and friendship; there is little laughter here. The three characters are Fugard’s first attempt to portray his own kind: literate, well-meaning South Africans caught in their government’s

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crackdown on dissent in 1963, which led many to flee the country. Every Fugard play can be seen as an exploration of the effects of public policy on individual lives, but A Lesson from Aloes is Fugard’s most quietly anguished portrait of this phenomenon. Aloes are thorny, spiky, succulents that survive without much water in very harsh environments. Piet Bezuidenhout, a middle-aged Afrikaner, once an active member of an antiapartheid group that was silenced by the police, grows aloes in his back garden. Identifying them by name is his chief pleasure, other than reciting English poetry. Piet’s English-speaking wife, back home after a stay in the Fort English mental home, and his “colored” friend and former comrade, Steve Daniels—preparing to leave South Africa on a one-way exit permit and just out of jail for breaking his banning order—are the other characters in this subtle but searing study of personal desolation. All three characters have internalized the shocks their world has given them. The first act opens with Piet trying to identify a rare aloe; this leads to a revelation of the bitterness that mars his relationship with Gladys. For her part, Gladys cannot forget the police seizure of her personal diaries during a raid prompted by Piet’s political involvement; Piet broodingly wonders why his old friends suspect him of being an informer. Tension builds as Piet and Gladys await the arrival of the Daniels’ family for a farewell celebration. When Steve does arrive, in the second act—without his family and a bit drunk—the party fails miserably. Playing a very nasty game, Gladys tells Steve that Piet had informed on him, but then she withdraws the charge. Piet refuses, however, to say anything: “Hell, Steve, you know why. If you could have believed it, there was no point in denying it.” Apparently reconciled with Piet, Steve leaves. Gladys decides to return to the hospital, and Piet is left alone with his unidentified aloe. In spite of its explicit title and insistent metaphor, A Lesson from Aloes is not didactic. There are no clear-cut answers and few, if any, happy endings in Fugard’s plays. Like Piet, Fugard cultivates a private garden with unidentifiable species. “MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys • In “MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys, Fugard returned to the humor associated with his earlier plays to underscore the point that personal choice and action define a life worth living. Set still further back in Fugard’s past than A Lesson from Aloes, and his most autobiographical play, “MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys takes place in a Port Elizabeth tearoom one rainy afternoon in 1950. A long one-act play—too long perhaps—it opens with two black waiters, Sam and Willie, joking and practicing ballroom dancing for a contest two weeks away. Both men will compete if Willie can appease the partner whom he has recently beaten for not getting the quickstep right. Sam hits on an ingenious solution for Willie’s future practice sessions: “Give her a handicap. . . . Give her a ten-second start and then let Count Basie go. Then I put my money on her. Hot favorite in the Ballroom Stakes: Hilda Samuels ridden by Willie Malopo.” As Sam demonstrates his superior skills, Hally, the teenage son of the tearoom owner, enters and applauds. Hally’s long friendship with the waiters—especially with Sam—is soon apparent, but Hally is tense because of his father’s imminent release from the hospital. Hally loves but is ashamed of his crippled, bigoted, alcoholic father and looks to Sam as a role model instead. Fugard lovingly re-creates Hally’s camaraderie with the waiters; he focuses particularly on a kite that Sam made for Hally from scrap materials—a kite that miraculously flew. Nevertheless, Hally’s “second family” cannot stand up against the demons of his first. These malign forces are unleashed in the play’s climax, when Hally insists that the “boys” call him “Master Harold,” tells

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them a crude racial joke, and, when Sam responds, spits in his face. Sam almost literally turns the other cheek, but Hally is too wracked with guilt to apologize. He leaves, and the curtain falls on the two waiters dancing once again—after Willie has used what was to be his bus fare home to start up the jukebox. A play about growing up and the real meaning of family as much as it is about racism, “MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys is at once exhilarating, sobering, exuberant, and wrenching. Like all of Fugard’s plays, it relies on resonant language; here, the governing metaphor is that of life as a ballroom dance, which leads Sam to dream of a world without accidents or collisions if people and nations can only get the steps right. The game that Hally and Sam play to identify “men of magnitude” who have benefited all humankind leads to some provocative choices by Hally—Charles Darwin, Leo Tolstoy, Socrates, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche among others; Sam’s choices are Abraham Lincoln, William Shakespeare, Jesus Christ, and Sir Alexander Fleming. Sam’s poor-looking kite becomes the most splendid thing Hally has ever seen aloft, and the bench to which Sam ties it when he has to return to work becomes the “Whites Only” bench of Sam’s final words to Hally: “If you’re not careful . . . Master Harold . . . you’re going to be sitting up there by yourself for a long time to come, and there won’t be a kite up in the sky. . . . I reckon there’s one thing you know. You don’t have to sit up there by yourself. You know what that bench means now, and you can leave it any time you choose. All you’ve got to do is stand up and walk away from it.” Avoiding sentimentality in a play that revels in sentiment is Fugard’s rare achievement here; “MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys is a masterwork from a master craftsperson. The Road to Mecca • Fugard’s experiments as a dramatist have been within the confines of social naturalism or realism. His modes are representational rather than expressionist or surreal; his plots are convincing; his language is often poetic but rarely abstruse, colloquial but rarely vulgar. In short, Fugard is not an innovator but a conservator: He emulates the best of his predecessors, but he translates their voices and techniques into his own uniquely South African vision. Over the years—a quarter of a century—he has become inimitable, and no more so than in The Road to Mecca. A threecharacter play, like “MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys, The Road to Mecca is one of Fugard’s most daring experiments. The play is set in the autumn of 1974, and all three of its characters are white: two proud Afrikaners who live in New Bethesda (a village in the Great Karoo) and an equally proud young English-speaking schoolteacher from Cape Town. The plot is essentially uncomplicated. The young woman, Elsa Barlow, drives eight hundred miles for an overnight visit with her old friend, Miss Helen—a reclusive sculptor whom the local pastor, Marius Byleveld, wants to put in a nursing home for her own security. In the first act, the two women slowly reestablish their long-standing friendship, but Marius arrives at the opening of the second act and begins to undermine Miss Helen’s confidence in her ability to cope and to create. Elsa briefly adopts Marius’s point of view when he tells her that Miss Helen almost set her house on fire earlier. Finally, in a moving reverie about the purpose of her Mecca, Miss Helen becomes courageous enough to dismiss Marius and assert her right to live with the danger of her creative impulses. Disheartened by his failure to convert Helen—and to make her love him—Marius leaves. The play ends with the women trusting each other once again.

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Although this plot is fairly conventional, Fugard’s choice of characters, the importance of the set, and the focus on the self-realization of the artist mark this play as a genuine advance for Fugard, a widening of his range. Although women and their concerns crop up obliquely in other Fugard plays—especially in People Are Living There and Boesman and Lena–The Road to Mecca is Fugard’s first attempt to fill space with two women talking, arguing, and nurturing each other. It is also the first time Fugard has dramatized the necessary isolation of the artist. Fugard’s epigraph for The Road to Mecca is an Emily Dickinson poem: “The soul selects her own society/ Then shuts the door./ On her divine majority/ Obtrude no more.” An extended metaphor for the artist’s vision—its genesis and its consequences–The Road to Mecca may also be read as a parable about pain, the pain of loving and not being loved. Apartheid is only the subtext of the play, but Fugard’s initial title was “My English Name Is Patience.” These are the words of the young, barefoot Afrikaner woman whom Elsa befriends en route to Helen’s house. This absent character pervades The Road to Mecca from beginning to end—like so many of Fugard’s striking offstage presences, whose silences become virtually audible. What all of these silent characters share is a need for love. Near the end of The Road to Mecca, candles flicker in mirrors and cast light on the walls—a stunning witness to Fugard’s belief that the “candle burns brighter because the night is dark” and an answer to his question, “Would the making of meaning be so moving without the eternal threat of chaos and nothingness?” Miss Helen’s laboriously crafted garden of statues—all manner of animals, camels, wise men, mermaids, and earth goddesses pointing East—did exist, at the home of the real Helen, Helen Niemand, in New Bethesda, South Africa. Created over a remarkable twenty years of Helen’s life, from age fifty to seventy, by a small, slight woman using broken bits of glass and hand-mixed cement, the statues are mute witnesses to her courage, integrity, and imagination. Thought mad by her myopic neighbors, she persevered alone. In her life and work, Fugard found the perfect fusion of symbol and referent, fiction and fact. All artists try to give meaning to matter, form to the formless, but only rarely does an artist give meaning to beauty, truth, love, and trust in so magical a form as The Road to Mecca. Playland • The first play Fugard wrote after the fall of apartheid takes place one month before the fall. Ironically titled, Playland concerns a dramatic encounter between a black night watchman (Martinus) and a white South African (Gideon) at an itinerant carnival on New Years Eve, 1989. Gideon’s drunken bragging about killing blacks in a border war motivates Martinus’s confession to killing a white man who was trying to rape a servant, Martinus’s fiancé. The difficulty of forgiveness is a major theme in Playland. Lurking beneath their stunning confessions are two angry, guilt-ridden characters both on the verge of violence and in search of expiation for their sins. In fact, Gideon’s fear and self-loathing almost provoke Martinus into retributive violence against him, culminating in Gideon’s exhortation, “Forgive me or kill me.” Also Martinus’s search to exorcise his own guilt is magnified because he would have to forgive the rapist that he killed as well as himself. The playland itself is an ironic symbol not of “play” but of escape from reality and denial of truth. Also the nonworking carnival ride, flickering lights, and Gideon’s broken car are all emblems of national disrepair. Like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to follow, Gideon and Martinus are microcosmic representations of two factions of a country that must listen to each other, rage, forgive, and

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choose to work together for the good of all, a reflection of Fugard’s optimism about his new country’s future. My Life • My Life, Fugard’s next work, is more a performance piece than a scripted play. Fugard chose diary entries from five different South African young women and wove the threads into performance art. His intent was to share the varied and similar hopes, dreams, and perceptions of the younger generation. My Life celebrates racial diversity, uniformity of visions, and South Africa’s future. Valley Song • Another play that blurs color lines is Valley Song. Here the main character is the Author, who speaks directly to the audience; even more unusual is that Fugard stipulates in the printed script that the same actor who plays the Author also play the role of a black farmer, Abraam Jonkers. This positive, forward-thinking play celebrates the limitless possibilities for South Africa’s youth. For Valley Song, Fugard returns to the setting of The Road to Mecca, the fertile valley of the Karoo, which is ripe for the rebirth of a country and its peoples. In Valley Song, the classic generation gap is typified by seventeen-year-old Veronica’s dreams of leaving the rural area for the big city while her seventy-year-old oupa (grandfather) is afraid of youthful rebellion and wants Veronica to continue to stay with him. The image of pumpkin seeds permeates the play—the celebration of nurtured growth. The play ends happily on a note of salvation, survival, and harmony. The Captain’s Tiger • In The Captain’s Tiger, the young writer protagonist is running from a miserable childhood, trying to find his authorial voice while heading from Africa to Japan on a tramp steamer in 1952. The young author deals with his conflicted feelings for his mother by striving, in vain, to rewrite his mother’s painful life into the happier life she should have had. The Captain’s Tiger revealed a new post-apartheid Fugard who clearly feels free to explore more personal issues. Sorrows and Rejoicings • The Off-Broadway production of Fugard’s Sorrows and Rejoicings opened in February, 2002. When the play begins, South African writer Dawid Olivier is already dead. In flashback we discover that Dawid had chosen the creative suicide of political exile to England when threatened with jail for his activist views. Present at the funeral are Dawid’s white British wife and angry eighteen-yearold daughter, his black former lover, and his own spirit. Fugard has said of this aptly titled play, “It is both a sorrowing for the pain of my country and the rejoicings of what it is becoming.” Other major works long fiction: Tsotsi, 1979. screenplays: The Occupation, 1964; Boesman and Lena, 1973; The Guest, 1977; Marigolds in August, 1982. teleplay: Mille Miglia, 1968. nonfiction: “The Gift of Freedom,” in At the Royal Court: Twenty-five Years of the English Stage Company, 1981 (Richard Findlater, editor); Notebooks, 1960-1977, 1983; Cousins: A Memoir, 1994. Bibliography Benson, Mary. Athol Fugard and Barney Simon: Bare Stage, a Few Props, Great Theatre.

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Randburg, South Africa: Ravan Press, 1997. Benson relates her friendship with South Africa’s two major playwrights and extraordinary insights into their lives and works _______. “Keeping an Appointment with the Future: The Theatre of Athol Fugard.” Theatre Quarterly 7, no. 28 (1977): 77-86. A personal biography regarding Fugard’s wife and daughter, his early career struggles, and his aesthetic debts to Jerzy Grotowski, Albert Camus, and others. Benson’s interview is followed by some comments on acting by and about Fugard. The entire issue is devoted to South African theater. Fugard, Athol. “Athol Fugard’s South Africa: The Playwright Reveals Himself to a Fellow Writer.” Interview by André Brink. World Press Review 37 ( July, 1990): 36-39. Excerpted from the Cape Town periodical Leadership, Brink discusses Fugard’s “commitment to the search for meaning” in a warm interview following the opening of My Children! My Africa! Fugard states that he regrets the time he must spend away from Africa, where his energies belong. Gray, Stephen. Southern African Literature: An Introduction. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1979. A strong discussion of Boesman and Lena, “seen by more South African audiences than any other South African play,” in its stage or film versions. Gray interprets the play as a “rewording of the myth” of Hottentot Eve: “The play is ultimately more about the strains of the marriage bond between her and her husband than the colour problem which aggravates it.” Vandenbroucke, Russell. Truths the Hand Can Touch: The Theatre of Athol Fugard. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985. A full study of the playwright’s life, work, and philosophies. Contains introductory material on South Africa and a concluding chapter on influences, crosscurrents, language, style, and critical reputation. Appendices offer the full text of The Drummer, an essay on Dimetos, and a production chronology. Bibliography and index. Walder, Dennis. Athol Fugard. New York: Grove Press, 1985. A general survey and appreciation of Fugard’s work up to “MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys. Walder says, Fugard’s plays speak “not only of the South African dimension of man’s inhumanity to man, but also of the secret pain we all inflict upon each other in the private recesses of our closest relationships.” Plates and index, but no chronology. Wetheim, Albert. The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard: From South Africa to the World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Wertheim explores Fugard’s life and work in such great detail as to make this a vital resource. Nancy Kearns, updated by Thomas J. Taylor and Howard A. Kerner

Federico García Lorca Federico García Lorca

Born: Fuentevaqueros, Spain; June 5, 1898 Died: Víznar, Spain; August 19, 1936 Principal drama • El maleficio de la mariposa, pr. 1920, pb. 1957 (The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, 1963); Mariana Pineda, pr. 1927, pb. 1928 (English translation, 1950); Los títeres de Cachiporra: La tragicomedia de don Cristóbal y la señá Rosita, wr. 1928, pr. 1937, pb. 1949 (The Tragicomedy of Don Cristóbal and Doña Rosita, 1955); El paseo de Buster Keaton, pb. 1928 (Buster Keaton’s Promenade, 1957); La doncella, el marinero, y el estudiante, pb. 1928 (The Virgin, the Sailor, and the Student, 1957); Quimera, wr. 1928, pb. 1938 (Chimera, 1944); El público, wr. 1930, pb. 1976 (fragment; The Audience, 1958); La zapatera prodigiosa, pr. 1930, pb. 1938 (The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife, 1941); Así que pasen cinco años, wr. 1931, pb. 1937, pr. in English 1945, pr. in Spanish 1954 (When Five Years Pass, 1941); El amor de don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín, pr. 1933, pb. 1938 (The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in His Garden, 1941); Bodas de sangre, pr. 1933, pb. 1935 (Blood Wedding, 1939); Yerma, pr. 1934, pb. 1937 (English translation, 1941); Doña Rosita la soltera: O, El lenguaje de las flores, pr. 1935, pb. 1938 (Doña Rosita the Spinster: Or, The Language of the Flowers, 1941); El retablillo de don Cristóbal, pr. 1935, pb. 1938 (In the Frame of Don Cristóbal, 1944); La casa de Bernarda Alba, wr. 1936, pr., pb. 1945 (The House of Bernarda Alba, 1947) Other literary forms • It may be argued with some justification that Federico García Lorca is best remembered as a poet. Although recognition for his poetry came first, García Lorca did divide his creative energies almost equally between the two genres, concentrating on poetry during the 1920’s and devoting himself more single-mindedly in the 1930’s to the theater. His first collection, Libro de poemas, appeared in 1921, and between 1921 and 1924 García Lorca continued work on Poema del cante jondo (1931; Poem of the Gypsy Seguidilla, 1967), Primeras canciones (1936), and Canciones, 1921-1924 (1927; Songs, 1976)—all of which attest his considerable knowledge of Andalusian folklore and a genuine musical flair. García Lorca’s reputation soared after the 1928 publication of Romancero gitano, 19241927 (The Gypsy Ballads of García Lorca, 1951, 1953), an ambitious attempt at recapturing tradition to express it in a modern idiom. The Gypsy is cast as a contemporary victim, a natural being at odds with an inflexible, repressive society, in powerful and compelling images of frustration, loss, and death. García Lorca’s fusion of personal and universal symbolism was almost too successful; critics disseminated rather too freely the facile “myth of the Gypsy” with García Lorca as its poet. This brought the angry riposte that the Gypsy was only one manifestation of the persecution of minorities. Other victims of persecution included the black and the homosexual, and both figured prominently in García Lorca’s next collection, Poeta en Nueva York (Poet in New York, 1940, 1955), written in 1929-1930 but published posthumously in 1940. Visiting the United States in 1929, García Lorca had been appalled by what he saw of Depression-era New York, finding there an anonymous, transient, and brutally violent society with no unifying mythology or collective dream. His denunciations of the alienation, pain, and spiritual desolation inflicted by the ruthless inhumanity of mod329

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ern technology found expression in nightmarish, surrealistic images of the entrapment and destruction of natural forces. If García Lorca wrote less poetry after Poet in New York, anguish and inner torment characterize the difficult and often obscure metaphors of the poems of Diván del Tamarit, (The Divan at the Tamarit, 1944), posthumously collected and published in 1940. A notable exception is the elegy of 1935, Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter, 1937, 1939), which, classical in form, moves in four parts from shock and horror by way of ritualized lament and tranquil meditation to a philosophical funeral oration. Less important than either his poetry or drama, but often a more explicit source of many recurring themes and images, is García Lorca’s prose, particularly Impresiones y paisajes (1918). The most complete collection of his poetic prose and other more ephemeral writings, such as letters, lectures, and interviews, may be found in Obras completas (1973). Throughout his life, García Lorca displayed remarkable talents for music and drawing, and the piano arrangements of his own and traditional poetry and the sketches which accompany, and sometimes explain, his poems and letters are well worth consulting. Achievements • In the decades since his death, Federico García Lorca has become something of a cult figure (particularly outside his native country, where the stylized image of Spain found in his poetry and plays has romantic appeal). His work has been widely translated, inspiring writers, composers, choreographers, painters, and filmmakers; critical studies, moreover, abound, and as a result, García Lorca’s name is now probably as familiar as that of Miguel de Cervantes. Much of this fame comes from a personal myth inspired equally by memories of García Lorca’s undeniably charismatic presence and the tragic circumstances of his untimely death. Proper assessment is therefore not easy. At odds with the myth of García Lorca’s quintessential Spanishness is the degree to which his stagecraft, both as dramatist and as director, belongs to broader European cultural currents. His constantly reiterated goal of the renovation of the Spanish theater was a vision entirely harmonious with the technical advances of luminaries such as Edward Gordon Craig, Max Reinhardt, and Konstantin Stanislavsky. Unlike them, he undertook the enterprise at a time when his national theater was sunk in the stagnation of unrelieved superficiality, and his achievement of a modern style is all the more creditable. In collaboration with stage-director Rivas Cherif and actress Margarita Xirgu, García Lorca brought new techniques from Paris to the staging of his own plays. Not content with winning over the theatergoing public of the capital, García Lorca’s fiveyear stint as codirector with Eduardo Ugarte of the “university theater,” La Barraca, brought the same modern techniques to the Spanish classics performed throughout Spain. His energy, ingenuity, and experience revolutionized theatrical style in the 1930’s, redeeming, albeit only briefly, the national theater from a creaking nineteenth century realism. As a dramatist, García Lorca promised much; his death cut off a brilliant future. Plays such as The Audience and When Five Years Pass are truly innovative, with elements that foreshadow the experimental theater of Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Eugène Ionesco. Even García Lorca’s dramas firmly rooted in the Spanish context have a universal quality. By baring the human soul, he communicated the many facets of humanity’s contact with the primitive, instinctual forces of the natural work in dynamic dra-

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matic language stripped of all superficiality. The culmination comes in The House of Bernarda Alba, García Lorca’s revival of the idea of tragedy for modern times. What new challenges and experiments he had in mind are, unfortunately, lost forever. Bernarda Alba’s final imposition of silence was all too prophetic. Only since the 1970’s, some forty years after García Lorca’s death, have Spanish dramatists begun to grapple with the many innovations he envisioned so clearly. Biography • Federico García Lorca was born in 1898 in a small Andalusian village about fifteen miles from Granada. His father was a prosperous landowner and his mother a sometime teacher. All four of their children grew up in comfortable circumstances with the advantages of a good formal education and the prolonged leisure to pursue the delights of music and literature. Indeed, García Lorca’s interest in the theater was apparent from a very early age in the puppet-theater shows that he designed and directed to entertain the household. In 1909, the family moved to Granada, where García Lorca went to school and attended university. The move was significant: The rich and varied cultural life there fired the young García Lorca’s ambition to write, while the city itself provided him with the subject matter of some of his most important works. Moreover, at the conservatory in Granada, García Lorca’s considerable musical ability brought him to the attention of Manuel de Falla. Their long friendship and occasional professional collaboration was based on a mutual interest in traditional Spanish music and folklore. In 1919, García Lorca left for Madrid and began a ten-year stay at the Residencia de Estudiantes that proved of great consequence to his artistic career. There, García Lorca kept company with the senior Spanish residents, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Gregorio Martínez Sierra, Antonio Machado; made friends with Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel; and enjoyed the frequent visits of famous European contemporaries of the stature of H. G. Wells, François Mauriac, Igor Stravinsky, Paul Valéry, and Albert Einstein. Above all, García Lorca found at the Residencia an audience that listened with intellectual acuity and sensitive appreciation to recitals of his poetry, plays, and music in what was, for him, a period of steady output and growing recognition. About this time, however, he fell prey to deep depression, and, by the summer of 1929, either sentimental or psychological reasons connected with his homosexuality led García Lorca to leave Spain for the United States. He registered at Columbia University to study English but soon abandoned the course. His difficulties with the language and sense of isolation in an alien culture only increased his depression, and it was with great relief that he left New York in the spring of 1930 for Cuba. García Lorca’s visit to Havana brought him fame and a sense of well-being, and when he returned to Spain later that year, he embarked on the most creative and productive period of his life. The political climate in Spain had changed radically with the fall of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera in 1930 and the election to power of a Republican government in 1931. In this liberal atmosphere, the arts flourished, and it is no coincidence that during these years García Lorca directed with such signal success the traveling-student theater group known as La Barraca. In the performance of plays of the Golden Age in the towns and villages of Spain, García Lorca set about the renovation of the Spanish theater that he would carry through into his own work. This fame as director, playwright, and poet led to a highly successful visit, in 1935, to Buenos Aires, which marked the high point of his career as the most celebrated dramatist in the Hispanic world.

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By July, 1936, civil war was inevitable. As the hostilities began, García Lorca returned to Granada—ill-advisedly, as it happened, since the city came under military rule almost immediately and, worse still, suffered a reign of terror in which political opponents and innocent victims alike were assassinated. García Lorca’s well-known friendships with pro-Republican supporters and his involvement with the Republicanfunded La Barraca made him an obvious political target; his reputation as a homosexual and his flamboyant success as a writer made him an easy mark for prejudice and envy. In constant fear for his life, García Lorca finally took refuge in the home of Luis Rosales, a fellow poet whose family’s political sympathies were with the Nationalist cause. García Lorca was, nevertheless, arrested there on August 16, held for a short time, and then shot either late on the night of August 18 or early the next morning. Analysis • Most of Federico García Lorca’s dramas were written when he was in growing command of his art. Intense creativity, however, meant little time for literary theorizing, and García Lorca’s views on his own work and its part in the projected renovation of the Spanish theater must be sought in the plays themselves and the various interviews he gave. His vision was at once lucid and surprisingly socialist for an otherwise apolitical writer: “I have given myself over to drama which permits more direct contact with the masses.” García Lorca saw the theater as a vocation requiring personal sacrifice from the dramatist to ensure not commercial success but a real identification with his people. Only half-jokingly “speaking as a true socialist” did García Lorca think the theater should be a “barometer,” marking the moral ascendancy or decadence of a nation. Thus finely attuned, the theater would act as a natural conscience, and its themes in Spain of the twentieth century would inevitably treat “a religious and socioeconomic problem.” Far from seeking out the exotic, García Lorca advocated a return to the classical norms of tragedy. If he also insisted that poetry and theater were inextricably linked, his poetic drama was to be neither cultish nor middlebrow ersatz, but would live naturally onstage, since “the theater is poetry taken from books and made human.” In less than ten years, García Lorca’s own dramatic style moved from a quasiromantic sensitivity to a classical starkness. He utilized his poetic talent to develop symbols and re-create popular traditions that effectively emphasized his view of the omnipresence of the tragic in human life. There is a tendency to restrict critical analysis of García Lorca’s theater to the elaboration of the monolithic themes that recur throughout his works. Those most frequently identified are impossible love, frustrated love, separation, and the opposition between desire and reality. Such an approach, however, tends to fragment and compartmentalize without doing justice to the superb theatricality of García Lorca’s dramas. By peopling his plays with characters who are “horribly tragic and bound to our life and times,” García Lorca managed to communicate to his audience the true passions of men and women, facilitating catharsis in the best tradition of the theater. Francisco Ruiz Ramón rightly argues that García Lorca’s canon derives from a basic “dramatic situation” rather than from any single theme, that his dramatic universe springs from the essential conflict between the principles of authority and freedom. This conflict is repeated and elaborated in every play and provides the dramatic structure that in every case has a concatenation of poetic symbols or themes (such as earth, water, moon, horse, bull, blood, and knife) and dramatic incarnations (examples of order, tradition, reality, and collective conscience that oppose those of instinct, desire,

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imagination, and individuality). Quite deliberately, García Lorca chose to present poetic drama on the modern Spanish stage; coincidentally, his is very much according to the theories of William Butler Yeats and T. S. Eliot, though with more conspicuous success in the practice than either of those two. Any exploration of the range of moral, socioeconomic, telluric, sentimental, or psychological problems encompassed by his poetic theater must take into account this radical decision. With García Lorca, nineteenth century realism in Spanish stagecraft gives way to a more fluid and dynamic concept of dramatic action to which dialogue, language, song, dance, movement, and scenery all make vital contributions. García Lorca’s theater was experimental and controversial, in keeping with his purpose of putting onstage “themes and problems that people are afraid to face.” In his chosen context of the dramatic conflict between authority and personal freedom, his own untimely death was the greatest tragedy of all. The Butterfly’s Evil Spell • There is an obvious thematic connection between García Lorca’s first play, The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, and, notably, poems such as “Los encuentros de un caracol aventurero,” “Canción otoñal,” and “Balada triste,” from his first collection, Libro de poemas. Romantic in theme but influenced by the subtle symbolism of the early poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez, both the poems and the play tell of love, illusion, frustration, and death; a new force breaks through the tranquillity of the old order, leaving senses and soul perturbed. The play dramatizes in lyric form the confusion caused in the daily life of a community of insects by the eruption of love which is mortal. The hero of this miniature tragedy, the cockroach poet Curianito, breaks with the logic, conventions, and strictures of his codified world by falling in love with “a vision which was far removed from his life,” a dying butterfly that has fallen to the ground. Precisely his atypical condition of poet makes Curianito seek union with the butterfly, which is at once the incarnation of an unrealizable ideal and the victim of the desire to attain that ideal. Through the impossible love between Curianito and the butterfly, García Lorca dramatizes the subtle relationship between aspiration and goal and the inevitable frustration of both as deviance in an otherwise ordered world. The essential dramatic situation of all García Lorca’s theater is present even in this early effort. The dramatic structure derives from the clash between the norm and the ideal worked out onstage by archetypal characters (who will reappear in the later plays) such as the mother (Doña Curiana), the spinster (Curianita Silvia), the doomed lovers (Curianito and the butterfly), and the tyrannical voice of public opinion emanating from the chorus of neighbors and onlookers (beetles and worms). With encouragement from Gregorio Martínez Sierra, The Butterfly’s Evil Spell was performed at the Teatro Eslava, in Madrid, on March 22, 1920. Despite García Lorca’s pious hope, expressed in the prologue, that his audience would appreciate this lesson from the natural world, the public had little interest in a play ostensibly about beetles and worms. Accustomed to the drawing-room plays of the commercial theater, they booed it mercilessly off the stage. Bitterly disillusioned, García Lorca learned the hard way that the Spanish theatergoing public still needed to be educated in the modern techniques so successful in Prague and Paris. Mariana Pineda • Seven years elapsed before García Lorca ventured back to the commercial stage, and to a resounding triumph. Mariana Pineda was performed in June, 1927, at the Teatro Goya, in Barcelona, by Margarita Xirgu’s company, with

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scenery designed by Salvador Dalí and under García Lorca’s own direction. It premiered that October at the Teatro Fontalba, in Madrid. In part, García Lorca’s success was a matter of felicitous timing. Mariana Pineda was a legendary figure of Granada, and her contribution to the republican opposition to Ferdinand VII had contemporary relevance for a twentieth century audience living under Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship. Probably this currency was rather more political than García Lorca intended; he had seized on the poetic possibilities of the historical facts. Certainly, García Lorca’s second dramatic production was less esoteric than the first. His starting point was the ballad about Mariana Pineda sung in Granada’s streets; this was developed into a total spectacle by expert staging and intuitive choreography. Such a combination, with the added appeal of topicality, assured the play a successful run. On its simplest level, the play is a romantic love story full of passion and sacrifice. Mariana’s association with the liberals of Granada is explained by her love for one of them, Pedro de Sotomayor, but both her love and the cause are doomed. Pedro escapes, leaving Mariana to face Pedrosa, the king’s representative, and certain death. The play moves through moments of great lyricism, notably the meeting between Mariana and Pedro in act 2, and Mariana’s tragic view of love in the final moments of the play. Good use is made of poetic symbolism both in a traditional visual fashion (for example, the red lettering on the banner and the children’s game, which combine to suggest spilled blood and death, or the conflict between good and evil reflected in the use of white and black in the scene sets and costumes) and in novel poetic interludes or portents of disaster when García Lorca interjects a romance extraneous to the plot but integral to the play’s thematic unity (for example, Amparo’s retelling of the bullfight in act 1 or Mariana’s lullaby of the tragic fate of Duke Lucena in act 2). From the first, love dominates the scene, and there is a growing sense of individuals caught helplessly in their own passion and in the affairs of others: Mariana in her love for Pedro, Fernando in his love for Mariana, Mariana and Pedro in their hatred for Pedrosa, who himself hates Pedro and desires Mariana. Mariana, the first fully realized character in García Lorca’s theater, is also the first in a long succession of society’s victims, but she never acts from purely political motives. This realization leads the spectator or reader to the second level of the play’s action: a dramatic situation in which love and liberty become identical. García Lorca’s heroine learns that individual liberty and society are mutually exclusive, that any attempt at personal freedom is doomed to failure and death. The Tragicomedy of Don Cristóbal and Doña Rosita • García Lorca’s early romanticism was one reaction against realism onstage; a return to the puppet theater of his youth, with its frantic pace, cross-purposes, and knockabout action, was another. His two puppet plays, The Tragicomedy of Don Cristóbal and Doña Rosita and In the Frame of Don Cristóbal, are, in effect, two versions of the same story, the second version being the more stylized. In The Tragicomedy of Don Cristóbal and Doña Rosita, the theme of love in conflict with parental obligation is treated with dramatic vigor: The father sells his daughter Rosita to Don Cristóbal, a rich man known for his lechery and cruelty. In this broadly comic farce, however, the fact that Rosita and her true love Cocoliche kiss in front of the cuckolded husband is enough to make Don Cristóbal fume and die, literally, ha estallado. Again, the dramatic situation exposes the power that feeds on fear, lies, and covetousness and argues in favor of the authenticity of the individual who escapes societal conventions.

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In the Frame of Don Cristóbal • In his In the Frame of Don Cristóbal, García Lorca shows some of the innovative technique that distinguishes the more ambitious The Audience by beginning the farce with a prólogo hablado in which Director and Poet turn the original story inside out. Don Cristóbal, by definition evil, now turns out to be good at the heart and forced by society to play an evil role, and Rosita has the truly insatiable sexual appetite. By replacing the lyric with the grotesque, García Lorca followed closely the esperpentos of Ramón María del Valle-Inclán and, as the Director notes, a whole tradition from “the Gallician ‘Bululu,’ Monsieur Guignol from Paris, and Bergamo’s Signor Harlequin.” How significant was this return to “the very essence of the theater” in order to give the theater new life is better seen in García Lorca’s two farces for people, The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife and The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in His Garden. The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife • García Lorca started work on The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife in 1926, but he did not finish the play until 1930. It was performed publicly first on December 24, 1930, at the Teatro Español with Margarita Xirgu in the leading role, Rivas Cherif as director, and costumes designed by Pablo Picasso; García Lorca subsequently revised and expanded the play into the version known today, which was premiered by Lola Membrives and her company on November 30, 1933, in Buenos Aires and on March 18, 1935, at the Teatro Coliseo in Madrid. The play was a huge success; its similarities to the highly stylized forms of ballet and operetta were noted and parallels were drawn with Manuel de Falla’s adaptation of El sombrero de tres picos (1874). Theater critics appreciated García Lorca’s blend of dialogue, poetry, and song, pointing out how he had captured the essence of Andalusian speech rhythms. The protagonist was considered a tour de force; a modern version of the unhappily married wife who, however unhappy her condition, consistently rejects all suitors, she is one more in a distinguished literary lineage that dates back to the earliest Spanish ballads. García Lorca, himself, however, insisted on the universality of the Shoemaker’s Wife and increasingly emphasized the poetic element of her struggle. In interviews held in 1932, he explained that “the Shoemaker’s Wife is not any woman in particular but all women” and, moreover, that “every spectator has a Shoemaker’s Wife beating in his breast.” He conceived this “poetic example of the human soul” to portray the violence of the clash between fantasy and reality: The poetic creature which the author has dressed as a shoemaker’s wife with the grace of a refrain or simple ballad, lives and sparkles everywhere, and the public should not be surprised if she appears violent or assumes a bitter tone, for she is continually in conflict, she struggles against the reality which surrounds her and she struggles against fantasy when this becomes visible reality. Violence is certainly the main characteristic of the Shoemaker’s Wife; the play opens and closes with her sharp retorts: “Be silent, tattle tongue” and “Be quiet, chinwags.” The whole of act 1 is rooted in violent antipathy: that of the Shoemaker’s Wife toward her neighbors and toward her husband, which never diminishes. Although García Lorca provides some details about the conditions of this mismarriage (its basis in her poverty and his loneliness, the considerable differences in age and outlook) and its difficult circumstances (the harmful gossip and ill will of the neighbors), these motivations are not sufficient in themselves to account for such a violent attitude.

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In a novel interpretation somewhat out of line with usual criticism, Ruiz Ramón makes much of García Lorca’s own avowed intention to dramatize “a myth of our pure unsatisfied illusion.” Thus, the anger of the Shoemaker’s Wife derives from frustration at the extent to which reality limits not only her individual dreams or desires but also her whole way of being. Her husband’s physical presence confines her very self; absent, he is absorbed into that fanciful self and so remembered with nostalgic affection; on his return, as he discloses his true identity, he again triggers her angry verbal abuse. In Mariana Pineda, García Lorca depicts the incarnation of liberty as an ideal; in contrast, The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife shows much more directly how personal liberty is attacked and endangered on a daily basis. The only nonthreatening presence is that of the child, “a compendium of tenderness and a symbol of that which is germinating and yet has long before it blossoms”; otherwise, the alienation of the Shoemaker’s Wife is complete. This violence done to the self by the other takes on tragic proportions in Yerma. Here (in The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife), humor and the comic spirit are ascendant. Act 2 is a particularly good example of the comic treatment of integrity as reputation and public opinion and integrity as the self inviolate. The Shoemaker’s Wife repulses Don Mirlo, the mayor, and others but is subject to increased vilification by the neighbors; she pursues her own dream reality, but this is shattered on the return of her husband. Hence, the gap widens between individual honor and societal norms. Precisely those forces that overwhelm the characters in the later play are at least superficially contained here: The couple agree on a modus vivendi in order to confront, together, the villagers’ malicious tongues. The self joins with the other, but one may well ask oneself at what cost. The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in His Garden • This pattern of the antagonistic couple as protagonists appears once more in farce in The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in His Garden, in which a marriage is contracted between two incompatible partners: the fifty-year-old Perlimplín, inexperienced in love, and the young and nubile Belisa, who dreams, half naked on her balcony, of her lovers. The characterization goes beyond caricature; in this farcical treatment of the juxtaposition of youth and age, sensuality and frustration, there is a certain element of pathos. The comic action of the wedding night that brings the discovery of the delights of love to Perlimplín (and makes him a five-time cuckold) turns to tragedy as he plans the conquest of his wife by becoming the embodiment of her vision of love, an illusion brilliant and alluring, but one whose death is implicit in its creation. In such a paradox, García Lorca strips certain elements of farce (disguise and mistaken identity) of their comic effect and moves nearer to the innovative cryptodramas The Audience and When Five Years Pass, in which the techniques of farce are used for different and more subtle ends. Innovative plays • During his stay at the Residencia de Estudiantes, García Lorca enjoyed close friendships with Dalí and Buñuel, which were to have an obvious effect on his work. Increasingly as the 1920’s wore on, García Lorca’s theater became more experimental; Surrealism, cinematic techniques, and E. Gordon Craig’s theories of stagecraft permeated this most avant-garde phase of his drama, which belongs roughly to the years from 1929 to 1931 and has much in common with his contemporaneous New York poems.

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García Lorca, wise from his initial bad experience with the commercial theater, had few illusions about his more innovative plays, calling them “irrepresentables.” The Audience and When Five Years Pass were coldly received even by García Lorca’s most intimate friends. Quite rightly, García Lorca considered that the frank treatment of homosexuality and the violence in The Audience placed it far beyond the grasp of the average audience of its time. Only the minority experimental theater clubs might have been persuaded to stage this kind of drama, and in 1936 there were plans (which came to nothing) for a performance of When Five Years Pass by Pura Ucelay’s group, the Club Anfistora. If public taste and attitudes were not then ready, García Lorca knew that “the impossible plays contain my true intention.” Time would confirm his opinion: In 1972, students at the University of Texas claimed The Audience for their own with great excitement, while in 1978, when When Five Years Pass finally reached the Spanish stage, it was hailed as García Lorca’s most original contribution to the national theater. The Audience • The Spanish title of The Audience, El público, stark and clinical, is, like its sets and most of its dialogue, a mystery designed to make one reflect on the meaning of love and life. As spectators, the audience observes the stage action, but, just as the play is the image of life, so the audience recognizes the masks and attitudes assumed by the actors as its own. There is, finally, no separation between actors and audience, between the episodes and incidents onstage and in life. R. Martínez Nadal’s reconstruction of the incomplete text (1978) includes perhaps the most powerful and direct statement by García Lorca on the function of the theater: “My characters . . . burn the curtain and die in the presence of the public. . . . One must destroy the theatre or live in it!” The audience of The Audience witnesses the process of self-discovery by the stage characters, who put on and take off their masks in a frenzied search for identity. They discuss the nature of the drama and participate in their own drama. By the offstage performance of Romeo and Juliet, the play-within-the-play, life is brought to the issues of homosexual love, the frustration of love by death, the treachery of appearances, and the shifting nature of all reality. For the spectators of this action onstage, the issues assume a living form; the characters are reflections of the public, and the audience of them. Boundaries and demarcations are dissolved and become, instead, an infinity of mirror images. In its intellectual range and daring use of technique and dialogue, The Audience is a startlingly “modern” play, certainly of the caliber of the experimental theater of Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, or Eugène Ionesco written some twenty years later. When Five Years Pass • When Five Years Pass was completed in 1931, barely a year after The Audience. Despite its difficulty, which stems from the same arbitrary radicalism and almost perversely individual symbolism of all experimental theater, it is less obscure and less shocking in theme and dialogue. Unambiguously, the title and subtitle, “A Legend of Time Passing in Three Acts and Five Scenes,” point to the central issue, but the composition is a musical one whereby García Lorca has dramatized in a series of fugues the tragedy of time passing for people, who are always at counterpoint, desiring the impossible and destroying what they have. Once again the characters are facets of the individual or the personification of differing attitudes toward a certain fact. El Amigo, Amigo 2° and El Viejo correspond to different facets of El Joven; their varying opinions on time passing are his at different moments in his life. They reflect the opinions and experience of the audience as well,

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for the play is an image which projects humanity’s common concerns with time, love, and death. Blood Wedding • The Audience and When Five Years Pass are García Lorca’s dramas on the lives of men; too frank and disturbing for their time, they never enjoyed the acclaim given to his dramas on the lives of women. The premiere of Blood Wedding on March 8, 1933, at the Teatro Beatriz in Madrid, with García Lorca directing Josefina Díaz de Artigas and her company, and its enthusiastic reception by both critics and public, marked the beginning of the final and most successful phase of García Lorca’s dramatic career both within Spain and abroad. The play was translated into French by Marcel Auclair and Jean Provost and was performed in English in New York in 1935; most important, its run in Buenos Aires, with Lola Membrives in the leading role, led to García Lorca’s wildly successful tour of the River Plate Republics and the beginning of the myth that continued into the twenty-first century. Blood Wedding and Lola Membrives’ revivals of Mariana Pineda and The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife made García Lorca famous, financially independent, and sure of his ability as dramatist and director. From a technical point of view, Blood Wedding reflects García Lorca’s decision to set aside experimental theater in favor of another kind of experiment, equally audacious in its way: “We must go back to writing tragedy. We are compelled to do so by our theatrical tradition. There will be time later for comedies and farces. Meanwhile I want to give the theater tragedies.” Not conceived as a single offering, Blood Wedding was to be the first part of “a dramatic trilogy of the Spanish land.” In 1933, García Lorca admitted that, if he was working hard on the second with its theme of the barren wife, “the third is maturing deep inside me. It will be called La destrucción de Sodoma”; despite García Lorca’s assurances early in 1935 that this tragedy, also known as Las hijas de Loth, was “almost finished” and “very advanced,” no version survives. Martínez Nadal again provides the only details available concerning the “magnificent theme” whose very title García Lorca conceded was “grave and compromising”: “Jehovah destroys the city because of the sin of Sodom and the result is the sin of incest. What a lesson against the decrees of Justice! And the two sins, what a manifestation of the power of sex!” While it is difficult to talk of structural unity when one of the three parts is missing, García Lorca did insist, first, that he was writing a trilogy and, second, that his tragedies were according to the classical model, “with four principal characters and chorus, as tragedies are meant to be.” García Lorca probably intended a modern version of the ancient Greek trilogies; the common theme was the illustration of the power of sexual energy in conflict with established societal norms and conventions. In Blood Wedding, in an attempt to circumvent the passionate love between Leonardo and the Novia, a marriage is arranged that ends in the death of the only two surviving male members of the feuding families; in Yerma, the passionate desire for maternity destroys its only hope of fulfillment. All tragedies in the trilogy were to present a struggle to the death between the two opposing principles of authority and personal freedom. The conflict is a constant in García Lorca’s work, but his revival of the classical form converts it into a spectacle of great theatricality. Much has been made of the Aristotelian pattern of Blood Wedding. Catharsis is possible because the characters who suffer are closely related. The catastrophe that overtakes both the Mother and the Bride may be attributed to their error, the Mother’s in her unforgiving hatred of the Félix family, which results in the death of her own son, and the Bride’s in marrying a man she does not love. Because the Mother brings about

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her son’s death, thereby thwarting her own desire to see her family grow and prosper, there is reversal of intention and, because she finally listens to the Bride’s story, recognition. The final solitude and pain of both the Mother and the Bride awaken pity and terror in the audience. The figures of Moon and Death provide the supernatural intervention in human life, and woodcutters and neighbors supply the chorus. The classical pattern gives style to the original source of the play, a short newspaper account in El defensor de Granada. The real incident and the play’s action are identical, but García Lorca removed the concrete beings to an unreal world, converting them into forces whose incentives are beyond human control. This conversion of the personal to the generic is marked by the integration of poetry and drama. With great dramatic economy, García Lorca built a logical construct: On the axis of action, the Novia and Leonardo are placed in jealous rivalry for family and personal reasons, while on the axis of passivity the respective parents arrange a marriage in which economic factors (money and land to be joined) and animal-like sexuality (“My son will cover her well. He’s of good seed” and “My daughter is wide-hipped and your son is strong”) outweigh any consideration of the Novia. The dramatic situation takes shape in the theme of passion first repressed and then triumphant: The Novia cannot resist Leonardo, the “pull of the sea,” “the head toss of a mule,” or force, which drives her to destruction. The power of sexual passion overthrows the proposed order (the marriage designed to lead to economic and moral prosperity) and justice, in that society demands retribution (persecution of the lovers), which leads to death: “On their appointed day, between two and three,/ these two men killed each other for love.” The Luna-(Muerte)-Mendiga scene thus symbolizes the fatal relationship between the tragedy’s two themes. Yerma • This same conflict may be seen in Yerma, if one accepts García Lorca’s own definition of the tragedy’s theme: “Yerma will be the tragedy of the sterile woman.” It is the only theme worked out in a poema trágico that deals with one character’s continuous development. As the action begins, Yerma has been married for two years and twenty days; by the end of act 1, three years; and from act 2 until the end of the drama, five years. This concept of time passing is fundamental; it marks the movement from anxiety to desperation as Yerma suffers a gamut of emotions until she finally accepts her sterility. The entire action centers on Yerma because the other characters—Juan, Victor, Dolores, and the Vieja—derive their dramatic life from interaction with Yerma, and the chorus of washerwomen and neighbors merely provides a dramatic representation of conflicting views (her sterility or her husband’s). As Yerma begins the process of indicting her husband in order not to accept the truth about herself, the opposition between Yerma and Juan increases: He becomes the symbol of society’s values, she a humiliated exception to nature’s rule of fecundity. Again, as in Blood Wedding, at the height of the action, realism is displaced by poetic fantasy. As Yerma resists the truth, so the real world loses its reality for her until, in desperation, she seeks fecundity in magic. When Yerma does accept her sterility during the romería, the dramatic situation is again conflictive. By killing Juan, Yerma takes possession of her inner life, but, like the Novia, she is “dead” to society; by her act of will, she is the author of her own sterility rather than the victim society would make of her. By engineering her own destiny, she destroys forever her own dream. The principle of authority is again set against that of personal freedom; sexual power is manifest in the overthrow of the natural order. The fecundity for which Yerma yearns but which she is denied be-

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comes a destructive, not a creative, force, truly a “scandal” worthy of García Lorca’s proposed trilogy. Doña Rosita the Spinster • Yerma followed Blood Wedding in quick succession: The premiere took place at the Teatro Español, Madrid, on December 29, 1934, performed by Margarita Xirgu and her company and directed by Rivas Cherif. García Lorca did not, however, capitalize on its success and finish the trilogy. Instead, on December 13, 1935, he offered Doña Rosita the Spinster: Or, The Language of the Flowers, with Xirgu again in the leading role and again under Cherif’s direction, to the Teatro Palacio Principal in Barcelona. According to García Lorca, Doña Rosita the Spinster was conceived in 1924, when José Moreno Villa told him of the rosa mutabile. This became the central image for the passing of time in a play in which costumes, scenery, and dialogue change in minute detail with each act in order to recapture “the life, peaceful on the outside yet seething within, of a Granadine virgin who gradually becomes that being at once grotesque and moving which is the spinster in Spain.” Gradually a difference is made between “real” time and the “inner” time of Rosita, who waits without hope for her fiancé’s return. Like the Shoemaker’s Wife, her self stays inviolate only while separate from the others. In act 2, Rosita explains to her aunt how easily she could divorce herself from the aging process, which occurs only through the eyes of others. Her tragedy is not the betrayal of her love but the destruction of her personal dream that she is loved. In García Lorca’s dramatic universe, other people, by their presence and their comments, pose a grave threat to the individual self’s inner life. At first sight, Rosita is a banal heroine, one whose fussy gentility makes her pathetic self-sacrifice slightly ridiculous; she is, in fact, an excellent study in repression, revealing “the drama of Spanish vulgarity, of Spanish prurience, of the desire for enjoyment that women must suppress deep down in their febrile beings.” The House of Bernarda Alba • García Lorca never completed his projected trilogy, but shortly before his death he gave a private reading of The House of Bernarda Alba, the synthesis of his Spanish rural tragedies. His best work, it was an exciting shift away from poetic drama in favor of social realism. Its first public performance was by Xirgu and her company in Buenos Aires in 1945; it was not performed in Spain until January 10, 1964. Like Blood Wedding, the play’s inspiration was real enough: The original Doña Bernarda kept a tyrannical watch over her unmarried daughters in the house next door to that owned by García Lorca’s parents in the small village of Valderrubio. Indeed, nothing is invented here except the story in García Lorca’s attempt at un documental fotográfico on women’s lives in rural Spain. The most violent conflict in García Lorca’s theater between the principles of authority and personal freedom unfolds in a closed space whose dimensions are physical (Bernarda’s house is variously described as a barracks, a prison, and a convent) and metaphorical (Bernarda’s first and last words impose silence). Authority here is the exercise of power to further a moral and social order based on public opinion, the qué diran. From the first, Bernarda, defined as cruel, cold, and tyrannical, is seen as the incarnation of that authority. Bernarda’s instinct for absolute power denies anyone personal liberty and, finally, negates reality itself. In opposition to this instinct for power, personal freedom translates into an equally basic instinct: sex. In a conflict lacking human or rational moments, Bernarda and the members of her household are isolated from the world and

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from one another. The only solution is the destruction of one or another of the conflicting forces. Madness or suicide provides the only way out of this closed world; both are extreme, neither is successful. María Josefa eludes Bernarda’s locks and bolts only in her fanciful ramblings; Adela’s final rebellion questions Bernarda’s authority, but Bernarda’s word is final: “The youngest daughter of Bernarda Alba died a virgin. Did you hear me? Silence, silence, I said. Silence!” Other major works poetry: Libro de poemas, 1921; Canciones, 1921-1924, 1927 (Songs, 1976); Romancero gitano, 1924-1927, 1928 (The Gypsy Ballads of García Lorca, 1951, 1953); Poema del cante jondo, 1931 (Poem of the Gypsy Seguidilla, 1967); Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, 1935 (Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter, 1937, 1939); Primeras canciones, 1936; Poeta en Nueva York, 1940 (Poet in New York, 1940, 1955); Diván del Tamarit, 1940 (The Divan at the Tamarit, 1944). nonfiction: Impresiones y paisajes, 1918. miscellaneous: Obras completas, 1938-1946 (8 volumes); Obras completas, 1954, 1960; Obras completas, 1973. Bibliography Cueto, Ronald. Souls in Anguish: Religion and Spirituality in Lorca’s Theatre. Leeds, England: Trinity and All Saints, 1994. A look at the function of religion and spirituality in the plays of García Lorca. Bibliography. Kiosses, James T. The Dynamics of the Imagery in the Theater of Federico García Lorca. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1999. Kiosses examines the symbolism and imagery in the dramatic works of García Lorca. Bibliography and index. Newton, Candelas. Understanding Federico García Lorca. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. Newton’s analysis of the life and works of García Lorca contains chapters on his major plays and his lesser-known plays. Bibliography and index. Smith, Paul Julian. The Theatre of García Lorca: Text, Performance, Psychoanalysis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. A critical analysis of the works of García Lorca that focuses on his plays, particularly their stage history. Bibliography and index. Soufas, C. Christopher. Audience and Authority in the Modernist Theater of Federico García Lorca. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996. Soufas examines García Lorca’s dramatic works with reference to audience and authority. Bibliography and index. Stainton, Leslie. Lorca: A Dream of Life. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999. A basic biography of García Lorca that examines his life and works. Bibliography and index. Wright, Sarah. The Trickster-Function in the Theatre of García Lorca. Rochester, N.Y.: Tamesis, 2000. An examination of the role of the trickster in the dramatic works of García Lorca. Bibliography and index. K. M. Sibbald

Jean Genet Jean Genet

Born: Paris, France; December 19, 1910 Died: Paris, France; April 15, 1986 Principal drama • Les Bonnes, pr. 1947, pb. 1948, revised pr., pb. 1954 (The Maids, 1954); Splendid’s, wr. 1948, pb. 1993 (English translation, 1995); Haute Surveillance, pr., pb. 1949, definitive edition pb. 1963 (Deathwatch, 1954); Le Balcon, pb. 1956, pr. 1957 (in English), pr. 1960 (in French), revised pb. 1962 (The Balcony, 1957); Les Nègres: Clownerie, pb. 1958, pr. 1959 (The Blacks: A Clown Show, 1960); Les Paravents, pr., pb. 1961 (The Screens, 1962) Other literary forms • Jean Genet’s literary career began with a small group of lyric poems, highly personal in subject matter, the first of which was the 1942 work “Le Condamné à mort” (“The Man Condemned to Death”). Collected in Poèmes (1948), their quality has been a matter of much debate. Genet has written four novels, NotreDame des Fleurs (1944, 1951; Our Lady of the Flowers, 1949), Miracle de la rose (1946, 1951; Miracle of the Rose, 1966), Pompes funèbres (1947, 1953; Funeral Rites, 1968), and Querelle de Brest (1947, 1953; Querelle of Brest, 1966). His autobiographical work, Journal du voleur (The Thief’s Journal, 1954) appeared in its original version in 1948 (only four hundred copies were printed), with a revised and expurgated version appearing in 1949. Genet’s so-called autobiography is perhaps more allegorical than factual, yet it remains the only available source on Genet’s early adult years. Genet’s ballet scenario, Adame miroir, with music by Darius Milhaud, was performed by the Ballets Roland Petit in 1946. His nonfiction includes essays on the philosophy of art, the most important being the 1957 “L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti” (“Giacometti’s Studio”) and the 1958 “Le Funambule” (“The Funambulists”); essays on dramatic theory, the most important of these being “Lettre à Pauvert sur les Bonnes,” an open letter to the publisher JeanJacques Pauvert in 1954 concerning The Maids and including the letters to Roger Blin concerning the production of The Screens (collected as Letters to Roger Blin, 1969); and a series of sociopolitical broadsheets, including pamphlets in defense of the Black Panthers and the Palestinian liberation movement. His four-volume Œuvres complètes appeared in 1952. Achievements • Despite Jean Genet’s comparatively small output of only five published plays, which includes two one-act plays, he, along with Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco, ranks as one of the major innovators in the French theater during that period (between 1945 and 1965) that witnessed the triumph of “the absurd” and led to the transformation of the whole concept of drama in the West. The drama of this period, which includes that of Jean Tardieu and the earlier works of Fernando Arrabal and of Armand Gatti, is frequently defined as “absurdist” or as “neo-Surrealist.” Neither term can be applied strictly to Genet, whose ancestry is to be sought much more profitably among the Symbolists of the beginning of the century and who appears to have been as unfamiliar with Antonin Artaud as with Bertolt Brecht until about 1954. Setting aside a precise debt to Jean-Paul Sartre, Genet seems to have evolved most of his fundamental dramatic theories, as opposed to his theatrical 342

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techniques, quite independently of his contemporaries. Thus, his drama is far more original than the works of, for example, Arthur Adamov or Jean Vauthier. Genet was reared as a Roman Catholic, and behind his theater lies a mystic’s vision of the world. Everything that exists, exists simultaneously in two dimensions: that of “pure materiality,” which is purposeless, meaningless, and in the fullest sense absurd, and that of an ideal transcendence, which is the domain of “purified significance,” independent of any need to be confined by reality, the domain of absolutes, of “angels” and of “miracles.” Neither of these dimensions, experienced alone, is tolerable. Pure materiality is existentially nauseating in its unjustifiable and arbitrary contingency; pure transcendence is unbearable, in that it is quite literally inhuman. Miracles are “unclean” (immonde, a key pun in Genet’s philosophy, meaning both “not of this world” and “unspeakably filthy”). Truth, or “poetry,” begins at the meeting point at which pure materiality is enhanced by the apprehension of a significance beyond and at which transcendence is humanized by being chained to some aspect of brutal and sordid reality. Abstruse as this may sound, this theory constitutes the basis of Genet’s theater. At the root of all theater, Genet declared in his letter to the publisher Pauvert, lies the ceremony, or ritual, of the Mass. In this ritual celebration, the real and the transcendental coincide absolutely. The celebrant priest is both an ordinary human being and the officiating Servant of God. The Blessed Host is both a nondescript and rather tasteless bit of wafer and the Body of Christ. No disguise, no illusion, no sleight of hand is necessary. It is the strength of faith in the communicant that will bring about the transformation of one dimension into another. To Genet, in this fundamental sense, all theater is religious: It is, or should be, an experience as intense as that of a personal communication with the beyond. Because audiences in this century are rarely imbued with that degree of fervor in their religious beliefs sufficient to transmute reality into symbol, Genet had to find alternative sources of emotional commitment capable of effecting the transformation. He made use of three sources: sexuality (deviant in particular), politics of the extremist variety, and racial confrontation, together with a minor but effective adjunct (in The Balcony), which is blasphemy. None of these is used for its own sake, but rather for its efficiency as a theatrical device—for the sake of its effect on the emotions and the psyche of the audience. Genet’s theater is a theater of hatred, summoned up for its pure emotional intensity, its ability to involve an audience so immediately and personally in the issues concerned that they will transmute the actors into symbols, with no need of illusion, costume, or any of the props of a naturalistic theater. Jean Genet in 1963 (Library of Congress) If the supreme poetic experience is

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that which transmutes “real” into “sur-real” without abandoning the plane of everyday reality, then a play that commits the audience to a hatred of the actors that is so intense that they forget that they are in a theater is the supreme poetic experience. Thus, by a roundabout route, Genet comes to link hands with the absurdists, with the neo-Surrealists, and with all the other leaders of the revolt against naturalism in the theater. His characters are never stable with the stability of day-to-day existence. They exchange identities, as in The Maids, they wear masks, as in The Blacks—yet the masks are invariably ill-fitting, half-revealing the “real” actor hidden behind them. They work out their Utopian fantasies in looking-glass brothels beneath the menace of a looking-glass revolution, as in The Balcony. On the other hand, they engender an atmosphere of violence and of commitment totally foreign to the politically tranquil metaphysical despair of Beckett or Ionesco. In this, they herald the later confrontationist theater of the 1970’s and 1980’s, that of Roger Planchon and of Ariane Mnouchkine. To write a play, The Screens, at the time Genet did, about the war in Algeria, with the Algerian revolutionaries as heroes and the French occupying forces as obscenely ludicrous, was an act of supreme political courage or one of senseless foolhardiness, or else of calculated nihilism. Or, perhaps it was an act that embodied Genet’s dramatic philosophy in its most perfect form: a play calculated to raise the emotions of its Parisian audience to such a pitch that the transmutation of reality into symbol would operate of its own accord, and the supreme poetic communication between dramatist and audience would be achieved with the barest minimum of naturalistic subterfuge. A final constituent of Genet’s achievement lies in his dramatic language. In translation, this is difficult to recapture because it involves dramatic poetry of the highest order; yet its subjects and situations, even given the most liberal interpretation, must be classed as unpoetic. In early reviews of his plays, the epithet “hysterical” recurred constantly. Like Paul Claudel, Genet is a master of a certain kind of impassioned rhetoric that is rare in the French tradition; however, he applies it to situations where it is, to put it mildly, unexpected. His black prostitutes and his destitute Arab riffraff “speak with the tongues of men and of angels”; his squashed-cabbage-leaf domestics have inherited the poetry of Juliet and Cordelia. It is shocking and yet it is right, this “sudden gift of tongues,” as Tardieu expressed it, “loaned unexpectedly to the eternally tonguetied.” As with all truly great dramatists, Genet’s ultimate achievement lies in the fact that he is a poet. Biography • Jean Genet has often been compared to his late-medieval predecessor, the thief and poet François Villon. That Genet was a thief is undeniable; the interest and the mystery lie in how he became transmuted into a poet. Little is known with certainty about Genet’s early life because for both literary and personal reasons, he took pains to transmute the events of his life into his “legend.” Born on December 19, 1910, in a public maternity ward in the rue d’Assas in Paris, the child of a prostitute, Gabrielle Genet, and an unknown father, Genet was adopted by the Assistance Publique (the national foundling society) and sent off to foster parents in the hill country of Le Morvan, between Dijon and Nevers. There, he took to petty thievery and, by the age of ten, was branded irrevocably as a thief. By Genet’s early teens, he was confined to a reformatory for juvenile criminals at Mettray, a few miles north of Tours, where he was subjected to homosexual seductions and assaults. Details about the next ten years of his life are scarce; one way or another, he became a male prostitute, a pickpocket, a shoplifter, and a remarkably unskilled burglar. He traveled from place to place, eventually making his way to Spain and then

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to North Africa, where he developed a sense of kinship with the Arab victims of colonization that would later emerge in The Screens. Yet he also, during this period, had become an assiduous autodidact who, when once arrested for stealing a volume of the poetry of Paul Verlaine, was more concerned with the quality of the verse than with the commercial value of the book. In Genet’s life, these two strains, criminality and poetry, seem to have run together in comfortable harness for twelve years or more. When he was sixteen, according to one source, he worked as guide and companion to a blind poet, René de Buxeuil, from whom he learned at least the rudiments of French prosody (and perhaps the principles of Maurrassian Fascism). Some years later, in 1936 or 1937, Genet deserted the Bataillons d’Afrique (the notorious Bat’ d’Af’—the punitive division of the French Army in North Africa) after striking an officer and stealing his suitcases, illegally crossing frontiers in Central Europe, and running a racket in questionable currency. During the same period, however, he also taught French literature to the daughter of a leading gynecologist in Brno, Moravia, and wrote her long letters in which explications of Arthur Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) alternate with laments for the fall of Léon Blum’s Front Populaire in June, 1937. It is unknown which arrest and what cause led him to the prison of Fresnes in 1942. It is certain that it was during this detention that he wrote his first published poem, “The Man Condemned to Death,” and drafted his first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers. According to the legend, he wrote the work on stolen sugar bags. When the first version was discovered and confiscated by a warder, he simply began all over again. In prison, Genet met a visitor, Olga Barbezat, whose husband, Marc Barbezat, a publisher, could count among his friends Jean Cocteau and Simone de Beauvoir. Genet’s manuscripts began to circulate, and Cocteau pronounced them works of genius. A year later, Genet had been released and arrested yet again. On this occasion, among the witnesses in court for the defense appeared Cocteau himself, who declared publicly that he considered Genet to be “the greatest writer in France.” Genet, for his part, continued his dual career as brilliant writer (poet, novelist, and, later, dramatist) and incompetent burglar. By the end of World War II, Genet had met Jean-Paul Sartre and members of his circle. In 1946, he had met theater director Louis Jouvet, a close friend of Sartre, and had shown him the manuscript of a four-act tragedy, The Maids. On Jouvet’s advice, Genet condensed it to a one-act version. In April, 1947, Jouvet staged it at the Théâtre de l’Athénée, in an ironically conceived double bill with Jean Giraudoux’s L’Apollon de Bellac (1942; The Apollo of Bellac, 1954). In 1948, Genet was arrested again and on this occasion was menaced with “perpetual preventive detention.” The circumstances surrounding this final appearance of Genet the criminal are, as usual, obscure. In all events, Genet now had powerful friends. On July 16, 1948, the influential newspaper Combat addressed an open letter, signed by Sartre, Cocteau, and the literary editors of the paper, Maurice Nadeau and Maurice Saillet, to the president of the Republic, “imploring his clemency on behalf of a very great poet.” The president, Vincent Auriol, was persuaded, and he granted a pardon. Thereafter, Genet was merely a writer. “I don’t steal the way I used to,” he told an interviewer for Playboy in April, 1964, nearly two decades later, “but I continue to steal, in the sense that I continue to be dishonest with regard to society, which pretends that I am not.” This comment reflects how Genet saw the situation at the time of The Screens, his clearest gesture of defiance against all that is held most sacred in the French bourgeois tradition. Since that time, society has triumphed. It is the supreme irony of Genet’s ca-

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reer that the poet who used his poetry to defy society is condemned, not to be outlawed, but to be adulated by that very society he had sought to challenge and to offend. It would seem to have been in reaction to this adulation that, during the 1960’s and 1970’s, Genet publicly allied himself with those whose defiance of society was much more effective than his own: the Black Panthers and the Palestinian terrorists. During the latter part of his career, Genet occasionally sought to prevent the production of his own plays; yet, at the same time, he continued to oversee the publication of his complete works. Something of this paradox, and this dilemma, can be intuited from the closing scenes of The Screens: Except for a small scattering of short political diatribes, Genet was silent following the writing of that play. In him, the romantic archetype of the “poet misunderstood” has been transformed into a new, but nevertheless tragic equivalent: the subversive poet who is understood only too well by those whom he did not credit with the intelligence or the goodwill to understand him. On April 15, 1986, Genet died alone in the Paris hotel room that had been his residence for several years. Analysis • Although Jean Genet’s productive period as a dramatist covers a comparatively short period, his inspiration ranges much more widely. His aestheticism, his concept of the drama as a quasi-mystical experience relating the human to the transcendental by way of the ambiguity of symbols, his uncompromising anarchism, his richly exuberant sensuality—all these link him directly with the enthusiasms of the fin de siècle, and clearly he would have felt as much spiritual affinity with Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley as with Joris-Karl Huysmans and Joséphin Péladan. Genet’s subject matter is rigorously contemporary. The problems he explores are those of the post-Hiroshima world, a world of tormented consciences and inverted values, of racism and revolution, of flamboyant sexuality and puritanical indoctrination. At the same time, recalling that he was creating his drama in the comparatively calm epoch of “the absurd,” with its emphasis on the ludicrous condition of humankind as viewed by the cold, ironic eye of indifferent eternity, his drama, in the violence of its revolt against the status quo, clearly anticipates that of the younger generation, a generation that still lay ahead of him. Genet was writing his drama in the decade of the Angry Young Men; however, while the causes of their anger are largely forgotten, those of Genet—a man who had much more to be angry about—are beginning only now to be appreciated. Genet’s five published plays fall into two distinct groups. The two earlier one-act dramas, The Maids and Deathwatch, have the economy of means, the tautness of construction, the close interdependence of characters, and the concentration within the rigid discipline of the three unities (time, place, and action) that are characteristic of all that is best in French classical and neoclassical theater. Their model and inspiration is almost certainly Sartre’s most effective play, Huis clos (1944; No Exit, 1946). Both, moreover, are fundamentally addressed to the intellect of the spectator. By contrast, the three later plays, The Balcony, The Blacks, and The Screens, depend at least as much on visual effects as on language. The three are broad, flamboyant canvases of loosely related episodes, panoramic rather than conventionally dramatic in structure, or rather (to use the term favored by Brecht, whose influence can be detected at every point), “epic.” Deathwatch • Deathwatch was the first play that Genet wrote, although not the first to be produced; it is also the most directly autobiographical. The character of Lefranc is

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clearly a self-portrait of the playwright, representing an alternative direction that his life might have taken. The play evokes the prison world of Fresnes and Fontevrault, as they are described in his novel Miracle of the Rose. Dominating this world by the aura of his invisible presence is Snowball, a condemned murderer incarcerated somewhere in his death cell on some remote upper story. The French title for the play, Haute Surveillance, is one of Genet’s more ingenious ambiguities, resuming in itself the significance of the action on three different levels. If haute surveillance is the technical name for the peculiarly sadistic form of detention that French criminal law had prescribed for its condemned prisoners awaiting execution, the term also suggests the watch kept from above by Snowball, in his transcendental state of “death in life,” over the rest of the prison and all its myriad inmates. At the same time, and most important of all, it suggests the watch kept by God, who, from the high mansions of Heaven, looks down on the tragedies of humankind and makes or mars (generally mars in Genet’s world) his destiny. Onstage, three men are confined in a cell that is open to the audience: Lefranc, a burglar, shortly due to be released; Maurice, a delinquent who, had he been only a few months younger, would probably have been packed off to Mettray; and Green-Eyes, another murderer, but one who, unlike Snowball, is awaiting trial and is still not condemned. Between these three men, with only rare interruptions from a warder, the entire action takes place in one cell and in the course of a single afternoon. In the “normal” world, there is a hierarchy of virtue having, at its summit, the saint, the man or woman who, having pushed the totality of human experience beyond the limits of endurance, has come face to face with God. In the prison, there is a similar hierarchy, not so much of evil, as of its metaphysical equivalent, transgression. He who has transgressed beyond this limit is imbued with the same mystic aura of sanctity; he sheds the same brilliant transcendental light (or darkness) over more common mortals, as does the saint. Just as the seeker after virtue may calculate by what act of selfdestroying asceticism and sacrifice he may aspire to sanctity, and yet, by the very fact of having calculated, forever exclude himself from the ranks of the elect, so may a sneak thief ponder the steps that would lead to the ineffable summit of transgression, and yet, by having pondered, condemn himself for all eternity to the lowly status of failed transgressor. This is the theme, and the action, of Deathwatch. At the very bottom of the hierarchy is Lefranc, the most insignificant of criminals, because, while he has violated the laws of bourgeois society, he has left intact the major taboos of humanity. Next comes Maurice, who, although still young, already possesses the flintiness, the inhumanity that promises great crimes in the future. Then comes Green-Eyes, the murderer, who has violated the most sacred of all taboos, that which decrees the sanctity of human life. Finally, at the summit, stands Snowball, in whom the cycle of crime and punishment (Genet at this stage owes much to Fyodor Dostoevski), of transgression and retribution, is complete. The range extends from petty lawbreaking to absolute evil. The immediate problem of the play is whether an essentially passive character, such as Lefranc (or such as Genet himself), having accepted the fact that the absolute, in his own case, can never be an absolute good and therefore must necessarily be an absolute evil, is capable of achieving this negative transcendence. The outcome is failure. Deliberately and gratuitously, Lefranc strangles the helpless Maurice, while Green-Eyes looks on, smiling sardonically; Lefranc then turns to Green-Eyes, believing that at last he has escaped his ignominious destiny and has earned his place among the elite. Green-Eyes, however, rejects him out of hand, and Lefranc discovers that it is

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not sufficient merely to be a murderer to shatter the walls that guard the transcendence of the spirit. His gratuitous crime is but one more failure added to the list of failures that constitute his life. He achieves his solitude, but it is Genet’s own solitude of degradation, not Snowball’s solitude of glory. The other path is closed to him forever. Alone among the critics who saw the play at its first performance, François Mauriac grasped the work’s implications; Mauriac described Deathwatch as a modern reevocation of the doctrines of Calvinism (or, in a French context, of Jansenism): a statement of the futility of the individual against the predestined patterns ordained by God since the moment of the Creation. The Grace of God alone, and not the will of humankind, however well intentioned, determines the ultimate value of the act. From Lefranc, the Gift of Efficient Grace was withheld, and so, in the end, his only reward is a contemptuous “Bastard!” from Green-Eyes. All appearances to the contrary, Deathwatch embodies a theological proposition in a modern context. The Maids • Genet’s second play, The Maids (his first play to be performed), is based on a real-life murder trial of 1933, in which two sisters, Christine and Léa Papin, were convicted of having murdered their mistress. The Maids contributed almost as much as Beckett’s En attendant Godot (pb. 1952, pr. 1953; Waiting for Godot, 1954) to exciting an international interest in the new French theater. The sisters Christine and Léa have become the sisters Claire and Solange; their names alone, with suggestions of light and darkness, of sun and of angels, suffice to lift them out of the domain of sordid reality and to elevate them to the very center of Genet’s mythology. From the very first line of the dialogue, however, this secondary symbolism is supplemented by another, which is rooted in the nature of the drama itself: The simultaneous awareness, for the audience, of illusion and reality is presented so that the two opposites, far from either merging or canceling each other, subsist together in all their irreconcilable hostility, each a dynamic and irreducible force in its own right. As the curtain rises, Claire and Solange, within the general context of dramatic illusion, possess a degree of reality as maids. Within this general context, however, they create a domain of secondary illusion, a play within a play. Claire plays the part of Madame, a deliberately faulty illusion in her grotesque and borrowed dresses, with her gruesomely padded body that parodies Madame’s sexual attributes, whereas Solange, perfectly disguised as Solange, plays the part of Claire. Thus, all reality is reduced to appearance, and all appearance to the status of a game. In terms of Genet’s dualist metaphysic, the confrontation of two incompatible dimensions, the two symbols play an essential part: that of the mirror and that of the double. The “real” is both itself as well as its transcendental reflection. Therefore, when Solange plays the part and takes on the character of Claire, the real Claire addresses the pseudo-Claire as “Claire,” even when she herself has temporarily slipped back out of her stage character as Madame and resumed her own reality as herself. The complexity of this doubling is further increased by Solange, who also slips back and forth from her role as Claire (in which case she is the maid, insulting and working herself up to a fury of hatred and vengeance against the mistress) to her reality as Solange. “In reality,” Solange is jealous of her sister and accuses her of having alienated the affections of her (Solange’s) lover, the Milkman. On both levels, reality and game, the hatred alone remains identical, but the transition from one level to another frequently takes place within a single speech, so that the dualities Claire/Solange and real-Claire/pseudo-Claire merge into each other and produce the fourfold mirror reflection of a single identity.

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Nightly, in their ritual-sacrificial game of exchanged identities, Claire and Solange ceremonially enact the murder of Madame. As always in Genet’s work, the contents of the dream spill over into waking life, for there is a real Madame, and the maids have planned her real murder, with a poison dissolved into her evening potion of lime tea. The plan, however, goes wrong. Madame has a lover, Monsieur, whom Claire has denounced to the police for some nameless felony, having first manufactured sufficient evidence to ensure that he will be convicted. The police are hesitant, and, just before Madame returns home, a telephone call informs the maids that Monsieur has been released on bail. Certain now that their treachery will be discovered, the maids realize not only that their dream of murdering Madame must become a reality if they are to escape the consequences of their denunciation but also that it must be realized immediately. Madame returns, the poison is ready, but then Claire and Solange, human beings who have betrayed another human being, are in their turn betrayed by the active malevolence of the inanimate world. The whole of the ritual is on the point of discovery when Claire reveals that it was Monsieur who had telephoned. Delirious with excitement, Madame rushes off to meet him, leaving her lime tea untasted; Claire and Solange remain alone once more, their dream of murder having evaporated, with one final sacrificial ritual for their only consolation. For the last time, they go through their exchange of identities. This time, Solange dresses as Madame but, by her words and gestures, acts the part of Claire the maid, while Claire remains dressed as Claire (or perhaps Solange), but acts the part of Madame. As the curtain falls, it is Claire/Madame who shifts even this “reality” out of time into eternity by herself drinking the lime tea. Thus, truth and falsehood become forever indistinguishable in the wordlessness of death. The poison was intended for Madame; Claire is Madame and, now that she can no longer speak her name, will remain so for all eternity. This extraordinary play, with its perfect one-act structure, its overwhelming dramatic tension, and its density of thought and symbolism, is rightly considered one of the masterpieces of the contemporary theater. It is a play about masks and doubles, about the evanescence of identity. It is also, marginally, a play about social injustice. In the plays that follow, this secondary preoccupation emerges ever more menacingly. The Balcony • The Balcony, the first of Genet’s plays in the Brechtian-epic (as opposed to the Sartrian-classical) tradition, was perhaps the most controversial of those that he had so far published. The very term “Brechtian” implies a degree of social commitment, and indeed the play shows the symbolic representatives of a threatened bourgeoisie (a Bishop, a General, a Judge, a Chief of Police) acting out in merciless caricature their erotic-masochistic fantasies in a luxurious Second-Empire brothel (“The Balcony”), while the hostile forces of the Revolution are actively engaged in occupying every point of vantage in the city. In Genet’s own introduction to the play, he denied most emphatically that it represents a satire or a parody of anything, calling it merely “the glorification of the Image and the Reflection.” He was furious when, in the world premiere of the play at the Arts Theatre Club in London, the director, Peter Zadek, portrayed the Queen as a caricature of the British monarchy. In an interview granted only a few days later, however, he declared that “my starting-point was Spain, Franco’s Spain; and the revolutionary who castrated himself was the symbol of all Republicans who have acknowledged their defeat.”

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The Balcony epitomizes the problems of interpretation arising when a dramatist uses social or political themes for both asocial and apolitical purposes. On the realistic level, both reactionaries and revolutionaries are equally unacceptable to Genet’s ideal of “pure poetry,” for both represent the disciplined forces of anti-individualism that are repugnant to him. The difference is that the first group represents a society that has already excluded him, whereas the second group represents a movement from which he would rather exclude himself. He is strongly attracted by the archaic mysticism of reaction yet is repelled by the individuals who incarnate it. On the other hand, he is on the whole attracted by individual revolutionaries yet disgusted by their materialistic ambitions and disciplinarian methods. In The Balcony, Genet reveals himself as an anarchist of the most classical variety. He has defined his own intrinsic attitude again and again. He is not in revolt against any particular society; he has simply opted out of all societies, which position, in the long run, presents him with a far more difficult attitude to sustain. Genet diligently abstracts his heroes from their social context, shows them as negative, individualistic, and concerned only with sanctity and with transcendental absolutes. With equal diligence, the audience replaces them where they came from and persists in interpreting them as positive heroes or victims in a relative social or political setting. The essence of Genet’s dilemma as a dramatist consists in that although he refuses to create a socialist theater, inevitably his negative revolt will be interpreted as some sort of socialism. These are the ambiguities that plague The Balcony and that make of it at once the most successful and at the same time the least convincing of Genet’s dramas. The Balcony is another of his symbolic-suggestive titles. As the throne (Heaven, altar, or condemned cell) from which an isolated consciousness looks down on humanity and bears away the weight of its sins, the Balcony is a brothel of a special type. It is a microcosm, a mirror reflection of the real world, in which all appearances become reality. It provides costumes, props, accessories, and endless mirrors; each customer acts out, in an erotic ritual of pure appearances, the part in which he or she would like to see himself. Inside the elaborate decor of these tiny closed worlds of absolute illusion, prostitutes and customers together enact the rituals of make-believe. Two realities lie behind all this aesthetic sublimation: the Revolution and, less obtrusive but more significant, a “theory of functions.” In the last analysis (this is the essence of the play), both establishment and revolution emerge as “functions” of each other. If a judge exists, he exists only as a function of a potential criminal: Were there no criminals, there would be no judges. Similarly, were there no bourgeoisie, there would be no revolution. The proletariat depends on the bourgeoisie for its very definition, its very existence. The one is the mirror reflection of the other; as always in Genet, the reflection is more real than the image. (Once the Queen is dead, and Madame Irma, the “Madame” of the Brothel, “plays” the Queen, the “real” revolution is crushed immediately.) By destroying the establishment, the Revolution destroys its own identity, which was defined and given existence by its function, which was that of opposing the establishment. Similarly, the Chief of Police (the most enigmatic figure in the play) is defined as the opponent of the Revolution. In annihilating the Revolution, he destroys his own function and thus annihilates himself, leaving himself only the brothel as an ultimate refuge, with his quest for his own mausoleum, whereby he might perpetuate his own nonfunctional existence as a myth. The Balcony is the most complex of Genet’s plays, the most ambiguous, and yet one of the most impressive. In a social situation, a person is what he or she is seen to be by

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others. This other-created self is given substance by the individual’s appearance—his or her uniform, robes, vestments. These props are the power symbols that constitute the person’s essence, yet power is defined by the object over which that power may be exercised. Remove that object, and both the power and the symbol of power, hence the identity, evaporate into nothingness. A “function” must function; where there is no context in which functioning is possible, the power is thrown back on itself. To be, the image can only contemplate its own reflection in the mirror. Therefore, in a sense, the first four mirror scenes of The Balcony should also recur at the end. Had the play been written by Beckett, this might have happened. As it is, there are suggestions: “In a little while, I’ll have to start all over again,” says Madame Irma in her concluding monologue, “put all the lights on again . . . dress up . . . distribute roles again . . . assume my own.” Basically, the structure of Genet’s later plays is too Brechtian-linear to allow this type of cyclical conclusion to be fully developed. The Balcony is a transitional play, and the experimental audacities of its form are not quite adequate to express the sophistication of its content. If Genet, together with many of his contemporaries, refused absolutely to commit himself to any ideology of the Left, this was for literary as well as for political reasons. To the poet, the most repulsive feature of the established Left was its reliance on platitudes and slogans. It needed the freakish genius of a Vladimir Mayakovsky to transmute slogans into poetry. For the rest, it is the seemingly irrevocable mission of the Left to crush poetry into slogans. The Blacks • Genet’s reply to this, both in The Blacks and in The Screens, was to reverse the accepted order of moral values accorded to either side in his confrontation of ideological opposites, thus giving the conventional platitudes a startling and shocking originality when bestowed on the right side for the wrong reason or on the wrong side for the right reason. In the drama of the political platitude (as in the melodrama, from which such drama springs), there are heroes and villains; the revolutionary heroes are good, while the reactionary villains are bad. In Genet’s variant, the revolutionary “heroes” are bad (degraded, murderous, and treacherous), while the reactionary “villains” are good (beautiful, idealistic, and constructive). The structure of The Blacks is that of a total theater—that is, of a theater employing all the media that contribute to the dramatic impact of the spectacle. It uses music, dance, rhythm, and ritual; contrasts masks and faces, illusion and reality; and employs different levels, exploiting a multiplicity of stage dimensions (Antonin Artaud’s “poetry in space”). It borrows its techniques from the jazz band and the jam session, from the church service and from the music hall, from the circus, and even, in the episodes of orchestrated laughter, from the stylized, cadenced mockery of the Aristophanic chorus. In such a context, the chief function and dramatic value of language is realized as a medium of incantation. This play has more in common with music than with normal drama, wherein representation has given way to abstraction. The aim of convincing an audience, assumed to be intellectual, has been replaced by that of rousing it to a state of mystical or hysterical delirium, using means that the high priest shares with the demagogue and the jazz trumpeter, with the snake charmer. The final effectiveness of the piece lies in the fact that it is by no means devoid of ideas. The dialectic is there, but it is conveyed by implication rather than by statement. The Blacks has little or no coherent story. Rather, it has a theme (the theme of black and white) and a structure that gradually reveals itself as having significance on differ-

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ent and unsuspected levels. The actors are black actors. They are introduced as a group of blacks with ordinary, everyday backgrounds—cook, sewing maid, medical student, prostitute—but have now come together to produce an entertainment, a “clown-show.” Meanwhile, entombed on the stage in a white-draped, flower-covered catafalque lies the corpse of a murdered white woman. Around this, a further dimension of illusion is developed: the rhythms, rituals, and ceremonies of hatred and violence. Observing this, high up in their gallery, sit five blacks masked as whites: the Queen, the Missionary, the Governor, the Judge, and the Valet, providing yet a further dimension, an audience for the clownery of the others. What precisely is this audience? For the actors below them on the stage, the court both is and is not an audience. It watches them, listens to them, applauds them, yet it is composed of actors acting as an audience, an unreal mirror reflection of the “real” audience in the pit and stalls facing them. It is also a chorus and, in symbolic form, the enemy. So the play develops for more than half its length, working out permutations and combinations with the elusive material of dimensions, of plays within plays and audiences within audiences, until suddenly, with the dramatic entry of Ville-de-SaintNazaire, the whole delicate structure collapses with the revelation of still another dimension: a play outside the play. Ville-de-Saint-Nazaire is not concerned with any dream of village love or of ritually murdered whites. He is a real political agitator (but what, at this point, is “real”?) who has been attending a secret meeting “just up the street outside the theater,” at which not a white but another black has been condemned to execution for having betrayed the clandestine Society for Black Rights. Meanwhile, all the others—actors, audience, true or false, black whites, and white blacks—disintegrate into dreams. The whole evening’s clownery was merely a deliberate diversion (as Archibald warned from the beginning), a smoke screen to keep the audience’s attention fixed while the executive committee got on with its job. The white court strips off its masks, the others strip off their personalities, and for an instant, they are any group of real blacks having an urgent political discussion. The former Valet, that erstwhile masked caricature of the bourgeois intellectual or artist in capitalist society, is now revealed as the cell leader, whose orders are obeyed instantly and without question. Eventually, he commands his combat section to take up their parts again and to resume the act; thus the audience is back in the dimensions of illusion. The victory, however, lies with Genet. In the closing scenes, when the audience knows that all is merely a “clown-show,” the hard, political play outside the play moves even further from reality than the actors portraying actors of the play itself. In yet another dimension, there is more reality— immediate political reality this time—in the notion of an armed and organized Direct Action Committee for Negro Rights than there is in ritualistic dances about the imaginary catafalque of an imaginary murdered white. Which is real and which is illusion? Compared with The Blacks, Luigi Pirandello’s experiments with the same problem seem almost childish. Ultimately, since there must be an end, the whole masked court of whites makes its way reluctantly toward the “infernal regions,” enveloped in a rain of muddled colonialistic platitudes. There is neither triumph nor fear on either side. What must be, must be. For the blacks, their victory over the whites is scarcely worth a comment; it is all in the day’s work. Their real problems lie elsewhere. In this play, masks reveal even more than they hide of the reality beneath. Among these, for the blacks, the most disquieting is the mask of language. These blacks, for all their blackness, are speaking with the language of the whites, not even Creole or petit-

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nègre (pidgin French), but the purest, most classical language of the Princesse de Clèves. The face masks can be removed easily enough, the language mask, never. Thus, when Village makes love to Vertu, he makes love to her in white language, and his black love for a black girl is transmuted into a white love for a white girl and thus becomes, even in its purest poetry, a pure falsehood. The Judge, the Governor, and the Missionary are gone, but the language remains: the irremovable trace of servitude imposed by a benevolent paternalism. In the final analysis, the black imitates more than the white: He imitates the very language that condemns his imitation. Such is the conclusion of The Blacks and the ultimate tragedy of colonialism. The Screens • Written in 1959-1960, at the climax of France’s catastrophic conflict with Algerian nationalism, it was inconceivable that The Screens, a play that ridiculed French patriotism and that caricatured as ludicrous buffoons conscript members of the French Army on active service, should be performed in Paris—or indeed anywhere within metropolitan France. Fragmented versions in translation were presented in Berlin and in London; the true world premiere was given in Stockholm in Swedish. Only some four years after the war had concluded had the accompanying emotions subsided sufficiently to allow a tentative, carefully spaced run at the Théâtre National de l’Odéon in Paris; even then, there were “incidents.” Insofar as Brecht must be considered a major influence on Genet’s later drama, The Screens is the most purely Brechtian of all his plays. Explicit argument is reduced to a minimum, and traditional psychology has dwindled to the vanishing point. Instead, the dramatic effect is created by a series of brilliant visual images, stylized and simplified almost to the point of primitivism, by violence, slogans, caricature, deliberate vulgarity, and by the overwhelming impression of hatred that remains in the atmosphere long after the actors of each individual scene have vanished. Most of the more obsessive themes and problems of Genet’s earlier dramas are present but are now reduced to their visual equivalent, acted out in front of the four levels of screens on the stage, on which the performers roughly chalk in a symbolic decor as required (a technique derived from cabaret shows of the period). Beneath this camouflage of primitivism, parody, and purely dramatic spectacle, traces of ideas reveal that Genet’s complex vision of the world has by no means ceased to evolve. The “hero” of the drama is Saïd, the most abject, cowardly, debased, and unlovable of all the fellahin, and the “heroines” are Warda and Malika, the ritualistically costumed and painted whores of the brothel. The “villains” are, on the one hand, the European colonists and the French Army of Occupation; on the other hand, and rather more ambiguously, they are the Arab militant insurgents, armed and disciplined, the very mirror reflection of the European occupiers whom they are driving back into the sea. In this respect, but only in this respect, The Screens recapitulates the argument of The Blacks; to maintain their identity in the face of the power of the white peoples, the oppressed of the Third World must assimilate the technology and master the efficiency of the Europeans and, in so doing, destroy forever the authentic heritage of those whom they are seeking to defend. It is a dilemma from which there is no escape, one of the profoundest tragedies of the modern world. Beneath the conflict of French and Arabs that forms the obvious subject of the play lies a much profounder and, for Genet, more immediately relevant conflict: that between anarchy and organization. If the main division of the characters is into white and brown, there is also a secondary division that cuts right across the first. On the one hand are anarchists, the reversers of conventional values so dear to Genet’s heart—

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Saïd; his mother; Leïla, his wife; Kadidja; and Ommu—and on the other, the orthodox forces of political reality. These include not only the colonials and the Légionnaires but also the disciplined Arab combatants themselves, who, in the final moments of the play, execute Saïd and, in so doing, relegate Genet’s dreams to where they belong: to the world of poetry, which, in political terms, is the world of acquiescent nonfunction, the world of death. When the audience first meets Saïd, he is on his way to his wedding, accompanied by his mother. Like that of Genet himself, Saïd’s authenticity resides in his abjection. He plunges downward into “sanctity” through his experiences of degradation and of evil. Leïla, his bride (the Arabic word means “night”), has only one outstanding individual characteristic: her ugliness. She is “the ugliest woman in the next town and all the towns around.” Progressively her ugliness becomes, for herself, for Saïd, and for his mother, the symbol of a total negativity, a total rejection of “accepted” values, aesthetic or otherwise. Meanwhile, Saïd progresses through ever more categoric stages of negation. From an outcast he becomes a thief; from a thief, a jailbird; from a jailbird, a traitor. His treachery is his final negation of positive values because he is betraying not only his own but also his creator’s committed cause; however, it is all so useless. As had happened with the prostitute Chantal in The Balcony, the Revolution seizes on Saïd’s image and elevates it into that of a hero. It transforms him into a symbol of himself, thus condemning him to the dimension of death and of unreality, even while he is yet alive. Just as Genet himself had been transformed from a criminal into the Poet (and thus transmuted from an ignominious life into a glorious death while alive), so Saïd is transmuted from his rebellious and abject self into a Glorious Cause. Death, after that, is a relief. The death of Saïd, however, is no solution to Genet’s own problem; it merely places Genet himself in the position of having to abandon either politics or poetry, having failed successively, through The Balcony, The Blacks, and The Screens, in his attempt to reconcile the two. “Certain truths are not applicable, otherwise they’d die,” says Ommu toward the end of The Screens. “They mustn’t die, but live through the songs they’ve become.” Poetry, in fact, is one thing, and politics, another. One is life, and the other is death. The only question is, which is which? Such is the insoluble problem left hanging in the air at the end of The Screens. “It’s dead we want you, dead,” says Ommu to Saïd. “That’s leaving me dead alive,” replies Saïd. After the writing of The Screens, Genet, caught finally in the trap of politics, would appear to have existed “dead alive.” Other major works long fiction: Notre-Dame des Fleurs, 1944, 1951 (Our Lady of the Flowers, 1949); Miracle de la rose, 1946, 1951 (Miracle of the Rose, 1966); Pompes funèbres, 1947, 1953 (Funeral Rites, 1968); Querelle de Brest, 1947, 1953 (Querelle of Brest, 1966). poetry: Poèmes, 1948; Treasures of the Night: The Collected Poems of Jean Genet, 1980. nonfiction: Journal du voleur, 1948, 1949 (The Thief’s Journal, 1954); Lettres à Roger Blin, 1966 (Letters to Roger Blin, 1969). miscellaneous: Œuvres complètes, 1952 (4 volumes). Bibliography Dobrez, L. A. C. The Existential and Its Exits: Literary and Philosophical Perspectives on the Works of Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and Pinter. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Dobrez examines existentialism in the works of Genet as well as those of Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Harold Pinter. Contains index.

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Hauptman, Robert. The Pathological Vision: Jean Genet, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and Tennessee Williams. American University Studies series. New York: Peter Lang, 1984. Hauptman examines ethics, specifically the presence of evil, in the works of Genet, Céline, and Williams. Contains bibliography. Knapp, Bettina Liebowitz. Jean Genet. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Knapp looks at Genet’s life and analyzes and interprets his works. Includes bibliography and index. Plunka, Gene A. The Rites of Passage of Jean Genet: The Art and Aesthetics of Risk Taking. London: Associated University Presses, 1992. This analysis of Genet and his works focuses on the psychology of risk taking. Includes bibliography and index. Read, Barbara and Ian Birchall, eds. Fowers and Revolution: A Collection of Writings on Jean Genet. London: Middlesex University Press, 1997. This collection of essays examines the life and criticizes and interprets the works of Genet. Includes index. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Saint-Genet, Actor and Martyr. 1963. Reprint. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983. The French writer Sartre’s biography of Genet. Includes bibliography. Stewart, Harry E., and Rob Roy McGregor. Jean Genet: From Fascism to Nihilism. New York: P. Lang, 1993. The authors examine how fascism, nihilism, and other political currents affected the writings of Genet. White, Edmund. Genet: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1994. A look at the life of the French writer. Includes bibliography and index. Richard N. Coe

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Born: London, England; November 18, 1836 Died: Harrow Weald, England; May 29, 1911 Principal drama • Ruy Blas, pb. 1866 (in Warne’s Christmas Annual ); Dulcamara: Or, The Little Duck and the Great Quack, pr., pb. 1866 (based on Gaetano Donizetti’s opera L’elisir d’amore); Allow Me to Explain, pr. 1867; Highly Improbable, pr. 1867; Harlequin Cock Robin and Jenny Wren: Or, Fortunatus and the Water of Life, the Three Bears, the Three Gifts, the Three Wishes, and the Little Man Who Woo’d the Little Maid, pr., pb. 1867; The Merry Zingara: Or, The Tipsy Gipsy and the Pipsy Wipsy, pr., pb. 1868; Robert the Devil: Or, The Nun, the Dun, and the Son of a Gun, pr., pb. 1868; No Cards, pr. 1869, pb. 1901 (libretto; music by Lionel Elliott); The Pretty Druidess: Or, The Mother, the Maid, and the Mistletoe Bough, pr., pb. 1869; An Old Score, pr., pb. 1869; Ages Ago: A Ghost Story, pr., pb. 1869 (libretto; music by Frederick Clay); The Princess, pr., pb. 1870; The Gentleman in Black, pr. 1870 (libretto; music by Frederick Clay); The Palace of Truth, pr., pb. 1870; A Medical Man, pb. 1870, pr. 1872; Randall’s Thumb, pr. 1871, pb. 1872; A Sensation Novel, pr. 1871, pb. 1912 (libretto; music by Florian Pascal); Pygmalion and Galatea, pr. 1871, pb. 1872; Thespis: Or, The Gods Grown Old, pr., pb. 1871 (libretto; music by Sir Arthur Sullivan); The Brigands, pb. 1871, pr. 1889 (libretto; music by Jacques Offenbach); On Guard, pr., pb. 1872; Happy Arcadia, pr., pb. 1872 (libretto; music by Frederick Clay); The Wicked World, pr., pb. 1873; The Happy Land, pr., pb. 1873 (as F. Tomline, with Gilbert A’ Beckett); The Realm of Joy, pr. 1873; The Wedding March, pr. 1873, pb. 1879 (adaptation of Eugène Labiche’s Le Chapeau de paille d’Italie); Charity, pr. 1874; Ought We to Visit Her?, pr. 1874 (with Annie Edwards); Committed for Trial, pr. 1874, pb. 1930 (adaptation of Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy’s Le Réveillon, later revised as On Bail); Topsy Turveydom, pr. 1874, pb. 1931; Sweethearts, pr. 1874, pb. 1878; Trial by Jury, pr., pb. 1875 (libretto; music by Sullivan); Tom Cobb: Or, Fortune’s Toy, pr. 1875, pb. 1880; Eyes and No Eyes: Or, The Art of Seeing, pr. 1875, pb. 1896 (libretto; music by Pascal); Broken Hearts, pr. 1875, pb. 1881; Princess Toto, pr., pb. 1876 (libretto; music by Frederick Clay); Dan’l Bruce, Blacksmith, pr., pb. 1876; Original Plays, pb. 1876-1911 (4 volumes); On Bail, pr. 1877, pb. 1881 (revision of Committed for Trial ); Engaged, pr., pb. 1877; The Sorcerer, pr., pb. 1877 (libretto; music by Sullivan); The Ne’er-do-Weel, pr., pb. 1878; H.M.S. Pinafore: Or, The Lass That Loved a Sailor, pr., pb. 1878 (libretto; music by Sullivan); Gretchen, pr., pb. 1879; The Pirates of Penzance: Or, The Slave of Duty, pr. 1879, pb. 1880 (libretto; music by Sullivan); Patience: Or, Bunthorne’s Bride, pr., pb. 1881 (libretto; music by Sullivan); Foggerty’s Fairy, pr., pb. 1881; Iolanthe: Or, The Peer and the Peri, pr., pb. 1882 (libretto; music by Sullivan); Comedy and Tragedy, pr. 1884, pb. 1896; Princess Ida: Or, Castle Adamant, pr., pb. 1884 (libretto; music by Sullivan); The Mikado: Or, The Town of Titipu, pr., pb. 1885 (libretto; music by Sullivan); Ruddigore: Or, The Witch’s Curse, pr., pb. 1887 (libretto; music by Sullivan); The Yeomen of the Guard: Or, The Merryman and His Maid, pr., pb. 1888 (libretto; music by Sullivan); Brantinghame Hall, pr., pb. 1888; The Gondoliers: Or, The King of Barataria, pr., pb. 1889 (libretto; music by Sullivan); Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, pr. 1891, pb. 1893; The Mountebanks, pr., pb. 1892 (libretto; music by Alfred Cellier); Haste to the Wedding, pr., pb. 1892 (libretto; music by George Grossmith); Utopia, Limited: Or, The Flowers of Progress, pr., pb. 1893 (li356

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bretto; music by Sullivan); His Excellency, pr., pb. 1894 (libretto; music by Osmond Carr); The Grand Duke: Or, The Statutory Duel, pr., pb. 1896 (libretto; music by Sullivan); The Fortune Hunter, pr., pb. 1897; Fallen Fairies, pr., pb. 1909 (with Edward German); The Hooligan, pr., pb. 1911; Gilbert Before Sullivan: Six Comic Plays, pb. 1967 ( Jane Stedman, editor); Plays, pb. 1982 (George Rowell, editor) Other literary forms • Apart from his writing for the theater, W. S. Gilbert’s principal literary accomplishment is The Bab Ballads (1869), whimsical verses that he illustrated himself. Originally published in comic journals such as Fun and Punch, they are generally regarded as the well from which Gilbert drew many of the songs and situations of his comic operas. Achievements • The comic operas of W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan are the product of one of the most successful collaborations in theatrical history, for while other teams of librettist and composer have achieved comparable distinction, in no other pair have the talents so complemented each other. Both chafed at the fact that their more serious accomplishments were less well regarded, and both tried, without great success, to work with other collaborators. Gilbert’s whimsy and legalistic paradoxes would have been little more than quaint if they had not been humanized by Sullivan’s melodies, and Sullivan’s choral and orchestral virtuosity and his propensity to parody found their focus in Gilbert’s preposterous plots. Gilbert and Sullivan’s initial collaborations took place over a span of six years, during which they were engaged in other artistic enterprises as well. With the composition of H.M.S. Pinafore, however, they began a decade of enormous popularity, with virtually one new opera a year, each with a measure of uniqueness yet all derived from a recognizable formula. Although the later operas are somewhat more musically complex and more extravagantly plotted, these advances are less the consequence of artistic maturity than of technical confidence. Gilbert’s not too serious social criticism, his tongue-twisting lyrics, and his gentle spoofs of romantic conventions appealed to a middle-class audience that had only recently been persuaded that the theater might be a respectable institution after all. The two operas Gilbert and Sullivan produced after the great breach that lasted from 1889 to 1893 are not sufficiently inferior to the others as to account for their unpopularity. The vogue of Gilbert and Sullivan had not ended, for the earlier operas continued to be revived. It is more likely that the collaborators had produced enough operas to keep their public happy. For almost a century, these operas have remained favorites on both sides of the Atlantic, kept alive largely by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, holders of the copyright, from whose elaborately stylized and insistently Victorian productions other professional and amateur renditions have been derived. Although changes in the company’s finances forced its closure in 1982, interest in the operas was not noticeably diminished, with both Joseph Papp’s 1980 revival and the 1983 film version of The Pirates of Penzance being well received. Continued interest in Gilbert and Sullivan was evidenced by the release of Topsy-Turvy, a 1999 feature film on their collaboration by British filmmaker Mike Leigh. Biography • William Schwenck Gilbert was born at 17 Southampton Street, Strand, London, on November 18, 1836, the son of a fairly well-to-do naval surgeon, who turned to a literary career at about the same time as young William did. At the age of two, while on holiday with his parents in Italy, Gilbert was kidnapped from his nurse

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and ransomed for twenty-five pounds. He later claimed to have a perfect recollection of the incident. At any rate, his plots frequently hinge on the removal of infants from their real parents. Educated at Boulogne, France, and Great Ealing School, he then attended King’s College, London, hoping to obtain a commission in the Royal Artillery. The sudden end of the Crimean War made a military career less appealing, and he obtained, by competitive examination, a clerkship in the Education Department of the Privy Council Office, a post he occupied from 1857 to 1862. Coming into an unexpected sum of money, Gilbert was able to free himself from that “ill-organised and ill-governed office.” Having already entered the Inner Temple, Gilbert was called to the Bar in 1863. He did not thrive as a barrister, however, earning no more than seventy-five pounds in his first two years of practice. He never wholly abandoned either his military or his legal aspirations, for he held a commission in the Fifth West Yorkshire Militia, the Royal Aberdeen Highlanders, and, from 1893, was a justice of the peace for the county of Middlesex. Gilbert’s career as a writer had been launched as early as 1857, when he accepted a commission to translate a French song for a theater program. His first play to be produced, Dulcamara, a travesty based on Gaetano Donizetti’s opera L’elisir d’amore (1832), was followed in succeeding years by similar treatments of operas by Donizetti, Vincenzo Bellini, Giacomo Meyerbeer, and others. In 1867, Gilbert was confident enough of his abilities to marry Lucy Blois Turner, a woman fourteen years his junior. Despite the example of the tempestuous marriage of Gilberts’ parents, his own irascibility, and his almost total absorption in his work, the union appears to have been a happy one. The 1860’s were also the years of the composition of The Bab Ballads. In 1869, he became a contributor of short comic plays for the German Reed’s Royal Gallery of Illustration, (Library of Congress) which provided a kind of family en-

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tertainment mixing song with improbable fable, presented without the elaborate trappings of the stage. He also began writing full-length comedies, such as The Palace of Truth, Pygmalion and Galatea, and Broken Hearts, whose plots involve the intervention of fairies or other supernatural agencies in human affairs. The first meeting of Gilbert and Sullivan took place at the Gallery of Illustration and was brought about through a common friend. Though each knew the work of the other, it was another two years before Gilbert proposed that Sullivan set to music the draft of Thespis (the musical score has since been lost). Neither appears to have taken this first collaboration very seriously, and four years were to elapse before they worked together on another opera, a curtain raiser prodded into being by Richard D’Oyly Carte, then the manager of the Royalty Theatre, in the Soho district of London. The extraordinary success of this piece, Trial by Jury, prompted D’Oyly Carte to lease the Opéra Comique as the home of the Comedy Opera Company and to commission a third opera, The Sorcerer. One success followed another. To frustrate theatrical piracy, a continuing problem as the popularity of their work increased, the premiere of The Pirates of Penzance took place in New York. By 1881, the trio of Gilbert, Sullivan, and D’Oyly Carte had opened their own theater, the Savoy, the first in the world to be illuminated by electric light. All their subsequent operas were produced here. That two men so temperamentally different—Gilbert, robust and litigious, and Sullivan, frail and affable—should have collaborated at all is more remarkable than that their association became strained during the decade of their greatest artistic and commercial success. Each considered that he was being asked to yield too much to the other. These differences were precipitated by the famous “carpet breach.” Believing that D’Oyly Carte had wrongly charged the theater’s new carpeting as a cost of production of The Gondoliers, rather than as one of building maintenance, and that Sullivan and he were thereby aggrieved, Gilbert insisted on an immediate renegotiation of the agreement among them. When D’Oyly Carte demurred and Sullivan proved insufficiently vigorous in his support of Gilbert’s demands, Gilbert became furious and actually took legal action against both of them. Although a compromise was eventually worked out, and two more operas followed the reconciliation, the heyday of the team of Gilbert and Sullivan was over. Gilbert continued to be active with other collaborators in the 1890’s, and he reverted as well to the fairy comedies of his pre-Sullivan days. Gout and other ailments, however, compelled him to lead a life of greater retirement. In 1907, some twenty-four years after Sullivan had received a similar honor, Gilbert was knighted for services to the theater—as a playwright rather than with the more prestigious designation he had craved, that of dramatist. Though rancor figured significantly in Gilbert’s life, his death was gallant. Diving to rescue a young woman swimming in the lake on his estate, Sir William suffered a fatal heart attack on May 29, 1911. Analysis • Alone among the comic versifiers of his age—Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, C. S. Calverley, Richard Barham, and others—W. S. Gilbert succeeded in converting comic verse to comic song, thereby transcending whimsy. For this, he certainly owes much to Sullivan. Yet in how many operas, comic or grand, does the work of the lyricist or librettist count for much? Gilbert has earned classic status not because he is timeless and universal, but because even after a century, he can impose a Victorian sensibility on his audience. Gilbert has occasionally been called “the English Aristophanes”; however extrava-

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gant that designation, it may serve as a useful point of departure. Assuredly Aristophanic is Gilbert’s capacity to create in his plays worlds in which recognizable institutions—the legal system, the military, the rigid caste system of Victorian society—are transformed into absurdities. In Trial by Jury, the legal wrangling between the counsels of the jilted Angelina and the flirtatious defendant are resolved by the judgment of the judge—to marry Angelina himself. In The Pirates of Penzance, a pirate must first serve an apprenticeship, as though he were an artisan or skilled mechanic; furthermore, the pirate gang is pardoned of all their offenses because “they are all noblemen who have gone wrong.” Also Aristophanic, though functioning in a different way, to be sure, are Gilbert’s choruses—the sisters, cousins, and aunts of Sir Joseph Porter in H.M.S. Pinafore, the giggling schoolgirls of The Mikado, or the professional bridesmaids in Ruddigore—which serve to accentuate the ludicrousness of the situations. The essential distinction, however, between the absurdities of Aristophanes and those of Gilbert is that for the Greek dramatist, the source of the comedy lay in some social or political aberration that he meant to expose, if not to correct. For Gilbert, on the other hand, though his plays are not devoid of social or political implications, the source of the comedy lies in the pursuit of some intellectual crotchet or paradox to its ultimate conclusion. The topsy-turviness of Gilbert’s plays originates in legalisms and logic-chopping. As a slave of duty, Frederic, the hero of The Pirates of Penzance, feels that he cannot betray his pirate comrades, loathsome though their trade is to him, until he is discharged of his indentures on his twenty-first birthday. Having been born on the last day of February in a leap year, however, he discovers that he is, in terms of birthdays celebrated, only a little boy of five. Similarly, through an ancestral curse, each baronet of Ruddigore must commit a crime daily or perish in unutterable agony. Failure to commit a crime is thus tantamount to committing suicide, which is itself a crime. Not only are the dilemmas of the characters resolved by similar sophistry, but also it appears that the complications have been conceived with no other purpose in mind. One Gilbert and Sullivan work that does not quite fit this description is Princess Ida. This opera, however, is essentially a reworking of an earlier Gilbert play, The Princess, a “respectful perversion” of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem of the same name (1847), that odd composition whose central subject is the education of women. Even here, however, Gilbert treats the topic not as a timely social issue but as an occasion to explore the comic implications of the attempted isolation of one sex from the other. To say that Gilbert’s plays take place in artificial environments hardly accounts for the intense intellectual pressure that has gone into their formation. The clash between the fairies and noblemen in Iolanthe, for example, originates in the play on the words “peri” and “peer.” The officers of the dragoon guards in Patience readily abandon their military garb and their military bearing to become aesthetic poets, because only in that guise can they successfully woo the chorus of rapturous maidens. Each opera enunciates a topsy-turvy premise, which is then examined. In H.M.S. Pinafore, it is the notion that “love can level ranks”; in Patience, it is that true love is disinterested; and in Iolanthe, it is that a race of immortal and insubstantial beings can exhibit all the characteristics of human beings. All these, it should be noted, are romantic notions derived very largely from literature. Gilbert’s fancies are drawn as well from some of his own early works, particularly his parodies and The Bab Ballads. Very little seems to come from direct observation of life or reflection on personal experience, except for the minutiae, the little personal quirks and foibles that make a caricature. The

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result is a series of plays often quite rich in references or allusions to contemporary life but as remote from that life as animated cartoons are from the life of animals. The characters and plots have been reduced to formula. Although some of the variations on them are quite subtle, the character types encountered in Gilbert’s plays are almost as rigid as those in classical New Comedy. In addition to the fresh and innocent heroine and her equally ingenuous hero, there is the fastidious and querulous authoritarian (who usually gets to sing the patter song)—Sir Joseph in H.M.S. Pinafore, Major-General Stanley in The Pirates of Penzance, the Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe, King Gama in Princess Ida, Ko-Ko in The Mikado, and the Duke of Plaza Toro in The Gondoliers—as well as the elderly, decayed contralto, who is physically repulsive yet longing for affection—Buttercup in H.M.S. Pinafore, Ruth in The Pirates of Penzance, Lady Jane in Patience, Katisha in The Mikado, Dame Carruthers in The Yeomen of the Guard, and the Duchess in The Gondoliers. The easy classification of roles in these operas makes them particularly attractive to repertory companies. For all the variety of locales in Gilbert’s works, the most frequent form of action involves what has been called the invasion plot. That is, the territory of a more or less settled group is overrun by another, the situation demanding some kind of compromise, if not retreat. Sir Joseph Porter and his female relations board H.M.S Pinafore; MajorGeneral Stanley’s daughters innocently decide to picnic in the pirates’ lair; the procession of peers invades the Arcadian landscape in act 1 of Iolanthe, only to have the fairies troop in force to Westminster in act 2. There is actual combat between military units in Princess Ida, and in The Mikado, the imperial retinue sweeps into Titipu, demanding of its inhabitants the appearance of conformity to decrees from on high. This reduction of character and plot to a formula, although it is more commercially palatable (thanks to Sullivan’s music) than the insipid paradoxes of Gilbert’s earlier straight plays, does not initially seem conducive to the generation of enduring art. Yet in at least two ways, it has secured Gilbert’s place in the theater, even if not as a dramaturge. First, it provided a vehicle for some of the most versatile metrical and verbal extravagances in the English language. As a lyricist, Gilbert is unsurpassed in his ability to provide both singable and memorable words not only to arias, ballads, duets, and choruses but also to part-songs of considerable complexity and to patter songs for single and multiple voices. (Patter songs, which sound like tongue twisters sung at top speed, include “I am the very model of a modern Major-General,” from The Pirates of Penzance.) The challenge produced the tuneful and rollicking songs familiar to almost everyone, such as “Faint Heart Never Won Fair Lady,” from Iolanthe, or “For He Is an Englishman,” from H.M.S. Pinafore. Yet it also produced tender and haunting songs, such as Ko-Ko’s “The Titwillow Song” in The Mikado (which must surely have originated as a parody of Desdemona’s “Willow Song” in William Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor of Venice (pr. 1604) and Jack Point’s “I Have a Song to Sing, O” in The Yeomen of the Guard. Moreover, it is in these lyrics, rather than in the large themes or preposterous situations of the operas, that Gilbert executes his greatest satiric thrusts. On the whole, like the audience for whom he wrote, Gilbert felt enormously pleased with the general state of things in the world around him and was vexed only by ideas, such as socialism or evolution, that threatened to rend society or by fads, such as aestheticism, that tended to distract it. Yet for all his conservatism, he did not wholly succumb to philistine complacency. In his songs, he frequently targets time-honored objects of satire: the abuse of privilege, the vanity in pride of ancestry, or the posturings of the nouveau riche. At the beginning of the second act of The Mikado, for example, Yum-Yum is

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adorning herself in preparation for her wedding day. She sings a song ingenuously identifying her with the world of nature, a song whose operation, like that of Alexander Pope’s description of Belinda at the beginning of The Rape of the Lock (1712, 1714), simultaneously elicits wonder and censure at the fair creature. As in this song, Gilbert’s satire is often ironically self-deprecating, requiring a good deal of attention to be understood. This demand for attentiveness constitutes Gilbert’s second significant contribution to the English theater. He educated a generation of middle-class theatergoers to listen carefully to what was being said onstage and to expect paradox at every turn. Though himself unwilling or unable to use the stage for serious mockery of social institutions, he made it possible for others to do so. He prepared audiences to receive the witty comedies of Oscar Wilde and the more intellectually provocative plays of George Bernard Shaw. H.M.S. Pinafore • Trial by Jury demonstrated that Gilbertian humor could successfully be translated to the operatic stage; The Sorcerer, that Sullivan could actually compose for Gilbert. In H.M.S. Pinafore, the collaboration attained its full flowering. The first and least complicated of their more popular operas, it is also the most familiar. The plot hinges on two threadbare conventions of comedy, a pair of lovers whose union is thwarted by their being of different social classes and a pair of babies, also of different classes, who have been switched in infancy. The discovery of the second circumstance conveniently resolves the difficulty of the first. Gilbert apparently believed in a fluid class structure: Josephine may marry up (although not too far up) but not down the social ladder, and Sir Joseph Porter, while his rise from office boy to First Lord of the Admiralty is a source of some amusement, is not repudiated, either as a cad or as a snob, for rejecting Josephine when she proves to be the daughter of a common seaman. His behavior is seen as quite understandable and serves to refute the absurd egalitarian sentiments he has uttered earlier, sentiments overwhelmed by the jingoistic sailors’ chorus and glee. As is usual in Gilbert, the satire against the ruling class is mild. It manifests itself through the self-revelation of an authority figure who is on the whole rather likable, however pompous. In the final analysis, such satire is seen as secondary to the larger purpose of amusement. Sir Joseph and his retinue of sisters, cousins, and aunts are there to provide a complication and a chorus. The Pirates of Penzance • The Pirates of Penzance is, as many have observed, H.M.S. Pinafore brought to land. All the color of the nautical talk and the costuming has been preserved in the pirates, the female chorus of Sir Joseph’s relations has become that of Major-General Stanley’s daughters, and there is even an additional male chorus of policemen. Buttercup, who had been responsible for the mixup of babies in H.M.S. Pinafore, has metamorphosed into Ruth, whose blunder is to confuse words, apprenticing the young Frederic to a pirate instead of a pilot. There are distant echoes here of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (pr. 1611) as Frederic, who has grown up knowing no women other than his nurse, Ruth, discovers the true nature of female beauty in Mabel. The complication is that, as a pirate, he is a sworn foe of legitimate authority, as represented by Mabel’s father. Once again, the comic resolution undercuts any serious social criticism: Because they are really renegade noblemen, who owe fealty to Queen Victoria, the pirates surrender in her name and become suitable mates for the Major-General’s daughters.

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There is far less occasion for criticism of social institutions in The Pirates of Penzance than in H.M.S. Pinafore. Rather, Gilbert takes delight in puncturing romantic myths. Instead of a band of lawless Byronic outcasts, Gilbert’s pirates are a guild of credulous, tenderhearted incompetents, whose evil purposes dissolve at once if their intended victim claims to be an orphan (a weakness that Major-General Stanley is quick to exploit). Their antagonists, the local constabulary, prove to be as unheroic as the pirates are unvillainous. Major-General Stanley, like Sir Joseph Porter, is a mere functionary. In the modern world, Gilbert seems to be saying, romantic idealization is no longer tenable, and the conflict between good and evil dwindles into banality. Patience • Although Patience appears to be one of the most topical of Gilbert’s works, taking aim at the whole aesthetic movement, the play’s origins belie that contention. The central situation derives from “The Rival Curates,” one of The Bab Ballads, in which two provincial clergymen compete for a title in abnegation or, in Gilbert’s term, “mildness.” Unlike the opera, the twenty-three-stanza ballad presents no motive for the eccentricity beyond that of a desire for reputation. The essential topsy-turvy premise of the opera, then, is that an affected mannerism extended to one’s whole demeanor will excite admiration. Gilbert confessed that he had difficulty sustaining the conceit through the two acts of the opera without falling into bad taste or blasphemy, and this may account for the transformation of the rival curates into poets. The emergence of the young Oscar Wilde as a flamboyant exponent of aestheticism made him appear to be a perfect prototype of Bunthorne, the fleshly poet, an association that proved profitable both for Wilde and the three partners of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company. Love interest in the opera is supplied by Patience, a dairymaid sensible enough not to be attracted by bizarre behavior yet sufficiently innocent of passion to believe that love must be totally disinterested. It is through the characterizations of the fleshly and idyllic poets, however, that Patience achieved its popularity and has maintained its interest. Gilbert’s attack was timely, to be sure, but somewhat off the mark. The eccentricity and languor of his poets are fair enough targets of satire, but he invests them as well with a kind of puritanism more appropriate to his curates. Elsewhere, Gilbert administers occasional mild jolts to middle-class complacency; in Patience, however, by portraying his poets not merely as fools but also as conscious hypocrites, he panders to philistine anti-intellectualism. Iolanthe • Iolanthe brings together the world of Gilbert’s earlier fairy plays and the world of reality, particularly legal and political reality. As in The Pirates of Penzance, Gilbert insists on looking at romantic matter in a matter-of-fact way. Like the Greek satirist Lucian, Gilbert endows his supernatural creatures not only with immortality, discretionary corporeality, and magical powers, but also with human emotions. The opening chorus of dancing fairies complains of boredom since the exile of Iolanthe for having married a mortal (Iolanthe is subsequently forgiven). The offspring of that union, the shepherd Strephon (a fairy from the waist up), is in love with Phyllis, the ward of the Lord Chancellor, who intends to marry her himself. Needless to say, both the young and the middle-aged lovers are properly sorted out by the end of the opera, but not before several clashes have taken place between the romantic and pragmatic worlds. Phyllis, seeing Strephon in the company of his very youthful-looking mother, is driven to jealousy; he, backed by the powerful influence of the fairies, takes over Parliament, where he proceeds to confound the whole political

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system by instituting competitive examinations for admission to the peerage and by eliciting assent to all his proposals. Iolanthe is quite remarkable for the good-naturedness of its critical observations on parliamentary democracy. At the beginning of act 2, Private Willis’s song ponders the division of people into parties, by which they relinquish their private intellects and submit to the discipline of a leader on entering the House of Commons. Two songs later, Lord Mountararat extols the House of Lords for doing precisely nothing and doing it “very well”: Britain’s glory is contingent on the assurance that “noble statesmen do not itch/ To interfere with matters which/ They do not understand.” Taken together, the two songs seem to express Gilbert’s belief that, however riddled with anomalies, the British system of government works very well indeed. The Mikado • The Mikado signaled a change of direction for Gilbert and Sullivan. With the exception of Thespis, whose setting is Olympus, and Princess Ida, which, like Tennyson’s poem, is laid in a legendary atmosphere, all their operas up to The Mikado had been contemporary. However outlandish the premises or exaggerated the manners, they could be seen as obvious extrapolations of the familiar. Whether Gilbert felt that he had exhausted this vein or whether the possibility for more elaborate productions was the inducement, The Mikado initiated a movement away from the familiar. Though topical allusions abound, the last six operas all take place either in a locale definitely not English or at a time decidedly not the present. They are also characterized by more complicated plots. The simple invasion formula gives way to more intricate maneuverings, and the songs are made to carry a greater burden of exposition and development. Though The Mikado may be no less popular than H.M.S. Pinafore or The Pirates of Penzance, it is more difficult to unravel and its satire is more oblique. Most obviously, in its portrayal of excessive ceremony and politeness masking bloodthirstiness and tyranny, The Mikado sardonically congratulates Englishmen for choosing not to belong to any other nation and laughs at the Victorian fascination for things Oriental. It is equally obvious, however, that Gilbert’s Japanese have no more authenticity than his fairies: The opening choruses of Iolanthe and The Mikado are strikingly similar. In both, the singers proclaim themselves creatures of artistic convention, doomed to perform antics they know to be meaningless. The world of The Mikado, then, is one of stylized behavior, in which the law no longer serves society but enslaves it. The Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe had proclaimed, “The Law is the true embodiment/ Of everything that’s excellent,” but it remains for Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner, to have “a little list” of society’s offenders who can be dispatched whenever a victim must be found, and for the Mikado himself to invent cruel and unusual punishments to “fit the crime.” The plight of the thwarted lovers, Nanki-Poo and Yum-Yum, is central; what is topsy-turvy is their entire milieu, in which forms are preserved at the expense of substance. The Yeomen of the Guard • The Yeomen of the Guard was Gilbert’s response to Sullivan’s repeated requests for more human situations, for characters less eccentric, and for songs whose sentiments were not continually undercut by irony. Though rich in comic turns, it aspires to the condition of grand, rather than comic, opera. It is quite likely that the setting—the Tower of London in the sixteenth century—with its potential for costuming and design, may have first suggested itself to Gilbert, and that only then did he begin to work on a plot.

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Sergeant Meryll, a yeoman of the guard, and his son, Leonard, and daughter, Phoebe, plan to effect the escape of Colonel Fairfax, who is destined to be executed on trumped-up charges of sorcery. Meanwhile, Fairfax, knowing nothing of their scheme, is resigned to dying, but desires to marry first and thus thwart the plan of his kinsman, who concocted the charges in order to inherit Fairfax’s estate. A hasty marriage is concluded with Elsie Maynard, a strolling singer. Fairfax, disguised as young Meryll, disappears from his cell, and his jailer, Wilfred Shadbolt, who in his love for Phoebe Meryll has unwittingly assisted the plot, is in danger of suffering the penalty in his stead. Shadbolt allies himself with the jester Jack Point, who, as Elsie’s lover, has also been discomfitted by Fairfax’s disappearance, and together, they concoct a tale. Like that of Ko-Ko and Pooh-Bah in The Mikado, the explanation given for Fairfax’s absence is filled with “corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative,” maintaining that Shadbolt shot Fairfax dead as he tried to escape. Phoebe, in love with Fairfax and in distress at seeing him woo Elsie in the guise of her brother, reveals his true identity to Shadbolt. As Phoebe and Shadbolt are now in possession of each other’s secret, they agree to marry in order to purchase each other’s silence. Fairfax, who has actually been reprieved, is genuinely attracted to the wife he has acquired out of convenience, Sergeant Meryll pairs off with Dame Carruthers, the housekeeper to the Tower, and only Jack Point is left pathetically without a mate at the opera’s conclusion. The substitution of intrigue for topsy-turviness obviously distances The Yeomen of the Guard from H.M.S. Pinafore, yet the work is recognizably Gilbertian; for all their melodramatic pretensions, the characters have affinities with those of the other operas. Even Jack Point, who falls insensible as the curtain descends, is cousin to the Lord Chancellor and Ko-Ko. The plight of these characters, however, has been more poignantly imagined. The Gondoliers • Composed in the midst of mounting strife between Gilbert and Sullivan, The Gondoliers is their last major theatrical success. In many ways it is the most colorful and lyric of the whole series. The richness of its foreign setting may be rivaled by that of The Mikado, but musically, it is unequaled; for this opera, Sullivan added to his usual array of arias, duets, part songs, and choruses the rhythms of Spain and Italy. Gilbert worked what must be the ultimate variation on the baby-swapping convention: Throughout the opera, the audience waits to find out which of the two gondoliers is the rightful king of Barataria, only to discover what may have already been guessed—that neither is. During the last few minutes of the opera, an even earlier switch is announced as having taken place, conveniently preventing the marriage of royalty with the lower orders. It often appears that Gilbert is engaging in self-parody in The Gondoliers, for the situations of the earlier operas are here piled on one another. Topsy-turviness is present not merely in the mixup of the infants but also in the joint rule of the two gondoliers while they await the determination of their status and in their ludicrous attempts to introduce republican monarchy. In the antics of the Duke and Duchess of Plaza Toro, Gilbert is not repudiating the aristocratic ideal—the Grand Inquisitor sings persuasively of the need for degree in a stable society. Rather, Gilbert portrays in them examples of a decayed and venal aristocracy. Like Pooh-Bah in The Mikado, they have pride but no honor. For all its sprightliness, however, The Gondoliers lacks the integrity of the earlier operas: Themes and characters are introduced capriciously because they have worked before.

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Other major works short fiction: The Lost Stories of W. S. Gilbert, 1982. poetry: The Bab Ballads, 1869; More Bab Ballads, 1873; Songs of a Savoyard, 1898. Bibliography Crowther, Andrew. Contradiction Contradicted: The Plays of W. S. Gilbert. Cranbury, N. J.: Associated University Presses, 2000. Criticism and interpretation of the plays of Gilbert. Bibliography and index. Finch, Michael. Gilbert and Sullivan. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1993. A look at the collaboration between Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan. Bibliography and index. Fischler, Alan. Modified Rapture: Comedy in W. S. Gilbert’s Savoy Operas. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991. Fischler begins his analysis with Gilbert’s fiftieth theatrical work, H.M.S. Pinafore, because it both separated him from other Victorian playwrights and was the turning point in his comic dramaturgy. Gilbert’s new approach to comedy appealed to bourgeois prejudices and provided his greatest popularity. Extensive notes and index. Joseph, Tony. The D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, 1875-1982: An Unofficial History. Bristol, England: Bunthorne, 1994. A history of the opera company at which most of the Gilbert and Sullivan works were performed. Bibliography and index. Orel, Harold, ed. Gilbert and Sullivan: Interview and Recollections. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994. A collections of interviews and essays remembering Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan. Bibliography and index. Stedman, Jane W. W. S. Gilbert: A Classical Victorian and His Theatre. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. A look at Gilbert’s life and works, including his collaborations with Sir Arthur Sullivan. Bibliography and index. _______. W. S. Gilbert’s Theatrical Criticism. London: Society for Theatre Research, 2000. A close examination of the criticism around Gilbert. Bibliography and index. Wilson, Robin, and Frederic K. Lloyd. Gilbert and Sullivan: The Official D’Oyly Carte Picture History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984. Hundreds of photographs and designs from the 107-year history of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company trace the evolution of the Savoy operas onstage in both England and the United States. Brief introductions to each section include biographical and critical information on Gilbert as it pertains to the opera company. Illustrations, bibliography, and index. Ira Grushow, updated by Gerald S. Argetsinger

Susan Glaspell Susan Glaspell

Born: Davenport, Iowa; July 1, 1876 Died: Provincetown, Massachusetts; July 27, 1948 Principal drama • Suppressed Desires, pr. 1915, pb. 1917 (one act; with George Cram Cook); Trifles, pr. 1916, pb. 1917 (one act); The People, pr. 1917, pb. 1918 (one act); Close the Book, pr. 1917, pb. 1918 (one act); The Outside, pr. 1917, pb. 1920 (one act); Woman’s Honor, pr. 1918, pb. 1920 (one act); Tickless Time, pr. 1918, pb. 1920 (one act; with Cook); Bernice, pr. 1919, pb. 1920; Plays, pb. 1920 (includes Suppressed Desires, Trifles, Close the Book, The Outside, The People, Woman’s Honor, Tickless Time, and Bernice); Inheritors, pr., pb. 1921; The Verge, pr. 1921, pb. 1922; The Chains of Dew, pr. 1922; The Comic Artist, pb. 1927, pr. 1928 (with Norman Matson); Alison’s House, pr., pb. 1930; Plays by Susan Glaspell, pb. 1987 (C. W. E. Bigsby, editor; includes Trifles, The Outside, The Verge, and Inheritors) Other literary forms • Susan Glaspell began her long career, which lasted almost four decades, writing short stories that appeared in such popular magazines as Harper’s Monthly, Good Housekeeping, American Magazine, and Woman’s Home Companion. The short stories, in the tradition of local-color writing, generally romanticized the Midwest and its people. Thirteen of her forty-three stories have been collected in Lifted Masks (1912). Although she enjoyed success as a short-fiction writer and a playwright, Glaspell regarded herself primarily as a novelist. Her nine novels include The Visioning (1911), Ambrose Holt and Family (1931), Norma Ashe (1942), and Judd Rankin’s Daughter (1945). In addition, she is the author of a children’s book, Cherished and Shared of Old (1940), several essays, and a biography of her first husband, George Cram “Jig” Cook, entitled The Road to the Temple (1926). Achievements • Susan Glaspell received recognition in three of the genres that she employed. Several of her short stories were selected for E. J. O’Brien’s yearly anthology, Best Short Stories: “Jury of Her Peers” in 1918, “Government Goat” in 1920, and “His Smile” in 1922. Her novel The Morning Is Near Us (1940) was a Literary Guild selection, and another novel, Brook Evans (1928), was made into the film The Right to Love by Paramount Pictures. In addition, she won in 1931 a Pulitzer Prize for her play Alison’s House. Her greatest achievement, however, was the work that she did with the Provincetown Players, a group that she helped found. The Provincetown Players, whose stated purpose was to produce new plays by American playwrights, was extremely influential and changed the direction of modern American drama, providing a forum where none had existed. From its inception to 1922, the group’s theater produced ninety-three new American plays by forty-seven playwrights. All but two of these playwrights had their first plays produced by the theater. Glaspell, who wrote eleven of her fourteen plays for the group, was, after Eugene O’Neill, the group’s most important playwright. Biography • Born July 1, 1876, to Elmer S. and Alice Keating Glaspell, descendants of pioneer settlers, Susan Glaspell grew up in Davenport, Iowa, and attended public 367

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schools. She went to Drake University in Des Moines, receiving her B.A. in 1899. While in college, she began writing stories and published her first one in the Davenport Weekly Outlook in 1896. After graduation, she spent two years working for The Des Moines Daily News and other newspapers as a reporter covering the court and legislative beats. She returned in 1901 to Davenport determined to become a writer. Her early stories, published in popular magazines, and her first novel, the best-selling The Glory of the Conquered: The Story of a Great Love (1909), were escapist, romantic, and conventional in form. In 1907, Glaspell met Floyd Dell, future writer and social critic; George Cram Cook, a socialist writer; and Cook’s feminist wife, Mollie. Cook and Dell established the Monist Society, a discussion group formulated to expose provincialism and to introduce avant-grade ideas to Davenport. Glaspell fell in love with Cook and encountered the disapproval of her friends and family. In 1909, in an attempt to end the affair, she traveled to Europe, using the royalties earned from her first novel. On returning to the United States, she spent time in Colorado, Davenport, Chicago, and Greenwich Village. She also finished her second novel, The Visioning, which shows Cook’s influence in the seriousness of the issues it introduced—trade unions, evolution, and divorce, to name a few—and began a third, Fidelity (1915), which explores small-town life in the Midwest and examines the limits placed on women by traditional gender roles. In 1912, she published Lifted Masks, a collection of short stories based on her experiences as a reporter. She and Cook, who had divorced his second wife, were married on April 14, 1913, in Weehawken, New Jersey. As a result of being exposed to his ideas, she grew more radical and less conventional in her fiction. Her writing moved away from the sentimental and began to focus on more contemporary themes: the conflict between morality and individual freedom, the hypocrisy of small towns, and the evolution of the “new woman.” Glaspell spent the summer of 1914 writing and acting in plays with friends in Provincetown, and the following summer the Provincetown Players was formed. Thus began a period of playwriting that lasted about fifteen years, from 1915 to 1931. She and Cook, who had a strong interest in drama, collaborated on the first play, Suppressed Desires, a satire on Sigmund Freud’s ideas. Unable to get the play produced by the Washington Square Players, the first little theater in New York City, and encouraged by friends, Glaspell and Cook formed the Provincetown Players in 1915 as an outlet for American plays. In 1916, the group moved to Greenwich Village and, through its emphasis on new ideas and techniques and its support of new American playwrights, strongly influenced American drama. Cook became president and remained so until 1922, and Glaspell supported the endeavor primarily through writing plays but also through acting and directing, for the time being giving up her career as a novelist. She first wrote one-act plays; then in 1919, her first full-length play, Bernice, was produced, Glaspell performing the role of Abbie. As the Provincetown Players became more commercial, Glaspell and Cook grew disillusioned, and in 1922, they moved to Greece, fulfilling a lifetime desire of Cook, who wanted to live in the land where great drama began. There, in 1924 in the ancient town of Delphi, Cook died. During the years Glaspell spent with Cook, she wrote one novel, seven one-act plays, four full-length ones, and twenty short stories, the stories written to achieve some financial security. After her husband’s death, she returned to Provincetown. Later, traveling in Europe, Glaspell met Norman Matson, a writer, whom she married in 1925. In 1928, she returned to writing novels: Brook Evans, Fugitive’s Re-

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turn (1929), and Ambrose Holt and Family, the latter adapted from The Chains of Dew, the last play she wrote for the Provincetown Players. She also wrote The Road to the Temple, a biography of Cook, in which she allowed, as much as possible, Cook’s own words, garnered from letters, diaries, and other sources, to speak for him. She collaborated with Matson on a play, The Comic Artist, and wrote Alison’s House, which received a Pulitzer Prize. In 1932, Glaspell was divorced from Matson. Her last play, “The Big Bozo,” was not produced or published, and no copies are known to exist. Glaspell did not see herself as a playwright and, without the Provincetown Players’ demand for new plays and without Cook’s encouragement, she ceased writing plays, although she retained an interest in the theater. In 1936, she went to Chicago to direct the Midwest Play Bureau of the Federal Theatre Project, where she selected plays and organized productions. Returning to Provincetown in 1938, she wrote three more novels: The Morning Is Near Us, Norma Ashe, and Judd Rankin’s Daughter. She died on July 27, 1948, in Provincetown, of viral pneumonia. Analysis • Although Susan Glaspell considered herself a novelist, she is best known for her plays. Her playwriting period lasted fifteen years, seven of which were during the time of her association with the Provincetown Players. In only one season, that of 1919-1920, did Glaspell not present at least one new play. Although her work in short fiction and the novel is somewhat conventional, her work in the theater is not. She experimented, taking risks with her plays. She was an early advocate of expressionism, the use of nonrealistic devices to objectify inner experience. She experimented with language, sometimes incorporating poetry into the dialogue, and her plays are more often about ideas—feminism and socialism—than they are about characters and plot. The general critical response of her contemporaries to her plays was praise for her realistic ones and a reaction of confusion to her more experimental ones. Her plays have a range of themes, but most concern the individual and the individual’s need to find self-fulfillment. Specifically, she focuses on women who attempt to go beyond societal roles, searching for independence and autonomy. Often, however, these women pay a price: in love or acceptance by family and friends, in money, or, in the case of Claire Archer in The Verge, in mental health. Sometimes the search is for the “otherness” of life, that which makes life worth living and takes one beyond the trivial and the commonplace. This search is often aided by a guide or mentor who, some critics argue, is patterned after (Library of Congress) Cook.

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Trifles • Glaspell’s best-known and most anthologized play is the one-act Trifles, written for the Provincetown Players’ second season, 1916-1917, to fill out a bill with Eugene O’Neill’s play Bound East for Cardiff (wr. 1913-1914, pr. 1916, pb. 1919) and later rewritten as the short story “A Jury of Her Peers” (1917). In The Road to the Temple, Glaspell describes the origin of the play, writing that she sat in the empty theater until the image of a Midwest farm kitchen with its occupants appeared before her. Trifles, based on an event that Glaspell covered as a reporter in Des Moines, takes place in the kitchen of Minnie Wright, a woman accused of murdering her husband. Minnie Wright, in jail, remains offstage for the entire play. Trifles marked Glaspell’s first use of the device of the absent protagonist, which would be employed again in other plays, most notably in Bernice and Alison’s House. The play, with its grounding in realism and regionalism, is not representative of her later, more experimental plays, but it is said to be the best structured of her plays, and it is certainly the most often performed. Trifles opens as five people enter a farmhouse kitchen. The three men—the sheriff (Mr. Peters), the county attorney (Mr. Henderson), and a neighbor (Mr. Hale)—are there to uncover evidence to link Minnie to the murder of her husband, John Wright, who was choked to death with a rope while he slept. The two women—the sheriff’s wife and the neighbor’s wife—are there to gather a few items to take to Minnie. As the men examine the kitchen, the bedroom, and the barn, the women remain in the kitchen. They notice the preserves Minnie had canned, the quilt she was sewing, things that the men belittle, but through their observations, the women solve the murder. The uneven stitching of the quilt indicates Minnie’s anxiety, and when the women discover a canary with a broken neck, they know the motive. Minnie, who loved to sing as a young woman, was, in a sense, caged by John, cut off from her interests and isolated. She was figuratively strangled by John as the bird had literally been. After he killed what she loved, the only thing that gave her joy, she responded by choking him. Although the women have information that could convict Minnie, they remain silent. Mrs. Hale, the neighbor, had already failed Minnie by not visiting her when she knew that Minnie’s life was bleak, and she will not fail her again. Mrs. Peters, the sheriff’s wife, understands from her own experience—she had lost her firstborn—what loneliness is, and she, too, will support Minnie. In a sense, they are the jury of her peers, peers because only they can understand her loneliness and desperation. They try and acquit her. The play, thus, is about sisterhood and the importance of women’s sustaining one another in a culture that is dominated by patriarchal attitudes, attitudes that trivialize women and the work—canning, quilting, baking—that they may do. The Verge • A more experimental play but one that also explores the limits placed on women is The Verge, a full-length play, produced in 1921 by the Provincetown Players. The play had a successful run at the New York MacDougal Street theater, but when it moved uptown to the Garrick Theatre, the audiences became more conventional and less receptive to the experimental and expressionistic play. Claire Archer, a Faust-like figure, wants to create new life-forms, plants that transcend the boundaries of reality, reaching for “otherness.” Claire has spent years in her laboratory developing her plants, but when one of them, the Edge Vine, regresses, she destroys it because it “doesn’t want to be—what hasn’t been.” Similarly, when Claire’s daughter Elizabeth accepts conventional attitudes, Claire rejects her, as she does with her sister Adelaide, who urges her to “be the woman you were meant to be.” Tom Edgeworthy, one of Glaspell’s mentors or guide figures, also fails Claire when he cannot commit to a complete relationship that would include both the spiritual and the

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physical. He does not reach for the “otherness” but instead attempts to restrain Claire: “I’m here to hold you from where I know you cannot go. You’re trying what we can’t do.” She disagrees, “What else is there worth trying?” Because he refuses to accept the “otherness,” she strangles him, destroying him as she did the Edge Vine. The play has strong feminist appeal in the character of Claire, who desires to go beyond the limits set by culture. She does succeed with her plant, the Breath of Life, but the price she pays is her sanity. Alison’s House • Glaspell’s last produced play, Alison’s House, presented by the Civic Repertory Theater in 1930, received a Pulitzer Prize. As she had in earlier plays—for example, The Comic Artist—Glaspell developed the theme of the artist and his or her obligation to society. Alison Stanhope, whose story is loosely based on the life of Emily Dickinson, has died eighteen years earlier, but some of her poems, which obviously deal with a love affair, have recently surfaced. Her relatives are torn between destroying them because they would reflect negatively on the family—the love affair was with a married man—and publishing them because of the public’s right to have access to them. The conflict is dramatized by the poet’s brother, who wants the poems to remain unpublished, and his daughter Elsa Stanhope, who argues for publication. Elsa, who also had an affair with a married man, is forgiven by her father as they reach the decision that the publication of the poems should not be denied because of small-town morality and hypocrisy. In addition to these themes, the play exhibits other features common to Glaspell’s plays: the absent main character and the setting of the small midwestern town. Other major works long fiction: The Glory of the Conquered: The Story of a Great Love, 1909; The Visioning, 1911; Fidelity, 1915; Brook Evans, 1928; Fugitive’s Return, 1929; Ambrose Holt and Family, 1931; The Morning Is Near Us, 1940; Norma Ashe, 1942; Judd Rankin’s Daughter, 1945. short fiction: Lifted Masks, 1912. nonfiction: The Road to the Temple, 1926. children’s literature: Cherished and Shared of Old, 1940. Bibliography Ben-Zvi, Linda. “Susan Glaspell’s Contributions to Contemporary Women Playwrights.” In Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights, edited by Enoch Brater. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Argues that Glaspell’s plays represent the female experience and that through their structure, characters, and language, the plays help to create a woman-centered drama. Bigsby, C. W. E. Introduction to Plays by Susan Glaspell. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Contains good biographical information and focuses on Glaspell’s development as a playwright. Provides insightful critical comments on four of Glaspell’s plays: Trifles, The Outside, The Verge, and Inheritors. Ozieblo, Barbara. “Rebellion and Rejection: The Plays of Susan Glaspell.” In Modern American Drama: The Female Canon, edited by June Schlueter. London: Associated University Presses, 1990. Explores why a playwright as influential as Glaspell had been to her contemporaries is excluded from many studies of drama and concludes that Glaspell was ignored because of her challenge to patriarchal attitudes.

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_______. Susan Glaspell: A Critical Biography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. A biography of the playwright. Sarlós, Robert Károly. Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players: Theatre in Ferment. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982. Although the focus of this book is on George Cram Cook, the author presents much useful biographical material about Glaspell. Good discussion of the influence of the Provincetown Players. Waterman, Arthur E. Susan Glaspell. New York: Twayne, 1966. Primarily a criticalanalytical study of Glaspell’s novels and plays but also contains relevant biographical information. A chapter on the Provincetown Players describes the importance of the group and Glaspell’s contribution to it. A bibliography contains both primary and secondary sources. Barbara Wiedeman

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MAGILL’S C H O I C E

Notable Playwrights Volume 2 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — Edmund Rostand 373 — 750

Edited by

Carl Rollyson Baruch College, City University of New York

Salem Press, Inc. Pasadena, California

Hackensack, New Jersey

Copyright © 2005, by Salem Press, Inc. All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address the publisher, Salem Press, Inc., P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, California 91115. All the essays in this set originally appeared in Critical Survey of Drama, Second Revised Edition, 2003, edited by Carl Rollyson. Some new material has been added. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Notable playwrights / editor, Carl Rollyson. p. cm. — (Magill’s choice) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 1-58765-195-5 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-58765-196-3 (vol. 1 : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-58765-197-1 (vol. 2 : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-58765-198-X (vol. 3 : alk. paper) 1. Drama—Bio-bibliography—Dictionaries. 2. Drama—Biography—Dictionaries. 3. Drama—History and criticism—Dictionaries. I. Rollyson, Carl E. (Carl Edmund) II. Series. PN1625.N68 2005 809.2’003—dc22 2004011762

First Printing

printed in the united states of america

Contents — Volume 2 Complete List of Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxiii Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Goldsmith, Oliver . . . . Gray, Simon . . . . . . . Gregory, Lady Augusta .

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Complete List of Contents Contents—Volume 1 Abe, Kfbf, 1 Aeschylus, 6 Albee, Edward, 15 Anouilh, Jean, 30 Aristophanes, 42 Ayckbourn, Sir Alan, 51 Baraka, Amiri, 61 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de, 74 Beckett, Samuel, 83 Behan, Brendan, 91 Bogosian, Eric, 99 Brecht, Bertolt, 104 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 116 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 131 %apek, Karel, 142 Chekhov, Anton, 153 Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 166 Chin, Frank, 173

Churchill, Caryl, 181 Cocteau, Jean, 187 Congreve, William, 195 Corneille, Pierre, 210 Coward, Noël, 222 Dryden, John, 230 Durang, Christopher, 241 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, 248 Eliot, T. S., 257 Euripides, 270 Farquhar, George, 283 Foote, Horton, 289 Friel, Brian, 295 Frisch, Max, 306 Fugard, Athol, 315 García Lorca, Federico, 329 Genet, Jean, 342 Gilbert, W. S., 356 Glaspell, Susan, 367

Contents—Volume 2 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 373 Goldsmith, Oliver, 385 Gray, Simon, 395 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 404 Hakim, Tawfiq al-, 412 Handke, Peter, 422 Hansberry, Lorraine, 431 Havel, Václav, 440 Hellman, Lillian, 447 Henley, Beth, 457 Howe, Tina, 464 Hwang, David Henry, 471 Ibsen, Henrik, 480

Inge, William, 493 Ionesco, Eugène, 501 Jonson, Ben, 516 Kushner, Tony, 526 Lagerkvist, Pär, 531 McCullers, Carson, 542 Mamet, David, 551 Marlowe, Christopher, 563 Middleton, Thomas, 578 Miller, Arthur, 587 Mishima, Yukio, 602 Molière, 610 O’Casey, Sean, 621 xxiii

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Odets, Clifford, 630 O’Neill, Eugene, 640 Orton, Joe, 651 Osborne, John, 659 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 668 Pinero, Arthur Wing, 674 Pinter, Harold, 685

Pirandello, Luigi, 697 Plautus, 705 Priestley, J. B., 711 Racine, Jean, 723 Rattigan, Terence, 734 Rostand, Edmond, 743

Contents—Volume 3 Ryga, George, 751 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 760 Schiller, Friedrich, 773 Shaffer, Peter, 783 Shakespeare, William, 795 Shange, Ntozake, 827 Shaw, George Bernard, 835 Shepard, Sam, 850 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 861 Simon, Neil, 873 Sondheim, Stephen, 885 Sophocles, 890 Soyinka, Wole, 901 Stoppard, Tom, 914 Strindberg, August, 925 Synge, John Millington, 935 Terence, 944 Tremblay, Michel, 950 Valdez, Luis Miguel, 961

Vega Carpio, Lope de, 969 Voltaire, 979 Wasserstein, Wendy, 988 Wilde, Oscar, 994 Wilder, Thornton, 1004 Williams, Tennessee, 1016 Wilson, August, 1032 Wilson, Lanford, 1039 Wycherley, William, 1048 Yeats, William Butler, 1057 Zindel, Paul, 1064 Dramatic Terms and Movements, 1074 Time Line, 1098 Geographical Index, 1103 Categorized Index, 1107 Subject Index, 1113

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Born: Frankfurt am Main (now in Germany); August 28, 1749 Died: Weimar, Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (now in Germany); March 22, 1832 Principal drama • Die Laune des Verliebten, wr. 1767, pr. 1779, pb. 1806 (The Wayward Lover, 1879); Die Mitschuldigen, first version wr. 1768, pr. 1780, pb. 1787, second version wr. 1769, pr. 1777 (The Fellow-Culprits, 1879); Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand, pb. 1773, pr. 1774 (Goetz of Berlichingen, with the Iron Hand, 1799); Götter, Helden und Wieland, pb. 1774; Clavigo, pr., pb. 1774 (English translation, 1798, 1897); Erwin und Elmire, pr., pb. 1775 (libretto; music by Duchess Anna Amalia of Saxe-Weimar); Stella, first version pr., pb. 1776, second version pr. 1806, pb. 1816 (English translation, 1798); Claudine von Villa Bella, first version pb. 1776, pr. 1779, second version pb. 1788, pr. 1789 (libretto); Die Geschwister, pr. 1776, pb. 1778; Iphigenie auf Tauris, first version pr. 1779, pb. 1854, second version pb. 1787, pr. 1800 (Iphigenia in Tauris, 1793); Jery und Bätely, pr. 1780, pb. 1790 (libretto); Die Fischerin, pr., pb. 1782 (libretto; music by Corona Schröter; The Fisherwoman, 1899); Scherz, List und Rache, pr. 1784, pb. 1790 (libretto); Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit, pb. 1787; Egmont, pb. 1788, pr. 1789 (English translation, 1837); Torquato Tasso, pb. 1790, pr. 1807 (English translation, 1827); Faust: Ein Fragment, pb. 1790 (Faust: A Fragment, 1980); Der Gross-Cophta, pr., pb. 1792; Der Bürgergeneral, pr., pb. 1793; Was wir bringen, pr., pb. 1802; Die natürliche Tochter, pr. 1803 (The Natural Daughter, 1885); Faust: Eine Tragödie, pb. 1808, pr. 1829 (The Tragedy of Faust, 1823); Pandora, pb. 1808; Die Wette, wr. 1812, pb. 1837; Des Epimenides Erwachen, pb. 1814, pr. 1815; Faust: Eine Tragödie, zweiter Teil, pb. 1833, pr. 1854 (The Tragedy of Faust, Part Two, 1838) Other literary forms • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe made substantial contributions to German letters in almost every genre. He is generally recognized as one of the world’s greatest lyric poets. Especially important in a vast array of powerful and diverse poems styled in many meters and forms are his Römische Elegien (1793; Roman Elegies, 1876), the exuberant love lyrics of Westöstlicher Divan (1819; West-Eastern Divan, 1877), and the magnificent ballads that he created during his association with Friedrich Schiller. With Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1779), Goethe achieved international fame as a novelist. His most important later narratives, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-1796; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1825) and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre: Oder, Die Entsagenden (1821, 1829; Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, 1827), became models for the development of the Bildungsroman. In addition to fiction, Goethe wrote nonfiction throughout his life, and many of his nonfiction works became landmarks of German thought and intellectual expression. The early essay Von deutscher Baukunst (1773; On German Architecture, 1921) is a key theoretical document of the Sturm und Drang movement. His autobiography, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811-1814; The Autobiography of Goethe, 1824), has special significance in the history of letters for what it reveals of the creative literary process. Among Goethe’s writings, several volumes of scientific and technical treatises, including Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären (1790; Essays on the Metamorphosis of Plants, 1863), Beyträge zur Optik (1791, 1792; contributions to optics), and 373

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Zur Farbenlehre (1810; Theory of Colors, 1840), were of particular import to Goethe himself. In later life he often regarded them as more meaningful than his literary work. The extensive correspondence with Schiller is only one of many revealing volumes of letters collected and published both during his lifetime and after his death. Achievements • From the beginning, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s success as a playwright depended not on his skill in creating drama per se, but rather on the manner in which his works communicated to the audience a sense of history and human experience that emphasized the special individuality of characters and the times in which they lived. The key to his artistic greatness was an unprecedented mastery of language. (Library of Congress) It gave his writings an intensity, a dynamic power of expression, and a new insight into life that set a pattern for psychological and social plays from Goethe’s time forward. Lines and scenes notable for their renewal of the language of antiquity with lightness, grace, naturalness, and eloquently blended rhythms earned for his mature works recognition as pinnacles of musically poetic dramatic literature. Goethe’s ability to cast in language timeless universal symbols for the diversity of human experience, achieved especially in his famous masterpiece The Tragedy of Faust, elevated him to the stature of a giant of world letters. The instant overwhelming acclaim for Goethe’s Goetz of Berlichingen, with the Iron Hand advanced him to the forefront of the Sturm und Drang (literally, “storm and stress”) movement and made him its standard-bearer. The propagators of the Sturm und Drang movement, in reaction to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, placed high value on the individual and his power to take moral action despite—and often against— repressive society. Under the tutelage of Johann Gottfried Herder, who was the chief theoretician of Sturm und Drang, Goethe created models that exerted powerful influence on works written for the German stage throughout the nineteenth century. Despite the attractiveness and intellectual power of their content, characterization, language, and ideas, Goethe’s dramas were not immediately successful as theater. They were difficult to stage, and deviations from norms of dramaturgy left weaknesses that stimulated negative response from critics. Nevertheless, guided by Schiller during the decade of their collaboration in Weimar, Goethe eventually rendered his most important works sufficiently playable to win for them a place in the standard repertory of the German stage. By 1808, Goethe was still most recognized by theatergoers for Goetz of Berlichingen, with the Iron Hand. The publication of the first part of The Tragedy of Faust together with

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the production of works revivified by Schiller reestablished Goethe’s image with the public. In later years, he enjoyed the status of an internationally renowned figure and received visits from influential people from all over the world. It was not until many years after his death, however, that he surpassed Schiller in popular estimation to assume his position as the man most representative of German literature. Biography • The early life of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was shaped by cultivated middle-class and patrician surroundings. An emotionally complex relationship with his sister Cornelia had significant impact on many of his creative works, while the contrasts in temperament and worldview of his parents fostered a rapidly developing awareness of German cultural polarities: northern intellectual and moral intensity and southern artistic sensuousness and sensitivity. From the autumn of 1765 until serious illness forced him to return home in 1768, Goethe studied law in Leipzig. Stimulated by encounters with popular rococo culture, a love affair with the daughter of an innkeeper, and university exposure to the ideas of Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, Johann Christoph Gottsched, Adam Friedrich Oeser, and Christoph Martin Wieland, he began creating poetry and light pastoral plays that were intended only to be socially entertaining. The poems of Neue Lieder (1770; New Poems, 1853) are his most important literary accomplishment of this period. After a slow convalescence in Frankfurt, during which he studied the writings of Susanne von Klettenburg and the natural philosophers Paracelsus von Hohenheim and Emanuel Swedenborg, Goethe entered the university at Strasbourg. Under the influence of Herder, whom he met during the winter of 1770-1771, and other Sturm und Drang figures, the young poet turned away from the cosmopolitan tendencies of Leipzig and declared allegiance to a German gothic ideal. Homer, William Shakespeare, and the Ossian poems of James Macpherson provided the literary models for changes in creative approach that mark Goethe’s subsequent writings. On the level of personal experience, his love for the pastor’s daughter Friederike Brion informed his best lyrics of the time. On completion of his studies, Goethe practiced law in Frankfurt. While at the Imperial Chancelry in Wetzlar during the summer of 1772, he fell in love with the fiancée of a friend—a situation that provided the basis for The Sorrows of Young Werther. In Frankfurt cultural circles, he became acquainted with Karl August, duke of Weimar; their ensuing friendship shaped the rest of Goethe’s life. The unbearable restrictions of an engagement to a wealthy banker’s daughter, Lili Schönemann, caused Goethe to flee to Weimar, where he established his permanent home in 1776. During the next decade two major influences molded his personal and creative existence. Charlotte von Stein, the wife of a court official, taught him social graces, organized his daily routine, and provided him with intellectual stimulation during the course of a lengthy, frustratingly platonic love affair. The continual burden of a variety of official duties in the service of Karl August broadened Goethe’s public experience but severely limited his artistic productivity. Neither a patent of nobility, which he received in 1782, nor his scientific studies provided him with the personal fulfillment that his nature demanded. A hasty departure to Italy in 1786 was in part an escape from the pressures of life in Weimar, in part a search for renewal and rejuvenation as a writer. The two years that Goethe spent in Italy gave him the peace, freedom, and inspiration necessary to complete three of his most important plays, Iphigenia in Tauris, Egmont, and Torquato Tasso, and to make substantial progress in the writing of The Tragedy of Faust. His experiences

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also yielded substance for significant works of poetry, especially Roman Elegies and Epigramme: Venedig 1790 (1796; Venetian Epigrams, 1853). The former collection, however, was also informed by his love for Christiane Vulpius. After his return to Weimar from Italy, she lived with him for many years and bore him several children before he finally married her during the French invasion of 1806. Goethe’s affirmative response to Schiller’s invitation to assist him in editing a new journal led to the most productive artistic friendship in the history of German letters. It is impossible to measure the full impact of reciprocal influence of ideas on the development of their poetry, dramas, and prose writings during the decade of their association. In the case of Goethe, neither The Tragedy of Faust nor the Wilhelm Meister novels would have attained their ultimate form and stature without Schiller’s influence. After Schiller’s death, experience of many kinds contributed substance and essence to Goethe’s mature works. The German Romantics stimulated him to a wider view of literature as a world phenomenon. His insatiable curiosity about life abroad led him to new friendships. Late love affairs with Marianne von Willemer and Ulrike von Levetzow moved him to write the most profoundly beautiful love lyrics of his career. In the completion of the second part of The Tragedy of Faust during his final years, he culminated his existence in the creation of a grand symbol for a life that saw him become, in the words of Thomas Carlyle, “the universal man.” Analysis • Like his poetry and prose narratives, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s dramas are powerful documents of personal introspection, evaluation, and interpretation of experience. Even the plays that are based on historical and earlier literary models derive their special character from their reflection of intimate feelings, concerns, passions, and perceptions that informed the author’s being. In defining the relationship between his works and his life, Goethe said that everything that he wrote was part of a grand confession. Examination of his creative growth and development, especially as mirrored in his dramatic writings, uncovers the rich and colorful panorama of his personal response to stimuli from people, both contemporaries and influential personalities of the past, directly and vicariously experienced events, traditions, issues, philosophies, cultural and social heritage, ideals, science, and confrontations with self. The basic characteristics of Goethe’s dramaturgy include episodic form, focus on cultural and existential polarities, emphasis on strong and careful characterization more than on the traditional external dramatic conflict and action, treatment of problems related to social and human ideals, and externalization of psychologically complex tensions arising from encounters between the individual and the surrounding world. Well defined in Goethe’s earliest successful plays, these features mark especially his theatrical masterpieces and set them apart from works by other playwrights of the time. Goethe’s successful career as a serious creator of dramatic literature did not actually begin until he came under the influence of Herder in Strasbourg. Before then he had experimented with light, undemanding plays written in the popular anacreontic style of the day and comedy in the manner of the classical French theater, but the results had not been very impressive. The Wayward Lover, his first pastoral work, is interesting for its revelation of an early command of sensitive, natural, graceful lyricism, yet has little to recommend it as stageworthy. The Fellow-Culprits, a comedy reflecting Goethe’s intense study of Molière, is a more demanding product of concrete observation of middle-class society, but a certain harshness in the portrayal of acts against law caused it to be rejected in the German theater.

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Involvement with Herder and the Sturm und Drang movement in Strasbourg was the first of three major intellectually formative experiences that triggered and gave direction to the most important stages in Goethe’s evolution as an internationally known dramatist. Herder introduced him to Shakespeare as a representative of a natural ideal that was preferable to the artificiality of French classicism as a literary model. Shakespeare’s approach to history, the realistic content and tragic nature of his art, and his emphasis on situations centered on the personalities of powerful individuals became patterns whose lasting impression is clearly visible in Goethe’s most famous plays, from Goetz of Berlichingen, with the Iron Hand through the final version of the second part of The Tragedy of Faust. Goethe’s special interpretation of Shakespeare’s motives and intentions provided him with the timeless dramatic situation that is central, in one guise or another, to all of his best-remembered plays: the conflict between the particular nature of the individual—his specific needs, freedom of will, natural ideals, creative genius—with the demands of the social establishment. In Goetz of Berlichingen, with the Iron Hand and the original fragmentary version of The Tragedy of Faust, the most significant dramatic products of the Strasbourg influences, a strong element of subjectivity prevails, in that the treatment of this problem of individual freedom corresponds to Goethe’s perception of his own struggle between an inner law of creativity and the external order of society’s institutions. By introducing in his Sturm und Drang plays a previously unattained richness and depth of individuality combined with a picture of life as organized around a definite focus, Goethe created a pattern that allowed his subsequent dramas to mature as symbolic and general statements about life. These artistic utterances are at once powerful in what they communicate and weak in traditional theatrical impact. Their great strengths are vivid characters who are alive in language and psychological presence; substantial, captivating situations; colorful scenes with intense representational quality; and effective dramatization of conflicting attitudes and worldviews. In his best plays, these factors outweigh significant weaknesses of plot and a persistent failure to develop dramatic situations to the full. For more than a decade after the appearance of Goetz of Berlichingen, with the Iron Hand, Goethe was unsuccessful in completing any new play of comparable artistic merit. In some cases, potentially powerful projects were left incomplete because of the struggling playwright’s inability to master the chosen substance; still other works foundered on their internal weaknesses or on general mediocrity. As Goethe turned away from the influences of Sturm und Drang, he attempted to emulate Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in the development of middle-class tragedy as a viable stage form. In Clavigo, he achieved a strong depiction of contemporary bourgeois society, its moods and spiritual attitudes, but could not compete with Lessing in dramatic technique or proper organization and orientation of plot. Like Clavigo, Stella, with its elegiac tone and its emphasis on the problems of the inner man, remained a secondary accomplishment in which the author captured social reality without attaining the literary power and originality that made Goetz of Berlichingen, with the Iron Hand dynamically appealing. Only in specific manifestations of the writer’s facility with language, especially his lyric virtuosity, do any of the completed plays of this period display substantial literary artistry. The second upswing in Goethe’s advancement as a dramatist occurred as a direct consequence of the process of rebirth and reorientation that he experienced in Italy between 1786 and 1788. Specific renewal of his creative approach featured a return to the elaboration of individual characters for their own sake, combined with expansion

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of the dramatic framework to give it the breadth and reality of history. At the same time, new awareness of models provided by the art of classical antiquity moved him toward strictness of form and organization, simplicity of plot and action, and pure, refined, stylized language. In the resulting completed works, including Iphigenia in Tauris, Egmont, and Torquato Tasso, the external conflict between individual will and the dominant order of the social whole is subordinated to the ideals of harmonious self-education and self-fulfillment governed by the principles of pure humanism. Action and plot are minimized in favor of portraiture, psychological penetration, and revelation of the central character’s internal dilemma in a situation that forces him to confront his own nature. Following the appearance of a fragmentary version of the first part of The Tragedy of Faust in 1790, the quality of Goethe’s completed productions again waned. Although the association with Schiller was fruitful in its impact on the technical aspects of his dramaturgy, it did not immediately stimulate the creation of new plays of lasting import. Among the writings completed before Schiller’s death, only The Natural Daughter—the first part of a planned, unfinished trilogy and the last of four plays in which Goethe came to grips with the phenomenon of the French Revolution—exhibits elements of potential greatness. These are visible especially in its cool, formal perfection; its carefully formed, elevated language; and the richness of its disputation. Finally, however, Schiller’s influence was the formative impulse that moved Goethe into his last and greatest period of dramatic-literary achievement. It was Schiller who encouraged him to complete The Tragedy of Faust, providing him with ideas and direction that in part enabled him to master seemingly insurmountable problems that had troubled him since he began the project during his Sturm und Drang years. The two parts of The Tragedy of Faust, which Goethe finished in 1808 and 1831 respectively, represent a summation, a synthesis, and a culmination in the development of the most representative characteristics of Goethe’s dramatic work. The episodic form that dominates Goetz of Berlichingen, with the Iron Hand and Egmont is carried to its greatest extreme in The Tragedy of Faust. Lyric language and portraiture, the major strengths of earlier works, attain new heights. The standard conflict of the great individual at odds with his social context finds logical resolution in Faust’s transformation from a seeker of experience into a man who accepts limited fulfillment in constructive human service. Goetz of Berlichingen, with the Iron Hand • Exposure to the Sturm und Drang enthusiasm for Shakespeare in Strasbourg caused Goethe to seek out identifiably German material for his plays, comparable to the English national material used by Shakespeare. In the autobiography of Gottfried von Berlichingen, a robber baron of the sixteenth century, Goethe found suitable subject matter which he adapted to his own purposes in Goetz of Berlichingen, with the Iron Hand, his first truly successful drama. The portrayal of Goetz in his role as Sturm und Drang hero—a man of natural genius, a great, free, creative personality—established the pattern for a completely new kind of dramatic literature. Goetz of Berlichingen, with the Iron Hand is not a play centered on a tension-filled situation. It is the dramatized chronicle of an entire life. In its abandonment of the traditional unities of time, place, and action; its panorama of disjointed yet often strikingly original scenes; its varied, colorful, vital dialogue; and its natural, vigorous tone, it shattered the barriers of the French classical theatrical heritage and anticipated the ultimate course of Goethe’s dramaturgical development.

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Central to the play’s exposition of Goetz’s existence is the confrontation and inevitably destructive conflict between an old, natural, free human order and the artificial institutions of a changing, ever more restrictive society—the opposition between individual will and the unrelenting progress of history. This conflict—couched in the story of Goetz’s feud with the bishop of Bamberg, his betrayal by a childhood friend, Weislingen, and his disastrous involvement in the historical backdrop of the peasant wars—serves to convey the tragedy of a man who has outlived his times. He can no longer be the free knight that he once was, because the impersonal political configurations of the dawning era make it impossible. Faced with the necessity to choose between inner collapse resulting from the resignation of freedom, and external destruction as a consequence of maintaining his integrity, Goetz stays true to himself and perishes. Goethe’s major achievement in the writing of Goetz of Berlichingen, with the Iron Hand was his success in creating the totality and fullness of a life that is its own reason for being. The lack of an organized thread of action and a uniform plot, often cited as the play’s most significant weakness, is more than balanced by the powerful authenticity of the characters, the successful portrayal of a complete social-historical reality, and the new and vital language that changed German theater forever. Iphigenia in Tauris • During his early Weimar period, Goethe became concerned with the creation of drama on the highest possible artistic level. Proceeding from the perception that only in the patterns and spirit of antiquity can aesthetic perfection be achieved, he sought to create a literary unity that combined beauty of form with a thematic content advocating humanistic idealism. The most important result of this endeavor was Iphigenia in Tauris. A prose version of the play was completed and performed in 1779, with Goethe himself playing the role of Orest, but the ultimate recasting in blank verse was not accomplished until 1786, when he went to Italy. Although based on Euripides’ model, Iphigenia in Tauris treats the existing elements of legend with a free hand, creating a synthesis of the classical and the modern. Goethe developed the tragic situation of antiquity from the perspective of the eighteenth century, replacing the ancient pagan religious motif with the concept of pure humane action. The central issue is expanded from the limited, localized situation of Euripides’ play to the entire history of the family of Tantalus, presented as a symbol for the historical progress of humankind. All the harshness and terror of her ancestors’ fate is brought to focus in Iphigenia, who must reexperience and suffer everything, not physically but psychologically. Like Goetz of Berlichingen, Iphigenia is faced with a moral dilemma. She matures through having to choose between lying, and thereby betraying the trust of Thoas, and telling the truth, thus placing the lives of herself, her brother, and his companion in jeopardy. Her victory over the tragic situation is a direct result of having exercised her own free will to maintain her personal integrity—a choice consistent with Goethe’s belief in the inherent goodness of humanity. Iphigenia in Tauris, like most of Goethe’s major dramatic works, is lacking in external action. Its artistic success derives, rather, from masterful lyric language, as well as a penetrating portraiture that reveals the title figure as the focus of a variety of complex themes. The latter include feminine ambition, isolation, evil and guilt, virtue, and humanity as a preserving and exalting force. The play is especially significant for a moral idealism that combines Christian and classical values in glorifying the possibility of absolute human goodness.

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Egmont • Although the final version of Egmont was completed and first published after Iphigenia in Tauris, making it at least technically a product of Goethe’s visit to Italy, it is primarily a document of transition from Sturm und Drang to classicism. In many respects it is the least satisfying of the major plays, exhibiting a lack of unity that is partly the result of the fact that it was written piecemeal, in the course of four distinct attempts made in the years 1775, 1778-1779, 1782, and 1787. Unsuccessful integration of surviving Sturm und Drang elements with new elements of classicism renders the presentation spotty and unconvincing, and the extreme emphasis placed on portraiture gives the work a static quality that caused even Schiller to criticize its lack of action. One result of this intensity of characterization is that secondary figures, especially Margaret of Parma, William of Orange, and the duke of Alba, are ironically more realistic, more vividly alive, than the central character. The main dramatic concerns of Egmont are quite similar to those of Goetz of Berlichingen, with the Iron Hand. In Egmont, as in Goetz, Goethe intended to present a powerful figure with a will to maintain his personal liberty. Set against the historical background of Spain’s tightening political and religious hold on the Netherlands, the conflict is again a confrontation between the individual and a repressive social establishment—in this instance an environment dominated by fanaticism and mistrust of any freedom. To some extent, Egmont is also a Sturm und Drang hero whose behavior is governed by instinct and impulse. The problem is—and this is the critical point— he appears passive because his character is illuminated primarily from outside. The spectator is told of Egmont’s achievements, virtues, strengths, and successes, but they are not confirmed directly in what Egmont does within the movement of the play. He fails to act to avert destruction and therefore perishes because of a blind, heedless confidence in himself. For that reason, he comes across as shallow, ordinary, and unworthy of sympathy. Despite the obvious weaknesses of Egmont, the work is important to the development of German drama for several reasons. By transforming the historical Egmont, a middle-aged husband and father, into a youthful, carefree lover, Goethe made of him an original character and broke with the tradition that the playwright could be only the dramaturgical processor of given material. At the same time, Goethe remained faithful to the spirit of the historical record, evoking the era of religious strife with telling details. Finally, by supplementing his historical sources with personal material from his daily routine—as, for example, in certain dialogues that reflect his ministerial experience—Goethe gave the play an unprecedented realism. Torquato Tasso • Aside from The Tragedy of Faust, the most deeply personal play that Goethe wrote was Torquato Tasso. It is the only drama in which he attempted to come to grips directly with the polarities and dilemmas of his vocation as a writer. Like Goetz of Berlichingen, with the Iron Hand and Egmont, Torquato Tasso derives its basic substance from the life of a real, historical person, in this case a famous Italian poet of the late Renaissance. In aspects of Tasso’s situation at the court of his mentor Alfons II, Goethe saw mirrored the problematic elements of his own life in Weimar—from the frustrating relationship with Charlotte von Stein to the spiritually conflicting demands of his art and his political-social responsibilities. The result was a kind of dramatic confession, a justification of the existence of the artist in which Tasso emerges as a symbol both for Goethe himself and for the poet in general. Tasso’s fate is related to that of earlier Goethean heroes in that it dramatizes the conflict between the will and nature of the individual and the demands and expectations of

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his or her society. Again, the play features little external action, and the dramatic tension is a function of the central figure’s inner being. The title character struggles to become a whole man, one who is at home in both the imaginative world of the poet and the practical, material realm of social intercourse and commitment. His counterpart is Antonio, Alfons’s state secretary, a genius of political reality with no meaningful artistic-creative dimension. They become enemies because, as one character observes, nature did not forge them into a single being. As more cultivated, refined versions of Faust and Mephistopheles, they symbolize the existential dichotomy that Goethe perceived as the very essence of his own (and modern humankind’s) nature. In its harmonious interplay of motifs and ideas relating to individual and social behavior, ideals and etiquette, freedom and self-control, Torquato Tasso eloquently illuminates timeless principles of moral philosophy. Yet at the same time, the play is deeply and personally human. Its treatment of life’s central ethical questions—culture and wisdom, humanism and civilization, idealism and reality—is part of one of the most profoundly moving portrayals of suffering in all German literature. Tasso’s final achievement of reconciliation serves to celebrate the vitality of both the physical and the moral person. The Tragedy of Faust • The two plays that constitute The Tragedy of Faust are, as a unit, universally regarded as Goethe’s greatest masterpiece and one of the most important artistic accomplishments of world literature. The Tragedy of Faust is the poeticdramatic summation of Goethe’s career as a writer and thinker. It is also a powerful, perceptive, intricately modeled, symbolic representation of the vast spectrum of the human condition. The legend of Faust occupied Goethe’s creative attention off and on from his Sturm und Drang years through his old age. The work that finally emerged is both the drama and the product of an entire life. Its two parts are framed and joined in the metaphysical relationship of the human to the divine in a way that justifies the work’s portrayal of human progress as a positive process of eternal development. Part one of The Tragedy of Faust is a nontraditional, lyricized Sturm und Drang production, consisting of short, rapidly changing scenes that carry Goethe’s early episodic technique to its extreme. The action’s focus is Faust the seeker. A pact that the traditional Faust made with the Devil is transformed by Goethe into a wager between the protagonist and a cleverly, cynically human Mephistopheles, with Faust’s eternal soul at stake. The essence of the bet is that Mephistopheles may claim Faust’s soul if he can fully satisfy Faust’s insatiable thirst for new experience. Proceeding from this agreement, the drama unfolds in two intertwined threads of plot: the tragedy of the intellectual who fails to find in knowledge true meaning for his life, and that of Gretchen, the innocent girl whom he destroys through his inability to attain lasting contentment in love. The central concern of the plot strand that illuminates the main character in his role as scholar is the existential definition of Faust as a symbol for humanity in the modern world. In the first scene that follows the “Prologue in Heaven,” the famous opening monologue communicates Faust’s frustration at the lack of fulfillment provided by his one-sided search for personal meaning in the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake. Failure to find a satisfactory solution in magic, subsequent contemplation of suicide, and the reawakening of his thirst for life in an almost mystical encounter with Easter and spring are the formative elements of experience that at last generate within him an awareness of the duality of his own nature. In a profound self-assessment in the

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second scene, Faust acknowledges that his soul consists of two opposing parts: one that draws him unrelentingly toward the things of the real, physical world, and another that urges him upward into an ideal, spiritual domain that holds the key to boundless existence. The internal conflict created by these two forces is what motivates him to forge the agreement with Mephistopheles and is the basis for all that follows. It leads him to new avenues of sensation and learning, including sensual, emotional gratification in the love affair with Gretchen, and the attempt to penetrate the secrets of nature through scientific investigations in renewed isolation from the world. By presenting in the character Faust the concept of polarities within the human spirit, Goethe created the basis for a general interpretation of humankind’s being. With the appearance of the two plays, the Faustian man—an individual torn between his simultaneous inclinations toward the real and the ideal sides of life—immediately became a symbol for basic mortal struggle and progress. This symbol had enormous impact on German literature in the works of the most important authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Within the first part of The Tragedy of Faust, the tragedy of the intellectual serves as a frame for the self-contained, linearly developed Gretchen material. The quest for new experience in the real world leads through a magical restoration of youth to a seeking of satisfaction in the universal experience of love. Faust’s seduction of the innocent Gretchen; the resulting deaths of her mother, brother, and baby; Faust’s betrayal of their relationship; Gretchen’s final insanity; and Faust’s failure to find lasting purpose in the alliance are the particulars of a timeless story that lays bare the fundamental psychological and emotional processes that govern the interaction of people. More important for the general conception of The Tragedy of Faust as a whole, however, is the fact that Faust’s destructive encounter with Gretchen, with all of its ramifications, has uniquely powerful symbolic value in its representation of a primary, potentially dangerous conflict that tears at the fabric of humanity’s social development. Specifically, Faust is the embodiment of cultivated civilization, while Gretchen is the essence of naïve, simple, natural being. The inherent tension between the two abstracts, culture and nature, is for Goethe the nucleus on which is centered the ultimate strain that dominates the internal world of the individual. Faust’s meeting with Gretchen and its attendant consequences thus become an admonitory representation of the sacrifice of natural human beings to the growing dominance of culture, and the temporal loss of elemental purity and goodness that can be regained only in the realm of divine absolutes. The second drama, largely a product of Goethe’s old age, is a highly stylized, often weighty, symbolic idea play that is connected to the first part only by the cosmic frame and occasional faint allusion to earlier events. In spite of its five-act form, part 2 is not a unified dramatic work. It, too, consists of self-contained episodes that are often only loosely related to one another. Emphasis is on the mature Faust and his search for existential consummation in the ideal realm of aesthetics, the social context of political manipulation, and the personal achievement of great deeds, symbolized respectively in his liaison with Helen of Troy, his service in the emperor’s court, and his final commitment to human service in the winning of land from the sea. Although it appears that Faust loses the wager with Mephistopheles, in that he feels a degree of fulfillment in his land-reclamation project, his ultimate redemption in the final scene of the play conveys the message that as long as people never quit striving, they will in fact achieve the divine destiny of their existence.

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Other major works long fiction: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 1774 (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1779); Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 1795-1796 (4 volumes; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1825); Die Wahlverwandtschaften, 1809 (Elective Affinities, 1849); Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre: Oder, Die Entsagenden, 1821, 1829 (2 volumes; Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, 1827). short fiction: Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten, 1795 (Conversations of German Emigrants, 1854); Novelle, 1826 (Novel, 1837). poetry: Neue Lieder, 1770 (New Poems, 1853); Sesenheimer Liederbuch, 1775-1789, 1854 (Sesenheim Songs, 1853); Römische Elegien, 1793 (Roman Elegies, 1876); Reinecke Fuchs, 1794 (Reynard the Fox, 1855); Epigramme: Venedig 1790, 1796 (Venetian Epigrams, 1853); Xenien, 1796 (with Friedrich Schiller; Epigrams, 1853); Hermann und Dorothea, 1797 (Herman and Dorothea, 1801); Balladen, 1798 (with Schiller; Ballads, 1853); Neueste Gedichte, 1800 (Newest Poems, 1853); Gedichte, 1812, 1815 (2 volumes; The Poems of Goethe, 1853); Sonette, 1819 (Sonnets, 1853); Westöstlicher Divan, 1819 (West-Eastern Divan, 1877). nonfiction: Von deutscher Baukunst, 1773 (On German Architecture, 1921); Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären, 1790 (Essays on the Metamorphosis of Plants, 1863); Beyträge zur Optik, 1791, 1792 (2 volumes); Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert, 1805; Zur Farbenlehre, 1810 (Theory of Colors, 1840); Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, 18111814 (3 volumes; The Autobiography of Goethe, 1824; better known as Poetry and Truth from My Own Life); Italienische Reise, 1816, 1817 (2 volumes; Travels in Italy, 1883); Zur Naturwissenschaft überhaupt, besonders zur Morphologie, 1817, 1824 (2 volumes); Campagne in Frankreich, 1792, 1822 (Campaign in France in the Year 1792, 1849); Die Belagerung von Mainz, 1793, 1822 (The Siege of Mainz in the Year 1793, 1849); Essays on Art, 1845; Goethe’s Literary Essays, 1921; Goethe on Art, 1980. miscellaneous: Works, 1848-1890 (14 volumes); Goethes Werke, 1887-1919 (133 volumes). Bibliography Bishop, Paul, ed. A Companion to Goethe’s “Faust”: Parts I and II. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2001. This collection of essays covers both parts of Goethe’s The Tragedy of Faust. Contains essays on the character of Faust and Mephistopheles and on the production of the play. Bibliography and index. Boyle, Nicholas. The Poetry of Desire (1749-1790). Vol. 1 in Goethe: The Poet and the Age. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. The first volume of a projected threevolume biography of Goethe. A monumental scholarly work. Covers the first forty years of Goethe’s life, including the writing and publication of his early works. _______. Revolution and Renunciation (1790-1803). Vol. 2 in Goethe: The Poet and the Age. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. This second volume covers only the next thirteen years of Goethe’s life. Boyle’s extensive discussion of the Wilhelm Meister novels and Goethe’s drama The Tragedy of Faust is set amid a period of radical political and social change, fallout from the French Revolution. Boyle, Nicholas, and John Guthrie, eds. Goethe and the English-Speaking World: Essays from the Cambridge Symposium for His 250th Anniversary. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2002. A collection of sixteen papers presented at a September, 1999, symposium at the University of Cambridge discuss Goethe’s literary and other achievements. Bibliography and index. Brough, Neil. New Perspectives on “Faust”: Studies in the Origins and Philosophy of the Faust Theme in the Dramas of Marlowe and Goethe. New York: Peter Lang, 1994. Brough

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compares and contrasts the portrayal of the Faust story in the works of Goethe and Christopher Marlowe. Bibliography and index. Kerry, Paul E. Enlightenment Thought in the Writings of Goethe: A Contribution to the History of Ideas. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2001. A examination of the philosophy that filled Goethe’s writings. Bibliography and index. Swales, Martin, and Erika Swales. Reading Goethe: A Critical Introduction to the Literary Work. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2002. A critical analysis of Goethe’s literary output. Bibliography and index. Wagner, Irmgard. Critical Approaches to Goethe’s Classical Dramas: Iphigenie, Torquato Tasso, and Diet Natürliche Tochter. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1995. Literary criticism of Goethe’s dramas, in particular Iphigenia in Tauris, Torquato Tasso, and The Natural Daughter. Bibliography and index. _______. Goethe. New York: Twayne, 1999. A basic biography of Goethe that covers his life and works. Bibliography and index. Williams, John R. The Life of Goethe: A Critical Biography. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. A biography of Goethe that presents his life as well as critical analyses of his works. Bibliography and index. Lowell A. Bangerter

Oliver Goldsmith Oliver Goldsmith

Born: Pallas, County Longford(?), Ireland; November 10, 1728 or 1730 Died: London, England; April 4, 1774 Principal drama • The Good-Natured Man, pr., pb. 1768; She Stoops to Conquer: Or, The Mistakes of a Night, pr., pb. 1773 Other literary forms • Although best remembered as a dramatist, Oliver Goldsmith is also known for his work in several other genres. His only novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), the comic and sentimental tale of a village curate’s attempts to guide his children through the tribulations of growing up, remains a minor classic. The Citizen of the World (1762), a recasting of Charles de Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (1721; Persian Letters, 1722), is a collection of fictitious letters, purportedly written by a Chinese philosopher who is living in London, describing English customs and English society from an outsider’s point of view. Goldsmith’s poetry was often comic as well (as in his parodies of “An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog,” of 1766, and “An Elegy on the Glory of Her Sex: Mrs. Mary Blaize,” of 1759), but when his sympathies were touched, he produced some creditable serious poems, the most notable of which is The Deserted Village (1770), a protest against the economic and social conditions that were forcing a massive shift of the populace from small villages to cities. Like other eighteenth century authors, Goldsmith earned his living by writing whatever publishers thought would sell: histories of Rome and England, biographical sketches, epilogues for the plays of others, translations, and introductions to the natural sciences as well as plays, novels, and poems. The best modern edition of Goldsmith’s varied canon is The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith (1966), in five volumes, edited by Arthur Friedman for Oxford University Press. Achievements • Oliver Goldsmith’s success rate as a dramatist is virtually unmatched: two plays written, the first very good, the second a masterpiece. Goldsmith was the preeminent English comic dramatist in the period of almost two centuries between William Congreve and Oscar Wilde. Only his contemporary Richard Brinsley Sheridan—who wrote more plays and had better theatrical connections—came close to matching Goldsmith’s talent. The qualities that make The Good-Natured Man and She Stoops to Conquer wonderful theater are the qualities that mark all Goldsmith’s writings: an eye for human foibles, a knack for creating the scene or situation in which such foibles can best display themselves, and a willingness to laugh at folly rather than to be irked by it. Goldsmith expresses his comic vision of human experience in language that induces the reader’s continuing attention and seduces the reader’s affection. Goldsmith was a writer who believed that it was his duty to entertain his audience. Like a stage performer, he used every device, trick, and resource that gives pleasure. No reader finds Goldsmith’s prose a chore to read; no theatergoer finds his plays too long. 385

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Biography • Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer is one of those classic ne’er-dowells in English literature who would rather eat, drink, and play a merry prank than work for a living. Tony may have been Oliver Goldsmith’s favorite male character in the play; at the very least, he was a kindred spirit, because the playwright himself had lived a ne’er-do-well’s existence before successful authorship brought him some stability and an income, however irregular it may have been. Goldsmith began life as the second son in the large family of an Anglo-Irish clergyman. What limited wealth the family had was destined to become part of his older brother’s inheritance or of the dowry for an older sister who “married above herself”; nothing much was left for Oliver. Goldsmith seems to have been equally slighted by nature: He was a sickly child, badly disfigured by smallpox contracted at age seven, and he was considered dull by his first teachers. From this inauspicious background, it took a number of years for Goldsmith to discover his niche in the world as a writer. Goldsmith was graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1749, after fitful periods of study that were punctuated by riotous parties and pranks, clashes with administrators, and attempts to run away. Two years later, he applied for ordination in the Church of England, but the red trousers he wore to the interview seem not to have made a favorable impression on the local bishop. Goldsmith’s uncle, the Reverend Thomas Contarine, gave him the money to study medicine, first at the University of Edinburgh and then at the University of Leyden, but the fledgling physician preferred to spend the time and money otherwise, wandering the Continent as a tourist. In 1756, when Goldsmith returned to London, he found it hard to support himself. His casual medical knowledge was no help in obtaining a doctor’s commission in the Royal Navy (which at the time appointed as “surgeon” almost anyone who could wield a scalpel without self-mutilation). Goldsmith tried teaching, but he proved less disciplined than the young boys he was supposed to instruct. Not until he began work as a proofreader for novelist-printer Samuel Richardson did Goldsmith find a task that focused his energies. Drawing on his Continental wanderings, the proofreader turned author in 1759 when his An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe was published with some success. His achievement brought Goldsmith freelance assignments from other publishers, and he contributed essays, reviews, and poems to several periodicals. From these, Goldsmith gained popular applause, the recognition of fellow writers, and a modest though unsteady income. The most notable sign of his success was his admission to the Literary Club in the early 1760’s. There, Goldsmith dined and conversed with the most prominent London intellectuals, among them the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, the politician Edmund Burke, the actor David Garrick, and the writer-critic Samuel Johnson. In the Literary Club, Goldsmith found and immersed himself in a sophisticated version of the lively fellowship Tony Lumpkin enjoys at the Three Pigeons Tavern. Club members helped channel Goldsmith’s efforts in new literary directions. When Goldsmith was threatened with arrest for nonpayment of rent, Samuel Johnson sent the unfinished manuscript of The Vicar of Wakefield (on which Goldsmith had been working intermittently for several years) to a publisher, who bought it for sixty pounds. Because Goldsmith did not get along with David Garrick, who was manager of the Drury Lane Theatre, Reynolds wrote a letter of recommendation to Garrick on behalf of Goldsmith’s recently finished first foray into drama, The Good-Natured Man. Though Goldsmith was no doubt eager to become a playwright, with a chance of making hundreds of pounds if his play ran until the third night (which was the performance known as the “author’s benefit”), The Good-Natured Man was not produced until two

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years later. Garrick and Goldsmith had argued over revisions and payments; eventually, Goldsmith had to take the play to another theater. The profits from his first play were enough to provide Goldsmith with new quarters, new furnishings, and several new coats; they also whetted his desire to repeat his success. By 1771, he had finished a second comedy, She Stoops to Conquer, which was produced by a recalcitrant theater manager who procrastinated over the production for more than a year until Johnson again intervened. Through his reasoned arguments and bearlike presence, Johnson persuaded the manager to put the play into production, and from the moment it opened on March 15, 1773, it was a huge success. Goldsmith, however, would have only thirteen months left in which to enjoy these financial rewards. Even after he turned novelist and dramatist, Goldsmith never stopped racing from literary project to literary project. He continued to write essays, biographies, and general histories as well as to compile translations and anthologies. Despite his remarkable output in the last decade of his life, he was never far out of debt. Fortunately, publishers were always eager for his services, because they knew that Goldsmith’s name on the title page increased their chances of a brisk sale. Goldsmith wrote almost until the hour of his death. His last effort was the poem “Retaliation,” a verse response to Garrick’s epigrammatic remark (that Goldsmith “wrote like an angel, but talk’d like poor Poll”). Goldsmith died on April 4, 1774, the victim of both a fever and the remedy prescribed to cure it. Analysis • Oliver Goldsmith wrote The Good-Natured Man and She Stoops to Conquer to spite the prevailing taste in comedy. In an essay written just after he completed the second play, he explained that the comedy of his time, which he called sentimental comedy, was a degeneration of a genre that had been clearly defined since the days of Aristotle. Comedy, Goldsmith lamented, had become a kind of tragedy that sought to influence the audience by appealing to its sympathy. Sentimental comedy was a dramatic subgenre that developed at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The Restoration comedy of manners, which had delighted audiences with contrasting manners, sharp wordplay, and sexual innuendo, had been attacked by Jeremy Collier and others as immoral. To save drama, some writers began to make sure that every rake reformed by the fifth act and that sober, sensible lovers got as much attention as witty, scandalous ones. Sir Richard Steele, in the influential The Conscious Lovers (pr. 1722), had shown that lovers could be entangled in plots of parental opposition and mistaken identities so compli(Library of Congress) cated that only the playwright could

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untie the fifth-act knots. Audiences, it seemed, would watch good people suffer through complex but manageable difficulties and would cheer when the protagonists swept all before them. Sentimental comedy was a part of Sensibility, a movement that characterized much literature after 1740. Sensibility invited readers and audiences to prove their humanity by sympathizing with the plight of fictional or dramatic heroes and heroines; it promised that their sympathy would be rewarded because all would work out in the end, leaving viewers with emotions stirred, teased, and satisfied. In his essay on “laughing comedy,” Goldsmith described the typical sentimental play in which the virtues of private life are exhibited . . . and the distresses rather than the faults of mankind made our interest. . . . In these plays almost all the characters are good, and exceedingly generous; they are lavish enough of their tin money on the stage; and though they want humor, have abundance of sentiment and feeling. Whatever claim to merit such plays have is reduced by the fact that they—like modern television situation comedies—are too easily written. Goldsmith scoffed that in sentimental comedies, it was enough to deck out the hero with a riband, or give the heroine a title; then to put an insipid dialogue, without character or humor into their mouths, give them mighty good hearts, very fine clothes, furnish a new set of scenes, make a pathetic scene or two, with a sprinkling of tender melancholy conversation through the whole. . . . The essay concludes with a lament on the art of making audiences laugh, an art that Goldsmith thought had disappeared with plays of Sir John Vanbrugh and Colley Cibber at the start of the eighteenth century. Determined to show that whatever delight sentimental comedies gave, laughing comedies gave better, Goldsmith submitted his own two plays as evidence. Even without the historical interest, many readers still find Goldsmith enjoyable for his prose style and his sense of humor. He is one of the masters of the middle style; his informal, almost conversational prose and his humane and humorous observations of individuals make his work accessible and pleasurable even to those who have never met a lord or made the Grand Tour. Goldsmith’s characters and comments are rooted in universal experience. The Good-Natured Man • The Good-Natured Man, which debuted while Hugh Kelly’s latest sentimental play, False Delicacy (pr. 1768), was dominating theatrical London, teased contemporary taste in two ways. First, Goldsmith created scenes that are ironic, farcical, or witty enough to generate laughter. Second, he delineated—that is, in traditional terms, offered up to ridicule—the folly of a culture hero of the age, the “good-natured man.” The good-natured man is the sentimental hero, the one who thinks with his heart rather than his head and who leaps to help solve life’s smallest distresses. This generous instinct, Goldsmith’s good-natured man discovers, has its limitations: One so inclined to sympathize with others may be in danger of losing himself. The twin purposes of the play—literary and moral—actually work together because the laughter that the play generates makes the lesson easier for the audience to accept. The Good-Natured Man traces Sir William Honeywood’s attempt to test and reform his nephew and heir, whose easy generosity (that is, good nature) has led him into extravagance and foolishness. Sir William’s plan is to involve young Honeywood in enough fictitious distresses that he will be jailed for debt. Young Honeywood, then, the

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uncle reasons, would learn a valuable lesson by seeing which of his friends come to his assistance and which of them have only been taking advantage of his generosity. Sir William willingly admits that his nephew’s universal benevolence is “a fault near allied to excellency,” but as far as Sir William is concerned, it is still a fault to be corrected. Sir William’s plot is intended to demonstrate the need for the sentimental, goodnatured man to be shown his follies, and most of the play’s other characters reinforce the same idea. Sir William himself is a not very subtle mouthpiece for the dramatist, expostulating precisely and exactly on the hero’s mistakes. Honeywood’s friend Croaker is the exact opposite of Honeywood; as a man who sees everything gloomily and selfishly, he lets the audience see the defects of the other extreme. Another friend, Lofty, is a character who counterfeits benevolence (pretending to use influence at court on his friends’ behalf) in order to puff himself up in the eyes of the world. Lofty is a conscious pretender, while Honeywood is sincere, but the latter comes to see that “in attempting to please all,” he “fed his vanity” as much as Lofty did. Once Honeywood has been arrested for debt, Sir William is pleased to learn, Miss Richland, a woman of independent fortune and a close friend, has secured his release. Honeywood, however, does not need his uncle’s conniving to find himself in difficulties. His benevolence, good nature, and sensibility generate other problems, one of the most knotty being his relationship with Miss Richland. Honeywood loves her deeply, but he is content to be only a friend. “Never let me harbour,” he proclaims sentimentally, “a thought of making her unhappy by a connection with one so unworthy her merits as I am.” In addition to being modest about his worth to her, Honeywood fears that he could never please her guardians, Mr. and Mrs. Croaker. Rather than tackle such obstacles directly, as would the witty hero of a Restoration comedy, Honeywood is content to sigh and wring his hands in distress. Circumstances, however, refuse to let Honeywood remain uninvolved. Honeywood must watch while Croaker tries to marry his son, Leontine, to Miss Richland, despite the fact that Leontine is really in love with Olivia, an orphan whom he has brought to England from France in place of the long-absent sister he was sent to fetch. Honeywood must not only watch Croaker’s matchmaking, but he must also intercede for Lofty’s wooing of Miss Richland. Lofty, pretending to sentimental friendship, calls on Honeywood to court the young heiress for him. Honeywood is on an emotional rack, stretched between the desire to please a friend and the agony of speaking love in another person’s name: “What shall I do! Love, friendship, a hopeless passion, a deserving friend! . . . to see her in the possession of another! . . . Insupportable! But then to betray a generous, trusting friend!—Worse, worse.” Honeywood’s dilemmas are solved in the last two acts by accident and by Sir William’s intercession. He lends money to Leontine and Olivia that they may elope, but when Croaker intercepts what he thinks is a blackmail letter, Honeywood accidentally sends him after the “blackmailer” to the very inn where the lovers are hiding. Catching his son and “daughter,” Croaker praises Honeywood for his help and Leontine damns him for his apparent betrayal. Meanwhile, in speaking to Miss Richland on Lofty’s behalf, Honeywood coaxes an admission of love from her. Not realizing that the one she confesses to loving is himself, Honeywood decides that “nothing remains henceforward for me but solitude and repentance.” As the characters gather at the inn for the last act, Sir William sets all to rights on his nephew’s behalf. First, he persuades Croaker to accept Olivia as Leontine’s bride: She is, Sir William testifies, the daughter of an old acquaintance, of good family, and an orphan with a fortune. Next, Sir William exposes the pretensions of Lofty so that

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Honeywood sees he is no friend. Now that his sentimental dilemma between love and friendship is understood to be no dilemma after all, a pleased but surprised Honeywood receives Miss Richland’s hand in marriage. The events have been a lesson for the good-natured man, who closes the play with the promise that “it shall be my study to reserve pity for real distress, my friendship for true merit, and my love for her, who first taught me what it is to be happy.” Goldsmith generates “laughing comedy” in the play by several devices: a farcial scene in which a bailiff and his deputy dress as gentlemen, humorous characters such as Croaker and Lofty whose foibles are played on repeatedly, and dialogue at crosspurposes. Dialogue at cross-purposes is one of Goldsmith’s favorite comedic devices, one of several dialogue strategies that had made the Restoration comedy of manners so rich in wit. When characters speak at cross-purposes, they manage to hold what appears to be a logical conversation although each is talking about a different subject. The result is confusion among the characters onstage and delight for the audience, which appreciates the ironic interplay of one attitude with another. The best of these scenes in The Good-Natured Man are Leontine’s marriage proposal to Miss Richland in act 1, Honeywood’s plea on Lofty’s behalf in act 4, and Honeywood’s interview with the Croakers in act 4. In the first instance, Leontine twists himself into verbal knots as he tries simultaneously to convince his father that he is making an ardent proposal and to make it lukewarm enough to ensure that Miss Richland will reject it. In the second, Honeywood pleads so eloquently for another that Miss Richland is convinced he speaks for himself. In the third, Honeywood counsels Croaker on how to forgive the eloping lovers—counsel that the old man mistakes for advice on how to treat a blackmailer. She Stoops to Conquer • What Goldsmith does well in The Good-Natured Man, he does brilliantly in She Stoops to Conquer. The second play dispenses with the mouthpiece figure of Sir William, offers more entanglements more dexterously resolved, and satirizes sentimental comedy more subtly. She Stoops to Conquer has no thesis at all in the usual sense. It is a play that is not about something; instead, it is a play that is something: a recipe for laughing comedy. Talking about She Stoops to Conquer is somewhat like trying to explain a joke. She Stoops to Conquer is an inventory of dramatic tricks for making comedy: juxtaposing high-class and low-class characters, creating farcical situations, putting witty dialogue in the mouths of several characters and having them converse at cross-purposes, establishing several good intriguers to initiate the action, and adding a generous helping of mistaken identities. She Stoops to Conquer is one of the purest pieces of entertainment ever written; it stands above its time and historical circumstances to such a degree that it has been a theatrical staple since its first production. To enjoy Goldsmith’s comedy, an audience needs no special knowledge or moral perspective; it needs only a willingness to react instinctively to high spirits, confusion, and surprise. The play is a delight for actors as well as audience because all the principal characters are good roles; it is a play for an acting company rather than a vehicle for one or two stars. Although there are two plots, they are so nicely balanced that no audience wishes to see one enhanced at the expense of the other. Goldsmith manages throughout the play to keep the audience informed of all that occurs while the characters onstage usually act under some mistaken impression. By constantly shifting who-knows-what-about-whom, Goldsmith keeps the plot throttle on “full ahead,” the characters in unexpected predicaments, and the audience wide

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awake. Casting the whole in clever dialogue adds to the delight. In the hands of actors capable of playing the physical comedy broadly, She Stoops to Conquer becomes three hours of fast-paced merriment. So much seems to be occurring simultaneously that She Stoops to Conquer is a difficult play to summarize. Perhaps reviewing the dramatis personae and sketching the action of the two plots best reveals Goldsmith’s dexterity at introducing contrasting parts while keeping the whole moving forward. This dramatist is a theatrical juggler of rare skill; once set into motion, no character, action, or situation falls from his hand. “The mistakes of a night” occur at the country residence of Mr. and Mrs. Hardcastle, a mismatched couple, each of whom is married for a second time. Mr. Hardcastle loves the country and its old-fashioned ways; Mrs. Hardcastle yearns for the city and the latest styles. Like another literary couple grown accustomed to each other’s hobbyhorses, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), each Hardcastle takes an independent path while poking fun at the spouse’s preference. Living at the Hardcastle residence are three young persons on the verge of independence and love. First, there is Tony Lumpkin, Mrs. Hardcastle’s son by her first marriage. He is about to turn twenty-one and come into his own estate. Mr. Hardcastle regards him as a lazy and useless child, while Mrs. Hardcastle dotes on him, one minute sure he has the makings of a scholar and the next worried that he is consumptive. Tony prefers to ignore both parents and to concentrate on drinking and singing at his favorite tavern, the Three Pigeons. Here he entertains his fellows with practical jokes and lyrics that make clear his values: Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain With grammar, and nonsense, and learning; Good liquor, I stoutly maintain, Gives genius a better discerning. Tony, the alehouse hero, is rather a bold protagonist for Goldsmith to portray to audiences accustomed to central male characters dressed in fine linen and attentive to providing themselves with life’s essentials: a pretty wife and a sufficient income. The second resident is Constance Neville, Mrs. Hardcastle’s orphaned niece. Constance is treated with as much restraint as Tony is indulged. She is eager to marry George Hastings but cannot, because her dowry, a substantial sum in jewels, is closely kept by her aunt. Mrs. Hardcastle is reluctant to give the jewels into Constance’s care because she hopes to force her niece to marry Tony. Mrs. Hardcastle’s matchmaking is having no luck: The sober Constance and the lighthearted Tony thoroughly dislike each other. Constance is a typical dramatic heroine of the time: pleasant but not especially bright, rich but without control of her fortune, and restless but not very disobedient. The third person is Kate, Hardcastle’s daughter by his first marriage. She and her father get along much better than do mother and son or aunt and niece. They are honestly affectionate with each other and speak frankly to each other; they care enough for each other to indulge each other’s preferences. Kate, for example, who shares her stepmother’s interest in fashion, moderates her indulgence by dressing for one half of the day in current styles and the other half in a plain country style that pleases her father. Mr. Hardcastle, in turn, has allowed Charles Marlow, the son of an old friend, to become Kate’s suitor only after knowing that he is financially sound, handsome, and modestly spirited. As the play begins, Kate anxiously awaits her first look at this prospecting and prospective husband.

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When young Marlow and Hastings (the man Constance loves) arrive at the Hardcastle house, they mistakenly believe that they are at a public inn. This false impression is entirely Tony’s fault. Tony recognizes the two London beaux when they stop to ask for directions at the Three Pigeons. Irritated by their affected manners, desirous of playing a trick on his stepfather, and anticipating no consequences but a solid embarrassment, Tony directs them to his stepfather’s house, telling them that he is sending them to the best inn of the neighborhood. This first mistake of the night begins a series of events that will turn the household topsy-turvy. Expecting the modest young men described by his old friend Sir Charles Marlow, Hardcastle greets the two weary travelers generously and familiarly. Surprised at the supposed innkeeper’s behavior, Marlow and Hastings react with hauteur and sarcasm. To Hardcastle’s every offer of hospitality, they respond with increased demands. This scene (act 2, scene 1) is a classic instance of Goldsmith’s spectacular handling of dialogue at cross-purposes. Soon afterward, Hastings encounters Constance and learns how Tony has deceived him and Marlow. The reunited lovers plan to elope as soon as Constance can gain possession of her jewels; to protect their plot, they decide to keep Marlow in the dark about where he is. They introduce him to Miss Hardcastle as if she had just alighted at the inn. Throughout the play these two couples will maintain distinct characteristics. Constance and Hastings, whose mutual affection is a given, will struggle against external obstacles; Marlow and Kate, having just met, will try to discover what mutual affection, if any, exists between them. Kate is eager to meet the man who has come to court her. In a complete reversal of the bold, brash character that he showed to Mr. Hardcastle, Marlow becomes shy and stuttering in Miss Hardcastle’s presence. It seems that proper young ladies of rank intimidate Marlow with their genteel and sentimental conversation. He bumbles his way through a conversation, saved only by Kate’s promptings: Miss Hardcastle: You were going to observe, Sir— Marlow: I was observing, Madam—I protest, madam, I forget what I was going to observe. Miss Hardcastle: . . . You were observing, sir, that in this age of hypocrisy— something about hypocrisy, sir. Marlow: Yes, madam. In this age of hypocrisy, there are few who upon strict inquiry do not a-a-aMiss Hardcastle: I understand you perfectly, sir. Marlow (aside): Egad! and that’s more than I do myself. Miss Hardcastle: You mean that in this hypocritical age there are few that do not condemn in public what they practise in private, and think they pay every debt to virtue when they praise it. While Constance enlists Tony’s help to get the jewels from his mother and thus free both of them from her matchmaking, Kate and Mr. Hardcastle try to decide who is the real Marlow: the overbearing puppy who insulted his host or the tongue-tied dandy who courted the daughter? The mystery begins to clear a little when Kate, now wearing her plain country dress, meets Marlow a second time. The young man makes his second mistake of the night. Not recognizing Miss Hardcastle in what appears to be a barmaid’s outfit, Marlow is immediately and frankly attracted to the pretty servant. He proves not shy at all in the presence of lower-class women. With them he can wittily compliment, flirt, and steal a kiss. When Mr. Hardcastle sees Kate receiving this impu-

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dent attention, he is ready to order Marlow from his house. Kate, however, having seen what a charming wooer the young man can be, protests that this is the same modest man she interviewed earlier. She asks her father for the chance to show Marlow’s real character; he begins to wonder if the usually sensible Kate is not now afflicted by that same malady that makes all young people undecipherable by their elders. At a second interview, Marlow begins to fall in love with the girl he assumes to be a household servant. For one frantic moment the two plots intertwine before going separate ways. Tony filches Constance’s jewels from his mother’s bureau and gives them to Hastings. To get them out of sight, Hastings hands the jewels to Marlow. Thinking that such valuable gems must not lie around unguarded, Marlow gives them to Mrs. Hardcastle for safekeeping. Mrs. Hardcastle, alerted by the odyssey of the jewels that something is afoot, is quickly suspicious when her illiterate Tony receives a letter. Neither Constance’s extemporaneous excuses nor Tony’s obstinacy can prevent Mrs. Hardcastle from snatching the letter and discovering instructions from Hastings about the elopement. Determined to frustrate her niece and Hastings, Mrs. Hardcastle orders her carriage made ready for a trip to London: Constance is going to be taken where she can be better watched. Thus, by the end of act 4, Goldsmith has every character’s fate up in the air. The dramatist who knotted things into such a delightful tangle, however, has enough legerdemain to unravel the confusion. Goldsmith will not have to step in to rescue the characters: Kate by her stooping and Tony by his prankstering will set all to rights. Kate has quite a tangle to undo: first, her father’s impression that Marlow is a rude guest and an inconsiderate lover; second, Sir Charles’s fear that the son he thought to be honest and modest is really the lout that Hardcastle has described and an indifferent lover to his friend’s daughter; third, Marlow’s belief that he can be gallant in the pantry but must act standoffish in the parlor. She accomplishes all three ends by having the fathers witness the third interview of Kate the maid and Marlow. He professes his love for her—and learns to his shock that he has wooed the redoubtable Miss Hardcastle as well as the pliant Kate. Meanwhile Tony has been frustrating his mother’s flight to London. In the darkness, he has led her carriage on repeated rounds of the estate before driving it into a pond; Mrs. Hardcastle is convinced that she is stranded “forty miles from home.” Determined to torment her further, Tony leads his mother into a gloomy thicket where even Mr. Hardcastle, out for a walk in his yard, may look like something more sinister. Although Tony’s prank is soon exposed, he at least has had the pleasure of exhausting his mother. Tony has exhausted the eloping lovers as well. Constance and Hastings decide it will be easier to talk Mrs. Hardcastle into compliance than to escape her this evening. All the cold and sore wanderers in the night return to the house and find Kate and Marlow engaged while the fathers stand beaming. When Mrs. Hardcastle threatens revenge on Tony and Constance, Mr. Hardcastle breaks another surprising bit of news: Tony has already reached the age of majority. The Hardcastles had kept this fact secret to keep the irresponsible Tony from squandering his inheritance, but Mr. Hardcastle now resents his wife’s misuse of her authority. Tony’s first act as an independent gentleman is to renounce any claim to Constance. George Hastings quickly grabs the marriageable hand that Tony surrenders. Everyone except Mrs. Hardcastle now sees that the mistakes of a night have turned out happily indeed. Even this account of the play omits some of its brighter moments: Hardcastle’s amusingly futile efforts to turn rough farm laborers into stylish drawing-room valets,

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the rousing but innocent debauchery of Tony’s friends at Three Pigeons, and Kate’s dumb-show wooing that quickly heals Marlow’s embarrassment after his mistakes were revealed. Actually nothing but reading or viewing can give a complete idea of the brilliance of She Stoops to Conquer. It is a rare play, in which no situation is unexploited, no detail wrong, and no word wasted. Other major works long fiction: The Vicar of Wakefield, 1766. short fiction: The Citizen of the World, 1762 (collection of fictional letters first published in The Public Ledger, 1760-1761). poetry: “An Elegy on the Glory of Her Sex: Mrs. Mary Blaize,” 1759; “The Logicians Refuted,” 1759; The Traveller: Or, A Prospect of Society, 1764; “Edwin and Angelina,” 1765; “An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog,” 1766; The Deserted Village, 1770; “Threnodia Augustalis,” 1772; “Retaliation,” 1774; “The Captivity: An Oratoria,” 1820 (wr. 1764). nonfiction: An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe, 1759; The Bee, 1759 (essays); The Life of Richard Nash of Bath, 1762; A History of England in a Series of Letters from a Nobleman to His Son, 1764 (2 volumes); Life of Henry St. John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke, 1770; Life of Thomas Parnell, 1770; An History of the Earth, and Animated Nature, 1774 (8 volumes; unfinished). miscellaneous: The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, 1966 (5 volumes; Arthur Friedman, editor). Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Oliver Goldsmith. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. A collection of essays of literary criticism on Goldsmith’s writings. Bibliography and index. Dixon, Peter. Oliver Goldsmith Revisited. Boston: Twayne, 1991. A basic biography of Goldsmith that provides coverage of his life and critical analysis of his works. Bibliography and index. Lucy, Seán, ed. Goldsmith, the Gentle Master. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 1984. A group of lectures on Goldsmith that discuss his literary works. Bibliography and index. Pathania, B. S. Goldsmith and Sentimental Comedy. New Delhi, India: Prestige Books, 1988. A study of Goldsmith that focuses on his plays and their relation to sentimental comedy. Bibliography. Swarbrick, Andrew, ed. The Art of Oliver Goldsmith. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble Books, 1984. This insightful series of essays on Goldsmith’s works attempts to restore serious critical attention to those classics created by Goldsmith as well as the certain areas of his life and work previously disregarded. Balances literary criticism with studies of more general aspects of the author, such as his political inclinations, his classical inheritance, his place within certain eighteenth century literary traditions, and his lack of originality. Chronological table. Worth, Katharine. Sheridan and Goldsmith. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Worth compares and contrasts the lives and works of Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Bibliography and index. Robert M. Otten, updated by Genevieve Slomski

Simon Gray Simon Gray

Born: Hayling Island, England; October 21, 1936 Principal drama • Wise Child, pr. 1967, pb. 1968; Spoiled, pr. 1968 (televised) pr. 1970 (staged), pb. 1971; Dutch Uncle, pr., pb. 1969; The Idiot, pr. 1970, pb. 1971 (adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevski’s novel); Butley, pr., pb. 1971; Dog Days, pr. 1975, pb. 1976; Otherwise Engaged, pr., pb. 1975; Molly, pr. 1977, pb. 1978 (revision of Gray’s television play Death of a Teddy Bear); The Rear Column, pr., pb. 1978; Close of Play, pr., pb. 1979; Stage Struck, pr., pb. 1979; Quartermaine’s Terms, pr., pb. 1981; Tartuffe, pr. 1982, pb. 1990 (adaptation of Molière’s play); The Common Pursuit, pr., pb. 1984; Otherwise Engaged and Other Plays, pb. 1984; The Rear Column and Other Plays, pb. 1985; Plays: One, pb. 1986; Melon, pr., pb. 1987 (revised as The Holy Terror, pr. 1989 [radio play], pb. 1990, pr. 1991 [staged]); Hidden Laughter, pr. 1989, pb. 1990; The Definitive Simon Gray, pb. 19921994 (4 volumes); Cell Mates, pr., pb. 1995; Simply Disconnected, pr., pb. 1996; Just the Three of Us, pr. 1997, pb. 1999; Life Support, pr., pb. 1997; The Late Middle Classes, pr., pb. 1999; Japes, pr., pb. 2000 Other literary forms • Simon Gray is primarily known as a stage dramatist, but he began his playwriting career as an author of television scripts, including The Caramel Crisis (1966), Death of a Teddy Bear (1967), A Way with the Ladies (1967), Sleeping Dog (1967), Pig in a Poke (1969), The Dirt on Lucy Lane (1969), Style of the Countess (1970), The Princess (1970), and Man in a Sidecar (1971). Besides being a successful dramatist, Gray has also published novels: Colmain (1963), Simple People (1965), Little Portia (1967), A Comeback for Stark (1968; under the pseudonym Hamish Reade), and Breaking Hearts (1997). Gray has also used the pen name James Holliday. Gray became editor of Delta magazine in 1964, and he coedited with Keith Walker an anthology entitled Selected English Prose that was published in 1967. In 1975, the playwright wrote the screenplay version of his play for the film Butley, directed by Harold Pinter and starring Alan Bates, re-creating his stage role as the title character. The movie was made as part of the American Film Theatre series. Achievements • Simon Gray has received many of the highest awards for dramatists. Death of a Teddy Bear won a Writers Guild Award, Butley received the Evening Standard (London) Award for Best Play of the Year in 1972, and Otherwise Engaged was voted Best Play by the New York Drama Critics Circle. Moreover, the filming of Butley and the option taken to film Death of a Teddy Bear are indicators of the dramatist’s popularity. Biography • Simon Gray was born on Hayling Island, Hampshire, England, on October 21, 1936, the son of James Davidson and Barbara Celia Mary (née Holliday) Gray. The elder Gray was a pathologist and first-generation Canadian of Scottish ancestry, and when World War II began, Simon Gray was sent from Great Britain to his grandparents’ home in Montreal. He returned to the United Kingdom for a while after the war and then moved back and forth between England, Canada, France, and Spain. He married Beryl Mary Kevern, a picture researcher, on August 20, 1964, and they had 395

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a son and a daughter. The couple divorced, and in 1997, Gray married Victoria Rothschild. He has had bouts with cancer and alcoholism. He became a recovering alcoholic in 1996, when alcoholism killed his younger brother, Piers, at the age of fortynine. This experience shows up in his plays, most particularly in Japes. Gray, a lecturer in English, taught at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1965 through 1966 and was on the faculty at Queen Mary College of the University of London from 1965 to 1984. This experience, together with his educational background, serves as the source of many of the dramatist’s subjects (and characters) and his literate style. He attended the Westminster School in London, and he received a B.A. (honors in English) from Dalhousie University in Canada in 1958, and another B.A. (again with honors in English) from Cambridge University in England in 1962. Between the awarding of his two bachelor’s degrees, Gray served as a lecturer at the University in Clermont-Ferrand, France. He resided in France from 1960 to 1961 and in Spain from 1962 to 1963. In 1987, Gray’s play Melon was produced in London, and that same year saw the production of his screenplay A Month in the Country. Hidden Laughter was produced in Brighton in 1989, and in London a year later. The Holy Terror, a revision of Melon, was broadcast in 1989 on the British Broadcasting Corporation’s radio and was published in 1990. The 1991 Arizona production was its premiere as a stage piece. Analysis • Two important elements in Simon Gray’s playwriting career evolved directly from his educational background. The Cambridge experience was clearly an important one. In a sense, when Gray reports, “I went to university when I was seventeen and I never left,” he is speaking metaphorically as well as literally. His postgraduate life has been spent in academia, but it is obvious that there are symbolic connections with his everyday life that reappear in his plays. During Gray’s tenure at Cambridge, there was an extraordinarily gifted group of other students also in attendance. The intellectual atmosphere was stimulating; a number of undergraduates wrote and acted in satiric revues on campus and then moved on to the London stage immediately afterward (and sometimes even while still pursuing their studies). Peter Cook, a contributor to the immensely successful Beyond the Fringe (1959), was one such. Novelist Margaret Drabble, television personality David Frost, actor Derek Jacobi, and Christopher Booker, a cofounder of Private Eye magazine, were among Gray’s contemporaries. Furthermore, director John Barton was a don at King’s College and poet Sylvia Plath lived in the town of Cambridge. Besides the literary climate of the present and the long line of literati connected with the university in the past, Gray was also exposed to literary and dramatic traditions in his course work. Many of his characters, settings, and plot situations derive from this aspect of his life. The numerous literary allusions that are characteristic of his style are direct outgrowths of Gray’s Cambridge experience. Finally, the many references to Cambridge, typically related to the concept of class distinctions, are similarly attributable to this period in his life. The second element is Gray’s experience as a teacher. A number of the aspects of his writing that can be traced to his university days extend to his professional career as well; the origins of several of Gray’s dramatic works reflect the attitude of an academic mind. Unlike many contemporary playwrights who began writing dramas while in college, Gray actually became a dramatist as a young man after he was graduated and while he was trying to write short stories and novels. He had already published two

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prose volumes, Colmain in 1963 and Simple People in 1965, when he adapted a short story that was primarily dialogue and sold it as a television script. The piece, entitled The Caramel Crisis, was televised in 1966, and within a year Death of a Teddy Bear, A Way with the Ladies, and Sleeping Dog were also televised. Death of a Teddy Bear was an awardwinning script, and Sleeping Dog was well received for its examination of the elements of domination and submission in the British national character (represented by Sir Herbert, a retired colonial administrator, who imprisons Claud, a black homosexual, in the basement of his manor house—the theme of ambiguous sexuality is also introduced). Gray’s plays are interesting, witty, and well structured, and his characters are believably drawn. Furthermore, he uses language well, and it is clear that the use of language in his later works has been influenced by Harold Pinter’s dramaturgy, improving an already good product. If Gray’s plays lack profound timely significance, they nevertheless excel in stagecraft and technique, and his works have entertained audiences at home in England and abroad. He does not contend that his plays are meant to convey a message, but he does work at his writing rigorously; Otherwise Engaged, for example, required thirty-five drafts. Combining this attention to craftsmanship with a flair for witty dialogue, Gray has achieved both critical acclaim and popular acceptance. Gray has had his difficulties with the theater establishment, despite the abiding commitment that director Pinter and actor Bates have invested in his work. He documents these difficulties in books such as Fat Chance (1995), which chronicles his exasperating experience with his play Cell Mates when the star actor, Stephen Fry, walked off the cast after the first week of its run in the West End and doomed the play just as it was gaining momentum. In 2001, he published Enter a Fox, which details the journey and problems associated with the production of his play The Late Middle Classes, killed in out-of-town tryouts. Gray speaks of Japes, produced in 2000, as perhaps his last play. He has always moved on to a new play before, but, he says, the drive seems to have gone out of him. Beyond such difficulties, Gray’s commitment to a theater rich in language, realistic in style, and highly structured in linear fashion runs counter to trends of the last decades of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, his characters are stunningly spectacular. They are riveting and memorable because of their obsessions, their abuse of one another, their wit, and ultimately their own self-destructive natures. Wise Child • Wise Child was written for television, too, but it was reportedly considered “too bizarre for home viewing,” and it became Gray’s first play to be staged in the theater (at the Wyndham on October 10, 1967). The play is usually considered Gray’s best early effort, and it has been favorably compared with the work of Joe Orton. The plot revolves around a criminal who is wanted for a brutal mail robbery and is hiding from the police by disguising himself as a woman (creating a sort of black comedy version of Brandon Thomas’s 1896 farce Charley’s Aunt) while his accomplice poses as his son. After the pair murder their homosexual landlord, the older man reverts to wearing men’s clothing, and the younger man dons the maid’s clothes. Gray was fortunate that one of the finest actors of all time, Sir Alec Guinness, took the lead role. The “son’s” part was played by Simon Ward, who would appear in later plays by Gray. Harold Hobson, drama critic for the London Sunday Times, was impressed by the piece. Dutch Uncle • Dutch Uncle followed Wise Child and was considerably less successful. Mounted by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Old Vic in London, the drama

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shows the academic turn of mind characteristic of Gray’s later works. The play was inspired by the case of police constable Reginald Christie, a mass murderer who did away with his wife, the wife of his upstairs lodger, and several other women. (Christie walled up the corpses in his kitchen. Gray’s play Death of a Teddy Bear, written a few years earlier, was similarly based on an actual murder case.) In Dutch Uncle, the main character, Mr. Godboy, tries to murder his wife to attract the attention of Inspector “Manly” Hawkins. His motivation is a homosexual obsession for the police officer. Unfortunately for Godboy, he proves ineffectual as a murderer—his wife blissfully and unknowingly avoids his trap—and when the inspector finally becomes interested in the household, it is because the upstairs tenant is the Merritt Street rapist. The play was not well received, and Gray himself described it as a failure “as witless as it was macabre. . . . [It] would goad an audience into an irritated restlessness.” He goes on to claim that the London opening was “the worst night in the British theatre.” Nevertheless, the husband’s distaste for his role as a husband and the dramatist’s exploration of the themes of domination and submission (also dealt with in Wise Child ) mark the play as a contemporary work. It was probably these elements that attracted Harold Pinter to Gray’s work. Spoiled • Next came Spoiled, a realistic domestic drama that was televised in 1968 and adapted for the stage in 1970. The play, which premiered at the Close Theatre Club in Glasgow, Scotland, on February 4, moved to London’s Haymarket Theatre on October 31 of the following year. It is about the relationships among a high school French instructor, his pregnant wife, and a young male student. While tutoring the teenager, the teacher seduces him, and the play evolves into a straightforward study of the “unthinking abuse of trust and power.” Spoiled also serves as a companion piece to Butley; both plays involve student-teacher relationships in an academic setting as well as failed marriages and homosexual activities. There are also some parallels with Otherwise Engaged. In contrast with the latter play, however, in which Simon Hench is too detached to be able to maintain a human relationship, Howarth, the teacher in Spoiled, falls tragically because he is too emotionally involved. Butley • Butley, one of Gray’s most successful dramas, premiered at the Oxford Playhouse on July 7, 1971, and then moved to the Criterion Theatre in London exactly one week later. The first of Gray’s works to be directed by Pinter, it starred Alan Bates in the title role. Subsequently the play moved to the Morosco Theatre in New York City, on October 31, 1972. All the action in the two-act play takes place in Ben Butley’s office in a college of London University. Act 1 opens at ten o’clock in the morning on the first day after the midterm break, and the second act begins about two hours later, “shortly after lunch.” Butley is an English teacher at the university. He shares an office with Joseph Keyston, whom he calls Joey. Joey is also an English instructor, a former student of Butley and his current lover. From the play’s beginning, it is clear what kind of person Butley is—even the office set reflects the nature of his mind. His desk, for example, “is a chaos of papers, books, detritus” in contrast to Joey’s neat, almost bare desk. Similarly, Butley’s bookcase is “chaotic with old essays and mimeographed sheets scattered among the books.” Butley’s attitude toward his profession is certainly evident, as is the unsettled state of his mind. The photograph of T. S. Eliot indicates the kind of literature that interests Butley and is a visual reference to the source of some of the literary allusions that em-

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bellish Butley’s conversations. The smeared and curled corner shows that what was once important enough to Butley that he put it on his wall no longer has his attention and has become damaged (and not repaired) as a result. The lamp that will not work for Butley is further evidence of the lack of connections in his life, the way that things no longer work for him. Butley’s egocentrism and the tactics that he uses to isolate himself from others and from his responsibilities are evident in his very first speech. He tells the head of his department, who has called him on the telephone, that he cannot talk at the moment because he is “right in the middle of a tutorial”—and all the while the audience can plainly see that Butley is sitting alone in his office. In a sense, there is dramatic irony involved here, too, and not only because the audience is aware of something that one of the characters (the caller, in this case) is not. Throughout the play, people try to get in touch with Butley, and he rejects their attempts; he constantly uses the false tutorial excuse to avoid contact. The comic touch of Butley taking a squashed banana from his pocket and throwing the peel on Joey’s desk seems to lighten the effect of Butley’s lie, but it soon becomes evident that this is merely another indication of Butley’s sloppy habits, his lack of consideration for others, and his conscious attempts to belittle everyone. The piece of toilet paper stuck to his chin to stop the blood from a cut sustained while he was shaving is a parallel to the banana. Obviously Butley does not demonstrate much respect for himself, and he shows even less for those with whom he comes in contact. In the first act, Gray introduces most of the rest of the characters who play major parts in the protagonist’s life. In essence, there is no action and no traditional plot. Joey appears first, and through his conversation with Butley, the various levels of their relationship are exposed, as is Butley’s estrangement from his wife and the possibility that Butley is about to be replaced in Joey’s life by Reg Nuttall. The word games, wit, literary allusions (often in the form of direct quotations), and cruelty that characterize Butley are also revealed. Butley emerges as a sad, lonely man who wants some sort of relationship with someone, preferably Joey, but who is unable to give enough of himself or accept enough from anyone else to allow them to penetrate his sarcasm to create a truly emotional relationship. Instead, Butley retreats behind a wall of sterile intellectualism. Miss Heasman, a minor character, makes an appearance, serving as a bit of comic relief (and creating dramatic irony) when Butley purposely misunderstands her request and then lies about her duties (the audience already knows about his treatment of a student with a similar request previously). There is also a confrontation between Butley and his wife, who informs him that she has decided to take up with an acquaintance of theirs. In his dealings with all of these people, Butley is consistently sarcastic and offensive, he knows where his victims are most vulnerable, and he sticks the knife in with sadistic pleasure and precision. He jokes about homosexuality, frequently by using double entendres or literary allusions. Other literary allusions (to Eliot, William Blake, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and others) provide further insight into Butley’s character (unwittingly on his part), as he uses them as weapons. Butley’s use of literary allusions is effective because the other characters in the play recognize their sources; this is an essential part of his game playing. Also indicated is the probability that patterns are being repeated, implying that they have all engaged in the activity before—and this is reinforced by Butley’s expressed appreciation for good comebacks by his targets. One of the games that he

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plays revolves around Joey’s constant use of the tag “in point of fact.” When Joey says that Reg’s family lives “in a place just outside Leeds, in point of fact,” Butley pretends that he thinks that “point of fact” is the name of a suburb. This becomes a running joke in the play and serves a dual purpose by simultaneously drawing attention to Reg’s lower-middle-class background. Butley also prepares the audience for the situation concerning Gardner. In act 2, the only major character not met in act 1 appears when Reg comes to collect Joey (and, incidentally, to make sure that Butley does not adversely influence the younger man’s decision to leave). Beyond this, about all that happens is a continuation of the lines self-destructively developed by Butley, leaving him as he was when he first came onstage—alone and ineffectually trying to turn on the lamp. Butley’s nonstop allusions (to Eliot, nursery rhymes, John Donne, D. H. Lawrence, John Milton, Sir John Suckling, Richard Lovelace, and Beatrix Potter, among others), his use of a northern dialect to denigrate Reg’s social background—all of this epitomizes his hollowness. In her essay, Sophia B. Blaydes discusses this important aspect of the writer’s technique and demonstrates how the allusions may provide insight into Butley’s self-image as an individual “beset by betrayal and mediocrity,” a tragic figure rather than the pitiable, “irresponsible, wasted man” that the characters in the play perceive him to be. The truth probably lies somewhere between: Butley is, indeed, surrounded by foolish people, but he cannot see beyond their flaws to their common humanity. Otherwise Engaged • Otherwise Engaged, also directed by Pinter and featuring Bates in the part of Simon Hench, was first presented at London’s Queen’s Theatre on July 30, 1975. In February, 1977, the production was transferred to the Plymouth Theatre in New York City, with Tom Courtenay making his long-awaited Broadway debut in the lead role. The setting for Otherwise Engaged is more elegant than that of Butley. As in the earlier play, the action is limited to the events that transpire in one room, in this instance over a period of time equivalent to the running time of the drama. That room is Hench’s living room in London. The plot has been described as the depiction of a series of events that occur during an afternoon that Hench wishes to spend listening to a newly acquired phonograph recording of Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal and that prevent him from accomplishing his goal; however, this is a bit like saying that Butley is about a teacher who is not interested in teaching. In act 1, Hench, a book publisher, is discovered preparing to listen to his new purchase. He is interrupted by Dave, a dull polytechnic student who is renting a flat from him. This is only the first of a series of interruptions. Hench no sooner gets rid of the young man, who is seeking advice on his love life and money, than Hench’s brother, Stephen, enters to expose fears and self-doubts about his professional status. Hench is witty, sociable, and somewhat supportive, but his rather obvious wish is to return to his recording. This pattern is repeated throughout the play. The next interruption comes in the form of Jeff Golding, a dilettantish literary critic who seems not to be particularly attractive either as a critic or as a person. He confesses, for example, that he does not like literature, and his own description of how he mistreats women is damning. Next, Jeff’s current mistress, Davina, appears, searching for her lover, whom she immediately dismisses. After Jeff leaves, Davina tries to seduce Hench. She is unsuccessful, but he does agree to consider for publication a book that she has written.

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Hench then records a message on his telephone answering machine to inform anyone who might call that he is “otherwise engaged” for the rest of the day. Bernard Wood enters. Hench and Wood attended Wundale School at the same time, a place where both men engaged in homosexual activities. Wood accuses Hench of seducing his fiancée, Joanna, and Hench admits to the transgression as the curtain falls. Act 2 opens where act 1 left off; in the continuation it becomes clear that Hench does not consider the seduction as a serious transgression. Wood wants to know if Hench’s wife is aware of his activities; the audience soon learns that Mrs. Hench is involved in an affair and that she is considering leaving her husband. Hench finds her choice of partners tasteless but sees the affair, like his, as posing no threat to their marriage. Wood, on the other hand, has a history of being unstable, and he calls to leave a message on the telephone recorder: He is going to shoot himself in the head because he is despondent about the Hench-Joanna affair, and he wants the act recorded so that Hench can hear it. Hench switches the machine off the instant before Wood squeezes the trigger. The play ends with Jeff returning to sit with Hench, listening to Parsifal. The theme of Otherwise Engaged is again that of a man incapable of sustaining human relationships. Unlike Butley, however, Hench does not even seem to desire a meaningful relationship. He is comfortable in his marriage—whether he or his wife, Beth, actually have engaged in affairs is less important to him than his desire that they remain together, mainly because breaking up is a tiresome process, and staying together makes life easier, especially since he does not wish to become emotionally involved with anyone, including his wife, anyway. There are some contradictory pieces of information provided by the dramatist. In act 1, Hench refuses to be seduced by the attractive Davina, even though she is aggressively willing and he admits that “I fancy you because of your breasts” (which she has exposed by removing her shirt). This scene is in direct contrast with Wood’s claim that Hench seduced his fiancée. Additionally, in spite of Stephen’s protests to the contrary, Hench does seem to have an interest in his brother’s well-being. Finally, there is the ironic counterpointing between Hench’s apparent attempts to remain emotionally disengaged from those intruders who surround him and his pleasure (and possibly his retreat) into Wagner’s Parsifal. Wagner’s music is lush and romantic in nature, full-bodied and emotional. If Hench enjoys this kind of music, it would indicate that he, too, has a romantic, emotional nature. His seeming lack of concern for Wood or Beth may stem either from his sense of hurt and betrayal, or from his realization that there may be little that he can do to alter the circumstances, or both. On the other hand, it may well be that he has no feelings for people and that he seeks emotional release in the safety of music—which can make no demands on him and which does not interrupt his privacy. Somewhat like the characters in Close of Play four years later, those in Otherwise Engaged are so wrapped up in their own problems that they think that all action focuses on them, and they are insensitive to and inconsiderate of others. Stylistically, the play is entertaining. Gray is at his witty, literate best, and he handles the language masterfully. There are some echoes from Pinter’s plays, particularly The Caretaker (pr., pb. 1960), The Collection (pr. 1961), and The Homecoming (pr., pb. 1965), and there are some amusing plot twists. The repetition of certain tags (“Not as stupid as he seems,” for example) and other stylistic devices used in Butley reappear in Otherwise Engaged. Structurally, the interweaving of reappearing characters, motifs (egotism, fidelity, dominance, sexuality, and so forth), and images (drinks thrown in people’s faces) all combine to give the play an operatic texture.

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Close of Play and Stage Struck • Gray’s subsequent plays did not immediately develop his earlier themes and style. In Close of Play (presented at the National Theatre’s Lyttleton Theatre in London on May 24, 1979), Gray returned to an intellectual setting of sorts. Jasper, a retired academic, sits silently while his wife, children, grandchildren, and assorted in-laws reveal the desperate nature of their lives. Close of Play is a dark, mature drama, yet it breaks no new ground for the playwright. With Stage Struck (Vaudeville Theatre, London, November 21, 1979), the dramatist tried his hand at a stage thriller in the vein of Ira Levin’s Deathtrap (pr. 1978) and Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth (pr., pb. 1970). Quartermaine’s Terms and The Common Pursuit • In 1981, Quartermaine’s Terms, his play about an ineffectual upper-class teacher who is fired by his school’s new principal, opened at Queen’s Theatre, London, on July 28. In New York, the Long Wharf Theatre presented the drama at Playhouse 91 in February, 1982. Quartermaine’s Terms earned wide praise; critic John Simon noted the play’s powerful mixture of laughter and melancholy and raved over its “understatedly heartbreaking ending.” The Common Pursuit focuses on a reunion of 1960’s campus rebels who have become 1980’s sellouts. The play manipulates time in a fashion that reminded some critics of Pinter’s Betrayal (pr., pb. 1978); Gray, though, explained that his source for the technique was an older television drama. Japes • Among the very best of Gray’s plays is Japes, which opened November 23, 2000, in Colchester and opened soon after the new year in the West End. It portrays the bizarre life that two brothers ( Jason or Japes and Michael or Mikey) lead over a span of twenty-seven years, as they share a house, as well as sharing the woman Michael marries. It is a poignant and sad display of cruelties and missed directions, mixed with love and mutual devotion. Other major works long fiction: Colmain, 1963; Simple People, 1965; Little Portia, 1967; A Comeback for Stark, 1968 (as Hamish Reade); Breaking Hearts, 1997. screenplays: Butley, 1975; A Month in the Country, 1987; Unnatural Pursuits, 1992. teleplays: The Caramel Crisis, 1966; Death of a Teddy Bear, 1967; Sleeping Dog, 1967; A Way with the Ladies, 1967; Pig in a Poke, 1969; The Dirt on Lucy Lane, 1969; The Princess, 1970; Style of the Countess, 1970; Man in a Sidecar, 1971; Plaintiffs and Defendants, 1975; Two Sundays, 1975; After Pilkington, 1987; Running Late, 1992; Femme Fatale, 1993. nonfiction: An Unnatural Pursuit and Other Pieces, 1985; How’s That for Telling ’Em, Fat Lady?, 1988; Fat Chance, 1995; Enter a Fox, 2001. edited text: Selected English Prose, 1967 (with Keith Walker). Bibliography Blaydes, Sophia B. “Literary Allusion as Satire in Simon Gray’s Butley.” Midwest Quarterly 18 (Summer, 1977): 374-391. Discusses the academic setting of Butley and concentrates on explicating some of the more obscure literary allusions. Includes an end note on the making and distribution of the film version in 1975. Burkman, Katherine H., ed. Simon Gray: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1992. An introduction and a chronology are followed by fourteen essays, a bibliography, and an index. This volume is the first book-length exploration of Gray’s work, from Wise Child to Hidden Laughter. Contains single-work essays, overviews, and articles on ad-

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aptations. The Holy Terror, a revision of Melon, which was produced in Arizona in 1991, is mentioned in the chronology but is not dealt with in the essays. Nothof, Anne. “The Pictures of Simon Gray: Dramatizing Degeneration.” Modern Drama 43, no. 1 (2000): 56-65. The essay portrays the artist as a disillusioned idealist whose degeneration (like that of the picture of Dorian Gray) is manifested in his plays, his protagonists, and his autobiographical notes. Rich, Frank. “Stage: Simon Gray Play, The Common Pursuit.” The New York Times, October 20, 1986, p. C17. This first play since Quartermaine’s Terms is about Cambridge “litterateurs from twenty years ago.” Rich provides some history of the play’s New Haven tryout and change of directors, one of whom is Gray himself. Includes a description of the play’s staging. Shafer, Yvonne. “Aristophanic and Chekhovian Structure in the Plays of Simon Gray.” Theater Studies 31/32 (1984/1985): 32-40. Deals extensively with Otherwise Engaged (whose central character is “a solitary searcher for order and peace in a chaotic world”) and Quartermaine’s Terms, with a Chekhovian atmosphere and a “central character moving through a landscape of incipient disaster, unable to take any action to save himself.” Stern, Carol Simpson. “Gray, Simon.” In Contemporary Dramatists, edited by Thomas Riggs. 6th ed. Detroit, Mich.: St. James Press, 1999. A thorough account of Gray’s work and his relationship with the British theater. Steven H. Gale, updated by Thomas J. Taylor, Robert McClenaghan, and Stanley Longman

Lady Augusta Gregory Lady Augusta Gregory

Born: Roxborough, Ireland; March 15, 1852 Died: Coole Park, Ireland; May 22, 1932 Principal drama • Spreading the News, pr. 1904, pb. 1905; The Rising of the Moon, pb. 1905, pr. 1907; Kincora, pr., pb. 1905, pr. 1909 (revised); The White Cockade, pr. 1905, pb. 1906; Hyacinth Halvey, pr., pb. 1906; The Canavans, pr. 1906, pr. 1907 (revised), pb. 1912; The Gaol Gate, pr. 1906, pb. 1909; Dervorgilla, pr. 1907, pb. 1908; The Jackdaw, pr. 1907, pb. 1909; The Workhouse Ward, pr. 1908, pb. 1909 (with Douglas Hyde; revision of The Poorhouse, pb. 1903, pr. 1907); Seven Short Plays, pb. 1909; The Travelling Man, pb. 1909, pr. 1910; The Image, pr. 1909, pb. 1910; The Full Moon, pr. 1910, pb. 1911; Coats, pr. 1910, pb. 1913; The Deliverer, pr. 1911, pb. 1912; Grania, pb. 1912; Damer’s Gold, pr. 1912, pb. 1913; The Bogie Men, pr. 1912, pb. 1913; Irish Folk-History Plays, pb. 1912; New Comedies, pb. 1913; The Wrens, pr. 1914, pb. 1922; Shanwalla, pr. 1915, pb. 1922; The Golden Apple, pb. 1916, pr. 1920; Hanrahan’s Oath, pr. 1918, pb. 1922; The Jester, wr. 1918, pb. 1923; The Dragon, pr. 1919, pb. 1920; Aristotle’s Bellows, pr. 1921, pb. 1923; The Story Brought by Brigit, pr., pb. 1924; Sancho’s Master, pr. 1927, pb. 1928; Dave, pr. 1927, pb. 1928; Selected Plays, pb. 1962 (Elizabeth Coxhead, editor); The Collected Plays of Lady Gregory, pb. 1970 (4 volumes; Ann Saddlemyer, editor) Other literary forms • Lady Augusta Gregory would have been a significant figure in Irish literature even if she had never written any plays. Her earliest writing centered largely on the life and correspondence of her deceased husband, Sir William Gregory. In 1894, two years after his death, she completed the editing of An Autobiography of Sir William Gregory, and in 1898 she published Mr. Gregory’s Letter Box. Lady Gregory also did a number of translations, most notably of Molière’s plays. Her plays were published in various collections throughout her lifetime and were collected in 1970 in The Collected Plays of Lady Gregory. A selection of nine plays can be found in Selected Plays, edited by Elizabeth Coxhead. Lady Gregory’s most valuable work for literature and Irish culture, however, was the gathering and publishing of the myths and legends of Ireland, a love for which began early in her life and lasted until the end. Traveling from village to village and cottage to cottage (including trips to the Aran Islands at the same time as John Millington Synge), she devoted herself to the recording of an oral tradition that she felt was central to the future as well as to the past of Ireland. The first of these numerous collections appeared as Cuchulain of Muirthemne in 1902, and the last, as Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland in 1920. Lady Gregory also wrote for and about the Irish Renaissance itself, particularly about the dramatic revival. In 1901, she edited a book of essays, Ideals in Ireland, that called for a renewal of Irish culture and criticized English domination. Her account of the rise of Irish drama and the struggles at the Abbey Theatre is given in Our Irish Theatre (1913). Lady Gregory’s other nondramatic writings grow largely out of her personal life. In 1921, she published Hugh Lane’s Life and Achievement, a memorial to her beloved nephew who died with the sinking of the Lusitania, and in 1926 A Case for the Return of 404

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Hugh Lane’s Pictures to Dublin, part of a futile battle to get his French Impressionist collection returned from England. Others oversaw the publication of some of her private thoughts and reminiscences in Coole (1931) and Lady Gregory’s Journals, 1916-1930 (1946). Achievements • The achievement of Lady Augusta Gregory is not to be found in awards and prizes given to her, but in the gift of her life, possessions, and talents to the literary and cultural awakening of modern Ireland. She would be a significant figure for any one of her contributions, but the sum of them makes her central to one of the most important movements in modern literature. Lady Gregory’s initial contribution to what has been called the Irish Renaissance (or Irish Literary Revival) was the early collecting of the myths and folktales of the Irish people. In so doing, she was participating in the discovery of the richness of socalled primitive cultures that was only beginning at the end of the nineteenth century to engage the interest of the earliest anthropologists and ethnologists. These efforts not only served an important historical function but also became a part of both her own plays and the poetry and plays of William Butler Yeats, and contributed significantly to the Irish people’s rediscovery of and pride in their own past. Lady Gregory’s plays, while not greatly influential on other playwrights, were important in their contribution to what has come to be called the Irish dramatic movement (especially in its primary expression, the Abbey Theatre) and as works of art in their own right. They broke new ground, for example, in the mixing of the fabulous with the realistic and in the transformation of peasant speech into successful dramatic dialect. Lady Gregory perfected the one-act play; she also led the way in demonstrating that the lives and speech of peasants could be the stuff of dramatic art—and, in fact, the popular success of her plays helped sustain the Abbey Theatre during years of great struggle. Perhaps her most important and most widely acknowledged achievement was as a motivating and sustaining force behind the Irish dramatic movement. As cofounder, with Yeats and Edward Martyn, of the Irish Literary Theatre at the turn of the century, later to become the Abbey Theatre, she worked tirelessly as director, fund-raiser, playwright, and defender in what seemed times of endless trouble. Lady Gregory’s contribution, however, extended beyond the dramatic movement itself. She also played the important role of encourager, comforter, guide, provider, and friend to fellow writers and laborers in the cultural renewal of Ireland. The symbol for this was her country estate, (Library of Congress) Coole Park, near Galway in the west

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of Ireland, where she graciously provided spiritual and material sustenance to many, in the best-known instance to Yeats. Biography • Lady Augusta Gregory was born Isabella Augusta Persse on March 15, 1852, at Roxborough in County Galway, the twelfth of sixteen children. Her staunchly Protestant family was thought to have come to Ireland in the seventeenth century at the time of Oliver Cromwell’s suppression of Ireland. The intellectual and aesthetic sterility of her childhood was relieved by the storytelling and quiet nationalism of her Roman Catholic nurse, Mary Sheridan. An avenue to the larger world of which she longed to be a part was provided by her marriage in 1880 to Sir William Gregory, a man of sixty-three who had recently resigned as governor of Ceylon and returned to his country estate at Coole Park, not far from Roxborough. As the new Lady Gregory, she found a large library, a kind and intelligent husband, and the beginning of an outlet for her incipient talents. It was to be many years before Lady Gregory would think of herself as a writer. Her first efforts consisted largely of editing the autobiography and letters of her husband, who died in 1892. Of more importance to her career, however, was the publication in 1893 of both Douglas Hyde’s Love Songs of Connacht and Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight. These two books sparked her own latent interest in the tales and speech of the Irish peasant. She was drawn to their lyric beauty, imaginativeness, and rich spirituality, and she made it her task for much of the rest of her life to record this rich oral tradition. Lady Gregory first discussed with Yeats in 1894 the possibility of launching a theater devoted to the writers and plays of Ireland. Their dream became a reality in January, 1899, with the founding of the Irish Literary Theatre. This movement was to be the central concern and accomplishment of her life. Initially, Lady Gregory’s contribution was largely practical. She was an organizer, fund-raiser, encourager, and occasional collaborating playwright; it was she who first argued that the theater should be in Dublin, not London, as Yeats proposed. Within a few years, however, she was writing plays of her own, initially, she said, to provide some brief comic relief from Yeats’s more esoteric works. These one-act plays proved to be more popular with the Dublin audiences than were Yeats’s, and her career as a playwright was well, if late, begun. The early years of the literary movement also saw the publication of a series of her collections of Irish myth and folklore, beginning with Cuchulain of Muirthemne and followed in rapid succession by Poets and Dreamers (1903), Gods and Fighting Men (1904), A Book of Saints and Wonders (1907), and The Kiltartan Wonder Book (1910). These were important books because they offered a single coherent telling of previously scattered tales (especially of the mythic hero Cuchulain) and, in so doing, made this heritage more widely known not only in Ireland but also abroad. The single phrase that sums up all that Lady Gregory aimed for and achieved was her own oft-repeated observation to her fellow laborers that “we work to add dignity to Ireland,” and work she did. As one of the directors of the Abbey Theatre (initially with Yeats and Synge), she was involved in constant battles—artistic, political, financial, and personal—to preserve the dramatic movement. As an Anglo-Irish Protestant with strong nationalistic convictions, she was suspected and attacked by both sides in the increasingly politicized and polarized Ireland. The symbol of all this was the famous riots early in 1907 over Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (pr., pb. 1907). Considered a slur against Ireland by the ardent nationalists, and immoral by some quarters of the Catholic Church, the play evoked a series

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of riotous confrontations within the theater and an ongoing controversy without. Lady Gregory defended the play with all her energies at the time and during a subsequent tour in the United States in the winter of 1911 to 1912, even though she personally disliked it. Lady Gregory’s skill as a dramatist grew rapidly, and her works were increasingly important to the financial solvency of the Abbey Theatre (especially since she collected no royalties for her plays). The first of a number of collections of her dramas, Seven Short Plays, came out in 1909, followed later by Irish Folk-History Plays (1912) and New Comedies (1913). The beginning of World War I marks a tragic turn in the life of a remarkable woman who became a central figure in the literary life of a nation, a woman who did not write her first imaginative work until she was fifty. Lady Gregory’s beloved nephew, Hugh Lane, died in the sinking of the Lusitania. His death left her with the task of trying to get his important collection of French Impressionist art returned from England to its rightful place in Ireland, a battle into which she futilely poured her declining energy until her death. In January, 1918, her only child, Robert Gregory, was killed while flying for the Royal Flying Corps. These personal tragedies, combined with her grief for the suffering of Ireland during the prolonged bloodshed of that nation’s struggle for liberation, cast a darkness over Lady Gregory’s declining years. The 1920’s were still years of effort on behalf of the Abbey Theatre, however, and they were brightened for a time by Lady Gregory’s special role in the discovery and encouragement of Sean O’Casey. That undertaking also took a sad turn, as O’Casey broke relations with her and the Abbey Theatre over their rejection in 1928 of The Silver Tassie. Lady Gregory’s last years were spent in poor health and growing loneliness, but she maintained her aristocratic dignity up until her death at Coole Park in 1932. Analysis • Lady Augusta Gregory’s beginnings as a dramatist were modest. Her first efforts involved contributions of pieces of realistic dialogue and plot to Yeats’s early poetic drama. Even when she began to write her own plays, she claimed that they were only to serve as brief comic relief from the more serious work of the poet. This situation, however, did not last long. Lady Gregory’s plays soon became important in their own right to the Abbey Theatre and to the Irish dramatic movement, and they remain a significant part of one of the most seminal periods in modern literature. The central motivation behind all that Lady Gregory did is found in her statement that she and others worked “to add dignity to Ireland.” Some of the ways in which her plays contributed to this lofty goal are suggested in her remarks on the desired impact of her historical plays, comments that at the same time give telling clues to the nature of her own work: I had had from the beginning a vision of historical plays being sent by us through all the counties of Ireland. For to have a real success and to come into the life of the country, one must touch a real and eternal emotion, and history comes only next to religion in our country. And although the realism of our young writers is taking the place of fantasy and romance in the cities, I still hope to see a little season given up every year to plays on history and in sequence at the Abbey, and I think schools and colleges may ask to have them sent and played in their halls, as a part of the day’s lesson. One sees here much that finds dramatic expression in Lady Gregory’s plays, including the desire to have her work both spring from and appeal to the common peo-

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ple of Ireland; the intention to recover and respect Irish history, particularly as it is found in the stories and songs of the people rather than in the books of academics; the unapologetic combination of didacticism and entertainment; the wish to preserve romance, myth, and imagination in an increasingly skeptical, political, and materialistic age; and the hope that Irish drama could be a natural part of the education and life of the Irish people. These desires find expression in each of the three categories into which Lady Gregory’s plays are usually divided: comedy, tragedy and tragicomedy (including the historical plays), and plays of wonder and the supernatural. Lady Gregory’s first plays were comedies. Like most of her drama, they were largely one-act works that combine a skillful command of structure, plot, and dialogue with genuine insight into human nature. In their formal character, Lady Gregory’s plays can most readily be understood, following critic Ann Saddlemyer, as classical treatments of largely Romantic subject matter. The plays demonstrate economy and balance, are very linear and simple in construction, and generally observe the classical unities of time, place, and action. The tendency to sameness and predictability in structure is relieved by her storyteller’s gift for local color and suspense, and by her effective adaption to the stage of the IrishEnglish dialect that she called Kiltartan (after the district in which she and her peasant models lived). Lady Gregory was not a great playwright. She was not considered so at the time, by herself or by others, and is only in recent years being rescued from the oblivion into which her reputation fell following her death. She deserves great respect, however, as one of a lesser rank who made a significant contribution at a crucial time and in so doing served both her art form and her country well. Comedies • The recurring locale for Lady Gregory’s comedies is the rural community of Cloon, a fictional version of the real town of Gort, near which Lady Gregory lived on her estate, Coole Park. The poor peasants and only slightly less impoverished townspeople with whom she mingled from her earliest childhood became her characters. She tried to capture not only their speech and mannerisms but also the quality of their lives that transcended their poverty and sometime clownishness. That quality had to do with their closeness to the spiritual heart of life, to myth and legend, to a sense of the past and of community, and to other dimensions of reality that Lady Gregory feared were disappearing from Ireland and from the world. These characters are not idealized. They are often fools, simpletons, and ne’er-dowells. Hers are not the heroic poor of some literature, yet beneath their gullibility, love of gossip, and simplemindedness is a closeness to the core of life that Lady Gregory admired and tried to capture. This accounts for the consistent sympathy for her comic creations. Lady Gregory laughed with, not at, her characters, and she did not set herself apart from the human foibles that they portray. One of those foibles, both a weakness and a strength, is the Irish love of talk. This very human desire to share lives manifests itself comically (and sometimes tragically) in Lady Gregory’s plays in an unquenchable thirst for gossip, a penchant for exaggeration and misrepresentation, a disposition to argument for its own sake, and an irrepressible urge to know their neighbor’s business. This foible is at the heart of two of her most successful works, Spreading the News and The Workhouse Ward. Spreading the News • The skillfully structured Spreading the News turns on the eagerness of a man’s neighbors to hear and believe the worst about him. Poor Bartley

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Fallon, a man convinced that if something bad is to happen, it will happen to him, finds that his innocent attempt to do a good deed becomes the basis, through a series of outrageous misunderstandings of everyday speech, of the universally believed story that he has murdered his neighbor and plans to run off with the neighbor’s wife. The humor of the situation grows exponentially as each new person who happens on the expanding story embraces it eagerly and adds to its enormity in passing it on. The comic tension builds even beyond where it seems it must be released as the appearance in good health of the supposedly murdered man only prompts the police to arrest him along with Bartley as they set off to find the body of the “real” victim, whom he is assumed to be impersonating. The Workhouse Ward • The Workhouse Ward also turns on the Irish love of talk. Two old men in a poorhouse argue viciously with each other until the sister of one, whom he has not seen for five years, arrives to offer to take him into her home (for largely selfish reasons). He is eager to leave his pitiful surroundings until he learns that his roommate cannot come with him. After the sister leaves, the two old men resume their fighting, hurling objects as well as words at each other. Both comedies illustrate Lady Gregory’s ability to capture the rich dialect of the Irish peasant in all its color, cadence, and natural metaphor. One of the old men in The Workhouse Ward responds to the charge of the other in typical fashion: “To steal your eggs is it? Is that what you are saying now. . . . Isn’t it a bad story for me to be wearing out my days beside you the same as a spancelled goat. Chained I am and tethered I am to a man that is ransacking his mind for lies!” As with most of Lady Gregory’s comedies, these two reveal her interest in something more than laughter. The condescending and uncomprehending attitude of the English magistrate in Spreading the News is a clear if commonplace indictment of Ireland’s oppressor, and his repeated references to his earlier duties in the Andaman Islands indicate that Ireland too is simply another of England’s exploited colonies. Both plays also reveal Lady Gregory’s fondness for symbolism and near allegory. She later said she wanted the two old men in The Workhouse Ward to be seen as symbols of Ireland itself, suggesting that the Irish, as with any family, feel free to fight among themselves but do not desire the interference of outsiders, especially hypocritical ones whose apparent benevolence is only thinly disguised exploitation. Tragedies • Although it was her comedies that were most popular and are most likely to last, Lady Gregory herself preferred to write tragedy. Her work in this form ranges from the highly condensed power of The Gaol Gate to one of her most ambitious works, the three-act Grania. One finds in the tragedies the clearest expression of the idealism, patriotism, and respect for the noble lost cause that are so much a part of Lady Gregory’s own character. The tragedies generally center on people who have refused to be the passive pawns of circumstance, and who, in insisting on acting independently, come to grief against the harsh realities of life. The Gaol Gate • In The Gaol Gate, the man who has acted independently is dead before the play begins. Refusing to inform on his friends, he is hanged for a political murder he did not commit. The action of the play centers on the discovery of his fate by his wife and mother. As they approach the prison, unaware that he has been executed, they agonize over the rumors that he has in fact informed against his friends. His wife makes excuses for him in preparation for the possibility that it may be true, but his

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mother, with a longer memory of the suffering of the people, will not tolerate the idea of a son who is not faithful to his neighbors. On learning that her son has died for his loyalty, the mother breaks into a shocking celebration that reveals simultaneously the strength of the code of honor of the nationalist, the woman’s own selfish desire to triumph over her son’s false accusers, and the mental strain of a grief too great to bear; the latter is reminiscent of Maurya’s break with reality at the end of Synge’s Riders to the Sea (pb. 1903). Grania • Given the nature of Irish history, it is fitting that Lady Gregory’s historical plays are found among the tragedies and tragicomedies. This is true both of plays based on Ireland’s mythological history, such as Grania, and of those based on more verifiable history, such as The White Cockade, an idiosyncratic account of James II and that infamous turning point for Ireland, the Battle of the Boyne. In Grania, a play that Lady Gregory never allowed to be produced during her lifetime, one finds in the treatment of the legendary love triangle between Grania, Diarmuid, and Finn perhaps her most sophisticated exploration of psychological motivation. As a strong woman whose determination to live intensely rather than conventionally leads her into a lifetime of turmoil to which she never succumbs, Grania perhaps contains more elements of Lady Gregory than she herself was ready to make public on the stage. Plays of wonder • The third major category consists of the plays of wonder and the supernatural. Here Lady Gregory explored most directly that realm of folk spirituality she loved and valued so much. It was this sense of the spiritual (in both a figurative and literal sense), underlying and giving meaning to the physical, that Lady Gregory feared was disappearing from the modern world. Her plays of wonder and the supernatural, many of them written for children, portray that world where reality is multilayered and the physical world is suffused with beings of another dimension. The Travelling Man • The Travelling Man, in which Lady Gregory gave the Christian tradition of entertaining angels or Christ an Irish setting, is a case in point. Lady Gregory adapted a story told her by an old peasant woman about a destitute girl who had been directed by Christ to the house of her future husband, but who herself failed years later to show charity to Christ in the guise of a traveling beggar. In the play, the woman readies the house, as she does each year on the anniversary of her rescue, for the possibility that her Saviour from long ago, the King of the World, will return as he had promised. She is so absorbed in preparing only the finest for what she assumes will be his dignified and impressive return, that she turns furiously against the poor beggar who interrupts her preparations, and who is Christ himself. In this play, as in many others, Lady Gregory demonstrated her interest in the deeper reality that infused the life of the Irish peasant with a significance that transcended physical deprivation. This need for a spiritual sustenance to redeem the tragic physical and political burden that had long been Ireland’s is the overarching theme of Lady Gregory’s plays. She valued, above all, the mythmakers of Ireland, whether the anonymous poets of ancient legend, or Raftery, the blind wandering poet of the early nineteenth century, or a political mythmaker such as Charles Parnell. She wanted the Irish Renaissance to be a revival of mythmakers, herself among them. The potential for all this rested, she believed, in the Irish people themselves, particularly the peasants, with their natural mythmaking reflected in their common stories, their conception of the world about them, and their very speech.

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Other major works nonfiction: Our Irish Theatre, 1913; Hugh Lane’s Life and Achievement, 1921; A Case for the Return of Hugh Lane’s Pictures to Dublin, 1926; Coole, 1931; Lady Gregory’s Journals, 1916-1930, 1946 (Lennox Robinson, editor); Lady Gregory’s Diaries, 1892-1902, 1995 ( James Pethica, editor). edited texts: An Autobiography of Sir William Gregory, 1894; Mr. Gregory’s Letter Box, 1898; Ideals in Ireland, 1901; Cuchulain of Muirthemne, 1902; Poets and Dreamers, 1903; Gods and Fighting Men, 1904; A Book of Saints and Wonders, 1907; The Kiltartan History Book, 1909; The Kiltartan Wonder Book, 1910; The Kiltartan Poetry Book, 1919; Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, 1920 (2 volumes). Bibliography Kohfeldt, Mary Lou. Lady Gregory: The Woman Behind the Irish Renaissance. New York: Atheneum, 1985. A narrative biography that provides information about Lady Gregory’s early personal life as well as a thorough account of her involvement with the Irish Literary Revival. While the work’s main emphasis is on the literary personalities among whom Lady Gregory spent the influential part of her life, use is also made of archival material. Kopper, Edward A., Jr. Lady Isabella Persse Gregory. Boston: Twayne, 1976. A basic biography of Lady Gregory that covers her private and professional life as well as her writings. Bibliography and index. Saddlemyer, Ann, and Colin Smythe, eds. Lady Gregory: Fifty Years After. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble Books, 1987. A substantial collection of essays that provide a comprehensive scholarly treatment of Lady Gregory’s life and times. Her playwriting and involvement with the Abbey Theatre provide the volume with its central focus. Also included is a considerable amount of material pertinent to an evaluation of the overall cultural significance of Lady Gregory’s career. Stevenson, Mary Lou Kohfeldt. Lady Gregory: The Woman Behind the Irish Renaissance. New York: Atheneum, 1984. A basic biography of Lady Gregory that covers her life and works. Examines at length her role in the Irish Literary Renaissance. Bibliography and index. Tobin, Seán, and Lois Tobin, eds. Lady Gregory Autumn Gatherings: Reflections at Coole. Galway, Ireland: Lady Gregory Autumn Gathering, 2000. This collection of essays examines Lady Gregory, her life and friends, her professional life, and her writings. Bibliography. Daniel Taylor, updated by George O’Brien

Tawfiq al-Hakim Tawfiq al-Hakim

Born: Alexandria, Egypt; October 9, 1898 Died: Cairo, Egypt; July 26, 1987 Principal drama • Khatim Sulayman, pr. 1924; al-Mar $ah al-jadidah, pr. 1926, pb. 1952; Ahl al-kahf, pb. 1933, pr. 1935 (The People of the Cave, 1989); Shahrazad, pb. 1934, pr. 1966 (English translation, 1955); Muhammad, pb. 1936 (partial English translation, 1955); Nahr al-junun, pb. 1937 (The River of Madness, 1963); Shajarat al-Hukm, pb. 1938; Piraksa: Aw, Mushkilat al-hukm, part 1, pb. 1939, part 2, pb. 1960; Salah al-mala $ikah, pb. 1941 (Angels’ Prayer, 1981); Pijmalyun, pb. 1942, pr. 1953 (Pygmalion, 1961); Sulayman alhakim, pb. 1943 (The Wisdom of Solomon, 1981); Himari qala li, pb. 1945 (short plays, one translated as The Donkey Market, 1981); al-Malik Udib, pb. 1949 (King Oedipus, 1981); Ughniyah al-mawt, pb. 1950, pr. 1956 (The Song of Death, 1973); al-Aydi al-na4imah, pb. 1954, pr. 1957 (Tender Hands, 1984); Bayna al-harb wa-al-salam, pb. 1956 (Between War and Peace, 1984); Rihlah ila al-ghad, pb. 1957 (Voyage to Tomorrow, 1984); al-Sultan alha$ir, pb. 1960, pr. 1961 (The Sultan’s Dilemma, 1973); Ya tali 4 al-shajarah, pr. c. 1961, pb. 1962 (The Tree Climber, 1966); al-Ta4am li-kull fam, pb. 1963, pr. 1964 (Food for the Millions, 1984); Shams al-Nahar, pr. 1964, pb. 1965 (Princess Sunshine, 1981); Masir Sursar, pb. 1966, pr. 1969 (Fate of a Cockroach, 1973); Kullu shay$ fi mahallihi, pb. 1966 (Not a Thing Out of Place, 1973); al-Wartah, pb. 1966 (Incrimination, 1984); Ahl al-qamar, pb. 1969 (Poet on the Moon, 1984); al-Dunya riwayah hazaliyah, pb. 1971, pr. 1972 (The World Is a Comedy, 1985); Fate of a Cockroach: Four Plays of Freedom, pb. 1973; Plays, Prefaces, and Postscripts of Tawfiq al-Hakim, pb. 1981, 1984 (2 volumes; William M. Hutchins, translator) Other literary forms • In addition to drama, Tawfiq al-Hakim was active in a number of genres. Among his novels, written rather early in his career, al-Qasr al-mashur (1936; the enchanted palace) is notable as a collaborative effort composed with the distinguished man of letters Taha Husayn. His most celebrated work of long fiction, Yawmiyat na$ib fi al-aryaf (1937; Maze of Justice, 1947), draws on al-Hakim’s experience as a legal functionary and deftly combines social commentary with satire. Other novels are significant as indications of al-Hakim’s propensity to experiment with this form of fiction. At intervals during his career, al-Hakim wrote short stories, which are most readily accessible through the two-volume collection Qisas, published in 1949. Al-Hakim also published a number of essentially autobiographical works, of which Sijn al-4umr (1964; The Prison of Life, 1992) deserves particular mention; Zahrat al-4umr (1943; life in flower) is a compilation of letters, translated from the French, from alHakim’s correspondence with those he met during his student days in Paris. Reflections on drama, art, and life are presented in works of literary criticism such as Min alburj al-4aji (1941; from the ivory tower) and Fann al-adab (1952; the art of literature), as well as other studies. For a number of years, beginning in 1943, al-Hakim wrote columns for the influential newspapers Akhbar al-yawm (news of the day) and alAhram (the pyramids) of Cairo. His collection of political essays, 4Awdat al-wa4y (1974; The Return of Consciousness, 1985), and a companion volume of documents published the next year, aroused criticism in some circles and wonderment in others, for their un412

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favorable commentary on the government of Egypt under President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Achievements • At the beginning of the twentieth century, drama in Egypt and the Arab world remained a derivative and largely secondary form of creative expression. Puppet and shadow plays were produced alongside adaptations drawn for the most part from French and Italian playwrights. Some innovations were introduced on the Egyptian stage with the production of works by Salim Khalil al-Naqqash, Ya4qub Sannu4 (James Sanua), and Ahmad Shawqi. After World War I, important new plays were written by Mahmud Taymur, and Najib al-Rihani’s performances in comic roles also aroused interest in the theater. Nevertheless, with only an exiguous native tradition, Tawfiq al-Hakim came to the forefront of modern Egyptian dramatists with strikingly original depictions of time-honored Middle Eastern themes. Al-Hakim’s earlier work, particularly that beginning with The People of the Cave, achieved the fusion of regional themes with European techniques. More than that, his work came to be classed as pioneering on at least three other fronts as well. He brought to the Egyptian and Arab stage unique and distinctive interpretations of Western works, notably versions of classical Greek drama. Many of his works have a surrealistic bent, suggesting analogies, which he has encouraged, with the Western Theater of the Absurd. He was also among the first Arab dramatists to write dialogue in colloquial language. Purists, who insisted on the use of classical Arabic, were outraged, but others have conceded that the effects may have heightened the contrasts between the timeless and the mundane that are integral concerns of al-Hakim’s productions. His efforts to introduce idiomatic usage into the language of the stage were followed by those of other notable playwrights. This trend in itself marks the extent to which, largely as a result of al-Hakim’s influence, drama has developed from the stylized, ritualistic forms that characterized the early Arab theater. Notwithstanding the decidedly mixed reception accorded his works during the early phases of his career, al-Hakim received a number of awards and honors in his native country. In 1951 he was made director general of the Egyptian National Library, and three years later he became a member of the Academy of the Arabic Language in Cairo. He was awarded the cordon of the republic in 1958, and he served as Egypt’s representative to UNESCO, in Paris, during the following two years. He received the State Literature Prize in 1961, and in 1963 a theater in Cairo was formally named for him. His position as the preeminent modern dramatist in the Arab world was underscored when a Tawfiq al-Hakim Festival was held at the University of Cairo in 1969. At that time al-Hakim also presided over a Congress of Arab Dramatists that was held in the Egyptian capital. In 1974, he became president of his country’s Story Writers’ Club. Although personally at times he may have been inclined to overstate his own importance—during the early 1960’s he announced his candidacy for the Nobel Prize in Literature—al-Hakim’s stature was imposing among Middle Eastern playwrights, and on the international level his works are almost certainly the most widely recognized of any Arab dramatic productions. Biography • For some time, the date of Tawfiq al-Hakim’s birth was in doubt—in places the year 1902 was cited, but later October 9, 1898, was accepted as proved. It is certain that he was born in Alexandria, Egypt, of an Arab doctor and a mother who was descended from a family of Ottoman officials and army officers. Although his educa-

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tion moved forward slowly during his early years, al-Hakim evinced an early interest in dramatic storytelling. In 1915, he entered the Muhammad Ali Secondary School in Cairo, and he received the baccalaureate in 1921. His youth evidently was marred somewhat by difficult relations with his mother, and a brief, unrequited love affair did nothing to improve his attitude toward women. During the short-lived revolution of 1919, which was provoked by the exile of Sa4d Zaghlul, a prominent national leader, to Malta, al-Hakim was imprisoned for composing patriotic songs. His incarceration was brief and hardly unpleasant; at about that time he wrote his first play, a work that Cairo producers would not stage because of its defiantly anti-British standpoint. For four years, until 1925, al-Hakim studied law at the state university in Cairo; increasingly it became evident that his proclivities, and his real calling, lay elsewhere. His further efforts at the writing of drama brought forth al-Mar$ah al-jadidah (modern woman), which was composed in 1923 and produced on the stage three years later. Three other short plays, including Khatim Sulayman (the ring of Solomon), were produced in 1924, shortly after he had committed them to paper. In spite of an undistinguished academic record—he graduated third from last among those who were promoted in his class–-al-Hakim entered the Collège des Lois at the Sorbonne in Paris. At that time he was still guided in part by his father’s wish that he should become a lawyer, and evidently he was otherwise undecided about which direction his career should take. During his student years in France—between 1925 and 1928—he spent much of his time reading, sightseeing, and absorbing as much European culture as possible. In addition to philosophy and narrative fiction, he delved at length into published drama and attended performances of major plays. It appears that al-Hakim was fascinated by the works of Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, and Luigi Pirandello. Classical Greek theater also left a lasting impression on him. The lack of an Arab dramatic tradition, which had troubled him during his first efforts in Egypt, was brought home to him more definitely; along the way, two love affairs, which turned out badly, added further poignancy to his outlook. In 1928, having passed all but one of his examinations, he returned to Egypt, ostensibly to commence work within the legal profession, but with his creative aspirations probably now foremost in his mind. After an apprenticeship of one year in Alexandria, al-Hakim served as a public prosecutor in various rural communities between 1929 and 1934; he then became director of the investigation bureau of the Ministry of Education, and in 1939 he was appointed to a position in the Ministry of Social Affairs. In 1943 he left public service to devote himself entirely to writing. It may readily be inferred from his fictional and autobiographical works that he regarded government positions as sinecures, an attitude he also detected in those around him. The decisive event of his career as a playwright was the publication in 1933 of his The People of the Cave. His transfer from legal to bureaucratic responsibilities may have been a result of the uproar that greeted this work. Although Taha Husayn, a leading critic, and other men of letters praised the play’s bold, unconventional approach, others castigated it for its use of informal, even ungrammatical, language. Shahrazad had already been published (in 1934) when an outcry broke out over the staged version of The People of the Cave; audiences rejected it as far too long and too far removed from the formal routines that they had come to expect from the theater. Typical of other dramatic works from this period are Muhammad, a lengthy treatment of episodes from the life of the Prophet, and other works set in classical times. In 1936, al-Hakim, on a visit to Europe, attended the Salzburg Theater Festi-

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val, and in 1938 he vacationed in the Alps, in an effort again to maintain cultural contacts abroad. The next period of al-Hakim’s creative life is sometimes associated with the title of his book Min al-burj al-4aji, which refers to the literary life as being led in an “ivory tower.” To be sure, some of his writings expressed concern about Nazi ambitions during World War II; in a more general light, he also wrote about his fears for world peace during an age dominated by brute militarism and technology. Other works explored classical Greek themes or considered episodes from the Old Testament that are also part of Islamic lore. In 1946 he was married, and thereafter fathered a son and three daughters; critics later have tried to determine the effect his family life had on the obvious though sometimes playful misogyny of his literary efforts. His reputation as a playwright detached from ideological concerns was reinforced during the period surrounding the Egyptian revolution of 1952 and the ultimate withdrawal of British forces from that country in 1956. In 1953, al-Hakim’s version of Shaw’s Pygmalion was staged at the Salzburg Theater Festival; in 1960, The Sultan’s Dilemma was published simultaneously in Cairo and, in a French translation, in Paris. He was honored by President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who secured official awards for him and attended the production premiere of Tender Hands in 1957. The author thus had reason to believe that his renown and acceptance of his works were on the rise. His works were also produced in other Arab countries; some of them were successfully adapted for the cinema. Quite apart from experiments with language, he turned increasingly to futuristic, global concerns or to the bemused contemplation of the absurdities in everyday life. Students of the theater struggled to find political allusions in alHakim’s later plays; some of them were set in remote historical periods and others took place in future ages. In January, 1973, the dramatist became directly embroiled in public concerns; he presented President Anwar el-Sadat with a letter on behalf of forty-six writers, protesting the nation’s indecisive stance against Israel. Although for a brief period publication and production of al-Hakim’s work were suspended, in October of that year war broke out, and the aging author vociferously supported Egypt’s military efforts. By 1974 a short treatise that al-Hakim had written that criticized the excesses and extravagances of the Nasser years was cleared for publication, in keeping with Sadat’s efforts to chart a political course of his own. Although this work, The Return of Consciousness, was denounced by Nasser’s remaining supporters (who, among other questions, asked why al-Hakim had remained silent until four years after their leader’s death), it became a best-seller for some time. In 1975, it was reported that a companion volume, which presented documents from the author’s work, in its turn had become the most popular book in Egypt. Although he did not go further in his professed intention to open the political files from his country’s recent past, al-Hakim remained an important and widely cited newspaper columnist. In line with the nation’s foreign policy, at times he suggested that Egypt and Israel may serve as islands of security in the Middle East. He also edited and supervised the collection of the numerous dramatic writings and other works that he composed over the years. Moreover, as the senior representative of an important modern tradition in Arabic and Egyptian literature, his works have been reprinted and have been made available in many parts of the world. Translations of al-Hakim’s writings exist in French, Spanish, Italian, German, Hebrew, Russian, and Japanese as well as other Middle Eastern languages; English language compilations of his major plays have also done much to increase his following.

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Analysis • Although Tawfiq al-Hakim’s dramatic imagination ranged across at least three millennia of human experience, touching down at particularly evocative points along the way, some generalizations may be made about common features in much of his work. Characterization has been important, but something less than a vital issue in his efforts; for that matter some leading personages have been typecast as abstract categories, such as war and peace, while others have been significant not for their intrinsic qualities but as participants in seemingly irrational situations. Characters in the plays based on medieval themes might possibly be interchanged with others from similar works. The domestic dramas also feature some stock types who seem to appear under various names in works of this kind. The author never claimed to have developed a florid, polished style—indeed, he purposely avoided such tendencies—and his dialogue has a crisp, staccato ring that often serves to heighten dramatic tension. There are, in many of his works, series of exclamations and interjections that, particularly in the absurdist dramas, merge with scenes taken up mainly with the exchange of questions. Even the most carefully constructed of al-Hakim’s plays have been meant as much for the reader as for the theater audience. Although some works have enjoyed considerably more success on the stage than others, the structure of his major dramatic efforts has been determined more by his thematic concerns than by the requirements of actual production. Many plays have long sequences of brief scenes, or sometimes present lengthy acts alternating with short, abrupt transitional passages. On another level, regardless of whether, during his classical or his absurdist phases, al-Hakim resolved the perennial questions of love, art, guilt, and social division, his works have posed these issues in unusual and distinctively original variations. Although at times he complained that during thirty years he attempted to accomplish for the Arab theater what it had taken Western civilization two thousand years to achieve, the freshness of his works, and the extent to which he has realized the conjunction of diverse aesthetic and moral concerns, should signify the magnitude of Tawfiq alHakim’s efforts within and indeed beyond the limits of the drama as he had found them. The drama of al-Hakim displays a remarkable diversity of outlook, and his breadth of vision inspires respect mingled slightly with awe. His cosmopolitan standpoint, coupled with his relentless quest for the new and untried, was in evidence across the span of his career. He was extraordinarily prolific; one recent count yielded eighty-four titles of dramatic works that he has composed, quite apart from his writings in other genres. His plays have been set in historical periods from the times of King Solomon of the Old Testament, through the age of classical Greek drama, across early and medieval periods of Islamic history, on to modern times in Egypt, and beyond, into the space age. al-Hakim depicted the rustic peasant landscapes of his native country, the courts of great monarchs from the past, and the cosmic scenery of new worlds to come. It may well be argued that his work is uneven, both in its technical execution and where depth of characterization is involved. It would seem that his penchant for the unexpected and the unusual at times may have affected the direction of his dramatic efforts; any facile attempt to devise categories for his works is doomed to frustration. Nevertheless, although even a chronological approach would be subject to anomalies and overlapping impulses may be observed in many areas, there are some broad elements of thematic continuity that may be discerned in the development of al-Hakim’s repertory.

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The People of the Cave • The historical contexts for major early works were derived from Islamic religious and literary traditions. The People of the Cave, the work that in 1933 was hailed as heralding the onset of a new era in Arab drama and that elicited stormy protests on the part of subsequent audiences, deals with the Christian legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, which is also cited in the Qur$an. In this play, visions of the miraculous, hope, and despair are presented in a light that is broadly consonant with the convictions of Muslim believers, but without prejudice to the Christian values that are also affirmed by Islam. Shahrazad • Shahrazad was al-Hakim’s effort to supply a continuation of Alf layla walayla (15 c.e.; The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment, 1706-1708); when the fabled storyteller survives and marries the monarch from the tale, some poignant and revealing reflections on nature, beauty, and mortality are recorded. Muhammad • Muhammad, which serves as a sort of Muslim Passion play, is a sweeping pageant that was meant to demonstrate al-Hakim’s belief that suitable dramatic forms could be found to evoke themes from the life of the Prophet. This play may also point to the author’s contention that the drama is meant to be read as much as it is meant to be viewed: In one edition there are a prologue, three acts, and an epilogue, comprising, in all, ninety-five scenes. The River of Madness • Absolute power and helplessness are treated in plays taken from past epochs of Oriental despotism. In The River of Madness, a one-act production, a monarch’s subjects drink mystical waters that render them impervious to his commands. At the end, the unnamed ruler also seeks wisdom in this form of supposed madness. It is not clear who is sane and who is not, or whence real authority springs. The Wisdom of Solomon • For all of his powers, the biblical King Solomon is unable to win the favor of a beautiful woman, in one of al-Hakim’s longer works, The Wisdom of Solomon. This effort, which draws on characters depicted in one of the author’s earliest plays, Khatim Sulayman, opens when a jinni appears to a humble fisherman and informs him of his quarrel with the king. He hopes for reinstatement into Solomon’s good graces. When the Queen of Sheba, the most beautiful of all women, is brought before the mighty monarch, Solomon in all of his glory is unable to win her favor. He is tempted to enlist the spirit, but is reluctant to summon unearthly powers. The queen remains demure as ever, and for all of his countless treasures and innumerable wives, the great ruler falls prey to the frailties of the flesh; he becomes old and dies. At the end, the jinni warns that love and power will provoke struggle on this earth for centuries and ages to come. The Sultan’s Dilemma • Themes of punishment and justice converge with concerns about past politics in some of the author’s later plays. In The Sultan’s Dilemma, which is set in late medieval Egypt, a man is sentenced to death for maintaining that the sultan is a slave; a lady intervenes on his behalf, demonstrates that the condemned man is indeed correct, and in the end the ruler’s place before the people must be redeemed by a complicated process of manumission. By emphasizing the absurdities of a bygone political system (where in fact under the Mamluk Dynasty the loftiest as well as the lowliest positions were occupied by those who in a technical legal sense were held in

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bonded servitude), al-Hakim implies that authority and official dignity are transitory attributes that are real only to the extent that society accepts them. Princess Sunshine • Princess Sunshine has an unspecified medieval setting, during the reign of a certain Sultan Nu4man. He rules over an odd kingdom: Princes from all around are flogged to deter them from courting the princess; executions must be halted because the gallows rope has been stolen. Harmony is achieved, however, when the princess agrees to marry one of her suitors, even after she learns that he is actually a commoner and his real name is the unprepossessing Dindan. Piraksa • Works that are borrowed from Western traditions exhibit another facet of al-Hakim’s conception of the drama. Aristophanes was the original source for Piraksa: Aw, Mushkilat al-hukm (Praxagora: or, the difficulties of government). The Egyptian playwright’s version turns out to be an exercise in political discourse. Some ludicrous problems arise when the protagonist of the title subjects ancient Athens to a form of feminist communism. Pygmalion • Pygmalion, though suggested by George Bernard Shaw’s work, also takes up classical concerns. A Cypriot Greek artist calls on the goddess Venus to endow one of his statues with life; when he falls in love with his creation, Pygmalion, the title character, fears that he will have to abandon sculpture. This work, published in 1942, highlights the conflicting demands of life, love, and art in a felicitous union of several disparate approaches to the drama. King Oedipus • A major work in al-Hakim’s canon is King Oedipus, which is an adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (c. 429 b.c.e.; Oedipus Tyrannus, 1715). In this version, the tragic denouement takes place when the monarch learns that he is not of royal birth. He is driven by a zealous pursuit of the truth even beyond the doors that should not be opened. Curiosity is Oedipus’s tragic flaw; when he learns that he was adopted, he is blinded. It is noteworthy here that, without introducing overt references to Islam, the pantheon of Greek gods from the original tragedy is replaced with suggestions of a monotheistic purpose. Countervailing concerns with predestination and free will arise when al-Hakim points to problems of divine intentions in this world. Tender Hands • Contemporary social issues figure in many of al-Hakim’s plays, sometimes in a bizarre, mocking sense; but a more straightforward presentation of these themes may be found in Tender Hands, which concerns the place in society of university graduates who have more formal learning than practical training. Whether grammatical usage has any relevance to the management of an oil company is a problem that is no more readily resolved than the just division of household tasks for a prospective couple. Nevertheless, all ends happily when a marriage uniting two leading characters is secured. Himari qala li • Whimsical and broadly comic themes have been pursued in several of al-Hakim’s works; this is the case with Himari qala li (my donkey said to me). In this group of dramatic sketches, the author’s donkey asks him questions about life’s predicaments; in some sequences the roles of human and animal almost seem to be reversed, as ordinary logic appears inadequate to explain the anomalies of humankind’s condition.

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The Tree Climber • In some of his works, al-Hakim acknowledged the examples of European playwrights such as Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, and Eugène Ionesco; in 1962 he announced that his most recent play had an irrationalist inspiration, and some affinities with the Theater of the Absurd, in the introduction to one of his best-known works. The Tree Climber opens as a retired railway inspector is perplexed by the simultaneous disappearance of his wife and a female lizard that had lived under their orange tree. After police interrogation, and with the testimony of a bizarre dervish who appears at the train station, the old railwayman confesses to murder and claims that by burying his wife’s body under the tree he had hoped to increase its yield of fruit. The lawmen begin digging, but they uncover nothing; the wife reappears later, and, when her husband questions her about her absence, he becomes enraged by her evasive answers. He strangles her, puts the body in the hole the police have left under the tree, and then is distracted by the mysterious dervish. During their conversation, the wife’s body vanishes; in its place they find the body of the lizard, the man’s talisman of good fortune. The Fate of a Cockroach and Not a Thing Out of Place • Another notable effort in the same vein is Fate of a Cockroach, which commences with a satirical view of order and legitimacy in the insect world. The cockroach king takes precedence over the queen because his whiskers are longer, but the female talks of mobilizing her sex for a war against predatory ants. The two seem to agree, however, that their species is the most advanced on the planet. Unknown to them, a married couple is arguing about the equitable disbursement of household funds. The wife asks the husband to kill a cockroach in their bathtub; when first the man and then the woman begin instead to contemplate the insect in admiration, a doctor is called in. He cannot understand either one of them because he has never been married. For a certain time, the husband and the wife quarrel about rank and obedience in a way that recalls the argument between the cockroach king and queen; relations seem more strained than ever after the maid, in the course of her cleaning routine, drowns the insect without a second thought. Not a Thing Out of Place is a brisk one-act piece that has villagers talking of melons that resemble human heads and a philosophically inclined donkey when they go off to join a local dance. The Song of Death and Incrimination • Themes of violence and guilt—notably those that elude any judicial resolution—are taken up in certain works. The one-act play The Song of Death deals with a blood vendetta between peasant families in Upper Egypt. A young university graduate is unable to persuade them that they would be better concerned with technological means to improve their living standards. Although power, punishment, and the political order have been considered in plays set in earlier periods, an absurdist treatment of crime during modern times is presented in Incrimination. Here a law professor who has written learned treatises on criminal psychology, but has never met any lawbreakers, is introduced to some local gang members. When a policeman is shot to death during a jewel theft, the scholar agrees to defend his acquaintance from the underworld in court. By a strange transposition of the clues, however, the evidence in the end points to the professor. It would seem, then, that in the author’s view guilt and innocence have no more fixed constancy than visual illusions. Voyage to Tomorrow • Voyage to Tomorrow begins with a crime story and ends with some of the ironic, futuristic twists that are notable in al-Hakim’s later drama. A man

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who perpetrated murder while in the throes of romantic infatuation is allowed to participate in an experimental, and extremely hazardous, space flight; his companion is a fellow convict who had committed four murders for personal gain. Against all the odds they survive and return to Earth during a future age when all material wants are provided for and people routinely live several hundred years. This state, however, is actually a despotism wherein love and romance are regarded as unwanted, somehow subversive relics of the past. The first convict, after a brief flirtation with a sympathetic brunette, threatens to kill a security guard who tries to separate them. He comes close to committing murder again for the sake of a woman. Here the great themes of conscience and emotional commitment are interwoven with the author’s visionary and speculative concerns. Angels’ Prayer • A final grouping of al-Hakim’s works might include those that deal with global issues. Here a question that is frequently posed is whether science will benefit humanity or assist in its mass destruction; this issue was taken up at intervals across much of al-Hakim’s career. In his attitude toward World War II, and in his considerations on the advent of nuclear weapons and rivalries in space exploration, al-Hakim dealt with important developments in advance of many other Arab authors. The short play Angels’ Prayer depicts an angel who comes to Earth. He finds a monk and a scientist quarreling over responsibility for the wayward path of the human race. The angel is later captured, tried, and executed at the behest of two tyrants who resemble Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. When he returns to Heaven, still holding his apple of peace, which the dictators have vainly tried to take from him, he urges the other angels to pray for the inhabitants of Earth. Between War and Peace and Food for the Millions • The one-act play Between War and Peace has an odd bit of personification: Characters named War and Peace meet in the boudoir of a lady named Diplomacy, where their deliberations resemble the intrigues of a lovers’ triangle. Human issues in the nuclear age are examined in Food for the Millions. A scientific prodigy claims to have made a discovery more important than the atom bomb: Food can be produced at an infinitesimal fraction of its original cost, and families everywhere will be able to have it in abundance. Others compare this project to the fond dreams of science fiction, and it falls by the wayside when the youth and other family members learn that their mother, before remarrying, may have acted to hasten the death of their seriously ill father. Toward the end of the drama there are some homely but portentous musings on water stains that repeatedly appear on their apartment walls; these may be symbolic of guilt in the household that has not yet been expunged. Poet on the Moon • In one of his last plays, Poet on the Moon, al-Hakim describes a flight to the moon on which, in spite of some misgivings from the authorities, a poet is allowed to accompany two astronauts. When they arrive, the poet is the only one who can hear the voices of moon creatures, who warn against any attempt to remove precious or hitherto unknown minerals from their domain. On the return of the spacecraft to Earth, the creatures effect the mysterious transmutation of moon rocks into ordinary vitreous earth, thus averting any premature or unprincipled exploitation of outer space.

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Other major works long fiction: 4Awdat al-ruh, 1933 (Return of the Spirit, 1990); al-Qasr al-mashur, 1936 (with Taha Husayn); Yawmiyat na$ib fi al-aryaf, 1937 (Maze of Justice, 1947); 4Usfur min al-Sharq, 1938 (Bird of the East, 1966); Raqisat al-ma4bad, 1939; al-Ribat al-muqaddas, 1944. short fiction: Qisas, 1949 (2 volumes); Arini Allah, 1953; In the Tavern of Life and Other Stories, 1998. nonfiction: Tahta shams al-fikr, 1938; Tahta al-misbah al-akhdar, 1941; Min al-burj al-4aji, 1941; Zahrat al-4umr, 1943; Fann al-adab, 1952; Sijn al-4umr, 1964 (The Prison of Life, 1992); Qalabuna al-masrahi, 1967; 4Awdat al-wa4y, 1974 (The Return of Consciousness, 1985); Watha$iq fi tariq 4Awdat al-wa4y, 1975; Nazarat fi al-din, al-thaqafah, al-mujtama4, 1979; Mamalih dakhiliyah, 1982. Bibliography Badawi, M. M. Modern Arabic Drama in Egypt. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Badawi’s study examines the state of Arabic drama in modern Egypt, touching on al-Hakim. _______, ed. Modern Arabic Literature. Cambridge History of Arabic Literature. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992. This history of Arabic literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth century contains a long section on al-Hakim as well as a description of many other major dramatists in Egypt and the Arabic world. El-Enany, Rasheed. “Tawfiq al-Hakim and the West: A New Assessment of the Relationship.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 27, no. 2 (November, 2000): 165175. An analysis of one of al-Hakim’s early novels on the cultural clashes between the East and the West. Provides insights into the dramatist’s views. Long, Richard. Tawfiq al-Hakim: Playwright of Egypt. London: Ithaca Press, 1979. A basic biography of al-Hakim that examines his life and works. Bibliography and index. Starkey, Paul. From the Ivory Tower: A Critical Analysis of Tawfiq al-Hakim. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Ithaca Press, 1988. Starkey presents criticism and analysis of the works of al-Hakim. _______. “Tawfiq al-Hakim.” African Writers. Vol. 1. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1997. A concise overview of the life and works of al-Hakim. _______. “Tawfiq al-Hakim (1898-1987): Leading Playwright of the Arab World.” Theater Three 6 (1989). A look at the life and works of al-Hakim two years after his death. J. R. Broadus

Peter Handke Peter Handke

Born: Griffen, Austria; December 6, 1942 Principal drama • Publikumsbeschimpfung und andere Sprechstücke, pr., pb. 1966 (Offending the Audience, 1969); Selbstbezichtigung, pr., pb. 1966 (Self-Accusation, 1969); Weissagung, pr., pb. 1966 (Prophecy, 1976); Hilferufe, pr. 1967 (Calling for Help, 1970); Kaspar, pr., pb. 1968 (English translation, 1969); Kaspar and Other Plays, pb. 1969; Das Mündel will Vormund sein, pr., pb. 1969 (My Foot My Tutor, 1970); Quodlibet, pr. 1970 (English translation, 1976); Der Ritt über den Bodensee, pr., pb. 1971 (The Ride Across Lake Constance, 1972); Die Unvernünftigen sterben aus, pb. 1973 (They Are Dying Out, 1975); The Ride Across Lake Constance and Other Plays, pb. 1976; Über die Dörfer, pr., pb. 1982 (Among the Villages, 1984); Das Spiel vom Fragen: Oder, Die Reise zum sonoren Land, pr., pb. 1989 (Voyage to the Sonorous Land: Or, The Art of Asking, 1996); Die Stunde da wir nichts voneinander wussten, pr., pb. 1992 (The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other, 1996); Zurüstungen zur Unsterblichkeit: Ein Königsdrama, pr., pb. 1997; Die Fahrt im Einbaum: Oder, Das Stück zum Film vom Krieg, pr., pb. 1999 Other literary forms • Although Peter Handke first achieved literary celebrity on the basis of his avant-garde plays, he is best known as a writer of fiction, having largely abandoned the theater early in his career. Most of Handke’s novels are quite short (several are of novella length), and their language is highly concentrated. As critic June Schlueter notes, while Handke’s awareness of the linguistic medium has remained constant, there has been a development in his fiction from an early emphasis on the limits of language and the failure of communication to an emphasis on the “redemptive power of poetic language.” In addition to his novels, Handke has published several books, which are often classified as nonfiction but which he himself regards as of a piece with his fiction. Among these are the much-praised novel Wunschloses Unglück (1972; A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, 1975), written in response to his mother’s suicide, and Das Gewicht der Welt (1977; The Weight of the World, 1984). Handke has published a small number of short stories, essays, and several slim collections of poetry; he has also written radio plays and has written or co-written screenplays and otherwise collaborated on the making of several films. Since the 1980’s, Handke has translated many works of French, Slovenian, English, and Greek writers, among them Marguerite Duras, Bruno Bayen, Aeschylus, and William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (pr. c. 1610-1611). Achievements • Despite his rather sparse output, Peter Handke is widely regarded as an important and influential contemporary dramatist. He became one of the first of the generation of German speakers born during World War II to achieve prominence. Unlike many other postwar German and Austrian writers, he does not hark back to the Nazi era, nor does he concern himself with “the past” in any usual way. At the same time, his plays do not follow the example of Bertolt Brecht, so pervasive in the postwar German theater: Handke’s plays are not theatrical in the ways Brecht’s are, nor do they have Brecht’s scope. Rather, they seek to define language as act and language as power. 422

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Three of Handke’s plays, Offending the Audience, Kaspar, and The Ride Across Lake Constance, have entered the international repertory; these works made him the most prominent German-language playwright of the 1970’s. While Handke was awarded several notable honors and awards—for example, the Gerhart Hauptmann Prize in 1967 and the Schiller Prize in 1972—he refused or returned other prizes, including the Büchner Prize (won in 1973, returned in 1999) and the Kafka Prize (refused in 1979). He accepted the Salzburg Literature Prize in 1986. Biography • Peter Handke was born in Griffen, Austria, on December 6, 1942. With the exception of a four-year period from 1944 to 1948, when he lived in Berlin, Handke lived in the country in southern Austria. In 1961, he entered the University of Graz to study law. The critic Nicholas Hern argues that this legal training influenced Handke’s style: “Most of his plays . . . consist of a series of affirmative propositions each contained within one sentence which is usually a simple main clause on a main clause on a main clause plus one subordinate clause.” While he was at the university, Handke published his work in Manuskripts, the university’s literary review. From 1963 onward, he devoted himself to writing, and his first novel, Die Hornissen (1966; the hornets), appeared the year after he left the university. This novel earned for Handke the chance to read at the prestigious Gruppe 47 conference in April of 1966, held that year at Princeton University. There he read from his second novel, Der Hausierer (1967; the peddler), and on the last day of the meeting he delivered a blistering attack on what he saw as the artistic failures of the group’s older members. Handke argued that much German postwar writing was too realistic and descriptive and “failed to realize literature is made with language, not with the things that one describes with language.” This outburst and the success of his first play, Offending the Audience, at the Frankfurt “Experimenta” theater week in June of that year, brought Handke considerable media attention; since he affected a Beatles-like hairstyle and mirrored sunglasses, he was much photographed, interviewed, and read. In 1966, he married actress Libgart Schwarz and moved to Germany from Austria. Over the next seven years, he lived in Düsseldorf, Berlin, Paris, and Kronberg (outside Frankfurt). His daughter, Amina, was born in Berlin in 1969. That same year, he joined with ten other writers to form a cooperative publishing house, Verlag der Autors. In 1979, he returned with his daughter to Salzburg in his native Austria. In the late 1990’s, Handke reestablished himself as one of the en(Jerry Bauer) fants terribles of German literature

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by vociferously taking the side of the Serbs in the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts, thus finding himself under attack from fellow writers, journalists, and politicians alike. Most of Handke’s literary output in the late 1990’s is a reflection of and a commentary on the events in the former Yugoslavia. As part of his condemnation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) attacks on Serbia, Handke returned the Georg Büchner Prize, including a substantial stipend, that the German government had awarded him in 1973, and formally renounced his membership in the Roman Catholic Church, which he accused of supporting what he called the genocide of the Serbian people. At the same time, he proudly accepted his elevation to the rank of Knight of Serbia. Analysis • Peter Handke calls his first three plays–Offending the Audience, Self-Accusation, and Prophecy–Sprechstücke (literally, speaking pieces). Both “speech” and “piece” are important, for Handke does away with such mundane dramatic considerations as plot and character, replacing them with activities and speakers. Thus, all three plays are made up of speech—pronounced word and rhetorical gesture—which is not involved in imitating an action. The plays examine the power and banality of public and private speech. Offending the Audience • Offending the Audience, the first of these plays to be produced, appeared in 1966 at Frankfurt’s Theater am Turm, a theater known for its dedication to the avant-garde. The play was accepted there only after it had been rejected by some sixty other more conservative theaters, and the avant-garde setting may have lessened the play’s impact, for it depends on the assumptions and conventions of mainstream theater—a theater in which William Shakespeare, Friedrich Schiller, and more recently Brecht have been the mainstays of the repertory. The play also depends on the predictable reactions of the patrons of such a theater—middlebrow, middle-class, and conservatively dressed. The audience enters a theater that appears set up for business as usual, complete with assiduous ushers and elegant programs. The usual routine occurs: Doors close and lights dim. When the curtain opens, four speakers are revealed (usually, but not necessarily, two men and two women) on a bare stage. The four ignore the audience and insult one another. Their speeches overlap and blend until at last a formal pattern is established, which culminates in the four saying one word in unison. (Handke has left what they actually say here unscripted.) The four now face the audience and, after a pause, begin to address it directly. Handke has simply broken his text into paragraphs, presumably each one spoken by a different speaker. He has not assigned gestures or speeches, and the script can in no manner be construed as a dialogue among the speakers. Thus, the director has a free hand with the assignment of speeches and movements. The direct address to the audience concerns four basic themes: the audience’s expectations of the theater, the nature of the audience itself, the nature of theatrical illusion and its absence in the current piece, and, by extension, the roles the spectators play in society. These topics are not presented in a logical way but, rather, in a repetitive intertwining of single, declarative sentences. A short sample from Michael Roloff’s translation conveys the flavor: The possibilities of theatre are not exploited here. The realm of possibilities is not exhausted. The theatre is not unbound. The theatre is bound. Fate is meant ironically here. We are not theatrical.

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After some twenty minutes of this, the audience is told, “Before you leave you will be offended.” They are then told why they are going to be offended. The piece ends with a decrescendo of silly and vulgar insults. At the end of the play, the curtain closes, only to open again as the four speakers take bows to recorded applause. So described, one has difficulty seeing why this was a popular play. Handke demonstrates the power of convention by removing it from the context in which it usually exists. He goes further by discussing those same conventions while violating them. The play affirms the power of theater by pointing out that the conventions are mistaken for the reality. When theater imitates, it does so through a structure of conventional movement and language. Handke forces the audience to see how often it confuses the convention with the reality it purports to imitate. Self-Accusation • Similar themes animate the two other Sprechstücke. Self-Accusation has two speakers—one male, one female—who in no sense carry on a dialogue. Rather, speaking alternately and together, they portray an Everyman who spells out the process of growing up civilized. Every sentence in the dialogue has “I” as its subject. Again a short quote will convey more than a description. I learned. I learned the words. I learned the verbs. I learned the difference between singular and plural. . . . I learned the adjectives. I learned the difference between mine and yours. I acquired vocabulary. In this play, the processes of verbal, moral, and physical growth are intertwined by Handke’s curiously declarative style. This style seems to imply that verbal growth is the controlling factor in shaping human life: Language civilizes at great cost and it creates our world. Kaspar • This notion that language creates the individual’s world also motivates Handke’s first full-length play, Kaspar. This play has a historical antecedent. In Nuremberg in 1828, a boy, Kaspar Hauser, was discovered, who—as a result of abuse and sensory deprivation—could, at age sixteen, say only one sentence: “I want to become a horseman such as my father once was.” Handke, however, does not write historical drama. He says in the play’s introduction that his play “does not show how IT REALLY IS OR REALLY WAS with Kaspar Hauser. It shows how someone can be made to speak through speaking. The play could also be called speech torture.” The play, like the Sprechstücke, presents a speaker on what is obviously still a stage, although a much more cultured stage than in the earlier plays. This speaker, Kaspar, is costumed and heavily made up as a Chaplinesque clown. This clown interacts with the voices of four Einsager, a neologism that literally means “in-sayers” but implies indoctrinator. (Michael Roloff translates it as prompter.) Later, Kaspar is joined by six other Kaspars all identically made-up and costumed. Handke lists sixteen stages through which Kaspar must pass, beginning with the question “Can Kaspar, the owner of one sentence, begin and begin to do something with his sentence?” and ending with “What is now Kaspar, Kaspar?” Handke has stressed his concern with identity and individuality by changing Kaspar’s only sentence to “I want to be a person like someone else was once.” Basically three main movements constitute the play. Kaspar and the audience learn that his one sentence is inadequate. The Einsager teach Kaspar new sentences until he has mastered language. It is at this point that the identical Kaspars appear. Finally

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Kaspar discovers that by accepting the Einsager’s language he has lost his uniqueness and identity. As Kaspar says, “I was trapped from my first sentence.” Voices heard on the loudspeaker suggest all the voices of coercion one hears in growing up—parents’ warnings, teachers’ threats, government propaganda. By calling the speakers “in-sayers,” Handke demonstrates how quickly humans internalize such voices. The audience is never fully certain where these prompters exist. Are they outside or inside Kaspar’s head? Handke might argue that humankind cannot answer that question about its own consciousness and that this inability to answer is the point. Each human being is made up of others’ speech that has been internalized. As the play progresses, the action onstage and the verbal images in Kaspar’s speech become increasingly more violent; indeed, there is the sense of a barely hidden threat throughout the play. By the end, Kaspar is left writhing on the ground to a shrill electronic noise, shouting over and over Othello’s phrase, “Goats and monkeys.” Writer June Schlueter suggests that Othello, like Kaspar, is concerned with the “idiocy of language”: Othello is led astray by Iago’s lines, just as Kaspar is by the Einsager’s sentences. A significant difference between the two works, however, is the difference between Renaissance and modern concepts of language. Iago manipulates language to his own ends and violates the moral order by destroying the relation between the world of objects and events and the world of language. Kaspar’s Einsager use a language that has only a tenuous and conventional relationship to the world of ideas and events. The play seems to argue that this is the only relationship language can have to reality. Influence of Wittgenstein • In discussing Handke’s ideas of language, nearly every critic mentions his countryman, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), and the group of linguists and philosophers known as the Vienna Circle, who flourished in the 1920’s. Although Handke admits to having read Wittgenstein and some of the others, he has not explained the effect of this philosophy on his work, nor have critics satisfactorily suggested what this relationship might be. Wittgenstein’s first major work, “Logischphilosophische Abhandlung,” (1921; best known by the bilingual German and English edition title of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922, 1961), reveals similarities with Handke’s understanding and use of language. The first is a stylistic similarity. Both writers use simple declarative sentences, frequently not connected by the usual linguistic connectors to what precedes or follows. In part, the style is a working out of Wittgenstein’s dictum: “What can be said can be said clearly, and what cannot be said must be passed over in silence.” The concern with “what can be said” and “what cannot” seems common to both writers. Wittgenstein seeks to put a limit to philosophy, which he defines as “not a body of doctrine, but an activity.” One “does philosophy,” and its value lies in its doing. Similarly, Handke presents a definition of speech as an activity in which the nature, direction, and energy of the act are all more important than the content conveyed by the speech. That about which “we must remain silent” Wittgenstein calls “the mystical,” by which he means not only the subjective religious feelings ordinarily associated with that term but also such normal areas of philosophic inquiry as ethics and aesthetics. Indeed he seems to put ontology (the question of existence) in the realm of the mystical: “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.”

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The notion that humankind infers the existence of the world from language extends throughout Handke’s work and even approaches the notion that humans create the world by speaking about it and by hearing elders speak about it. Drama has traditionally dealt with those subjective feelings and expressions about which Wittgenstein says humankind “must pass over in silence.” In fact, Handke does pass over them in silence. The expressions of subjective feelings (and they are very rare) are offered as objective statements and have no value beyond themselves. Thus, one becomes aware of a hole, an absence, in the middle of Handke’s work. His dramas seem to be concerned with aesthetics, ethics, and identity—yet there is no language in them that discusses these issues; they are approached through silence. One could argue that Handke parodies a Wittgensteinian universe to show its inadequacies. A more consistent understanding of the plays, however, might be approached through another of Wittgenstein’s ideas, the pictorial theory of language, which argues that language can picture reality and that propositions “show what they say.” Further, he insists, “What can be shown, cannot be said.” This last proposition is extremely important in considering Handke’s purpose. Instead of parodying Wittgenstein’s universe, he displays its tragicomic nature. Because language is always inadequate, humankind is led to wildly comic errors and actions; because human beings can never speak about that which is most important, they are left alone and twitching at the end of the action. During his later years, Wittgenstein rethought the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and challenged his own picture theory. He admitted that language arises out of specific social occasions, and, therefore, words need not always name objects. In his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953), Wittgenstein developed the notion of language games and stressed that speech is an activity. The Ride Across Lake Constance • Handke clearly likes to play language games, but for him, unlike Wittgenstein, they are never innocent. Handke’s games are always zero-sum; there is a winner and loser, a master and servant, a speaker and listener. In this, Handke seems to participate in a major theme of German drama, the relation of the individual will to authority. His use of this theme creates a tragic paradox: Language, which enables human beings to conceive of freedom, is the principal force that prevents them from achieving it. Handke’s two full-length plays The Ride Across Lake Constance and They Are Dying Out explore this paradox and the power relations that it creates. Unlike Handke’s earlier plays, The Ride Across Lake Constance has a real set—a kind of nineteenth century drawing room with a long double staircase leading into it. There are some suggestions that this may be a madhouse, but Handke, as usual, never specifies. What is apparent is that it is a set. Handke insists on the theatricality of the piece. He arbitrarily assigns the names of famous German actors to his characters, but he suggests that “the characters should bear the names of the actors playing the role . . . the actors are and play themselves at one and the same time.” In an interview, Handke said that the play examines “poses” as they are used onstage and in life. The title derives from a folktale in which the hero, lost in fog, crosses Lake Constance on very thin ice. When learning of his narrow escape, he dies of fright. “To ride on Lake Constance” is the German equivalent for the expression “skating on thin ice.” Author Nicholas Hern suggests that the “thin ice” in the play is society itself and that the play explores what society means by the concepts of sense and madness. This sense of the social definition of madness relates this play to the themes of

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power and domination in all Handke’s work. The familiar images and apparatus of dominance fill the stage. One woman is sold a riding crop and later beaten, another seeks to dominate a man through temptation. Two men are shown in a clear masterservant relationship. Yet the audience feels neither threatened nor enraged by these relationships and acts because they appear as theatrical poses. A typical first reaction to The Ride Across Lake Constance is befuddlement; New York theater critic Clive Barnes admitted that within the first two minutes of the play, he realized that he did not know what was going on. One suspects that Handke wants the audience to see that reality is a mental construction socially imposed and accepted and that madness reconstitutes the world in a socially unacceptable but no less valid way. Again language, sentences, and the place of objects deny the viewer the freedom to recreate reality except through madness. They Are Dying Out • Handke’s next play, They Are Dying Out, suggests that humankind’s normal construction of the world is equally mad. Its protagonist, Herr Quitt, is a protean, laissez-faire capitalist of the sort who prompted Germany’s economic recovery. Throughout the play, he sees into and seems to criticize capitalist society. As Schlueter points out, however, no critic has convincingly given a definition of Handke’s politics; she adds that the play “stops considerably short of becoming a Marxist platform.” The German title of the play means, literally, the irrational are dying out, and the play seems to be about irrationality. Quitt cannot reconcile his inner sensibilities with his social actions. When he denounces capitalism, another capitalist says, “It was just a game, wasn’t it? Because in reality you are. . . .” Quitt cuts him off with, “Yes, but only in reality.” This notion that one can choose the irrational world and that it is truer than the rational world motivates one strain of German Romantic thought, especially that of the poet Novalis. Again, it is unclear where Handke stands. His hero commits suicide at the end of the play by beating his head against a rock to the sound of recorded belching. Is this the defeat of the poet by the modern world? Is it the ultimate image of the failure of civilization? Whatever it is, Handke believes that one cannot talk rationally about it. Handke can only offer the image. Thus Quitt, who is shown as a dominant force throughout the play, destroys himself in part because of society’s dominion over him, because of the understanding that society drives human beings away from their true selves. Because Handke is in this play more concerned with society than language, it is the first of his plays to have conventional characters and something approaching a plot. Narrative seems here to be the appropriate mode. This might suggest that Handke’s career as a dramatist began with an examination of language’s inability to communicate, passed through an examination of how language forces people to construct reality, and concludes with the acknowledgment that language is only one of the forces that determine humankind. His work centers on force, attack, control, and humans’ inability to protect themselves. 1990’s plays • Handke’s career as a dramatist began with an examination of language’s inability to communicate and passed on to an examination of how language forces humans to construct reality. In the plays he wrote in the late 1990’s responding to the Balkan conflict, Zurüstungen zur Unsterblichkeit (preparations for immortality) and Die Fahrt im Einbaum (the journey in the dug-out canoe, or the play about the film about the war), he arrives again at a position first articulated in Kaspar: Language is a

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tool of manipulation and indoctrination. The Einsager, the linguistic social engineers of his most famous play, turn into the chorus of the three journalists in Die Fahrt im Einbaum. Other major works long fiction: Die Hornissen, 1966; Der Hausierer, 1967; Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter, 1970 (The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, 1972); Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied, 1972 (Short Letter, Long Farewell, 1974); Wunschloses Unglück, 1972 (A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, 1975); Die Stunde der wahren Empfindung, 1975 (A Moment of True Feeling, 1977); Die linkshändige Frau, 1976 (The Left-Handed Woman, 1978); Langsame Heimkehr, 1979 (The Long Way Around, 1985); Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire, 1980 (The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1985); Kindergeschichte, 1981 (Child Story, 1985); Der Chinese des Schmerzes, 1983 (Across, 1986); Slow Homecoming, 1985 (includes The Long Way Around, The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire, and Child Story); Die Wiederholung, 1986 (Repetition, 1988); Die Abwesenheit: Ein Märchen, 1987 (Absence, 1990); Nachmittag eines Schriftstellers, 1987 (The Afternoon of a Writer, 1989); Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht: Ein Märchen aus den neuen Zeiten, 1994 (My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay, 1998); In einer dunklen Nacht ging ich aus meinem stillen Haus, 1997 (On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House, 2000); Der Bildverlust: Oder, Durch die Sierra de Gredos, 2002. short fiction: Begrüssung des Aufsichtsrats, 1967. poetry: Die Innenwelt der Aussenwelt der Innenwelt, 1969 (The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld, 1974); Gedicht an die Dauer, 1986. screenplays: Chronik der laufenden Ereignisse, 1971; Der Himmel über Berlin, 1987 (Wings of Desire, with Wim Wenders, 1987). teleplay: Falsche Bewegung, 1975. nonfiction: Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeinturms, 1972; Als das Wünschen noch geholfen hat, 1974; Das Gewicht der Welt, 1977 (journal; The Weight of the World, 1984); Das Ende des Flanierens, 1980; Die Geschichte des Bleistifts, 1982 (journal); Phantasien der Wiederholung, 1983 (journal); Aber ich lebe nur von den Zwischenräumen, 1987; Versuch über die Müdigkeit, 1989; Versuch über die Jukebox, 1990; Versuch über den geglückten Tag, 1991; The Jukebox and Other Essays on Storytelling, 1994 (translation of Versuch über die Müdigkeit, Versuch über die Jukebox, and Versuch über den geglückten Tag); Eine winterliche Reise zu den Flüssen Donau, Save, Morawa and Drina: Oder, Gerechtigkeit für Serbien, 1996 (A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia, 1997); Am Felsfenster morgens: Und andere Ortszeiten 19821987, 1998 (journal). translations: Prometheus, gefesselt, 1986 (of Aeschylus); Das Wintermärchen, 1991 (of William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale). Bibliography DeMeritt, Linda. New Subjectivity and Prose Forms of Alienation: Peter Handke and Botho Strauss. New York: Peter Lang, 1987. Examines the use of social psychology in German-language twentieth century literature by providing critical interpretation of Handke’s and Strauss’s prose works. Firda, Richard A. Peter Handke. New York: Twayne, 1993. The most accessible and comprehensive introductory survey of Handke’s work up to the early 1990’s. Includes a good biography and a jargon-free overview of his major dramatic and prose works. Bibliography and index. Hern, Nicholas. Peter Handke. New York: Ungarm, 1971. One of the first scholarly studies of Handke, particularly useful for a study of his early Sprechstücke plays.

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Konzett, Matthias. The Rhetoric of National Dissent in Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, and Elfriede Jelinek. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2000. Examines the ways in which three authors expose state-directed consensus and harmonization that impede the development of multicultural awareness in modern-day Europe. Explores how Handke focuses on national suppression of post-ideological voices in historians’ rendering of marginalized individuals. Schlueter, June. The Plays and Novels of Peter Handke. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983. Concentrates on the use of language in Handke’s work. Useful as an update of the Hern book. Sidney F. Parham, updated by Franz G. Blaha

Lorraine Hansberry Lorraine Hansberry

Born: Chicago, Illinois; May 19, 1930 Died: New York, New York; January 12, 1965 Principal drama • A Raisin in the Sun, pr., pb. 1959; The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, pr. 1964, pb. 1965; To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, pr. 1969, pb. 1971; Les Blancs, pr. 1970, pb. 1972; The Drinking Gourd, pb. 1972 (Robert Nemiroff, editor); What Use Are Flowers?, pb. 1972 (Nemiroff, editor); Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays of Lorraine Hansberry, pb. 1972 (includes Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd, and What Use Are Flowers? ) Other literary forms • As a result of her involvement in the Civil Rights movement, Lorraine Hansberry wrote the narrative for The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality (1964), a book of photographs, for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Because she died at such a young age, Hansberry left much of her work unpublished, but her husband, Robert Nemiroff, the literary executor of her estate, edited and submitted some of it for publication and, in the case of Les Blancs, production. In addition, he arranged excerpts from Hansberry’s various writings into a seven-anda-half-hour radio program entitled To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, which was broadcast on radio station WBAI in 1967. This program was later adapted for the stage, opening at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York on January 2, 1969, and becoming the longest running production of the 1968-1969 season. Many readers know Hansberry through the anthology of her writings edited by Nemiroff, To Be Young, Gifted, and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words (1969), a book that has enjoyed very wide circulation. Achievements • Lorraine Hansberry’s career was very brief, only two of her plays being produced in her lifetime, yet she recorded some very impressive theatrical achievements. She was only twenty-nine when A Raisin in the Sun appeared on Broadway, and its great success earned for her recognition that continues to this day. When A Raisin in the Sun was voted best play of the year by the New York Drama Critics Circle, she became the first black person as well as the youngest person to win the award. In 1973, a musical adapted from A Raisin in the Sun, entitled Raisin (with libretto by Nemiroff), won a Tony Award as best musical of the year (1974). She was respected and befriended by such figures as Paul Robeson and James Baldwin, and she helped in an active way to further the work of the Civil Rights movement. Though her later work has received far less recognition than her first play, A Raisin in the Sun continues to enjoy a broad popularity. Biography • Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born on May 19, 1930, in the South Side of Chicago, the black section of the city. Her parents, Carl and Mamie Hansberry, were well-off. Her father was a United States deputy marshal for a time and then opened a successful real estate business in Chicago. Despite her family’s affluence, they were forced by local covenants to live in the poor South Side. When Hansberry was eight years old, her father decided to test the legality of those covenants by buying a home in a white section of the city. Hansberry later recalled one incident that occurred shortly after the family’s move to a white neighborhood: A mob gathered outside their 431

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home, and a brick, thrown through a window, barely missed her before embedding itself in a wall. In order to stay in the house, to which he was not given clear title, Carl Hansberry instituted a civil rights suit against such restrictive covenants. When he lost in Illinois courts, he and the National Assocation for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) carried an appeal to the United States Supreme Court, which, on November 12, 1940, reversed the ruling of the Illinois supreme court and declared the local covenants illegal. Thus, Lorraine had a consciousness of the need to struggle for civil rights from a very young age. Her father, despite his legal victory, grew increasingly pessimistic about the prospects for change in the racial situation, and he finally decided to leave the country and retire in Mexico City. He had a stroke during a visit to Mexico, however, and died in 1945. Hansberry’s uncle, William Leo Hansberry, was also an important influence on her. A scholar of African history who taught at Howard University, his pupils included Nnamdi Azikewe, the first president of Nigeria, and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. Indeed, William Leo Hansberry was such a significant figure in African studies that in 1963, the University of Nigeria named its College of African Studies at Nsakka after him. While Lorraine was growing up, she was frequently exposed to the perspectives of young African students who were invited to family dinners, and this exposure helped to shape many of the attitudes later found in her plays. Lorraine, the youngest of four children, was encouraged to excel and was expected to succeed. After attending Englewood High School, she enrolled in the University of Wisconsin as a journalism student. She did not fare very well at the university, however, and felt restricted by the many requirements of the school. After two years, she left Wisconsin and enrolled in the New School for Social Research in New York, where she was permitted greater leeway in choosing courses. Once in New York, Hansberry began writing for several periodicals, including Freedom, Paul Robeson’s monthly magazine. She quickly became a reporter and then an associate editor of the magazine. In New York, she met Robert Nemiroff, then a student at New York University, and they were married in June of 1953. By this time, Hansberry had decided to be a writer, and although the bulk of her energies went into writing, she did hold a variety of jobs during the next few years. When Nemiroff acquired a good position with music publisher Phil Rose, she quit working and began writing fulltime. Hansberry’s first completed work was A Raisin in the Sun, which, after (Library of Congress) an initial struggle for financial back-

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ing, opened on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on March 11, 1959. The play, starring Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Louis Gossett, Jr., and Claudia McNeil, was an enormous success, running for 530 performances, and in May, winning the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Soon thereafter, Hansberry and Nemiroff moved from their apartment in Greenwich Village to a home in Croton, New York, in order for Hansberry to have more privacy for her work. At the same time, her success made her a public figure, and she used her newfound fame to champion the causes of civil rights and African independence. She made important speeches in a variety of places and once confronted then Attorney General Robert Kennedy on the issue of civil rights. It was not until 1964 that Hansberry produced another play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, and by that time she was seriously ill. The play opened at the Longacre Theatre on October 15, 1964, to generally good but unenthusiastic reviews, and Nemiroff had to struggle to keep it open, a number of times placing advertisements in newspapers asking for support, accepting financial support from friends and associates, and once accepting the proceeds from a spontaneous collection taken up by the audience when it was announced that without additional funds, the play would have to close. On this uncertain financial basis, production of the play continued from week to week. Hansberry’s life continued in much the same way. While the play struggled, she was in a hospital bed dying of cancer. She once lapsed into a coma and was not expected to recover, but for a brief time she did rally, recovering all of her faculties. Her strength gave out, however, and on January 12, 1965, she died. That night, the Longacre Theatre closed its doors in mourning, and The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window closed after 101 performances. Analysis • Lorraine Hansberry claimed Sean O’Casey as one of the earliest and strongest influences on her work and cited his realistic portrayal of character as the source of strength in his plays. In To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, she praised O’Casey for describing the human personality in its totality. O’Casey never fools you about the Irish . . . the Irish drunkard, the Irish braggart, the Irish liar . . . and the genuine heroism which must naturally emerge when you tell the truth about people. This . . . is the height of artistic perception . . . because when you believe people so completely . . . then you also believe them in their moments of heroic assertion: you don’t doubt them. In her three most significant plays, A Raisin in the Sun, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, and Les Blancs, one can see Hansberry’s devotion to the principles that she valued in O’Casey. First, she espoused realistic drama; second, she believed that the ordinary individual has a capacity for heroism; and finally, she believed that drama should reveal to the audience its own humanity and its own capacity for heroism. Hansberry claimed that her work was realistic rather than naturalistic, explaining that naturalism tends to take the world as it is and say: this is what it is . . . it is “true” because we see it every day in life . . . you simply photograph the garbage can. But in realism . . . the artist . . . imposes . . . not only what is but what is possible . . . because that is part of reality too. For Hansberry, then, realism involved more than a photographic faithfulness to the real world. She sought to deliver a universal message but realized that “in order to cre-

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ate the universal you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality . . . emerges from truthful identity of what is.” This concern for realism was present from the very beginning of Hansberry’s career and persisted in her work, though she did occasionally depart from it in small ways, such as in the symbolic rather than literal presence of “The Woman” in Les Blancs, that character symbolizing the spirit of liberty and freedom that lives inside humanity. Essential to Hansberry’s vision of reality was the belief that the average person has within him or her the capacity for heroism. Hansberry believed that each human being is not only “dramatically interesting” but also a “creature of stature,” and this is one of the most compelling features of her drama. Like O’Casey, Hansberry paints a full picture of each character, complete with flaws and weaknesses, yet she does not permit these flaws to hide the characters’ “stature.” Perhaps she expressed this idea best in A Raisin in the Sun, when Lena Younger berates her daughter Beneatha for condemning her brother, Walter Lee. Lena says, “When you start measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is.” For Hansberry, each character’s life is marked by suffering, struggle, and weakness, yet in each case, the final word has not been written. Just as Beneatha’s brother can rise from his degradation, just as Sidney (in The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window) can overcome his ennui, so each of her characters possesses not only a story already written but also possibilities for growth, accomplishment, and heroism. Hansberry permits no stereotypes in her drama, opting instead for characters that present a mixture of positive and negative forces. Hansberry’s realistic style and her stress on the possibilities for heroism within each of her characters have everything to do with the purpose that she saw in drama. As James Baldwin observed, Hansberry made no bones about asserting that art has a purpose, that it contained “the energy that could change things.” In A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry describes a poor black family living in Chicago’s South Side, her own childhood home, and through her realistic portrayal of their financial, emotional, and racial struggles, as well as in her depiction of their ability to prevail, she offers her audience a model of hope and perseverance and shows the commonality of human aspirations, regardless of color. In The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, she takes as her subject the disillusioned liberal Sidney Brustein, who has lost faith in the possibility of creating a better world. After all of his disillusionment, he realizes that despair is not an answer, that the only answer is hope despite all odds and logic, that change depends on his commitment to it. So too, in Les Blancs, Hansberry gives her audience a character, Tshembe Matoseh, who has a comfortable, pleasant, secure life and who seeks to avoid commitment to the cause of African independence, though he believes in the justness of that cause. He learns that change comes about only through commitment, and that such commitment often means the abandonment of personal comfort on behalf of something larger. A Raisin in the Sun • Hansberry’s earliest play, A Raisin in the Sun, is also her finest and most successful work. The play is set in the South Side of Chicago, Hansberry’s childhood home, and focuses on the events that transpire during a few days in the life of the Younger family, a family headed by Lena Younger, the mother; the other family members are her daughter, Beneatha, her son, Walter Lee, and his wife, Ruth, and son, Travis. The play focuses on the problem of what the family should do with ten thousand dollars that Lena receives as an insurance payment after the death of her hus-

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band, Walter Lee, Sr. The money seems a blessing at first, but the family is torn, disagreeing on how the money should be spent. The play’s title is taken from Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem” and calls attention to the dreams of the various characters, and the effects of having those dreams deferred. The set itself, fully realistic, emphasizes this theme from the first moment of the play. The furniture, once chosen with care, has been well cared for, yet it is drab, undistinguished, worn out from long years of service. The late Walter Lee, Sr., was a man of dreams, but he could never catch up with them, and he died, exhausted and wasted, worn out like the furniture, at an early age. His family is threatened with the same fate, but his insurance money holds out hope for the fulfillment of dreams. Lena and Walter Lee, however, disagree about what to do with the money. Walter Lee hates his job as a chauffeur and plans to become his own man by opening a liquor store with some friends, but Lena instead makes a down payment on a house with one-third of the money, and plans to use another third to finance Beneatha’s medical studies. After the two argue, Lena realizes that she has not permitted her son to be a man and has stifled him, just as the rest of the world has. In order to make up for the past, she entrusts him with the remaining two-thirds of the money, directing him to take Beneatha’s portion and put it into a savings account for her, using the final third as he sees fit. Walter Lee, however, invests all the money in a foolhardy scheme and discovers shortly thereafter that one of his partners has bilked him of the money. The house that Lena has purchased is in a white neighborhood, and a Mr. Lindner has approached the Youngers, offering to buy back the house—at a profit to the Youngers—because the members of the community do not want blacks living there. Walter Lee at first scornfully refuses Lindner’s offer, but once he has lost all the money he is desperate to recoup his losses and calls Lindner, willing to sell the house. The family is horrified at how low Walter has sunk, but when Beneatha rejects him, claiming there is “nothing left to love” in him, Lena reminds her that “There is always something to love. And if you ain’t learned that, you ain’t learned nothing.” Lena asks Beneatha, “You give him up for me? You wrote his epitaph too—like the rest of the world? Well, who give you the privilege?” The epitaph is indeed premature, for when Lindner arrives and Walter is forced to speak in his son’s presence, Walter gains heroic stature by rejecting the offer, telling Lindner in simple, direct terms that they will move into their house because his father “earned it.” It is a moment during which Walter comes into manhood, and if it has taken him a long while to do so, the moment is all the richer in heroism. The theme of heroism found in an unlikely place is perhaps best conveyed through the symbol of Lena’s plant. Throughout the play, Lena has tended a small, sickly plant that clings tenaciously to life despite the lack of sunlight in the apartment. Its environment is harsh, unfavorable, yet it clings to life anyway—somewhat like Walter, whose life should long ago have extinguished any trace of heroism in him. Hansberry gives her audience a message of hope. Hansberry also reminds her audience of the common needs and aspirations of all humanity, and she does so without oversimplification. None of the characters in the play is a simple type, not even Lindner, who might easily have been presented as an incarnation of evil. Instead, Lindner is conveyed as a human being. When asked why she portrayed Lindner in this manner, Hansberry replied “I have treated Mr. Lindner as a human being merely because he is one; that does not make the meaning of his call less malignant, less sick.” Here is where Hansberry calls her audience to action. She re-

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minds the audience of what it is to be human and enjoins them to respect the dignity of all their fellows. An interesting subtheme in the play, one that would be developed far more fully later in Les Blancs, is introduced by Joseph Asagai, an African student with a romantic interest in Beneatha. Some of the most moving speeches in the play belong to Asagai, and when Beneatha temporarily loses hope after Walter has lost all the money, Asagai reminds her of her ideals and the need to keep working toward improvement in the future. When Beneatha asks where it will all end, Asagai rejects the question, asking, “End? Who even spoke of an end? To life? To living?” Beneatha does not fully understand Asagai’s argument at the time, but its meaning must be clear enough to the audience, who will see at the end of the play that Walter’s victory is not an end, but rather one small, glorious advance. There will be other trials, other problems to overcome, but, as Asagai says, any other problem “will be the problem of another time.” The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window • Hansberry’s second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, never matched the success of her first, but it, too, uses a realistic format and was drawn from her own life. Instead of South Side Chicago, it is set in Greenwich Village, Hansberry’s home during the early years of her marriage with Robert Nemiroff, and the central character is one who must have resembled many of Hansberry’s friends. He is Sidney Brustein, a lapsed liberal, an intellectual, a former insurgent who has lost faith in his ability to bring about constructive change. As the play opens, Sidney moves from one project, a nightclub that failed, to another, the publication of a local newspaper, which Sidney insists will be apolitical. His motto at the opening of the play is “Presume no commitment, disavow all engagement, mock all great expectations. And above all else, avoid the impulse to correct.” Sidney’s past efforts have failed, and his lost faith is much the same as Beneatha’s in A Raisin in the Sun. The surrounding environment goes a long way toward explaining Sidney’s cynicism. His wife, Iris, has been in psychoanalysis for two years, and her troubled soul threatens their marriage. Iris’s older sister, Mavis, is anti-Semitic, and her other sister, Gloria, is a high-class call girl who masquerades as a model. Sidney’s upstairs neighbor, David Ragin, is a homosexual playwright whose plays invariably assert “the isolation of the soul of man, the alienation of the human spirit, the desolation of all love, all possible communication.” Organized crime controls politics in the neighborhood, and drug addiction is rampant; one of Sidney’s employees at the defunct nightclub, Sal Peretti, died of addiction at the age of seventeen, despite Sidney’s efforts to help him. Faced with these grim realities, Sidney longs to live in a high, wooded land, far from civilization, in a simpler, easier world. The resultant atmosphere is one of disillusionment as characters lash out in anger while trying to protect themselves from pain. One of the targets of the intellectual barbs of the group is Mavis, an average, settled housewife who fusses over Iris and pretends to no intellectual stature. When the wit gets too pointed, though, Mavis cuts through the verbiage with a telling remark: “I was taught to believe that creativity and great intelligence ought to make one expansive and understanding. That if ordinary people . . . could not expect understanding from artists . . . then where indeed might we look for it at all.” Only Sidney is moved by this remark; he is unable to maintain the pretense of cynicism, admitting, “I care. I care about it all. It takes too much energy not to care.” Thus, Sidney lets himself be drawn into another cause, the election of Wally O’Hara to public office as an independent, someone who will oppose the drug culture and gangster rule of the neighborhood.

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As Sidney throws himself into this new cause, he uses his newspaper to further the campaign, and even puts a sign, “Vote for Wally O’Hara,” in his window. Idealism seems to have won out, and indeed Wally wins the election, but Sidney is put to a severe test as Iris seems about to leave him, and it is discovered that Wally is on the payroll of the gangsters. Added to all this is Gloria’s suicide in Sidney’s bathroom. Her death brings Sidney to a moment of crisis, and when Wally O’Hara comes into the room to offer condolences and to warn against any hasty actions, Sidney achieves a clarity of vision that reveals his heroism. Sidney says, This world—this swirling, seething madness—which you ask us to accept, to maintain—has done this . . . maimed my friends . . . emptied these rooms and my very bed. And now it has taken my sister. This world. Therefore, to live, to breathe—I shall have to fight it. When Wally accuses Sidney of being a fool, he agrees: A fool who believes that death is waste and love is sweet and that the earth turns and that men change every day . . . and that people wanna be better than they are . . . and that I hurt terribly today, and that hurt is desperation and desperation is energy and energy can move things. In this moment, Sidney learns true commitment and his responsibility to make the world what it ought to be. The play closes with Iris and Sidney holding each other on the couch, Iris crying in pain, with Sidney enjoining her: “Yes . . . weep now, darling, weep. Let us both weep. That is the first thing: to let ourselves feel again . . . then, tomorrow, we shall make something strong of this sorrow.” As the curtain closes, the audience can scarcely fail to apply these closing words to themselves. Only if they permit themselves to feel the pain, Hansberry claims, will it be possible to do anything to ease that pain in the future. James Baldwin, referring to the play, said, “it is about nothing less than our responsibility to ourselves and to others,” a consistent theme in Hansberry’s drama. Again and again, she reminds the audience of their responsibility to act in behalf of a better future, and the basis for this message is her affirmative vision. Robert Nemiroff says that she found reason to hope “in the most unlikely place of all: the lives most of us lead today. Precisely, in short, where we cannot find it. It was the mark of her respect for us all.” Les Blancs • Hansberry’s last play of significance, Les Blancs, was not in finished form when she died and did not open onstage until November 15, 1970, at the Longacre Theatre, years after her death. Nemiroff completed and edited the text, though it is to a very large degree Hansberry’s play. It was her least successful play, running for only forty-seven performances, but it did spark considerable controversy, garnering both extravagant praise and passionate denunciation. Some attacked the play as advocating racial warfare, while others claimed it was the best play of the year, incisive and compassionate. The play is set not in a locale drawn from Hansberry’s own experience but in a place that long held her interest: Africa. Les Blancs is Hansberry’s most complex and difficult play. It takes as its subject white colonialism and various possible responses to it. At the center of the play are the members of the Matoseh family: Abioseh Senior, the father, who is not actually part of the play, having died before it opens, but who is important in that his whole life defined the various responses possible (acceptance, attempts at lawful change, rebellion); in addition, there are his sons, Abioseh, Eric, and, most important, Tshembe. Hans-

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berry attempts to shed some light on the movement for African independence by showing the relationships of the Matosehs to the whites living in Africa. The whites of importance are Major Rice, the military commander of the colony; Charlie Morris, a reporter; Madame Neilsen, and her husband, Dr. Neilsen, a character never appearing onstage but one responsible for the presence of all the others. Dr. Neilsen has for many years run a makeshift hospital in the jungle; he is cut in the mold of Albert Schweitzer, for he has dedicated his life to tending the medical ills of the natives. It is because of him that all the other doctors are there and because of him, too, that Charlie Morris is in Africa, for Charlie has come to write a story about the famous doctor. Whereas Charlie comes to Africa for the first time, Tshembe and Abioseh are called back to Africa by the death of their father. Abioseh comes back a Roman Catholic priest, having renounced his African heritage and embraced the culture and beliefs of the colonialists. Tshembe, too, has taken much from the colonial culture, including his education and a European bride. He has not, however, rejected his heritage, and he is sensitive to the injustice of the colonial system. Though he sees colonialism as evil, he does not want to commit himself to opposing it. He wants to return to his wife and child and lead a comfortable, secure life. For both Charlie and Tshembe, the visit to Africa brings the unexpected, for they return in the midst of an uprising, called “terror” by the whites and “resistance” by the blacks. Charlie gradually learns the true nature of colonialism, and Tshembe, after great struggle, learns that he cannot avoid his obligation to oppose colonialism actively. While Charlie waits for Dr. Neilsen to return from another village, he learns from Madame Neilsen that the doctor’s efforts seem to be less and less appreciated. When Tshembe comes on the scene, Charlie is immediately interested in him and repeatedly tries to engage the former student of Madame Neilsen and the doctor in conversation, but they fail to understand each other. Tshembe will accept none of the assumptions that Charlie has brought with him to Africa: He rejects the efforts of Dr. Neilsen, however well-intentioned, as representing the guilty conscience of colonialism while perpetrating the system. He also rejects Charlie’s confident assumption that the facilities are so backward because of the superstitions of the natives. Charlie, on the other hand, cannot understand how Tshembe can speak so bitterly against colonialism yet not do anything to oppose it. Tshembe explains that he is one of those “who see too much to take sides,” but his position becomes increasingly untenable. He is approached by members of the resistance and is asked to lead them, at which point he learns that it was his father who conceived the movement when it became clear that the colonialists, including Dr. Neilsen, saw themselves in the position of father rather than brother to the natives and would never give them freedom. Still, Tshembe resists the commitment, but Charlie, as he leaves the scene, convinced now that the resistance is necessary, asks Tshembe, “Where are you running, man? Back to Europe? To watch the action on your telly?” Charlie reminds Tshembe that “we do what we can.” Madame Neilsen herself makes Tshembe face the needs of his people. Tshembe by this time knows what his choice must be, but he is unable to make it. In his despair, he turns to Madame Neilsen, imploring her help. She tells him, “You have forgotten your geometry if you are despairing, Tshembe. I once taught you that a line goes into infinity unless it is bisected. Our country needs warriors, Tshembe Matoseh.” In the final scene of the play, Tshembe takes up arms against the colonialists, and Hansberry makes his decision all the more dramatic by having him kill his brother

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Abioseh, who has taken the colonial side. Yet, lest anyone misunderstand the agony of his choice, Hansberry ends the play with Tshembe on his knees before the bodies of those he has loved, committed but in agony, deeply engulfed by grief that such commitment is necessary. Les Blancs is less an answer to the problem of colonialism than it is another expression of Hansberry’s deep and abiding belief in the need for individual commitment, and in the ability of the individual, once committed, to bring about positive change for the future, even if that requires suffering in the present. Surely her commitment to her writing will guarantee her work an audience far into the future. Other major works nonfiction: The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality, 1964 (includes photographs); To Be Young, Gifted, and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words, 1969 (Robert Nemiroff, editor). Bibliography Carter, Steven R. Hansberry’s Drama: Commitment amid Complexity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. An examination of Hansberry’s plays from the political standpoint. Bibliography and index. Cheney, Anne. Lorraine Hansberry. New York: Twayne, 1994. A basic biography of Hansberry that examines her life and works. Bibliography and index. Domina, Lynn. Understanding “A Raisin in the Sun”: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. A study that places Hansberry’s works and life in context and examines her portrayal of African Americans in literature. Bibliography and index. Effiong, Philip U. In Search of a Model for African American Drama: A Study of Selected Plays by Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, and Ntozake Shange. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2000. A study of the plays of three prominent African Americans, including Hansberry. Bibliography and index. Kappel, Lawrence, ed. Readings on “A Raisin in the Sun.” San Diego, Calif.: Greenhaven Press, 2001. A collection of essays that deal with aspects of Hansberry’s most famous work. Bibliography and index. Keppel, Ben. The Work of Democracy: Ralph Bunche, Kenneth B. Clark, Lorraine Hansberry, and the Cultural Politics of Race. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. Keppel examines race relations and the Civil Rights movement, including a discussion of Hansberry’s role in the movement. Bibliography and index. Leeson, Richard M. Lorraine Hansberry: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. This sourcebook focuses on Hansberry as a dramatist, examining her portrayal of African Americans in literature. Bibliography and index. Scheader, Catherine. Lorraine Hansberry: A Playwright and Voice of Justice. Springfield, N.J.: Enslow, 1998. A biography that examines Hansberry’s dual roles as civil rights advocate and dramatist. Bibliography and index. Hugh Short updated by Katherine Lederer

Václav Havel Václav Havel

Born: Prague, Czechoslovakia; October 5, 1936 Principal drama • Autostop, pr., pb. 1961 (with Ivan Vysko5il); Zahradni slavnost, pr., pb. 1963 (The Garden Party, 1969); Vyrozum0ní, pr. 1965, pb. 1966 (The Memorandum, 1967); Ztímená momnost soustr0d0ní, pr., pb. 1968 (The Increased Difficulty of Concentration, 1969); Spiklenci, pr. 1974, pb. 1977; Mebrácká opera, pr. 1975, pb. 1977 (adaptation of John Gay’s comic opera; The Beggar’s Opera, 1976); Audience, pr. 1976, pb. 1977 (English translation, 1976); Horský hotel, pb. 1976, pr. 1981; Vernisám, pr. 1976, pb. 1977 (Private View, 1978; also as Unveiling); Protest, pr. 1978 (English translation, 1980); Largo desolato, pb. 1985 (English translation, 1987); Pokoukení, pb. 1986 (Temptation, 1988); Asanace, pb. 1987, pr. 1989 (Redevelopment: Or, Slum Clearance, 1990); Selected Plays, 1963-1983, pb. 1992; The Garden Party and Other Plays, pb. 1993; Selected Plays, 1984-1987, pb. 1994 Other literary forms • Known primarily as a playwright, Václav Havel has also written criticism and poetry, plays for radio and television, and essays. Some of his poems (Antikódy, 1966) and essays, as well as his first two plays, were published as Protokoly (1966). His radio play And0l Strámny was broadcast in 1968, and his television play Motýl na antén0 appeared in West Germany in 1975. Perhaps Havel’s most important essay is “Moc bezmocnych” (1978; “The Power of the Powerless,” 1983). By far Havel’s most significant nondramatic work, however, is Dopisy Olze, 1979-1982 (1985; Letters to Olga, 1988), which was first published in a somewhat different version in German translation, in 1984, as Briefe an Olga: Identität und Existenz—Betrachtungen aus dem Gefängnis. (The Czech version was issued in Canada by an émigré publisher.) The title of this remarkable book is misleading: Written in prison, these are not personal letters but rather wide-ranging reflections, tracing the author’s intellectual and spiritual experience but anchored in harsh realities. Another noteworthy nondramatic work is Dalkovy vyslech (1986; Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvím7ala and Václav Havel, 1990). Hvíz7ala, a noted Czech journalist in exile, wanted to interview Havel on his thoughts at turning fifty, but the politics of the time made it impossible to meet face to face. To work around this, Hvíz7ala sent written questions for reply. Havel’s first attempt, answering in writing, came out too stiff and essaylike. Hvíz7ala was looking for a more conversational approach, so Havel turned to a tape recorder to capture oral responses, which Hvíz7ala subsequently transcribed. Achievements • Václav Havel is the most important Czech playwright of the second half of the twentieth century, acclaimed both in his native land and abroad. His early plays, which established his international reputation, are, as he has modestly said, “plays about bureaucrats.” They are, however, much more than that: They are about the mechanism of power, about the dehumanization built into the very institutions that are supposed to serve humanity, about the prison built by the desiccated language of bureaucracy. The fact that he is enthusiastically received in the West suggests that bureaucracy has a momentum of its own and may well be yet another Frankenstein-like offshoot of modernity, whatever its ideological underpinnings may be. 440

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That his plays were allowed to be staged at all is attributable to the relative liberalization or demoralization of the communist control of the arts in Czechoslovakia during the 1960’s. Neither the import nor the relevance of Havel’s work diminished in the harsher climate of the 1970’s and 1980’s. As Markéta Goetz-Stankiewicz, the leading Western critic of the Czech theater, has suggested, not all Havel’s work has received its due in a world that would benefit from his insight into the roots of the continuing crisis of modernity. His plays offer the sad wisdom of an art born of suffering, tempered by the ironic self-awareness and black humor that he has identified as essential to the “Central European climate.” Havel was honored in 1969 with the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. Twice, in 1968 and 1970, he received the Obie Award. However, Havel’s crowning achievement in the post-Soviet era has been in the field of politics. Shortly after the nearly bloodless collapse of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, he became the nation’s first democratically elected president. After the peaceable dissolution of the nation into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the Czechs elected him their president. His political work has earned for him numerous political awards, including the Averell Harriman Democracy Award, the Raoul Wallenberg Human Rights Award, and the Statesman of the Year Award. He has received honorary degrees from numerous colleges and universities, including an honorary degree of doctor of philosophy from York University, Toronto, Canada, in 1982. Biography • Václav Havel was born October 5, 1936, the son of a wealthy restaurateur and entrepreneur, Václav M. Havel, himself the author of a voluminous autobiography. Some of Prague’s architectural landmarks were built by Havel’s father, and an uncle was the owner of Barrandov Studios, the center of Czech filmmaking. Such illustrious connections, decidedly nonproletarian, were held against the young Havel in communist Czechoslovakia, making him ineligible for any higher formal education well into the 1960’s. On the other hand, as he was to note later, this very handicap forced him to view the world “from below,” as an outsider—a boon to any artist. After finishing laboratory assistant training, Havel began working in a chemical laboratory, attending high school at night; he was graduated in 1954. Between 1955 and 1957, Havel attended courses at the Faculty of Economy of the Prague Technical College. This was followed by military service and, finally, his work in the theater in Prague: first at the Theater Na Zábradlí and, from 1960, at the Balustrade. His knowledge of the theater is truly intimate: He entered it as a stagehand, gradually moving to lighting, then to an assistant directorship, and finally becoming the dramaturg—that is, the literary manager—of the theater at the Balustrade. When, in the changed atmosphere of political liberalization, he was allowed to study dramaturgy, he took advantage of the opportunity, although he was already a full-fledged playwright and a literary manager, graduating in 1967. Between 1967 and 1969, Havel became active as the chairman of the Circle of Independent Writers. This, as well as his work at the Balustrade, was prohibited by the authorities in 1969, when his plays were banned and his publications withdrawn from libraries. Officially, he ceased to exist as a Czech playwright. During the first half of the 1970’s Havel worked as a laborer in a brewery. In January, 1977, he reappeared in the public eye as one of the signatories and chief spokespeople of Charter 77, the courageous manifesto of the human rights movement in Czechoslovakia. As a result, he was imprisoned between January and May, 1977. In the same year, he wrote an open letter to Gustav Husák, the president of Czechoslovakia, and was arrested

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(Miloš Fikejz)

in January, 1978. Finally, after yet another arrest, in May, 1979, he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. He was released in 1983, in poor health. After his release, Havel was subject to intense police surveillance, but he managed to continue meeting with other dissidents and discussing politics. In 1989, he was arrested once again for political activity and was briefly imprisoned. However, on November 17 of that year, events transpired to thrust Havel into the forefront of politics. This was the sudden collapse of communist power in Czechoslovakia, known as the Velvet Revolution (a name derived from the 1960’s alternative band The Velvet Underground, but also suggesting softness and civility, as opposed to the coarse brutality of most revolutions). In ten days marked by an astonishing absence of violence, the communist government gave way to a new democratically elected government, and Havel was elected its first president. Over the next several years, Havel presided over the successful privatization of the Czechoslovakian economy, as well as the “Velvet Divorce” in which the Czech Republic and Slovakia peaceably parted ways to become independent countries, resolving their differences through legal negotiation instead of bloodshed. Unlike other notable dissidents to become their nations’ first post-communist leaders, such as Lech Wauesa of Poland or Zviad Gamsakhurdia of the Republic of Georgia, Havel had long-term staying power. He was president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 to 1992 and then was president of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003. Havel’s personal life was turbulent throughout the 1990’s. He had recurring medical problems, at least partly the result of damage to his health during his years in prison, although his bout with lung cancer was attributed to his heavy smoking. After the loss of his wife, Olga, to cancer, he married a movie actress, Dagmar Veškrnová, a move that opened him to heavy criticism from his opponents. Analysis • Václav Havel’s plays appear in hindsight as crystallizations of the ambiguous time of relative liberalization in a monolithic totalitarian society. This may perhaps

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also be the reason for their success in the West: Czechoslovakia then, and the West both then and now, seem to share the mood of relativism, uncertainty, and ambiguity characteristic of any transitional period. Although it is a matter of speculation whether Western society is actually evolving toward full-scale socialism, Czechoslovakia at the time of Havel’s greatest successes (between 1963 and 1968) was without any doubt moving toward a less pervasive socialism, at least as it is defined there. The monolith was cracked; the totalitarian machinery was breaking down, though still operating by fits and starts. This created a peculiar atmosphere, exploited by Havel to great effect: What was formerly unquestionably true and clear was suddenly being questioned. The leaders themselves encouraged such questioning by admitting past mistakes that included staged trials and real executions. The followers, on the other hand, could no longer be sure that the present party line would not change shortly and were thus inhibited from acting aggressively on the party’s behalf. There were indeed further changes and new revelations of misdeeds. Thus, the political situation acted as a destabilizing force, motivating people to question not only it but also everything else. This was an intense time of debate, of discoveries—and of defeats as well. The Garden Party • Some of the questions Havel asked in The Garden Party could be formulated thus: Is it possible to adjust to the constantly changing policy emanating from above? If so, after all the maneuvering, is the human being still the same as before he started on the tortuous path of adjustment? The Pludek family, middle-class, solid, and old-fashioned, fears that Hugo, their son, will not be able to make a successful career for himself in the confusing contemporary world with its contradictory signals. The Pludeks, survivors of a bygone era, manage to get by relying on routine, fortified by clichés that they keep repeating, as if trying to anchor themselves in a reality that keeps dissolving around them. In Havel’s dialogue, the meaning is hilariously stripped from these clichés and proverbs by deft substitutions, so that while they still resemble proverbial sayings (for such is the form and context in which they are found), their content has been decanted from them, leaving behind an exotic sediment at once both grotesque and absurd. The result is not only absurd but also humorous and vitally meaningful on a higher level: It is immaterial whether the Pludeks’ proverbs make sense because even perfect proverbs are irrelevant in the unstable world in which they live. Hugo surprises his parents when, during and after a garden party, he penetrates an institution, learns its peculiar bureaucratic language, and turns this newly acquired knowledge against the institution and its representatives. His success is unexpected and phenomenal, but so is the price that he has to pay: He becomes a convert to the absurd and thoroughly relativist jargon of the institution, a jargon designed to hide the meaning of one’s ideas, for one’s commitment cannot be questioned if it is not clear what exactly one stands for. Thus, Hugo becomes an expert Inaugurator and Liquidator at the same time. When liquidation is in, he liquidates, but quickly, on noticing the slightest shift of policy, he begins to inaugurate, and so on. Thus, although Hugo is successful, he is no longer the same Hugo—indeed, his parents at first do not even recognize him. The parents themselves, however, are not immune to the contagion of the debased language, and, after a long harangue by Hugo, they accept him. It is not necessary to point to the political allusions, because the play of necessity operates on a level of abstraction that universalizes the plight of Hugo and his parents. This quality shows Havel a worthy follower of the great masters of the Theater of the

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Absurd, Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco, whom Havel helped to stage at the Balustrade. The Memorandum • The Memorandum is, if anything, a further and quite logical extension of Havel’s concern for the debasement of language. Here he expresses this concern through the brilliant satiric device of an artificial language, Ptydepe, which the bureaucracy decides to employ for all communications. The introduction of the new language strikes terror, not unlike an unexpected change of political line. The question Havel asks is: What happens to an otherwise loyal bureaucrat who knows nothing about the impending introduction of Ptydepe? Can he adjust? Finally, as in the previous play: What is the price of such an adjustment? Thus, some of the concerns with which Havel dealt in The Garden Party reappear but in high relief because of the striking effect of the artificial language with its unearthly and perverse sounds, designed to be impossible to learn, and even if learned, impossible to use. Here science makes its entrance, for Ptydepe is a scientifically designed, perfectly rational language. This beautifully implies the “scientifically” designed society of socialism, in which—so the State claims—all the imperfections are caused by the survival of “prescientific” attitudes. Alas, the converts to the scientific and unnatural Ptydepe are not immune to sudden political change, and no sooner do they “learn” Ptydepe, than another language appears, called Chorukor, based on a diametrically opposed premise: While Ptydepe is based on the principle of maximum differentiation among words, with words increasing in length as their frequency decreases (the word for wombat, for example, is more than three hundred letters long), Chorukor is based on the notion that words with related meanings should sound the same as well, with only slight variations to distinguish them from one another. The protagonist of The Memorandum, Josef Gross, is a humanist battling the opportunist responsible for the introduction of Ptydepe. When Gross’s chance to put his humanistic ideals to the test comes, however, he fails, having already accepted Balass, the careerist, and Ptydepe. When Maria, a girl in whom Gross is genuinely interested, is fired by Balass, Gross does not act, for this would mean countermanding Balass’s instructions and making himself vulnerable. Gross’s breakdown is a tragedy that contrasts with the prodigious ability to adjust found in a man such as Balass—a type that seems to predominate in bureaucracies. It is perhaps on this level, that of the depiction of “organization man,” that the play is of most interest to audiences in the West. The Increased Difficulty of Concentration • After the success of these early plays, Havel made a departure of sorts with The Increased Difficulty of Concentration. Gone is the focus on bureaucracy and office intrigue but not Havel’s preoccupation with language. Can language survive ethical relativism? Is it possible to have more than one personality: professional and private, with the latter subdivided further into husband and lover? The protagonist, Dr. Huml, is a social scientist, a victim of the routine forced on him by circumstance and by his own choices. His behavior, robotlike and lacking in human feeling, is echoed by his tautological writings. It is very fitting that Dr. Huml, an intellectual, a member of the elite, becomes by the end of the play an unwitting collaborator in the dehumanizing policies to which he ostensibly objects. His writings and indeed his very life have had an alienating, dehumanizing effect, and it is only just that he in turn should become a guinea pig for others.

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The experimental plays • Havel’s Spiklenci (the conspirators), The Beggar’s Opera, and Horský hotel (mountain resort) are of uneven quality because of their experimental nature and have thus been accorded less attention than his earlier plays. To be fair, one has to stress that two vital elements of the theater, the staging and the reaction of the audience, were no longer available to him, with the exception of The Beggar’s Opera. Havel himself is not quite sure about Spiklenci, in which he deals with multiple conspiracies, moving from office intrigue to the shadowy world of revolutionary dictators, generals, and prisoners. This is a somber and unreliable world in which loyalty changes as unpredictably as the party line (or official language) did before. Havel is making a point here about the importance of the individual in history. The events of conventional history—the demonstrations, government policies, and so on—are alluded to but always remain incidental and unimportant. The real history is conspiratorial. The implications are astounding: The role of the masses is that of extras; the revolution itself is a deal struck among a gang of power-hungry little people with few, if any, redeeming features. Most ominously, the system of conspiracy neutralizes the good man and gives an unfair advantage to the ambitious clod, the darling of absolute power. The Beggar’s Opera, yet another version of John Gay’s masterpiece The Beggar’s Opera (pr., pb. 1728), suggests that competing establishments, competing centers of power, are essentially the same beneath their surface enmity, as are their victims: the weak, the innocent, the defenseless. The play deserves to be staged, but perhaps Bertolt Brecht’s treatment in the 1920’s casts such a spell that few dare to stage Havel’s version, whatever its merit. Horský hotel is another matter. Here the problem lies in an experiment that involves, as before, the use of repetition, nonsense, and dislocation based on interchangeability of characters and consequent lack of plot, development, and structure. The play is difficult to read, but may be salvaged, as Markéta Goetz-Stankiewicz suggested, as a film script. The autobiographical plays • Havel returned to the stage—in the West, if not in his own country—with three one-act plays: Audience, Private View, and Protest. The plays met with great acclaim in the New York production in 1983 and were well received in Europe, Canada, and Australia as well. The popularity of these linked autobiographical plays, which differ considerably from Havel’s early work, is particularly interesting given their genesis: They were originally conceived and performed as private entertainments for Havel’s friends in Prague. All three plays deal with the problems of a playwright, Van0k, who like Havel is not allowed to publish in his country. In Audience, a brewery foreman asks the laborer-playwright Van0k to inform on himself, since the boss is tired of writing police reports about him. In Private View, several friends attempt to bribe Van0k to give up and make his peace with the regime because surrender pays so well. In Protest, Van0k is called by an old acquaintance who has since accommodated the authorities but who now has a favor to ask. Ultimately, Van0k refuses to accept the byzantine rationalizations by which men and women excuse their failure to take a stand. Hugo, Gross, Huml, and Van0k’s tempters have lost or are about to lose something precious. Havel never spells out exactly what it is they are in the process of losing. He only tells the reader how that loss occurs. That seems sufficient in a world little aware of the existence of values that are precious enough to be preserved at any price. Havel’s oblique reminder of their existence is a minor triumph in a major struggle in which he has acquitted himself as a master of his art and a hero of his nation.

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Temptation • Following his 1978-1983 period of imprisonment, Havel wrote a new play, drawing on the story of Dr. Faustus. Temptation tells the story of Dr. Henry Foustka, a scientist in a research institute, who is involved in various experiments of an ethically questionable nature. He also habitually treats his staff in a dehumanizing fashion and makes a great show of the idea that they are producing and protecting the Truth, even as all of them are constantly involved in idle chatter. The devil is represented by one Fistula, an informer, who seeks to draw Dr. Foustka into his circle by mentoring Foustka in his investigation of black magic. The main action of the play deals with how Foustka struggles to cling to his respectability after his temptation, until he finally realizes that he is ruined and will be punished. Foustka claims that his dabbling in sorcery was solely to discredit it as unscientific. Fistula turns out to be a double agent, and the devil is the pride of the system that uses science for its own ends, a criticism of Soviet-supported and controlled communism. However, the ending of the play is left ambiguous, and the audience is never told precisely what manner of punishment will befall Foustka, since his final immolation onstage is a highly symbolic scene, not to be taken literally. In leaving Foustka’s precise fate unspecified, Havel gives the play its greatest strength because he leaves it up to the reader put the pieces together and realize that while the individual parts may be true, they add up to a lie. Even truth can become demoniac if it is instrumentalized and robbed of its own life. Other major works poetry: Antikódy, 1966. teleplay: Motýl na antén0, 1975. radio play: And0l Strázný, 1968. nonfiction: Dopisy Olze, 1979-1982, 1985 (Letters to Olga, 1988); Dalkovy vyslech, 1986 (Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvm7ala and Václav Havel, 1990); Letni premitani, 1991 (Summer Meditations, 1992); Open Letters: Selected Prose, 1965-1990, 1991 (Paul Wilson, editor); Toward a Civil Society: Selected Speeches and Writings, 19901994, 1994 (Wilson, editor); The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice, 1997. miscellaneous: Protokoly, 1966; O lidskou identitu, 1984. Bibliography Goetz-Stankiewicz, Marketa. The Silenced Theatre: Czech Playwrights Without a Stage. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979. Examination of the situation of numerous dissident playwrights under the communist regime, including Havel. Keane, John. Václav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Although this biography focuses primarily on Havel’s political activities, it includes extensive information on Havel’s plays and how they reflect the development of his political concepts. Kriseova, Eda. Václav Havel: The Authorized Biography. Translated by Caleb Crain. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Officially authorized biography, using sources provided by Havel that may not be available to other biographers but may be slanted to soft pedal awkward or uncomfortable aspects of his career. Symynkywicz, Jeffrey. Václav Havel and the Velvet Revolution. Parsippany, N.J.: Dillon Press, 1995. Although dealing primarily with Havel’s role in the Velvet Revolution, also looks at the role of his plays in forming his reputation. Peter Petro, updated by Leigh Husband Kimmel

Lillian Hellman Lillian Hellman

Born: New Orleans, Louisiana; June 20, 1905 Died: Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts; June 30, 1984 Principal drama • The Children’s Hour, pr., pb. 1934; Days to Come, pr., pb. 1936; The Little Foxes, pr., pb. 1939; Watch on the Rhine, pr., pb. 1941; The Searching Wind, pr., pb. 1944; Another Part of the Forest, pr. 1946, pb. 1947; Montserrat, pr. 1949, pb. 1950 (adaptation of Emmanuel Robles’s play); The Autumn Garden, pr., pb. 1951; The Lark, pr. 1955, pb. 1956 (adaptation of Jean Anouilh’s play L’Alouette); Candide, pr. 1956, pb. 1957 (libretto; music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Richard Wilbur, John Latouche, and Dorothy Parker; adaptation of Voltaire’s novel); Toys in the Attic, pr., pb. 1960; My Mother, My Father, and Me, pr., pb. 1963 (adaptation of Burt Blechman’s novel How Much? ); The Collected Plays, pb. 1972 Other literary forms • In addition to her original stage plays, Lillian Hellman published original screenplays, a collection of the letters of Anton Chekhov, her adaptations of two French plays (Montserrat, L’Alouette) and of an American novel (How Much? ), an operetta adapted from Voltaire’s Candide: Ou, L’Optimisme (1759; Candide: Or, All for the Best, 1759; also as Candide: Or, The Optimist, 1762; also as Candide: Or, Optimism, 1947), many uncollected articles, and several volumes of memoirs, the first two of which have received as much acclaim as her best plays. Achievements • Lillian Hellman was the most important American follower of Henrik Ibsen after Arthur Miller. Like Ibsen in his middle period, she wrote strong, wellmade plays involving significant social issues. Like Ibsen, she created memorable female characters, some strong, some weak. Her most important female character, Regina Giddens of The Little Foxes and Another Part of the Forest, seems at least partially modeled on Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. Both Hellman and Ibsen were exceptional in depicting believable, memorable children. Like him, though more frequently, she used blackmail as a dramatic ploy. Her plays, like Ibsen’s, can be strongly and tightly dramatic, and, like his, some, notably The Little Foxes, have a question ending: That is, one in which the eventual outcome for the major characters is left ironically uncertain. Her last two original plays, however, recall Chekhov more than Ibsen in their depiction of feckless characters and, in one of the two, an apparent, though only apparent, plotlessness. She has been blamed for her employment of melodramatic plot elements, but her use of them is often valid and essential and does not interfere with accurate character analysis, convincing dramatic dialogue, and adroit handling of social issues. Hellman was, after Tennessee Williams, the most important dramatist writing primarily about the American South. Two of her plays, Watch on the Rhine and Toys in the Attic, won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Hellman received many other awards, including the Brandeis University Creative Arts Medal and the National Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal. Biography • Lillian Florence Hellman was born in New Orleans of Jewish parents. Her father was also born in New Orleans, and her mother in Alabama, of a family long estab447

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lished there. Part of her mother’s family moved to New York, and when Hellman was five years old, her parents moved there and commenced a routine of spending six months of each year in New York and six in New Orleans with her father’s two unmarried sisters. As her memoirs make clear, Hellman’s plays are strongly influenced by her urban southern background. Her mother’s family was a source for the Hubbards in The Little Foxes and Another Part of the Forest; her paternal aunts, for the sisters in Toys in the Attic. All Hellman’s original plays except the first two (The Children’s Hour and Days to Come) are set in the South: in the Washington area, in Alabama towns, or in New Orleans. Hellman was graduated from high school in New York in 1922, attended New York University from 1922 to 1924, and briefly attended Columbia University in 1924, without completing a degree at either school. She worked for a time thereafter in New York and Hollywood in the areas of publishing, book reviewing, and reading manuscripts of plays and movie scenarios. In 1925, she married Arthur Kober; they were divorced in 1932. Two years later, her first play, The Children’s Hour, was a tremendous hit, achieving a longer original run (691 performances) than any of her later plays. From that success until her last play in 1963, she was primarily a playwright and occasionally a scriptwriter, though she was never really happy in the theater. Over the years, Hellman made various visits to Russia, to Civil War Spain, and elsewhere in Europe, including a very dangerous visit to Nazi Germany to take money to the underground at the request of a friend. For many years, she was the companion of the novelist Dashiell Hammett, though they lived together only sporadically. Congressional investigations of communism in the United States in the early 1950’s caused serious trouble for both her and Hammett, though she denied having sufficiently consistent or deep political convictions to belong to any party. As a result of the investigations, Hellman and Hammett were both blacklisted in Hollywood, and she lost the home she owned and shared with Hammett in upstate New York, as well as various friends. Hammett was imprisoned. Soon after his release, he became ill, and Hellman took care of him until his death in 1961. In her later years, Hellman devoted herself to her four books of memoirs and taught at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Berkeley. She died on June 30, 1984, at Martha’s Vineyard. Analysis • Beginning with her first play, The Children’s Hour, Lillian Hellman’s plays possessed certain dramatic characteristics: crisp, forceful, realistic dialogue; clear character construction and analysis; and a clear-cut plot line in the tradition of the wellmade play, with fast movement and adroitly handled suspense that kept (and can still keep) audiences enthralled. Most of her plays can be called melodramatic, because of the suspense, because of the use of violence and of blackmail, and because of obvious authorial manipulation to achieve a neat conclusion. The plays are never, however, pure melodrama because pure melodrama would not include valid, well-drawn characters or significant themes. The Children’s Hour • The Children’s Hour, like many of Hellman’s plays, concerns the destructive power of evil, its ability to erode human relationships and destroy lives. In this play, evil is manifested by a child’s malicious lie and its repercussions in the lives of two women. The play, which was based on an actual lawsuit, the Great Drumsheugh Case, opens on a class in progress at a girls’ boarding school in Massachusetts. The teacher, Lily Mortar, is the aunt of Martha Dobie, one of the two young women who own and operate the school.

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Presently, student Mary Tilford enters—very late for class— carrying a bunch of flowers with which she appeases the teacher. Then the other owner, Karen Wright, enters. Karen has lost her bracelet and asks one of the girls, Helen, if she has found it, an important issue in the play. Karen asks Mary where she got the flowers. Mary repeats her claim that she picked them. Karen, apparently recognizing them, says Mary got them out of the garbage pail and has been lying. Mary’s response is, and continues to be, that the teachers are against her, that they never believe her, and that she is telling the truth. Karen grounds her for two weeks. Mary says her heart hurts and pretends to fall into a faint. She is carried to her room. Martha enters, and she and (Library of Congress) Karen discuss Mary as a troublemaker, send for Karen’s fiancé ( Joe Cardin, who is a doctor and also Mary’s cousin), discuss getting rid of Mrs. Mortar, and discuss Karen’s plans to marry Joe as soon as school is out. Martha is clearly upset at the imminent marriage, although she likes Joe. She hates interference with a friendship that has gone on since college and hates the possibility that Karen might leave the school. Joe arrives and goes off to examine Mary. At this point in the play, the audience cannot be sure of the meaning of Martha’s jealousy, of whether Mary’s feelings are in any sense justified, of whether the events thus far are more taut with emotion than what might be expected on a day-by-day basis in a girls’ boarding school. Mrs. Mortar, deeply insulted at Martha’s desire to get her away from the school and at her offer to send her to London and support her there, indirectly accuses her niece of homosexual feelings toward Karen. Mary’s two roommates are caught eavesdropping. Joe has a friendly confrontation with Martha, who apologizes and falls into his arms, weeping. It is reasonably clear that she does not recognize her feelings for Karen as homosexual, if they are. Mary comes in, and it is clear that Joe considers her a troublemaker, as do the women. Then, as the adults leave and the audience sees Mary for the first time alone with other girls, her character becomes only too clear. Indeed, one becomes more and more convinced that Mary’s lies, her manipulation, her dictatorial attitude toward her schoolmates, and presently her outright blackmail of one of them and her cruelty to another represent more than mere naughtiness or adolescent confusion. Mary is psychotic, and dangerously so. Feeling no affection for anyone, she lives for manipulation and power. As soon as the teachers leave the room, she throws a cushion at the door and kicks a table. Apparently, her one genuine feeling

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other than hatred is the belief that the teachers hate her as much as she hates them. She tells her roommates that if she cannot go to the boat races (since she has been grounded), she will see to it that they do not go either. She forces a girl named Rosalie to do some work for her by hinting of knowledge that Rosalie stole the bracelet that Karen asked about earlier. She forces her roommates to report the conversation that they overheard, and while Mary certainly does not completely understand its import, she nevertheless recognizes it as a weapon she can use. She immediately announces that she is going to walk out and go home, and by physical force, she makes one of the girls give her the money to get there. On this moment of tension, typical of a well-made play, act 1 closes. The Children’s Hour is unusual among Hellman’s plays in that it does not all take place in one setting. Act 2 takes place in the living room of the home of Mary’s grandmother in Boston. As scene 1 of the act opens, Mary arrives and is admitted by the maid, Agatha, who clearly does not trust her for an instant. Left alone while Agatha goes to fetch Mrs. Tilford, Mary tries with the aid of a mirror to make herself look sick. Mrs. Tilford enters, and Mary dashes into her arms, in tears. It soon becomes clear that Mrs. Tilford is an intelligent woman but that, unlike Agatha, she can be taken in by her granddaughter. It is an irony of the play, however, that she cannot be taken in easily. Had Mary been able to deceive her by simple lies, there would have been no play. Her usual tricks—tears, stories of being mistreated— do not work. Mrs. Tilford has supported Martha and Karen in their establishment of the school, has encouraged her friends to send their daughters there, and certainly trusts the schoolmistresses. Mary, therefore, begins to use the story she has heard secondhand, mentioning it at first vaguely and uncertainly, but then, as she sees that it is having an effect, more positively and specifically. Mrs. Tilford is deeply disturbed and obviously finds it difficult to believe that such a story could be invented. She starts to phone Karen but decides against it. She calls Joe and urgently asks him to come over. She calls a friend, perhaps one with a daughter or granddaughter at the school, asking her to come over as well. Scene 2 opens with Agatha telling Mary that Rosalie is coming to spend the night; a few moments later, Rosalie arrives. The audience learns, partly now and fully later, that Mrs. Tilford has communicated with the parents of all the girls and told them Mary’s story, with the result that all the girls have been called home. Rosalie is spending the night with Mary because her mother is in New York. These circumstances represent significant flaws in the structure of The Children’s Hour, though they are not as noticeable in performance: First, it is difficult to believe that a woman of Mrs. Tilford’s maturity and intelligence would take such drastic action on the basis of her granddaughter’s word alone; second, it has to be Rosalie, among all the students, whose mother is out of town, or the play would simply grind to a halt. About the first, one might say in Hellman’s defense that it would be emotionally and even intellectually difficult for Mrs. Tilford to believe that her granddaughter would have either the desire or the knowledge to invent such a lie; that to seek external verification of the story would be, even if it were true, almost surely fruitless; and that, given the time and place, it would have been irresponsible of her not to inform the other parents. Problems remain, even so. Surely Mrs. Tilford could have spoken with Joe first. True, Hellman arranges that Joe arrives late, on the plausible ground that he had to stop at a hospital, but would one more night have mattered so much? Doubtless, Mrs. Tilford’s urgency is partly emotional, on the ground that most, if not all, of the girls have been at the school on her recommendation. This does not ex-

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plain, however, her calm assurance later in the play that the story is true. She takes the logical attitude that Martha’s, Karen’s, and Joe’s denials are meaningless, since they are to be expected regardless of whether the story is accurate. She is also a woman who, given her class, her money, and her intelligence, is not prone to being wrong. Perhaps one should regard her attitude as a typical Hellman irony: It is her very sense of responsibility that has made her act irresponsibly. Less defense can be offered for the presence of Rosalie. All one can say is that her presence is essential to the play, and that in a well-made play this represents perhaps the minimum of manipulation. The scene develops very dramatically. Mary blackmails Rosalie into being prepared to support her lies if necessary. Joe arrives, and very soon he and his aunt are battling. Karen and Martha arrive, and the battle enlarges, with strong emotions on one side and calm assurance on the other. Mrs. Tilford is not even moved by the threat of a libel suit. Finally, Joe insists that Mary be questioned and, against Mrs. Tilford’s wishes, brings Mary in. Mary, genuinely nervous, tells her story, making it more and more circumstantial, until finally the circumstances catch her in a lie. She has said that she has seen things through Karen’s keyhole, and Karen announces that her door has no keyhole. Mary is therefore forced to say that it was Martha’s room, not Karen’s; Martha announces that she lives on a different floor, at the other end of the house, and, moreover, shares her room with Mrs. Mortar. Mrs. Tilford is severely shaken. Backed into a corner, Mary says that it was not she but Rosalie who saw them, and that she saw them because Karen’s door was halfway open. Rosalie is summoned and at first denies the story, but when Mary makes it plain that she will, if necessary, expose Rosalie as a thief, Rosalie agrees that the story is true and collapses in tears. The curtain falls. After so tense a moment, act 3 is almost anticlimactic. It opens on the same scene as act 1. Karen and Martha are alone in the house. They have lost their case; the townspeople are against them; they feel so persecuted that they refuse even to answer the phone; and they have not even dared to leave the house. In a rather surprising anticipation of Samuel Beckett and the Absurdists, Martha says that they are “waiting,” with the implication that that is all they—or at any rate, she—will ever do. Martha hopes that Karen will escape through marrying Joe, but Karen seems doubtful. Mrs. Mortar, who had left when told to by Martha, unexpectedly enters, and the audience learns that she would have been the key witness at the trial, that she refused to return, and thus the case was lost. Her failure to return was owing to her reluctance to become involved in such a scandal. She returns now because she has run out of money, but Martha has no more to give her. Mrs. Mortar leaves the room, and Joe enters. He is planning for the marriage and for all three of them to leave together permanently, even though he would thus be giving up a promising career. Martha leaves, and in his words and attitude toward Karen it becomes clear that Joe is uncertain of the truth. Karen quietly denies any homosexual relationship, and he apparently accepts the denial, but it is uncertain whether his doubts have been laid to rest. Karen asks him to think things over for a day or two and make a decision. He reluctantly agrees and leaves, insisting that he will come back, though Karen is sure that he will not. Martha returns and, in a scene of high emotion, tells Karen that, though she had not previously been aware of it, the story that has been told about them was, at least so far as her feelings went, true. She loves Karen “that way.” She leaves the room, and presently, a muffled shot is heard. Karen opens the door and sees that Martha has killed herself. Mrs. Mortar rushes in, sees what has happened, and expresses her remorse.

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The doorbell rings, and she answers it. It is Agatha. Mrs. Tilford is waiting in her car. Mrs. Mortar tries to keep her from coming in, but Karen allows her to enter, and Mrs. Mortar rushes out sobbing. The final dialogue is between Karen and Mrs. Tilford. Mrs. Tilford has learned the truth. The bracelet was found among Rosalie’s things, and Rosalie confessed. Apparently, Mary has confessed, too. The judge at the trial will arrange a public apology and explanation, and Mrs. Tilford will pay the amount of the damages and as much more as they will take. Karen announces Martha’s death and expresses her bitter feelings toward Mrs. Tilford and her attempts to relieve her conscience through money. Gradually, however, Karen recognizes Mrs. Tilford’s sincerity and sees that the old woman will be the greater sufferer because she has refused to commit Mary to an institution and will hence have to live permanently in her company and because Martha’s suicide will inevitably burden her memory. Karen agrees to accept Mrs. Tilford’s money. She disagrees with Mrs. Tilford’s hope that she and Joe will marry. The two separate amicably, and Karen is left alone at the play’s end. Hellman expressed the feeling later that the final scene was unnecessary, that it was simply evidence of her personal compulsion to spell things out. Certainly none of her important later plays spells things out so thoroughly, but in The Children’s Hour, the final scene provides desirable satisfaction for the audience. The only valid objection to the scene is that it raises a new possibility: Mrs. Tilford appears soon after Martha’s suicide, rather than earlier, perhaps in time to prevent it. Once Martha’s feelings are clear, however, it seems doubtful, given the time and circumstances, that anything could have kept her alive, and Hellman properly leaves Karen with an uncertain future. Karen’s belief in Joe’s permanent defection may be wrong; it may not. The possibility of a happy outcome for her is a valid comfort to an audience after so much bitter emotion, but the certainty of a happy ending would be difficult to accept. The play was in part a succès de scandale on Broadway, since open treatment of homosexuality was very unusual at the time. Hellman wrote the scenario for the first film version, These Three (1936), in which the homosexuality was changed to a traditional triangle. A later version restored both title and content. The Little Foxes • The Little Foxes is, and almost surely will remain, Hellman’s standard play. It represents significant advances in technique over The Children’s Hour and is in various ways more typical of Hellman’s overall production. First, it is set in the Deep South (small-town Alabama), as are three of Hellman’s four most significant later plays. Second, the characters are more sharply distinguished and more deeply realized, and the dialogue is more individualized. Third, Hellman displays three significant qualities that are not fully realized in The Children’s Hour: compassion, humor, and irony. Fourth, The Little Foxes displays more clearly a sociopolitical theme than does the earlier play: These are “the little foxes who spoil the vines” (a quotation from the Song of Solomon), whom Hellman sees as twentieth century capitalists in embryo. The Little Foxes concentrates on a rapacious small-town Alabama family, the Hubbards, and on some of their victims. The year is 1900. As the play opens, Regina Giddens is giving a dinner party for a businessman from Chicago, William Marshall, with whom her brothers are negotiating to join them in opening one of the first cotton mills in the South. All the characters in the play are present except Regina’s husband, Horace, the town banker, long confined at The Johns Hopkins Hospital with a bad heart. The remaining characters are Regina’s brothers, Ben and Oscar Hubbard; Os-

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car’s wife, Birdie, the last member of an aristocratic family impoverished by the Civil War; Oscar and Birdie’s son, Leo; Horace and Regina’s daughter, Alexandra; and the servants, Addie and Cal. Unlike the Hubbards, Birdie has cultural interests; she is a frightened woman, bullied by her husband. Ben is a jovial hypocrite whose hypocrisy has become so practiced that he is sometimes almost unaware of it. He and Regina are the dominant Hubbards. Oscar is relatively weak, obtuse, and blustery, while Leo is a lesser version of Oscar. Alexandra shares Birdie’s cultural interests and seems not at all Hubbard-like. Regina herself is a handsome woman, a smooth and clever conniver, who takes in Marshall to a degree that Ben, for all his hypocrisy, cannot. When the deal for the cotton mill has been struck, the young couple drive Marshall to the station to return to Chicago. The Hubbards are triumphant, looking forward to being rich. One problem remains: The three siblings are supposed to contribute equal sums to the mill project, enough to make them together the majority shareholders, but while Ben and Oscar are ready to put up their share, Regina must get hers from Horace, who has ignored all letters on the subject. In a piece of typical Hubbard trickery, Regina declares that Horace is holding out because he wants a larger share, and Ben finally agrees that he should have a larger share and that the difference will come out of Oscar’s. Oscar is furious, but he is mollified by Regina’s quite specious assurance that she will consider something that Oscar very much wants: a marriage between Leo and Alexandra. A plan is then made to send Alexandra, who is devoted to Horace, to bring him home. Many modern plays, including several of Henrik Ibsen’s, involve the return of someone long gone, but the return is almost always early in the play. In The Little Foxes, the audience must wait, with anticipation, for what Horace’s return in the second act will bring. Before Horace’s arrival, Oscar and Leo conceive a plan to steal eighty thousand dollars’ worth of bonds from Horace’s safety deposit box, to finance their venture. (If they can do this, they will not need Regina as a partner.) Horace then arrives, stiff and ill, accompanied by Alexandra, who has his heart medicine. During the course of the act, it becomes clear that Horace and Regina are, and have been, at odds during most of their marriage, that Horace will not agree to finance the proposed project, and that he will not consent to a marriage between Alexandra and Leo. It is also clear that Regina will not be thwarted and that Horace is too physically frail to withstand her will. In act 3, Horace, who has discovered the theft of the bonds, informs Regina about the crime and tells her that he will pretend that the theft was a loan. Moreover, he will change his will, leaving Regina the bonds and all his other property to Alexandra. Regina will thus lose the opportunity to invest in the business venture (because the partners will no longer need her money), and she will lose her inheritance from Horace. Furiously, she tells him that she married him only for money. He becomes distraught, reaches for his medicine, spills it, and asks her to get his new bottle. She simply stands there as he collapses and dies. Regina is now in a position to blackmail her brothers into assigning her a 75 percent interest in the mill, lest she prosecute them. Regina is triumphant; nevertheless, she now faces a life of loneliness because Alexandra has discovered her mother’s treachery and will leave her. The play ends with a question and is the better for it. If the ending represented a total and final triumph, it would emphasize the play’s kinship to pure melodrama, and given the characters, an ending that had finality would be unlikely. Ben is too clearsighted, too ironically aware, too psychologically healthy to give up. Alexandra’s po-

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tential for fighting is probably small, but one cannot be sure. Moreover, the Hubbard siblings are more complex than a recital of the plot might make them seem. Ben retains an incompetent servant because she has always been in the family. Ben and Oscar both seem genuinely moved by Horace’s death. Ben and Regina are both capable of viewing their own, and others’, behavior ironically, and there is humor in some of their dialogue. Regina is frightened at what she has done, or rather not done. Wicked as the two may be, and much as they might remind one of nineteenth century melodramatic villains, they are human beings, complex enough to be believable. The play, moreover, has other ironies that remove it from total melodrama. It is ironic that Leo should be Birdie’s son and Alexandra Regina’s daughter, because Leo is an extreme version of Oscar, and Alexandra has the outlook of Horace. For most of his life, however, Horace has been weak, yielding to his wife, as Birdie has to her husband. Birdie, for whom one is made to feel compassion, gains enough strength to tell Alexandra the truth, and Horace gains enough strength to stand up to Regina. These are highly individualized human beings, and the play is skillfully constructed, absorbing, and genuinely insightful. Watch on the Rhine • Like The Little Foxes, Watch on the Rhine contains murder and blackmail, but it is a very different kind of play, peopled with a very different set of characters. It takes place entirely in the living room of Fanny Farrelly, in her country mansion near Washington, D.C. Fanny is a wealthy, eccentric matriarch in her sixties, a character typical of comedy of manners: basically good-hearted, sparklingly alert, and accustomed to having her own way. The time of the play is the spring of 1940. Germany is Nazi-ruled, and there is war in Europe in which the United States has not yet become involved. The pattern of the first two acts of the play consists of alternating conversation of three kinds: humorous and witty, at times gossipy, as is appropriate to comedy of manners; affectionate; and tense, either because of personally threatening political maneuvers or because of the triangle that is a subplot in the play. The shifts from one type to another can be sudden, but they are always appropriate. Tension can lapse into humor, or an unexpected remark can turn humor into tension. The characters include, besides Fanny, the other permanent residents of the mansion: Fanny’s son, David, a lawyer in his deceased father’s firm in Washington, in his late thirties; Fanny’s longtime companion Anise, a Frenchwoman; and one of the servants, Joseph. There are also two houseguests who have long overstayed their welcome, Marthe de Brancovis, the daughter of an old friend of Fanny, and her husband, Teck, a Romanian count. Fanny’s daughter Sara, her husband Kurt Müller, a member of the anti-Nazi underground and a German in exile, and their children arrive. The audience learns that Kurt has collected twenty-three thousand dollars to aid the resistance in Germany. In brief, Teck discovers the money and threatens to expose Kurt to the German embassy officials unless he is paid ten thousand dollars. Kurt is forced to kill Teck and flee the country, aided by Fanny, who during the course of the play has come to realize the Nazi threat and to be lifted above her own private concerns. The killing is presented, strangely, as an absence of the need to fight evil on all fronts, whether on a conventional battlefield or in one’s own environment. Watch on the Rhine is probably the best American play concerning World War II. It demonstrates that war is not limited to battlefronts and that the world is too small for anyone, anywhere, to be unaffected by large-scale violence. It demonstrates that such violence affects the cultured and the humane, whether they are poor, like Kurt, or

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wealthy, like Sara’s family. The play is highly unusual in being a comedy of manners in which the central subject is war. In spite of the attempted blackmail and actual murder that figure prominently in its plot, it is among the least melodramatic of any of Hellman’s plays, and to call the murder melodramatic has its own irony because this particular murder constitutes an act of war. The characters in Watch on the Rhine are developed with clarity and depth. Fanny is a far more individualized portrait of a wealthy, dominant older woman than is Mrs. Tilford in The Children’s Hour. Unlike Mary Tilford or Ben and Regina, Teck is a flaccid, unwilling villain. Unlike Birdie, Horace, and Alexandra, the good people are strong, and for the only time in all her plays, Hellman presents, in Kurt, an admirable hero and a marriage based on strong and permanent love. A believable presentation of either of these is indeed a rarity in modern drama. The children in Watch on the Rhine are more fully portrayed than those in The Children’s Hour. The theme has universal validity; oppression is indeed a major issue throughout Hellman’s plays. In The Children’s Hour, it is oppression by the established rich, by a psychotic child, by established standards of behavior. In The Little Foxes, it is anticipated oppression on a broad scale by a rising class of capitalists, and actual oppression on a narrower scale by moneyed southerners against blacks, poor whites, fallen aristocrats, and one another. Watch on the Rhine widens the range in dealing with oppression by Fascists and would-be Fascists. Blackmail itself, in all three plays, is a form of oppression. Later in Hellman’s work, in The Autumn Garden and Toys in the Attic, she showed that even generosity and love can be forms of blackmail; those plays, like Watch on the Rhine, give the theme a universality that Hellman’s first two successes lack. The Little Foxes will probably remain the most popular Hellman play in dramatic repertory, but Watch on the Rhine is certainly among her most effective. Other major works screenplays: The Dark Angel, 1935 (with Mordaunt Shairp); These Three, 1936; Dead End, 1937 (adaptation of Sidney Kingsley’s play); The Little Foxes, 1941 (with Dorothy Parker, Arthur Kober, and Alan Campbell); Watch on the Rhine, 1943 (with Dashiell Hammett); The North Star: A Motion Picture About Some Russian People, 1943; The Searching Wind, 1946; The Chase, 1966. nonfiction: An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir, 1969; Pentimento, 1973; Scoundrel Time, 1976; Maybe, 1980; Eating Together: Recipes and Recollections, 1984 (with Peter Feibleman); Conversations with Lillian Hellman, 1986. edited texts: The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov, 1955; The Big Knockover: Selected Stories and Short Novels of Dashiell Hammett, 1966. Bibliography Feibleman, Peter. Lily: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman. New York: William Morrow, 1988. The author, the son of old New Orleans friends of Hellman, became her close friend and companion in her last years, a relationship he describes in this book. His accounts of renovating the house on Martha’s Vineyard inherited from Hellman were first published in his column in Lear’s magazine. Contains a sadly riveting account of Hellman’s illness. Some of the anecdotal accounts of their time together are in Hellman’s section of Eating Together, a collection of southern recipes selected by both writers, in page proof when she died in 1984. Griffin, Alice, and Geraldine Thorsten. Understanding Lillian Hellman. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. A study of Hellman’s literary output, includ-

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ing The Children’s Hour, Another Part of the Forest, The Little Foxes, Watch on the Rhine, The Autumn Garden, and Toys in the Attic. Bibliography and index. Horn, Barbara Lee. Lillian Hellman: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Provides criticism and interpretation of Hellman’s dramatic works as well as plots and stage history. Bibliography and indexes. Mahoney, Rosemary. A Likely Story: One Summer with Lillian Hellman. New York: Doubleday, 1998. A look at Hellman from her friend, Rosemary Mahoney. Mellen, Joan. Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. The story of Hellman’s relationship with author Dashiell Hammett. Bibliography and index. Rollyson, Carl. Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. A readable and scholarly biography of Hellman. Photographs, bibliography, index. Wright, William. Lillian Hellman: The Image, the Woman. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986. A biography of Hellman that covers her life and works. Bibliography and index. Jacob H. Adler, updated by Katherine Lederer

Beth Henley Beth Henley

Born: Jackson, Mississippi; May 8, 1952 Principal drama • Am I Blue, pr. 1973, pb. 1982; Crimes of the Heart, pr. 1979, pb. 1982; The Miss Firecracker Contest, pr. 1980, pb. 1982; The Wake of Jamey Foster, pr., pb. 1982; The Debutante Ball, pr. 1985, pb. 1991; The Lucky Spot, pr. 1986, pb. 1987; Abundance, pr. 1990, pb. 1991; Beth Henley: Four Plays, pb. 1992; Monologues for Women, pb. 1992; Control Freaks, pr. 1992, pb. 2001; Signature, pr. 1995, pb. 2001; L-Play, pr. 1996, pb. 2001; Impossible Marriage, pr., pb. 1998; Family Week, pr. 2000; Beth Henley: Collected Plays, pb. 2000-2001 (2 volumes) Other literary forms • In addition to her works for the stage, Beth Henley has written screenplays, including Nobody’s Fool (1986); True Stories (1986), in collaboration with David Byrne and Stephen Tobolowsky; and the film versions of her plays Crimes of the Heart (1986), The Miss Firecracker Contest (1989), and Come West with Me (1998). She has also written the teleplays Survival Guides (1986) and Trying Times (1987), both with Budge Threlkeld. Achievements • Beth Henley is often compared to fiction writers Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor for her sympathetic portrayals of eccentric characters who lead deceptively simple lives in small southern communities. Her work has also been identified with the literary traditions of the grotesque and the absurd. Henley’s unique achievement, however, is the intermingling of absurdism and realism. Her plays realistically capture the southern vernacular and take place in authentic southern settings, yet they also exaggerate the recognizable and push the bizarre to extremes to reveal the underlying absurdity of the human condition. Henley’s characters are rooted in her southern heritage, but the meaning of their experiences is not limited to time and place. Loss and renewal, the vulnerability of loving, and the frail but indomitable human spirit are among her recurring themes. Henley delivers these serious concerns, however, through unpredictable characters, outrageously witty dialogue, and offbeat humor. It is her insistence on the value of laughter in the face of adversity that places her within the tragicomic tradition of modern dramatic literature. Another of Henley’s strengths is that she approaches her craft with a keen insight into what is stageworthy. This awareness, no doubt, is one of the reasons that her first full-length play, Crimes of the Heart, won the Pulitzer Prize in drama in 1981 with the distinction of being the first play to win the coveted award before appearing on Broadway. Crimes of the Heart also received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1981, and in the same year, Henley captured the prestigious George Oppenheimer/ Newsday Playwriting Award. Experiments with style and theme during the 1990’s led Henley away from her southern characters and settings; however, these plays, including Family Week, have not received critical or popular acclaim. Biography • The second of four daughters, Elizabeth (Becker) Henley was born May 8, 1952, in Jackson, Mississippi. Her parents, Charles Boyce and Elizabeth Jose457

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phine Becker, were reared in the neighboring communities of Hazlehurst and Brookhaven, locales that Henley adopted for two of her plays. Henley’s father, an attorney, served in both houses of the Mississippi legislature. A shy child plagued with chronic attacks of asthma, Henley, often bedridden, entertained herself by reading play scripts that were in production at the New Stage Theatre in Jackson, where her mother, an amateur actress, regularly performed. Henley attended high school in Jackson. During her senior year, she took part in an acting workshop at the New Stage Theatre, an experience that influenced her decision to become an actress. Selecting drama as her major, Henley enrolled at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, in 1970. While a sophomore, she wrote her first play as an assignment for a playwriting class. The play, a one-act comedy titled Am I Blue, was produced at the university under a pseudonym in her senior year. After graduation from Southern Methodist University in 1974 with a bachelor of fine arts degree, Henley taught creative dramatics and acted for the Dallas Minority Repertory Theatre. She earned a livelihood at odd jobs as a waitress, file clerk, and photographer of children at a department store. In 1975, she received a teaching scholarship from the University of Illinois, where she taught acting classes while pursuing graduate studies in drama. In the summer of 1976, she acted in the Great American People Show, a historical pageant presented at the New Salem State Park. Hoping to break into films as an actress, Henley moved to Los Angeles in the fall of 1976. Failing to get auditions for parts, Henley turned to writing screenplays as a creative outlet, but without an agent to represent her, the studios would not read her scripts. Thinking that stage plays would have a better chance of getting performed, especially in small theaters, Henley began working on a comedy (set in Hazlehurst, Mississippi) about a crisis in the lives of three sisters. With production costs in mind, she

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deliberately limited the play to six characters and one indoor set. She finished Crimes of the Heart in 1978 and submitted it to several regional theaters without success, but Henley’s friend and fellow playwright Frederick Bailey had faith in the play. Without Henley’s knowledge, he entered Crimes of the Heart in the annual drama competition of the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Kentucky, where it was selected as a cowinner for 1977-1978. In February, 1979, the Actors Theatre produced the play as part of the company’s annual Festival of New American Plays. The play was an immediate success. After productions in Maryland, Missouri, and California, Crimes of the Heart opened to full houses on Off-Broadway on December 21, 1980. The public’s high regard for the play was matched by critical acclaim. In April, 1981, at the age of twenty-eight, Henley was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for Crimes of the Heart, the first woman so honored in twenty-three years. In the fall of 1981, after having been recognized by the New York Drama Critics Circle as the best American play of the season, Crimes of the Heart premiered on Broadway; it ran for 535 performances. Subsequent productions were staged in England, France, Israel, and Australia. Meanwhile, Henley was writing a television pilot entitled “Morgan’s Daughters” for Paramount Pictures and a screenplay called The Moon Watcher about a historical pageant set in Petersburg, Illinois. She also took a small role as a bag lady in Frederick Bailey’s No Scratch, produced in Los Angeles in the summer of 1981. In January, 1982, the New York Repertory Company staged Henley’s Am I Blue with two other one-acts under the collective title Confluence. Theater critics found weaknesses in the playwright’s student effort but also acknowledged that the comedy showed the promise of her later work. Within the next three years, two other comedies written before Henley won the Pulitzer Prize were produced in New York City. The Wake of Jamey Foster opened on Broadway on October 14, 1982, but closed after only twelve nights. Critics found the play, which was also set in Mississippi, too repetitious of Crimes of the Heart. Written before The Wake of Jamey Foster, The Miss Firecracker Contest was staged in New York in the spring of 1984. Again critics faulted the play for its similarity to her earlier works. Undaunted by these box-office failures, Henley kept writing for the stage. In the spring of 1985, the South Coast Repertory Theater in Costa Mesa, California, produced her next play The Debutante Ball. In the following year, Henley’s The Lucky Spot (set in a dance hall in Pigeon, Louisiana, in 1934) premiered in New York City. Reviews of the play varied, but one critic considered The Lucky Spot to be Henley’s best play since Crimes of the Heart. In 1990, Abundance, Henley’s drama about two mailorder brides whose lives become entangled in the American West of the late nineteenth century, opened in New York City to mixed reviews. Later in the same year, the New York Stage and Film Company staged a workshop production of Henley’s Signature in Poughkeepsie, New York, but the play was not produced until 1995. Set in Hollywood in the year 2052, the play depicts a ruined society in which everyone is obsessed with pursuing fame. Henley’s L-Play continued a period of experimentation with style and theme. The play deals with six themes done in six different styles. Impossible Marriage marked Henley’s return to Off-Broadway theater in 1998. The play is set in Savannah, Georgia, and tells of a young bride-to-be named Pandora whose upcoming wedding is opposed by nearly every other character, including her older, very pregnant sister, Floral (portrayed by Holly Hunter). While Hunter received positive notices, the play was not a success. Family Week followed in 2000 and starred another Henley regular, Carol

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Kane. The play closed after only six performances. The darkly comic play explores issues of alcoholism, sexual abuse, and murder. As a Pulitzer Prize winner, the playwright-actress also found herself in demand as a screenwriter. While continuing to write stage plays, Henley wrote the screenplay for the acclaimed film version of Crimes of the Heart, released in late 1986; the script for another film, Nobody’s Fool; and a screenplay based on her drama The Miss Firecracker Contest. Henley also collaborated with David Byrne and Stephen Tobolowsky on the screenplay entitled True Stories and with Budge Threlkeld on two television scripts, Survival Guides and Trying Times. Henley’s plays have reached audiences far beyond the regional theaters for which she first wrote, making her a significant contributor to American dramatic literature. Although the plays written after Crimes of the Heart have failed to bring her the critical praise she earned with that first full-length comedy, her dramatic output as a whole reveals a consistency in tone and theme unsurpassed by her American contemporaries. Analysis • While the plays of Beth Henley are well constructed and provide ample conflict and suspense, the playwright’s keen sense of place and character and her humorous yet compassionate view of the human predicament most typify her work. Her plays are set most often in her home state of Mississippi, where the innocent façade of friendly small-town life belies the horror and lunacy within. The dark side of humanity—the unpredictable, the irrational, the abnormal—attracts Henley, and her plays abound with stories of sickness, disease, and perversions. Ironically, however, Henley creates comedy out of the grotesque and shapes endearing characters out of eccentricity. Usually, Henley’s plays depict the family in crisis joined by a close circle of friends and neighbors. From this basic situation, Henley makes her case for emotional survival. Guilt, despair, and loneliness are typical experiences of Henley’s failed heroines, but each continues to search for some measure of happiness and often finds it, if only momentarily, in the community of others. Whereas Henley doggedly exposes human frailties, in the final analysis, her view is a charitable one and her plays are optimistic, although they offer no lasting resolutions to her characters’ problems. The key to understanding Henley’s optimism lies in the laughter that her plays evoke; laughter functions to undercut that which is horrifying in life and to render it less horrifying. Henley’s reputation as a major American playwright was established with three full-length plays, Crimes of the Heart, The Miss Firecracker Contest, and The Wake of Jamey Foster. These plays also best illustrate the qualities that shape her unusual talent: a uniquely comic but sad voice, a distinguishing preoccupation with the bizarre, and a gift for working out variations on the themes of loneliness, guilt, loss, and renewal. Crimes of the Heart • Set in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, five years after Hurricane Camille, Crimes of the Heart is about three sisters—Lenny, Meg, and Babe MaGrath. The immediate crisis is that the youngest sister, Babe, has shot her husband, Zackery Botrelle, who is the richest and most powerful man in the community. The plot is fairly easily resolved when Zackery recovers and his threat to confine Babe in a mental institution is thwarted. This, however, hardly accounts for the sisters’ bizarre tale, which Henley unravels through exposition that is brilliantly interspersed with the main action. Babe’s trouble is only one more disaster among many that the MaGrath women have experienced, beginning with their father’s desertion and their mother’s suicide

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(she hanged herself and the family’s cat). The mother’s death left the sisters under the supervision of their grandfather, and now the care of the sick old man has fallen to Lenny, the oldest sister, because Babe married young and Meg escaped to California to pursue a singing career. Growing up in the shadow of their mother’s inexplicable suicide and the notoriety it brought, each of the sisters suffers silently and alone. Meg was especially affected. Fearing to show pity as a sign of weakness, she tested herself as a youngster by staring at a book full of pictures of people with horrible skin diseases. Remarkably, Henley wrings laughter out of the MaGrath’s misfortunes: The sisters suspect that Mama MaGrath killed herself because she was having a bad day; Lenny’s prospects for marriage are bleak because she has a deformed ovary; and Babe shoots Zackery because she does not like his looks. To Henley’s credit, the laughter is never at the expense of her characters, and there is a kind of bizarre logic to their eccentric behavior that makes the incredible credible. After Babe attempts suicide twice (because she, too, is having a bad day), she learns why her mother hanged the cat: She was afraid to die alone. The Miss Firecracker Contest • Of the same eccentric mold as the MaGrath women, twenty-four-year-old Carnelle Scott, the central character of The Miss Firecracker Contest, seeks to overcome her well-earned reputation as the town trollop by becoming Miss Firecracker at the annual Fourth of July celebration in her hometown of Brookhaven, Mississippi. Because Carnelle’s determination to succeed is exceeded only by her lack of talent, the outcome is predictable. Carnelle loses (she comes in fifth in a field of five), but she manages to overcome her despondency over the loss and joins her friends to watch the fireworks display at the close of the play. Henley enlivens the simple plot with a number of very odd characters, all of whom, like Carnelle, seek redemption from their unhappy pasts. Delmount Williams, Carnelle’s cousin, is a former mental patient who wants to be a philosopher; his sister Elain finds it easier to desert her husband and sons than to abandon her clock collection; and Carnelle’s seamstress, Popeye Jackson, who learned her trade by making dresses for frogs, hears voices through her eyes. Henley’s propensity for the grotesque is even more marked in The Miss Firecracker Contest than in Crimes of the Heart. Carnelle recalls a childhood bout with ringworm, the treatment for which was to shave her head and cover it with a disgusting ointment; Delmount’s last job was scraping up dead dogs from county roads; and all fondly remember Ronelle Williams, Delmount and Elain’s mother, who died looking like a hairy ape after having her cancerous pituitary gland replaced by one from a monkey. Although in The Miss Firecracker Contest Henley tries too hard to be amusing at times, her characters are distinctly drawn and believable despite their whimsicality. The Wake of Jamey Foster • Henley pushes the morbid to extremes in The Wake of Jamey Foster, which is set at Easter time in Canton, Mississippi. The inevitability of death, an underlying theme in Henley’s earlier work, is the central focus of this very black comedy in which Marshael Foster, the thirty-three-year-old widow of Jamey Foster, endures the embarrassment of holding the wake of her estranged husband in her home. Marshael faces the ordeal with anger and remorse; she has only recently filed for divorce because her alcoholic husband left her for another woman. The widow finds little comfort from the strange group of friends and relatives who gather to pay their last respects to Jamey, who is laid out in the cheapest pine box available and dressed in a bright yellow sports coat.

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Among the mourners are Marshael’s brother, Leon Darnell, a turkey jerker in a chicken factory; the orphan Pixrose Wilson, Leon’s betrothed, who is planning a career washing dogs; Collard Darnell, Marshael’s promiscuous sister, whose whole life has been marred by a low score on an IQ test that she took when she was twelve years old; Jamey’s brother, Wayne Foster, a successful banker, and his wife, Katie, who turn up their noses at the other guests; and Brocker Slade, a pig farmer who is in love with Marshael. Very little that is significant happens in the play. As the group waits for morning and Jamey’s funeral, they eat, drink, play cards, and take pictures of the corpse, but mostly they talk about gruesome things that have happened to them or others they know: arson, brain damage, miscarriages, automobile accidents, the cow that kicked Jamey in the head and killed him, and exploding pigs. Although plot is subsumed by character and character borders on caricature, The Wake of Jamey Foster is both entertaining and convincingly human, especially in the solace the characters find in the calamities of others. Henley’s rise to prominence in the American theater is remarkable considering the regionalism that characterizes her work. The weaknesses of her plays, a penchant for telling tall tales that stretch credulity and a tendency to write gags that force laughter, are overcome by her gift for creating memorable characters. Whereas Henley’s most important dramatic material is often confined to small southern towns and the misfits who inhabit them, her humorous but sympathetic treatment of human foibles has a universality and originality that make her one of the most imaginative dramatists writing for the American theater. Other major works screenplays: Nobody’s Fool, 1986; Crimes of the Heart, 1986 (adaptation of her play); True Stories, 1986 (with David Byrne and Stephen Tobolowsky); Miss Firecracker, 1989 (adaptation of her play); Come West with Me, 1998 (adaptation of her play Abundance); The Shipping News, 2002 (adaptation of E. Annie Proulx’s novel) teleplays: Survival Guides, 1986; Trying Times, 1987 (with Budge Threlkeld). Bibliography Betsko, Kathleen, and Rachel Koenig, eds. Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights. New York: Beech Tree Books, 1987. In an interview, Henley discusses her individual development as an artist, themes, and dramaturgy; gives advice to new writers; and touches on feminist issues, especially the recurring question of a feminist aesthetic. Bryer, Jackson R., ed. The Playwright’s Art: Conversations with Contemporary American Dramatists. Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Chronicles Henley’s contribution to contemporary Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regional theater in the United States. Henley discusses the creative process. Haller, Scot. “Her First Play, Her First Pulitzer Prize.” Saturday Review 8 (November, 1981): 40-44. Critiques the Off-Broadway production of Crimes of the Heart and attempts to account for Henley’s idiosyncratic voice. Henley combines elements of the naturalistic play with characters from absurdist comedy and writes “with wit and compassion about good country people gone wrong or whacko.” Some attention is given to Henley’s biography. Harbin, Billy J. “Familial Bonds in the Plays of Beth Henley.” Southern Quarterly 25 (Spring, 1987): 81-94. Examines Henley’s plays through The Debutante Ball but gives

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Crimes of the Heart the most attention. Recurring themes concern “the disintegration of traditional ideas, such as the breakup of families, the quest for emotional and spiritual fulfillment, and the repressive social forces within a small southern community.” Hargrove, Nancy D. “The Tragicomic Vision of Beth Henley’s Drama.” Southern Quarterly 22 (Summer, 1984): 54-70. Analyzes Crimes of the Heart, The Miss Firecracker Contest, and The Wake of Jamey Foster and finds that the plays “are essentially serious, although they are presented in the comic mode” and that the value of love, especially family love, is Henley’s predominant theme. Hargrove’s is the first scholarly article to examine Henley’s work. Jaehne, Karen. “Beth’s Beauties.” Film Comment 25 (May/June, 1989): 9-12. Highlights the film version of The Miss Firecracker Contest and quotes Henley extensively. Henley’s plays analyze “the ways women conform to or rebel against standards of femininity.” Although she likes to read tragedies, Henley says “in my own writing I can’t see the situations I look at without laughing. I back into comedy. I can’t help it.” Jones, John Griffin, ed. “Beth Henley.” In Mississippi Writers Talking. Vol. 1. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1982. Interviews Henley about her family background, education, and playwriting. Henley says that she likes to write about the South “because you can get away with making things more poetic.” About the meaning of her plays, Henley confesses, “I don’t think very thematically. I think more in terms of character and story.” McDonnell, Lisa J. “Diverse Similitude: Beth Henley and Marsha Norman.” Southern Quarterly 25 (Spring, 1987): 95-104. Compares Henley’s Crimes of the Heart, The Miss Firecracker Contest, and The Wake of Jamey Foster and Norman’s Getting Out (pr. 1977, pb. 1979) and ’night, Mother (pr. 1982, pb. 1983). Whereas both writers use the family as a framework and employ gothic humor, their plays differ remarkably in tone and style. Henley “writes comedy with serious dimensions, Norman, serious drama with comic overtones.” Simon, John. “Sisterhood Is Beautiful.” Review of Crimes of the Heart. New York 14 ( January 12, 1981): 42-43. Reviews the Off-Broadway production of Crimes of the Heart. Simon calls Henley “a new playwright of charm, warmth, style, unpretentiousness, and authentically individual vision.” His analysis connects Henley’s characters to those of Anton Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor, and Tennessee Williams. If Henley “errs in any way, it is in slightly artificial resolutions.” Ayne C. Durham, updated by Rhona Justice-Malloy

Tina Howe Tina Howe

Born: New York, New York; November 21, 1937 Principal drama • Closing Time, pr. 1959; The Nest, pr. 1969; Birth and After Birth, wr. 1973, pb. 1977, revised pr. 1995; Museum, pr. 1976, pb. 1979; The Art of Dining, pr. 1979, pb. 1980; Appearances, pr. 1982 (one act); Painting Churches, pr. 1983, pb. 1984; Three Plays, pb. 1984; Coastal Disturbances, pr. 1986, pb. 1987; Approaching Zanzibar, pr., pb. 1989; Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays, pb. 1989; One Shoe Off, pr., pb. 1993; Approaching Zanzibar and Other Plays, pb. 1995; Pride’s Crossing, pr. 1997, pb. 1998; Rembrandt’s Gift, pr. 2002 Other literary forms • Tina Howe is known primarily for her plays. Achievements • Tina Howe has earned distinction as one of the leading American dramatists of the commercial theater, and she has received some of the highest awards for playwriting. In 1983, largely in response to her most studied and successful play, Painting Churches, she captured an Obie Award for Distinguished Playwriting, the Rosamond Gilder Award for Outstanding Creative Achievement in Theatre, and a Rockefeller Playwright-in-Residence Fellowship. In addition to the Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award for Outstanding New American Playwright in 1984, she has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a Tony nomination for Best Play (Coastal Disturbances), and an honorary degree from Bowdoin College. Pride’s Crossing was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama and in 1998 received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play. Biography • Tina Howe, reared in New York City, was born into an aristocratic and celebrated family. Her grandfather, Mark Antony DeWolfe Howe, was a renowned poet and Pulitzer Prize recipient. Her father, Quincy Howe, was an eminent radio and television broadcaster, and her mother, Mary, was a painter. After attending private schools in New York, Howe went to Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, where she received a baccalaureate degree in 1959. Howe tried her hand at playwriting during her undergraduate studies and had a play produced (Closing Time) at Sarah Lawrence College, with Howe directing and Jane Alexander, Howe’s classmate, starring in the production. Howe did not seriously consider becoming a dramatist, however, until the year after her graduation, when she traveled to Paris and had the opportunity to meet aspiring young writers and, more important, to see various experimental, absurdist theater productions, in particular Eugène Ionesco’s La Cantatrice chauve (pr. 1950; The Bald Soprano, 1956) and Rhinocéros (pr., pb. 1959; Rhinoceros, 1959). This experience was a turning point for Howe, for the absurdist dramas appealed to her own antic, comic spirit, and these plays would later influence her dramaturgical style. She returned to New York, married writer Norman Levy in 1961, and taught high school English in Maine, where she also served as drama coach for the school’s club. This position helped her learn her craft, for the rigors of writing one-act plays 464

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for the club’s production season helped her gain the discipline and focus that she needed as a writer. During the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, Howe and Levy took various teaching positions at colleges in Chicago, Madison, and Albany. Howe continued to write plays, with The Nest receiving a professional production. In 1973, the couple settled in New York City with their two children. In 1983 Howe began working as an adjunct professor of playwriting at New York University and in 1990 became a visiting professor at Hunter College. Analysis • Tina Howe is not only one of the most prominent female playwrights from a new generation of American dramatists who emerged during the second women’s movement but also represents a group of dramatists whose works characterize the postmodern theater movement that began in the early 1970’s. Her plays blend traditional domestic drama with the experimental techniques that deploy considerable theatricality. On the surface, they appear naturalistic, slice-of-life comedies, but she injects an element of Surrealism throughout her plays by inserting unexpected, outrageous actions: the frenetic destruction of artworks, an old lady jumping on a trampoline. Like the absurdists, Howe focuses on existential issues, but she lacks their darkness and nihilism, preferring that her characters, and the audience, laugh at life’s reversals and accept them with valor and courage. Her language can be, at turns, everyday conversation with dialogue overlapping, or elegantly poetic arias and soliloquies. Through comedy, Howe probes the most basic of human emotions, forces laughter and compassion for those who suffer agonies familiar to all, and reminds viewers that life is full of both tragic and comic events. She celebrates life’s everyday, ordinary events—the sunsets, the family vacation, the reunion with relatives—those special ephemeral moments that can be captured perhaps on canvas or with a photograph but can never be relived. Between birth and death is life in process. Howe reminds the audience to live it to the fullest. Howe’s plays are remarkable for their absurdist depiction of life and their female perspective. Her playwriting style closely allies her with the absurdists, to whom she admits her indebtedness. In particular, she borrowed the absurdists’ use of surreal details, incongruous actions, bizarre situations, and farcical characters, for these devices suited her interest in exploring the passions, drives, fears, and anxieties that lie below the surface in all persons. As a result, her plays are, on the one hand, wildly comic, replete with pratfalls, sight gags, and much physical and verbal comedy, and yet, on the other hand, are rueful and poignant, exposing the emotional pain of characters who battle life’s unavoidable tragedies and suffering. Howe’s tragicomic view of life has sparked comparisons between her work and and that of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, specifically for Howe’s ability to capture “the same edgy surface of false hilarity, the same unutterable sadness beneath it, and the indomitable valor beneath both.” Howe presents her absurdist view of life from the female perspective: The central protagonists of her plays are women, and it is through their experiences that Howe explores such universal concerns as the ravages of time, the ineluctable human process of deterioration, the basal anxieties over death, and the human need to find meaning and permanence in an ephemeral world. The Nest and Birth and After Birth • Howe’s first two comedies, The Nest and Birth and After Birth, are her most overtly feminist and absurdist plays. In these works, Howe draws biting satirical portraits of women as they struggle to find autonomy in a world

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demanding that they live according to the traditional roles of wives and mothers. The Nest depicts a trio of young women battling one another for the prize of an ideal husband, and the inanity of their actions culminates in a highly charged, symbolic moment, when one of the women removes all of her clothes and dives into a seven-foottall wedding cake. The Nest was panned by critics and closed after one performance. Birth and After Birth looks at women’s choices concerning childbirth. Through Sandy, mother of a four-year-old son with behavioral problems (played by an adult actor), who grows increasingly disillusioned and enraged over the demands that her family places on her, Howe shows the physical and emotional toll that child rearing takes on women and attacks the myth that marriage and motherhood fulfill women’s lives. On the opposite pole, Mia, a married anthropologist with no children, fears the physical pain of childbirth, and although she has tried to find personal fulfillment through her job, she feels inadequate as a woman because she has no children. With this play, Howe said she wanted “to show how threatening women on either side of the fence can be to each other.” The play implies as well that women, regardless of their choices regarding marriage and children, continue both to define and to judge themselves according to the myths of motherhood and family life. Birth and After Birth has proved so incendiary that Howe has had difficulty getting it staged. A new approach • After the failure of these two plays, Howe made a conscious effort to alter her playwriting style. She took note of the successful Broadway plays at the time and concluded that audiences wanted escape, so she set out to find settings that had not been used onstage before, something that audiences would find novel. More important, she decided to tone down her feminist voice by couching it in less threatening dramatic terms. As a result, Howe took women out of their domestic arena, placed them in such exotic and unlikely locales as museums, restaurants, and beaches, and made her central protagonists women artists. When Howe hit on this idea and wrote her first successful play (Museum) as a result of her new writing strategy, she knew that she had hit her stride: “I had found my niche at last. I would write about women as artists, eschew the slippery ground of courtship and domesticity and move up to a loftier plane.” Her later plays are still full of comic exuberance, zany characters, and outrageous situations, but her female characters, in the main, now seek their creative and intellectual potential through nontraditional roles, most particularly as artists. Museum • As the play’s title suggests, Museum takes place in a museum gallery with three modernist exhibits: five life-size, clothed figures hanging from a twenty-five-foot clothesline and a basket of clothespins on the floor, a series of sculptures made from animal bones and feathers displayed on pedestals, and a group of three, totally white paintings along one wall. Museum has no traditional plot; it is a collage of conversations by some forty gallery visitors who meander about studying the exhibits, some expressing their disgust and confusion over such abstract drivel, others completely enthralled and postulating the meaning of each work and the purpose of art in general. The climax of the action occurs when Tink Solheim, a friend of Agnes Vaag (the sculptor of the animal-bone exhibit) begins frantically to search for the special secret that Agnes said was hidden in one of the sculptures. Tink finds a hidden switch, and when she turns it, the lights dim, floodlight illuminates the statue, and music by Johann Sebastian Bach swells out from a hidden speaker. The crowd stands entranced for several minutes, experiencing a communal epiphany. This spiritual awakening leads to

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pandemonium, as the play concludes with the gallery visitors running about in a frenzy, ripping apart the exhibits, and stealing parts of them in their desire to own at least a small part of something artistic, spiritual, and eternal. The Art of Dining • The communal and spiritual experience brought about by a woman’s work of art in Museum has its parallel in Howe’s next play, The Art of Dining. The artist in this play is Ellen, a gourmet chef and partner with her husband in a trendy restaurant. Where people coveted art in Museum, in this comedy they wish literally to devour it. Starving diners from the surrounding area come to the restaurant to feast voraciously on Ellen’s famous culinary masterpieces. The symbol of spiritual starvation in the previous play is made more literal in The Art of Dining, and, similar to the finale of Museum, Howe brings all the visitors together in one communal, ritual moment brought about by the female creator. Everyone huddles together to feast on Ellen’s complementary dessert. The symbolism of this closing moment of shared community is articulated by one of the diners, Elizabeth Colt, a young anorexic novelist, who stands apart as the diners eat with gusto and explains that centuries ago people gathered together in a shared celebration to enjoy the feast. Through their collective communion brought about by Ellen’s gift, this group of strangers comes together in one common humanity, “purified of their collective civilization and private grief.” Painting Churches • Painting Churches, Howe’s most successful comedy, returns to the world of the artist. It explores parent-child relationships, children’s need to gain parental acceptance and approval, and, especially, the larger and more serious issues of life’s inevitable process toward deterioration and the ultimate movement toward death. In this play, Mags Church, an impressionist painter, visits home after a long absence to paint a portrait of her aged parents before their imminent move from their Boston family home and just prior to her first solo show in a famous art gallery. Mags needs her parents’ recognition of her creative genius (something they have never given her), and she hopes that her portrait of them will gain their respect for her as an artist and an adult. Once home, however, Mags sees the debilitating effects of time on her parents; her father, Gardner, once a renowned poet, is now addled, and her mother, Fanny, has been reduced to a life of taking care of her senile husband. Mags must face the shattering reality that all children encounter: Her parents are nearing death. After some difficulty getting her parents to sit still long enough to pose, Mags finally finishes her portrait, and it is this gift to her parents that brings all three together in a celebratory moment at the end of the play. When Fanny and Gardner look at their portrait, they compare it to one of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s works, and eventually they envision themselves as figures in a Renoir café scene with couples dancing. A Chopin waltz begins to play, and they start to dance about the room, oblivious to Mags, who stands watching them, her eyes filled with tears. Through Mags’s painting, her parents have been rejuvenated, if only for a moment, for in effect they have been transformed into the painting. For a brief, magical moment, time stands still. Mags has locked her parents in time, capturing and immortalizing them by her portrait. Although her parents will soon die, they will continue to live not only in her memory but also forever on her canvas. Coastal Disturbances • Coastal Disturbances includes various short scenes that form a collage, a series of impressions about love from different points of view, from an el-

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derly couple who have withstood infidelities and other marital tragedies to a young couple caught up in sexual infatuation. The play’s heroine, Holly, is a professional photographer who has come to a private beach in Massachusetts for a two-week vacation to take photographs and to forget a disastrous affair with her agent-boyfriend in New York. Holly becomes enamored of a compassionate and lovable lifeguard, but when her former boyfriend tracks her down and begs a reconciliation, she capitulates to his charm. Although Howe is concerned with the passage of time, which is made quite visible by the ever-changing and gorgeous sunrises and sunsets on the beach, she does not explore this theme as vividly and dramatically as in Painting Churches. Coastal Disturbances is atypical of Howe’s work; it is a love story that attempts to teach that forgiveness, compassion, and tenderness can calm any emotional disturbance and heal the heart. Approaching Zanzibar • With Approaching Zanzibar, Howe returns to her previous preoccupations with life’s ephemerality, death, art, and rebirth. The Blossom family (husband Wally, wife Charlotte, and two children, Turner and Pony) take a crosscountry trek from Hastings, New York, to Taos, New Mexico, to visit Charlotte’s dying aunt, Olivia. On this two-week trip, the Blossoms enjoy a typical vacation, camping out, fishing, visiting relatives, and meeting some interesting strangers. At every turn, the realities of life’s brevity and ultimate closure through death form a palpable background. Not only is the trip itself a metaphor for the journey of life with its end in death (symbolized by Olivia), but also, throughout, characters make repeated references to the passage of time and the loss of youth and its promise of a future. Charlotte is menopausal, and her anguish over her inability to have more children causes her nightmares about abandoned babies. Wally, once a famous composer, lost his creative energy when his parents’ deaths the year earlier traumatized him, forcing him to confront his own mortality. Howe underscores her theme of the inexorable cycle of life (birth, death, rebirth) not only through dialogue with numerous allusions to evolution and reincarnation but also through the Blossom children. Although Charlotte and Wally face midlife, their children are their source of hope and touch with immortality. Turner is a musical prodigy with great promise of carrying on his father’s talent. Pony possesses the most miraculous and powerful counter to death, her potential progeny. The celebration of the female’s ability to create life and rejuvenate her species as the ultimate defense against death forms the play’s closing tableau: Pony, alone at Olivia’s bedside, rejuvenates the dying woman; soon the two hold hands and begin jumping on Olivia’s bed (a trampoline) while crying out “Paradise.” All the others rush into the room, freeze at the sight of them leaping into the air, and then gather around the bed to join their euphoric shouts of “Paradise.” Here again, Howe ends her play in a highly charged, theatrical moment of spiritual communion, an affirmation of life, nurturing, and humanity, with the female at its core. Pride’s Crossing • In Pride’s Crossing, Howe wanted fictionally to allow an elderly maiden aunt of hers, a “dutiful Boston daughter” who never rebelled against social mores, to express anger over what she had missed. Pride’s Crossing explores a powerful woman’s passage through a life marred by social constraints. The play’s main protagonist is ninety-year-old Mabel Tidings Bigelow, who in her twenties was the first woman to swim across the English Channel. In the course of the play Mabel’s memories take shape and we see the younger

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Mabel at ages rangingfrom ten to sixty. The usually rebellious young woman’s family were part of a proper Bostonian upper class, and her ties to that society cost her the one great—but socially unacceptable—love of her life; she married an alcoholic Boston Protestant instead of the Jewish doctor who truly loved her. The younger Mabel’s athleticism and physical strength contrast with the lost potential of the feisty but aged woman who still clings to social niceties and has lost her physical power. In the end, Pride’s Crossing expresses the passion of the old woman who looks back and sees the consequences of doing what she thought was right, rather than taking the plunge and following her heart. Bibliography Backes, Nancy. “Body Art: Hunger and Satiation in the Plays of Tina Howe.” In Making a Spectacle, edited by Lynda Hart. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989. Women writers’ use of food has become a major area of research, and this essay adds to that body of scholarship by incisively examining Howe’s abundant use of food imagery relative to cultural inscriptions about women’s bodies, self-image, self-control, and nurturing. Barlow, Judith E. “The Art of Tina Howe.” In Feminine Focus, edited by Enoch Brater. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1989. Barlow discusses one of the central motifs in Howe’s plays, the importance of art in daily life. Barlow pays particular attention to Howe’s use of women as artists, and her insightful comments clarify Howe’s interest in celebrating the unique and powerful creativity of women artists. _______. “Tina Howe.” In Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights. Edited by Philip C. Kolin and Colby H. Kullman. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996. Howe discusses writing comedic plays and the recurring themes in her work. Betsko, Kathleen, and Rachel Koening. Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights. New York: Beech Tree Books, 1987. Howe’s interview contains a range of biographical information on her, including her writing habits, her view on the arts, her absurdist roots, and her thematic concerns from The Nest to Painting Churches. DiGaetani, John L. A Search for a Postmodern Theater: Interviews with Contemporary Playwrights. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991. In this interview, Howe discusses her indebtedness to the absurdist playwrights, her concerns as a feminist writer, and autobiographical aspects of her plays and characters. Contains a photograph of Howe. Howe, Tina. “Antic Vision.” American Theatre 2 (September, 1985): 12, 14. Although numerous published interviews with Howe provide firsthand information from the playwright, this essay by Howe, written after the success of Painting Churches, offers the most insight into her views about comical playwriting, her feminist vision, and her aesthetic voice. Contains photographs from production scenes of Painting Churches and The Art of Dining. _______. “Women’s Work: White Gloves or Bare Hands?” American Theatre 15 (September, 1998): 7. Excerpts from a keynote speech given at the November, 1997, Women’s Project Conference. Howe talks about critical responses to her early plays and being both a writer and mother. Kachur, B. A. “Women Playwrights on Broadway: Henley, Howe, Norman, and Wasserstein.” In Contemporary American Theatre, edited by Bruce King. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. This chapter on four prominent women playwrights includes

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information on Howe’s metadramatic techniques and her feminist perspective, particularly her use of women both as central protagonists and as artists. Swarns, Rachel L. “New Play, and Old Questions, About Women.” New York Times, December 7, 1997, Section 2, p. 4. Howe discusses the struggle to find acceptance for women playwrights and feminist topics on Broadway. Other women playwrights and producers offer their perspectives. Wetzsteon, Ross. “The Mad, Mad World of Tina Howe.” New York 16 (November 28, 1983): 58. Wetzsteon surveys Howe’s plays through Painting Churches, discusses biographical details, and provides a brief analysis of Howe’s playwriting style and themes. B. A. Kachur, updated by Maureen Puffer-Rothenberg

David Henry Hwang David Henry Hwang

Born: Los Angeles, California; August 11, 1957 Principal drama • F.O.B., pr. 1978, pb. 1983; The Dance and the Railroad, pr. 1981, pb. 1983; Family Devotions, pr. 1981, pb. 1983; Sound and Beauty, pr. 1983 (two one-acts, The House of Sleeping Beauties, pb. 1983, and The Sound of a Voice, pb. 1984); Broken Promises: Four Plays, pb. 1983; Rich Relations, pr. 1986, pb. 1990; As the Crow Flies, pr. 1986; Broken Promises, pr. 1987 (includes The Dance and the Railroad and The House of Sleeping Beauties); M. Butterfly, pr., pb. 1988; One Thousand Airplanes on the Roof, pr. 1988, pb. 1989 (libretto; music by Philip Glass); F.O.B. and Other Plays, pb. 1990; Bondage, pr. 1992, pb. 1996 (one act); The Voyage, pr. 1992, pb. 2000 (libretto; music by Glass); Face Value, pr. 1993; Trying to Find Chinatown, pr., pb. 1996; Golden Child, pr. 1996, pb. 1998; The Silver River, pr. 1997 (music by Bright Sheng); Peer Gynt, pr. 1998 (adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play); Aida, pr. 2000 (with Linda Wolverton and Robert Falls; music by Elton John; lyrics by Tim Rice; adaptation of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera); Flower Drum Song, pr. 2001 (adaptation of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s musical) Other literary forms • David Henry Hwang has written a number of screenplays, including M. Butterfly (1993), Golden Gate (1994), and Possession (2001). He has also written for television with scripts that include My American Son (1987) and The Lost Empire (2001). Achievements • David Henry Hwang is the first Asian American playwright to bring specifically Asian and American themes to Broadway and Off-Broadway theater. His plays explore issues of ethnic identity, gender, and imperialism, with often stunning theatrical flair. Within the first decade of his career as a playwright, he staged six major productions in New York and abroad, garnering four Off-Broadway “Best Play” nominations and awards. M. Butterfly, his first Broadway play, won both the New York Drama Desk Award and the Tony Award for Best Play as well as a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Golden Child was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play in 1998 and earned an Obie Award for Playwriting in 1997. Biography • David Henry Hwang was born in Los Angeles on August 11, 1957, the son of Henry Yuan Hwang, a banker, and Dorothy Huang Hwang, a professor of piano. His father grew up in Shanghai, China, and emigrated in the late 1940’s to California, where he enrolled in the business program at the University of Southern California. His mother, born in southeastern China, had grown up in the Philippines. Hwang received his A.B. degree in English from Stanford University in 1979, then briefly taught writing in a high school in Menlo Park, California, before attending the Yale School of Drama in 1980 and 1981. His first play, F.O.B., was performed at Stanford University before being accepted for production at the National Playwrights Conference at Connecticut’s O’Neill Theater Center in 1979, when he was twenty-one years old. The following year, Joseph Papp brought it to the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Public Theatre, Off-Broadway. It won an Obie Award for the best new play of the season. 471

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Like F.O.B., Hwang’s next two plays focused on the Chinese American experience. The Dance and the Railroad depicts two nineteenth century immigrants working on the transcontinental railroad, while Family Devotions is a bizarre farce set in contemporary California. His next two plays, jointly titled Sound and Beauty, are stylized one-act plays set in contemporary Japan; they were produced Off-Broadway in 1983. The first, The House of Sleeping Beauties, reinvents a novella by Yasunari Kawabata, making the author a character in a version of his own work. The second, The Sound of a Voice, involves a conflict between a samurai warrior and a bewitching female hermit whom he intends to kill. In 1983, Hwang received a Rockefeller playwright-in-residence award and a National Endowment for the Arts artistic associate fellowship. A Guggenheim Fellowship followed in 1984, as did fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts in 1985. On September 25, 1985, he married Ophelia Y. M. Chong, an artist, from whom he was later divorced. Rich Relations, produced Off-Broadway in 1986, was his first work not about the Asian experience and his first critical failure, though it recapitulated various themes from his earlier plays. Nevertheless, Hwang has termed this failure exhilarating, freeing him from undue concern about critical reaction. M. Butterfly, produced in 1988, brought Hwang international renown, a Tony Award for the Best Play of 1988, the Outer Critics Circle Award, and a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize in 1989. Based on a true story of a French diplomat and his Chinese lover who turned out to be not only a spy but also a man, the play explores issues of gender, identity, racism, and political hegemony. The same year, he collaborated with composer Philip Glass on One Thousand Airplanes on the Roof, a science fiction work concerning a character who may have been kidnapped by visiting aliens. In 1992, Hwang’s one-act play Bondage premiered at the Humana Festival of New Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Kentucky. Set in a parlor frequented by sadomasochists, its two characters are completely covered in black leather, so that their respective races cannot be discerned. In 1994, the film Golden Gate was released, based on Hwang’s screenplay and directed by John Madden. Set in San Francisco in 1952, it depicts the persecution of Chinese Americans by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) during the Joseph McCarthy era, when they were suspected of having ties to the communist revolution in China. FBI agent Kevin Walker (Matt Dillon) investigates laundryman Chen Jung Song (Tzi Ma), who has collected and sent funds to his and his friends’ impoverished relatives in China. Following Song’s ten-year imprisonment and subsequent suicide, agent Walker, in disguise, courts the dead man’s daughter, who is a law student trying to clear her father’s name. Hwang’s play Golden Child opened at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre in New York in 1996, directed by James Lapine. Its plot concerned the struggle between tradition and change in a family in 1918 China, when its members encounter a Christian missionary whose values challenge their traditional Confucianism. The play won an Obie Award in 1997. The Silver River, a “chamber opera” on which Hwang collaborated with composer Bright Sheng, premiered at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival in 1997. Based on a beloved Chinese legend, the opera’s four characters were intended to be radically different kinds of performers—two “Westerners” and two Chinese, performing in the style of Peking Opera.

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In 1998, the Trinity Repertory Company of Providence, Rhode Island, presented Hwang’s adaptation and abridgment of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (pb. 1867; English translation, 1892). Described by one reviewer as “Gynt-lite,” this version shortened Ibsen’s epic drama to two hours (a 50 percent reduction), removing entire scenes and characters while renaming others. It also added pop-culture anachronisms, Freudian symbols, and broad farce. Hwang next collaborated with Linda Wolverton and Robert Falls in writing the book for the pop musical Aida, with music by Elton John and lyrics by Tim Rice. It was first produced in 2000. Like Giuseppi Verdi, whose opera Aida premiered in 1871, Hwang and his co-authors drew on a story by nineteenth century Egyptologist Mariette Bey; however, they added characters not present in Verdi’s work. These included Mereb, an Ethiopian slave who provides comic relief, and Zoser, who seeks to poison the pharaoh and assume the throne himself. In 2001, Hwang’s radically overhauled version of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song premiered in Los Angeles, directed by James Longbottom; it was the musical’s first major revival since it opened in 1958. During this year Hwang also completed a screen adaptation of A. S. Byatt’s novel Possession (1990). Now set in a fading Chinese Opera house in Chinatown, the central theme of Flower Drum Song is the tension between the older generation’s belief in tradition and the younger generation’s desire to assimilate into American culture. It also focuses on a young woman’s experience after fleeing Mao Zedong’s China in 1959. Analysis • Images of Asians and Asian Americans in modern culture have been relatively rare and often stereotypical; few have been created by Asian Americans themselves. On-screen stereotypes ranged from Charlie Chan (performed by a white actor), an image of wise but humble, ultimately “knowing” inscrutability, to the cook Hop Sing on the television series Bonanza (1959-1973). Contact between Eastern and Western cultures had been depicted in such works as David Belasco’s Madame Butterfly (pr. 1900, pb. 1935, the basis for Giacomo Puccini’s opera of the same name), Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s The King and I (pr. 1951) and Flower Drum Song (pr. 1958), John Patrick’s The Teahouse of the August Moon (pr. 1953, pb. 1954), and Paul Osborn’s The World of Suzie Wong (pr. 1958, based on the novel by Richard Mason). Whatever their merits, however, none of these plays offered a genuinely Asian perspective on the events portrayed. By the early 1970’s, literature by and about Asian Americans began to emerge; a decade later, its first critically acclaimed and commer-

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cially successful playwright was David Henry Hwang. From his earliest plays about the Chinese American experience to his Broadway hit M. Butterfly and the subsequent rewriting of Flower Drum Song, he has progressively explored issues of ethnic cultural identity, gender roles, the East/West relationship, and the effects of imperialism—and has done so with deftly constructed plots, a number of which incorporate elements of Chinese opera. F.O.B. • In his introduction to F.O.B. and Other Plays, Hwang identified three phases “in attempting to define [his] place in America,” and his early plays correspond to these. The first is an “assimilationist” phase, in which one tries to “out-white the whites” in order to fit in with the majority culture. Dale, the central character of his first play, F.O.B., is a second-generation American of Chinese descent who dresses like a “preppy” and particularly disdains Chinese immigrants who are “Fresh Off the Boat,” abbreviated “F.O.B.” One such, named Steve, is the target of his scorn throughout the play, in part because he reminds Dale of his ancestry, the nonwhite, non-American past that he prefers to ignore, discard, or deny. Steve’s cousin Grace, a first-generation Chinese American, functions as an intermediary between the two men, with insight into the plight of both the newly arrived and the all-too-assimilated “A.B.C.’s,” meaning “American-Born Chinese.” Steve announces himself as the great god Gwan Gung, the Chinese folk hero, the “god of warriors, writers, and prostitutes.” Grace tells him that in the United States, Gwan Gung is dead; nevertheless, her contact with Steve reawakens her own fantasy, Fu Ma Lan, a great woman warrior. Dale repudiates both myths, having struggled for so long to overcome his Chinese-ness, but Steve’s presence forces him to reexamine his values. Following Dale’s attempts to humiliate the immigrant, Steve becomes in monologue the embodiment of “ChinaMan,” the immigrant Everyman who helped build the American West, particularly its railroads. Such cultural kinship finally binds Steve and Grace, who transmutes him from dead god to living warrior. Dale is left behind at the end of the play, uncomprehending, unrepentant, and alone. The Dance and the Railroad • Gwan Gung also figures significantly in The Dance and the Railroad, Hwang’s second play, a product of his “isolationist-nationalist” phase, in which he wrote primarily for other Asian Americans, having rejected “the assimilationist model” as “dangerous and self-defeating.” Set in 1867, The Dance and the Railroad is a two-character, one-act play whose characters, Lone and Ma, are workers building the transcontinental railroad but are currently on a nine-day laborers’ strike. Although conflicts between white management and Chinese labor underlie the action, personal differences between the characters and the traditions of Chinese opera and culture become increasingly prominent. Lone, a refugee from the Chinese opera, isolates himself from the other workers, practicing his art in solitude on the mountainside, above the strike and commercial toil. Ma, a gullible F.O.B. laborer who believes in the promises of the Gold Mountain in America, ascends in search of Lone, discovers his austere artistic training regimen, and yearns to learn opera to “become” Gwan Gung in the new land. To learn the discipline that artistry requires, Ma maintains the “locust” position all night, a metaphor for immigrant experience. Finally worthy to study Gwan Gung, Ma rejects doing so and returns to the work below when the strike ends. The play’s later scenes are performed in the style of Chinese opera. The actor playing Lone—his namesake, John Lone—had trained with the Peking Opera for eight years; he also directed the play, choreographed it, and provided its music.

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Family Devotions • Hwang’s third play, Family Devotions, is a nine-character farce set in contemporary California. The action centers on three generations of a thoroughly “assimilated” Chinese American family satirically based on Hwang’s own; they are visited by their “second brother” Di-gou, a doctor and former violinist who has lived for thirty years under the Communist chinese regime. His sisters, ardent fundamentalist Christians, are shocked to find out that he is an atheist and that he rejects the legend of See-Goh-Poh, a Christian “Woman Warrior” who allegedly saved his soul at age eight. He, in turn, is baffled by the family’s crass materialism and conspicuous consumption and has come to ask his sisters to renounce their faith and return home with him. The first act ends with one of the sisters, Ama, delivering a fiery testimonial from a rolling, neon-lit pulpit as the “Hallelujah Chorus” blares away. In the second act, the sisters and their daughters tie Di-gou to a table, assailing him with the word of God and See-Goh-Poh. He breaks his bonds in a holy fit of possession, speaks in tongues, and exposes See-Goh-Poh as a fraud whose crusade was a ruse to conceal an unwanted pregnancy. As the grotesque exorcism proceeds, the sisters die in their chairs as Di-gou continues his vehement speech. Di-gou and the young child of the family depart, leaving the house a spiritual wreck, torn between the Chinese past and the California present, between myth and reality. The play shows the influence of American playwright Sam Shepard, to whom it is dedicated, but many of its thematic preoccupations—assimilation versus origins, lost ethnic awareness, a core conflict of incompatible values—are recognizably Hwang’s own. The House of Sleeping Beauties • In the third phase of his writing, Hwang sought to move beyond his personal experience. The House of Sleeping Beauties is an adaptation of a novella Nemureru bijo (1960-1961 serial, 1961 book; The House of the Sleeping Beauties, in The House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories, 1969) by Yasunari Kawabata, who is himself one of the play’s two characters. The play is set in a brothel where elderly men learn to accept their mortality by sleeping beside comatose, nude, drugged young virgins. In Hwang’s version, Kawabata comes there to research a book but becomes spiritually (platonically) involved with Michiko, the elderly proprietress. The play ends with his suicide by self-poisoning, and he is rocked to his final eternal sleep in her lap. The Sound of a Voice • The companion piece of The House of Sleeping Beauties is The Sound of a Voice, a fable of a samurai warrior who goes into a forest to kill a bewitching female hermit but instead falls in love with her. The role of the witch was originally written for an onnagata, a male actor specializing in women’s parts in Japanese Kabuki theater, but in the initial production it was played by a woman, Natsuko Ohama. Rich Relations • Rich Relations, produced in 1986, was Hwang’s first play with all Caucasian characters and his first critical and commercial failure. Like Family Devotions, it lampooned evangelical Christianity, deathbed resurrections, and crass materialism within a suburban Los Angeles family, but it offered little that was new in technique or ideas. M. Butterfly • M. Butterfly, two years later, was a commercial and critical triumph on Broadway. The play is based on an article that appeared in The New York Times about

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the conviction for espionage of a French diplomat, who aided the Communist Chinese government by turning over embassy documents to his mistress of twenty years, a Chinese opera singer whom he had mistakenly believed to be an extremely modest woman. Hwang, however, sought no additional details from the actual case so as to avoid writing a docudrama; he was struck by the story as an inversion of the plot of the play and opera Madame Butterfly, in which a Japanese woman falls in love with a Caucasian man, is spurned, and commits suicide. In Hwang’s play, the diplomat, René Gallimard, is the counterpart of Puccini’s Westerner, Pinkerton, as he falls in love with opera singer Song Liling, unaware that she is the Chinese counterpart of an onnagata and an agent of the communist government. The role of Song Liling is played by a man (B. D. Wong in the original production), though this fact is not revealed to the theater audience until the beginning of the third act when, in a moment of startling theatricality, Song Liling removes her makeup and changes clothes onstage, dispelling the illusion for the audience before disclosing her true gender and identity to Gallimard in a nude scene near the end of the play. In many ways, M. Butterfly continues the thematic preoccupations that became apparent in Hwang’s earlier plays: the use of Chinese opera from The Dance and the Railroad, the role for an onnagata and the unorthodox sexuality of The Sound of a Voice, and the clash of Asian and Western values that recurred in all of his earlier plays. Incorporating both Puccini’s music and Chinese opera, M. Butterfly also explores issues of gender and racial stereotyping, of dominance and submission (political as well as sexual), and of the morality of the Western presence in Asia. Furthermore, the play audaciously questions the nature of love and illusion, undermining any certainty about the ultimate knowability of another person or, indeed, of the world itself. While that theme was not new in twentieth century literature—having been particularly prominent in Ford Madox Ford’s novel The Good Soldier (1915), for example, seldom, if ever, has it been presented with such dramatic effectiveness and theatrical flair. M. Butterfly also marks a considerable advance in Hwang’s dramatic technique over the earlier plays, which were chronologically presented on realistic sets. The play begins with a retrospective monologue by Gallimard in his prison cell; many flashbacks to European and Asian locales are introduced throughout twenty-seven brief scenes in three acts. The stylized set, designed by Eiko Ishioka, is dominated by a gently sloping, curved ramp, enabling a flexible use of the stage space. The original title, Monsieur Butterfly, was shortened to M. Butterfly (at Hwang’s wife’s suggestion) to seem more mysterious and ambiguous. Following the phenomenal success of M. Butterfly, Hwang worried that whatever he did next would be considered a disappointment; accordingly, following a collaboration with the composer Philip Glass on a work titled One Thousand Airplanes on the Roof, he worked primarily on film scripts, including a screen adaptation of M. Butterfly. In 1992, his one-act play titled Bondage opened in Louisville, Kentucky. Bondage, like The House of Sleeping Beauties, is set in an exotic brothel: one that caters to sadomasochists, where a dominating female is paid to humiliate a male clientele. The play begins with Terri, the female dominatrix, in a session with Mark; both are covered from head to toe in black leather so that their faces as well as their ethnic identities are concealed from the audience. The play consists of a fantasy game in which their races continually change, further exploring themes of gender, racial, and political stereotyping, as well as intricate power relationships.

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Trends and themes in the 1990’s • In the plays and screenplays that Hwang has written after Bondage, two major trends have become increasingly apparent. The first is his ongoing interest in the history of the modern Chinese American experience; he has consistently articulated this little-known aspect of American history, as in the awardwinning Golden Child, set in 1918, and in the critically assailed film Golden Gate, which was set during the McCarthy era of the 1950’s. In each of these works, questions of allegiance are paramount: The desire to preserve centuries-old cultural traditions and family values proves difficult to reconcile with a desire to become assimilated into American culture. Yet, as Golden Gate demonstrates in particular, the extent of one’s “American-ness” or “Other-ness” remains dangerously in question, difficult if not impossible to prove to the satisfaction of those in authority. Like V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and Buchi Emecheta, among others, Hwang explores the nature of “hybridity,” a crosscultural experience that has drawn increasing attention in postmodern and postcolonial literature. The second major trend in Hwang’s later plays is his boldly transformative use of earlier works, particularly (but not exclusively) Western operas. Puccini’s Madame Butterfly and Verdi’s Aida both exemplify what the critic Edward Said has termed “Orientalism,” the tendency of European (or American) writers and composers to “invent” an “Orient” that is defined by the “other-ness” of its ways, though such presentation may have little or nothing to do with the actualities of life in those non-Western cultures. Hwang’s works are often redactions of these classics, deconstructing some of the cultural assumptions that prevailed when they were first produced. Because Aida was a collaboration in which Hwang joined two other writers, a composer, and a lyricist, the extent and nature of his specific contributions to the text cannot readily be ascertained. Flower Drum Song • In his revamping of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song, however, both of the trends cited above receive their fullest elaboration since M. Butterfly. The original production, which opened in New York in 1958, was not as successful as South Pacific, Oklahoma!, Carousel, or The Sound of Music, but it ran for over 600 performances and was made into a film in 1961. Based on a novel by Chin Y. Lee (1957), it told the story of a mail-order bride from China, Mei-Li, who arrived in San Francisco to marry nightclub owner Sammy Fong, who was already in love with Linda Low, a stripper in the club. Although many of its cast members were Asian (including Pat Suzuki as Linda Low and Miyoshi Umeki as Mei-Li), the role of Sammy Fong was played by a Caucasian actor, Larry Blyden, who was made up to appear Chinese. In Hwang’s revision of the story, the character of Sammy Fong has been eliminated. The setting is now a traditional Chinese theater that has presented Chinese opera, but is being transformed by the owner’s son into a Western-style nightclub, the Club Chop Suey. The father, Master Wang, is rooted in traditional Chinese culture, while his son Ta is attracted to the more modern and Americanized culture that is represented by the nightclub. The characters of Linda Low and Mei-Li have been retained in Hwang’s version, although Mei-Li is now a refugee from Mao’s China. The score, though reorchestrated, retains most of the songs from the original (except “The Older Generation”) and restores one that was cut from the original production before its Broadway opening (“My Best Love”). One song (“The Next Time It Happens”) from another Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Pipe Dream, was also added. The emphasis on the two styles of theater also allows Hwang to develop the theme of performance and theatricality that also characterized M. Butterfly.

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Other major works screenplays: M. Butterfly, 1993 (adaptation of his play); Golden Gate, 1994; Possession, 2001 (with Neil LaBute and Laura Jones; adaptation of A. S. Byatt’s novel). teleplays: My American Son, 1987; The Lost Empire, 2001. Bibliography Bernstein, Richard. “France Jails Two in Odd Case of Espionage.” The New York Times, May 11, 1986, p. K7. The original news account on which M. Butterfly is based. It recounts the sentencing for espionage of Bernard Bouriscot, a forty-one-year-old French diplomat, and Chinese opera singer Shi Peipeu. During their twenty-year relationship, Bouriscot mistakenly believed Peipeu was a woman. He also believed they had a son, Shi Dudu. Chen, Tina. “Betrayed into Motion: The Seduction of Narrative Desire in M. Butterfly.” Hitting Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism 1, no. 2 (Spring, 1994): 129-154. Analyzes M. Butterfly as postmodern drama, focusing on its relationship with the audience. Gerard, Jeremy. “David Hwang: Riding on the Hyphen.” The New York Times Magazine, March 13, 1988, pp. 44, 88-89. This biographical profile, preceding the Broadway debut of M. Butterfly, focuses on Hwang’s crossover from ethnic to mainstream commercial theater with a play that violates conventions of commercial theater in its treatment of sexism, racism, and imperialism, plus its inclusion of Chinese opera, its scandalous plot, and its brief nudity. Hwang comments on the self-doubt that accompanied his sudden fame. Hwang, David Henry. “Interview with Marty Moss-Coane. Edited with an Introduction by John Timpane.” In Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights, edited by Philip C. Kolin and Colby H. Kullman. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996. Edited transcript of an interview broadcast on National Public Radio in 1993. Hwang discusses the process of adapting M. Butterfly for the screen and discusses his family and childhood in more detail than typically found elsewhere. _______. “M. Butterfly: An Interview with David Henry Hwang.” Interview by John Lewis DiGaetani. The Drama Review: A Journal of Performance Studies 33, no. 3 (Fall, 1989): 141-153. In this extensive interview, Hwang discusses M. Butterfly, Edward W. Said’s Orientalism (1978), the mutual misperceptions of West and East embodied in Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, and his play’s implications about homosexuality, heterosexuality, and fantasy in love. He also suggests that René Gallimard knew—at some level—that his lover was a man. Photographs. Morris, Rosalind. “M. Butterfly: Transvestism and Cultural Cross Dressing in the Critique of Empire.” In Gender and Culture in Literature and Film East and West: Issues of Perception and Interpretation, edited by Nitaya Masavisut et al. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994. Discussion of gender issues and the theme of imperialism in Hwang’s best-known play. Pace, Eric. “I Write Plays to Claim a Place for Asian Americans.” The New York Times, July 12, 1981, p. D4. This biographical profile was published shortly after The Dance and the Railroad opened in New York. Among his attributes as a playwright, Hwang discusses his ability to listen to people with opposite views and empathize with both, his interest in myth and legend, and his concern that Chinese American characters be presented not as polemics but as people. Skloot, Robert. “Breaking the Butterfly: The Politics of David Henry Hwang.” Modern

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Drama 33, no. 1 (March, 1990): 59-66. Skloot discusses the ways in which M. Butterfly brings its audience “into complicity with the discovery, dismantling, and reestablishment of theatrical illusion.” Though within the limits of “old-fashioned playwriting,” it also challenges traditional assumptions about gender politics, cultural politics, and theatrical politics, which are discussed in separate sections of the article. Street, Douglas. David Henry Hwang. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1989. This fifty-two-page study, the first book to have been written on Hwang’s work, provides a useful introductory overview of his plays through M. Butterfly and contains a concise but detailed biography of the playwright. Bibliography. Weinraub, Bernard. “Fleshing Out Chinatown Stereotypes.” New York Times, October 14, 2000, section 2, pp. 7, 27. Lengthy interview-based profile of Hwang, emphasizing his reworking of Flower Drum Song and its preproduction history. William Hutchings

Henrik Ibsen Henrik Ibsen

Born: Skien, Norway; March 20, 1828 Died: Christiania (now Oslo), Norway; May 23, 1906 Principal drama • Catalina, pb. 1850, revised pb. 1875, pr. 1881 (verse drama; Catiline, 1921); Kjæmpehøien, pr. 1850, revised pb. 1854 (dramatic poem; The Burial Mound, 1912); Norma: Eller, En politikers kjærlighed, pr., pb. 1851 (verse satire); Sancthansnatten, pr. 1853, pb. 1909 (St. John’s Night, 1921); Fru Inger til Østraat, pr. 1855, pb. 1857 (Lady Inger of Østraat, 1906); Gildet paa Solhaug, pr., pb. 1856, revised pb. 1883 (verse and prose drama; The Feast at Solhaugh, 1906); Olaf Liljekrans, pr. 1857, pb. 1902 (verse and prose drama; English translation, 1911); Hærmænde paa Helgeland, pr., pb. 1858 (The Vikings at Helgeland, 1890); Kjærlighedens komedie, pb. 1862, pr. 1873 (verse comedy; Love’s Comedy, 1900); Kongsemnerne, pb. 1863, pr. 1864 (The Pretenders, 1890); Brand, pb. 1866, pr. 1885 (dramatic poem; English translation, 1891); Peer Gynt, pb. 1867, pr. 1876 (dramatic poem; English translation, 1892); De unges forbund, pr., pb. 1869 (The League of Youth, 1890); Kejser og Galilæer, pb. 1873, pr. 1896 (2 parts: Cæsars frafald and Kejser Julian; Emperor and Galilean, 1876, 2 parts: Caesar’s Apostasy and The Emperor Julian); Samfundets støtter, pr., pb. 1877 (The Pillars of Society, 1880); Et dukkehjem, pr., pb. 1879 (A Doll’s House, 1880; also known as A Doll House); Gengangere, pb. 1881, pr. 1882 (Ghosts, 1885); En folkefiende, pb. 1882, pr. 1883 (An Enemy of the People, 1890); Vildanden, pb. 1884, pr. 1885 (The Wild Duck, 1891); Rosmersholm, pb. 1886, pr. 1887 (English translation, 1889); Fruen fra havet, pb. 1888, pr. 1889 (The Lady from the Sea, 1890); Hedda Gabler, pb. 1890, pr. 1891 (English translation, 1891); Bygmester Solness, pb. 1892, pr. 1893 (The Master Builder, 1893); Lille Eyolf, pb. 1894, pr. 1895 (Little Eyolf, 1894); John Gabriel Borkman, pb. 1896, pr. 1897 (English translation, 1897); Naar vi døde vaagner, pb. 1899, pr. 1900 (When We Dead Awaken, 1900); Samlede verker, hundreaarsutgave, pb. 19281957 (21 volumes); The Oxford Ibsen, pb. 1960-1977 (8 volumes); The Complete Major Prose Plays, pb. 1978 Other literary forms • Henrik Ibsen’s volume of poetry, Digte, was published in 1871; Ibsen: Letters and Speeches appeared in English translation in 1964, and The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen appeared between 1906 and 1912 and in 1928. Achievements • Henrik Ibsen is widely acknowledged as the father of modern drama, but his significance in literature and history overshadows the influence of his revolutionary stage techniques and his iconoclastic concept of the theater. James Joyce observed of Ibsen, his youthful idol, “It may be questioned whether any man has held so firm an empire over the thinking world in modern times.” Despite early disappointments, which led to twenty-seven years of self-imposed exile from Norway, Ibsen at last received the acclaim there that he had been accorded previously throughout Europe, and by the end of his long and immensely productive career, the Norwegian government granted him a state funeral as one of its most illustrious, if controversial, citizens. Ibsen’s plays continue to be revived throughout the world, and a steady stream of scholarly books and articles testifies to his popularity among critics and readers who appreciate the therapeutic northern blasts of Ibsen’s message. 480

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The unvarying setting of Ibsen’s quest as a creative artist was the human mind. At first, he concentrated, with little success, on Norwegian nationalistic themes and historical subjects, in opposition to the Danish domination of Scandinavian theater. As he probed increasingly profound psychological themes involving the individual and society, his analytic dramas seemed threateningly radical, largely incomprehensible, or simply obscene to European audiences then content with frothy farce or Scribean melodrama. Ibsen’s first plays written from exile in Italy won for him fame, but their critical reception was mixed. Later, his social problem plays found their greatest contemporary acceptance in England through William Archer’s devoted translations and George Bernard Shaw’s espousal of Ibsen’s work as support for his own Socialist theories. In his next stage, Ibsen concentrated on the individual’s psychological condition; his last plays, written after his return to Norway, which deal with the conflict between art and life, exhibited his shift to Symbolism and were greeted with enthusiasm by James Joyce and Thomas Mann, who both learned Norwegian solely to read Ibsen’s works. Another lonely thinker, Sigmund Freud, wrote a perceptive essay on the Oedipus complex as motivation in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm. Much of Europe, especially czarist Russia, saw Ibsen’s plays as potentially explosive, but by 1935, the prominent critic Johanna Kröner commented, “Through Ibsen’s influence, European drama has experienced a powerful renewal and progress.” Ibsen’s technical innovations in the theater have become so widely accepted that it is difficult to grasp the intense novelty that they represented to their contemporary audiences. The strongly realistic and even naturalistic stage settings of his mature plays contain a wealth of closely observed detail that requires a corresponding intensity of attention by actors to the individualized behavior of his characters. His tense, crackling interchanges of dialogue, a dramatic shorthand, often seem to omit more words than they include, conveying highly complex states of mind and passions through implication and demanding a high degree of emotional stamina from his actors. As Ibsen’s American translator Rolf Fjelde has observed, the language of Ibsen’s finest plays resembles poetry in its compaction and resonance. Above all, as Henry James noted, Ibsen has a “peculiar blessedness to actors . . . the inspiration of dealing with material so solid and so fresh,” an attraction that seems as valid for the careful reader as it is for Ibsen’s stage interpreter. Though Ibsen’s contributions to dramatic theory and form have been outmoded by many of the very dramatists his work inspired, his insight into the human condition has not dated. Ibsen insisted that he not only “described human beings” but also “described human fates.” Such fates, springing from deep conflicts in human personalities, provide both solid and fresh material for endless meditation. In scholar Einar Haugen’s words, “Ibsen’s plays . . . enable people to look beyond the little cares of the day and . . . give them some glimpses of eternity.” Biography • Henrik Johan Ibsen was born on March 20, 1828, to a well-to-do merchant family of Skien, a small town in the county of Telemark in Norway, whose people Norwegian historians describe as “sanguine but often melancholic . . . proud and stiff . . . afraid openly to surrender to a mood,” people who have an apparent lack of spontaneity that Ibsen called “the shyness of the soul.” The Ibsens lived well, entertaining lavishly, until Henrik was seven, when financial pressures bankrupted his father, and the family was forced to move to an isolated farm.

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Through the next eight years, young Ibsen felt himself an outcast from the provincial, snobbish social clique once eager to savor the family’s hospitality. When he was fifteen, Ibsen became apprenticed to an apothecary at Grimstad, a tiny shipbuilding village down the coast, and his poverty was intensified by the necessity of supporting an illegitimate son for the following fourteen years. The boy’s mother, a servant of his employer, was ten years older than Ibsen, and there was no thought of marriage. Though he was already writing poetry, Ibsen originally had considered becoming a physician, but the revolutionary fervor in the air in 1848 led him to write Catiline, a dramatic treatment in blank verse of the rebellious Roman senator. After failing his entrance examinations for medicine, Ibsen turned wholeheartedly to literature. In the fearsome struggles that he experienced in the next two decades of his life, Fjelde sees “the seeds of so many of the themes and motifs that found their way into the series of masterpieces composed between Ibsen’s forty-seventh and seventyfirst years.” Having already endured financial ruin and the scorn of “pillars of society,” Ibsen next faced the frustrations of an unappreciated author. Selling his painfully financed copies of Catiline as scrap paper, he realized only enough funds to buy himself and a friend one decent dinner during his six years as the new Norwegian Theater’s stage manager and resident playwright. From 1857 to 1862, Ibsen abandoned some of his early bohemianism to become artistic director of the poverty-stricken Norwegian Theater in Christiania (now Oslo), which then was a backward, swampy town whose audiences worshiped the dominant Danish theater. Ibsen wrote eight plays there, all stressing Norwegian history and national spirit; all failed. He had married Suzannah Thoreson in 1858, the Norwegian Theater closed in 1862, and in 1864 they left for the Continent with their only child, Sigurd. Ibsen chose not to live in Norway again for twenty-seven years. The disillusionment that Ibsen must have felt toward his countrymen is clear in the two verse plays that he wrote in exile, Brand and Peer Gynt. Brand involves an unbending country pastor whose ideal is “all or nothing”; he sets out to reform his society but is destroyed. Peer Gynt, a folktale drama, chronicles the escapades of a picaresque rascal who wins forgiveness in a woman’s embrace. Brand earned for Ibsen fame and a modest stipend from the Norwegian government at the same time that it provoked fiery debate at home and abroad, while Peer Gynt, a witty criticism of the relatively comfortable life in eastern Norway, eventually became the one book that most Norwegians would take with them if they had to emigrate, according to the Norwegian literary historian Francis Bull. At the same time, Ibsen was mulling over the implementation of Hegelian idealism in a huge “world(Library of Congress) historical” play which evolved into

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Emperor and Galilean, an account of Julian the Apostate that depicts the monumental battle of Christianity against paganism in the fourth century Roman Empire. This tenact play, impossible to stage, was not accepted by Ibsen’s contemporaries and remained largely unappreciated. Beginning in the 1870’s, the second half of his exile, Ibsen moved restlessly from place to place in Europe: Rome, Austria, Munich, and Dresden. As he went, he constructed a series of twelve major prose plays that he wanted grasped “as a continuous and coherent whole,” the “subtly and significantly interconnected dramatic cycle,” as Fjelde describes it, on which Ibsen’s artistic reputation chiefly rests. For these plays, he not only drew on the bitter disappointments of his own early life in Norway but also wove the most personal experiences of others’ anxiety, frustration, and mental anguish into them. By 1891, when Ibsen had somewhat hesitantly returned to Norway to stay, Meyer claims that “Christiania was . . . full of people who regarded themselves as the originals of various characters in his plays,” not an unmixed blessing. Whatever their social or psychological antecedents, the characters of Ibsen’s great prose cycle represent the complex stresses of the modern world, relentlessly exposing such human failings as hypocrisy, moral cowardice, emotional slavery, and deep frustration in marriage. The conflict between the demands of his life and his art adversely affected Ibsen’s own marriage. Often at least geographically separated, he and his wife gradually drew apart emotionally as well. As he aged, Ibsen became increasingly fascinated with the young, and during a holiday to the Tirol in 1889, he had a brief and hopeless affair with an eighteen-year-old Viennese girl, Emilie Bardach, whom he called “the May sun of a September life.” Ibsen subsequently formed emotional attachments to three other young women, among them the pianist Hildur Andersen, whom he described in a phrase from Peer Gynt as “My Empire and my Crown!” The young women who dominate his last plays—Hedda, Hilde, Rita, and Irene—share passionate, youthful intensity, but their hopes are defeated by the careers of their would-be lovers. None of Ibsen’s late involvements developed into a total sexual relationship. As he wrote in his notes for Hedda Gabler, “The great tragedy of life is that so many people have nothing to do but yearn for happiness without ever being able to find it.” Meyer cites psychiatrist Anthony Storr’s diagnosis of Ibsen as technically “an obsessional character”: Such creative people “want to create an imaginary world in which everything can be controlled, and want to avoid the unpredictability and spontaneity of real relationships with real people.” Ibsen’s attraction to youth, however, was not limited to young girls. His young French male companion, director Aurélian-Marie Lugné-Poë, noted that Ibsen “had an almost obsessive interest in the rising generation” and took pains to become acquainted with Norway’s new writers and artists, “the people who understood his plays most clearly.” During 1891, the year that he returned to Norway to stay, Ibsen attended a performance of August Strindberg’s Fadren (pr., pb. 1887; The Father, 1912) and a lecture by the thirty-two-year-old Knut Hamsun, author of a pain-filled autobiographical novel of the working class entitled Sult (1890; Hunger, 1899). Hamsun had already given his lecture elsewhere and attacked Ibsen and his work forcefully, particularly “the inherent stiffness and poverty of his emotional life.” Hamsun mistakenly saw merely social significance in Ibsen’s work, a position of many later critics, but Ibsen attended not only that lecture but also the second and third of the series, finding confirmation there, Meyer conjectures, “of the conviction he himself had already reached that a writer

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must explore the uncharted waters of the unconscious,” the dark arena that Ibsen chose for his last plays. At seventy-two, as the new century arrived, Ibsen was failing physically. He suffered the first of a series of strokes on March 5, 1890, and never regained full physical health. He hoped to start a new play and perhaps even to travel, but as his condition deteriorated, he was able only to sit at his window gazing vacantly before him; once the renowned actress Eleonora Duse, whose greatest stage triumphs were in his works, gazed in mute tribute at his wintry silhouette from an icy sidewalk. Toward the end, he told his wife, “You were the eagle that showed me the way to the summit.” His last word was “Tvertimod!” (“On the contrary!”), a fitting comment, Meyer observes, “from one who had devoted his life to the correction of lies.” His state funeral on June 1, 1906, was attended by an immense crowd, and over his grave, the Norwegian people set a column bearing “the simple and appropriate symbol of a hammer.” Analysis • “To be a poet is, most of all, to see,” Henrik Ibsen said, and early in his literary career, he had already recognized the hammer as at once the symbol of creation and of destruction, with mythical overtones of the Old Norse thunder god, Thor, who unflinchingly sacrificed his own hand to bind the wolf Fenris and save his world from the unleashed forces of the underworld. Ibsen’s early poem “The Miner” shows his gaze fixed firmly into the depths: “Downward I must break my way . . . break me the way, my heavy hammer, to the hidden mystery’s heart.” Throughout his literary canon, although he is best known for his prose dramas, the rich poetic vein is never far from the working face of Ibsen’s creativity. The constructions and destructions necessary to the realization of Ibsen’s vision fall into two distinct categories on either side of the watershed year of 1875. Fjelde differentiates them in apt architectural metaphor, viewing the earlier romantic group of Ibsen’s plays as a diverse old quarter, ranging from Roman villa to Viking guildhalls and even a contemporary honeymoon hotel, while glimpsing immediately beyond a small arid space “what appears to be a model town of virtually identical row houses . . . dark and swarming with secret life.” Whatever the outward style of their construction, at the core, all of Ibsen’s earlier plays share a basically romantic orientation. Romanticism had already reached its fiery height in most of Europe by the time Ibsen published his first verse drama in 1850, but like the northern summer sun, the German-derived glow of romanticism lingered longer in Norway, where the emerging Norwegian state, lately reestablished, was seeking its national identity in its Viking heritage. While reviewing a folkloristic play in 1851, Ibsen presented his own characteristically individual theory on nationalism in literature: “A national author is one who finds the best way of embodying in his work that keynote which rings out to us from mountain and valley . . . but above all from within our own selves.” Following that precept at the risk of alienating superpatriots, Ibsen wrote three Viking plays, Lady Inger of Østraat, The Feast at Solhaugh, and The Vikings at Helgeland. In 1862, he made an extensive field trip to gather folklore, which he incorporated with Rousseauistic ideals of the simple natural life in The Pretenders, another medieval Viking drama; in the volcanic Brand, set in the harsh west fjord country; and in the lighthearted Peer Gynt. An important part of Norway’s nationalistic fervor stemmed from its state Lutheranism, in which Ibsen had received a traditionally rigorous grounding as a child, although none of his plays portrays clergymen sympathetically. In Brand, Ibsen also seemed to embody Søren Kierkegaard’s famous “either-or” in Brand’s call for “all

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or nothing,” challenging the institutionalized religion of his day. Haugen has commented that paradoxically “the rascal Peer is saved, but the heroic Brand is sacrificed,” seeing therein a reflection of Ibsen’s early religious training, similar to his puritanical attitude toward sex and his emphasis on the necessity of confession and atonement for redemption. The dominant philosophical trend of Ibsen’s time and place was the idealism of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who died in 1831. Ibsen’s enormous double play, Emperor and Galilean, departs from the strictly romantic theories present in his earlier work to take the direction of a Hegelian dialectic conflict between “thesis” and “antithesis,” which is resolved by a “synthesis” that itself becomes the “thesis” of a new conflict. Ibsen pits the pagan happiness that he had celebrated in his Viking plays against the spiritual beauty represented by Christ’s redeeming sacrifice on the Cross. The failure of Julian the Apostate to bring about the required “third empire,” mingling the Christian and the pagan worlds, may be read as Ibsen’s rejection, like Kierkegaard’s, of the possibility of achieving a synthesis in this life. For Ibsen, duality was inescapable in the human condition, with humanity caught between what it is and what it should be, between the beastly nature and the divine. In 1875, midway in his literary career, Ibsen struck an “arid place” where he reluctantly had to concede that the rhyme and meter suitable to romantic drama could no longer convey his explorations of “the hidden mystery’s heart.” The literary trend in Europe, leading toward the realistic and even naturalistic expression of contemporary social problems, came to Scandinavia principally through the critic Georg Brandes, who had become Ibsen’s close friend in 1871. Ibsen’s last twelve plays divide neatly into three distinct subgroups of four dramas each, characterized by their dominant thematic elements—social, psychological, and philosophical. This sequence, which Ibsen clearly intended as an organic whole, leads inexorably from social agony to spiritual conflict and at last to an area hitherto unexplored in Ibsen’s time, described by Fjelde as an “extraordinary, pre-Freudian sensitivity to unconscious pressures behind the conscious mind—the relationships of motives and conflicts bred in the troll-dark cellar.” In each category, Ibsen employed his personal experiences differently. From The Pillars of Society to An Enemy of the People, the social plays use contemporary settings that might have been encountered on the streets of Christiania and characters caught up in the new industrialized manifestation of the old conflict between what is and what ought to be. Between The Wild Duck and Hedda Gabler, Ibsen’s hammer broke through to a deeper layer of consciousness beyond the social, forcing away the barriers which the individual erects between his self-image and his ideals. Finally, from The Master Builder to When We Dead Awaken, Ibsen probed the clash between his artistic vocation and his responsibility to those who loved him, using in each play a flawed creative personality who at last realizes that the ultimate height of achievement is denied him because he has not been able to merge love with his art. With the twelve plays of his prose cycle, Ibsen adopted what Fjelde calls “a way of seeing, deceptively photographic on the surface, actually a complex fusion of perspectives, which then became his dramatic method,” as, even more significantly, he simultaneously reached the summit and the deepest heart of his own experience of life. To the theater in particular and to literature in amazing generality, Ibsen bequeathed innovations almost as astonishing in retrospect as they must have been to his contemporaries. He was first to involve ordinary human beings in drama, abandoning the old artificial plots and instead creating scenes that might be encountered in any

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stuffy drawing room or aching human heart. He conveyed for the first time in centuries a depth and subtlety of understanding of human character and relationships, especially those of women, evocative of the height of human tragic experience seen previously among the Elizabethans and the Periclean Greeks. He dared to challenge social abuses, knowing their agonizing sting at first hand. He explored the unconscious mind to an extent unmatched until the promulgation of Freud’s theories decades later. The Vikings at Helgeland • Before Ibsen gained the summit of his creative efforts he participated in the attempt to create a national Norwegian theater by writing plays based on Norwegian folktales. Ibsen gathered his material for The Vikings at Helgeland not from the medieval German epic The Nibelungenlied but from a much older work, The Völsungasaga, itself a derivation of the Elder Edda containing the story of the Valkyrie Brynhild, who destroys her beloved hero Sigurd because he has betrayed her trust. Ibsen chose to base The Vikings at Helgeland on the Icelandic family saga, in which, he said, “the titanic conditions and occurrences of The Nibelungenlied and the Volsung-Saga have simply been reduced to human dimensions.” Yet he saw an insoluble incompatibility between the objective saga and the dramatic form: “If a writer is to create a dramatic work out of this epic material, he must introduce a foreign element. . . .” Ibsen’s “foreign element” in The Vikings at Helgeland is realism, a rendition of the myth of Brynhild set in tenth century Norway, at the advent of Christianity. The Brynhild-figure is Hjørdis, a merciless visionary, married to Gunnar but in love with Gunnar’s close friend, the weak-willed warrior Sigurd, who had won her under the guise of Gunnar and with whom she has had her only satisfying sexual experience. When Hjørdis learns of the deception—Sigurd is married to another woman—she slays her lover, hoping to be united with him in death, but as he dies, Sigurd reveals that his meek wife Dagny has converted him to Christianity. In despair and rage, the pagan Hjørdis hurls herself into the sea. Ibsen’s preoccupation in The Vikings at Helgeland is not with the fall of mythic goddesses and heroes but with the human tragedy wrought by deliberate falsehood, a theme to which he would often return. Brand • Ibsen called Brand “a dramatic poem.” Brand is a stern young pastor who defies both his church superiors and the self-serving local governmental officials, demanding “all or nothing” in the service of his God. Brand even applies his unbending doctrines to his mother, to whom he refuses to grant forgiveness unless she relinquishes all her property, and to his wife and his child, who die because Brand will not take them to a milder climate. Brand then leads his flock to an “ice church” high in the mountains, where he believes that they will all be closer to God, but, daunted by the painful journey, his people at last stone him and return to their valley far below. Brand is finally moved to tears by a vision of his dead wife shortly before he is buried by a mammoth avalanche, above whose roar he hears a voice proclaim, “He is a God of love.” In Brand, the story of a man whose tragedy is the negation of love, Ibsen not only used the figure of an acquaintance he had met in Rome, Christopher Bruun, a devout reformer who fought the established church as well as the spirit of compromise, but also drew on his own personality. He remarked in an 1870 letter, “Brand is myself in my best moments.” Emperor and Galilean • Emperor and Galilean, the double play that stands between Ibsen’s two groups of dramas, ranges over much of the fourth century Roman Empire, interpreting successive phases in the life of Julian the Apostate, who tried to replace

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Constantine’s Christianity with a renewed paganism. In part 1, Caesar’s Apostasy, the young Julian is disillusioned by Christianity and is influenced by the pagan seer Maximos, who desires a “third empire” uniting classical beauty and Christian ethics. In part 2, The Emperor Julian, force proves ineffective in reinstating pagan religious observances; in battle, Agathon, a Christian, slays Julian, who mutters as he dies, “Thou hast conquered, Galilean.” Like Cain and Judas, Julian unknowingly changed history in a way he never intended. Ibsen told Edmund Gosse, “The illusion I wanted to produce is that of reality . . . what I desired to depict were human beings.” He also said later that Emperor and Galilean contained “more of my own personal experience than I would care to admit.” He saw Christianity as removing the joy from human life, his own included, encasing people in an emotional confinement from which only violent action could free them. This play marks Ibsen’s “farewell to epic drama” and his adoption of prose as his dramatic medium; Meyer calls it the “forerunner of those naturalistic plays which were shortly to explode . . . like a series of bombs.” A Doll’s House • The famous slamming of the Helmer front door in A Doll House was the second realistic explosion in Ibsen’s bombardment of his society’s outmoded thought and repressive lifestyle. Significantly, new translations of the play point out the vital difference between the older title, A Doll’s House, a house belonging to the “doll” Nora, and A Doll House, a complex toy, as Fjelde suggests, that itself is “on trial . . . tested by the visitors that come and go, embodying aspects of the inescapable reality outside.” At the beginning, Nora is merely a pretty young wife preparing for Christmas, almost a child herself in her eagerness to please her banker-husband as his “squirrel” and “lark.” As Hermann J. Weigand has demonstrated, Nora’s love of playacting, her readiness to lie, and her desire to show off make her all the more convincing as she reveals that she has secretly borrowed money needed to save her husband from a physical collapse. Worse, the conventions of the day denied women the right to take out loans in their own names, so Nora was forced by circumstances to forge her dying father’s signature to the loan. Her creditor, Nils Krogstad, blackmails her to keep his position at Helmer’s bank. When Helmer learns of Nora’s debt, he selfishly and brutally declares that she is unfit to rear their children. Nora recognizes the falsity of her position and leaves her husband and children, slamming the door on her life as the toy of Helmer, who is himself a toy of society. In his “Notes for a Modern Tragedy” (1878), Ibsen wrote, “There are two kinds of moral laws . . . one for men and one, quite different, for women.” He knew that in his day, “woman is judged by masculine law,” and he used for specifics the contemporary real-life tragedy of Laura Kieler, a friend of Ibsen who had taken out a secret loan so that she could travel with her husband to Italy for his health. The loan went bad; she forged a check; and when the bank refused payment, her husband had her committed to a public asylum and demanded a separation, so that her children would not be contaminated by her presence. Kieler grudgingly took his wife back eventually, but Ibsen’s use of her sad story in his play placed additional stress on their already difficult relationship, and Laura Kieler resented A Doll House fiercely. Many interpreters narrowly see A Doll House as a plea for female emancipation. Nothing seems further from Ibsen’s intention. In 1879, he did strongly support equal voting rights for female members of the Scandinavian Club in Rome, but nearly twenty years later, in 1898, when he spoke to the Norwegian League for Women’s Rights, he declared, “My task has been the description of humanity,” as Fjelde notes,

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putting the issue of women’s liberation squarely in the larger context of “the artist’s freedom and the evolution of the race in general.” Ghosts • Ibsen wrote to Sophie Adlersparre in 1882, “After Nora, Mrs. Alving had to come,” and he often said that writing Ghosts was “an absolute necessity” for him. Mrs. Alving is not simply a Nora grown older, but a character evolved into a vastly more tragic figure. Nora leaves her home, but Mrs. Alving stays with her debauched husband, an irredeemable syphilitic sot. After his death, she builds an orphanage with his fortune and welcomes home their son Oswald, who has been living as an artist in Paris. A villainous carpenter at the orphanage, Engstrand, tries to entice his daughter Regine, Mrs. Alving’s maid, into becoming a hostess (and more) in a seamen’s hangout he plans to build, and Engstrand persuades Mrs. Alving’s pastor, Manders, to speak to Mrs. Alving in that regard. Manders, once Mrs. Alving’s lover, though he counseled her to return to her husband, learns not only that Regine is Captain Alving’s illegitimate daughter but also that Mrs. Alving has begun to question her religion. As they talk, they overhear an innocent flirtation between Oswald and Regine in the next room, a “ghost” of a flirtation of years before, when Mrs. Alving overheard her husband and her maid, Regine’s mother. After fire destroys the uninsured orphanage, consuming the captain’s financial legacy, the ill and exhausted Oswald learns the horrifying truth about Regine’s birth and his own inherited venereal disease. Regine consequently leaves to join Engstrand, who blackmails Manders into supporting his new business venture, and Mrs. Alving is left alone with Oswald as he slips into paretic insanity, begging his mother to help him end his life at once. Ibsen knew that such material could hardly help but inflame Victorian sensibilities. Early in 1882, he wrote, “The violent criticisms and insane attacks . . . don’t worry me in the least.” As always, Ibsen relished the thrill of the battle, but Ghosts aroused more negative sentiment than any of his other plays. Norwegian critics led Europe in dismissing it, Ludvig Josephson calling it “one of the filthiest things ever written in Scandinavia,” and Erik Bøgh rejecting it as “a repulsive pathological phenomenon.” Nevertheless, Ghosts stimulated the young and the daring. By 1888, some observers noted that the play was comparable to classical Greek tragedy though written about modern people, an opinion still popular today. Whereas in the Greek drama, inexorable Fate brings heroes low, in Ibsen’s Ghosts, the power of the past devours the central figures. A choice once made must stand, regardless of the consequences, Ibsen is saying, and all the shocks that he delivers to his audience reinforce his basic message. The human choice must be made, in Fjelde’s words, “out of the integrity of one’s whole being.” The ghosts of the past rise to strangle Helene Alving, the hypocritical Pastor Manders, and even the innocent victims of their parents’ mistakes, Oswald and Regine. The most powerful of Ibsen’s tightly constructed social plays, Ghosts also marks an important milestone in dramatic history; according to Meyer, it was “the first great tragedy written about middle-class people in plain, everyday prose.” Rosmersholm • Ghosts of a somber past also haunt the brooding manor house in Rosmersholm, the second of Ibsen’s psychological dramas and the one that, after Ghosts, had the worst contemporary reviews. Among the few who supported it, Strindberg, in a rare tribute to Ibsen, declared Rosmersholm “unintelligible to the theatre public, mystical to the semi-educated, but crystal-clear to anyone with a knowledge of modern psychology.” The central problem of Rosmersholm is the redemption of a human spirit. A young,

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liberal-spirited woman, Rebecca West, came to the estate on a western fjord as companion to Rosmer’s wife, Beate, and after Beate’s suicide stayed on as manager of the household, influencing Rosmer, who feels drawn to her unconsciously. His brother-inlaw, the inflexible schoolmaster Kroll, attempts to turn Rosmer back to conservatism, but when he fails, he recalls his late sister’s intimations of “goings-on,” as does the leader of the radical element, the journalist Mortensgaard. Rosmer tries to quiet the talk by proposing to Rebecca, but she rejects him violently. After Rosmer’s sense of guilt at his wife’s despair begins to eat at him, Rebecca openly admits her guilt in urging Beate to death, confessing that she had acted out of love for him. As she prepares to leave the estate, she tells Rosmer that her earlier “pagan” will has fallen under Rosmersholm’s traditional moralistic spell, which “ennobles . . . but kills happiness.” Rosmer and Rebecca pledge their mutual love, savoring one final moment of bliss before, in atonement, they follow Beate into the white foam of the millrace. Meyer claims that “in this play Ibsen was, for the first time . . . in any play for over two centuries, overtly probing the uncharted waters of the unconscious mind.” Ibsen had given the play the working title “The White Horses,” after the ghost reputedly seen frequently on the estate, a white horse, the symbol of irresistible unconscious forces driving the individual to excessive behavior, based on a folktale about a water spirit in equine shape that lures its victims into dangerous depths. Ibsen gradually reveals that Rebecca came to Rosmerholm as not only the former mistress of one Dr. West but also, as she learned too late, his daughter. Her Oedipal guilt, as Freud observed in 1914, drove her to dispose of Beate, “getting rid of the wife and mother, so that she might take her place with the husband and father.” Beate’s death in the millrace was only the most recent guilt-inspired act of violence that Rebecca, under the refining, “ennobling” influence of Rosmer, found she must expiate. Ironically, Rosmer himself is weak, and his one act of heroism is performed for Rebecca: “There is no judge over us; and therefore we must do justice upon ourselves.” In his advice to a young actress undertaking the role of Rebecca in Christiania, Ibsen wrote, “Observe the life that is going on around you, and present a real and living human being.” He also instructed the head of the Christiania Theater that Rebecca “does not force Rosmer forward. She lures him.” His characterization of Rebecca West, who throughout the play crochets an indefinable white garment, calls up mythic overtones of the Norse Norns, spinning out human destiny in some white-fogged eternal night. Ibsen’s revelation of man’s destiny in Rosmersholm is once more in woman’s hands, here lightening the eternal dark with one perfect gesture of sacrificial atonement made ironically for an imperfect lover, an echo of the myth of Brynhild that he had treated earlier in The Vikings at Helgeland and to which he would return before long. With Rosmersholm, Ibsen left off political themes as motivation in his drama. The men and women of the Ibsen plays that followed became increasingly aware of what Meyer calls “the trolls within, not the trolls without . . . strange sick passions which direct their lives.” Ibsen’s earlier plays had portrayed men such as Rosmer undone by their involvement with provincial politics, while his later works stress figures, mostly women such as Rebecca, who feel intense passion but who cannot express it and thus become “ennobled” without some salvific act of atonement requiring the emancipation of self-sacrifice. Hedda Gabler • In the powerful domestic tragedy Hedda Gabler, often considered his most popular play, Ibsen adapted the old myth of Brynhild to startling new uses.

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Around this time, he wrote, “Our whole being is nothing but a fight against the dark forces within ourselves,” and he began to see that the greatest human resource in that struggle, the will, tended to remain undeveloped in women of his day. As the daughter of General Gabler, Hedda had romantically dreamed of a perfect hero, but her dreams and her physical realization with a man not her equal were quite different. Eilert Løvborg, whose combination of profligacy and brilliant scholarship had originally fascinated her, proved unworthy, and she turned in anger and frustration to mediocre Jørgen Tesman, settling for the weaker man as Hjørdis had done in The Vikings at Helgeland. Like Hjørdis, too, Hedda is violently jealous of the gentle girl her first hero seems to prefer. At the opening of the play, Hedda and Jørgen have returned to their bourgeois home and to Jørgen’s bourgeois aunts after a wretched six-month European honeymoon. Hedda is suffering from massive ennui already, compounded by a pregnancy she ferociously denies. When she learns that Eilert Løvborg has reformed under the tutelage of ordinary Thea Elvstad, whose lovely curling hair she has always envied, Hedda exacts a horrifying vengeance. She goads Løvborg to drink again; he loses the only manuscript of the monumental book he has composed with Thea’s help, and he later comes to his senses in the boudoir of the redheaded Mlle Diana, a notorious fille de joie. Jørgen finds Løvborg’s manuscript and gives it to Hedda, but when Løvborg, frantic at the loss of his “child,” comes to Hedda for help, she denies all knowledge of it. Alone, Hedda burns his book, and after a final conversation, she sends him to a “beautiful” death by handing him one of her father’s dueling pistols. Hedda’s own moment of despair arrives when she learns that Løvborg has botched his suicide disgracefully. She now is trapped not only with Jørgen, and Thea Elvstad, now Jørgen’s scholarly inspiration, and his remaining aunt, but also with a blackmail threat from lascivious Judge Brack. Her only escape is to kill herself and Jørgen’s despised unborn child. The portrayal of Hedda Gabler has challenged actresses throughout the play’s history, and critics have read her variously as a frustrated feminist, a remnant of the shattered aristocracy, a sadistic psychopath, and even, as Meyer does, as Ibsen’s “Portrait of the Dramatist as a Young Woman.” No one-sided interpretation seems adequate. Throughout this play, the most claustrophobic of Ibsen’s dramas, Hedda Gabler moves in a web of complex symbols, trapped at last, according to Haugen, “between a Christian-bourgeois domesticity and a pagan-saturnine liaison.” Her father’s pistols, symbols of his rank, his avocation, and his personality, represent both Hedda’s entrapment and her release, for the pistol found with the mortally wounded Eilert Løvborg at Mlle Diana’s establishment catches Hedda in an unthinkable scandal, while the remaining one allows her to make restitution to the only person who matters now to Hedda Gabler—herself. Hedda Gabler is appropriately the last of Ibsen’s psychological dramas. Ibsen often claimed that “Self-realization is man’s highest task and greatest happiness,” yet, as he expressed it in Peer Gynt, “to be oneself is to slay oneself.” Hedda Gabler’s tragedy is not merely the selfish act of a spoiled, bored woman, but a heroic act to free herself from a domination she cannot accept. Incapable of selfless love for a fatal multitude of reasons, Hedda Gabler at last even ruefully abandons her youthful dream of “vine leaves in his hair,” the pagan ecstasy that had aroused her sensuous curiosity toward Eilert Løvborg. Her self-realization allows her one last moment of paradoxical human life, the moment she leaves it, a poetic truth of “hidden and mysterious power,” in

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Martin Esslin’s words, “which springs from the co-existence of the realistic surface with the deep subconscious fantasy and dream elements behind it.” The Master Builder • Not long after the publication of The Master Builder, Ibsen stated, “It’s extraordinary what profundities and symbols they ascribe to me. . . . Can’t people just read what I write?” Ibsen insisted then, as always, that he only wrote about people’s inner lives as he knew them: “Any considerable person will naturally be . . . representative of the . . . thoughts and ideas of the age, so that the portrayal of such a person’s inner life may seem symbolic.” Having shared experiences, at least to some degree, with many of his characters, Ibsen’s last plays, the philosophical garnering of his life’s harvest, are in that sense rich in symbol. The title “Master Builder” has been applied frequently to Ibsen himself in recognition of his mastery of his craft and art, and more perilously, as an identification of the dramatist with the hero of the first of his philosophical plays, Halvard Solness, a talented architect just realizing that he is passing his prime. At the peak of his chosen profession, Solness is gnawed by his wife’s unhappiness, a result of his absorption in his work, and obsessed by his strange ability to affect the lives of others, especially his bookeeper Kaja, by the extrasensory projection of his powerful will. Solness had begun his career with churches erected to the glory of God, though for the last ten years he has defied God by choosing to build only human dwellings. Now Solness is attempting a synthesis, a “third world” of architecture, by building himself a home with a tall spire, like a church. At this difficult moment in his art and life, the passionate young Hilde Wangel enters both. She had become infatuated with Solness ten years earlier when he had daringly hung his last dedication wreath on the tower of her village church. She now urges him to repeat the feat, though he has begun to suffer from vertigo, and, inspired by her youthful ardor, he attempts “the impossible” again. As Hilde waves her white shawl—like Rebecca’s, but completed, quivering to unseen harps—Solness plunges to his death. Critics following William Archer have often played heavily on overt resemblances between Ibsen and Solness. Their ages are similar, their marriages unhappily affected by their devotion to their work, their infatuations with much younger girls notorious. Other commentators stress the resemblance between Solness’s three types of building and Ibsen’s three types of prose drama. Still others stress the Hegelian thesis-antithesis-attempted synthesis structure of Solness’s work and Ibsen’s several dramatic versions of that theme. Meyer cites Ibsen’s 1898 lecture to students in Christiania, in which he observed that Solness was “a man somewhat akin to me.” In an interview, Ibsen also declared that architecture was “my own trade.” His “May sun,” Emilie Bardach, was unspeakably grieved to have been identified publicly with the vicious Hilde of The Master Builder, and conjectures about Solness’s marriage injured Ibsen’s relations with his own wife. Haugen suggests that The Master Builder “involves the Christian-pagan conflict,” since Solness defies God, ceases building churches, and attempts to find his creative outlet solely among “happy human beings.” Fjelde convincingly warns against equating Solness’s “homes for happy human beings” with Ibsen’s Ghosts or Rosmersholm, and suggests an archetypal reading, in which Solness represents the sacred king who has reached the acme of his powers and must be sacrificed by his own consent to ensure the continued existence of his clan, an impression reinforced, Fjelde claims, when at the close of the play “the young king, Ragnar, brings to the old king, Solness, that ambiguous symbol of victory and death, the ribboned wreath.”

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Thus, Solness’s death, which illuminates the entire play, may be seen on various levels of meaning, as biographically, realistically, symbolically, and mythically significant. The Master Builder perhaps more than any other of Ibsen’s plays illustrates the immense control that Ibsen could exert over his expressed theme through the limpid prose he used as his dramatic vehicle, which approaches poetry in its compression, imagery, and suggestiveness. Here, too, Ibsen examines not only the workings of the unconscious mind but also mysterious powers beyond ordinary sensory perception, without destroying his chosen naturalistic perspective. Fjelde aptly describes the dramatic method in Solness’s tragedy as “Truths beyond, within, outside the self . . . a lyric and seamless unity.” Other major works poetry: Digte, 1871; Poems, 1993. nonfiction: Ibsen: Letters and Speeches, 1964. miscellaneous: The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, 1906-1912, 1928 (13 volumes). Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Henrik Ibsen. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1999. A collection of criticism regarding Ibsen’s plays. Bibliography and index. Ferguson, Robert. Henrik Ibsen: A New Biography. London: R. Cohen, 1996. A basic biography that covers the life and works of Ibsen. Bibliography and index. Garland, Oliver. A Freudian Poetics for Ibsen’s Theatre: Repetition, Recollection, and Paradox. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1998. A Freudian approach to examining the psychology that pervades Ibsen’s plays. Bibliography and index. Goldman, Michael. Ibsen: The Dramaturgy of Fear. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. An analysis of Ibsen’s plays with respect to his portrayal of fear. Bibliography and index. Johnston, Brian. The Ibsen Cycle: The Design of the Plays from “Pillars of Society” to “When We Dead Awaken.” Rev. ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. An examination of some of Ibsen’s social plays. Bibliography and index. Ledger, Sally. Henrik Ibsen. Plymouth, England: Northcote House in association with the British Council, 1999. A biographical study of the dramatist Ibsen. Bibliography and index. McFarlane, James, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. A comprehensive reference work devoted to Ibsen. Bibliography and index. Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten. Ibsen and Early Modernist Theatre, 1890-1900. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1997. An examination of Symbolism, modernism and Ibsen, focusing on his reception in England and France. Bibliography and index. Templeton, Joan. Ibsen’s Women. 1997. Reprint. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. A study of Ibsen’s drama that examines his portrayal of women. Bibliography and index. Theoharis, Theoharis Constantine. Ibsen’s Drama: Right Action and Tragic Joy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. A critical examination of Ibsen’s plays, with special emphasis on the themes of joy and dutiful action. Bibliography and index. Mitzi Brunsdale

William Inge William Inge

Born: Independence, Kansas; May 3, 1913 Died: Los Angeles, California; June 10, 1973 Principal drama • To Bobolink, for Her Spirit, pb. 1950; Come Back, Little Sheba, pr., pb. 1950; Picnic, pr., pb. 1953 (expansion of the fragmentary “Front Porch”); Bus Stop, pr., pb. 1955 (expanded version of his one-act People in the Wind, pb. 1962); The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, pr., pb. 1957 (originally as Farther Off from Heaven, pr. 1947, pb. 1950); Four Plays by William Inge, pb. 1958; The Tiny Closet, pr. 1959 (in Italy), pb. 1962 (one act); A Loss of Roses, pr. 1959, pb. 1960; The Boy in the Basement, pb. 1962 (one act); Bus Riley’s Back in Town, pb. 1962 (one act); Summer Brave, pr., pb. 1962 (revision of Picnic); Summer Brave and Eleven Short Plays, pb. 1962; Natural Affection, pr., pb. 1963; Where’s Daddy?, pr., pb. 1966 (originally as Family Things, pr. 1965); Two Short Plays: The Call, and A Murder, pb. 1968; Midwestern Manic, pb. 1969; Overnight, pr. 1969; Caesarian Operations, pr. 1972 Other literary forms • William Inge was fundamentally a dramatist. Atlantic/Little, Brown published two of his novels, Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff (1970) and My Son Is a Splendid Driver (1971). Bantam published his earlier scenario for Splendor in the Grass (1961). The manuscript of his final novel, “The Boy from the Circus,” was found on a table in his living room after his suicide. The manuscript had been rejected by a New York publisher and returned to him; he had not opened the envelope containing it. His two published novels and his first screenplay are set in Kansas and are populated by the same sort of lonely, frustrated people found in his major dramas. Achievements • Although William Inge cannot be said to have advanced the technique of modern drama, as Eugene O’Neill did, he was the first notable American dramatist to write seriously and sensitively about the Midwest, much in the tradition of Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson among novelists, of Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters among poets, and of Grant Wood among painters. Inge’s first five Broadway plays—Come Back, Little Sheba; Picnic; Bus Stop; The Dark at the Top of the Stairs; and A Loss of Roses—are set in the Midwest and examine in believable and accurate detail the pent-up frustrations of living in the sort of midwestern small towns that Inge knew intimately from his childhood and youth. The Liberty of some of his plays is the Independence, Kansas, of his childhood; great irony underlies his choice of that place-name. The decade beginning in 1950 was a remarkable one for Inge. It is unique for an unknown playwright to emerge on Broadway with the sort of critical and commercial success that Come Back, Little Sheba commanded and then to be able to produce in rapid-fire succession three more commercial triumphs. Inge did just this, following the 1950 production of Come Back, Little Sheba with Picnic in 1953, Bus Stop in 1955, and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs in 1957. Come Back, Little Sheba ran for 190 performances; the next three plays ran for more than 450 performances apiece. Come Back, Little Sheba won for its author an award from the New York critics as the most promising playwright of the season. Picnic won the Pulitzer Prize, a New York 493

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Drama Critics Circle Award, and the Donaldson Award, which it shared with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (pr., pb. 1953). Even though Inge’s next two plays won no awards, they were highly successful. Inge’s reputation as a serious dramatist was assured; in addition, his first four full-length plays were made into films that succeeded both critically and commercially. In 1958, just as Inge crested the wave of popularity to which his first four Broadway plays had brought him, Four Plays by William Inge was issued by Random House, which had previously published each of the plays separately. It was followed by Heinemann’s British edition in 1960. Inge’s next play, A Loss of Roses, into whose production the author put a considerable amount of his own money, reached Broadway in 1959 and was rejected by critics and audiences alike. It closed after twenty-five performances, leaving Inge, who was singularly sensitive, severely depressed as well as financially strained. The failure of A Loss of Roses caused Inge to leave New York permanently. At the strong urging of Elia Kazan, who had become a close friend after directing The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, Inge moved to the West Coast and turned his talents to screenwriting. His first attempt, Splendor in the Grass, which Warner Bros. produced, again focused on small-town midwestern life and was so successful that it received the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay of 1961. Splendor in the Grass was to be Inge’s last artistic triumph. He followed it in 1963 with Natural Affection, which played on Broadway for only thirty-six performances and was the subject of even harsher criticism than A Loss of Roses had received. Hurt and distraught, Inge returned to California, where he worked on screenplays. He also did a final original screenplay, based on one of his one-act plays entitled Bus Riley’s Back in Town, about which he wrote (in a letter to R. Baird Shuman of May 20, 1965): “As for Bus Riley, the picture is a loss. I took my name off it. I haven’t even seen the version they are showing.” Inge died a broken and defeated man, convinced that he had nothing more to say. His legacy to American drama is nevertheless great. He dealt with the Midwest as had no American playwright before him. As his close friend Tennessee Williams had focused dramatic attention on the South, so had Inge focused dramatic attention on the Midwest. He created a gallery of memorable characters, particularly female characters, because he understood the female mind remarkably well. Inge’s Broadway successes and his screenplay for Splendor in the Grass have secured his position as an American dramatist. Although he generally lacked the pioneering genius and willingness to experiment with form possessed by O’Neill, Clifford Odets, and Williams, Inge still ranks high among the significant contributors to American theater in the twentieth century. Biography • William Inge’s understanding of the female personality is not surprising in view of the fact that he came from an emphatically female-dominated home. As the youngest of Luther Clayton and Maude Sarah Gibson Inge’s five children, Inge identified more closely with his mother and sisters than he did with males. His father was a traveling salesman who spent little time at home during Inge’s formative years. The young Inge, much dominated by his mother, early developed an interest in acting, largely through his initial school experiences with recitation. Popular as a teenager, Inge was a cheerleader and was active in his high school’s dramatic programs. He enjoyed acting and continued his studies after high school at the University of Kansas, where he majored in drama and frequently acted in univer-

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sity productions. Still provincially midwestern at the time of his college graduation, Inge feared going to New York to pursue his first love, acting, and went instead to George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville to prepare for teacher certification and to take a master’s degree in education. Inge taught high school for one year in Columbus, Kansas, where he surely met numerous teachers such as those he depicts with such accuracy in Picnic and students such as those in Splendor in the Grass. For the next ten years, except for a crucial three years as art, music, book, and drama critic for the St. Louis Star-Times, Inge taught English and drama at the college level, first at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, and then at Washington University in St. Louis. It was the crucial years away from teaching, from 1943 to 1946, that led Inge into his career as a playwright. In his position as a three-year replacement for a friend on the Star-Times who had been drafted, Inge interviewed Tennessee Williams, who was resting at his parents’ home in St. Louis after the 1944 Chicago opening of The Glass Menagerie. A friendship blossomed, and Williams persuaded Inge to do some serious writing. Farther Off from Heaven, the prototype for The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, was the result, and in 1947, Margo Jones, whom Inge had met through Williams, produced the play in her theater in Dallas. The production was well received, and Inge was encouraged by its success to continue writing. By 1949, he had abandoned teaching in order to devote himself fully to his writing. During this period, Inge had become a heavy drinker, and in 1948, he joined Alcoholics Anonymous. Through his association with this organization, he came to understand much more about alcoholism and about alcoholics, information that finds its way directly into Come Back, Little Sheba in the person of Doc Delaney, the play’s frustrated protagonist. Similarly, Inge, continually beset by depression, self-doubt, and concern about his homosexuality, which he was never able to accept, began a course of psychoanalysis in 1949, and he was in and out of analysis through the 1950’s. Although one may question whether psychoanalysis made Inge any better able to cope with his own fears and frustrations, its influences and effects are clearly seen throughout his work, particularly in A Loss of Roses, Natural Affection, and Where’s Daddy? Despite the successes he had known, by 1973 Inge felt that he was “written out,” that he had nothing more to say. Although he enjoyed his work in theater workshops at the University of California campuses at Los Angeles and Irvine and was successful in them, he was unable to deal with the artistic frustrations that plagued him, and on June 10, 1973, he took his own life. Analysis • William Inge understood both the people and the social order of the Midwest, particularly the matriarchal family structure common to much of the area. Inge’s midwestern plays reverberate with authenticity. His first four Broadway plays depict their commonplace characters with extraordinary sensitivity, building through accounts of their prosaic lives toward a pitch of frustration that is communicated to audiences with enormous impact. By capturing so deftly this pervasive sense of frustration, Inge presents the universal that must be a part of any successful drama. Audiences left Inge’s early plays with an internalized sense of the gnawing isolation and conflict that his characters experienced. This is his legacy to American drama. Come Back, Little Sheba • All Inge’s best instincts as a playwright are at work in Come Back, Little Sheba, the story of Doc and Lola Delaney, who are twenty years into a

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marriage that was forced on them when the eighteen-year-old Lola became pregnant while the promising young Doc was a medical student. Their hasty marriage was followed by Doc’s dropping out of medical school and becoming a chiropractor as well as by the loss of the baby through the bungling of a midwife, to whom Lola went because she was too embarrassed to go to an obstetrician. Lola ends up sterile and, as the action of the play begins, fat and unattractive. Doc has become an alcoholic, but as the play opens, he has been dry for a year. Come Back, Little Sheba is a study in contrasts. It presents thesis and antithesis but seldom any satisfying or convincing synthesis, which makes it a sound piece of realistic writing. Little Sheba is Lola’s lost puppy, who “just vanished one day—vanished into thin air.” More than representing a surrogate child, Little Sheba represents Lola’s lost youth, and only when Lola stops looking for Sheba is it clear that some resolution has taken place, even though the resolution is not presented as a cure-all for Doc and Lola Delaney’s problems. The play revolves largely around four characters: Doc; Lola; Marie, their boarder; and Turk, the recurring priapic figure whom Inge later used to keep the action moving in Picnic and in other of his plays. Marie, although she is engaged to someone else, is having a brief affair with Turk (significantly, a javelin thrower) before the arrival of her fiancé from out of town. Lola is titillated by this tawdry affair and actively encourages it, even though she is planning to fix a special meal for Marie’s fiancé, Bruce, when he arrives. Doc, who sees Marie as the daughter he never had, is appalled by the whole misadventure. He falls off the wagon and gets roaring drunk. The dramatic climax of the play is his drunk scene, in which he threatens passionately to hack off all of Lola’s fat, cut off Marie’s ankles, and castrate Turk, but falls into a drunken stupor before he can accomplish any of these vile deeds and is taken off to the drunk tank. So terrified is he by the drunk tank that he returns home chastened, but not before Lola has attempted to go home to her aging parents, only to be rebuffed when she telephones them with her request. As the play ends, Doc pleads with Lola, “Don’t ever leave me. Please don’t ever leave me. If you do, they’d have to keep me down at that place [the drunk tank] all the time.” Doc and Lola are back together, not for very positive reasons, but rather because neither has any real alternative. The characterization and the timing in this play are superb; the control is sure and steady. The business of the play is well taken care of early in the action as Lola, a lonely woman unhappy with herself and with what she has become, talks compulsively to anyone who will listen—the milkman, the postman, the next-door neighbor, and Mrs. Coffman, who in contrast to Lola is neat, clean, and well-organized, as a woman with seven children needs to be. Lola tells the audience all they need to know about her history while convincing them of her loneliness by reaching out desperately to anyone who comes into her purview. The resolution for Lola comes in the last act, when she begins to clean up the house, pay attention to her appearance, and write a note for the milkman rather than lurk to engage him in conversation. Lola’s dream sequences, which hold up quite well psychologically, are skillfully used to handle more of the necessary business of the play. The final dream has to do with Turk and the javelin, which Turk has already described as “a big, long lance. You hold it like this, erect.” In Lola’s dream, Turk is disqualified in the javelin throwing contest and Doc picks up the javelin “real careful, like it was awful heavy. But you threw it, Daddy, clear, clear, up into the sky. And it never came down.” Inge’s exposure to Freudian psychoanalysis certainly pervades the dream sequences.

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Inge does not give the audience an upbeat or hopeful ending in Come Back, Little Sheba; rather, he presents life as it is. Perhaps Lola has matured a little. Perhaps both she and Doc have gained some insights that will help them to accept their lives with a bit more resignation than they might otherwise have, but nothing drastic is likely to happen for either of them. They will live on, wretchedly dependent on each other. If their marriage lasts, as it probably will, the mortar that holds it together will be dependence more than love. At least Lola has faced reality sufficiently to say, “I don’t think Little Sheba’s ever coming back, Doc,” and to stop searching for her. Picnic • Inge’s second Broadway success, Picnic, started as a fragmentary play, “Front Porch,” that Inge wrote shortly after Farther Off from Heaven. The original play consisted of little more than character sketches of five women in a small Kansas town. The play grew into Picnic, a much more fully developed play, and finally into Summer Brave, which is little different from Picnic except in the resolution of the Madge-Hal conflict. Four of the five women in Picnic live in one house. They are Flo Owens; her two daughters, Millie, a sixteen-year-old tomboy, and Madge, the prettiest girl in town; and their boarder, Rosemary Sydney, a schoolteacher in her thirties. Madge is engaged to marry Alan Seymour. Their next-door neighbor is sixty-year-old Helen Potts, who also participates in the action of the play. These women are all sexually frustrated; although Madge and Rosemary both have suitors, the relationships are specifically delineated as nonsexual. Into this tense setting is introduced an incredibly handsome male animal, Hal Carter, who exudes sexuality. As insecure as he is handsome, Hal is down on his luck and has arrived in town looking for his friend Alan Seymour, who might be able to give him a job. Hungry, he exchanges some work in Helen Potts’s yard for a meal. He works bare-chested, much to the consternation of the women, whose upbringing decrees that they feign shock at this display but whose natural impulses are in conflict with their conservative upbringing. Hal, reminiscent of Turk in Come Back, Little Sheba, causes chaos, as might be expected. The play focuses on the women, and Hal serves as the catalyst. Inge’s ability to draw convincing characters, particularly female characters, is particularly evident in Picnic. He maintains his clear focus on the women in the play, using Hal precisely as he needs to in order to reveal these women as the psychologically complex beings they are. Never does the focus slip; never does the control over material and characters waver. As the action develops toward a climax in the second act, Hal’s physical presence more than anything else pushes the conflict to its dramatically necessary outcome. Millie and Rosemary start drinking from Hal’s liquor bottle after Hal turns his attention from Millie to her more mature sister. Both Millie and Rosemary are soon drunk. Flo vents her own frustrations by upbraiding the two of them, but not before Rosemary, humiliated that Hal is not available to her and distressed that she finds him so attractive, shrieks at him that he came from the gutter and that he will return to the gutter. This emotional scene heightens Hal’s insecurity, which is necessary if the play is to proceed convincingly to a love affair between Hal and Madge, an outcome that seems inevitable. The screaming fit also forces Rosemary to face reality and to realize that her erstwhile suitor, Howard, is probably her only realistic out if she is not to continue teaching and if she is not to become frustrated and grow old alone. She goes off with Howard and yields to him, after which she asks, then begs him to marry her. In the play’s final version, he will go only so far as to say that he will come back in the morning but when

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he does, Rosemary has already spread the news that she and Howard are going to marry, so that when Howard arrives, everyone congratulates him, and he has no choice but to leave with Rosemary, presumably to marry her. Inge is intrigued by the theme of forced marriage, which recurs in nearly all his major plays, and Picnic offers a striking variation on the theme. Back at the picnic, Alan and Hal have engaged in fisticuffs and Alan has reported Hal to the police, forcing him to leave town in order to avoid arrest. In Summer Brave, Hal leaves and Madge stays behind; at the urging of Joshua Logan, Inge changed the ending of the play, so that in Picnic, Madge packs her suitcase and follows Hal a short time after his forced departure. Bus Stop • Bus Stop, despite its popular acceptance, does not have the stature of Come Back, Little Sheba or Picnic. An expanded version of Inge’s one-act People in the Wind, Bus Stop is set in a small crossroads restaurant between Kansas City and Wichita, where the passengers on a bus are stranded because of a blizzard. Among the passengers is Bo Decker, a twenty-one-year-old cowpoke from Montana who is traveling with Virgil Blessing, a middle-aged father surrogate (suggestive of Pinky in Where’s Daddy? ), and with a brainless little singer, Cherie, whom he met in a Kansas City nightclub, where she was performing. Bo was pure until he met Cherie, but now, in a comical rolereversal, he has lost his virginity to her and is insisting that she return to Montana with him to make him an honest man. Cherie joins Bo and Virgil, and they are on their way west when the bus is forced by the weather to pull off the road. Cherie has second thoughts about going to Montana, and after thinking the matter over, she accuses Bo of abducting her and the police become involved in the situation. Bo has a fight with the sheriff. He is humiliated and apologizes to everyone in the restaurant, including Cherie. Before the play is over, however, Bo asks Cherie to marry him, she agrees, and they set out for Montana, leaving Virgil Blessing behind and alone. The development of Bus Stop is thin, and the characterization, particularly of Bo, is not close to the high level reached in Come Back, Little Sheba and Picnic. Although Bo is similar in many ways to Turk and Hal, he is made of cardboard and lacks the multidimensional elements that make Turk and Hal convincing. The play is stronger in the presentation of its minor characters, particularly the lonely, frustrated Grace, a middle-aged woman who lives at the small crossroads where the bus has stopped and who works the night shift in the restaurant. She has sex with a truck driver not because she loves him but because he keeps her from being lonely. In the end, she and Virgil Blessing are left alone in the restaurant. The bus has pulled out, and one might think that Grace and Virgil are the answer to each other’s loneliness, but Inge does not provide a double resolution in this play. He permits Bo and Cherie to leave on a somewhat optimistic note, much as he allowed Hal and Madge a future in Picnic, but he wisely backs off from providing the pat resolution that a romance between Grace and Virgil would have provided, because the psychological motivation for such a relationship has not been built sufficiently throughout the play. The original play, People in the Wind, contained two characters who were not included in Bus Stop. They are two older women, apparently both unmarried and seemingly sisters, who are going to visit their niece. It appears that they want the niece to take them in in their old age, but they are not sure she will do so. They are nervous, drinking bicarbonate of soda to calm their stomachs. They represent the fate that can befall people who do not form close family ties early in their lives. In dropping them

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from Bus Stop, Inge was clearly opting to make the focus of the later play love rather than loneliness, which was the central focus of People in the Wind. The Dark at the Top of the Stairs • The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, the finished version of Farther Off from Heaven, is Inge’s most autobiographical play. In it, the author returns to a plot centering on a family, and this time, it is clearly Inge’s own family that he is writing about. Rubin Flood is a harness salesman who travels a great deal, leaving his children, Sonny and Reenie, in a mother-dominated home. The setting is a small town in Oklahoma. Inge, who had been in psychoanalysis for several years when he wrote The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, paid particular attention to the Oedipal elements of the mother-son relationship in this play and in two subsequent plays, A Loss of Roses and Natural Affection, although not with the success that he achieved in this earlier presentation. Rubin Flood and his wife, Cora, were married early, propelled into marriage by Rubin’s unmanageable libido. The marriage has encountered difficulties, which come to a head when Rubin, having lost his job—a fact he keeps from his wife—discovers that Cora has bought Reenie an expensive dress for a dance given at the country club by the nouveau riche Ralstons. He demands that the dress be returned for a refund, and a heated argument ensues, during which Cora taunts Rubin to strike her. He obliges and then leaves, vowing never to return. In act 2, Cora’s sister, Lottie, and her dentist husband, Morris, have arrived for a visit. Cora hopes that she will be able to persuade Lottie to take her and the children in now that Rubin has abandoned them. In this scene, also, Reenie’s blind date for the dance, Sammy Goldenbaum, arrives. A cadet at a nearby military academy, Sammy is meticulously polite and none too secure. His exquisite manners charm Lottie and Morris before he and the pathologically shy Reenie depart for the dance. Once at the dance, Reenie introduces Sammy to the hostess, who is drunk, and Reenie leaves the dance, not telling Sammy she is going. He tries to find her but cannot. In act 3, Reenie’s friend Flirt appears with the news that Sammy took the train to Oklahoma City, rented a hotel room, and killed himself, presumably because the drunken Mrs. Ralston, on discovering that Sammy was Jewish, had asked him to leave the party. Sammy’s suicide forces the principal characters to reconsider their lives, and the play ends somewhat on the upbeat. Rubin has returned home. He is tamed, as is evidenced by the fact that he confesses to Cora, “I’m scared. I don’t know how I’ll make out. I . . . I’m scared,” and that he leaves his boots outside, not wanting to dirty up Cora’s clean house. Sonny Flood, who has been an obnoxious child throughout the play, apparently has turned the corner by the end of it. He volunteers to take his distraught sister to the movies, and when his mother tries to kiss him goodbye, he declines to kiss her, giving the audience an indication that his Oedipal tendencies are now coming under control. Inge tried to do something daring in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, and although he failed, it was a creditable attempt. He juggled two significant conflicts, the Rubin-Cora conflict and the Sammy-society conflict. As the play developed, the conflict involving the suicide was not sufficiently prepared for to be wholly believable. Inge’s admitted purpose was to use the suicide subplot to divert the attention of the audience from the conflict between Rubin and Cora, so that they could return to this conflict in the last act with a fresher view. The suicide subplot has been severely attacked by critics. It is, however, a serious misinterpretation to view the suicide as an event that the author intended to present re-

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alistically. It can succeed only as a symbol, serving the useful function of promoting the resolution of the main conflict. This is not to justify the suicide subplot, which is a weakness in the play, but rather to demonstrate the artistic purposes Inge envisioned for it. Later plays • None of Inge’s later plays achieved the standard of his four Broadway successes. Some of his most interesting work is found in his one-act plays, fourteen of which are available in print. Had Inge lived longer, probably some of the materials in these plays would have lent themselves to further development as full-length dramas; particularly notable are To Bobolink, for Her Spirit, The Tiny Closet, and The Boy in the Basement. Other major works long fiction: Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff, 1970; My Son Is a Splendid Driver, 1971. screenplays: Splendor in the Grass, 1961; All Fall Down, 1962; Bus Riley’s Back in Town, 1964. Bibliography Leeson, Richard M. William Inge: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. A study that focuses on the stage history and production of Inge’s works. Contains plot summaries. McClure, Arthur F. Memories of Splendor: The Midwestern World of William Inge. Topeka: Kansas State Historical Society, 1989. The focus is the “regional quality” of Inge’s work. Unusual features include photographs and posters from stage and film productions and reminiscences from those who served as models for Inge’s characters and from actors who played them. McClure, Arthur F., and C. David Rice, eds. A Bibliographical Guide to the Works of William Inge, 1913-1973. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991. An attempt to “present a complete picture of Inge’s work as a teacher, journalist and author.” Divided into works by Inge, including his journalistic articles and reviews; biographical information, among them obituaries; critical articles and reviews of Inge’s work; and brief chapters on his forays into film and television. Sporadic annotations. Shuman, R. Baird. William Inge. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1989. An updated version of Shuman’s 1965 book, this volume focuses primarily on summarizing and analyzing the plays. Shuman’s stated goal is “to present a balanced view of William Inge and . . . show the inroads . . . public expectations make upon the private and creative life” of a sensitive artist. Index, select bibliography. Voss, Ralph F. A Life of William Inge. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989. A carefully researched “reconstruction” of Inge’s life, with numerous photographs, most of Inge at various stages of life. Voss’s examination reveals a troubled man whose life was a “pattern” of secrecy, especially concerning his homosexuality and alcoholism. Voss concludes, “’Inge Country’ was never just the state of Kansas or the midwestern prairies . . . [but] almost always a troubled state of mind.” R. Baird Shuman, updated by Elsie Galbreath Haley

Eugène Ionesco Eugène Ionesco

Born: Slatina, Romania; November 26, 1909 Died: Paris, France; March 28, 1994 Principal drama • La Cantatrice chauve, pr. 1950, pb. 1954 (The Bald Soprano, 1956); La Leçon, pr. 1951, pb. 1954 (The Lesson, 1955); Les Chaises, pr. 1952, pb. 1954 (The Chairs, 1958); Victimes du devoir, pr. 1953, pb. 1954 (Victims of Duty, 1958); Le Maître, pr. 1953, pb. 1958 (The Leader, 1960); La Jeune Fille à marier, pr. 1953, pb. 1958 (Maid to Marry, 1960); La Nièce-Épouse, pr. 1953 (The Niece-Wife, 1971); L’Avenir est dans les œufs: Ou, Il Faut de tout pour faire un monde, pr. 1953, pb. 1958 (The Future Is in Eggs: Or, It Takes All Sorts to Make a World, 1960); Amédée: Ou, Comment s’en débarrasser, pr., pb. 1954 (Amédée: Or, How to Get Rid of It, 1955); Jacques: Ou, La Soumission, pb. 1954, pb. 1955 (Jack: Or, The Submission, 1958); Théâtre, pb. 1954-1966 (4 volumes); Le Nouveau Locataire, pr. 1955, pb. 1958 (The New Tenant, 1956); Le Tableau, pr. 1955, pb. 1963 (The Picture, 1968); L’Impromptu de l’Alma: Ou, Le Caméléon du berger, pr. 1956, pb. 1958 (Improvisation: Or, The Shepherd’s Chameleon, 1960); Tueur sans gages, pr., pb. 1958 (The Killer, 1960); Plays, pb. 1958-1965 (6 volumes); Rhinocéros, pr. in German 1959, pb. 1959, pr. in French 1960 (Rhinoceros, 1959); Les Salutations, pr. 1959, pb. 1963 (Salutations, 1968); Scène à quatre, pr. 1959, pb. 1963 (Foursome, 1963); Délire à deux, pr. 1962, pb. 1963 (Frenzy for Two or More, 1965); Le Roi se meurt, pr. 1962, pb. 1963 (Exit the King, 1963); Le Piéton de l’air, pr. 1962, pb. 1963 (A Stroll in the Air, 1964); La Colère, pb. 1963 (Anger, 1968); La Soif et la faim, pr. 1964, pb. 1966 (Hunger and Thirst, 1968); La Lacune, pb. 1966, pr. 1969 (The Oversight, 1971); L’Œuf dur: Pour préparer un œuf dur, pb. 1966, pb. 1970 (The Hard-Boiled Egg, 1973); Jeux de massacre, pr., pb. 1970 (Killing Game, 1974; also pb. as Wipe-out Games, 1970); Macbett, pr., pb. 1972 (English translation, 1973); Ce formidable bordel, pr., pb. 1973 (A Hell of a Mess, 1975); L’Homme aux valises, pr., pb. 1975 (Man with Bags, 1977); Parlons française, pr. 1980; Voyages chez les morts: Ou, Thèmes et variations, pb. 1981 ( Journeys Among the Dead: Themes and Variations, 1985) Other literary forms • Eugène Ionesco was known primarily for his plays. Over the years, however, he published memoirs and fiction worthy of critical attention; most notable are the memoirs Journal en miettes (1967; Fragments of a Journal, 1968) and Présent passé passé présent (1968; Present Past Past Present, 1972) and the novel Le Solitaire (1973; The Hermit, 1974). Successful as a playwright, Ionesco also surfaced occasionally as a theorist of the drama, notably in Notes et contre-notes (1962; Notes and Counter-Notes, 1964). Several of his better-known plays, including The Killer and Rhinoceros, were in fact developed from texts originally conceived, written, and published as short fiction; in addition, Ionesco published several highly innovative children’s books that prove edifying to the adult reader as well. Achievements • Eugène Ionesco is rivaled only by Samuel Beckett as the world’s best-known and most influential exponent of experimental drama, and he is credited with the development of new conventions according to which serious drama would henceforth have to be written and judged. A number of his early plays, such as The Bald Soprano, The Lesson, and The Chairs, are already established in the “permanent” dra501

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matic repertory, along with Beckett’s En attendant Godot (pb. 1952, pr. 1953; Waiting for Godot, 1954) and Fin de partie (1957; Endgame, 1958). Although his work differs sharply from Beckett’s, both in concept and in execution, Ionesco was recorded as having welcomed Beckett’s 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature as applicable partially to himself, in recognition of a kindred spirit. It is clear that, following the emergence of these playwrights, serious drama would never again be the same. In 1971, two years after Beckett received the Nobel Prize, Ionesco found his own achievement honored by election to the highly conservative Académie Française, a turn of events that only a short time earlier might have seemed equally unthinkable to the playwright and to the institution. Perhaps it appeared for a time that the ultimate artistic anarchist had joined, or become, the establishment; in fact, it was the theater that had changed. Discovered, according to his own account, by accident, Ionesco’s singular approach to dramatic creation ultimately revolutionized the French—and international— stage as thoroughly as the imported work of Luigi Pirandello had a generation earlier. Casting doubt not only on dramatic conventions but also on more fundamental assumptions concerning the nature of language and the nature of humankind, Ionesco’s chaotic and tragic vision proved, on reflection, even more anarchic than Beckett’s lugubrious pessimism, to which it is frequently compared. Unlike Beckett, Ionesco mistrusted language to such an extent that it assumes a distinctly minor function in his plays, considerably overshadowed by such visual elements as the gestures and placement of actors. For Ionesco, language was at best the means to an end, certainly never an end in itself. As a result, Ionesco’s plays frequently prove unrewarding if they are merely read or considered simply as literature. Arguably, Ionesco’s plays are in fact not literature at all, depending as heavily as they do on actors and directors for their completion. Once staged, however, Ionesco’s plays turn out to be as profound and intellectually challenging as any drama ever written. Biography • The writer now known to the world as Eugène Ionesco was born November 26, 1909, as Eugen Ionescu in Slatina, Romania. His father (and namesake) was a Romanian lawyer, and his mother, née Thérèse Ipcar, was the daughter of a French engineer working in Romania. (When fame sought out Ionesco in his early forties, he advanced his publicized birth date to 1912 in an effort to appear younger; as he approached the age of eighty, he reversed his original decision. Many reference sources, however, continue to cite his birth year as 1912 even years after his death at age eightyfour.) Shortly after Ionesco’s birth, his parents moved to Paris, where his father continued the study of law. In 1911 a daughter, Marilina, was born to the couple and in 1912 another son, Mircea, who would die in infancy of meningitis. In 1916 the elder Eugen Ionescu returned to Romania, presumably to take part in World War I, leaving his family in France. It later turned out that instead of serving in the military, he had joined the government police. After the war, even as his wife assumed that he had died in battle, he had used his political power to arrange for himself a convenient divorce and remarriage, adding insult to injury by demanding (and getting) custody of his children by his first wife. Thus it happened that the twelve-year-old Eugène returned with his sister to Romania, where he would continue and complete his studies. By 1926, Thérèse Ipcar Ionescu had herself returned to Romania, settling in Bucharest where she found work in a bank. Following a dispute with his father and stepmother, young Eugène sought refuge in his mother’s apartment, to which his sister had

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already escaped. By the time he completed his secondary education in 1928, he was living in a furnished room at the home of an aunt, his father’s sister. The elder Ionescu, all the while refusing to pay alimony or child support, used his political connections to secure scholarships for his son at the University of Bucharest. Father and son would, however, remain divided on the issue of the son’s studies, with the father favoring engineering over literature. Notwithstanding, the future playwright pursued a degree in French and became a regular contributor of poetry and criticism to various literary magazines. In 1934 he created a minor scandal with a volume entitled simply Nu (No!), a collection of articles questioning most of the major (Romanian) literary figures and movements of the day. Married in 1936 to Rodica Burileanu, whom he had met during their student days some six years earlier, Ionesco taught French in various Romanian schools, remaining active as a contributor to literary journals. In 1938, he obtained from the Romanian government a grant to study French literature in Paris. His projected thesis, on the themes of sin and death in French poetry since Baudelaire, would remain unfinished and perhaps unwritten as Ionesco read the writings of such thinkers as Nikolai Berdayev, Gabriel Marcel, and Jacques Maritain. With the declaration of World War II in 1939, Ionesco returned with his wife to Romania, where he taught French at a Bucharest secondary school. Before long, however, he thought better of his move and attempted to return to France, finally succeeding in May, 1942. A daughter, Marie-France, was born to the Ionescos in August, 1944. For the remainder of the decade, Ionesco earned a meager living on the fringes of literary life, dividing his work among translation, journalism, editorial work, and occasional teaching. During those years, the future playwright recalled, he studiously avoided the theater, dismissing its stock-in-trade as lies or, at the very least, a massive waste of time and energy. By his own account, Ionesco blundered into playwriting quite by accident when, not long after World War II, he sought to broaden his employment prospects by learning English on his own time, with the help of a popular text-and-record set then readily available in bookstores. As the trained literary scholar and translator applied himself to his task, the seemingly random recital of phrases and phonemes began to make less and less sense. Named characters would, for example, inform one another of their names and relationships, then announce with finality that the floor was down, while the ceiling was up. Ionesco, soon losing all interest in the acquisition of English, began instead to jot down words and phrases as they rearranged themselves in his mind. When he had finished, the result looked rather like the script of a stage play, albeit a play such as had never before been seen or heard. Revised and reworked well into rehearsal, The Bald Soprano was eventually performed in May, 1950, at the Théâtre des Noctambules. The author, meanwhile, had begun to frequent avant-garde artistic and dramatic circles in Paris, most notably the Collège de ’Pataphysique, named in honor of the turn-of-thecentury playwright Alfred Jarry, author of Ubu roi (wr. 1888, pr., pb. 1896; English translation, 1951). Understandably reluctant at first, Ionesco soon warmed to the task of writing plays, having at last discovered what was evidently his true vocation; by 1952, he had seen two more of his plays in production, with others already written and waiting to be performed. He also found himself at the forefront of what appeared to be a new kind of theater, soon to be joined by such other middle-aged authors as Samuel Beckett and Arthur Adamov, for both of whom, as for himself, French was essentially an adopted

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idiom. Incredibly, Ionesco continued to turn out new and baffling plays for years without repeating himself, drawing on a rich store of images and memories that had lain dormant since childhood. Only later did Ionesco’s expression begin to seem labored, because, in part, of the consequences of an ill-advised “debate” initiated in the late 1950’s by the British critic Kenneth Tynan. Recalling such controversies of the 1930’s as Marxist attacks on Thornton Wilder or Clifford Odets’s rebuke of Luigi Pirandello for not openly opposing Benito Mussolini in his plays, Tynan’s criticism of Ionesco (whose work he had at first championed) centered on the resolute antirealism and seeming “irrelevance” of Ionesco’s dramatic expression, implying that the playwright was derelict in his duties as an artist and that such tendencies as his, if allowed to continue, would distract audiences from social and political problems urgently requiring their attention. Ridiculous though such charges may seem in retrospect, they provoked at the time a vigorous debate involving such peripheral figures as Philip Toynbee and Orson Welles. Ionesco, in defense of his art, wisely argued that art should serve no particular political creed but should remain a watchdog to all. Indeed, Ionesco’s theater had already projected a profound sensitivity to human suffering, beyond politics in its defense of dignity and its aversion to posturing of any kind. Nevertheless, Ionesco proved to be peculiarly sensitive to the charges leveled against him, allowing at least one of his subsequent plays, Rhinoceros, to be interpreted as liberal social satire, presumably a bone thrown to pacify his more antagonistic critics. In fact, Rhinoceros is little different from Ionesco’s other plays, written before or since, and collapses under the freight of political significance applied to it as if by afterthought. From the early 1960’s onward, Ionesco stressed the primacy of art, both in his plays and in his other writings, opposing in particular the Bertolt Brecht style of Social Realism that had asserted itself on the Paris stage. As an artist, however, he became increasingly committed to the cause of intellectual and artistic freedom, particularly in Romania and other nations of the eastern bloc. During the 1970’s and 1980’s, despite increasingly frail health, he took part in a number of international colloquia both literary and political. He died March 28, 1994, at his home on the Boulevard Montparnasse in Paris and is buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery. Analysis • Although Eugène Ionesco’s dramatic art is often traced to such precursors as the plays of Alfred Jarry and Antonin Artaud, it is essentially sui generis, springing primarily from nightmarish visions deeply rooted in the author’s own mind and experience. In fact, two of his later plays, A Hell of a Mess and Man with Bags, can be traced directly to nightmares recorded in his autobiographical writings of the mid-1960’s. As a boy, Ionesco recalled, he frequently attended puppet shows mounted for children in the Jardin de Luxembourg; during the years since, he remained haunted by the reverse relationship of human beings to marionettes, seeing his fellow mortals as puppets pulled by forces unseen and unexplained, prone to violence either as perpetrator or as victim. Puppetry must thus be seen as one of the strongest verifiable influences on Ionesco’s theater, as on modern drama in general. Indeed, the grotesquely “flat” characters of The Bald Soprano, although immediately drawn from names assigned at random to dialogue in a language textbook, can readily be traced to a deeper, more fecund source in the tradition of the Punch and Judy show. Critic Martin Esslin hailed Ionesco’s theater as a far more effective illustration of Albert Camus’s concept of the absurd than Camus himself had ever written for the stage. Forsaking the convenience of rational expression still relied on by Camus, Jean

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Anouilh, and even Jean-Paul Sartre, Ionesco—in Esslin’s view—presents on the stage the absurd in its purest form, more true to life (if less “realistic”) by the mere fact of its apparent gratuity. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a more effective illustration of dehumanizing habit than is to be found among Ionesco’s peculiarly automated characters, whose aspirations (if any) have long since been separated from their lives. When death threatens (as it often does in the later plays), Ionesco’s habit-conditioned characters will often proceed as lambs to the slaughter in a manner even more credible than the “philosophical suicide” described by Camus in Le Mythe de Sispyphe (1942; The Myth of Sisyphus, 1955) as a characteristic human response to the absurd. Ionesco’s memories of puppetry may also account for the strong visual element in his plays, more dependent on gesture and blocking than on the stage set itself, which may range from elaborate to nonexistent. (The most elaborate of Ionesco’s stage sets are those that call for enormous quantities of objects, be they household furnishings or eggs, implying that humans are being crowded off the earth by the commodities used for their need or pleasure.) As noted, the spoken text itself is, as a rule, the least significant element of Ionesco’s dramaturgy, literally “upstaged” by the posturing and placement of its characters. Dramatically, Ionesco’s most effective use of language occurs in its deformation, with “normal” speech replaced either by incongruous banalities or by equally nonsensical monosyllables. Even so, it is possible to imagine certain of Ionesco’s plays performed as pure pantomime; Exit the King, for example, was originally written in the form of a ballet. Certain critics, moreover, detected in Ionesco’s dramaturgy a strong cinematic influence, primarily from silent films and those of the Marx Brothers. Considered as a whole, Ionesco’s work exhibits a number of different styles, each of them uniquely his own. Although it may be tempting to consider those styles as evolutionary stages, such analysis founders on the simple evidence that the styles do not necessarily occur in chronological order. The Lesson, for example, would appear at first glance to be more evolved and “later” than it really is. There is also the matter of the Tynan debate, or London controversy as it has often been called among students of Ionesco’s work. During the late 1950’s, perhaps because of the debate, Ionesco began writing plays in which, for the first time, he appeared to be saying something specific; critics, noting the trend either with delight or with alarm, observed that his expression was somewhat weaker than in his earlier efforts. Yet, his expression had not really changed; the best of his apparently “didactic” plays, in retrospect, have much in common with the rest of his theater, both earlier and later. Rhinoceros, perhaps the weakest of the lot, is a highly typical Ionesco play, hampered mainly by the commonly held assumption of intended specific meaning. One of Ionesco’s more entertaining and edifying styles, although commonly associated with his shorter plays, involves the characters in aimless speech as the stage gradually fills with objects. In one of Ionesco’s earliest plays, The Chairs, the two main characters keep bringing out chairs to seat an unseen multitude of guests. Although the proliferation of chairs is hardly the main point of the play, Ionesco clearly appreciated the visual effect and would use it again more than once, most notably in The New Tenant, in which furniture is carried onstage with difficulty inverse to its weight. At first, the movers struggle under the weight of bric-a-brac and table lamps; with their task well under way, they balance heavy chests delicately on the tips of their fingers. At the end, not only is the stage filled with furniture, but also presumably the streets and highways outside. The title character, who apparently owns all these things, asks only that the landlady turn out the lights as she leaves him; in a rather obvious effort to

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rediscover the prenatal state, he has long since been hidden from view by his possessions. Easily appreciated or understood at a preconscious level, yet subject to varied interpretations, Ionesco’s imagery has brought to the stage sights and sounds that would tax the ingenuity and imagination of even the most resourceful designers. In a variation on the proliferation theme, for example, the characters of Amédée share the stage with a growing corpse that is about to crowd them out of house and home; what usually shows of this monstrosity is a man’s shoe, approximately three meters in length, with sock and trouser leg attached. In Hunger and Thirst, the furniture must be specially designed so that it will sink into the floorboards as if into mud. In Exit the King, similarly, the king’s throne must simply vanish from the stage while the curtain remains open. Not all of the headaches fall upon the set designer alone; two of Ionesco’s plays call for an “attractive” female character with multiple noses and breasts. Whether (as is doubtful) Ionesco’s dramaturgy was in any way influenced by Camus’s speculations on the absurd, his writings, both expository and creative, give evidence of a deep sensitivity and strong moral conscience of the sort commonly associated with The Myth of Sisyphus and its author. Although more visceral than cerebral, Ionesco’s expression adds up to one of the most deeply humanitarian statements in contemporary literature, haunted by a nagging doubt that humankind will ever assimilate the evident lessons of history. Ionesco’s King Bérenger, the Everyman protagonist of Exit the King, meets and surpasses in his life and death the anguished declaration of Camus’s Caligula (1954; English translation, 1948) that men die and are not happy; resuming in his modest person the history of all human endeavor, King Bérenger remains lucid even in his final moments, painfully aware that all has gone for nought. Elsewhere in Ionesco’s theater, nearly all forms of human behavior are duly stripped of acculturated meaning, shown to be as absurd and out of phase as they often seemed to Camus himself. In Jack: Or, The Submission and The Future Is in Eggs, for example, courtship and marriage are reduced to the least attractive stereotypes, characterized by animal noises, obscene rutting gestures, and a quantitative standard for human reproduction. In Amédée, the telephone-operator wife “goes to work” at a switchboard in her own apartment while her husband, a writer, labors over the same phrases that have occupied him fruitlessly for years. The theme of repetition, dominant in several plays that end exactly as they began, bears further witness to the apparent futility of all human endeavor. Beneath it all, however, the viewer can perceive a strong nostalgia for lost innocence, or at least for things as they ought to be. In each of his plays, Ionesco seems to be exhorting his audience to “rehumanize” the world before matters get worse than they already are. Striking in its imagery and resonance, Ionesco’s theater remains one of the more durable bodies of work in twentieth century drama. Although uneven in quality, perhaps least effective when the author seemed to have a specific message in mind, his theater is nevertheless sufficiently rich and varied to provide rewarding work for future generations of actors and directors. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the strongest of his plays were in frequent production around the world, performed by professional and amateur actors alike. In retrospect, it appears fortunate that the playwright never capitulated fully to his detractors’ stated demands for relevance; his theater, perennially relevant to basic human needs and tendencies, stands as a useful, even necessary mirror through which to study human behavior, both individual and social.

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The Bald Soprano • The Bald Soprano, Ionesco’s first play, served clear notice of a major new talent and remains his best-known effort and the one most frequently performed. Rivaled only by Beckett’s Waiting for Godot as a classic of the contemporary drama, The Bald Soprano (produced in London as the The Bald Prima Donna) is neither the strongest nor the weakest of Ionesco’s plays; it is surely, however, among the most memorable. Set against the stuffy banality of a bourgeois household (Ionesco himself suggested the use of a set prepared for Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, 1890, English translation, 1891), The Bald Soprano begins with the dour, machine-voiced Mrs. Smith informing her husband that it is nine o’clock. The grandfather clock, however, has just struck seventeen times. Silent except for the regular clucking of his tongue, Smith puffs on his pipe as he reads the evening paper, held upside down. Mrs. Smith, seemingly oblivious to his lack of interest, continues to discuss the fine English food that they have eaten (including such anomalous dishes as quince-and-bean pie) and tell him the ages of their children. If Mrs. Smith’s monologue seems increasingly surreal, the dialogue becomes even more so as Smith, still reading the paper, expresses amazement that the ages of the deceased are routinely printed in the papers, while those of newborns never are. Husband and wife then discuss a recent operation that the surgeon first performed on himself. Even so, the patient died. A good doctor, opines Smith, should die with his patient, just as a captain should go down with his ship. Discussion of an apparent obituary for one Bobby Watson soon elicits the further information that the man has been dead for three years, that he left a truly well-preserved corpse, that his wife (also named Bobby Watson, as are their son and daughter) is unattractive because she is too dark, too fat, too pale, and too thin. All traveling salespeople, it seems, are also known as Bobby Watson, and vice versa. Before long, the Smiths’ maid interrupts to announce the arrival of their invited guests, Mr. and Mrs. Martin. Although introduced as husband and wife, the Martins (in what has since become one of the most famous scenes in contemporary drama) begin speaking to each other with all the tentative awkwardness of a pickup between strangers on a train. Gradually, expressing amazement with each passing coincidence, the Martins discover that they live in the same town, on the same street, in the same building, on the same floor, in the same apartment, and sleep in the same bed. Cleverly mocking every recognition scene known to conventional theater, Ionesco locks the couple in a passionate embrace, only to have the maid announce that the Martins are not husband and wife or even who they think they are, since her daughter and his daughter are not the same person, having eyes of different color on each side of the face. Once admitted to the Smiths’ parlor, the Martins join their hosts in what may well be the most effective parody of social interaction ever portrayed on the stage; all four participants hem and haw, clear their throats, and let one another’s conversational gambits drop with a resounding thud. Ionesco’s true intentions, however, clearly lie deeper than mere parody, and the conversation soon degenerates into a nightmare of cross-purposes interrupted (and complicated) by the arrival of an even more gratuitous personage, the Fire Chief. The Chief, it seems, is making his rounds in search of possible fires; his arrival, meanwhile, has been preceded by a long discussion of whether the ringing of a doorbell indicates the presence of someone at the door. (The bell in fact sounds three times, at rather long intervals, before the Chief sees fit to show himself.) Once inside, the Chief avails himself of celebrity treatment to regale his hosts with a long, involved, and

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totally nonsensical story prefaced with the title, “The Head-Cold.” The maid, attempting a story of her own, is pushed brutally offstage by the other characters and possibly beaten to death; in any event, she is not seen again. Once the Chief has left, conversation among the four main characters resumes with a gabble of inapposite proverbs, soon degenerating into nonsense syllables shouted with great vehemence, simulating quite effectively the sounds of a genuine argument among four people. At the end, the syllables assume the regular rhythm of a chuffing locomotive, whereupon the curtain falls. A brief final scene recapitulates the first, with the Martins instead of the Smiths. In its current and final form, The Bald Soprano incorporates many evolutionary changes said to have occurred in the course of production. At first, Ionesco admitted, he had no real idea of how to end the play, having once considered (and rejected) the arrival of armed “police” to clear the house of spectators. Later, he decided on a reprise of the opening scene with the Smiths, replacing them still later with the Martins to reinforce the notion of interchangeability already manifest in the Bobby Watson dialogue. Even the play’s title is claimed as an addition, having occurred when an actor playing the Fire Chief in rehearsal misspoke the phrase “institutrice blonde” (“blonde schoolmistress”) as “cantatrice chauve” (roughly, “bald primadonna” or “bald soprano”). Supposedly, the actress playing Mrs. Smith ad-libbed the line, “She still wears her hair the same way,” and the hitherto untitled play was on its way. Although such an explanation may well be apocryphal, the fact remains that much of The Bald Soprano as it is now known was improvised in production, proving (among other things) the impressive fluidity of Ionesco’s developing talent. The Lesson • To those spectators falsely conditioned by the nonsense title of The Bald Soprano, the action of The Lesson may well have come as a rude shock. Although his first play calls for no vocalist, or even any bald person, The Lesson has very much to do with instruction, as seen in its most negative aspects. If knowledge is power, the play seems to be saying, it can also be used as a weapon, either political or sexual. In fact, there is no evidence that the Professor of The Lesson really knows anything— except perhaps, on occasion, the techniques of psychological manipulation. His important-sounding lectures are by turns banal, nonsensical, irrelevant, and selfcontradictory; yet the torrent of verbiage that pours forth from his mouth soon reduces his young, strong, confident Pupil to utter helplessness in anticipation of her inevitable death. Mild-mannered and tentative at the outset, the elderly Professor gains such confidence from the sound of his own voice that he is quite plausibly capable of murder, committed with an invisible knife made manifest by words. Recapitulating the frequent use of nonsense dialogue in The Bald Soprano, Ionesco in The Lesson at first disorients the spectator with the Pupil who, armed merely with a schoolgirl’s book bag, confidently announces her intention to pursue the “total doctorate”; even so, she is shaky on elementary geography and utterly unable to subtract, although she can multiply six-digit numbers in her head. When asked to account for the latter talent, she calmly replies that she has memorized all possible products. As in the earlier play, incipient tragedy is never far removed from comedy, and The Lesson, for all its sense of impending doom, is well provided with hilarious moments. Despite obvious elements of political satire (increasingly evident toward the end of the play), the predominant tone of The Lesson is sexual. The Pupil, for all her apparent innocence, is a highly provocative figure only dimly aware of her powers. The Professor, helpless and seemingly tongue-tied in the presence of his acerbic Housekeeper, re-

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sponds to the Pupil’s implicit provocation with increasingly violent and eventually murderous aggression. As the Housekeeper has warned him, “philology leads to the worst”; for Ionesco, “philology” here connotes not a “love of language” but a penchant pursued past the point of addiction. The Professor seems to exist only when, and because, he speaks. Language covers a multitude of probable sins, acquiring hypnotic powers quite beyond the scope of logic. For some, The Lesson symbolizes the inherently sexual nature of all teaching, which involves, at least in its intent, an act of penetration. Such an interpretation gathers further momentum from a Sartrean interpretation, whereby the Professor hides inauthentically behind his function in order to brutalize and terrorize a world that has long threatened him. The Lesson retains such resonance as to resist simplistic attempts at explanation. For all its weaknesses (especially the anticlimactic ending), the play presents an arresting and still original deformation and reformation of human behavior and is one of Ionesco’s best-realized expressions of a nightmarish vision. The Chairs • Initially baffling even to those spectators familiar with The Lesson and The Bald Soprano, The Chairs broke new ground in the development of Ionesco’s theater by introducing a poetic element of which his earlier plays had given little indication. Although connected to the earlier plays by nonsense elements, disconnected speech, and disorientation of the spectator, The Chairs establishes a thoughtful, elegiac tone that anticipates both Exit the King and the best plays of Beckett, whose Waiting for Godot was soon to be produced for the first time. Like The Lesson, The Chairs vigorously rejects simplistic efforts at interpretation, although on the surface it might be said to be “about” love, marriage, aging, and, above all, the futility of all human endeavor. Both individually and as a pair, the nonagenarian couple with the main speaking parts recapitulate in their behavior all stages of human life, from babyhood to extreme old age. By turns pathetic and ridiculous, frequently sympathetic, the Old Man and the Old Woman represent as effectively as Hamm and Clov, of Beckett’s Endgame, the human need to “mean something,” even against insuperable odds. Set inside a tower on a remote and sparsely populated island, The Chairs presents the old couple in what will be their final moments, as the Old Man prepares to leave his testament for all humanity. The testament, it seems, is in the form of a speech that the Old Man has prepared from the raw material of his long life, but which he feels unqualified to deliver in his own voice. For the momentous occasion, he has hired a professional Orator, who will deliver the speech to a carefully selected assemblage of invited dignitaries including the Emperor himself. In time, the distinguished guests begin to arrive, greeted and seated by the delighted and understandably anxious old couple. The audience, however, never sees the guests, who are represented onstage by a rapidly growing number of empty chairs—hence the play’s title. Gesturing and grimacing in a worthy parody of Marcel Proust’s aristocratic hosts, the old couple continue to seat their invisible audience; the Orator, however, is quite visible, and as soon as the Emperor arrives (unseen), the action is ready to begin. Sure at last that he has not lived in vain, his message about to be delivered, the Old Man leaps to his death from a tower window, followed closely by his wife. When the Orator rises to speak, however, he proves to be a deaf-mute (or at least tongue-tied). Turning at last to an available blackboard, the Orator fares hardly better,

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managing at best a meaningless gabble of words, letters, and fragments. Lest the spectator, however, leap to the conclusion that the Orator’s audience has been hallucinated by the old couple, Ionesco calls in his script for crowd noises that, in production, tend to sound like a cross between applause and howls of derision. The audience, invisible or not, is still in evidence. The Chairs remains, like its predecessor, hauntingly enigmatic, reflecting back on the spectator his own attempts to determine the play’s meaning. The Killer • Following the belated success of The Chairs, Ionesco embarked on the most prolific phase of his career, producing more than a dozen short sketches and oneact plays as well as his first full-length plays, including Amédée and Victims of Duty. It was also during this period that the author’s earliest and best-known work gave rise to the revisionist London controversy, involving (as did many similar disputes in the twentieth century) the social role of the writer as seen from the political Left. By 1958, Ionesco stood persuasively accused (by Kenneth Tynan and others) of shunning his appropriate function in favor of nonsense theater, which is irrelevant by definition. Among the greater of ironies is that Ionesco, a man truly displaced by two world wars, gave evidence even in his earliest plays of a profound social conscience. Nevertheless, his deep-seated mistrust of political extremism on both sides left him peculiarly vulnerable to charges of political indifference. Like George Orwell before him, Ionesco aroused the ire of doctrinaire liberals by rejecting their proposed “solutions” as well as those offered from the Right. In any event, it appears in retrospect that Ionesco may well have taken the criticism very much to heart, much as he professed not to in such documents as Notes and Counter-Notes. Toward the end of the 1950’s Ionesco’s plays seemed to strive increasingly for political relevance, with decidedly uneven results. In the strongest of these efforts, however, Ionesco retained his unique personal stamp with plays that resist any attempt to assign arbitrary political significance. The Killer, in particular, functions effectively as satire while going far deeper in its analysis of human aspirations and behavior. While waxing eloquent about the abuses of political power, The Killer also has much to say about the simple imperfectibility of human nature and the inevitability of death. Partially set in a futuristic “Radiant City,” probably inspired by the projections of the architect Le Corbusier, The Killer marks the first appearance of the protagonist Bérenger, a partially autobiographical Everyman-figure to be featured in several more plays of Ionesco’s middle period. Arriving in Radiant City, which is surrounded by several darker neighborhoods, Bérenger is astounded to learn that most common problems and ailments have been banished from the area for good. His guide, the Architect (who also functions as police chief and coroner), explains that nothing has been left to chance, and that even the weather is controlled. Unfortunately, the streets are empty; eventually, the Architect explains to Bérenger that the inhabitants are hesitant to leave their homes for fear of an unknown killer, who lures people to their deaths by promising a glimpse of “the colonel’s photograph.” Based on a short story in fact entitled “La Photo du colonel” (“The Colonel’s Photograph”), The Killer quickly departs from simple satire in its deliberately uncertain distinction between the act of murder and the basic fact of death. If curiosity kills the cat, it doubtless kills people as well; whatever the “colonel’s photograph” may indeed be like, it represents, among other things, the irrational element implicit in all human behavior. In French, the play’s title suggests an unpaid, hence gratuitous killer,

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and in many respects the Killer differs little from the conventional figure of the Grim Reaper. If death is inevitable, The Killer is not, however, without distinct political overtones. Employees of the state, it seems, enjoy guaranteed immunity from the Killer’s assaults, a fact made painfully evident when Mlle Dany, the Architect’s secretary and the woman of Bérenger’s dreams, resigns her job only to fall victim soon after to the Killer. Another plainly political element is evident in the person of Mother Peep (“la mère Pipe”), a demagogue and rabble-rouser who has risen to prominence of sorts as keeper of the public geese. Divorced from the context of the play, the masterly scene depicting Mother Peep’s rally might well be seen as one of the most powerful parodies of demagoguery and totalitarianism ever portrayed on the stage. Restored to context, however, the scene ultimately provides still further evidence of the absurd, together with the Killer himself. Political satire thus serves, for Ionesco, as the means to an end, rather than as an end in itself. Motivated primarily by his desire to avenge Mlle Dany’s apparently senseless murder, Bérenger sets off on a dogged search for the Killer, often appearing to be the only sane man (or indeed the only human being) in a world turned upside down. After adventures involving several cases of mistaken identity, Bérenger at last comes face to face with his quarry, an apparently feeble, one-eyed individual who, according to Ionesco, may or may not actually appear on the stage, according to the wishes of the individual director. In any case, the Killer has no real lines to speak, serving mainly as foil to Bérenger’s impassioned, eloquent (and perhaps overlong) speech in defense of life, liberty, and the human race. As close to lyricism as Ionesco had thus far come in his career, Bérenger’s speech in The Killer remains a powerful statement in defense of humanity; predictably, however, it falls on deaf ears, and Bérenger, out of options, offers himself freely to the Killer’s brandished knife. More ambitious in scope than any of Ionesco’s earlier efforts for the stage, The Killer seemed to move his career into a new phase, partially satisfying those critics who had assailed his earlier work for its “irrelevance.” It seems likely, however, that such critics may have seen primarily what they wanted to see; despite obvious political overtones, The Killer seems far closer to Ionesco’s characteristic mode of expression than it may at the time have been supposed. In any case, it was not long before the critics were presented with a new object of study, the well-known and still controversial Rhinoceros. Rhinoceros • First produced within a year after The Killer (to which it is related by the character of Bérenger), Rhinoceros remains the best-known and most frequently performed of Ionesco’s later plays, quite probably for the wrong reasons. Although decidedly weaker than The Killer, Rhinoceros is not without its strengths; unfortunately, those strengths tend to be slighted by directors and spectators alike, in favor of those elements providing the play with its apparent “relevance.” Considering the heat generated at the height of the so-called London Controversy, it is perhaps not surprising that Ionesco proved more willing than usual to allow the attachment of literal significance to one of his more ambitious efforts. Unfortunately, the play itself, although up to Ionesco’s usual standards, tends to collapse under the weight of “meaning” applied from without. Last seen in The Killer as an eloquent advocate of human nature, Bérenger makes his entry in Rhinoceros in a decidedly more passive role, as an easygoing if rather morose fellow who would prefer, when possible, to be left alone. Indeed, he tries as long as possible to go about his business, despite the gathering invasion of rhinoceroses,

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whose bizarre trumpeting can be heard from the street below. Indeed, the device of the proliferating pachyderms is every bit as powerful and eloquent as that of a gratuitous murderer in the previous play. Perceived at first as invaders from outside, the pachyderms are gradually seen to be emerging among the populace as well. A certain Mme Boeuf at first flees in terror from a trumpeting beast, only to recognize (somehow) in its voice the accents of her missing husband: She rides happily off on the animal’s back in a parody of the traditional recognition scene rivaled only by the Martins of The Bald Soprano. Characters around Bérenger begin to talk and act strangely, finding the invaders handsome and their language beautiful, far more so than the “merely” human. It is not long before transformations from man to beast become an hourly occurrence, with the animals taking over local businesses and ultimately the broadcast media. At the time of the play’s introduction, Ionesco readily admitted to obvious parallels between “rhinoceritis” and the rise of Nazi Germany from the decadent Weimar Republic. Unfortunately, his acknowledgment served to authorize a fixed interpretation of a play which, in true Ionesco fashion, is in its essence open-ended and fraught with ambiguities. If staged without preconceptions as to meaning, Rhinoceros quickly emerges as one of Ionesco’s more unsettling staged nightmares, less effective than The Killer but nearly as resonant as The Lesson. Unfortunately, deliberate efforts to present Rhinoceros as antifascist propaganda rob the play of one of its more haunting qualities, implicit in the characterization of Bérenger. Quite unlike his earlier avatar in The Killer, the Bérenger of Rhinoceros is neither eloquent nor potentially heroic. Indeed, one of the major tensions latent in the play as written resides in the passivity of Bérenger, in his anguished uncertainty as to whether he could turn into a rhinoceros even if he so wished. His refusal to capitulate, articulated in the final scene and hailed by critics as proof of Ionesco’s “message,” emerges from the context of the play in accents not of heroism but of desperation. Bérenger alone remains the last human being on earth, less because he will not change than because he simply cannot. If viewed with sufficient objectivity, Rhinoceros thus emerges as a chilling portrayal of an individual in a society, any society, ostracized by his or her fellows for reasons that cannot be fully comprehended. It is possible that future generations of actors and directors may well discover the latent subtext of Rhinoceros and restore the play to its rightful place among Ionesco’s more disorienting nightmare visions. In the meantime, Rhinoceros remains hampered by its prevalent literal interpretation, far less effective as polemic than such overtly political plays as those of Bertolt Brecht or the later Adamov. Neither fish nor fowl, Rhinoceros, as commonly interpreted, can neither swim nor fly. To Ionesco’s ultimate credit, however, it remains a better play than it seems. Exit the King • Rivaled only by The Killer, Exit the King is perhaps the strongest and best realized of Ionesco’s later plays, deserving more frequent revivals than it has received. Deceptively simple both in concept and in execution, Exit the King harks back to The Killer and The Chairs in its portrayal of a royal Bérenger awaiting death. Deftly compressing all of human history into a single life-experience, Ionesco presents a King Bérenger who, during several centuries of life and rule, has invented the airplane and the bicycle, has pseudonymously written all the plays and sonnets attributed to William Shakespeare, and has personally built all the major cities in Western Europe. By now, however, his kingdom is crumbling, its monuments are in ruins, and his rule is crippled by anarchy. The action of the play compresses some twenty years, indicated

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by Queen Marguerite’s assertion that the king will be dead within an hour and a half, at the end of the play. Inevitably reminiscent of Camus’s Caligula, whose historically inspired imperial protagonist substitutes his own caprices for those of an incomprehensible natural order, Ionesco’s King Bérenger suffers primarily from an awareness of the simple fact that people die and are not happy. Like the Old Man of The Chairs, Bérenger has lived and labored in vain; unlike the Old Man, he knows as much, vigorously protesting the unfairness of his fate. Resuming in his person the lives of all who have ever suffered, worked, or dreamed, Bérenger ultimately speaks in his anguish to the futility of all human endeavor given the eventuality of death, a finality as capricious as the actions of The Killer in the first of the Bérenger plays. Surprisingly, in the light of its evident ambitions, Exit the King genuinely works, both as text and in production. Ponderousness of tone is avoided largely through Ionesco’s choice of supporting characters; the king’s protracted final moments are witnessed by both of his queens (one young and pretty, the other middle-aged and tart of tongue), a guard, and a Doctor who serves also as Astrologer and Chief Executioner. Among them, the characters provide for a strong infusion of humor, if never “comic relief.” The aging Queen Marguerite, clearly descended from Mrs. Smith and from Madeleine of Amédée, continues the satire of marriage that runs as an undercurrent through many Ionesco plays; the younger Queen Marie, meanwhile, seems to represent maternal warmth as well as the promise of young love. The Doctor, who has aided and abetted the king in many of his Promethean schemes, frequently provides a perfect foil for the king’s thoroughly human grievances. In an evident parody of the political slogan “Every man a king,” Ionesco presents a king who is indeed Everyman and whose life will be nullified as well as ended with his death. In the French title, the use of the reflexive construction reinforces the notion that death is a process rather than a mere event; the king, implies Ionesco, is dying—as are all men and women from the moment of their birth. Exit the King remains among the most eloquent and economical of Ionesco’s dramatic statements, surpassing most of his subsequent efforts. Hunger and Thirst, for all its innovative brilliance, is sententious and often confused; Killing Game reiterates what Ionesco had already said, and said better, in such earlier efforts as The Killer and The Chairs. Of Ionesco’s later efforts, only Man with Bags approaches the concise statement and eloquent imagery to be found in such plays as The Killer and Exit the King. Man with Bags • Based in large measure on nightmare visions already recorded in Ionesco’s memoirs, Man with Bags ironically inverts, intentionally or not, the title and premise of Jean Anouilh’s immensely popular 1937 play, Le Voyageur sans bagage (Traveller Without Luggage, 1959). Anouilh’s play, in part a parody of the Oedipus theme, presents an amnesiac war veteran who, reunited with his true family after twenty years and countless false leads, seeks refuge in amnesia against a sordid past that he has no desire to reclaim. Rejecting the obviously valid claims of the Renaud family, the pseudonymous Gaston opts instead for outright fantasy, declaring that he is “washed clean” of his youth, and indeed of his identity. It remained for Ionesco, however, to explore even in his earliest efforts the horrific consequences that result when identity is lost or denied. Whether the individual likes it, identity (especially as retrieved through memory) is the only available proof of his existence. It therefore seemed quite fitting that Ionesco, nearly forty years after Traveller Without Luggage, should balance Anouilh’s speculative fantasy with a highly convincing rebuttal.

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Despite the strong infusion of dream elements in such earlier plays as The Chairs, The Killer, and A Stroll in the Air, Man with Bags is the first of Ionesco’s efforts to be characterized by its author as a dream play. Ionesco, who, by the time of the play’s introduction, was well acquainted with the precepts and procedures of Jungian psychoanalysis, readily conceded that his characters were in fact archetypes and that the play represented an attempt to explore human identity through dreams. No longer known as Bérenger, the autobiographical protagonist is identified simply as “The Man” or “No-man,” the latter an obvious recollection of the pseudonym chosen by Odysseus during his encounter with the Cyclops. Another archetype strongly recalled by the protagonist in his adventures and behavior is that of the Wandering Jew. In a succession of scenes shifting wildly in space and time, the man travels resolutely in search of both his ancestry and his identity, accompanied only by the “luggage” of his memory. Unlike such earlier dream plays as those of August Strindberg and those attempted by the Surrealists, Man with Bags abounds in the sharp, seemingly realistic detail to be found in actual dreams. Linked by the preconscious logic peculiar to the dream experience, the scenes are striking in their imagery and often memorable. In one, for example, an old woman converses animatedly with her long-lost mother; the actress playing the mother is in her young and vibrant twenties, the age at which the old woman last saw her. Political elements such as bureaucracy, war, and oppression are present in abundance, although portrayed (as usual in Ionesco’s work) without emphasis, as yet another anomalous fact of life, such as death. As in real dreams, sexual fantasies are juxtaposed with philosophical and political ones. In another memorable scene, the protagonist is propositioned by a married woman and accepts the offer in full view of her apparently willing husband, who agrees to keep an eye on the protagonist’s luggage; the assignation then takes place in a public park ominously filled with armed guards. In the final scene, the man pauses to rest on one of his suitcases while the other characters rush about with their own luggage, vigorously pursuing the quest for identity of which the man himself has now grown tired. He does not, however, abandon or drop his own luggage; no doubt he will soon rise to his feet and continue as before. Memories, suggested Ionesco, remain the only proof that people have concerning the fact of their own individual passages through life. Other major works long fiction: Le Solitaire, 1973 (The Hermit, 1974). short fiction: La Photo du colonel, 1962 (The Colonel’s Photograph, 1967). screenplay: La Vase, 1970 (The Mire, 1973). radio play: Le Salon de l’automobile, 1952 (The Motor Show, 1963). nonfiction: Nu, 1934; Notes et contre-notes, 1962 (Notes and Counter-Notes, 1964); Journal en miettes, 1967 (Fragments of a Journal, 1968); Présent passé passé présent, 1968 (memoir; Present Past Past Present, 1972); Un Homme en question, 1979; Le Blanc et le noir, 1980; Hugoliade, 1982 (Hugoliad: Or, The Grotesque and Tragic Life of Victor Hugo, 1987); La Quête intermittente, 1988. children’s literature: Story Number 1: For Children Under Three Years of Age, 1969; Story Number 2: For Children Under Three Years of Age, 1970; Story Number 3: For Children over Three Years of Age, 1971; Story Number 4: For Children over Three Years of Age, 1975. Bibliography Coe, Richard N. Ionesco: A Study of his Plays. London: Methuen, 1971. The latest of several volumes written on Ionesco by the same critic beginning in 1961; the pres-

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ent volume includes a translation of the hitherto unpublished short play The NieceWife. Esslin, Martin. The Theater of the Absurd. Reprint. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968. Esslin’s ground-breaking study remains authoritative on Ionesco’s theater and on its situation within the context of twentieth-century avant-garde drama. Gaensbauer, Deborah B. Eugène Ionseco Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1996. Replaces an earlier volume (1972) by Allan Lewis in Twayne’s World Authors Series; generally sound critical and historical presentation of Ionesco’s dramatic canon and its legacy. Lane, Nancy. Understanding Eugène Ionesco. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994. Published just before Ionesco’s death, Lane’s study is among the first to take note of Ionesco’s corrected birth date and other biographical details; generally sound readings of the major plays. Nottingham French Studies 35, no. 1 (1996). Edited by Steven Smith. A special Ionesco issue of the journal published by the University of Nottingham, collecting a dozen articles dealing with all aspects of the author’s thought and theater. Contributors include David Bradby, Ingrid Coleman Chafee, Emmanuel Jacquart, and Rosette Lamont. David B. Parsell

Ben Jonson Ben Jonson

Born: London, England; June 11, 1573 Died: London, England; August 6, 1637 Principal drama • The Isle of Dogs, pr. 1597 (with Thomas Nashe; no longer extant); The Case Is Altered, pr. 1597, pb. 1609; Every Man in His Humour, pr. 1598 (revised 1605), pb. 1601 (revised 1616); Hot Anger Soon Cold, pr. 1598 (with Henry Chettle and Henry Porter; no longer extant); Every Man out of His Humour, pr. 1599, pb. 1600; The Page of Plymouth, pr. 1599 (with Thomas Dekker; no longer extant); Robert the Second, King of Scots, pr. 1599 (with Henry Chettle and Thomas Dekker; no longer extant); Cynthia’s Revels: Or, The Fountain of Self-Love, pr. c. 1600-1601, pb. 1601; Poetaster: Or, His Arraignment, pr. 1601, pb. 1602; Sejanus His Fall, pr. 1603, pb. 1605 (commonly known as Sejanus); Eastward Ho!, pr., pb. 1605 (with George Chapman and John Marston); Volpone: Or, The Fox, pr. 1605, pb. 1607; Epicœne: Or, The Silent Woman, pr. 1609, pb. 1616; The Alchemist, pr. 1610, pb. 1612; Catiline His Conspiracy, pr., pb. 1611 (commonly known as Catiline); Bartholomew Fair, pr. 1614, pb. 1631; The Devil Is an Ass, pr. 1616, pb. 1631; The Staple of News, pr. 1626, pb. 1631; The New Inn: Or, The Light Heart, pr. 1629, pb. 1631; The Magnetic Lady: Or, Humours Reconciled, pr. 1632, pb. 1640; A Tale of a Tub, pr. 1633, pb. 1640; The Sad Shepherd: Or, A Tale of Robin Hood, pb. 1640 (fragment) Other literary forms • Ben Jonson was a masterful poet as well as a dramatist. His poetry, with some justification, has the reputation of being remote from modern readers. A dedicated classicist, Jonson emphasized clarity of form and phrase over expression of emotion, and many of his poems seem to be exercises in cleverness and wit rather than attempts to express an idea or image well. Others of his poems, however, retain their power and vision: “To Celia,” for example, has given the English language the phrase “Drink to me only with thine eyes.” The difficulty of Jonson’s poetry originates in large part in his very mastery of poetic form. Jonson was a student of literature, and he was a man of letters with few equals in any era. He studied the poetic forms of classical Greek and Latin literature as well as those of later European literature, and he used what he learned in his own work. The result is a body of poetry that is very diverse, including salutations and love poems, homilies and satires, epigrams and lyrics. Much of the poetry appeals primarily to academics because of its experimental qualities and its displays of technical virtuosity. Yet those who allow themselves to be put off by Jonson’s prodigious intellectualism miss some of the finest verse in English. Jonson was also a prodigious writer of masques—dramatic allegorical entertainments, usually prepared to celebrate special occasions and presented at court. Jonson’s masques have in common with his poetry technical achievement and, with much of his occasional verse, a focus on the virtues, real and reputed, of nobility and royalty. Although the emphasis was on spectacle and celebration of the aristocracy, Jonson tried to make his masques legitimate works of literature, and they have enjoyed increasing critical attention in recent years. 516

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Achievements • Ben Jonson was the foremost man of letters of his time. His knowledge of literature was combined with a passionate personality and a desire to be respected; the combination resulted in his efforts to elevate authors in the estimation of society. He endeavored to demonstrate the importance of literature in the lives of people and in their culture. Although he regarded his dramatic work as merely one facet of his literary life, he was determined that the playwright should receive the esteemed title of “poet.” In the Elizabethan era, plays were regarded as unimportant public amusements; satires, sonnets, and narrative verse were expected to carry the heavy freight of ideas and art. Jonson worked to establish drama as a legitimate literary form by showing that it could be a conscious art with rules of organization that were as valid as those of more esteemed literary genres. In 1616, Jonson published The Workes of Benjamin Jonson, including in the volume nine of his plays in addition to other writings. Never before had any author dared to give his plays the title “Works.” The term “works” was usually reserved for profound philosophical treatises. Jonson was derided by some writers for being conceited and for trying to make plays seem important; even after his death, some traditionalists found his title difficult to accept. Further, Jonson promoted the cause of drama as high art by devoting much care to the publishing of the texts of his plays, thereby establishing a higher standard for published texts of dramas than had existed before. The publication of The Workes of Benjamin Jonson led at least indirectly to the important First Folio edition of William Shakespeare’s plays. Jonson’s reputation as a dramatist is inextricably bound with that of Shakespeare. Although Jonson was esteemed above Shakespeare by most of his contemporaries, subsequent eras have elevated Shakespeare at Jonson’s expense. Thus, although Jonson’s comedies are wonderful and are well received by modern audiences, they are rarely performed. Shakespeare’s poetry is better than Jonson’s; his tragedies are more moving; his comedies are more diverse and have superior characterizations. To acknowledge Shakespeare’s superiority is not to derogate Jonson’s achievement; Shakespeare is alone atop the world’s authors, but Jonson is not far below. In addition, Jonson’s plays are superior to Shakespeare’s in consistency of plot and structure. Had there been no William Shakespeare, there might today be Jonson festivals, and Volpone and The Alchemist might be the revered standards for college drama productions. Biography • Tradition has it that Benjamin Jonson was born in 1572; literary historians put his birth in 1573, probably on June 11. His father, an Anglican minister, died about a month before Jonson was born.

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His mother married a master bricklayer in 1574; the family lived in Westminster. While growing up, Jonson attended Westminster School and became a student of William Camden, who was perhaps the greatest classicist and antiquarian of the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages. Jonson’s interest in classical literature, his care in constructing what he wrote, and his respect for learning all have their origins in the teachings of Camden. Techniques for writing that Jonson used throughout his life were first learned from Camden, including the practice of writing out a prospective poem first in prose and then converting the prose to verse. In about 1588, Jonson became an apprentice bricklayer. This part of his life became the subject of jokes and gibes in his later years, but he seems to have taken pride in his humble origins. His respect for achievement and general lack of respect for claims of importance based solely on heredity or accident may have had their roots in his own struggles as a lower-class laborer. He left his bricklaying work to join the army in its war against the Spanish in the Lowlands in 1591 or 1592. During his tenure in the army, he apparently served with some distinction; he claimed that he was the English champion in single combat against a Spanish champion and that he slew his opponent while the assembled armies watched. He was handy with swords and knives and was, when young, quite combative and physically intimidating. Jonson eventually returned to England. Little is known of his activities until 1597, save that he married Anne Lewis on November 14, 1594. The marriage seems to have been unhappy. Before 1597, Jonson might have been an actor with a traveling troupe, many of whose members eked out marginal livings in the towns and hamlets of England. He was imprisoned in 1597 for having finished a play begun by Thomas Nashe; The Isle of Dogs was declared seditious by the Privy Council of the queen. The play, like most of Jonson’s collaborations, has not been preserved. After a few weeks, Jonson was released from prison. Jonson’s career as a playwright began in earnest in 1598 after the production of The Case Is Altered, which was performed by a troupe of boys from the Chapel Royal. In that same year, Every Man in His Humour, the first of Jonson’s important plays, was performed by William Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Tradition has it that Shakespeare recognized Jonson’s talent and persuaded the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to stage the play. Although he admired Shakespeare, Jonson never regarded himself as principally a playwright, and therefore he never became a permanent shareholder in an acting company, as did Shakespeare. This enabled Jonson to maintain his artistic freedom but prevented him from earning the good living that Shakespeare and other shareholders enjoyed. The year 1598 was a busy one for Jonson; he was again imprisoned, this time for killing an actor, Gabriel Spencer, in a duel on September 22. Jonson’s property was confiscated, he was branded on the thumb, and he was to be executed, but he saved his life by pleading benefit of clergy, which he could do under ancient English law because he could read. While in prison, he was converted to Roman Catholicism, a faith he practiced until about 1608. In 1606, he was charged with seducing young people into Roman Catholicism; the charges were dropped when he converted back to Anglicanism. Jonson pursued an active life as an author of plays, poetry, and treatises. His comedies were successful, but his tragedies were badly received. In 1603, Queen Elizabeth died and King James assumed the English throne. Jonson’s Entertainment at Athorpe helped to launch him on a long career as a court poet. Also that year, his son Benjamin died at the age of six. Though Jonson was finding public acclaim and honor, his private life was miserable. He and his wife lived apart from 1602 to 1607, he lost his namesake

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son, and he grew obese. In 1605, he collaborated with John Marston and George Chapman on the rollicking comedy Eastward Ho! and was again imprisoned for a supposed slight to King James; the play made fun of Scots. Jonson’s plays Volpone, Epicœne, and The Alchemist enhanced his reputation among his literary peers; his court poetry and masques enhanced his status with King James. In 1616, he published The Workes of Benjamin Jonson and was awarded a pension by the king. The pension and Jonson’s position as the leading literary figure in England in 1616 have encouraged many historians to call him an unofficial poet laureate, and he is usually honored as the first to fill that role in England. Until the death of King James in 1625, Jonson enjoyed his role as a favorite of the king and a respected author. His honors included a master of arts degree from the University of Oxford. When Charles I assumed the throne, Jonson’s status at court declined. The pension of wine and money was haphazardly delivered, and Jonson had difficulty pursuing his scholarly career because his lodgings burned down in 1623, and his books and papers were destroyed. He returned to playwriting with The Staple of News in 1626; the play was not as well received as his earlier comedies. In 1628, he suffered a stroke and was partially paralyzed. In 1629, his play The New Inn was staged by the King’s Men and was a disaster. He continued to write until his death on August 6, 1637. He left unfinished the play The Sad Shepherd, which some critics admire. Although cranky, egotistical, and homely, Jonson retained much of his hold on the leading literary people of his time and was esteemed by younger authors even after his death. He is one of literature’s most colorful figures. Combative, robust, and dedicated to his art, Jonson made major contributions to the development of English literature. Analysis • Ben Jonson’s dramatic canon is large, and most of the plays in it are worthy of long and careful study. He is best remembered for his comedies, which influenced comedy writing well into the eighteenth century and which remain entertaining. Jonson took Horace’s maxim to heart—that to teach, a writer must first entertain—and he followed literary rules only so far as they enabled him to instruct and entertain his audience. By observing the neoclassical unities of time and space in his plays, Jonson gave his works a coherence often lacking in the comedies of his contemporaries: Loose ends are resolved, subplot and main plot are interwoven so that each enhances the other, and the conclusion of each play resolves the basic issues brought up during the action. Jonson’s concern with entertaining makes most of his comedies delightful and attractive to modern audiences; his effort to instruct makes his plays substantial and meaningful. From the beginning of his career as a playwright, Jonson was successful with comedy. His two attempts at tragedies are interesting as experiments but are unlikely to be successful with general audiences. His comedies are varied, ranging from the city to the countryside and including satires, comedies of manners, and farces. He was most successful when writing about city life, moralizing with good-natured humor. Jonson’s stature as a playwright is greater than current popular knowledge of him would indicate. Had Shakespeare lived at another time, Jonson would be the dramatic giant of his era. His comedies deserve to be performed more often than they are; his masterpieces play well before modern audiences, and even his minor plays have wit and ideas to recommend them. Jonson is a dramatist of the first rank. Every Man in His Humour • Of his early comedies, Every Man in His Humour is the most important. Jonson’s first significant popular success, it best represents those qual-

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ities that make some of his later plays great works of literature. Typical of a Jonsonian comedy, Every Man in His Humour has a complex interweaving of plots that creates an atmosphere of comic frenzy. Fools are duped, husbands fear cuckolding, wives suspect their husbands of having mistresses, fathers spy on sons, a servant plays tricks on everyone, and myriad disguises and social games confuse the characters. The audience is not left in confusion but is carefully let in on the nuances of the various plots. The plot features Edward Knowell, who journeys to London to visit Wellbred, a wit whose devil-may-care behavior might get Edward into trouble. Old Knowell, Edward’s father, follows his son to London in order to spy on him, and his servant Brainworm connives and plays tricks—as much to amuse himself as to gain anything. Subplots involve Captain Bobadill, a braggart soldier; Cob and Tib, the landlords of Bobadill; Kitely, a merchant; and Downright, Wellbred’s plainspoken brother. The almost bewildering multiplicity of characters is typical of many of Jonson’s plays. He borrows the plot of unwarranted suspicions from classical dramatists. Captain Bobadill is the miles gloriosus, the braggart soldier (usually a coward), a stock character in classical comedies. Brainworm is the conniving servant, another stock figure from classical comedies. Other characters also serve specific purposes: Downright is a shatterer of illusions—he points out the falseness in others. Edward Knowell is the romantic lead—a hero who retains his innocence in the middle of the turmoil of the plot. Kitely, Dame Kitely, Cob, and Tib provide much of the low comedy and serve to reflect the ridiculousness of the behavior of the main characters. Although it shares many of the characteristics that typify Jonson’s later comedies, Every Man in His Humour shows the dramatist still in the process of forging his mature style. He is still trying to reconcile his classical models to the traditions of English drama and to the tastes of his audience. The plot is loose, almost chaotic, and not as tightly controlled as those of The Alchemist and Volpone. Volpone • “What a rare punishment/ Is avarice to itself,” declares Volpone. At the heart of the complex play Volpone is the straightforward moral judgment that the evil one commits brings with it a suitable punishment. In Volpone, Jonson satirizes human nature and the baser impulses of humanity. The play’s characters pursue basely materialistic ideals, and in attaining their goals, they ensure their own downfall. Volpone begins the play with a monologue that is in itself a classic: “Good morning to the day; and next, my gold!/ Open the shrine that I may see my saint.” His servant and partner in crime, Mosca, draws open a curtain and reveals piles of gold. Volpone has called the repository a “shrine” and the gold a “saint.” As the rest of the monologue reveals, Volpone regards wealth with a religious fervor; gold, he asserts, is the “son of Sol”; it “giv’st all men tongues”; it “mak’st men do all things.” Volpone is not merely a clever faker, nor is his servant, Mosca. He is a devotee of an ideal, and as such he is at once more likable and more dangerous than an ordinary thief. He has the excuse that confidence men traditionally have had: that the greed of his victims is their undoing; if they were good people, he would be unable to cheat them. As long as he sticks to victimizing greedy people, he is spectacularly successful; the victims eagerly give him gold and jewels in the hope of gaining his fortune by having it left to them when he dies. When he seeks to “bed” innocent Celia, however, his empire of gold and deceit begins to crumble into its component parts of venality, lust, and spiritual morbidity. Volpone is a captivating character. He is capable of wonderful flights of language and of clever intrigue, and he is a consummate actor; his strength is his knowledge of

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how much he can manipulate people into doing what he wants done; his weakness is his overweening pride—he revels too much in his ability to dupe his victims. By pretending to be an old, dying man, he helps convince his victims of his imminent death and of the possibility that one of them will inherit his wealth. They give him expensive gifts to ingratiate themselves with him. His accomplice, Mosca, is also a skilled actor, who can be obsequious one moment, gallant the next—all things to all people. Mosca convinces each victim that he is favored above all others in Volpone’s will. The scheme is very successful, and there is much hilarity in the gulling of the lawyer Voltore (the vulture), the elderly Corbaccio (the crow), and the merchant and husband of Celia, Corvino (the raven). The actors should resemble their roles: Voltore is craven and menacing; Corbaccio is thin and leggy; and Corvino is quick-eyed and aggressive. There is exuberance in Volpone’s shifts from boisterous and athletic man to bedridden old cripple, in Mosca’s cheerful conniving, and in the duping of three socially prominent and nasty men. The subplot of Lord and Lady Politic Would-be heightens the comedy as Volpone, in his guise as cripple, endures Lady Would-be’s endless talking and her willingness to surrender her virtue for his favor. Volpone’s gold-centered world would be thoroughly jolly if he were not right about gold’s ability to influence people. His victims include innocents, such as Bonario, who is disinherited by his father, Corbaccio, so that Corbaccio can leave his wealth to Volpone in the hope that Volpone will reciprocate. Corvino values wealth above all else; he is a fitting worshiper at the shrine of gold, and he would sacrifice anything to the high priest Volpone in exchange for the promise of acquiring more wealth: Corvino even gives his jealously guarded and naïve wife, Celia, to the supposedly impotent Volpone; she is expected to sleep with him. Underlying the gold-centered world is ugliness; under Volpone’s dashing personality is bestiality; under Mosca’s wit is spiritual paucity. Jonson shows this graphically. Volpone must pretend to be physically degenerated, yet the pretense mirrors the spiritual reality. As the play progresses, his performance becomes more extreme; eventually, he pretends to be nearly a corpse. The more complex his scheming becomes, the more wretched he must show himself to be. He is trapped in his world of gold; when he wants to leave his home to see what Celia looks like, he must disguise himself as a lowly mountebank. The physically vibrant Volpone is restricted to his gold and Mosca. When he reveals himself as ardent lover to the trapped Celia, his feigned physical degeneration emerges in his spiritual self, and he is doomed. Volpone is a great play because it is a nearly perfect meshing of comedy, symbolism, suspense, and moralizing. Each change in any of its aspects is matched by changes in all. Its satiric targets are universals, including greed, moral idiocy, and the replacement of spiritual ideals with materialistic ones. Greed brings down most of the principal characters, including Mosca. Pride brings down Volpone; he cannot resist one more chance to display his brilliance. He pretends to be dead and to have left his fortune to Mosca, simply for the sake of seeing how his victims respond when they learn that he has left them nothing. Mosca, loyal only to the money, wants to keep all for himself. Gold turns the world upside down when made the focus of human endeavor: A husband gives his wife to another man; a father displaces his son; the just are made to look false; and a servant becomes master. Gold should serve its owner, and when Volpone enshrines it, he upsets the proper order of society. The carnality of Volpone is discovered by Bonario, who was accidentally present during Volpone’s near-rape of Celia because of one of Mosca’s plots involving Corbaccio. In the ensuing trial, Volpone is presented to the court as a nearly dead old man

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who is incapable of molesting anyone. Voltore puts on his public mask of respectability and argues to the court that Bonario and Celia are liars and worse, and that those accused by them are honest and innocent. An important theme in the play is that of performance versus reality. Corbaccio properly acts the part of the kindly old gentleman. Corvino plays the honest merchant. Both are respected members of society. Yet just as the exuberant exterior of Volpone covers a decayed spirit, so, too, do the public personalities of Corbaccio, Corvino, and Voltore belie their evil. In a world in which gold is of paramount importance, such people can seem good; likewise, the truly honest and chaste Bonario and Celia can be made to seem conniving, greedy, and concupiscent. Mosca almost gets the money. Corbaccio and Corvino almost escape with their reputations intact. Voltore almost wins a false case with his skillful arguments. Volpone cannot stand to lose his gold and cannot stand to see his victims succeed where he has failed. He reveals all to the court. The conclusion seems contrived—after all, the clever Volpone could start over and find new victims to gull—but it is thematically apt. No matter how often Volpone were to start over, his plotting would end the same way, because he worships a base and false god that cannot enrich his soul. The ending reveals the falseness in the principal characters and lays bare the emptiness of Volpone’s world. The use of the villain as protagonist can be found in the tragedies of Jonson’s contemporaries. Shakespeare’s Macbeth, for example, remains one of literature’s most interesting villainous heroes. The use of a villain as protagonist in a comedy was more rare and may have come from classical comedies, in which conniving servants were often the most entertaining characters. Jonson created for himself a distinctive literary voice by using villains such as Volpone to carry his moral ideas; in The Alchemist, he exploited the same tension with equal success. The Alchemist • Samuel Taylor Coleridge ranked the plot of The Alchemist among the three best in literature, along with those of Sophocles’ Oidipous Tyrannos (c. 429 b.c.e.; Oedipus Tyrannus, 1715) and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749). Like Volpone, the play is about people pretending to be what they are not. The Alchemist, however, goes a step further: Its characters seek to be transformed, to be made over into new people. The three characters who gull the others operate out of a house, and as in Volpone, the victims are brought to the house for fleecing. In contrast to the action of Volpone, however, the action of The Alchemist remains tightly focused on the house; society at large comes to the Blackfriars’ house to be duped and cheated. Jeremy, the butler, goes by various names—usually Face, the conspirator. When his master leaves on a trip, he takes in Subtle, a down-on-his-luck swindler, and Doll Common, a prostitute. There is little pretense of a noble alliance, as in Volpone; these are criminals whose ignoble characters are never in doubt, although they, like their victims, aspire to become what they are not. Part of the genius of the play is the fooling of the victimizers even as they prey on their victims. Doll Common plays the Queen of Faery for the stupid Dapper and a noblewoman for Sir Epicure Mammon. She throws herself into her roles with the hope that she will become—not simply pretend to be—a lady of noble character. Subtle forgets his recent destitution and begins to believe in his ability to transmute human character, even if his alchemical tricks cannot change matter. Face retains some sense of proportion as he shifts from one role to another, but even he hopes to become the important man in society that he cannot be while he remains a butler. These three quarrelsome rogues are laughable, but they also carry Jonson’s moral freight: One must

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know oneself before a change in character is possible. All except the house’s master, Lovewit, hope to be what they are not yet cannot change because they do not know themselves. Dapper is a clerk who hopes to be a successful gambler; he hopes that Subtle, who poses as an alchemist, will be able to guarantee him good luck. Drugger is a silly shopkeeper who wants a guarantee of good business. Kastril is a country squire who wishes to become an urban wit. His sister, Dame Pliant, is an empty-headed, wealthy widow whose beautiful body hides an almost nonexistent personality. Tribulation, Wholesome, and Ananias are hypocritical Puritans who hope that Subtle will give them the philosophers’ stone—which is reputed to have great alchemical powers to transmute— so that they will be able to rule the world. Sir Epicure Mammon (regarded by many critics as one of Jonson’s greatest dramatic creations), egotistical and blind to his own weaknesses, wants the philosophers’ stone so that he can become a kind of Volpone, ruling a materialistic realm in which he would be wonderful in his generosity and terrible in his appetites. Mammon is already living a fantasy, and he needs little encouragement from Subtle, Face, and Doll Common. The victims are motivated by greed and lust; their desires dictate the nature of their cozening. The fun is in the increasingly complex machinations of the resourceful schemers. The satire is in the social roles of the victims, who range from clerk and shopkeeper to religious leader and gentleman. By the play’s end, Surly, the friend of Mammon, has tried to reveal the schemers for what they are, but only Pliant believes him, and she believes whatever she is told. Mammon is in ardent pursuit of a prostitute in whom he sees noble ancestry; Wholesome and his aide Ananias are fearful of losing their chance to transform the world; Dapper is bound, gagged, and locked in a closet; and Subtle and Face are hopping from one deceit to another in order to keep their schemes balanced. Their small world is based on false understandings of self; no one understands who he really is. The hilarious confusion ends when Lovewit returns home and refuses to be fooled by Face’s explanations. Some critics argue that Lovewit is every bit as deluded as the other characters. They argue that the world of The Alchemist remains disordered at the play’s finish. Yet Lovewit seems to see through Face’s lies and games; he seems to know perfectly well what he is doing when he takes Pliant and her fortune for himself. While his remark to Face, “I will be rul’d by thee in any thing,” can be taken to mean that master has yielded to servant, which would be a representation of disorder, it is more likely that Lovewit is expressing gratitude for the deliverance to him of Pliant, as his subsequent remarks suggest. He puts Face back in his place as servant; he puts Kastril in his proper place as his brother-in-law; and he handles the officers of the law and Tribulation and Mammon with confidence. He is in command of the problems created by Face, Subtle, and Doll Common almost from the moment he enters his home. Given the moral themes of the play, Lovewit’s commanding presence provides a satisfying conclusion by showing a character who knows himself bringing order to the chaos brought on by fools. Epicœne • Between Volpone and The Alchemist, Jonson wrote Epicœne, and after The Alchemist he wrote Bartholomew Fair and The Devil Is an Ass. The last-named work is an amusing play but not one of Jonson’s best. The other two, however, rank among his most successful comedies. Unlike Volpone and The Alchemist, they involve broad social milieus. Volpone and The Alchemist present tight little worlds that parody reality; Volpone and Mosca rule theirs at the shrine of gold; Subtle, Face, and Doll Common are minor deities in the world encompassed by their house. In both plays, the outer

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world intrudes only to resolve their plots. In Epicœne and Bartholomew Fair, the larger world of Jacobean society appears on the stage. Epicœne was written for a theatrical company made up entirely of boys, and the central conceit of the play turns on that aspect of its first performance, much as Shakespeare’s As You Like It (pr. c. 1599-1600) has the young man playing Rosalind, a woman, pretend to be a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman. Jonson’s trick is to have Epicœne, played by a boy, turn out at play’s end to be a boy. As in his other great comedies, false pretenses form one of the play’s major themes. The duping of Morose, who loathes noise, draws in braggarts, pretentious women, and urbane wits. Coarse language, persistent lying, and brutality are revealed as the underlying traits of the supposedly refined and sophisticated members of polite society. In addition, Jonson calls into question the validity of sexual roles; Epicœne is called everything from the ideal woman to an Amazon—the boy who plays her fits easily into the society of women and is readily accepted by women until revealed as a boy. Bartholomew Fair • Bartholomew Fair also deals in disguises and confused identities but is more cheerful than Jonson’s other great comedies. The setting of a fair encourages varied action and characters, and Jonson evokes the robust nature of the fair by providing vigorous action and scenes that would be typical of the fairs of his day. The character Ursula is representative of the fair: She is the pig-woman, the operator of a stall that sells roast pig. Big, loud, and sweaty, she embodies the earthiness of the fair, which is noisy and hot with crowding people. The language of the characters is coarse, and they often use vulgarities. The effect is one of down-to-earth good humor and the happy-ending plot. This effect contrasts with Epicœne, which also features grossly vulgar language; its characters are supposedly refined, but they reflect their gutter minds in gutter language. Instead of being down-to-earth, much of the humor seems dirty. Other major works poetry: Poems, 1601; Epigrams, 1616; The Forest, 1616; Underwoods, 1640. nonfiction: The English Grammar, 1640; Timber: Or, Discoveries Made upon Men and Matter, 1641. translation: Horace His Art of Poetry, 1640. miscellaneous: The Workes of Benjamin Jonson, 1616; The Works of Benjamin Jonson, 1640-1641 (2 volumes). Bibliography Butler, Martin, ed. Re-presenting Ben Jonson: Text, History, Performance. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. An examination of the theater in the time of Jonson as well as of his works. Bibliography and index. Cave, Richard, Elizabeth Schafer, and Brian Woolland, eds. Ben Jonson and Theatre: Performance, Practice, and Theory. New York: Routledge, 1999. A collection of essays dealing with the dramatic works of Jonson and the English theater of his time. Bibliography and index. Dutton, Richard, ed. Ben Jonson. Longman Critical Readers. Harlow, England: Pearson Education, 2000. This study presents critical analysis and interpretation of Jonson’s literary works. Bibliography and index. Evans, Robert C., ed. Ben Jonson’s Major Plays: Summaries of Modern Monographs. West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 2000. A reference work containing abstracts and bibliographies of materials by and concerning Jonson. Bibliography and index.

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Harp, Richard, and Stanley Stewart, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. A companion to the playwright and his works. Haynes, Jonathan. The Social Relations of Jonson’s Theatre. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. A look at Jonson’s dramatic works with emphasis on his political and social views. Bibliography and index. Loxley, James. The Complete Critical Guide to Ben Jonson. New York: Routledge, 2002. A handbook designed to provide readers with critical analysis of Jonson’s works. Bibliography and index. Martin, Mathew R. Between Theater and Philosophy: Skepticism in the Major City Comedies of Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001. An examination of the dramatic works of Jonson and Thomas Middleton, with regard to their use of comedy. Bibliography and index. Sanders, Julie. Ben Jonson’s Theatrical Republics. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. An analysis of the political and social views of Jonson as they were manifested in his dramatic works. Bibliography and index. Summers, Claude J., and Ted-Larry Pebworth. Ben Jonson Revisited. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1999. Though this book covers Jonson’s nondramatic writings as well as his plays, it is an excellent starting point for understanding his drama. Each major play receives a full analysis, and Jonson’s entire canon is placed in the context of its time. Bibliography and index. Kirk H. Beetz, updated by John R. Holmes

Tony Kushner Tony Kushner

Born: New York, New York; July 16, 1956 Principal drama • Yes Yes No No, pr. 1985, pb. 1987 (children’s play); A Bright Room Called Day, pr., pb. 1987; Hydriotaphia: Or, The Death of Dr. Brown, pr. 1987, pb. 2000; Stella, pr. 1987 (adaptation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s play); The Illusion, pr. 1988, pb. 1992 (adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s play L’Illusion comique); Widows, pr. 1991 (with Ariel Dorfman; adaptation of Dorfman’s novel); Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (Part One: Millennium Approaches), pr. 1991, pb. 1992; Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (Part Two: Perestroika), pr. 1992, pb. 1993, revised pb. 1996; The Good Person of Setzuan, pr. 1994 (adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s play); Slavs! (Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness), pr. 1994, pb. 1995; A Dybbuk: Or, Between Two Worlds, pr. 1997, pb. 1998 (adaptation of S. Ansky’s play The Dybbuk); Terminating: Or, Lass meine Schmerzen nicht verloren sein, Or, Ambivalence, pr., pb. 1998 (adaptation of William Shakespeare’s sonnet 75); Death and Taxes: Hydriotaphia and Other Plays, pb. 2000 (includes Reverse Transcription, Hydriotaphia, G. David Schine in Hell, Notes on Akiba, Terminating, and East Coast Ode to Howard Jarvis); Homebody/Kabul, pr. 2001, pb. 2002 Other literary forms • Tony Kushner is primarily known for his plays, although he has written a children’s book, Brundibar (2002), and his thoughts are collected in Tony Kushner in Conversation (1998), edited by Robert Vorlicky. Achievements • Tony Kushner won directing fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts in 1985, 1987, and 1993. He received a playwriting fellowship from the New York State Council for the Arts in 1987. Kushner won the John Whiting Award from the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1990. Kushner’s other awards include the Kennedy Center/ American Express New American Play Award in 1992 and the Will Glickham playwriting prize in 1992. Angels in America earned Kushner a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, two Drama Desk Awards, the Evening Standard Award, two Laurence Olivier Award Nominations, the New York Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award, and the Lambda Liberty Award for Drama. In 1998, London’s National Theatre selected Angels in America as one of the ten best plays of the twentieth century. Kushner’s plays have been produced in more than thirty countries around the world and at the Mark Taper Forum, the New York Shakespeare Festival, New York Theatre Workshop, Hartford Stage Company, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Biography • Tony Kushner was born in New York City in 1956, but the family soon moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana, so his parents, classical musicians, could pursue professional opportunities there. From an early age, Kushner’s parents encouraged him to participate in music, literature, and the performing arts. Kushner’s mother was also an actress, and he vividly recalls seeing his mother perform when he was only four or five years old, which made a powerful impression on him and probably inspired him 526

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to pursue a life in theater. His artistic and literary interests, his Jewish background, and his homosexuality set him apart from other children. In an interview with Richard Stayton of the Los Angeles Times, Kushner said that he has distinct memories of being gay since he was six. Kushner knew that he felt slightly different from most other boys. By the time he was eleven, Kushner had no Image not available doubts about his homosexuality. However, Kushner kept his sexuality a secret throughout his college education at Columbia University in New York, even undergoing psychotherapy designed to make him heterosexual. Kushner eventually came out, or revealed his sexual orientation, to his family and friends. Coming out as a homosexual became a prominent theme in his writing, and many of his plays depict Tony Kushner in 1993 (AP/Wide World Photos) characters struggling with their sexuality. Kushner received his B.A. from Columbia in 1978, where he studied medieval literature, and he pursued an M.F.A. at New York University, where he studied directing. Kushner began working as a switchboard operator before his professional theater career took off with the production of A Bright Room Called Day in 1987 and the momentous hit, Angels in America in 1991. Kushner has served as an artist-in-residence and director at New York University, Yale, Princeton, the Julliard School of Drama, and at the St. Louis Repertory Theater. Analysis • Tony Kushner has forged a new reputation as a spokesperson for change and progress during politically conservative times. In the early 1990’s, his seven-hour, two-part Broadway production of Angels in America transformed him from an unknown gay Jewish activist into the most promising, highly acclaimed playwright of his generation, who insisted on the power of theater to convey important truths. In this work, Kushner is concerned with the moral responsibilities of people during war and politically repressive times. He insists on political messages in all of his plays, opposing the popular notions that Americans do not like politics and that entertainment cannot be political. Although socialist politics and gay rights are not always mainstream topics, Kushner feels that artists need to be willing to take an issue that they feel passionately about and to address themselves to it extensively to build a consensus among groups. Kushner wants his plays to be part of a large political movement that teaches responsibility, honesty, social justice, and altruism. Kushner’s plays are dark and speak about death, but they are full of hope for future change. He does not back away from difficult and unpopular social issues.

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A Bright Room Called Day • Kushner’s first important play was conceived during President Ronald Reagan’s re-election in 1984, but its historical setting is 1932-1933 in the Weimar Republic of Germany before World War II. A close group of friends lose track of each other as they are forced into hiding during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. Kushner attempted to link the politics of Nazi Germany with the conservative Republican administration of Reagan, which caused many critics to complain about Kushner’s implicit comparison of Reagan to Hitler, the Nazi totalitarian. In one version of the play, a contemporary American character, Zillah Katz, moves to Berlin in the recently reunified Germany, where she lives in the apartment of Agnes Eggling, one of the original members of the German friends during World War II. Zillah and Agnes communicate to each other through dreams, though separated by forty years in time, and Zillah is inspired to political activism. Kushner raises the idea that all human actions are political. Angels in America, Part One • This play initially came to life in a poem that Kushner wrote after finishing graduate studies at New York University. The poem was about gay men, Mormons, and the famous lawyer Roy Cohn. Originally conceived as a ninety-minute comedy, the play blossomed into two parts about the state of the United States and its struggles with sexual, racial, religious, and social issues such as the AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) epidemic. Angels in America mixes reality and fantasy. Though it is filled with many different characters, Kushner designed Angels in America to be performed by eight actors each of whom plays several roles. This groundbreaking play focuses on three households in turmoil: a gay couple, Louis Ironson and Prior Walter, struggling with AIDS; another couple Harper Pitt and Joe Pitt, who is a Morman man coming to terms with his own sexuality; and the high-profile lawyer Roy Cohn, a historical person who died of AIDS in 1986. Cohn denied his homosexuality his whole life and persecuted gays. Cohn also helped Senator Joseph McCarthy persecute suspected members of the Communist Party in the 1950’s. The subtitle Millennium Approaches describes the impending doom that the character Prior feels when dealing with the deadly disease AIDS. Prior’s illness heightens his sense of a coming apocalypse. Toward the conclusion of the play, a gloriously triumphant angel descends on Prior, rescuing him from death. Prior’s lover Louis has abandoned him in cowardly fear of the illness. The angel tells Prior he has been selected to be a prophet: “Greetings, Prophet;/ The Great Work begins:/ The Messenger has arrived.” The play’s main statement is that the United States’ response to the AIDS epidemic has been politicized and ineffective. Angels in America, Part Two • This play continues the themes of the first part, but is a more somber play, getting its subtitle, perestroika, from Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev’s Russian word for the attempt at “restructuring” the nation’s economic and social policies. The story of Prior’s encounter with the angel continues. The angel tells Prior that God has abandoned his creation and that Prior has been anointed to resist modernity and return the world to the “good old days.” Rejecting the authority granted him, Prior tells the angel that he is not a prophet and wants to be left alone to die in peace. Prior journeys to heaven to talk with God. The wondrous being that visited Prior at the end of Part One turns out to personify stagnancy or death, causing Prior to reject his commission. The lawyer Roy Cohn dies, but his spirit makes appearances later in the play, taking on the role of a lawyer for God. Even as he is dying, Roy

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Cohn tries to manipulate the system and get special medical attention and trick the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg into singing him a lullaby. At the play’s conclusion, the major characters are gathered around the statue of the Bethesda angel in Central Park, where no water runs in the winter. Prior has been living with AIDS for five years, and he and his friends tell the story of the original fountain of Bethesda: When the millennium comes, everyone suffering in body or spirit who walks through the waters of the fountain will be healed and washed clean of pain. Prior and his friends represent a variety of religious and racial backgrounds and various sexual orientations. Even though the real angels seem incompetent and careless, the friends gathered at the Bethesda fountain represent a positive coalition working together to cure the ills of society. The perestroika of the subtitle speaks about the fundamental restructuring necessary in order to confront grave medical, social, and economic issues of the late twentieth century. Slavs! • This play uses materials from the two-part Angels play, and it resembles the earlier play because of its interest in the matrix of social, economic, and political change resulting from the collapse of the Soviet Union. The play portrays the negative effects on people resulting from a lack of coherent leadership. The play begins on a frozen Moscow street in 1985, where two women discuss the failures of Soviet socialism. The character Aleksii Prelapsarianov, borrowed from the second part of Angels in America, is called “the world’s oldest living Bolshevik” in Slavs! Prelapsarianov is concerned that the modern reformers do not have sufficient intellectual principles to guide them: “How are we to proceed without theory? Is it enough to reject the past, is it wise to move forward in this blind fashion, without the cold brilliant light of theory to guide the way?” Kushner makes a statement about the lack of direction in modern times. Socialism looks to the past in order to get the structure of the future, but modern restructuring does not have coherent theory to direct it. The very last line of the play, “What is to be done?” is asked throughout the play. Despite the failure of communism and the discrediting of socialist theory, the capitalism of the West has failed to find an answer to social and economic injustice. The most emotional statement of this conundrum comes from the lips of Vodya Domik, an eightyear-old mute girl who died as a result of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown. She regains her voice along with a disheartened vision of the bitter reality of history: “Perhaps it is true that social justice, economic justice, equality, community, an end to master and slave, the withering away of the state: these are desirable but not realizable on the Earth.” A Dybbuk • The play is an adaptation of Sy Ansky’s 1920 Yiddish play concerning the marriage of Leah, the daughter of a wealthy man who has pledged her to the son of another wealthy family. Leah experiences anguish and frustration because her true love is a penniless Yeshiva student named Khonen. Leah secretly returns Khonen’s passion. When the father formally proclaims the appropriate husband for Leah, Khonen gets revenge by entering Leah’s body as a “dybbuk,” a Yiddish word meaning “a disturbed spirit” who takes possession of another’s body. The father turns in frustration to the revered Rabbi of Miropol for an exorcism. However, the father finds himself under judgment by the rabbinical court. Long ago, the father had promised Leah to Khonen, but his greed blinded him to Leah’s true desires when he tried to marry her to a rich young man. In the end, he pays for his vices by giving half of his wealth to the poor. Even the most unintended immoral act can have profound social consequences.

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The play tries to foreshadow the forthcoming evils of the Holocaust in the closing epitaph. Other major works nonfiction: Tony Kushner in Conversation, 1998 (Robert Vorlicky, editor). children’s literature: Brundibar, 2002 (illustrated by Maurice Sendak). miscellaneous: Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness: Essays, a Play, Two Poems, and a Prayer, 1995. Bibliography Bras, Per K. Essays on Kushner’s Angels. Winnipeg, Canada: Blizzard Publishing, 1996. This collection of essays and an interview with the playwright discuss the impact of productions of Angels in America in regions and nations outside the United States, including Scandinavia, England, and Australia. Fisher, James. The Theater of Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope. London: Routledge, 2001. A complete study of Kushner’s work, Fisher’s work covers all full-length, one-act, and adapted works by this Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist. Fisher argues that Kushner is unusual among American playwrights because he believes that all theater is political. His plays explore the moral, social, religious, and political questions that shape the future of the United States in the world community. Geis, Deborah R., and Steven F. Kruger. Approaching the Millennium: Essays on “Angels in America.” Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. The book is divided into sections on Ronald Reagan’s America and politics, identities in Angels, Kushner’s theater, and Angels in performance contexts. Osborn, M. Elizabeth, Terrence McNally, and Lanford Wilson. The Way We Live Now: American Plays and the AIDS Crisis. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1990. Plays by a variety of contemporary playwrights including Susan Sontag, Harvey Fierstein, and Kushner demonstrate how the performing arts community has been devastated by the AIDS crisis. Jonathan L. Thorndike

Pär Lagerkvist Pär Lagerkvist

Born: Växjö, Sweden; May 23, 1891 Died: Lidingö, Sweden; July 11, 1974 Principal drama • Sista mänskan, pb. 1917; Den svåra stunden, pr., pb. 1918 (The Difficult Hour, I-III, 1966); Himlens hemlighet, pb. 1919, pr. 1921 (The Secret of Heaven, 1966); Den osynlige, pb. 1923, pr. 1924; Han som fick leva om sitt liv, pr., pb. 1928 (The Man Who Lived His Life Over, 1971); Konungen, pb. 1932, pr. 1950 (The King, 1966); Bödeln, pb. 1933, pr. 1934 (adaptation of his novella; The Hangman, 1966); Mannen utan själ, pb. 1936, pr. 1938 (The Man Without a Soul, 1944); Seger i mörker, pb. 1939, pr. 1940; Midsommardröm i fattighuset, pr., pb. 1941 (Midsummer Dream in the Workhouse, 1953); De vises sten, pb. 1947, pr. 1948 (The Philosopher’s Stone, 1966); Låt människan leva, pr., pb. 1949 (Let Man Live, 1951); Barabbas, pr., pb. 1953 (adaptation of his novel); Dramatik, pb. 1956 (3 volumes) Other literary forms • Pär Lagerkvist is, outside Sweden, best known as a novelist. In his own country, he is highly esteemed both as a poet and as a novelist and is ranked second only to August Strindberg in Swedish drama (excluding the cinema). He is also the author of essays on drama, literature, and painting; prose poems; sketches; travel essays; and many short stories. Achievements • As a Scandinavian playwright, Pär Lagerkvist now belongs to a triumvirate that includes Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. Thomas Buckman, the translator of seven of Lagerkvist’s plays and of his essay on modern theater, recognizes him as having introduced “a new spirit of modernism” into drama. The scholar Alrik Gustafson, who was a friend and frequent guest of Lagerkvist, observed in 1951 that “Lagerkvist has placed his stamp so firmly on Swedish literary culture that a recent Scandinavian writes: ‘If Swedish literature after 1914 may be expressed by a single name, that name must without question be Pär Lagerkvist.’” One may perhaps expect high praise from Scandinavians and from professors of Scandinavian studies, and indeed Martin Seymour-Smith, insisting that “Scandinavians overvalue their literature,” says that “no better example of this habit could be found than in the vastly inflated reputation of Lagerkvist” and adds that in expressionist drama “his example has been disastrous.” This somewhat peevish appraisal is at least explicit on the magnitude of Lagerkvist’s influence. For better or worse, Lagerkvist has been a real force in modern Swedish drama and literature. Richard B. Vowles, a critic of Lagerkvist’s fiction, has written, fairly and noncommittally, “Between 1912 and 1918 he largely established the expressionist direction of Swedish modernism.” It would be difficult to deny that Sweden’s renowned film director Ingmar Bergman followed this direction. “Lagerkvist,” according to Peter Cowie in his 1982 biography of Bergman, “is the only twentieth century Swedish artist whose religious preoccupations are on a par with Bergman’s.” Lagerkvist’s theme of the need for faith in a world unable to make proper provision for it is, again according to Cowie, “crucial to Bergman’s films of the fifties, and in particular The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring.” In his much-quoted praise of the novel 531

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Barabbas (1950; English translation, 1951), which was subsequently dramatized, André Gide wrote, “It is the measure of Lagerkvist’s success that he has managed so admirably to maintain his balance on a tightrope which stretches across the dark abyss that lies between the world of reality and the world of faith.” Gide’s statement may serve as a summary of the tension that informs Lagerkvist’s drama; it is also evidence that appreciation of Lagerkvist is not limited to Scandinavia or to academe. In the Scandinavian triumvirate there is, generally, in Ibsen a movement from psychological realism to symbolic naturalism, in Strindberg a movement from psychological naturalism to symbolic expressionism, and in Lagerkvist a movement from Strindbergian expressionism to metaphysical cubism. “Metaphysical” and “cubist” are terms that have become commonplace in Lagerkvist criticism. Others are visionary, anguished, spiritual, uncompromising, and honest. The term “moral” also appears in such criticism. Lagerkvist’s morality proved to be as unconventional as his religion (he identified himself as a religious atheist). In his work, simplistic notions of good and evil give way to the moral tension between love and evil, with “good” and “bad” being understood as functional opposites: Subject to moral tension, the individual becomes good at, or bad at, being a human (människa). The Lagerkvistian individual determines his own character, or ethical identity, by resolving this tension from within, by finding the kingdom of God, not in an external heaven or a prescriptive tradition but within the self. Existentialists would call this anguished search a quest for authenticity and an ethical imperative. In his book On Moral Fiction (1978), John Gardner, attesting Lagerkvist’s achievements as novelist and poet (to which must be added playwright), declared: “We have seen in recent years a few great novelists and poets like Pär Lagerkvist, who have interested themselves not only in the anguish of the social moment but also in a larger or at least more enduring problem: metaphysical anguish.” Biography • Pär Fabian Lagerkvist displayed his predisposition to independence in his very first appearance in print, a letter to the local newspaper in October, 1905, written when he was fourteen: Every schoolboy is surely aware of the hostility that exists, not only in Växiö but in other cities as well, between elementary- and secondary-school pupils. This hostility may appear to be insignificant, but it certainly is not; it is nothing other than the beginning of a pernicious class hatred in Sweden. For how easily does a boy from elementary school, who during his entire schooling grows accustomed to harboring the same hostility toward a secondary-school pupil that the socialists harbor toward the upper social classes, how easily does such a boy fall victim to pernicious socialism. Conversely, a secondary-school pupil can easily begin to hate not only the elementary-school students but also, when he is older and more mature, all members of the working class. Therefore, comrades, let’s begin to lay aside this bad habit and rather try, in harmony, to further the best interests of our country. [signed ] A schoolboy. In five to seven years’ time, Lagerkvist would become sufficiently amenable to socialism to lend his creative talents to the Social Democratic journals Fram, Stormklockan, and Norskensflamman. Thirteen months after his debut in the local newspaper, he published a prose sketch entitled “Moderskärlek” and signed “Jagibus.” It is a sentimental piece with a trace of

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bitterness over the emigration to the United States of which Småland had seen much during the last half of the nineteenth century. The burgeoning of Lagerkvist’s literary career coincides with the development of cubism from 1907 to 1914. In 1909 and 1910 he published thirteen poems under the pen name “Stig Stigson.” The first work published in his own name was the poem “Kväll” (“Evening”), written in February, 1911, in honor of the poet Gustaf Fröding, who had recently died. In 1912, he published seven new poems, a copy of two hitherto unpublished Strindberg letters that he had discovered, a prose fantasy entitled “Gudstanken” (“God’s Thought”), and his first novel, Människor (people). Many of Lagerkvist’s early works, particularly his poems, have a militant socialist focus that would give way by 1916 to his broader human(© The Nobel Foundation) istic expressions of längtan (longing), ångest (anguish), and kärlek (love). Adumbrations of his plays and later novels are evident in “God’s Thought,” in which a Diana figure (to reappear in a 1960 novel), as a vestige of a dead religion, serves to turn a man toward the experience of his own being and, consequently, away from preoccupation with the supernatural, and in a 1912 poem, “Min Gud” (“My God”), which begins, “My god is a proud, defiant man/ — —my god is a child gone astray,” asserts midway, “My god is what life has given me/ to mold into worship and belief,” and concludes, “my god—my god—: he is I!—he is I!— — —.” Lagerkvist’s maternal grandparents had been farm people, severely uncompromising in their fundamentalist religion. In their presence, Lagerkvist learned the cold terror of a religion of judgment. His father, Anders Johan Lagerkvist, a foreman at a railroad yard, and his mother, née Johanna Blad, were devout Christians, but their persuasion was marked more by the solace of the Gospel than by the rigidity of the Law. Ultimately, Lagerkvist abandoned the faith of both his grandparents and his parents. In 1913, Lagerkvist published three poems and two prose sketches in Stormklockan, to which he also contributed twelve reviews, including his review of Fyodor Dostoevski’s Unizhennye i oskorblyonnye (1861; The Insulted and Injured, 1887). His review article on Guillaume Apollinaire’s Les Peintres cubistes: Méditations esthétiques (1913; The Cubist Painters: Esthetic Meditations, 1944) appeared in Svenska dagbladet. He also published that year Två sagor om livet (two tales of life, a pair of short stories) and his very important essay Ordkonst och bildkonst (Literary Art and Pictorial Art, 1982), which established his championship of cubism and helped to change the literary climate in Swe-

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den. He saw cubism as greatly superior to impressionism and naturalism and developed the suggestion that the literary artist would do well to adhere to the mathematical technique and the structural principles of the cubist painter. Lagerkvist passed his student-examination in Växjö at the age of nineteen, entitling him to wear the white studentmössa (student-cap), indicative of his eligibility for university study. He entered Uppsala University in 1911 but gave it up after a single term. Människor includes passages expressive of his dissatisfaction with student life. He carried on his studies independently. During the first half of 1913, he was in Paris, carefully appraising the theories and methods of French painting, particularly expressionism, Fauvism, and, as noted, cubism. He lived in Denmark during World War I and recorded his bitter but lyric lament over the waste and inhumanity of war in Järn och människor (iron and men), a collection of five short stories published in 1915. In the next year, his first collection of poems appeared under the title of the poem that opens the collection, Ångest. The title, translated as “anguish,” denotes a painfully intellectual emotion. Lagerkvist’s first major renditions of the theme coincided with his residence in the country of Søren Kierkegaard, who had defined the existentialist concept of ångest as “a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.” Lagerkvist developed a presentation of ångest as an intensified consciousness of längtan (longing). Längtan is common to both innocence (ignorance) and loss of innocence (awareness); it is in the loss of innocence that längtan becomes ångest. Both Lagerkvist and Kierkegaard see spirit as an intellectual emotion, as the imaginative awareness that is at once the source, the sustenance, and the identity of “anguish”; both see it as a synthesis of body and soul, a synthesis that spirit itself effects when it awakens from its own dream. Lagerkvist’s längtan is Kierkegaard’s Aand . . . drømmende (spirit . . . dreaming). It was during this period in Denmark that Lagerkvist added to his independent curriculum a thoroughgoing study of drama. He concluded that modern theater, like modern literature, was seriously oppressed by naturalism; in “Modern teater: Synpunkter och angrepp” (1918; “Modern Theatre: Points of View and Attack,” 1966), he criticized contemporary drama as vigorously as he had criticized contemporary literature in Literary Art and Pictorial Art, and his suggestion for its rejuvenation was much the same as the one he had made for literature—chiefly, mathematical construction and an application of the principles of cubist painting. He berated the naturalistic theater for its failure to express the time in which people were currently living, a time greatly in need of giving adequate expression to its ångest. His first play, Sista mänskan (the last man), was published in 1917. Like his first novel, it was patently expressionistic, depressingly informed by the imagery of darkness, and presumably a failure. Lagerkvist never permitted any reprinting of Människor; and while he did not object to reprintings of Sista mänskan, he seems never to have sought or encouraged its production once he had achieved success with his subsequent plays. The number of plays he wrote is relatively small, thirteen in the thirty-six years from 1917 through 1953, with two of these being adaptations from his prose fiction. He published no dramatic works during the last twenty-one years of his life. The film production of his Barabbas in 1962 was essentially the work of others. Ibsen, having written twice that many plays in fifty-one years, remained active as a playwright until only seven years before his death. Strindberg, who wrote his last play only three years before his death, had completed forty-six plays in, at most, thirty-seven years. By the time Lagerkvist had written his second and third plays, his second compris-

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ing three one-act plays and his third being a one-act play, he had succeeded August Brunius, his good friend and the author of the foreword to Literary Art and Pictorial Art, as art and drama critic for Svenska dagbladet. During 1918-1919, he wrote forty-six reviews for the newspaper. In 1922 he collected his thoughts on innocence, awareness, and spirit and wrote them down in “Myten om människorna” (the myth of humankind). This work deals with the beginning, as Sista mänskan deals with the end, of humankind. Only a fragment of it has been published. By 1925, Lagerkvist was well established as a significant figure in Swedish literature. In 1928, having successfully worked in all the literary genres that mark his canon, he received the prestigious literary prize awarded by Samfundet De Nio (The Committee of Nine). Lagerkvist’s most challenging works during the next decade were Bödeln (1933; The Hangman, 1936) and Den knutna näven (1934; The Clenched Fist, 1982), the latter written in conjuction with his travels to Greece and Palestine. In these works, he measures ångest against the problem of evil with which he had struggled in Sista mänskan and which he had elucidated in his collection of short stories Onda sagor (1924; evil tales). The Hangman is a lyric comment on the brutalism of fascist sovereignty; more important, it develops in sympathetic antipathy the theme of the necessity and persistence of evil. The subject is expanded in lyric essays in The Clenched Fist as Lagerkvist elaborates his version of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian duality. Unlike Nietzsche, Lagerkvist limits these motifs almost exclusively to morality, yet, like Nietzsche, he recognizes the positive and negative forces in each and the great dangers resulting from the ascendance of either one over the other. These themes receive masterful treatment in the novel Dvärgen (1944; The Dwarf, 1945) with its Apollonian artist-scientist Messer Bernardo, its Dionysian dwarf Piccoline, and its theme of inherent human evil. Four years before publication of The Dwarf, Lagerkvist had succeeded to the chair of the deceased Verner von Heidenstam as a duly elected member of the Swedish Academy of Literature, that body of “immortals” that selects the winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Lagerkvist was himself nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1950, the year in which he published his novel Barabbas. André Gide had won the prize in 1947, T. S. Eliot in 1948. The 1949 prize was held over to 1950, the year of Lagerkvist’s nomination; it was won by William Faulkner, for whom it is said Lagerkvist had cast his ballot, and the 1950 prize was awarded to Bertrand Russell. The 1951 prize was awarded to Pär Lagerkvist, the Uppsala University dropout who had received an honorary Ph.D. from the University of Gothenburg in 1941 and whose works became the subject of study at Uppsala. Lagerkvist’s speech at the Nobel Prize ceremonies consisted of the aforementioned fragment from his 1922 composition “Myten om människorna.” From 1951 until his death in 1974, Lagerkvist published only six works—his ninth and last volume of poetry and five short novels. In 1977, his daughter Elin Lagerkvist published Antecknat, a collection of his notes, jottings, and diary entries, dating from 1906, and seven previously unpublished poems. Analysis • Ångest is a subject that does not lend itself to comedy readily. Even the comedian Woody Allen had to move from farce to the seriocomic and serious in order to accommodate his attention to his Manhattanesque angst. Pär Lagerkvist’s brooding seriousness—the Swedish word for it is grubbel—is rarely relieved in his work by a light touch or a comic lift. None of his plays is a comedy. Those that are not tragedies, or tragic, are, at their most positive level, hauntingly melancholy.

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Sista mänskan • A good approach to his first play, Sista mänskan, is to see its world as the terminus of the world brought into being in “Myten om människorna,” which begins, “Once upon a time there was a world.” In “Myten om människorna,” a man and a woman come to this world for a short visit. They make a home. The husband hunts and tills the soil. The wife bears three sons. One evening she tells her children about the other worlds she knows. When the youngest son dies, it is understood that he has gone to another world. The man and his wife grow old. After they die, their surviving sons feel great relief. Unbothered by further contemplation of other worlds, the two young men joyously go out to take possession of the earth, on which human life is burgeoning. From this paradisiacal setting, Lagerkvist has excluded a creator and for the visit of Lucifer has substituted the event of death. The Adam and Eve of this myth have come from a heavenly realm where all was clear, bright, and glorious and where their love for each other was taken for granted. On earth, their love could not be taken for granted. It was a miracle, infinitely precious because it could not last. In their love and in their life on earth, they lost their knowledge of Heaven; it became a mystery. When the woman told her sons about the other world, she could not remember enough to satisfy her youngest, who, quite unlike his brothers, yearned for Heaven. In his yearning, he withers and dies, while his brothers revel in life on earth. There are two ideas expressed here. The first is that the price of earthly life is ignorance of Heaven; its corollary is that in the human presumption to know a no longer knowable Heaven, earthly life is wasted. The divinity of the other world separates the individual from the divinity within the self in proportion as the self yearns for the other world. The second idea is that loss of innocence is the price of human love and of the awakening of spirit in the physical consummation of that love. The two ideas constitute the lesson that has not been learned in Sista mänskan, in which earth’s last humans struggle for survival in the cold and the encroaching darkness of a world whose sun is dying. Adam and Eve have become Gama, a blind man, and Vyr, mother of a young boy named Ilja. Present also are a paralytic, a cripple, a leper, a redhead, old women, the last humans, the dead, and a chorus of suppliants. In the past, which is to say in the course of human history, Gama had raped Vyr, who in turn blinded him while he slept and then went off to live alone and bear and rear the son she had conceived. Blind Gama returns and attempts to love Vyr and her son without at first knowing that Vyr is the former victim of his lust and that Ilja is his son. Vyr desperately needs Gama’s love, and Ilja hungers for the knowledge of what love is. Gama and Vyr fall in love, but when Gama learns who Vyr is and that she was the one who blinded him, he strangles her. Ilja loses his desire to live and sinks to the ground. Gama, losing his sanity, calls out his son’s name and sinks to the ground. In this short three-act play, Lagerkvist’s pessimism is at its peak: He offers no hope that humankind will learn, not the meaning, but the lesson of life—namely, the need to stabilize evil by means of love. The meaning of life is something for each individual to determine through apprehending the divinity within the self. Sista mänskan is Lagerkvist’s expressionistic attempt to sustain what he considers to be Strindberg’s rebellious renaissance in theatrical art. In “Modern Theatre,” the 1918 essay in which he extols Strindberg’s dramaturgy and condemns what he sees as Ibsen’s tediously formalistic naturalism, Lagerkvist insists that modern theater should be true to its time, and he makes a statement that could pass for a description of the mise en scène of The Last Man: “At this time everything is torn apart, at loose ends, harsh, contra-

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dictory, with light and darkness irreconcilably opposed. And we must live within what encompasses us, in the time that is our own, feeling our way about in it and trying to understand.” The Difficult Hour, I-III • The expressionistic chiaroscuro of Sista mänskan is retained in The Difficult Hour, I-III, a more successful theatrical encounter with the lesson of life. The “difficult hour” is that critical moment at which life passes into death. Each of the one-act plays in this trilogy of death shows an individual—respectively, a young man, an old man, and a boy—learning the lesson of life during the moment in which he learns that he is dead. Although The Difficult Hour, I-III comprises three plays, it is a dramatic unit with a progressive lessening of the difficulty of the critical moment: The young man dies screaming in remorseful confusion; the old man dies in resignation; and the boy dies with full acceptance of his fate. Lagerkvist uses the image of physical deformity to symbolize human imperfection and limitation: a blind man, a paralytic, a cripple, and a leper in Sista mänskan; a hunchback and a dwarf in The Difficult Hour, I-III. The Secret of Heaven • In the one-act play The Secret of Heaven, there is a blind man, a cripple, and a dwarf. Fate is represented by a man in tights who pulls the heads off dolls as indiscriminately as the spinning Parcae broke the threads of human lives. Religion takes the form of a man wearing a yarmulke who claims to understand everything except God. God appears, as he appears in the novella Det eviga leendet (1920; The Eternal Smile, 1934), in the person of an old man sawing wood. A young man asks the old woodsman for the meaning of everything and is told that meaning consists in the fact that everything whirls around (Allting snurrar runt). Later, when the young man receives the same answer from the man in the yarmulke, who adds a note of determinism by saying that everything must whirl around (allting ska snurra runt), he leaps into the void, screaming in frustration. The play’s setting, which also reappears in The Eternal Smile, is Heaven, or eternity, wherein only God, darkness, and the dead are to be found. Den osynlige • Sista mänskan and The Difficult Hour, I-III both exhibit what Wylie Sypher has called “cubist simultaneous perspective” in that both view human existence from the coextensive and intersecting planes of life and death and against the irreconcilable forces of light and darkness. In the three acts of his fourth play, Den osynlige (the invisible one), light and darkness are reconciled as the complements of a dualism. Like Aeschylus’s Oresteia (458 b.c.e.; English translation, 1777), which discloses the mean between light and darkness and not the elimination of darkness in favor of light to be the proper object of human seeking, the play begins in darkness, wherein the voice of the Invisible One is heard, and ends in light, with the Invisible One identifying himself as människoanden (the human spirit), predicting his victory over and survival of Death, and dismissing Death. The refrain of the play’s third act is “God is dead.” When Death asks the Invisible One if he is God, he says, “No, God is dead,” and asserts that he, the human spirit, is alive. Two limited forces, tyranny and rebellion, personified respectively as the Administrator and the Hero, both come to an end: The Administrator is struck down by the Invisible One, and the Hero is mortally wounded in fighting for his beliefs. Death and the human spirit remain as the forces of opposition, which, in a type of Zoroastrian dualism, make the world go round, or ensure that everything whirls around. The Invis-

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ible One does emerge as God, not the eternal and external woodcutter, but the divinity resident in the heart of each human being. The Man Who Lived His Life Over • The Man Who Lived His Life Over begins with a voice in darkness telling a dead man named Daniel that he may live again. Daniel is restored to his youth and his shoemaker’s trade and determines that his second life will be the right one. It proves to be quite as bad as the first because again Daniel expects life, or God, to conform to his own true and unique identity. Daniel cannot really live, he can only exist because, looking for life to live him, he fails to make his life his own. The voice from the darkness proves to have been Death. God, as the human spirit, appears at the beginning of Daniel’s second life in the form of an alcoholic man with a wooden leg who sells shoelaces. His name is Boman (Home-man or Livingman). He teaches Daniel how to make one’s life one’s own, but Daniel does not learn the lesson. In his first life, Daniel had followed the dictates of passion—a course that led him to prison, convicted of the murder of a disreputable woman who flouted his desire. In his second life, he becomes a slave to conventional morality and drives his youngest son to suicide by refusing to let him carry on with the woman he loves, a woman of loose morals. The two lives are presented in simultaneity and from the simultaneous perspectives of a fantastic premise and a realistic setting, as Lagerkvist’s cubism here supersedes his expressionism. All three acts of The Man Who Lived His Life Over reverberate with the call for existentialist authenticity. In the first act, for example, Daniel tells Boman that “we live out something that has been thrown to us”; Boman quite agrees and is pleased with Daniel’s insight into what Martin Heidegger had termed Geworfenheit (throwness) and adds that this thrown life “somehow becomes our own,” that “we get used to it, and it becomes, so to speak, our self.” The King • Lagerkvist’s sixth play, The King, in three acts, is a mythic drama concerning the ritual of a king’s being reduced to beggary for one day, during which a member of the lowest class, in this case a criminal, rules as king. The criminal-king instigates a rebellion of his class against the upper classes and with its success assumes permanent power. The real king, as a member of the rebel horde, has been killed. Apart from its mythic information, the play is entirely conventional in structure and development. The image of deformity is retained, this time in a king’s fool who is hunchbacked and a dwarf. The theme of authenticity is worked out as both the real king and the criminal-king realize their true selves in their changed roles. Historically, the play reflects the proletarian and God-is-dead movements: The new king commends a young man, whose life he has spared, for vowing to serve humankind after he, the king, has declared, “There are no divine laws any more.” Stylistically, the play shares the simplicity and spareness of Lagerkvist’s later narrative fiction. The Hangman • A long one-act play adapted from his novella of the same title, The Hangman (also known as The Executioner), shows Lagerkvist at the peak of his talent as a dramatist. The play begins in a medieval tavern that later becomes a modern nightclub and the scene of a race riot with Nazi-like whites shooting and killing members of a black jazz band. There are three separate tableaux, each implicating the executioner, as a figure of evil, in an act of love. In the first, he lets a boy drink from his hand and

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thereby frees the boy from a curse. In the second, he saves the life of a woman whom he is to behead by marrying her and loving her. In the last, he presides over the Crucifixion of Christ, who calls him brother; the executioner then calls out that God is dead and that he himself is the living Christ whose task it has always been and always will be to shed blood as the means of relieving humankind of its burden of guilt. The image of deformity is limited to blindness in The Hangman and, except for Deaf Anna in Midsummer Dream in the Workhouse, in Lagerkvist’s last six plays. In two of those last six plays, Seger i mörker (victory in the dark) and Barabbas, there is not even a blind person, but both plays sustain and intensify Lagerkvist’s expression of anguish at human blindness to human values. The Man Without a Soul • The Man Without a Soul and Seger i mörker, in, respectively, five acts and four acts, are political dramas reminiscent of the Spanish civil war and other European events of the late 1930’s. The man without a soul is the unfeeling murderer of a member of the political opposition. He enters into a relationship with a woman whom he learns is the mistress of the man he has killed. The knowledge of his evil coupled with his experience of love for the woman gives birth to his soul, or his authenticity, as the woman gives birth to her former lover’s son. The woman dies in childbirth. The man, sentenced to death for deserting his comrades, dies in soul-birth as he goes to his execution in a flood of light with head uplifted. Seger i mörker • Seger i mörker follows the mythic device of rival brothers. Robert Grant, stepbrother to Gabriel Fontan, the premier of a democratic government, conspires to overthrow the government and install a military dictatorship. He succeeds, but Gabriel gains a victory of the spirit as he, having been unfaithful to his wife, Stella, is reconciled with her before both are to be executed. They reaffirm their love and their faith in the political ideals they have shared. Robert, distraught over Stella’s refusal to be spared, remains alone in the cell from which the husband and wife have been led to the firing squad, collapses on hearing the salvo, and crawls about like an animal as the sounds of airplanes and bombs draw ominously nearer and nearer. The darkness enshrouding Robert’s victory is the darkness of the jungle. Both these political dramas are as dramaturgically conventional and as formal as any of Ibsen’s plays. The same is true of The Philosopher’s Stone. At the same time, all three maintain and intensify Lagerkvist’s constant themes of light and darkness, love and evil, individual authenticity, and the divinity of the human spirit. He reverts to Strindbergian expressionism in Midsummer Dream in the Workhouse and Let Man Live, but only as he nears the end of working his vein of drama. Midsummer Dream in the Workhouse • Midsummer Dream in the Workhouse, with The Difficult Hour, I-III, The Man Who Lived His Life Over, and The Hangman, is the most successful of Lagerkvist’s plays. Midsummer Dream in the Workhouse is a dream play in which Blind Jonas creates an imaginary world for a young Cecilia and manages to inhabit that world himself. If this play were to have an epigraph, it would be the words of Boman in The Man Who Lived His Life Over: Yes, we live as well as we can . . . this hard, hard life . . . we endure it . . . drag ourselves through it . . . day by day, year after year . . . as well as we are able to. . . . And we have our dreams, we have our dreams! Have you thought about that? Oh, there is generosity, there is generosity. . . . And we have our dreams.

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Gustafson has written that in this play “Lagerkvist experiments with a strange blend of delicate dream elements and a coarse realism of situation and dialogue to produce a dramatic fantasy of haunting beauty.” The Philosopher’s Stone • The Philosopher’s Stone (literally, “the wise men’s stone”; the pun on alchemy and the Magi of the New Testament is lost in translation) is Lagerkvist’s longest play. Its four acts are somewhat marred by passages of awkward exposition and unengaging, lengthy dialogue. Albertus is an alchemist with faith in science but without religious faith. His wife, Maria, is a devout Christian. His friend Simonides is a dedicated rabbi, whose son Jacob wants to marry Albertus’s daughter Catherine. Neither father approves of the marriage, which does not take place. Instead, Jacob is executed for killing a constable from whose hands he sought to rescue Catherine. Simonides and his followers are expelled from their ghetto. Catherine, to her mother’s joy, decides to become a nun. Albertus lets the fire in his laboratory oven go out. Neither Albertus, obsessed with his chemical search for gold, nor Maria and Simonides, obsessed with their respective gods, foster the human love that Catherine and Jacob wished to consummate. Science and religion are not at odds in this play, although initially they seem to be. Actually, they prove to be unwitting coconspirators against the human spirit. Let Man Live • From the conventional format of The Philosopher’s Stone, Lagerkvist turns to a one-act recitative in Let Man Live. There are fourteen speakers: Judas Iscariot, who committed suicide, and thirteen who were executed: Richard, a seventeenyear-old radio operator killed while working for the underground; Joe, a black man who wanted to be a jazz saxophonist and who was lynched on suspicion of having danced with a white woman; Comtesse de la Roche-Montfaucon; a serf caught stealing meat; a witch who had had sexual intercourse with Satan; Giordano Bruno; an Inca chief killed by Christians; Jeanne d’Arc; Paolo and Francesca; a Christian martyr; Jesus; and Socrates. Each of the speakers addresses the audience directly and attests fidelity to his or her true self: Each has died as the price of having lived authentically. The plotless recitative ends with Paolo and Francesca calling on the audience to let humankind live. The work has been called an oratorio; it is also something of an oral chaconne. Barabbas • Lagerkvist’s dramatization of his novel Barabbas is cast in two acts, each divided into five scenes. The play opens and closes with a prospect of the three crosses on Golgotha. Barabbas is the story of an evil man redeemed by his authentic desire for a faith that he cannot achieve or understand and for a love that he cannot experience. At the end of both the novel and the play, Barabbas goes to his death physically with, but psychologically apart from, the Christians, whose Lord is love. Of the filmed Barabbas, it may be said that many of the scenes—the crucifixions, the eclipse of the sun, the copper-mine episode—and the character of Sahak are evocative of effects of Lagerkvist’s novel and play, but such excesses as the needlessly complex scenario and the transformation of Barabbas into a gladiator are inconsistent with Lagerkvist’s dark simplicity. In the play Barabbas, the physical and psychological chiaroscuro and the titular character’s groping for love do much to evoke the effects of Sista mänskan, but with Barabbas, Lagerkvist seems to have realized his intention with regard to those effects and seems also to have satisfied himself that he has done what he set out as a play-

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wright to do. In Sista mänskan, there is this note on Seger i mörker: “Love is the one essential thing. All the other things are side effects. They have their importance as props—but love is the play itself.” This note may be equivalent to a summary of Lagerkvist’s intention as a playwright. Other major works long fiction: Människor, 1912 (novella); Det eviga leendet, 1920 (novella; The Eternal Smile, 1934); Gäst hos verkligheten, 1925 (novella; Guest of Reality, 1936); Bödeln, 1933 (novella; The Hangman, 1936); Dvärgen, 1944 (The Dwarf, 1945); Barabbas, 1950 (English translation, 1951); Sibyllan, 1956 (The Sibyl, 1958); Ahasverus död, 1960 (The Death of Ahasuerus, 1962); Pilgrim på havet, 1962 (Pilgrim at Sea, 1964); Det heliga landet, 1964 (The Holy Land, 1966); Pilgrimen, 1966 (collective title for previous 3 novels); Mariamne, 1967 (Herod and Mariamne, 1968). short fiction: Två sagor om livet, 1913; Järn och människor, 1915; Onda sagor, 1924; Kämpande ande, 1930; I den tiden, 1935; The Eternal Smile and Other Stories, 1954; The Marriage Feast and Other Stories, 1955; Prosa I-V, 1956; The Eternal Smile: Three Stories, 1971. poetry: Ångest, 1916; Den lyckliges väg, 1921; Hjärtats sånger, 1926; Vid lägereld, 1932; Genius, 1937; Sång och strid, 1940; Dikter, 1941; Hemmet och stjärnan, 1942; Aftonland, 1953 (Evening Land, 1975). nonfiction: Ordkonst och bildkonst, 1913 (Literary Art and Pictorial Art, 1982); Teater, 1918; “Modern teater: Synpunkter och angrepp,” 1918 (“Modern Theatre: Points of View and Attack,” 1966); Det besegrade livet, 1927; Den knutna näven, 1934 (The Clenched Fist, 1982); Den befriade människan, 1939; Antecknat, 1977. miscellaneous: Motiv, 1914 (poetry, essays, and prose sketches); Kaos, 1919 (poetry and the play The Secret of Heaven); Modern Theatre: Seven Plays and an Essay, 1966; Five Early Works, 1989. Bibliography Scobbie, Irene. Pär Lagerkvist: Gäst hos verkligheten. 2d ed. Hull: Orton and Holmes, 1976. A study of Lagerkvist that focuses on his novel, Guest of Reality. Provides insights into the drama. Bibliography. _______, ed. Aspects of Modern Swedish Literature. Rev. ed. Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour Editions, 1999. Contains an in-depth study of Lagerkvist, among other writers. Sjöberg, Leif. Pär Lagerkvist. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976. A study that combines biographical information on Lagerkvist with criticism of his works. Bibliography and index. Spector, Robert Donald. Pär Lagerkvist. New York: Twayne, 1973. A basic biography of Lagerkvist that covers his life and works. Bibliography. Warme, Lars G. A History of Swedish Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. A scholarly study of Swedish literature that covers significant writers such as Lagerkvist. White, Ray Lewis. Pär Lagerkvist in America. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979. A look at the appreciation for Lagerkvist in the United States. Bibliography. Roy Arthur Swanson

Carson McCullers Carson McCullers

Born: Columbus, Georgia; February 19, 1917 Died: Nyack, New York; September 29, 1967 Principal drama • The Member of the Wedding, pr. 1950, pb. 1951 (adaptation of her novel); The Square Root of Wonderful, pr. 1957, pb. 1958 Other literary forms • Carson McCullers will be remembered primarily as a writer of fiction who experimented, with varying degrees of success, in the genres of drama, poetry, and the essay. She was one of the foremost of the remarkable generation of southern women writers who, in addition to McCullers, included Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Katherine Anne Porter. With her fellow women writers, and with such southern male writers as William Faulkner, Truman Capote, and Tennessee Williams, McCullers shares an uncanny talent for capturing the grotesque. Her fictional world is peopled with the freaks of society: the physically handicapped, the emotionally disturbed, the alienated, the disenfranchised. This preoccupation with the bizarre earned for her a major place in the literary tradition known as the “southern gothic,” a phrase used to describe the writers mentioned above and others who use gothic techniques and sensibilities in describing the South of the twentieth century. Few have created a fictional South as successfully as has McCullers in her best fiction. Hers is a small-town South of mills and factories, of barren main streets lined with sad little shops and cafés, of intolerable summer heat and oppressive boredom. In her first and perhaps best novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), she portrays a small southern town from the points of view of five of its residents: Mick Kelly, the confused adolescent heroine; Doctor Copeland, an embittered black physician whose youthful idealism has been destroyed; Jake Blount, an alcoholic drifter with Marxist leanings; Biff Brannon, the sexually disturbed owner of the café, where much of the novel’s action takes place; and John Singer, the deaf-mute whose kindness, patience, and humanity to the other characters provide the moral center of the novel. The themes of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter are ones that McCullers never completely abandoned in her subsequent fiction and drama: the loneliness and isolation inherent in the human condition, the impossibility of complete reciprocity in a love relationship, the social injustice of a racially segregated South, and adolescence as a time of horrifying emotional and sexual confusion. In Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), she explored sexual tension and jealousy among the denizens of a southern army post. The Member of the Wedding (1946), the novel she later adapted into the successful play of the same title, treats the delicate symbiotic relationship between a lonely adolescent girl, her seven-year-old cousin, and a black domestic. The Ballad of the Sad Café, first published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1943 and later in a collection of McCullers’s short works, is justifiably called one of the finest pieces of short fiction in American literature. It deals with another bizarre triangle, this one involving a masculine, sexually frigid, smalltown heiress; her cousin, a hunchback dwarf; and her former husband, a worthless former convict with an old score to settle. The four works of fiction mentioned above guarantee McCullers a permanent place among American writers of World War II and the postwar era. She also published 542

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more than a dozen short stories, most of which are not specifically set in the South. The best of them—“Wunderkind” (1936) and “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.” (1942), for example—are proficiently executed exercises that demonstrate the sure control and balance so crucial to McCullers’s longer fiction. McCullers also wrote critical essays that betray a deep emotional and technical understanding of imaginative literature. Her small body of poetry, heavily influenced by the seventeenth century Metaphysicals, is consistently interesting. After McCullers’s death, her sister, Margarita G. Smith, collected her previously uncollected short fiction, her literary criticism, and her poetry and essays in The Mortgaged Heart (1971). Achievements • Carson McCullers’s reputation as a playwright rests solely on the phenomenal success of one play, The Member of the Wedding, which she based on her novel of the same title. Her only other play, The Square Root of Wonderful, was a critical and popular failure and a professional disappointment from which McCullers never quite recovered. The very critics and theatergoers who hailed McCullers as a brilliant innovator in 1950 turned their backs on her in 1958. Flawed and uneven as her theatrical career was, however, McCullers deserves a special place among modern American playwrights, not only for what she achieved but also for what she attempted. With her friend Tennessee Williams, she was one of the first American playwrights to parlay a fragile, moody, nearly static vision of human frailty into solid commercial theater. No one was more surprised by the success of The Member of the Wedding than McCullers herself. She had seen but a handful of plays in her life when Williams, with whom she was spending the summer of 1946 on Nantucket, suggested that she turn her novel into a play. Excited by the idea of writing in a new and unfamiliar genre and intrigued by Williams’s sense that the novel had strong dramatic possibilities, McCullers spent that June calmly and steadily composing a draft of the play. Across the dining room table from her sat Williams, who was working on Summer and Smoke—it was the only time either of them was able to work with anyone else in the room. Despite Williams’s willingness to help, McCullers steadfastly rejected her friend’s advice, following instead her own creative instincts. Though all odds were against it, the play was an immediate success when it opened on Broadway in January, 1950. Audiences gave the cast standing ovations, and the critics almost unanimously praised the work’s grace, beauty, and timing. In the spring, The Member of the Wedding won two Donaldson Awards—as the best play of the season and as the best first Broadway play by an author—and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. McCullers was named Best Playwright of the Year and given a gold medal by the Theatre Club. The Member of the Wedding ran for 501 performances and grossed more than one million dollars on Broadway before enjoying a successful national tour. This great acclaim, remarkable enough for a more conventional drama, is even more remarkable when one considers that The Member of the Wedding is a “mood play,” dependent on emotion and feeling rather than on a standard plot. All three acts take place on one deliberately confining set, and much of the play’s significant action happens offstage, “between acts,” as it were. Indeed, even while praising the play, reviewers questioned whether it was a genuine drama at all. Like Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (pr. 1944) and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (pr. 1949)—significantly, the only two plays Carson McCullers had seen produced on Broadway before writing her hit– The Member of the Wedding is a play that subordinates plot to characterization, action to

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the almost poetic accretion of psychic detail. That audiences would even sit through, let alone cheer, such a slow-moving piece of drama was a revelation to the theater world of 1950. The success of The Member of the Wedding solved McCullers’s chronic financial problems and earned for her a reputation as a gifted and innovative dramatist, but seven years of ill health and personal tragedy ensued before her next play, The Square Root of Wonderful, opened on Broadway in October, 1957. Plagued from the outset by personnel changes and by McCullers’s incompetence at the kind of last-minute rewriting required by the theater, the play failed almost immediately. Neither McCullers nor director Jose Quintero could do anything to save it, and it closed after only forty-five perforCarson McCullers in 1959 (Library of Congress) mances. The disaster of The Square Root of Wonderful left McCullers severely depressed, so anxious had she been to repeat the triumph of The Member of the Wedding. Various physical ailments by then made it difficult for her to write at all, and she never again attempted writing for the theater. Biography • Carson McCullers’s life was one beset by serious illnesses and complex personal relationships. The last twenty years of her life were spent in the shadow of constant physical pain, but like her fellow southerner Flannery O’Connor, she continued working in spite of her handicaps, seldom complaining. She was married twice to the same man, an emotional cripple who drained her financially and psychically and who ultimately killed himself. That she left behind her a magnificent body of work and any number of devoted friends when she died at the tragically young age of fifty is a testament to the courage with which overwhelming obstacles can be overcome. McCullers knew at first hand the small-town South that figures so prominently in her best writing. As the eldest of the three children of Lamar and Marguerite (Waters) Smith, Lula Carson Smith spent a normal middle-class childhood in the racially segregated mill town of Columbus, Georgia. Her father, like Mr. Kelly in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Mr. Addams in The Member of the Wedding, was a jeweler who spent much of his time at work. Her mother, a lively, cultured woman and a strong influence throughout McCullers’s life, encouraged her daughter’s intellectual and artistic pursuits. By the age of fourteen, Carson Smith had dropped the Lula from her name and had announced her intention to become a concert pianist. She was by then practicing the piano several hours a day and taking lessons from Mary Tucker, the wife of an army colonel stationed at nearby Fort Benning. Her complex relationship with the Tucker family, at once giving her a sense of belonging and of estrangement, was later to

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provide material for the triangle theme of The Member of the Wedding. Like her heroine Frankie Addams, McCullers was fond of writing plays, casting them with family and friends, and staging them in her living room. By the time she was graduated from high school, McCullers had already privately decided to become a writer rather than a musician. Inspired by the Russian realists and by the plays of Eugene O’Neill, McCullers had already tried her hand at both drama and fiction. The seventeen-year-old McCullers set out for New York City in September, 1934, with vague plans both to study music at the Juilliard School of Music and to study creative writing at Columbia University. By February, 1935, she had enrolled at Columbia, and the following September she enrolled in Sylvia Chatfield Bates’s writing class at New York University. During the summer of 1935, while she was vacationing in Georgia, a mutual friend introduced her to James Reeves McCullers, an army corporal stationed at Fort Benning. Reeves McCullers, like Carson, was interested in a career in letters. That he had neither the motivation nor the talent that enabled Carson to become a successful author was to be the source of much friction between them and a contributing factor to Reeves’s eventual mental collapse. In 1936, Reeves left the army to join Carson in New York, and in September of 1937, they were married in the Smith home in Columbus. By this time, McCullers had begun to undergo the cycles of illness and creativity that would characterize the rest of her life. Fatigued by the hectic pace of New York, she was forced to return to Georgia from time to time for peace and quiet, but her writing career had also taken off. Whit Burnett, with whom she had worked at Columbia, had published her story “Wunderkind” in the December, 1936, issue of his magazine Story, and she had begun to outline the plot of what would become her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. In the spring of 1939, while she was living with Reeves in Fayetteville, North Carolina, “The Mute” (as the novel was then called) was accepted by Houghton Mifflin. By autumn, she had completed a second manuscript, “Army Post” (later published as Reflections in a Golden Eye). McCullers had long before vowed that when she would become a famous author, she would make New York her home. Feeling stifled in the South, their marriage in trouble, the McCullerses moved to New York only a few days after the publication of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, in June, 1940. The move, however, did nothing to improve their relationship. Carson, a sudden celebrity, was being courted by the literary world and making distinguished friends, among them W. H. Auden. That summer, as recipient of a fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Middlebury, Vermont, she came to know Wallace Stegner, Louis Untermeyer, and Eudora Welty. It was not only Carson’s increasing fame and Reeves’s continued obscurity that placed stress on their relationship. Both were sexually naïve at the time of their marriage, and both were given to infatuations with members of their own sex. Though most of their homosexual relationships remained unconsummated, Carson’s crush on the brilliant young Swiss emigrant Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach was difficult for Reeves to tolerate. In September, 1940, Carson and Reeves separated. They were later divorced, only to remarry in 1945 when Reeves returned from action in World War II. For the rest of Reeves’s life, they were to be alternately separated and reconciled. Their long and stormy relationship was ended only by Reeves’s suicide in France in 1953. When she separated from Reeves in the autumn of 1940, Carson accepted an invitation from her friend George Davis to move into a restored brownstone located in Brooklyn Heights. On establishing residence at 7 Middagh Street, she found herself in

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the midst of an unusual experiment in group housing; it later came to be known as February House. Besides her and Davis, the inhabitants included W. H. Auden, the striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee, and, later, the composer Benjamin Britten and the writer Richard Wright and his family. McCullers made her home in this strange household intermittently for the next five years. When not traveling abroad, resting in Georgia, or spending time at Yaddo, the artists’ colony in upstate New York, she played hostess in Brooklyn Heights to a distinguished group of celebrities from the literary and entertainment worlds, including Janet Flanner, Christopher Isherwood, Salvador Dalí, and Aaron Copland. While in Georgia in February, 1941, McCullers suffered a stroke that left her partially blind and unable to walk for weeks. She would be victimized by such attacks for the rest of her life, and even after the first one, she never quite regained the kind of creative fervor of which she had once been capable. She was not to finish her next novel, The Member of the Wedding, until 1946, six years after she first started drafting it. Her final novel, Clock Without Hands, took her ten years to complete, not appearing until 1961. After 1947, as a result of the second severe stroke in a year, her left side was permanently paralyzed, and even the physical act of sitting at a typewriter was a challenge for her. McCullers’s Broadway career of the 1950’s was, as has been noted, a source both of exhilaration and of disappointment for her. Nevertheless, her uneven career as a playwright brought her financial security, greater exposure than she had ever had before, and the fame she had craved since childhood. By the end of her life, she was an international literary celebrity, able to count among her personal friends the English poet Edith Sitwell and the Danish-born writer Isak Dinesen. In 1958, severely depressed by Reeves’s suicide in 1953, her mother’s death in 1955, and the failure of her second play, McCullers sought professional psychiatric help from Dr. Mary Mercer, a therapist who was to care for McCullers until the author’s death. Through the 1960’s, McCullers was progressively less able and willing to leave the Nyack, New York, house that she had bought in 1951. She died there on September 29, 1967, of a cerebral hemorrhage. Analysis • Though Carson McCullers’s reputation as a playwright will never approach her reputation as a writer of fiction, it is her uniqueness in both genres that accounts for both her successes and her failures. Her first play succeeded because it defied conventions of plot and action; her second play failed in part because it too often mixed the modes of tragedy, comedy, and romance. It is no accident that three of her novels have been made into successful films, nor is it accidental that no less a playwright than Edward Albee adapted her novella The Ballad of the Sad Café for the stage. McCullers’s dramatic sense was in every way original, and both her hit play and her failure demand acceptance on their own terms, quite apart from the whims of current theatrical convention and popular tastes. The Member of the Wedding • Like the novel from which it was adapted, The Member of the Wedding, McCullers’s first play, is a masterpiece of timing, mood, and character delineation. Insofar as there is a plot, it can be summarized as follows: Somewhere in the South, twelve-year-old Frankie Addams, a rebellious loner and a tomboy, secretly longs to belong to a group. Rejected by the girls at school, having recently lost her best friend, Frankie has no one to talk to except Berenice Sadie Brown, the black woman who cooks for Frankie and her father, and a seven-year-old cousin, John

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Henry. When she discovers that her brother, Jarvis, is going to be married, Frankie decides to join him and his bride on their honeymoon and make her home with them in nearby Winter Hill, thus becoming once and for all a member—a member of the wedding. Although Berenice tries to make her come to her senses, Frankie persists in her plan and makes a scene during the ceremony, begging the couple to take her with them. When they refuse, an agonized Frankie vows to run away from home. Sticking her father’s pistol into the suitcase that she has already packed for the honeymoon, Frankie does leave, but it is later disclosed that she has spent the night in the alley behind her father’s store. Chastened and somewhat resigned, she returns home, admitting that she had thought of committing suicide but then had changed her mind. By the end of the play, which takes place several months after the wedding, life has changed for all three main characters. John Henry has died of meningitis; Berenice has given notice to Mr. Addams; and Frankie, having largely outgrown the adolescent identity crisis of the previous summer, has acquired a best friend and a beau, both of whom she had earlier hated. Although Frankie is undoubtedly much happier than she was at the beginning of the play, she has become a pretentious teenager, bereft of the poetry and passion of childhood. Berenice has lost not only John Henry but also her foster brother, Honey, who has hanged himself in jail. As the curtain falls on the third act, Berenice is alone onstage, quietly singing “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” the song that she had sung earlier to calm the tortured Frankie. Most of the “action” of the play takes place offstage and is only later recounted through dialogue. The wedding and Frankie’s tantrum occur in the living room of the Addams house, but the scene never moves from the kitchen: The audience is told about the wedding and about Frankie’s disgrace by characters who move back and forth between the two rooms. Both Honey’s and John Henry’s deaths occur between scenes, as does Frankie’s night in the alley. By thus deemphasizing dramatic action, McCullers is able to concentrate on the real issue of the play, the relationship among Frankie, Berenice, and John Henry. By confining the action to one set, the kitchen and backyard of the Addams residence, the author effectively forces the audience to empathize with Frankie’s desperate boredom and sense of confinement (and, perhaps, with Berenice’s position in society as a black domestic). For much of the play, the three main characters are seated at the kitchen table, and this lack of movement lends the work the sense of paralysis, of inertia, that McCullers learned from the plays of Anton Chekhov and applied to the South of her childhood. Frankie Addams is one of the most memorable adolescents in literature, at the same time an embodiment of the frustrations and contradictions inherent in adolescence and a strongly individual character. She yearns to belong to a group even as she shouts obscenities and threats to the members of the neighborhood girls’ club. She is both masculine and feminine, a tomboy with a boy’s haircut and dirty elbows who chooses a painfully vampish gown for her brother’s wedding. McCullers skillfully exploits alternately comic and tragic aspects of Frankie’s character. The audience must laugh at her histrionic declarations (“I am sick unto death!”) but must also experience a strong identification with her sense of vulnerability and isolation (“I feel just exactly like somebody has peeled all the skin off me”). Caught between childhood and womanhood, Frankie is curious about both sexual and spiritual love. She claims to have been asked for a date by a soldier, only to wonder aloud “what you do on dates,” and she is still capable of climbing into Berenice’s

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lap to hear a lullaby. Frankie’s body is fast maturing, but her emotions are slow in catching up. Berenice Sadie Brown serves in the play as Frankie’s main female role model (Frankie’s own mother has died in childbirth), an embodiment of fully realized adult sexuality. As complex a character as Frankie, Berenice is much more than a servant: She is confessor, nurse, and storyteller. At forty-five, Berenice has been married four times but truly loved only her first husband—the remaining three she married in vain attempts to regain the bliss she enjoyed with Ludie Maxwell Freeman. Her search for love closely parallels Frankie’s own, and despite their often antagonistic relationship, they share moments of spiritual harmony, as when they discuss the nature of love, a “thing known and not spoken.” Berenice also represents the position of the black in a segregated South; indeed, the issue of racism is very much present in The Member of the Wedding (as it is in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Clock Without Hands), a fact that has often been overlooked by critics of both the novel and the play. Though she is the most influential adult in the world of the two white children, she is treated as a servant by the white adults. Berenice must deal not only with Frankie’s growing pains but also with problems ultimately more grave: the funeral of an old black vegetable vendor and the arrest, imprisonment, and suicide of her foster brother, Honey. Both Berenice and T. T. Williams, her beau, behave noticeably differently around white adults, while Honey, in a sense representative of a new generation of southern African Americans, refuses even to call Mr. Addams “sir.” He is eventually jailed for knifing a white bartender who will not serve him. Honey’s flight in the third act coincides with Frankie’s own. Like Frankie, Honey is rebellious and frustrated, but unlike her, he is unable to find a place for himself in a hostile society. Death for Honey is preferable to confinement in the “nigger hole” or more “bowing and scraping” to white people. If Honey’s death in the third act symbolizes the end of Frankie the rebel, the death of John Henry represents the end of Frankie’s childhood. Throughout the play, John Henry acts as a sort of idiot savant, uttering lines of great insight and demanding the plain truth from a hypocritical adult world. He asks Berenice why Mr. Addams has called Honey a nigger, and seems, ironically, incapable of understanding the nature of death. He is a link between Frankie and her childhood, a constant reminder of how recently she played with dolls (he gratefully accepts the doll that Jarvis has given Frankie as a gift after she rejects it). Frankie wants at once to be John Henry’s playmate and to outgrow him. Though the transformed Frankie reacts coldly to John Henry’s death, Berenice is devastated by it. She truly loved her “little boy,” and she blames herself for having ignored his complaints of headaches in the first stages of his disease. John Henry dies a painful death, a victim who has done nothing to deserve his cruel fate. The Member of the Wedding is a play about growing up, but it is also about the sacrifices that must be made before one can enter the adult world. Frankie is composed and even confident at the end of the play, but she has lost whatever sympathy she had for Berenice. Berenice is severely depressed by two deaths whose logic defies her. John Henry and Honey are dead, and the newlyweds are stationed in occupied Germany. When Berenice is left alone onstage at the end of the third act, holding John Henry’s doll and singing a song whose truth the play has seriously questioned, the audience is forced to wonder with her whether the adult world of compromise and responsibility is worth entering.

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The Square Root of Wonderful • McCullers stated in the author’s preface to the published version of The Square Root of Wonderful that the lives and deaths of her mother and her husband in part compelled her to write the play. Marguerite Smith’s grace, charm, and love of life emerge in the character of Mollie Lovejoy, while Phillip Lovejoy embodies all the tragic contradictions that led Reeves McCullers to alcoholism and suicide. Like so much of McCullers’s work, the play concerns a love triangle: Mollie Lovejoy, who lives on an apple farm in suburban New York with her twelveyear-old son, Paris, has twice been married to Phillip Lovejoy, an alcoholic writer now confined to a sanatorium. As the play opens, Mollie has only recently met John Tucker, a no-nonsense architect who is determined to wed her. Complications arise when Phillip Lovejoy unexpectedly returns to the farm, intent on a reconciliation with Mollie. His mother and his spinster sister are also on the scene, having come to New York from the South to visit Mollie and Paris and to see Phillip’s new play (ironically, a failure). The relationship between Phillip and Mollie has been a stormy one. The sexual attraction between them remains strong, and they sleep together on the night of Phillip’s return, much to the chagrin of John Tucker. Still, Mollie cannot forget the years of drunken abuse she suffered at Phillip’s hands. Physical abuse she could tolerate, but she decided to divorce him finally when he humiliated her by telling her that she used clichés. Mollie is clearly in a dilemma. In one of the play’s most successful scenes, she admits to Paris that she loves both John and Phillip. Phillip’s problems, however, are manifold and insoluble. Clearly, he wants a reunion with Mollie so that she will protect him, as she once did, from his own selfdestructive tendencies. When he at length realizes that Mollie will not return to him and, perhaps more important, that he will never again be able to write, he commits suicide by driving his car into a pond. With Phillip’s death, Mollie is free to leave the apple farm and move to New York, and there is every reason to believe that she will eventually marry John Tucker. Despite its commercial and critical failure, the play is perhaps worthy of more attention than it has received. At its best, it is a meditation on the nature of love. Mollie Lovejoy has always conceived of love as a sort of magic spell that is divorced from logic and free will. Her love for Phillip has brought her as much humiliation as happiness. From John Tucker, she learns that love can also be a matter of choice among mature adults. He uses the language of mathematics in describing his view of love to Paris: For John, humiliation is the square root of sin, while love is the square root of wonderful. The minor characters also provide interesting commentaries on the nature of love. Sister Lovejoy, the spinster librarian, lives in a world of fictional lovers drawn from the pages of books. Mother Lovejoy, while often a comic character, is at bottom a loveless woman who has spent her life humiliating her daughter. The play’s weaknesses, however, are many. The sure sense of timing that characterizes The Member of the Wedding is largely absent from The Square Root of Wonderful. The shifts in mood are less subtle than in the earlier play, and tragedy often follows too closely on the heels of comedy. The superb early morning scene in which Phillip Lovejoy says goodbye to his son, for example, is too rapidly undercut by a comic scene between Mother and Sister Lovejoy as they discuss Phillip’s death. This tragicomic mixture of modes that McCullers executes so well in The Member of the Wedding goes awry in The Square Root of Wonderful, in part because none of the characters— except, perhaps, Phillip Lovejoy—is carefully enough drawn to elicit an audience’s sympathy.

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McCullers’s best work is set in the South, not in upstate New York farmhouses. Her best work is also fiercely individual, completely defiant of convention and popular tastes. The Square Root of Wonderful fails largely because its author, in her eagerness to produce a second Broadway triumph, allowed producers, directors, and script doctors to strip it of the brilliant idiosyncracies that make The Member of the Wedding an American classic. Other major works long fiction: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, 1940; Reflections in a Golden Eye, 1941; The Ballad of the Sad Café, 1943 (serial), 1951 (book); The Member of the Wedding, 1946; Clock Without Hands, 1961; Carson McCullers, Complete Novels, 2001. short fiction: The Ballad of the Sad Café: The Novels and Stories of Carson McCullers, 1951; The Ballad of the Sad Café and Collected Short Stories, 1952, 1955; The Shorter Novels and Stories of Carson McCullers, 1972. children’s literature: Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as a Pig, 1964. miscellaneous: The Mortgaged Heart, 1971 (short fiction, poetry, and essays; Margarita G. Smith, editor). Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Carson McCullers. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. A collection of essays critically analyzing the works of McCullers. Bibliography and index. Carr, Virginia Spencer. The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1985. A biography of McCullers that covers her life and work. Bibliography and index. _______. Understanding Carson McCullers. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. An examination of the works of McCullers. Bibliography and index. Clark, Beverly Lyon, and Melvin J. Friedman, eds. Critical Essays on Carson McCullers. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996. Selected essays on McCullers that examine her life and work, with emphasis on her southern origins. Bibliography and index. McDowell, Margaret M. Carson McCullers. Boston: Twayne, 1980. An analysis of McCullers’s fiction and drama. Contains a brief chronology, a bibliography of works by and about McCullers, and an index. Rich, Nancy B. The Flowering Dream: The Historical Saga of Carson McCullers. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Chapel Hill Press, 1999. An examination of McCullers’s work, including her dramas. Bibliography. Savigneau, Josyane. Carson McCullers: A Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. A biography of McCullers, looking at her works and her life, including her southern upbringing. Bibliography and index. J. D. Daubs, updated by Katherine Lederer

David Mamet David Mamet

Born: Chicago, Illinois; November 30, 1947 Principal drama • Camel, pr. 1968; Lakeboat, pr. 1970, revised pr. 1980, pb. 1981; Duck Variations, pr. 1972, pb. 1977; Sexual Perversity in Chicago, pr. 1974, pb. 1977; Squirrels, pr. 1974, pb. 1982; American Buffalo, pr. 1975, pb. 1977; Reunion, pr. 1976, pb. 1979; A Life in the Theatre, pr., pb. 1977; The Revenge of the Space Pandas, pr. 1977, pb. 1978 (one act; children’s play); The Water Engine, pr. 1977, pb. 1978; Dark Pony, pr. 1977, pb. 1979; The Woods, pr. 1977, pb. 1979; Mr. Happiness, pr., pb. 1978; Lone Canoe, pr. 1979 (music and lyrics by Alaric Jans); The Sanctity of Marriage, pr. 1979, pb. 1982; Donny March, pr. 1981; The Poet and the Rent, pr., pb. 1981 (children’s play); A Sermon, pr., pb. 1981; Short Plays and Monologues, pb. 1981; Edmond, pr. 1982, pb. 1983; Glengarry Glen Ross, pr., pb. 1983; The Disappearance of the Jews, pr. 1983, pb. 1987 (one act); Red River, pr. 1983 (adaptation of Pierre Laville’s play); Goldberg Street: Short Plays and Monologues, pb. 1985; The Shawl, pr., pb. 1985; A Collection of Dramatic Sketches and Monologues, pb. 1985; Vint, pr. 1985, pb. 1986 (adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s short story); The Cherry Orchard, pr., pb. 1986 (adaptation of Chekhov’s play); Three Children’s Plays, pb. 1986; Three Jewish Plays, pb. 1987; Speed-the-Plow, pr., pb. 1988; Uncle Vanya, pr., pb. 1988 (adaptation of Chekhov’s play); Bobby Gould in Hell, pr. 1989, pb. 1991 (one act); Three Sisters, pr., pb. 1990 (adaptation of Chekhov’s play); Oh Hell: Two One-Act Plays, pb. 1991; Oleanna, pr. 1992, pb. 1993; The Cryptogram, pr., pb. 1994; No One Will Be Immune: And Other Plays and Pieces, pb. 1994; Plays: One, pb. 1994; An Interview, pr., pb. 1995 (one act); Plays: Two, pb. 1996; Plays: Three, pb. 1996; The Old Neighborhood, pr. 1997, pb. 1998 (includes The Disappearance of the Jews, Jolly, and D.); Boston Marriage, pr. 1999, pb. 2001; Plays: Four, pb. 2002 Other literary forms • While first and foremost a theatrician, David Mamet has also gained respect for his work in other literary forms. Perhaps Mamet’s most popular contributions have been to Hollywood. His screenplays, which include The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), The Verdict (1982), The Untouchables (1985), House of Games (1987), Things Change (1988), Homicide (1991), Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), The Spanish Prisoner (1997), Wag the Dog (1997), The Heist (2001), and Hannibal (2001), have been praised for their intriguing plots and monologues of cruelty. Mamet is also an accomplished director. He has directed many of his own best screenplays, from House of Games to Homicide and The Spanish Prisoner. Most scholars point to House of Games, with its ritualized forms of expiation, and Glengarry Glen Ross, with its dazzling repartee, as his best work in film. Finally, Mamet demonstrates his skill as an essayist in Writing in Restaurants (1986), a collection of essays that best spells out the playwright’s theory of dramatic art as well as his sense of cultural poetics. Achievements • David Mamet, winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 (for his play Glengarry Glen Ross), two Obie Awards (1976, 1983), and two New York Drama Critics Circle Awards (1977, 1986) among many others, is regarded as a major voice in American drama and cinema. He animates his stage through language, a poetic idiolect that explores the relationship between public issue and private desires—and the effects of this 551

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(Bridgitte Lacombe)

relationship on the individual’s spirit. He is known for his wit and comedy, but beyond the streetwise dialogues lie more problematic concerns. The typical Mamet play presents the near-complete separation of the individual from genuine relationships. Mamet replicates human commitments and desires in demythicized forms: commodity fetishism, sexual negotiations and exploitations, botched crimes, physical assaults, fraudulent business transactions enacted by petty thieves masquerading as business associates, and human relationships whose only shared features are the presence of sex and the absence of love. Although Mamet varies his plays in terms of plots and themes, he seems at his best when critiquing what he believes is a business ethic that has led to the corruption of both the social contract and his heroes’ moral values. Mamet’s major achievements, then, concern his use of language, his social examination of professional and private betrayals and alienation, and his ability to capture the anxieties of the individual— whether he or she is a small-time thief, a working-class person, or a Hollywood executive. Biography • Born on the South Side of Chicago on November 30, 1947, David Alan Mamet became interested in the theater as a teenager. He worked at the Hull House Theatre and at Second City, one of Chicago’s richest improvisational performance sites at the time, experiences that he recognized as having exerted an important influence on his language, characterizations, and plot structures. His mother, Lenore Silver, was a schoolteacher, his father, Bernard Mamet, a labor lawyer and minor semanticist, and though the parents’ intellectual awareness of language plainly influenced their son, their divorce seems to have affected the young Mamet even more greatly. After Mamet was exiled to what he saw as a sterile suburb of Chicago—Olympia Fields, his geographical move seemed all the more complicated because of his familial

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dislocations. His stepfather apparently (Mamet revealed in a 1992 essay entitled “The Rake”) physically and psychologically abused the Mamet family, and it seems as if the world of the theater offered the playwright some form of reprieve and, later, recognition from a tension-filled youth. As a boy, Mamet also acted on television, an opportunity made possible by his uncle, who was the director of broadcasting for the Chicago Board of Rabbis. Mamet often was cast as a Jewish boy plagued by religious self-doubt and concerns. After graduating from Francis Parker, a private school in downtown Chicago, Mamet attended Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, where he majored in theater and literature. At Goddard, he wrote his first play, Camel, which fulfilled his thesis requirement for graduation and was staged at the college in 1968. During his junior year (1968-1969), Mamet moved from Plainfield to New York City, where he studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse with Sanford Meisner, one of the founding members of the Group Theatre in the 1930’s. While his talents as an actor were minimal at best, Mamet’s attention to idiolect and its cadence was greatly enhanced by Meisner. After earning his B.A. in literature in 1969, he worked in a truck factory, a canning plant, and a real estate office, and he labored as an office cleaner, a window washer, and a taxi driver. He also became a drama teacher for a year at the Marlboro College (1970-1971) and, after working at more odd jobs, returned to Goddard College as artist-in-residence (1971-1973). While at Goddard, he formed a group of actors that soon moved to Chicago as the St. Nicholas Theatre Company, for which he served as artistic director. Soon, Mamet’s plays became regular fare within the burgeoning theater world in Chicago. Such small but influential theaters as the Body Politic, the Organic Theatre, and then the more established Goodman Theatre presented Sexual Perversity in Chicago and American Buffalo. In 1974, Mamet became a faculty member on the Illinois Arts Council and a year later a visiting lecturer at the University of Chicago. In 1976-1977, he became a teaching fellow at the Yale School of Drama. Thus, the mid-1970’s were pivotal years for the playwright. In 1975, American Buffalo opened at the Goodman Theatre and soon moved to the St. Nicholas Theatre; the play won a Joseph Jefferson Award for Outstanding Production, as did Sexual Perversity in Chicago that same year. Moreover, Mamet in 1975 finally saw his work staged in New York City: Sexual Perversity and Duck Variations opened at the St. Clement’s Theatre and, in 1976, moved to the Off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theatre. In 1976, American Buffalo opened at the St. Clement’s Theatre and Mamet won an Obie Award for Sexual Perversity in Chicago and American Buffalo. No fewer than nine Mamet plays appeared in 1977 in theaters in New Haven, New York, Chicago, and, among other cities, London. American Buffalo, for which Mamet received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, premiered on Broadway in 1977, starring Robert Duvall. In 1980, Al Pacino starred in a revival of American Buffalo in New Haven. Such successes confirmed Mamet’s reputation as a new and vital theatrical voice in the United States. Mamet has written more than thirty plays, a number of sketches, poetry, essays, children’s plays, several important Chekhov adaptations, a book concerning film directing, and more than a dozen screenplays. He has also garnered many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross in 1986. Mamet in the 1990’s has been honored for his brilliant use of language and characterizations that capture important aspects of American cultural poetics. His play Oleanna, which opened at the Orpheum Theatre in New York City in October, 1992, and featured William H. Macy and

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Mamet’s wife, British-born Rebecca Pidgeon, has only added to the dramatist’s reputation for staging serious plays about serious matters. Analysis • David Mamet is an ethicist. From his initial plays–Camel, Lakeboat—to those pivotal works that first brought him notoriety–Sexual Perversity in Chicago, American Buffalo—and from Glengarry Glen Ross to Oleanna, Mamet explores a delicate moral balance between private self-interests and larger public issues that shape modern culture. Indeed, Mamet is at his best when critiquing the tensions between his heroes’ sense of public responsibility and their definition of private liberties. Throughout his theater, Mamet presents a dialectic that, on the one hand, recognizes the individual’s right to pursue vigorously entrepreneurial interests, but that, on the other, acknowledges that in an ideal world, such private interests should, but do not, exist in equipoise with a civic sense and moral duty. This underlying tension produces in Mamet’s protagonists divided loyalties. Such tension also gives his theater its particular unity of vision and ambivalent intensity. Mamet has often mentioned that his views of the social contract have been greatly influenced by Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), and such indebtedness in part accounts for Mamet’s preoccupation with business as a sacramental world. Veblen’s work, like Mamet’s, underscores human action and response in terms of “pecuniary emulation,” imperialist ownership, primitive sexual roles as first seen in ancient tribal communities, questions of honor, invidious comparisons, and the relationship between self-worth and wealth. Mamet is a theatrician of the ethical precisely because his characters, plots, and themes map out a predatory world in which only the fittest, and surely the greediest, might survive. Hence, Mamet’s plays all are concerned with charting the moral relationship between the public issues of the nation and the private anxieties of its citizens. Mamet seems at his best when dramatizing the way in which public issues, usually in the form of business transactions, permeate the individual’s private sensibilities. “Business,” for Mamet, becomes an expansive concept, including not only one’s public, professional vocation but also one’s private, personal existence—the problematic “business” of living itself. Under the guise of healthy competition and the right to pursue a contemporary version of the myth of the American Dream, Mamet’s heroes too often conveniently twist such business savvy to suit their own selfish needs. Further, this examination of “business” suggests, for Mamet, that people live in a Macbethean world, where “fair is foul and foul is fair,” where sharp business practice too often leads to corruption, where deception and stealing are simply regarded as being competitive within the American business world. Mamet believes in the powers of the imagination and art to liberate, to create a liberal humanism. This is exactly what John in A Life in the Theatre and Karen in Speed-thePlow believe. Such an attitude, however, clearly does not make sense, Mamet also implies throughout his theater, because there is little or no place for such romantic impulses in a hurly-burly business world. What makes Mamet’s heroes so theatrically engaging to watch concerns an invisible inner drama, a subtextual crisis that haunts them: Underneath the character’s hard-boiled, enameled public bravado lies a figure plagued with self-doubt and insecurities. If Mamet’s heroes try to come to some higher consciousness, as do Don in American Buffalo, Aaronow in Glengarry Glen Ross, and Karen in Speed-the-Plow, such valiant impulses to come to awareness are not ultimately to be realized. Many of Mamet’s best characters—Bernie in Sexual Perversity in Chicago or Teach in American Buffalo—

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simply seem unwilling or unable to understand what Mamet believes are the regenerative powers implicit in self-awareness and self-responsibility. Some of his characters— most of the men in Lakeboat, for example—do not seem to understand that any form of transcendent consciousness even exists as a possibility. Perhaps this explains why many Mamet heroes lack the capacity to celebrate any experience external to the self. Typical Mamet heroes seem motivated only in sexual and financial terms, blinding themselves to the larger personal or societal implications of their exploits. To be sure, some Mamet characters exude a deeper awareness, as do the Father and Daughter in Dark Pony, Aaronow in Glengarry Glen Ross, or Karen in Speed-the-Plow. Others, moreover, come tantalizingly close to understanding their own essential self and the reason for their existence in a world of diminished possibilities; Lang in The Water Engine and Edmond in Edmond possess some degree of self-awareness, ineffectual as such awareness turns out to be for them. Mamet’s works, however, show a grimly deterministic theater in which his heroes are victims. Their victimization stems from outer forces—a ruthless business associate, an opportunistic executive, a petty thief—as well as from inner forces: the failure of self-reliance, the exaggerated claim that proves false, and characters’ obsession with money that they will never see and with relationships that will never be fulfilling. Thus, throughout his career, Mamet investigates the relatedness of one’s job, sense of fulfillment, and morality. The problem facing his characters, however, is that they struggle (and usually fail) to take responsibility, choosing instead to avoid honest communication or anything that might lead to an authentic encounter. Instead, Mamet’s heroes often commit ethically perverse deeds that only further contribute to their own marginalization. In their efforts not to confuse public and private issues, Mamet’s characters ironically distort the social contract to such an extent that humane values, communication, and love are reduced to barely felt forces. Mamet’s theater, in sum, repeatedly returns to broader social questions about communication and community. To be sure, not every Mamet drama includes verbal tirades and physical if not psychological violence. Duck Variations, A Life in the Theatre, Reunion, The Woods, and The Shawl—to cite plays spanning much of Mamet’s career— appear as relatively quiet, meditative works whose plots and themes seem more interiorized. On the other hand, the playwright seems most comfortable, and at the height of his aesthetic power, when he replicates anger and betrayal, mystery and assault, and when he deepens social satire into private loss. From Sexual Perversity in Chicago through at least Speed-the-Plow, relationships are as ephemeral as they are unsatisfying, and a brutalizing language seems to be an attempt by his heroes to mask, unsuccessfully, their primal insecurities. There are no villains in his theater—only individuals whose world of diminished possibilities and banalities defines and confines them. The detectable optimism found throughout much of Writing in Restaurants, a collection of essays that Mamet published in 1986 concerning his theory of art, seldom manifests itself in his theater. In a Mamet play, “things change” (to use the title of a Mamet screenplay), or perhaps things do not change, his characters remaining ossified spirits, divided against the self and the other, against home and their outer world. Mamet is a theatrician of the ethical. His characters, sets, and overall situations, however, map out a predatory world in which genuine communication and authentic love remain distant forces. Hence, Barker’s lines in The Water Engine ratify, Mamet suggests, the gulf between idea and reality:

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And now we leave the Hall of Science, the hub of our Century of Progress Exposition. Science, yes, the greatest force for Good and Evil we possess. The Concrete Poetry of Humankind. Our thoughts, our dreams, our aspirations rendered into practical and useful forms. Our science is our self. Such practicality, for Mamet, prefigures a kind of spiritual death on both a cultural and an individual level. Mamet’s following observation from Writing in Restaurants is hardly surprising: “As the Stoics said, either gods exist or they do not exist. If they exist, then, no doubt, things are unfolding as they should; if they do not exist, then why should we be reluctant to depart a world in which there are no gods?” This comment stands as the metaphysical question Mamet raises, and refuses to resolve, in his theater. The resolutions, whatever they may be, are left for the audience to ponder. Duck Variations • Three early Mamet plays prefigure the issues discussed above. Duck Variations concerns Emil Varec and George S. Aronovitz, two men in their sixties sitting on a park bench, whose reflections and constant duologues reveal their attempt to come to terms with their own insignificance in the world. Built on numerous episodes, the play shows that the two men come too close to talking about their own finiteness, and so both replace honest conversation with banal talk, their way of avoiding their fear of death. Lakeboat • In another early play, Lakeboat, Mamet presents life aboard the T. Harrison, a ship traveling through the Great Lakes. The men are leading death-in-life existences because their jobs have reduced their lives to deadening routines and habits. Built around fragments of conversation, the play presents ordinary men—Joe, Fred, and Fireman—leading desperate lives. To fill the void, they engage in endless talks that lead to no epiphany; like the ship, they simply sail through their lives. Sexual Perversity in Chicago • Sexual Perversity in Chicago presents thirty-four scenes dealing with sex. The play opens in a singles’ bar, where Bernard tells his friend Danny, in graphic detail, about his recent sexual encounter with a woman. Their conversations are carnivalesque dialogues filled with obscenities and dirty jokes. Deb and Joan, the central females in the drama, seem little better off, as Bernard’s sexist remarks are matched by Joan’s hostile response to Danny. Clearly in this play, Mamet outlines a world in which eros has been defleshed and a fundamental and anxietyproducing loneliness dominates. Near the end of the play, Danny and Bernard stare at women on the beach, and when one does not respond to Danny’s coarse remarks, he screams obscenities, which outline the intensity of his frustration and his inability to deal with loss. Sexual encounters, devoid of any genuine love, account for the title and theme of this important work. American Buffalo • These three earlier plays stand as examples of Mamet’s interest in portraying people whose lives have almost been reduced to nothingness, a motif that he continues to refine in American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed-the-Plow, and Oleanna, plays that most theatergoers and critics believe represent his best work. American Buffalo concerns small-time thieves who find a buffalo nickel in Don’s junk shop (where the play unwinds), motivating them to rob the man from whom Don supposedly purchased the coin. Don orchestrates the robbery plans, which the younger

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Bob, who eats sugar, soda, and drugs, will try to accomplish. Teach, a nervous man with a swagger, insists that he, a man, do the job; Teach cannot believe that Don would let Bob, a boy, try such a robbery. A long honor-among-thieves conversation ensues, in which Teach’s lines brilliantly reflect Mamet’s vision, a vision suggesting the extent to which ethics have been devalued and stealing has been elevated to the status of good business savvy. Free enterprise, Teach lectures Don, gives one the freedom “[t]o embark on Any . . . Course that he sees fit. . . . In order to secure his honest chance to make a profit.” He quickly adds that this does not make him “a Commie” and that the “country’s founded on this, Don. You know this.” The robbery never takes place, but near midnight, Bob returns with another buffalo nickel. Don seems embarrassed, and Teach becomes agitated, hitting the boy several times. Bob reveals that he bought the coveted nickel, made up the story about a rich coin collector, and suggested the burglary. Suddenly, whatever friendships exist among the men temporarily evaporate: Teach attacks Bob and trashes the entire junk shop. A precarious friendship, however, still remains. The play ends when Teach regains his composure and readies himself to take the injured Bob to the hospital; Bob and Don exchange apologies, and the curtain falls. If the characters do not realize how much they have buffaloed one another, the audience certainly does. Glengarry Glen Ross • Glengarry Glen Ross extends Mamet’s preoccupation with business as a sacramental world. The play dramatizes the high-pressure real estate profession as seen through the plight of small-time salesmen. Greed lies at the center of the play, for the characters’ directing force in life is to secure sales leads, to close deals with clients, and to rise to the top of the board, the chart announcing which man in the sales force wins the ultimate prize—the Cadillac. The losers will simply be fired. Glengarry Glen Ross, like The Water Engine, Mr. Happiness, and American Buffalo, relies on the myth of the American Dream as its ideological backdrop. The title refers to Florida swamps, not the Scottish Highlands, which indicates just how much the playwright wishes to make experience ironic in this drama. Whereas the characters in Lakeboat, Reunion, and even The Shawl lead lives of quiet desperation, those in Glengarry Glen Ross scream out two hours of obscenity-laced dialogue. Levene may be the most desperate, for his business failures of late lead him to crime: Through a Pinteresque unfolding of events, viewers learn that he robs his own office to secure precious sales leads. Moss is the most ruthless, masterminding the robbery while Aaronow simply seems bewildered by his cohorts’ cheating. Williamson is the office manager, whose lack of sales experience and pettiness earn him the scorn of all. Ricky Roma, however, is different. Roma emerges as the star of the sales team. He also appears as the most complex. Youthful, handsome, Roma exudes a certain panache that sets him apart from the others. Whereas the others talk about their past conquests and how, with luck (and deception), they will rise to the top of the sales board, Roma produces. If Levene and Moss radiate a frenetic pursuit of customers, Roma appears soft edged. Roma, indeed, nearly succeeds in swindling an unsuspecting customer, James Lingk, who nearly gets locked into buying suspect real estate. Ironically, Williamson reveals to Lingk the truth, and Roma loses his prized commission when Lingk cancels the deal. When Roma hears this, he screams obscenities at Williamson and adds: “You just cost me six thousand dollars. (Pause.) Six thousand dollars. And one Cadillac.” More than losing a sale, Roma loses what ethical perspective, if any, he possesses.

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Roma cannot comprehend this. Like Levene and Moss, Roma has no conscience, no sense of the boundaries of business ethics. Like the characters throughout Mamet’s theater, Roma and his colleagues distort language and action to justify their work. The play ends with Levene’s arrest; Mamet suggests that, after Levene’s and perhaps Moss’s arrests, life will go on, business as usual. Speed-the-Plow • Speed-the-Plow extends Mamet’s business plays. Set in Hollywood, the play centers on Bobby Gould, the recently promoted head of production for a Hollywood film company, and Charlie Fox, a friend who shows him a “buddy prison” film script. They sense a hit because of a macho star who will fill the lead role. In a dialogue that by now is regarded as vintage Mamet, the two celebrate their future fame and money (that surely will be certified by casting the macho star in the film) through a litany of obscenities. The plot thickens when they have to read a serious novel for cinematic possibilities and when a temporary secretary, Karen, enters and Charlie bets five hundred dollars to see if Bobby can seduce her. Karen, however, preaches the truth to Bobby (“Is it a good film?” she asks), who decides to replace the “buddy prison” script with a film based on a novel on radiation. An outraged Charlie verbally and physically assaults Bobby when he hears this and rages at Karen. After Karen says that she would not have gone to bed with Bobby, Charlie throws Karen out, and he and Bobby become friends again and produce the banal “buddy” film. A lack of trust animates this play, in which these Hollywood men are the spiritual kin of the men in American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross. Oleanna • Oleanna, a play that in part concerns sexual harassment, represents the playwright’s response to the Anita F. Hill-Clarence Thomas controversy. In act 1, a male college professor, John, and a female student, Carol, are in his office, she there because of difficulties in understanding his class. John, who is under tenure review, offers to help. The complacent professor, who is happily married and is negotiating a deal on a house, listens as she confesses, “I don’t understand. I don’t understand what anything means . . . and I walk around. From morning til night: with this one thought in my head. I’m stupid.” He offers Carol some advice and a consoling hand. While the audience senses an impending catastrophe, act 1 gives little hint at—depending on one’s point of view—just how distorted the interpretation of the seemingly innocuous events of the first act will become. The hurly-burly of act 2, however, makes for sparkling drama. Carol registers a complaint, accusing the professor of sexism, classism, and sexual harassment. He calls her back to the office in a failed attempt to clear up any misunderstandings. For John, she is dealing with “accusations”; for Carol, he has to face “facts.” A campus support group helps Carol, and the play presents her growing sense of power and John’s loss of control over events for which he may or may not be responsible. By the final scene, John loses more than the house and tenure. The college suspends him, and he may be facing charges of rape. Reduced to a groveling, pathetic figure, John appears in stark contrast to the suddenly articulate and holier-than-thou Carol. In Oleanna, Mamet returns to a world in which the gaps between words and deeds remain. The play is theatrically powerful precisely because its author never fills in such gaps. Instead, theatergoers might ask: Is Carol framing John? Are her accusations legitimate? Is Carol simply the first to have the courage to challenge a patronizing and, perhaps, womanizing male teacher? Is John so much a part of an inherently misogy-

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nistic world that he seems blithely unaware that his well-meaning actions are in fact highly sexist? Mamet invites viewers to respond to these and many other questions (issues of censorship, political correctness, battles of the sexes, representations of women in theater, and so on). Thus, this 1992 play continues Mamet’s exploration of a world that remains a battleground of the sexes, where primal feelings of trust and rational human discourse between women and men remain problematic at best—if not impossible. The title of the play, taken from a folk song, alludes to a nineteenth century escapist vision of utopia. Oleanna reminds the audience of the impossibility of such vision. The Cryptogram • Mamet’s The Cryptogram concerns John, a ten-year-old boy who is afraid to fall asleep and who wonders where his father is. Donny, John’s mother, expresses frustration throughout the play because she has often tried in vain to persuade John to go to sleep. On the first night in the play, John refuses to go to sleep, making the excuse that he is awaiting his father, who has promised to take him camping. Del, a friend of the family, who seems to be romantically linked with Donny, tries to calm John down and coax him to go to sleep, yet he also appears to be distracting the boy, trying to hide from him the fact that John’s father has left the family for good. Del tells Donny and John about a camping trip he took with John’s father the previous week, yet Donny discovers subsequently that the camping trip never took place and that the father was actually using Del’s abode to commit adultery. Donny feels betrayed by Del, thus terminating any opportunity for Del to have a permanent romantic relationship with Donny, which had been possible with Donny’s husband out of the picture. A month later, feeling guilty that he has betrayed both Donny and John, Del gives John one of the boy’s father’s most prized possessions—his German pilot’s knife. John, as usual, refuses to go to bed and only agrees to do so if he can sleep with a stadium blanket, which he cannot obtain because it is already packed (Donny, upset by her husband’s decision to leave her and by Del’s betrayal, is moving). Del gives John the knife as a memento of his father and also to cut the twine so that he can open the box containing the blanket. John takes the knife and walks toward the box, talking about voices that he hears in his bad dreams, voices that keep calling him. Hearing John say that the voices are calling him, Del hands him the knife and says, “Take the knife and go.” The play ends chillingly as the audience is left to ponder what exactly John will do with the knife. The play is entitled The Cryptogram because John keeps asking about his father and trying to solve the mystery surrounding his disappearance. Del and Donny refuse to tell him where his father is (actually, they, themselves, do not know) or that his father has left his mother, ending the marriage and breaking up the family structure. In fact, the conversations between Del and Donny are so cryptic that the audience experiences great difficulty in discerning what event has happened. The audience discovers that Del and Donny, the only characters who know what has transpired, keep secrets even from each other. However, it is Mamet’s deft use of language that leads to the suspenseful nature of the mystery. Although Mamet is a dramatist, his plays manifest that he is a poet. His plays are very much about language itself. In The Cryptogram as well as his other dramas, Mamet excels in his use of dialogue; he exhibits an excellent ear for dialogue, whether it involves the two adults in this play who strive to maintain their secret from John about his father’s decision to leave the family, the working-class dialogue of Teach, Bob, and

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Don in American Buffalo, or the middle-class realtors in Glengarry Glen Ross. Mamet adeptly uses dialogue to portray realistic characters with realistic language. In The Cryptogram, when Del asks John what he means when he mentions, “I could not sleep,” John is confused because he believes that his comment is self-explanatory. Del denies that it is, remarking, “It means nothing other than the meaning you choose to assign to it.” Del’s comment concerns the power and the use of language, but it also is meant to confuse John. The dialogue between Del and Donny is also telling. As in many of Mamet’s plays, the characters know each other so well that they finish each other’s sentences and interrupt each other, which leads to the confusion and the cryptic and suspenseful nature of the events. Language becomes a code. Mamet leaves it for the audience to figure out different strands in the play, such as the mystery of the torn blanket. The intensity builds in the last scene, which is evident by the increasing wrath of Donny as she attempts to persuade John to go to sleep and by John leaving with the knife, hearing voices that beckon him as he is without his male protector, his missing father. Reunion • Two other Mamet plays that merit discussion are Reunion, a play whose title might better read as “disunion,” and Edmond. In Reunion, Bernie tells Carol that, although he comes from a broken home, he is “a happy man” who works at “a good job,” but his uneasiness remains, particularly when one sees the contemporary world in which he and Carol live: “It’s a . . . jungle out there. And you got to learn the rules because nobody’s going to learn them for you.” Thus, true knowledge about the soul and the universe can, in Mamet’s world, only be purchased, as the almost poetic lines continue: “Always the price. Whatever it is. And you gotta know it and be prepared to pay it if you don’t want it to pass you by.” Out of such everyday as well as sensory experiences, Mamet implies throughout his canon, emerge no epiphanies. Rather, his characters merely internalize the messy inconclusiveness of their misspent lives, without the reassurances of some higher consciousness. Edmond • In Edmond, the title character is a racist, sexist, homophobic who leaves his “safe” marriage and embarks on an urban quest to find meaning to his fragmented world. Encountering violence, murder, sexual frustration, and so on, he winds up in jail, sodomized by his black cell mate. If Edmond learns anything from his quest, it is that he accepts his own plight as an acquiescent victim in the jail cell. He becomes the compliant partner with his cell mate. Other major works long fiction: The Village, 1994; The Old Religion, 1997; Wilson: A Consideration of the Sources, 2000. poetry: The Hero Pony, 1990; The Chinaman, 1999. screenplays: The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1981 (adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel); The Verdict, 1982 (adaptation of Barry Reed’s novel); The Untouchables, 1985; House of Games, 1987; Things Change, 1988; We’re No Angels, 1989; Homicide, 1991; Glengarry Glen Ross, 1992 (adaptation of his play); Hoffa, 1992; Oleanna, 1994 (adaptation of his play); Vanya on 42nd Street, 1994; American Buffalo, 1996 (adaptation of his play); The Edge, 1997; The Spanish Prisoner, 1997; Wag the Dog, 1997 (with Hilary Henkin; adaptation of Larry Beinhart’s novel American Hero); Ronin, 1998 (credited as Richard Weisz); The Winslow Boy, 1999 (adaptation of Terrence Rattigan’s play); State and Main, 2000; The Heist, 2001; Hannibal, 2001; Lakeboat, 2001 (adaptation of his play).

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teleplays: Five Television Plays, 1990; A Life in the Theatre, 1993 (adaptation of his play); Lansky, 1999. radio plays: Prairie du Chien, 1978; Cross Patch, 1985; Goldberg Street, 1985. nonfiction: Writing in Restaurants, 1986; Some Freaks, 1989; On Directing Film, 1991; The Cabin: Reminiscence and Diversions, 1992; The Village, 1994; A Whore’s Profession: Notes and Essays, 1994; Make-Believe Town: Essays and Remembrances, 1996; True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor, 1997; Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama, 1998; Jafsie and John Henry: Essays on Hollywood, Bad Boys, and Six Hours of Perfect Poker, 1999; On Acting, 1999. children’s literature: The Owl, 1987; Warm and Cold, 1988 (with Donald Sultan); Passover, 1995; The Duck and the Goat, 1996; Bar Mitzvah, 1999 (with Sultan); Henrietta, 1999. Bibliography Bigsby, C. W. E. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama: Beyond Broadway. Vol. 3. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Bigsby devotes about forty pages to Mamet, whom he considers “a poet of loss.” His analyses are as sensitive as they are challenging, and they are compulsory reading for anyone interested in Mamet. Includes a bibliography. __________. David Mamet. London: Methuen, 1985. This first book-length study of Mamet is essential reading. Bigsby examines twelve plays and sees Mamet as “a moralist lamenting the collapse of public forum and private purpose, exposing a dessicated world in which the cadences of despair predominate.” Contains a brief bibliography. Carroll, Dennis. David Mamet. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. Carroll’s discussions of Mamet’s language are excellent, and he considers the plays in terms of business, sex, learning, and communion. This slender volume also contains a useful bibliography and chronology. Dean, Anne. David Mamet: Language as Dramatic Action. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990. In this perceptive study, Dean suggests that language describes, prescribes, defines, and confines Mamet’s characters. Hudgins, Christopher C., and Leslie Kane, eds. Gender and Genre: Essays on David Mamet. New York: Palgrave, 2001. This significant essay collection contains chapters on mothers in American Buffalo and Speed-the-Plow, gender and desire in House of Games and Speed-the-Plow, the women in Edmond, teaching in Oleanna, language and violence in Oleanna, and several other chapters. The book is very useful considering that the essays are very good and gender is a prevalent theme in Mamet’s drama. Kane, Leslie. Weasels and Wisemen: Ethics and Ethnicity in the Work of David Mamet. New York: Palgrave, 1999. This book, by a major authority on Mamet, covers issues such as morality and vice, as well as the influence of Jewish culture in his drama. Kane’s book analyzes the theme of power in Mamet’s drama, such as the relationship between power and ethics in his plays. _______, ed. David Mamet: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1992. The volume contains Kane’s introduction, her two interviews, and her bibliography in addition to twelve essays by Ruby Cohn, Dennis Carroll, Steven H. Gale, Deborah R. Geis, Ann C. Hall, Christopher C. Hudgins, Michael Hinden, Pascale Hubert-Leiber, Matthew C. Roudané, Henry I. Schvey, and Hersh Zeifman. Contains a detailed annotated bibliography, an excellent chronology, and a thorough index.

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_______. David Mamet in Conversation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. This book consists of interviews that Mamet has given, including some that have never appeared before in print. In these interviews, Mamet discusses his plays and films, as well as various themes such as sex, theatre, and dialogue. The interviews with Jim Lehrer and Charlie Rose are among the best in the book. _______. David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross”: Text and Performance. New York: Garland, 1996. This essay collection is essential for scholars and students who study this play. The essays concern the play as a detective story, the film version, anxiety, money, nostalgia, Levene’s daughter, identity, and morality (this chapter also covers Edmond), and other themes. The book concludes with a very useful bibliography. Matthew C. Roudané, updated by Eric Sterling

Christopher Marlowe Christopher Marlowe

Born: Canterbury, England; February 6, 1564 Died: Deptford, England; May 30, 1593 Principal drama • Dido, Queen of Carthage, pr. c. 1586-1587, pb. 1594 (with Thomas Nashe); Tamburlaine the Great, Part I, pr. c. 1587, pb. 1590 (commonly known as Tamburlaine); Tamburlaine the Great, Part II, pr. 1587, pb. 1590; Doctor Faustus, pr. c. 1588, pb. 1604; The Jew of Malta, pr. c. 1589, pb. 1633; Edward II, pr. c. 1592, pb. 1594; The Massacre at Paris, pr. 1593, pb. 1594(?); Complete Plays, pb. 1963 Other literary forms • Christopher Marlowe translated Lucan’s Bellum civile (60-65 c.e.) as Pharsalia (1600) and Ovid’s Amores (c. 20 b.c.e.) as Elegies (1595-1600) while still attending Cambridge (c. 1584-1587). The renderings of the Elegies are notable for their imaginative liveliness and rhetorical strength. They provide as well the earliest examples of the heroic couplet in English. Hero and Leander (1598), a long, erotic poem composed before 1593, is also indebted to Ovid. It is the best narrative of a group that includes William Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593) and John Marston’s The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion’s Image (1598). The vogue for these Ovidian epyllions lasted for more than a decade, and Marlowe’s reputation as a poet was confirmed on the basis of his contribution. He completed only the first two sestiads before his death, after which George Chapman continued and finished the poem. Marlowe’s brilliant heroic couplets create a world, in Eugene Ruoff’s words, of “moonlight and mushrooms”; his lovers are the idealized figures of pastoral works, chanting lush and sensual hymns or laments. A sophisticated narrator—viewed by most critics as representing Marlowe’s satiric viewpoint—manages to balance the sentimentalism of the lovers, giving the poem an ironic quality that is sustained throughout. This tone, however, is not a feature of Marlowe’s famous lyric, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.” First published in an anthology entitled The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), the poem is a beautiful evocation of the attractions of the pastoral world, a place where “melodious birds sing madrigals.” Technically called an “invitation,” “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” became an extremely popular idyll and was often imitated or parodied by other writers. One of the most intriguing responses, “The Nymph’s Reply,” was composed by Sir Walter Raleigh and published in The Passionate Pilgrim. Its worldly, skeptical attitude offers a contrast to the exuberance of Marlowe’s lyric. Without a doubt, this pastoral piece, along with Hero and Leander, would have ensured Marlowe’s reputation as a major literary figure even if he had never written a work intended for the stage. Achievements • It is difficult to overestimate the poetic and dramatic achievement of Christopher Marlowe. Although his career was short (about six years), Marlowe wrote plays that appealed to an emerging popular audience and that strongly influenced other dramatists. The heroes of the plays have been called “overreachers” and “apostates,” figures whom many critics believe reveal the defiance and cynicism of Marlowe himself. In addition to introducing these controversial, larger-than-life protagonists, Marlowe was also instrumental in fusing the elements of classical—and especially 563

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Senecan—drama and native morality plays, thereby establishing a style that would be followed by many subsequent playwrights. Doctor Faustus is the prime example of Marlowe’s talent for combining classical satire and a conventional Elizabethan theme of humanity in a middle state, torn between the angel and the beast. The vitality of Doctor Faustus, Tamburlaine the Great, and Marlowe’s other works can be traced as well to his facility for writing powerful yet musical blank verse. Indeed, so regular and forceful is his style that his verse has been described as “Marlowe’s mighty line,” and his achievement in blank verse no doubt influenced Shakespeare. It is apparent in such plays as Richard II (pr. c. 1595-1596), The Merchant of Venice (pr. c. 1596-1597), and Othello, the Moor of Venice (pr. 1604, rev. 1623) that Shakespeare was also inspired by certain of Marlowe’s themes and plots. Marlowe did not possess a patriotic spirit; his heroes are not Prince Hals but rather men similar to Shakespeare’s Richard III. Yet he was sensitive to the range of passion in human nature. Many of Marlowe’s characters reflect a true-to-life, even psychological complexity that preceding English playwrights had been incapable of demonstrating. Doctor Faustus’s fear on the night he will lose his soul is beautifully portrayed in the memorable Latin line, adapted from Ovid’s Amores, “O lente, lente currite noctis equi!” (“O slowly, slowly, run you horses of the night”). Barabas, villain-hero of The Jew of Malta, displays almost the same intensity of feeling as he rhapsodizes over his gold, his “infinite riches in a little room.” Over the short span of his career, Marlowe moved away from the extravagant declamatory style of Tamburlaine the Great to a blank verse—notably in Edward II—that echoed the rhythm of elevated speech. It is difficult to predict what further advances there would have been in his style had he lived as long as Shakespeare. It is doubtful, however, that he would have changed so radically as to achieve universal popularity. His vision was satiric and therefore narrow; the themes and characters that he chose to write about lacked widespread appeal. Nevertheless, “Kit” Marlowe transformed the English stage from a platform for allegorical interludes or homespun slapstick into a forum for exploring the most controversial of human and social issues. Marlowe also established the poetic medium—vigorous blank verse—that would prove to be the dominant form of dramatic expression until the close of the Elizabethan Age. Biography • Christopher Marlowe was born in Canterbury, England, in February, 1564. His father was a respected member of the tanners’ and shoemakers’ guild. Marlowe attended the King’s School of Canterbury in 1579 and 1580 and in 1581 began study at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He was the recipient of a scholarship funded by Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury. As a foundation scholar, Marlowe was expected to prepare for a post in the Church. In 1584, he took his bachelor of arts degree, after which he continued to hold his scholarship while studying for his master of arts degree. It appears that he would not have been granted his degree in 1587 except for the intervention of the queen’s Privy Council. This body declared that Marlowe had done the government some service—probably as a spy in Reims, home of exiled English Roman Catholics—and ordered that he be granted his M.A. at the “next commencement.” Marlowe had no doubt been writing poetry while at Cambridge, and he probably decided to make his way in this profession in London. It is certain that he was there in 1589, because he was a resident of Newgate Prison during that year. He and a man named Thomas Watson were jailed for having murdered another man, although it appears that Watson actually did the killing. Three years later, in 1592, Marlowe was

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again in trouble with the law, being placed under a peace bond by two London constables. Clearly, the young writer and scholar did not move in the best of social circles, even though his patron was Thomas Walsingham and Sir Walter Raleigh was his close friend. One of Marlowe’s colleagues, a man with whom he once shared a room, was Thomas Kyd, who in May of 1593 was arrested, charged with atheism, and tortured. Kyd accused Marlowe of atheism, claiming that the heretical documents found in their room belonged to the latter. The Privy Council sent out an order for Marlowe’s arrest (he was staying at the Walsingham estate), but instead of imprisoning him, the Council simply required that he report every day until the hearing. That hearing never took place: Marlowe died within two weeks after his detainment. On May 30, after a bout of drinking at a tavern in Deptford, Marlowe quarreled with a companion named Ingram Frizer, who settled the account by stabbing the playwright. Those who believed the charge of atheism brought against him saw Marlowe’s end as an example of God’s justice. Others, however, speculated on the possibility that he was the victim of an assassination plot, spawned to eliminate a spy who may have known too much. This theory seems fanciful, but it had many contemporary adherents, as the details surrounding the murder do not adequately explain the facts. Whatever the cause, Marlowe’s death marked the tragic end of a meteoric career on the public stage. As an innovator—and rebel—he challenged his fellow playwrights to achieve greater heights of creativity, and he left behind a rich legacy of plays and poems. Analysis • Taken as a whole, Christopher Marlowe’s canon represents a crucial step forward in the development of Elizabethan dramaturgy. Without him, there could not have been a Shakespeare or a John Webster, both of whom learned something of the art of popular melodrama from this master. It is lamentable that Marlowe’s early death deprived audiences and subsequent critics of more examples of his poetic drama, drama that stirs both the heart and the mind. Dido, Queen of Carthage • Marlowe probably began writing plays while he was a student at Cambridge. Dido, Queen of Carthage, which appeared in quarto form in 1594, was composed in collaboration with Thomas Nashe and was first performed by the children’s company at the Chapel Royal. How much Nashe actually had to do with the work is conjectural; he may have only edited it for publication. The tragedy shows little evidence, however, of the playwright’s later genius. It is closely tied to Vergil’s Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e.; English translation, 1553), with much of its blank verse qualifying as direct translation from the Latin. The characters are wooden and the action highly stylized, the result of an attempt to translate the material of epic into drama. The play impresses mainly through the force of its imagery. Tamburlaine the Great, Part I • Sections of Marlowe’s first popular theater success, Tamburlaine the Great, Part I, were probably sketched at Cambridge as well. First produced around 1587 (probably at an innyard), this exotic, bombastic piece won for its author considerable fame. His name was quickly cataloged with other so-called University Wits—men such as Robert Greene, John Lyly, and George Peele, whose dramas dominated the Elizabethan stage in the late 1580’s. Marlowe’s great dramatic epic was roughly based on the career of Timur Lenk (1336-1405), a Mongolian fighter who had led an army that defeated the Turks at Ankara in 1402. The defeat meant the salvation of Europe, an event that doubtless stimulated Marlowe’s ironic vision. The

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playwright could have found the account of the audacious Scythian’s career in many Latin and Italian sources, but his interest may have been first aroused after reading George Whetstone’s The English Mirror (1586). Tamburlaine emerges as an Olympian figure in Marlowe’s hands. He begins as a lowly shepherd whose physical courage and captivating, defiant rhetoric take him to victories over apparently superior opponents. Although episodic, the plot does achieve a degree of tension as each successive opponent proves more difficult to overcome. Tamburlaine’s first victim is a hereditary king named Mycetes, who underrates his adversary’s strength and persuasiveness. The lieutenant who is sent to capture the upstart is suddenly and decisively won over to the rebel’s side. Tamburlaine next outwits Cosroe, Mycetes’ brother, who thinks he can use this untutored fighter to consolidate his own power. As the “bloody and insatiate Tamburlaine” kills him, Cosroe curses the turn of Fortune’s Wheel that has cast him down. Even so, Marlowe believes not in the capricious goddess as the chief ruler of humankind but in a kind of Machiavellian system directed by the will of his larger-than-life hero. A major test of Tamburlaine’s will comes in his confrontation with Bajazeth, emperor of the Turks. Before the battle between the two warriors, there is a boasting bout between their two mistresses, Zenocrate and Zabina. The former, daughter to the Soldan of Egypt and in love with Tamburlaine, praises her beloved’s strength and his destined glory. Both women also pray for the victory of their men, parallel actions that invite a comparison between the pairs of lovers. When Tamburlaine defeats Bajazeth, he takes the crown from Zabina’s head and gives it to his queen—and “conqueror.” Marlowe thereby demonstrates that the play qualifies as a monumental love story as well. Bajazeth is bound up and later thrown into a cage with his defeated queen; this contraption is then towed across the stage as part of Tamburlaine’s victory procession. Before the final siege of Damascus, the city that houses Zenocrate’s father, the Soldan, Tamburlaine unveils a magnificent banquet. During the festivities, he releases Bajazeth from his cage in order to use him as a footstool from which he will step onto his throne. This audacious touch of spectacle verifies Marlowe’s aim of shocking his audience and displays contempt for the pride of rulers. In the midst of this banquet, Tamburlaine orders his lieutenants to “hang our bloody colors by Damascus,/ Reflexing hues of blood upon their heads,/ While they walk quivering on their walls,/ Half dead for fear before they feel my wrath!” These threatening, boastful words are followed quickly by a change of colors to black, which signifies Tamburlaine’s intention to destroy the city. He underscores this purpose by condemning four virgins, supplicants sent to assuage his anger, to their deaths on the spears of his horsemen. The destruction of the city soon follows, although the Soldan and the King of Arabia (to whom Zenocrate is still betrothed) lead out an army to do battle with their oppressor. While this battle takes place offstage, Bajazeth and Zabina are rolled in to deliver curses against their torturers. Wild from hunger and despair, Bajazeth asks his queen to fetch him something to drink; while she is away, he brains himself against the bars of the cage. Zabina, returning from her errand, finds her husband’s battered corpse and follows his lead. The horror of this double suicide no doubt satisfied the popular audience’s appetite for gore, an appetite that Marlowe fed lavishly in this play. The finale of the first part depicts Tamburlaine’s victory over the Soldan, who is spared because the victor plans to crown Zenocrate Queen of Persia. Meanwhile, her betrothed, the King of Arabia, dies from battle wounds; his death causes little conflict, however, in Zenocrate, who follows Tamburlaine as if he were indeed her conqueror,

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too. Now the lowly shepherd-turned-king declares a truce, buries his noble opponents with solemn rites, and prepares to marry his beloved in pomp and splendor. He appears to stand atop Fortune’s Wheel, a startling example of the Machiavellian man of iron will to whom no leader or law is sacrosanct. There is little sense here that Tamburlaine is intended as an example of pride going before a fall. He has achieved stunning victories over foes who are as immoral as he is; most of them, including Bajazeth, emerge as fools who miscalculate or underrate Tamburlaine with fearful consequences. No doubt the popularity of the play is traceable to this fact and to the truth that most people nurture an amoral desire for fame or power that this hero fulfills with startling success. Tamburlaine the Great, Part II • Part II shows Tamburlaine continuing on his road to conquest, securely characterizing himself as the scourge of God. As the play opens, Sigismund, Christian king of Hungary, and the pagan monarch Orcanes agree to a truce. This ceremony strikes one as ironic, as pagans and Christians swallow their pride in order to challenge and defeat the half-god who threatens them. In the meantime, Tamburlaine proudly surveys the fruits of Zenocrate’s womb: three sons through whom he hopes to win immortality. One of the brood, however, is weak and unattracted by war; Calyphas seems devoted to his mother and to the blandishments of peace. His effeminate nature foreshadows Tamburlaine’s decline and fall, revealing that his empire cannot survive his own death. Even though his two other sons exhibit natures cruel enough to match their father’s, the flawed seed has obviously been planted. The hastily forged truce is suddenly broken when Sigismund tears the document and turns his forces on Orcanes. Though Marlowe appears to be attacking the integrity of Christianity, he was in fact appealing to his audience’s anti-Catholic sentiments. When Sigismund is wounded and dies, moreover, Orcanes announces that Christ has won a victory in defeating one so treacherous as Sigismund. While these events transpire on the battlefield, another death is about to take place in Tamburlaine’s tent. Zenocrate has been in failing health, and her imminent death causes her husband to contemplate joining her. That he should entertain such a gesture at the height of his power confirms the depth of his love for Zenocrate. Her imploring words—“Live still, my lord! O, let my sovereign live!”—manage to stay his hand, but his pent-up rage cannot be restrained at her death. Shifting from a figure of gentleness and compassion in a moment’s time, Tamburlaine orders the town in which she dies to be burned to the ground. With the defeat of Sigismund, Orcanes emerges as a kingmaker, leading the grand procession at which Callapine, the avenging son of Bajazeth, vows to use his new crown as the means to conquer the lowly Scythian. This scene is succeeded by another ceremonial pageant, this one led by the mournful Tamburlaine and his sons carrying the coffin of Zenocrate. Her body will remain with the company wherever they go in battle. Determined to teach his sons the arts of war, Tamburlaine commences a lesson in besieging a fort. When Calyphas balks, afraid of wounding or death, an angry father lances his own arm and orders his sons to dip their hands in his blood. All of them comply, although Calyphas is moved to pity at this horrid sight. With this ritual, Marlowe underscores the tribal nature of his hero’s family but at the same time implies that the letting of blood by Tamburlaine will not necessarily cure the “defect” in it. The central battle in the second part pits Tamburlaine and his sons against Callapine and his crowned kings before Aleppo. In a preliminary verbal skirmish, Tam-

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burlaine belittles Almeda, a traitor, who cowers behind Callapine’s back when invited to take his crown. The scene is seriocomic as Almeda proves himself a coward before his kingly followers; his weakness is meant to parallel that of Calyphas, Tamburlaine’s son. The latter remains behind in a tent playing cards while his two brothers earn martial honors on the battlefield. When they and their father enter, trailing the conquered Turkish monarchs behind them, Tamburlaine seizes his weakling son and stabs him. Among the many scenes of bloodshed Marlowe presents in the play, this is probably the most shocking and repulsive. Although he cites his role as God’s scourge and this deed as “war’s justice,” Tamburlaine here reveals a self-destructive side of his nature that has not been evident before. The audience does not have long to ponder the murder; the scene of horror is quickly followed by one of pageantry. Trebizon and Soria, two pagan kings, enter the stage drawing a chariot with Tamburlaine holding the reins. This spectacle is accompanied by the superhero’s disdaining words: “Holla, ye pamper’d jades of Asia!/ What can ye draw but twenty miles a day,/ And have so proud a chariot at your heels,/ And such a coachman as great Tamburlaine?” The monarch-prisoners hurl curses at their captors as, like Bajazeth and Zabina, they are taunted unmercifully. Tamburlaine’s soldiers are rewarded with Turkish concubines, after which the royal train heads toward Babylon for yet another bloody siege. Before the walls of this ancient city, Tamburlaine calls on its governor to yield. (The scene recalls the negotiations before the walls of Damascus in Part I.) When he refuses, the lieutenants Techelles and Theridamas lead their soldiers in scaling the city’s walls. The victory is quickly won, and Tamburlaine, dressed in black and driving his chariot, proudly announces the city’s defeat. A quaking governor promises Tamburlaine abundant treasure if he will spare his life, but the conqueror disdains such bribes and has his victim hanged in chains from the walls. Theridamas shoots the governor while Tamburlaine proceeds to burn Muhammadan books in an open pit. Defying Mahomet to avenge his sacrilege if he has any power, Tamburlaine suddenly feels “distempered”; he recovers quickly, however, when he hears of Callapine’s army advancing. Does Marlowe mean to imply that his hero’s unexpected illness is punishment for his act of defiance? Although such an explicit moral lesson seems uncharacteristic, the connection between the two events appears to be more than a passing one. The weakened Tamburlaine manages a final victory over Bajazeth’s son, after which he produces a map that represents the extent of his conquests. With a trembling finger, he also directs his sons’ attention to the remaining countries that they will be expected to conquer. Giving his crown to Theridamas (who later bestows it on Amyras) and turning his chariot over to his sons, Tamburlaine then calls for Zenocrate’s hearse, beside which he stretches out to die. Before the mighty general’s body is carried off, Amyras delivers the fitting eulogy: Meet heaven and earth, and here let all things end, For earth hath spent the pride of all her fruit, And heaven consum’d his choicest living fire: Let earth and heaven his timeless death deplore, For both their worths will equal him no more. The death of the Scourge of Heaven follows no particular event; its suddenness only serves to underscore Tamburlaine’s mortality. The audience is reminded of Alexander’s demise in the midst of his glory. Because the chariot becomes such a dominant prop in the second part, Marlow may have likewise meant to suggest a parallel be-

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tween his hero and Phaëthon, who in his pride fell from Jove’s chariot because he could not control its course. Whatever the interpretation of this hero’s fall, there can be little doubt that his mighty feats and his Senecan bombast made him an extremely popular—and awesome—figure on the Elizabethan stage. The Jew of Malta • For his next play, The Jew of Malta, Marlowe also chose an antihero who poses a threat to the orderly rule of European society. As Tamburlaine had ruled by martial strength, Barabas (named to recall the thief whose place on the Cross was taken by Christ) hopes to dominate the world by his wealth. Although Marlowe depicts him as a grasping, evil man (to the delight of the anti-Semitic Elizabethan audience), Barabas holds one’s interest as Richard III does—by the resourcefulness of his scheming. Just as Tamburlaine’s audacity appeals to an unconscious desire for power, so Barabas’s scorn for Christian morality probably appealed to the audience’s wish to defy authority. He is not portrayed, however, as a sympathetic character, even though in the early stages of the play, the behavior of his Christian opponents toward him reveals their hypocrisy. Faced with a threat from the powerful Turkish fleet, Ferneze, the Maltese governor, turns to Barabas for help in raising tribute money. While three of his colleagues agree to give up half of their estates and consent to baptism, Barabas refuses this arrangement, miscalculating the power and determination of the governor. Accompanied by a chorus of anti-Semitic remarks by the knights, Ferneze announces that he has already sent men to seize Barabas’s property. He also declares that he intends to transform the Jew’s mansion into a nunnery; this news further enrages Barabas, who curses them: “Take it to you, i’ th’ Devil’s name.” This scene highlights the hypocrisy of the Maltese; it also reveals the extent of Barabas’s hatred for those among whom he has lived and worked. The audience has learned from the prologue spoken by Machiavel that the hero is one of his disciples and soon realizes that the subsequent action will show him “practicing” on his enemies. When his daughter Abigail comes to recount angrily the takeover of their house, Barabas counsels patience, reminding her that he has hidden a fortune beneath its floorboards. In order to recover the money, he spawns a daring plan that requires his daughter to take vows as a means of entering the newly founded nunnery. In a heavily theatrical confrontation staged by Barabas, father accuses daughter of deserting him and their religion, while in an aside he tells her where to find the money. As Abigail is hurried into the mansion, she is spied by two young men, Mathias and Lodowick, both of whom fall in love with her—a rivalry that Barabas will later turn to his advantage. Later that night, Abigail appears on a balcony with Barabas’s bags in her hands; she throws these down to him as he sees her and shouts: “O girl! O gold! O beauty! O my bliss!” This outburst illustrates the Jew’s seriocomic nature, as he employs such impassioned speech to praise his gold. Eight years later, Shakespeare incorporated this trait into his characterization of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. In the square the next day, Barabas begins to practice in earnest against Ferneze. Ferneze’s son Lodowick expresses his love for Abigail and is invited by Barabas to supper for a meeting with his “jewel.” This dinner will prove Lodowick’s undoing, as Barabas tells the audience in an aside. The Jew then proceeds to purchase the slave Ithamore, who will serve his master’s will no matter what the command. In order to test the fellow, Barabas lists a remarkable catalog of evil deeds—including poisoning wells in nunneries—that he has supposedly committed. Ithamore responds by declaring himself in a league of villainy with the Jew: “We are villains both!—Both

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circumcised, we hate Christians both!” The slave aids his master by taking a forged challenge from Lodowick to Mathias, with whom Abigail is truly in love, even though her father has forced her to display affection for Lodowick. When the rivals meet to engage in a duel, Barabas is positioned above them, watching with pleasure as they kill each other. Now, however, Ithamore and Abigail, whom he has told of the feigned challenge, know the extent of Barabas’s treachery. In melodramatic fashion, the Jew decides that his daughter must die or she will reveal his deed. To kill her, he has Ithamore prepare a poisoned pot of rice to be “enjoyed” by all the nuns. To secure Ithamore’s loyalty, Barabas promises him the whole of his inheritance, and he seems to adopt him as his son. The audience, however, knows from another aside that Barabas intends to kill his slave as well when the time is right. Ithamore does his master’s bidding, but before Abigail dies, she gives proof of her father’s guilt to Friar Bernardine (depicted as a lustful clown), who vows to confront the Jew with it, accompanied by Friar Jacomo. Barabas outwits these two fellows, assuring them that he wishes to be converted; as he did with Lodowick and Mathias, he starts the two men quarreling with each other. By means of a clever ruse devised with the aid of Ithamore, he also eliminates these potential enemies. As each of his schemes proves successful, Barabas celebrates more openly and melodramatically. In this play, unlike Tamburlaine the Great, the audience senses that the hero-villain will soon go too far, tripping up on some unforeseen obstacle. The audience is meant to experience this sense of impending doom, especially after the murder of the innocent Abigail, who converted to Christianity before her death. This deed establishes a parallel between Barabas and the biblical Herod, another murderer of innocents. Meanwhile, Ithamore, aided by a pimp and his whore, tries to blackmail his master to feed the whore’s expensive tastes. Barabas resolves to kill them all. Disguised as a French musician, he comes to the party at which Ithamore and the others are drunkenly planning to destroy the Jew. Barabas plays and sings, then tosses to the revelers a bouquet that he has dusted with poison. They smell it and go ahead boldly in their plan to expose the Jew’s actions. Before they die, they manage to tell Ferneze of Barabas’s treachery; he and the others are led offstage, from where an officer quickly comes to tell of all of their deaths. The audience quickly learns, however, that Barabas has taken a sleeping potion and thus has deceived his enemies. Now intent on revenge, he joins forces with the besieging Turks, showing them a way into the city through a hidden tunnel. With a suddenness of movement that imitates the Wheel of Fortune, Ferneze is defeated and Barabas is appointed governor of the island by the Turks. Rather than torturing and killing the former governor, as might be expected, Barabas offers to return his power and destroy the Turks if Ferneze will pay him, which Ferneze agrees to do. The Jew then invites Calymath to a feast in celebration of their great victory. Hard at work in the hall, Barabas constructs an elaborate trap that he plans to spring on Calymath with Ferneze’s help. When the moment arrives, however, the Maltese governor cuts a rope that causes Barabas to fall into the trap, a large cauldron filled with boiling liquid. Ferneze then arrests the Turkish leader, telling him that his troops have been surprised and killed in the monastery where they were housed. Amid the shouts and curses of the Jew—“Damn’s Christians, dogs, and Turkish infidels!”—the play ends in triumph for the Maltese citizens. The Jew of Malta ends in the defeat of Machiavellian plotting. Even though he is a scheming villain throughout most of the action, however, Barabas might also be con-

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sidered a near-tragic figure if one regards him as a man who degenerates in reaction to the evil done to him. In part, this reaction must follow from the behavior of Ferneze and Calymath; neither is morally superior to Barabas. He must honestly be described as the Elizabethan stereotype of a Jew, given to melodrama and sardonic humor. The audience feels no sympathy for him in his death, only a kind of relief that his destructive will has been defeated by someone capable of outwitting him. Although he finally overreaches himself, Barabas emerges as a totally fascinating villain, matched only by Shakespeare’s Iago and Richard III. The Massacre at Paris • In The Massacre at Paris, Marlowe depicts the episodic adventures of another antihero, the Guise, who is distinguishable from his predecessors only in representing the power of the Papacy. The character is based on a historical figure who was assassinated in 1588; the action recounts the infamous Saint Bartholomew’s Day debacle of 1572, when hundreds of Huguenots were murdered by Roman Catholic forces. The succession of victims, whom the Guise orders murdered ostensibly to please the Church, makes the audience recoil from the character and his motives. Lacking any comic element in his nature, he qualifies as a parodied Machiavel intent on disrupting the reign of Henry III, a lecherous and inept leader. The Guise’s soliloquies show him to be in quest of an “earthly crown,” which he believes he deserves because of his superior will and intelligence. What makes him different from Tamburlaine is his inability to control his passions and the behavior of those closest to him. In critical situations, his rhetoric fails him. His wife’s affair with the king’s favorite cuckolds the Guise. Henry delights in making the sign of the horns at him in public. Enraged at being made a figure of public ridicule, he arranges to kill his rival, an act that all but ensures his fall. The man who stands in opposition to both the Guise and Henry III is King Henry of Navarre. Although his speeches lack the fire and melodrama that mark the Guise’s outbursts, Navarre champions a Catholicism that is anticlerical, even fundamentalist. He also defends the principle of king and country, which the Guise and Henry seem to have forgotten in their quest for power. To prove his antipapal views, Navarre joins forces with Queen Elizabeth in an alliance the rightness of which Marlowe underscores by having a dying Henry III embrace it. This bit of manipulation has led some critics to argue that with this play, Marlowe was returning to his own Christian faith and was rejecting the amoral position taken by Tamburlaine. It is dangerous, however, to infer an author’s beliefs from those held by his characters; there is no corroborating evidence in this case. There can be little doubt that Navarre is intended to be seen as a heroic character unlike any encountered in the other plays. If he is not Prince Hal, he is certainly Bolingbroke, a man who acts on principle and proves effective. Even though the confrontation between Navarre and the Guise has about it all the elements of exciting drama, The Massacre at Paris is ultimately disappointing. The Guise’s philosophy of seeking out perilous situations in order to test his strength of will does hold one’s attention for a while, but the play offers none of the heroic bombast of a Tamburlaine or witty audacity of a Barabas. There is a great deal of bloodshed on the stage and off, but there is no clear purpose for the murders, no sense in which they forward some particular end in the plot. To complicate matters, the text that has survived is garbled; no amount of reconstructing can account for the missing links. While Marlowe may have been attempting a new dramatic design (some textual critics suggest that the original version was twice as long), The Massacre at Paris in its present form

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cannot be regarded as achieving the degree of pathos necessary to call it a successful tragedy. Edward II • In Edward II, however, such pathos can be found in the fateful careers of two men whose wills and hearts are sorely tested. Edward is presented as a man who is required to rule as king even though his weak nature disqualifies him from the task. As misfortune hounds him, he acquires humility and insight, which help to give him a more sympathetic personality than he has at the play’s opening. He progresses toward self-understanding, and this transformation distinguishes him from more static characters such as Tamburlaine and Barabas. On the other hand, Mortimer, a man like Navarre who starts out professing deep concern for the destiny of his country, gradually loses the audience’s sympathy as he becomes driven by ambition for the crown. This pattern of characterization charges Edward II with pathos of the kind Shakespeare would achieve in his tragedy Richard II, which was based on Marlowe’s play and appeared a year after it. Like Shakespeare, Marlowe turned to Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577) to find the source material for Edward II. While earlier playwrights had attempted to transform the stuff of chronicle history into drama, Marlowe was the first to forge a dramatic design that is coherent and progressive. He presents a single theme—the struggle between Edward and his nobles—modulating it by means of the hero’s victories and defeats. When Edward is finally overcome and the crown falls to his heir, he pursues Mortimer and his deceitful queen until revenge is won. In an ending unlike those of Marlowe’s earlier plays, the accession of Edward III brings with it the promise of happier, more prosperous days. This exuberance at the close is a far cry from the condition of the state when the action begins. Gaveston, Edward’s minion, seeks to divide his lover from the nobles not only for sexual reasons. He shows that he is ambitious and disdainful of his superiors. In an opening-scene confrontation (which Gaveston overhears), Edward defies the lords, announcing his intention to appoint Gaveston Lord High-Chamberlain. Edward’s brother Kent at first supports him, telling the king to cut off the heads of those who challenge his authority. Yet by the close of the scene, when Edward has alienated the lords, the commons, and the bishops, Kent begins to wonder openly about his brother’s ability to rule. Mortimer, a man possessed by brashness, stands as the chief opponent to the king. He is begged by Queen Isabella not to move against the crown, even though she has been displaced by Gaveston. Mortimer is not alone in his opposition to the king’s behavior. The archbishop of Canterbury joins the peers in composing a document that officially banishes Gaveston. Although Edward rages against this rebellious act, he soon realizes that to resist might well lead to his own deposing. He is trapped because he has placed love for his minion above his concern for England. It is significant in this regard that Gaveston is both low-born and a Frenchman, which qualified him as a true villain in the eyes of Elizabethan Englishmen. Before the two men part, expressing vows that sound like those of heterosexual lovers, Edward turns to Isabella, accusing her (at Gaveston’s prompting) of being involved in an affair with Mortimer. Tortured by her husband’s harsh, and for the moment untrue, words, Isabella approaches the lords and, with Mortimer’s aid, persuade them to rescind the banishment order. Edward rejoices, suddenly announcing plans to marry Gaveston to his niece; his enthusiasm is not shared by Mortimer and his father, who see this as another move to entrench Gaveston in royal favor. The minion’s success also breeds Machiavellian ambition in younger courtiers, the audience learns from a short interlude involving

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Young Spencer and Baldock. This mirroring technique, by which lesser characters are observed copying the traits of the central figures, serves Marlowe’s moral or instructive purposes in other plays as well. When Gaveston returns in triumph, he expresses contempt for the “base, leaden earls” who greet him with a mocking recital of his newly acquired titles. Lancaster, then Mortimer and others, draw their swords and threaten Gaveston, an action that prompts Edward to order Mortimer from his court. A shouting match follows, sides are taken, and the earls set about planning how they will murder Gaveston. Fuel is added to the fire when Edward childishly refuses to ransom Mortimer’s uncle, who has been captured by the Scots. (One can see in this episode parallels with the Hotspur-Henry IV quarrel in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, pr. 1598.) Rejecting his brother Kent’s sound advice to seek a truce with the lords, Edward declares his intention to be revenged on them all, plotting openly with Gaveston to be rid of his enemies. By allowing himself to be driven by anger, Edward exhibits his political naïveté: His threat against Mortimer also alienates the people, to whom he is a hero. Furthermore, as Marlowe makes clear, the lords frequently express their desire to expel the king’s favorite, not the king. It is important to realize that the playwright does not present the homosexual affair in an exploitative way; rather, he wants the audience to understand how Edward’s blind defense of his “friendship” makes it easy for his enemies to rally to the cause. The lords finally decide to move openly against Gaveston, whose whereabouts Isabella reluctantly reveals. Isabella’s position has been made increasingly difficult by the king’s claim that she and young Mortimer are lovers. Now her action seems to confirm Edward’s suspicions, even though she affirms her love for the king and her son. When Gaveston is overtaken by his enemies—one of whom compares him to Helen of Troy—he is accused of being a common thief, then given over to Warwick’s custody, an act that ensures his death. Rather than solving the country’s problems, however, the removal of Gaveston exacerbates them. Edward quickly embraces the support of Young Spencer and Baldock, his new favorites, while continuing to ignore the incursions of Scots marauders and of the French King Valois, who has invaded Normandy. Marlowe here paints a vivid picture of the collapse of the body politic from internal and external forces. Yet when the inevitable civil war breaks out, Edward wins, proceeding quickly to take revenge against those “traitors” who opposed him. In his rage, however, he makes another mistake; rather than killing Mortimer, he imprisons him in the Tower, where his ambition (or virtu) has an opportunity to flower. With the aid of Edward’s disgruntled brother Kent, Mortimer escapes to France to seek aid—along with Isabella—to restore England to her former health. It now appears that Isabella and Mortimer have joined forces to place Prince Edward on the throne. Yet as they leave the French court with promises of support, the queen and the young climber appear to have their own interests, not those of the kingdom, at heart. Not surprisingly, Edward is easily defeated in a second encounter with the lords, bolstered as they are by the troops of Mortimer and Isabella. Isabella immediately proclaims Prince Edward the new “warden” of the realm, then turns the question of Edward’s fate over to the lords. It is at this point that Marlowe begins portraying the deposed king in a more sympathetic light. When he is captured by Leicester, Edward, along with Young Spencer and Baldock, is disguised and begging sanctuary from an abbot. In these perilous straits, he still refuses to denounce his friendship with obvious parasites. As the bishop of Winchester asks for his crown, deeming the act for “England’s

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good,” Edward suddenly refuses to take it from his head, accusing Isabella and Mortimer of outright rebellion. What makes Edward such a pitiful figure here is his inability to comprehend his part in creating the circumstances of his fall. He regards himself as a wronged innocent surrounded by wolfish traitors; this self-blindness prevents him from acting wisely and in the country’s best interests. Although he lacks the spiritual dimensions of Shakespeare’s King Lear, his jealous possession of the crown represents the same childlike faith in the object, not in the qualities which it represents. This attitude and the behavior that it engenders—a self-dramatizing resignation—lead to Edward’s death. References to the Wheel of Fortune fill the final scenes of Edward II. Mortimer and Isabella appear to have reached the Wheel’s top, as both actively plot Edward’s death. Isabella emerges, however, as a mother determined to see her son ascend the throne, while Mortimer clearly plots to seize power for himself. He determines that the deposed king must die, but he will act through subordinates rather than directly. Mortimer’s tactics represent the victory of Machiavellianism, as he proceeds to rule through plotting and hypocrisy. He has Prince Edward crowned, declaring himself to be protector, then sends Lightborn and Matrevis to murder Edward. In a sad yet gruesome scene, the disheveled Edward is murdered in his jail bed when Lightborn places a table on top of him and jumps up and down on it. This horrible deed is quickly answered by Edward III, who arrests Mortimer, has him hanged and beheaded, and then places the head on his father’s hearse. Isabella is sent to the Tower as the new king demonstrates the traits of strength and decisiveness that assure England’s future glory. Edward III is a monarch who, like Shakespeare’s Henry V, restores not only peace but also the values of patriotism and justice, which are necessary to the peaceful progress of the state. In Edward II, Marlowe scores several successes. He creates a coherent play out of strands of historical material, lending pathos and poetic strength to the main character. He explores the depths of human emotions and depicts skillfully the ambiguous personalities of figures such as Isabella with consummate talent. He also reveals the effects of Machiavellianism in a personage, Mortimer, whose nature is more believable, less stereotyped, than those of Barabas or the Guise. These advances in dramaturgy not only lent tragic potency to Edward II but also prepared the way for Marlowe’s most spectacular tragic achievement, Doctor Faustus. Doctor Faustus • A major obstacle in the path of critics of Marlowe’s most popular melodrama, however, is the state of the text. Not published until eleven years after the playwright’s death, the play was modified by “doctors” who were paid to add certain effects and delete others. To complicate matters further, an enlarged quarto edition was published in 1616; this version features alterations that suggest it may have been printed from the promptbook. Today’s text is largely the work of Sir Walter Greg, who attempted a reconstruction of the play based on the extant quartos. The tragedy bears some resemblance to English morality interludes dealing with damnation and salvation. By selecting the Faustus myth, however, Marlowe was committed to portraying a story of damnation alone, with a hero who realizes too late the terrible consequences of selling his soul to the Devil. Indeed, the most impressive aspect of Doctor Faustus is its incisive treatment of the protagonist’s tortured state of mind, which could easily be construed as an object lesson to sinners in the Elizabethan audience. Yet Marlowe was not preparing an interlude for the edification and instruction of simpleminded rustics. He was a daring, provocative artist exploring the character of a

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man who was legendary for his intellectual curiosity and for his intense desire to break the bonds of human knowledge and experience. However, Doctor Faustus does not contain any praise for the Christian religion and, therefore, is not a Christian morality play. The character Doctor Faustus is closely related to Tamburlaine, another Marlovian hero whose desire for knowledge and power sent him on a spectacular quest. While Tamburlaine, however, is able to win the prize—if only for a brief time—Doctor Faustus in fact falls from the position of social and spiritual prominence he holds at the play’s opening. He is a victim of a system he chooses to defy. In that act of defiance, he begins almost immediately to deteriorate into a fool. The stages of that decline are carefully, ironically traced by Marlowe, who seems to want the audience to regard his hero’s striving as a futile gesture. The play’s ending, with Faustus being led away by devils who torture and then dismember him, offers no optimistic vision to the audience. Doctor Faustus thus stands as Marlowe’s most pessimistic play, a tragedy that instructs its spectators in the dangers and ultimate limitations of the human imagination. The play’s opening (after an induction by a Senecan Chorus) finds Faustus in his study rejecting the orthodox or conventional disciplines and hungering for the demigod status of a magician. Even though he is cautioned against incurring God’s anger by the Good Angel, Faustus invites two magicians, Valdes and Cornelius, to dine with him. In an effective bit of mirroring, Marlowe invents a servant named Wagner, who mimics the behavior of his master by behaving condescendingly toward two scholars who have come to warn Faustus about practicing the “damn’d art.” One is struck throughout the play by the concern shown for the hero by his friends. When Doctor Faustus manages to cast a spell and call up his servant Mephostophilis, the audience should quickly realize that he has made a bad bargain. Lucifer’s messenger tells him directly that he desires the magician’s soul and that Faustus will possess only the power the devils choose to give him. Unfortunately, Faustus’s pride blinds him to the reality of the contract, which he signs with his own blood. He must forfeit his soul after twenty-four years of magic. In a humorous parallel scene, Wagner, too, calls up spirits and purchases the services of a clown, the burlesque counterpart of Mephostophilis. The slapstick underplot makes clear the ironic point: The servants control their masters and not vice versa. While the Good Angel urges Faustus to repent, he instead boldly defies God and mocks the existence of Hell. His haughtiness begins to weaken, however, when second thoughts about the contract start to plague him. Supposing himself to be beyond salvation, Faustus instead turns to Mephostophilis for answers to questions about the creation of humanity and the world. In place of answers, Mephostophilis offers evasions and sideshows, such as the procession of the Seven Deadly Sins. Again a comic scene echoes the main action as Robin the Clown steals his master’s conjuring books and invites Dick to turn invisible with him, in which state they plan to visit the tavern and drink all they wish without paying. References to bills and nonpayment throw into relief the predicament of the hero, whose “bill” must be paid with his life. When the audience next encounters Faustus, he is in fact supposed to be invisible as he visits a papal banquet, where he daringly strikes the pope and plays sophomoric tricks on the cardinals. The appeal of such anti-Catholic skits to a Protestant audience is obvious; Marlowe reinforces that point when he has Faustus help rescue the rival Pope Bruno from imprisonment. Yet even though he succeeds in puncturing the vanity of Rome, Faustus also reveals himself to be a second-rate showman rather than the demigod he had hoped to become. Marlowe accomplishes this effect by depicting his hero first in the papal setting; then in Emperor Charles’s court, placing the cuckold’s horns on the

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heads of three courtiers; and finally in a tavern, where he tricks a horse-courser into believing he has pulled off Faustus’s leg. This foolery has been heavily criticized by commentators as nothing more than an attempt to divert the mechanicals. Some have argued that the scenes involving Robin and the other clowns were in fact added by subsequent playwrights. There can be little doubt, however, that many of these scenes are intended to underscore the hero’s decline and to foreshadow later events. The horse-courser’s pulling off of Faustus’s “leg” and the subsequent purchase of a mare that turns out to be a bale of hay foreshadow the hero’s final dismemberment and comment on the bad bargain that Faustus has made with Lucifer. As in plays such as Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, burlesque business in the underplot of Doctor Faustus provides a more informal way of appreciating the thematic significance of the main action. Marlowe also exhibits his expertise in using conventions of the Elizabethan stage to reinforce his main themes. At the court of Emperor Charles, Faustus creates a dumb show that depicts Alexander defeating Darius, then giving the defeated king’s crown to his paramour. (While this action is taking place, Mephostophilis places the cuckold’s horns on the head of Benvolio, one of the courtiers who has challenged Faustus’s authority.) The dumb show celebrates the victory of a great warrior and is obviously intended as an elaborate compliment to the emperor. Yet it also suggests how distant Faustus himself is from the noble stature of an Alexander; instead of performing great deeds—his original purpose—he can function only in the medium’s role. This identity is reinforced in the climactic scene of the play, when Faustus requires Mephostophilis to conjure up Helen of Troy. She crosses the stage quickly, leaving Faustus unsatisfied. He is then approached by an old man who urges him to repent before it is too late. Stricken by these words and by his conscience, Faustus nearly commits suicide with a dagger that the invisible Mephostophilis conveniently places in his hand. The old man returns to stop him, but when he leaves the stage, Mephostophilis materializes and berates Faustus for his desperate attempt. Now believing himself beyond redemption and driven by desire, the magician calls again for Helen of Troy, whom he praises, kisses, and then leads away. Several commentators believe this act of intercourse with a spirit (a succuba) damns Faustus unequivocally. His soul has become so corrupted as a result that it shares the demoniac spirit with the other devils. Marlowe, however, clearly wants his audience to believe that Faustus could save himself at any time should he decide to repent and ask forgiveness. The dilemma he faces is that he is torn between despair and faint hope; he never manages to decide on a course of action and take it. This depiction of man as a battleground for the forces of good and evil looks back to the morality plays and ahead to plays of psychological complexity such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (pr. c. 1600-1601). In the case of Doctor Faustus, the failure to repent allows Lucifer, Mephostophilis, and other devils to conjure up yet another vision, this time of a horror-filled Hell. Left alone on the stage, Faustus makes a pitiful attempt to slow the passage of time—“O, lente, lente, currite noctis equi!”—but now his magic has left him. This speech highlights one of the play’s chief ironies: Twenty-four years have passed as quickly as twenty-four hours, the last one ticking away toward Faustus’s doom. When the scholars who were Faustus’s friends next enter, they find only his limbs, the grim remains of a man who thought himself to be a god. Hell turns out to be no fable for the damned hero. The hero of Doctor Faustus, Marlowe’s major artistic and popular success, belongs with Marlowe’s others by virtue of his defiance and his compelling rhetorical style.

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Other major works poetry: Hero and Leander, 1598 (completed by George Chapman); “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” 1599 (in The Passionate Pilgrim). translations: Elegies, 1595-1600 (of Ovid’s Amores); Pharsalia, 1600 (of Lucan’s Bellum civile). miscellaneous: The Works of Christopher Marlowe, 1910, 1962 (C. F. Tucker Brooke, editor); The Works and Life of Christopher Marlowe, 1930-1933, 1966 (R. H. Case, editor); The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, 1973 (Fredson Bowers, editor). Bibliography Downie, J. A., and J. T. Parnell. Constructing Christopher Marlowe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. This scholarly study contains essays on Marlowe’s life and works. Includes bibliography and index. Grantley, Darryll, and Peter Roberts, eds. Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture. Aldershot, Hants, England: Scholar Press, 1996. This collection of essays covers topics such as Marlowe and atheism and the staging of his plays and provides in-depth analysis of most of his plays. Bibliography and index. Hopkins, Lisa. Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life. New York: Palgrave, 2000. A study of Marlowe’s career and what is known of his life. Hopkins focuses on Marlowe’s skepticism toward colonialism, family, and religion. Simkin, Stevie. Marlowe: The Plays. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Simkin provides indepth analyses of Marlowe’s dramas, major and minor. Bibliographical references and index. _______. A Preface to Marlowe. New York: Longman, 2000. In addition to providing a biography of Marlowe, Simkin analyzes his major and minor plays, concluding with a chapter on Marlowe’s influence on the theater. Bibliography and index. Tauton, Nina. Fifteen-nineties Drama and Militarism: Portrayals of War in Marlowe, Chapman, and Shakespeare’s Henry V. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2001. Tauton looks at war in the works of Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and George Chapman, writing in the late sixteenth century. Bibliography and index. Tromly, Fred B. Playing with Desire: Christopher Marlowe and the Art of Tantalization. Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Tromly discusses the dramatic works of Marlowe from the playwright’s use of tantalization. Bibliographical references and index. Trow, M. J., and Taliesin Trow. Who Killed Kit Marlowe? A Contract to Murder in Elizabethan England. Stroud, England: Sutton, 2001. This discussion focuses on Marlowe’s mystery-shrouded death, providing both the evidence that is available and the many theories that exist. Bibliography and index. Robert F. Willson, Jr., updated by Glenn Hopp

Thomas Middleton Thomas Middleton

Born: London, England; April 18, 1580 (baptized) Died: Newington Butts, Surrey, England; July 4, 1627 Principal drama • The Honest Whore, Part I, pr., pb. 1604 (with Thomas Dekker); The Family of Love, pr. c. 1604-1607, pb. 1608; The Phoenix, pr. 1604, pb. 1607; Your Five Gallants, pr. 1604-1607, pb. 1608; A Trick to Catch the Old One, pr. c. 1605-1606, pb. 1608; A Mad World, My Masters, pr. c. 1606, pb. 1608; Michaelmas Term, pr. c. 1606, pb. 1607; The Roaring Girl: Or, Moll Cutpurse, pr. c. 1610, pb. 1611 (with Dekker); The Witch, pr. c. 1610, pb. 1778; A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, pr. 1611, pb. 1630; No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s, pr. c. 1613-1627, pb. 1657; More Dissemblers Besides Women, pr. c. 1615, pb. 1657; A Fair Quarrel, pr. c. 1615-1617, pb. 1617 (with William Rowley); The Widow, pr. c. 1616, pb. 1652 (with Ben Jonson and John Fletcher?); The Major of Queenborough, pr. c. 1616-1620, pb. 1661 (with Rowley); The Old Law: Or, A New Way to Please You, pr. c. 1618, pb. 1656 (with Rowley and Philip Massinger); Anything for a Quiet Life, pr. c. 1621, pb. 1662 (with John Webster?); Women Beware Women, pr. c. 1621-1627, pb. 1657; The Changeling, pr. 1622, pb. 1653 (with Rowley); A Game at Chess, pr. 1624, pb. 1625; The Selected Plays of Thomas Middleton, pb. 1978 Other literary forms • Thomas Middleton’s nondramatic work includes a number of youthful, less accomplished works. He produced The Wisdom of Solomon, Paraphrased (1597), a poem based on the Book of Solomon; Micro-cynicon (1599), a volume of satiric poems; The Ghost of Lucrece (1600), a narrative poem; and The Black Book (1604) and Father Hubburd’s Tales (1604), two satiric pamphlets, the latter of which includes poetry. Through the rest of his career, the main body of Middleton’s writing that was not for the theater consisted of the lavish public or court entertainments known as masques, pageants, or shows. Middleton was the author of at least seven lord mayors’ shows—huge allegorical spectacles honoring the city, performed outdoors using expensive sets and costumes. In 1603, he collaborated with Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson on a coronation pageant, The Magnificent Entertainment Given to King James, and in 1625, he was in charge of a pageant to welcome Charles I to London after King James’s death. Between 1604 and 1625, he wrote at least six other masques and entertainments for the court and for important occasions. Achievements • Like most of the dramatists of his day, Thomas Middleton lived as a practicing man of the theater without apparent concern for claiming literary stature. As with William Shakespeare (but in contrast to Jonson), the evidence suggests that he cared little about having his works published. Apparently the success he sought was that of the playwright whose works were performed, not read. Yet his works do have stature, both in reading and in performance. He created a number of interesting and insightful comedies, several substantial tragicomedies, and the most fascinating political satire of the age. Four of Middleton’s comedies are frequently described as masterpieces, and two of his tragedies are considered great works. The four comedies, all dating from the first half of his career (1604-1613), are A Chaste Maid in Cheapside; A Mad World, My Masters; 578

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The Roaring Girl; and A Trick to Catch the Old One. The two tragedies, both written later (1620-1627), are The Changeling and Women Beware Women. (To these might be added The Revenger’s Tragedy of 1606-1607, generally attributed to Cyril Tourneur but believed by some critics to be Middleton’s work.) Middleton is judged by some to be the third great playwright, after Shakespeare and Jonson, in a period notable for its abundance of gifted dramatists. Biography • Very little is known about Thomas Middleton’s life except what can be determined from legal and theater records. Middleton’s father was a bricklayer but also a gentleman who acquired a sizable estate by buying London property. Middleton was born in 1580, and when he was five, his father died, leaving an estate of more than three hundred pounds to his wife. She then wisely placed the estate in trust to three advisers to protect herself and her children from fortune hunters. Soon, she married Thomas Harvey, an adventurer who had just returned from Sir Walter Raleigh’s expedition to colonize Roanoke Island. Apparently, marrying Middleton’s mother was also a business venture and apparently Harvey did not know about the trust; as a result, between 1587 and 1599 there was constant litigation as Harvey attempted to gain control of his wife’s fortune. From the age of seven on, young Middleton was in the midst of an ugly family situation that undoubtedly encouraged his later bent for satire. At eighteen, Middleton entered Oxford, where he studied for at least two years but left without taking a degree. By 1601, he had left Oxford for his new love, the theater, and in the following year was receiving payment from Philip Henslowe, the theater owner, for collaborations with Dekker and John Webster. About this time, Middleton married Mary Marbeck, the sister of an actor. At first, Middleton was writing for the Lord Admiral’s Men, but beginning in 1603, he began writing primarily for Paul’s Boys and the Children of the Chapel Royal, two companies of professional “child” actors (actors in their early and middle teens). For the private indoor theater called the Blackfriars, which served a well-to-do, sophisticated audience, Middleton wrote a number of his most satiric and successful city comedies. During the years when Jonson wrote Volpone (pr. 1605) and when Shakespeare was approaching the end of his career, Middleton became established as one of the leading English playwrights. Soon, Middleton was working more for the adult companies, especially the Prince’s Men and the Lady Elizabeth’s Men. He came to associate more with Dekker and Webster and with William Rowley and to write a broader type of comedy. Middleton suffered from indebtedness and had to struggle through lawsuits. By 1609, he was living at Newington Butts because it was close to the theater district, and he apparently lived there until his death. Beginning about 1613, Middleton turned increasingly to writing and producing lord mayor shows, and this led in 1620 to his appointment as city chronologer, by which time he was probably fairly well-to-do. During this period, he tried his hand at several tragicomedies, a genre made popular by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. Finally, in the 1620’s came his two great tragedies, The Changeling and Women Beware Women. In 1624, A Game at Chess, probably Middleton’s last play, created a huge scandal. At the time, anger toward Roman Catholic Spain was especially high in England, and Middleton provided a focus for this sentiment. His play is an elaborate allegory in which a game of chess reflects the contemporary international situation. The play was a phenomenal success, drawing capacity crowds for nine days in succession, an unusually long run for the theater in that era. Finally, because of protests by the Spanish am-

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bassador over the play’s seditious nature, the Privy Council ordered the play closed down and, according to one report, had Middleton imprisoned. In any case, he was soon involved with overseeing the printing of the play, which was also very successful. Although A Game at Chess was probably very lucrative for Middleton, he left very little behind for his widow when he died three years later, at the age of forty-seven. Her death followed two weeks after his own. Analysis • As is the case with many writers of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, Thomas Middleton’s canon has never been definitively established. For several reasons, it is extremely difficult to determine what is his work: The concrete evidence is scanty. Many plays were published in pirated editions, and Middleton frequently collaborated in writing his plays. Many critics do not believe that Middleton has a distinct style. Indeed, T. S. Eliot, in an essay highly praising Middleton as an artist, went so far as to say that he felt no sense of a distinct personality unifying the plays: To Eliot, Middleton was simply a name connecting a number of works. Although the controversy surrounding Middleton’s authorship has not been resolved, the critical consensus is that there are stylistic and thematic patterns connecting those plays that are definitely by Middleton. In fact, the Victorians had already perceived a pattern in Middleton’s plays: To them, Middleton’s viewpoint was immoral. Modern criticism consistently rejects this reading but acknowledges that Middleton’s subject matter was frequently low and often shocking and was presented with little apparent value judgment by the author. Middleton’s comedies, usually set in the city and usually antiromantic, are pictures of lust, greed, and ambition. They are frequently called “realistic,” and the term applies well in one sense. The modern reader must not expect consistent realism or naturalism in the modern sense, for, like all plays of the period, Middleton’s plays employ many nonrealistic conventions. Still, they are realistic in that they are filled with the language and behavior of the least elegant characters of London—with the bravado of grocers and the gabble of grocers’ wives, with the slang of whores and the cant of thieves, and with the equally unrefined attitudes and language of various gentlemen and gentlewomen, who are also hungry for gold and glamour. In all of this uproar, Middleton is remarkably detached. Authorial judgments are made, but they are implied through subtle ironies rather than directly stated. Middleton worked at first with a comedy of humors in the tradition of Roman comedy and under the immediate influence of Jonson. In these early comedies, he developed an increasing interest in character, in the psychology of human behavior and particularly the psyche’s response to sin. Often, Middleton’s characters undergo startling but carefully prepared-for conversions as their sins overwhelm them. Also, he became fascinated with presenting contemporary London life from a woman’s point of view: Middleton often placed female characters at the center of his plays. Consistent with his psychological interest, Middleton from the beginning stood apart from his characters, allowing them to speak and act with little authorial intrusion. Irony is an increasingly persistent effect in these plays, and it is often gained through the aside and the soliloquy. With these conventions, Middleton reveals inner fears and desires, often in conflict with a character’s public pose. Middleton’s detached, ironic stance and his intense psychological interest are even more apparent in the tragedies later in his career. In these plays in the tradition of Shakespeare, Webster, and John Ford, he continued to use sin and retribution, particularly sexual degradation, as major themes. As in his earlier plays, he typically blended prose with blank verse, a verse that is never ornate but that rises to eloquence when the scene demands it.

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There is something particularly modern about Middleton’s attitude toward his material; perhaps it is a moral relativism. This modernity shows up in his persistent exploration of the psyche’s complexity and in the ironies through which this complexity is expressed. His characters cannot be dismissed or summarized easily—a disturbing fact to previous ages looking for more decisive, discriminating judgments. Yet to the modern age, this is the highest kind of morality, and for that reason, Middleton’s reputation will probably endure. The Roaring Girl • Written in collaboration by Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl centers on a real-life London woman named Moll Frith. Moll was reputed to be a prostitute, bawd, and thief, but the playwrights present her as a woman of great spirit and virtue whose reputation is maligned by a petty, convention-bound society. In the play, as in real life, Moll dresses in men’s clothes, smokes a pipe, and wears a sword. This unconventionality, the play suggests, leads to her spotted reputation. She is a roaring girl—a brash woman-about-town—but beneath this lack of femininity is a courageous, high-principled woman. Moll intervenes in the main plots and is involved in skirmishes with many of the characters, consistently displaying her ability to stand up for the oppressed and mistreated, most eloquently when they are women. The main plot of The Roaring Girl involves a young man, Sebastian Wengrave, and a young woman, Mary Fitzallard, in love with each other but prevented from marrying because Sebastian’s father, Sir Alexander Wengrave, wants a well-to-do daughterin-law. Sebastian plots to outwit his father: He will pretend to be in love with the infamous Moll, and when his small-minded father learns this, he will agree to the union with Mary simply to get rid of Moll. The plan temporarily backfires, however, because Sir Alexander at first reacts by employing a false-witted humor character named Ralph Trapdoor, “honest Ralph,” to tempt Moll to theft and have her executed. Moll resists his temptations and instead exposes Trapdoor as a coward, ultimately eliciting a confession and an apology from him. She is also instrumental in helping Sebastian win Mary and even in bringing on a complete conversion of his father, who eventually sees Moll with the eyes of true judgment rather than through his willful prejudices. Accompanying the main plot are two parallel stories of couples whose marriages are tested by callous gallants. One of these men, Laxton, leads on Mrs. Gallipot until she tricks her supremely gullible husband into giving thirty pounds to him. Ultimately, however, she becomes disgusted with her would-be seducer and denounces him to her husband, whose eyes are finally opened. Similarly, a “gentleman” named Goshawk tries to seduce Mrs. Openwork; her husband, however, is far shrewder than Gallipot. He outmaneuvers Goshawk, and together husband and wife expose Goshawk’s lechery. In both of these plots, marriage survives its attackers, but the differences between the marriages are equally important. Given Gallipot’s blindness and Mrs. Gallipot’s lechery, their marriage survives largely because Laxton prefers money to sex. The Openworks’ marriage, on the other hand, survives because of the intelligence and integrity of the marriage partners. A major motif in The Roaring Girl is the reversal of gender stereotyping. Moll wears masculine clothes; Mary disguises herself in men’s clothes; Mrs. Gallipot speaks scornfully of her “apron” husband; and Moll several times overcomes male antagonists by means of her sword and the manly art of bullying. These reversals of sex roles are one of the means of uniting the many elements of the play: They reveal that appearances count for little, that the reality of a person’s character shows up only through certain

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kinds of trials. Such trials or tests are quite frequent in the play. For example, Openwork tests Goshawk’s integrity, Goshawk tests Mrs. Openwork’s virtue, and Laxton tests Mrs. Gallipot’s. Moll’s honesty is tried by Sir Alexander through Trapdoor, and Moll herself tests the courage and integrity of many characters. The play overturns conventional assumptions that men have a monopoly on courage and that all women are the daughters of Eve. Instead, the play implies that men and women must be judged carefully and on their individual merits. Throughout the play, Moll stands as a lively, unconventional, attractive woman—an ancestor of the Shavian heroine. She is the one shining example of integrity in the play and one of the great creations of the period. A Chaste Maid in Cheapside • In contrast to The Roaring Girl, which was coauthored by Middleton and Dekker, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside was written by Middleton alone. Also, in contrast to the eponymous protagonist of The Roaring Girl, the “chaste maid” of the title is a minor character. The play focuses instead on several men—Allwit, Sir Walter Whorehound, and Yellowhammer—who embody the values of London’s Cheapside district (an area notorious for its unchaste women—and men). The play is admirable for its complex interweaving of many plots and for Middleton’s detached stance, which creates such effective satire. Yellowhammer, a goldsmith, and his wife, Maudlin, have two children: One is sweet, silent Moll, the chaste maid of the title, and the other is Tim, a foolish young man who is overly impressed with himself for having done well in Latin at Cambridge. The parents’ overriding concern is to “sell” their children to prosperous spouses. They plan to have Moll marry Sir Walter Whorehound (in spite of his last name), and they hope to marry Tim to Sir Walter’s “niece” (even though, as they eventually learn, she is actually his cast-off whore). In the meantime, Allwit (a play on the term “wittol,” a willing cuckold) has been living comfortably without working because he and his wife have been quite willing for wealthy Sir Walter to “keep” Mistress Allwit as his mistress. In fact, Allwit is quite content that Sir Walter has fathered all of Mistress Allwit’s children. The central conflict in the play develops when Allwit learns that Sir Walter might marry Moll: Allwit must prevent this if he and his wife are to remain in Sir Walter’s keep. A romantic plot runs through the play: Moll and a penniless young gentleman, Touchwood Junior, want to marry, but her greedy father opposes the plan. Another plot involves Touchwood Senior, who is so sexually potent that his wife (and many other women as well) are continually bearing his children. As a result, he and his wife have agreed that they must separate for a time because of the expense of increasing the size of their family. Finally, a related plot involves Sir Oliver Kix and his lady, relatives of Sir Walter, who are miserable because they are childless. The ways the plots develop and are resolved reveal their related purposes. Touchwood Senior generously fathers a child for Sir Oliver. This resembles the Allwit/Sir Walter arrangement but with the important exception that Sir Oliver has no idea that he is a cuckold. Because Sir Oliver and Lady Kix now have an heir, they take the place of their relative, Sir Walter, in line for the family fortune and thus ruin his chances to win Moll. Meanwhile, however, Sir Walter and Touchwood Junior have a sword fight because of Moll, in which Sir Walter is seriously wounded. Thinking that he is dying, Sir Walter undergoes a kind of deathbed conversion and delivers an angry sermon to Allwit, who callously throws his former benefactor out. Then, in a burlesque of a tragicomic ending, the characters assemble for what they believe is the funeral of Touch-

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wood Junior (dead from the sword fight) and of Moll (dead of grief), but in the middle of the ceremony both characters arise from their coffins and reveal that they are married. In the outcome of the play, a rough poetic justice operates. Touchwood Junior wins Moll, and Tim Yellowhammer finds himself married to Sir Walter’s “niece,” who is almost what he deserves. Although Sir Walter has repented and become a sort of moral spokesman, his rejection by Moll and his loss of fortune are a suitable penance for his earlier lechery. On the other hand, the treatment of Allwit violates the pattern. Throughout the play, he has served as a remarkably detached commentator on morals and manners. For example, in one sharply satiric scene, he delivers the author’s cutting observations about the hypocrisy of the Puritan women when they come to the christening of the Allwit’s child. This uncomfortable intimacy between the audience and such a character complicates the audience’s judgment of him and at least disconcerts the audience as they condemn him. Ultimately, Allwit is left with a comfortable home and has begun to play the role he will adopt thereafter—that of the hypocritically “moral” citizen. At this point, Middleton chooses realism over a too-simplistic moralism: Although comedy demands a degree of poetic justice, life reminds one that degenerate behavior often goes unpunished. The Changeling • Middleton’s greatest and most frequently read play is The Changeling. Coming near the end of an extraordinary period in England drama, it is often described as the last great English tragedy. The play’s psychological realism makes it particularly appealing to the modern temperament. The Changeling was written in collaboration with William Rowley, and scholars generally agreed that Rowley wrote almost all of the subplot, while Middleton wrote almost all of the main plot and was responsible for the unity of the whole. Set in Spain, The Changeling centers on a young woman, Beatrice, who falls in love with one young man, Alsemero, whom she first meets five days after she has become betrothed to another man, Alonzo. Beatrice believes that fate has been unfair to her in causing her to find true love five days too late. She is desperate to break off the engagement to Alonzo but feels bound to its because of her father’s insistence and because she would be dishonoring her vow. To resolve this dilemma, she exploits DeFlores, a poor gentleman employed as a servant to her father. Beatrice finds DeFlores physically repulsive, but DeFlores is passionately attracted to her. Noticing this, Beatrice flatters him into thinking that she finds him handsome and then easily persuades him to kill Alonzo. All along, she blindly assumes that payment in gold will satisfy him; she fails to see that DeFlores (whose name suggests “deflower”) expects to have her as his reward. For his own part, DeFlores, having seen that Beatrice can cold-bloodedly arrange her fiancé’s murder, understandably assumes that she will no longer have scruples about yielding her virginity to him. This radical, but psychologically plausible, misunderstanding creates considerable tension until DeFlores must finally state the payment that will satisfy him. Beatrice is shocked that he would “murder her honor,” at which DeFlores points to her moral blindness: “Push, you forget yourself!/ A woman dipped in blood, and talk of modesty?” DeFlores reminds her that she is now “the deed’s creature,” that her moral innocence is gone now that she has commissioned a murder. Beatrice first becomes furious and then kneels and implores him to spare her, but he stands triumphant over her, grandly declaring, “Can you weep fate from its determined purpose?/ So soon may you weep me.”

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Alsemero and Beatrice are soon married, but Alsemero, largely because he is obsessed with being sure of his wife’s purity, proposes to administer a virginity test. Because she has been seduced by DeFlores, Beatrice is able to pass the test only by deception. She realizes that she will fail the next test, her wedding night, and she plots to have her maid Diaphanta take her place in the wedding bed for a few hours. Diaphanta stays too long; she is awakened by a fire in the house, started by DeFlores, who kills her in the ensuing confusion. At this point, Beatrice recognizes that she has come to love DeFlores, revealing, in the psychological terms of the play, that she has been reduced to his level. Finally, Alsemero discovers Beatrice and DeFlores together and confronts her as a whore. As the confessions at last come out, DeFlores kills Beatrice and then himself, and her husband and father are left with the horror of what has happened. The subplot of The Changeling takes place in an insane asylum, where Alibius, who runs the madhouse, jealously keeps his wife, Isabella, closely guarded. Two inmates who are merely feigning madness, Antonio and Franciscus, and Lollio, Alibius’s subordinate, all try to seduce Isabella. Although she has more of a motive for unfaithfulness than does Beatrice, she remains loyal to her vows and eventually shames her husband into treating her better. This subplot works as a comic contrast to the main action of the tragedy. Lollio unsuccessfully tries to use Isabella’s apparent unfaithfulness to blackmail her into yielding to his lust, and the scene in which this occurs is pointedly placed between the two private meetings between Beatrice and DeFlores. On several occasions, the madmen in the asylum run across the stage shouting out their dangerously uncontrolled desires, provoking their keepers to use the whip on them. This image of uncontrolled human appetite held in check reflects on the main plot: Beatrice and DeFlores—and, arguably, Alsemero, because of his failure to honor Beatrice’s betrothal—fail to check their own libidinous desires. The main plot of The Changeling was based on a moralistic narrative by John Reynolds called The Triumphs of God’s Revenge Against the Crying and Execrable Sin of Willful and Premeditated Murder (1621); Middleton’s version makes changes that soften the harsh judgment of the original. In the source story, Beatrice is continuously selfpossessed, but in the play she is pictured as distracted, out of control, moved by an overwhelming fate. She frequently allows this fate, operating through her willful temperament, to distort her sense of morality. Through a heavy use of the soliloquy and the aside, Middleton reveals the intense inner struggles and desires of his characters, particularly Beatrice and DeFlores. Ultimately, Beatrice is disgusted with her sinful behavior, even though, in contrast to many of the great figures of Shakespearean tragedy, she is not fully enlightened about her errors at the end; a part of her tragedy lies in her moral blindness. DeFlores, by contrast, gains less sympathy but, like Shakespeare’s Macbeth, more stature by always behaving with his eyes open. Women Beware Women • As in The Changeling, the characters in Women Beware Women are obsessed with lust; like Beatrice, they become totally degraded because of it. Also as in The Changeling, two plots borrowed from two distinct sources are woven together ingeniously, each one commenting on the other. The main plot deals with a marriage that at first seems wholesome, perhaps even romantic. Leantio, a Florentine businessman, has married a Venetian woman, Bianca, who appears not to regret having given up family riches for love. When he leaves her with his mother as her chaperone, the Duke of Florence sees the beautiful, foreign Bianca and desires her. In order to pander to their sovereign, a brother and sister, Hippolito and Livia, plot to bring the two women to their house so that the duke can seduce Bianca.

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As Livia distracts Leantio’s mother with a game of chess, Hippolito conducts Bianca on a tour of the house. Hippolito suddenly presents the duke to Bianca and leaves her alone with him. Bianca halfheartedly resists the duke but soon yields to his passionate wooing and his promises of wealth. While this is occurring, the chess game below provides brilliant ironic commentary on the seduction above. When Leantio returns, Bianca treats him scornfully and openly flaunts her new lover. Leantio strikes back by becoming the lover of Livia, who has developed a sudden passion for him. The subplot presents the relationship between Hippolito and his niece Isabella, who at first seem to have a pure, loving friendship. When Hippolito tries to seduce his niece, however, Isabella rejects him in horror. As in the main plot, Livia intercedes to help her brother by telling Isabella a lie—that she is not really a blood relative of Hippolito. Relieved of the threat of incest, Isabella can now express her love for Hippolito. Thus far, Isabella is essentially an innocent victim, but she is not so innocent when she agrees to go ahead with an arranged marriage in order to cover her love affair. She is betrothed to a coarse, stupid man, the ward of a character named Guardiano. Both plots revolve around women who appear to be virtuous but who quickly reveal their frailty. Isabella at first appears to be a foil to Bianca, but she is scarcely her moral superior. In both plots, Livia schemes to destroy a woman in order to please her brother. Eventually, Hippolito learns about Livia’s relationship with Leantio and, strangely, defends her honor by fighting and killing him. In anguish, Livia retaliates by revealing Hippolito’s relationship with his niece, and this brings on the series of revenges in the denouement. During a masque to celebrate the wedding of the duke to Bianca, fictitious violence turns out to be real revenge and suicide. At the end, death comes to Isabella, Guardiano, Livia, Hippolito, the duke, and Bianca. As a summary of its plot suggests, Women Beware Women is a play of almost unrelieved horror and baseness. The play’s only decent character, the cardinal, appears late in the action as a commentator on this baseness. Several of the main characters highlight their moral confusion by adopting moral poses in the midst of their depravity; Isabella’s marriage with Guardiano’s ward is an example of this defense mechanism, as is Hippolito’s concern for his sister’s honor even though at the time he is knowingly committing incest. Similarly, the lecherous duke deludes himself that he will become a virtuous person simply by marrying Bianca. At the center of the intrigue stands Livia, outwardly a good-humored, sociable woman but underneath a vastly dangerous person because of her extraordinary indifference to moral standards. Hippolito, as he dies, has some sense of what the tragedy has been about: “Lust and forgetfulness has [sic] been amongst us,/ And we are brought to nothing.” Through this and other reminders near the end, and above all through the many ironies of the play, audiences are able to see the tremendous waste of healthy instincts destroyed by lust and ambition. Other major works poetry: The Wisdom of Solomon, Paraphrased, 1597; Micro-cynicon, 1599; The Ghost of Lucrece, 1600. miscellaneous: The Magnificent Entertainment Given to King James, 1603 (with Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson); The Black Book, 1604; Father Hubburd’s Tales, 1604 (includes poetry); Sir Robert Sherley, 1609; The Works of Thomas Middleton, 1885-1886 (8 volumes; A. H. Bullen, editor).

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Bibliography Brittin, Norman A. Thomas Middleton. New York: Twayne, 1972. Presents in a chronology and an introduction what little is known of Middleton’s life, then marches through the generally accepted canon. The final chapter outlines the critical response to Middleton, and the annotated secondary bibliography is a good guide. Chakravorty, Swapan. Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. A look at the political and social world that surrounded Middleton and found its way into his plays. Bibliography and index. Daileader, Celia R. Eroticism on the Renaissance Stage: Transcendence, Desire, and the Limits of the Visible. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Daileader looks at the depiction of women and eroticism in the works of Middleton and Shakespeare. Bibliography and index. Heinemann, Margot. Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama Under the Early Stuarts. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Heinemann considers a series of problems: Why do Middleton’s tragedies differ in tone from others of the period? Why did his work change so much over his career? How could A Game at Chess have been staged in the midst of a political crisis? Heinemann finds the answers in the plays’ political settings. Heller, Herbert Jack. Penitent Brothellers: Grace, Sexuality, and Genre in Thomas Middleton’s City Comedies. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000. Heller looks at Calvinism, sex, and city and town life in Middleton’s comedies. Bibliography and index. Martin, Mathew R. Between Theater and Philosophy: Skepticism in the Major City Comedies of Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001. A scholarly study that looks at skepticism as it appeared in the comedic dramas of Middleton and Jonson. Bibliography and index. Elliott A. Denniston, updated by Frank Day

Arthur Miller Arthur Miller

Born: New York, New York; October 17, 1915 Principal drama • The Man Who Had All the Luck, pr. 1944, pb. 1989; All My Sons, pr., pb. 1947; Death of a Salesman, pr., pb. 1949; An Enemy of the People, pr. 1950, pb. 1951 (adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play); The Crucible, pr., pb. 1953; A Memory of Two Mondays, pr., pb. 1955; A View from the Bridge, pr., pb. 1955 (one-act version); A View from the Bridge, pr. 1956, pb. 1957 (two-act version); Collected Plays, pb. 1957 (includes All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A Memory of Two Mondays, A View from the Bridge); After the Fall, pr., pb. 1964; Incident at Vichy, pr. 1964, pb. 1965; The Price, pr., pb. 1968; The Creation of the World and Other Business, pr. 1972, pb. 1973; The American Clock, pr. 1980, pb. 1982; Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays, Volume II, pb. 1981 (includes The Misfits, After the Fall, Incident at Vichy, The Price, The Creation of the World and Other Business, Playing for Time); The Archbishop’s Ceiling, pr., pb. 1984; Two-Way Mirror, pb. 1984; Danger: Memory!, pb. 1986, pr. 1988; Plays: One, pb. 1988; Plays: Two, pb. 1988; Plays: Three, pb. 1990; The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, pr. pb. 1991; The Last Yankee, pb. 1991, pr. 1993; Broken Glass, pr., pb. 1994; Plays: Four, pb. 1994; Plays: Five, pb. 1995; Mr. Peter’s Connections, pr. 1998, pb. 1999 Other literary forms • Although Arthur Miller’s major reputation is as a playwright, he has published reportage, Situation Normal (1944); a novel, Focus (1945); a novelized revision of his screenplay The Misfits (both 1961); a screenplay entitled Everybody Wins (1990); two collections of short stories, I Don’t Need You Any More (1967) and Homely Girl: A Life, and Other Stories (1995); three book-length photo essays in collaboration with his wife, Ingeborg Morath, In Russia (1969), In the Country (1977), and Chinese Encounters (1979); and one television drama, aired in 1980, Playing for Time. Most studies of Miller’s career neglect his nondramatic writing, even though he has demonstrated an impressive command of the short-story form and has proved himself remarkably adept at blending reportage, autobiography, and dramatic reflection in his later essay-length books, such as “Salesman” in Beijing (1984) and Spain (1987). All the important themes of his plays are explored in his nondramatic work, which also contains considerable comment on the nature of drama. The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (1978), edited by Robert A. Martin, and Conversations with Arthur Miller (1987), edited by Matthew C. Roudané, are essential to an understanding of Miller’s theory of drama, his career in the theater, his political views, and his work as a whole; as is his autobiography, Timebends (1987). Achievements • Arthur Miller has been acclaimed as one of the most distinguished American dramatists since Eugene O’Neill, the father of modern American drama. Because of his direct engagement with political issues and with the theoretical concerns of contemporary drama, he has frequently been a significant spokesperson for his generation of writers. His reputation seems secure both nationally and internationally, and his plays continue to be performed live or through screenplay adaptations all over the world. Miller successfully synthesized diverse dramatic styles and movements in the belief that a play should embody a delicate balance between the individual and society, be587

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tween the singular personality and the polity, and between the separate and collective elements of life. Miller is a writer of social plays whose concern with the moral problems in American society led him to probe the psychological causes of behavior. He builds on the realist tradition of Henrik Ibsen in his exploration of the individual’s conflict with society but also borrows Symbolist and expressionist techniques from Bertolt Brecht and others. He bases his plays on the assumption of an objective reality that is comprehensible as well as a subjective reality that makes life problematic and ambiguous. Therefore, all attempts to interpret his work from either an exclusively political or an exclusively psychological standpoint fail, for Miller regards his plays as indissoluble amalgamations of inner and outer realities. Miller’s achievement as a dramatist has been recognized with numerous awards. These include the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for Death of a Salesman; the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for All My Sons in 1947 and for Death of a Salesman in 1949; the Antoinette Perry Award in 1949 for Death of a Salesman and for The Crucible. In 1956, Miller received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the University of Michigan, and he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1958. During the 1990’s, he received the William Ingle Festival Award for distinguished achievement in American theater and the Edward Albee Last Frontier Playwright Award. In 1998, Miller was named Distinguished Inaugural Senior Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. In 1999, he received the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play (Death of a Salesman) and in 2001 a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and the John H. Finley Award for Exemplary Service to New York City. Biography • Arthur Miller grew up in New York City with an older brother and a younger sister. His father was a prosperous businessperson until the Crash of 1929, after which the family suffered through the Depression, a period that had a major impact on Miller’s sense of himself, his family, and his society, and one that figures prominently in many of his dramas, essays, and stories. During the Depression, Miller drove trucks, unloaded cargoes, waited on tables, and worked as a clerk in a warehouse. These jobs brought him close to the kind of working-class characters who appear in his plays. His observation of his father’s fall from financial security and of the way the people immediately around him had to struggle for even a modicum of dignity placed Miller in a position to probe individuals’ tenuous hold on their place in society. Although Miller had been a poor student in school, he was inspired

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by Fyodor Dostoevski’s implacable questioning of individual impulses and societal rules in The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880), and eventually he was able to persuade the University of Michigan to admit him. Almost immediately he began to write plays that were to receive several Hopwood awards. If Miller was not exactly a Marxist during his college years (1934-1938), he was certainly a radical insofar as he believed that American society had to be made over, to be made fair to the masses of people who had been ruined by the Depression. His early student plays contain sympathetic portrayals of student militants and union organizers as well as compassionate characterizations of small business owners and professional people caught in the economic and political tyranny of capitalism. In the fall of 1938, after his graduation from the University of Michigan with a bachelor of arts degree in English language and literature, Miller joined the Federal Theatre Project in New York City, for which he wrote numerous radio plays and scripts until 1943. Some of these works express his irrepressible interest in social and political issues. In 1940, Miller married Mary Grace Slattery, and a daughter, Jane, was born in 1944. They divorced in 1956. From Miller’s earliest student plays to Death of a Salesman, there is an evolution in his treatment of individuals in conflict with their society, a gradual realization of conflicts within individuals that both mirror the larger conflicts in society and define a core of singularity in the characters themselves. Undoubtedly, Miller’s intense involvement in public affairs in the 1940’s and 1950’s—his support of various liberal and radical causes and his subsequent testimony about his political commitments before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956 are two examples—reflected and reinforced his need to write social plays. Miller’s marriage to Marilyn Monroe in 1956, far from being the perplexing and amusing sideshow the press made of it, had a significant impact on his writing, not only by encouraging him to focus on female characters in ways he previously had not but also by stimulating him to enlarge on and reconsider the theme of innocence that he had adumbrated in earlier plays. After his divorce from Monroe in 1961, he wrote some of his finest plays and continued to participate in local, national, and international affairs—including two terms as international president of PEN, the worldwide writers’ organization. He was a delegate to the Democratic conventions of 1968 and 1972. Miller married Ingeborg Morath, a Austrian-born photojournalist, in 1962, and the couple collaborated on several travel books. After serving as a lecturer at the University of Michigan in the mid-1970’s, Miller retired to a large Connecticut estate, where he continued to write and where he indulged in such hobbies as carpentry and gardening. In 1997, he petitioned the Czech government to halt arrests of dissident writers. His international reputation expanded during the 1980’s, when he directed Death of a Salesman in Beijing, China. Throughout the 1990’s, Miller continued to receive numerous awards for distinguished achievement. In early 2002, his wife died. Analysis • A back injury prevented Arthur Miller from serving in the armed forces during World War II, but in characteristic fashion, he became involved in the war effort by gathering material for a screenplay, “The Story of GI Joe,” which was never filmed but instead became the basis of his book Situation Normal, in which he reported on army camps in the United States and on soldiers’ attitudes toward the war in which they were preparing to fight. For the most part, the soldiers had no great interest in the democratic principles for which Miller believed the war was fought, but he elevated one war hero, Watson, to a representative position as a figure whose intensely avowed loyalty to his

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company represents the democratic solidarity many others cannot articulate. Miller admitted candidly the skepticism of Watson’s company commander, who doubted Watson’s wholehearted commitment to rejoin his fellow soldiers in one of the most dangerous theaters of the war: “The company pride that made him do the great things he did do is gone now and he is left unattached, an individual,” who yearns for—yet probably fears—returning to men he knows he will never see again. Thus, Situation Normal was transformed into the drama of how Miller’s innocent convictions about the war were challenged by psychological and social complexities; indeed, the book is informed by a crisis of conviction that Miller did not fully recognize until the writing of After the Fall and Incident at Vichy. The Man Who Had All the Luck • Even in an early play, The Man Who Had All the Luck—Miller’s first Broadway production—there is some awareness of the dangers inherent in the innocent attitude of characters such as David Frieber, who insists that the world conform to what his employer, Shory, calls “the awards of some cloudy court of justice.” At twenty, Frieber is still a child, Shory suggests, and Frieber admits that he does not know what he is supposed to be. He believes that he must somehow earn everything that comes to him. That good fortune and the complex interplay of societal forces he cannot control also contribute significantly to his success is an idea that disturbs him. In his quest to become self-made, he withdraws from society, from his family, and ultimately from himself. In the midst of his guilty obsession with the fact that others have aided him, he is unable to see that he has already demonstrated his resourcefulness. In his delusion that he can measure himself, he gives up everything he owns and starts a new business. Frieber’s lunacy seems somewhat forced—much too strident, making it all too obvious that Miller has a point to prove. Moreover, Frieber’s quasi-philosophical declamations disturb what is otherwise rather well-executed midwestern dialogue. All My Sons • Miller comes even closer to fluent dialogue and carefully crafted dramatic structure in All My Sons, his first Broadway success and the first play he deemed mature enough to include in his Collected Plays of 1957. Critics have long admired the playwright’s suspenseful handling of the Keller family’s burden: the father’s permitting defective parts to remain in warplanes that subsequently crash. Not only does Joe Keller fail to recognize his social responsibility, but also he allows his business partner to take the blame and serve the prison term for the crime. Gradually, events combine to strip Keller of his rationalizations. He argues that he never believed that the cracked engine heads would be installed and that he never admitted his mistake because it would have driven him out of business at the age of sixtyone, when he would not have another chance to “make something” for his family, his highest priority. “If there’s something bigger than that I’ll put a bullet in my head!” he exclaims. He also claims that other businessmen behaved no differently during the war and that Larry, his son who died flying a warplane, would have approved of his actions: “He understood the way the world is made. He listened to me,” Keller contends. He maintains these arguments, however, as a man who has clearly been challenged by his surviving son, Chris, who questions his father’s very humanity when the full truth of Joe’s irresponsibility is exposed: “What the hell are you? You’re not even an animal, no animal kills his own, what are you?” Joe Keller’s tough, resilient character crumbles quickly after Larry’s former fiancée, Ann, discloses Larry’s last letter, in which he expresses his intention to crash his plane

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in shame over his father’s culpability. The play turns somewhat melodramatic with Joe’s reversal of viewpoint, his discovery of his social responsibility, and his human loss in the deaths of the young fliers. His statement, “They were all my sons,” depends heavily on Larry’s self-abnegating idealism and on other contrived plot devices, as Leonard Moss instructively points out. Miller resorts to the theatrical trick of the lastminute revelation rather than relying on character development. Nevertheless, the logic of destroying Joe’s innocent disregard of the world at large—he is not so much deeply cynical as he is profoundly unaware of the ties that must hold society together—is compelling, especially because he cries for moral direction. “What do I do? he asks his wife, Kate, thus strengthening Chris’s imperative that his father reckon the consequences of his terrible moral oversight. If audiences are still gripped by the final events of All My Sons, it is because the play’s early scenes convincingly dramatize familiar aspects of family and community, with characters who know one another very well, who are quick to respond to the nuances of conversation and to what is unspoken but clearly implied. What disables Miller’s plays before Death of a Salesman is not so much an inadequate understanding of dramatic form; rather, both his dramatic and nondramatic prose lack artistic tact. He tends to overstate social problems, to give otherwise inarticulate characters such as Lawrence Newman in the novel Focus an inappropriately self-conscious language that is meant to identify their cumulative awareness of societal sickness—in Newman’s case, of anti-Semitism. Like so much of Miller’s writing, however, Focus transcends its faults because of its author’s incisive portrayal of events that relentlessly push Newman to the brink of self-knowledge. Death of a Salesman • In Death of a Salesman—originally entitled “The Inside of His Head”—Miller brilliantly solves the problem of revealing his main character’s inner discord, rendering Willy Loman as solid as the society in which he tries to sell himself. Indeed, many critics believe that Miller has never surpassed his achievement in this play, which stands as his breakthrough work, distinguished by an extremely long Broadway run, by many revivals, and by many theater awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1949. Death of a Salesman seems destined to remain an American classic and a standard text in American classrooms. Willy Loman desperately wants to believe that he has succeeded, that he is “well liked” as a great salesman, a fine father, and a devoted husband. That he has not really attracted the admiration and popularity at which he has aimed is evident, however, in the weariness that belabors him from the beginning of the play. At the age of sixtythree, nearing retirement, Willy dreads confronting the conclusion that his life has gone offtrack, just like the automobile he cannot keep from driving off the road. His mind wanders because he has lost control: He has trouble keeping up with the bills; he feels hemmed in at home by huge, towering apartment buildings; his sales are slipping drastically; and his sons have thwarted his hope for their success. Earlier in his career, Miller might have made a good but unremarkable play out of Willy’s dilemma, a drama about how American society has misled him and stuffed him with unrealizable dreams until a conflict between social structures and individual desires becomes inevitable. Instead, Miller learned from the mistakes in his earlier plays not to divide individual and social realities too neatly or too simply, so that in Death of a Salesman, he created a great play that is not merely about a victim of society. Willy is not easily categorized; he is both simple and complex. On the one hand, he has all the modern conveniences that stamp him as a product of society; on the other

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hand, he is not content to be simply another social component. As he tells Linda, his wife, who tries to soothe his sense of failure, “some people accomplish something.” “A man has got to add up to something,” he assures his brother, Uncle Ben. Willy resists the idea that his life has been processed for him—like the processed American cheese he angrily rejects for Swiss, his favorite. Still, he wonders, “How can they whip cheese?” and thus he can be diverted from self-scrutiny to the trivialities of postwar consumer society. Willy worries that he talks too much, that he is fat and unattractive, but he also brags about his persuasive abilities, his knack for knowing how to please people. Similarly, he alternately regards his son Biff as a bum and as having “greatness”; Willy’s automobile is alternately the finest of its kind and a piece of junk. Willy is a mass of contradictions who asks why he is “always being contradicted.” He has never been able to sort himself out, to be certain of his course in life. He is insulted when his friend Charley offers him a job, because the job offer and Charley’s self-assured demeanor—he keeps asking Willy when will he grow up—remind Willy of Uncle Ben, a man who is “utterly certain of his destiny,” who once extended to Willy a tremendous opportunity in Alaska, an opportunity Willy rejected with regret in favor of a salesperson’s career. He lives with the might-have-been of the past as though it were his present and even confuses Charley with Ben. As a result, scenes from Willy’s past and present follow— and indeed pursue—one another successively in a fuguelike fashion that shows his awareness of his failure to progress. There is a grandeur in Willy’s dreams of success; his self-deceptions are derived from his genuine perceptions of life’s great possibilities, which are like the big sales he has always hoped to make. This is why Linda abets his penchant for self-aggrandizement. She knows that he has not been a successful salesperson, but she tempers his faults: “You don’t talk too much, you’re just lively.” At the same time, she is utterly believable as a housewife who has to know how much money her husband has brought home from work. After Willy exaggerates his sales from one trip, Linda quietly but firmly brings him back to reality by simply asking, “How much did you do?”—a question that becomes more pointed if the actress playing the role delicately emphasizes the word “did.” When the play is read aloud, there is an uncanny power in some of its simplest and seemingly pedestrian lines, lines that capture the nuances and innuendos of colloquial language. This subtly effective dialogue is enhanced by a powerful use of human gesture that distinguishes Death of a Salesman as a completely realizable stage drama. Toward the end of the play, for example, after Biff, “at the peak of his fury,” bluntly tells Willy, “Pop, I’m nothing!” Biff relents, breaks down, sobs, and holds on to Willy, “who dumbly fumbles for Biff’s face.” This brief intimate encounter encapsulates everything that can be learned about Willy and Biff and about the play’s import, for the son renounces the father’s ridiculous belief in the son’s superiority even as the son clings to the father for support. While Biff rejects Willy, he embraces him and has to explain himself to Willy, who is “astonished” and at first does not know how to interpret his son’s holding on to him. Willy does not understand why Biff is crying. Willy has always been blind to Biff’s needs, has always “fumbled” their relationship, yet—as so often— Willy transforms Biff’s words of rejection into an affirmation. The Biff who leans on him is the son who “likes me!” Willy exclaims, after their close but momentary contact. This fleeting instance of family solidarity, however, cannot overcome the abiding family conflicts and misunderstandings, epitomized by Willy’s delusion that the insurance money accrued from his suicide will finally make him the good provider, the person who furthers his son’s magnificent future.

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An Enemy of the People • Miller followed Death of a Salesman with his 1951 adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s En folkefiende (pb. 1882; An Enemy of the People, 1890). Miller transforms Ibsen’s language into American idioms and shortens the play to emphasize the impact of Dr. Stockmann’s confrontation with his community, which will not acknowledge its polluted water, its own moral and political corruption. Stockmann’s battle against public opinion clearly foreshadows John Proctor’s struggle with his society’s selfinflicted evil in The Crucible. The Crucible is far more complex than Miller’s adaptation of Ibsen’s play, however, because Proctor is much more complicated than Stockmann, and the motivations of the Puritans are not as easily fathomed as those of Stockmann’s townspeople, who are primarily worried about their economic welfare. Even so, An Enemy of the People prefigures the fundamental questions raised in The Crucible about the value of human dignity and individuality and the kind of justice one can expect from a majority culture, especially when that culture begins to doubt its own coherence. The Crucible • With incisive historical summaries, Miller, in The Crucible, characterizes the community of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, which has been beset by property disputes, by a slackening in religious fervor, and by an increasing lack of trust among its citizens. Rather than face their inner turmoil, some of Salem’s citizens search for scapegoats, for people who can take on the society’s sense of defeat and frustration, who can be punished, and who can carry away by means of their execution the society’s burden of guilt. In short, the Puritans seek signs of the devil and devil-worship in their midst in order to dissolve their own dissension. Although John Proctor, like Stockmann, speaks against his community’s blindness to the true causes of its corruption, he does not share to the same degree Stockmann’s naïveté, youthful outrage at injustice, and virtually pure innocence as a dissident. On the contrary, Proctor eventually opposes the witch-hunt, because he accepts his own part in having made that hysterical clamor for scapegoats possible. Proctor knows that he has not acted quickly enough to expose Abigail, the chief instigator of the witch-hunt, because he has feared his own exposure as an adulterer. What finally exercises his conscience is not simply that he had previously given way to his lust for Abigail but that he had deluded himself into thinking he no longer cared for her and had even reprimanded his wife, Elizabeth, for failing to forgive him. Elizabeth is unbending but not without cause, for she intuits her husband’s tender feelings toward Abigail and suspects that he refuses to know his own mind. Proctor almost relinquishes his good name by confessing to witchery, until he realizes that however deep his guilt and responsibility may be for the community’s corruption, he cannot surrender his integrity, his cherished individuality. Like Willy Loman, Proctor reaffirms his own name—“I am John Proctor!”—and prefers his own crucible to his society’s severe test of him for its redemption. The Crucible is not only Proctor’s play, however, and as important as its moral and political implications are—it was first received as a parable on McCarthyism and the 1950’s hysteria over communism in the United States—it deserves analysis as a dramatic whole in the same way that Death of a Salesman does. In Miller’s superb creation of scenes that require a company of carefully choreographed actors and actresses, he is able to dramatize an entire society and to show the interplay of individual and group psychology. Proctor would not be regarded as such a powerful personality were it not for the full panoply of personalities out of which he emerges. In this respect, The Crucible has a finer equilibrium as a social play than does Death of a Salesman, which is inescapably dominated by Willy Loman’s consciousness.

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Miller’s accomplished use of the Puritans’ formal idioms suggests their rigid judgments of one another. Perhaps he even exaggerates the archaisms of their language in order to stress the gravity of their worldview, although at the same time, he dramatizes a childishness in their readiness to credit the workings of witchcraft. There is a great deal of humor, for example, in one of the play’s early scenes, in which Mrs. Putnam’s energetic entrance explodes the seriousness of reports that the Reverend Parris’s child, Betty, has been bewitched. Mrs. Putnam, every bit as excited as a child, immediately glances at Betty and wonders, “How high did she fly, how high?” The simple, naïve directness of these words catches the audience up in a kind of enthusiasm for the marvelous that will soon infect Abigail and her female followers as well as the whole society of Salem. By varying his speakers’ styles to conform to the precise demands of each dramatic situation, Miller wins the audience’s absolute confidence in the psychological reality of his characters. A Memory of Two Mondays • Miller’s excursion into the Puritan past was followed by the writing of two one-act plays, A Memory of Two Mondays and A View from the Bridge (later revised as a two-act play), both of which he regarded as having arisen from his personal experience, although it took him some time to discover the autobiographical elements of the latter play. A Memory of Two Mondays covers the Depression period before Miller’s admission to the University of Michigan, and the play centers on the discrepancy between human needs and work requirements. Kenneth, the most melancholy character in the play, also has the greatest feeling for life and for its poetry. In the end, however, he has forgotten the poems he recites to Bert, the only character who escapes the tedium of the automobile parts warehouse, who will read the great books and save enough money to go to college. The other characters remain very much imprisoned in their everyday lives. Bert’s leavetaking is hardly noticed, even though he lingers in obvious need of making more out of his friendships at the warehouse than others are willing to acknowledge. Earlier, he and Kenneth had washed the windows of the warehouse to get a clear look at the world in which they were situated; now Kenneth is a drunk and Bert must stand apart, like his author, remembering the meaning of what others have already forgotten because of the demands of their jobs. Although A Memory of Two Mondays is one of Miller’s minor achievements, it is also one of his most perfectly executed dramas in that the impulse to rescue significance from Bert’s departure is sensitively qualified by the consciousness of human loss. A View from the Bridge • Miller’s one-act version of A View from the Bridge is also a memory play—in this case based on a story he had heard and pondered for several years. Eddie Carbone, a longshoreman, is driven to violate the most sacred ties of trust that bind his community by his compulsion to possess his niece, Catherine— a compulsion that he denies and displaces by conceiving an unreasoning dislike for his wife’s young relative, Rodolpho, an illegal immigrant whom Eddie has agreed to harbor. Eddie implies that Rodolpho is a homosexual, an unnatural man who will marry Catherine merely to make his stay in the country legal. Eddie’s desperate need to have Catherine becomes so uncontrollable that, when she and Rodolpho make plans to marry, he informs on Rodolpho and his brother, Marco, who are apprehended in circumstances that expose Eddie to his neighborhood as an informer. In Marco’s view, Eddie must be confronted with his subhuman behavior. In words reminiscent of Chris’s charge in All My Sons that his father is not human, Marco calls Eddie an animal who must abase himself. “You go on your knees to me!” Marco com-

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mands Eddie, while Eddie expects Marco to give him back his “good name.” They fight, and Eddie dies, stabbed by Marco with the former’s own knife. In a sense, Eddie has stabbed himself; the play has shown all along that Eddie’s mortal wound has been self-inflicted. Eddie’s cry for self-respect recalls similar pleas by Willy Loman and John Proctor, and the concern in A View from the Bridge with informing and betrayal of friendships and blood ties echoes themes from Miller’s student plays through The Crucible, foreshadowing not only his own refusal to “name names” in his testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities but also Quentin’s fundamental exploration of many different kinds of betrayal in After the Fall. Yet Miller first wrote A View from the Bridge as if he were aloof from its central story, as if it were a parable that he did not understand. He even provides a narrator, Alfieri, an attorney who ruminates over the significance of the story as Miller admits he had done in writing the play. The one-act version of A View from the Bridge seems aloof from the audience as well. There is very little attempt to probe the characters’ psychology, so that what Miller gains in dramatic force by presenting events swiftly and starkly, he loses in the audience’s inability to empathize with circumscribed characters. Miller acknowledges these faults and notes that the two-act version more fully develops his characters’ psychology, particularly that of Eddie’s wife, Beatrice. Catherine, too, is a much-improved character in the two-act version. She tentatively expresses her divided feelings about Eddie, whereas in the one-act version, she is far less self-searching, almost woodenly immune to his passion. In the two-act, she desires to appease Eddie’s growing fears of her approaching adulthood. She loves him for his devotion to her, but her childlike behavior, as Beatrice points out to her, only encourages his possessiveness. Thus, Catherine tries gradually to separate herself from Eddie so that she can attain full maturity. As a result, Eddie’s rigid refusal to admit his perverse passion for Catherine, even when Beatrice confronts him with it, makes him singularly willful and more particularly responsible for his tragedy than is the case in the one-act version, in which all the characters, except Alfieri, are rather helplessly impelled by events. In this respect, Rodolpho is a more credible suitor for Catherine in the two-act version because he is somewhat more commanding (she pleads with him, “I don’t know anything, teach me, Rodolpho, hold me”) in capturing her love and therefore a stronger counterweight to Eddie’s authority. A View from the Bridge in two acts still does not overcome all the play’s weaknesses. For example, Alfieri, like many narrators in drama, seems somewhat intrusive in his use of elevated language to wrest an overarching meaning from characters and events, even though he is an active participant in some fine scenes. Nevertheless, the play is as beautifully written and moving as any of Miller’s major works, and its main character is almost as powerfully drawn as Willy Loman and John Proctor, who, like Eddie Carbone, will not “settle for half”—will not be content with less than their lives’ joy. Because of an ample sense of self, they allow themselves, in Alfieri’s words, “to be wholly known.” An interlude • Miller arrived at an impasse upon his completion of the two-act version of A View from the Bridge, which was successfully produced in England in 1956, and he did not have another new work staged until 1964. Various explanations have been offered for this long gap in his dramatic production—including his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, the attendant publicity that interfered with his working life, and the trying and time-consuming process of defending his political activities. Of crucial impor-

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tance, however, seems to have been his feeling that what he had been working for in his plays had not been sufficiently understood by his public. At any rate, he wrote several plays that did not satisfy him, a number of short stories, and a screenplay, The Misfits, that was subsequently revised as a novel. He may have turned to other literary forms from a belief that he had temporarily exhausted what had been an evolving sense of dramatic structure. Nondramatic prose seems to have permitted him to explore certain themes and narrative viewpoints that he had not been able to incorporate fully in A View from the Bridge, for his next produced play, After the Fall, successfully fuses narrative and dramatic discourse in the figure of its central character, Quentin, who constantly forces the audience into the explicit position of auditors rather than into the intermittent role of eavesdroppers addressed by a narrator as in A View from the Bridge. After the Fall • How does one live in a world beset by death? This question is relentlessly probed in After the Fall, with its concentration-camp tower serving as one of the central metaphors for the human betrayal of life. As was so often true in the camps, the characters in After the Fall are divided against themselves. Not only can kind men kill, but also intelligent men can act like idiots, and Maggie—innocent in so many ways—is horribly transformed into a hater of life. Quentin, who is Maggie’s momentary stay against confusion, witnesses “things falling apart” and wonders, “Were they ever whole?” He proves to be incapable of protecting Maggie, so concerned is he with his own survival. In the very act of saving her from her pills—from her death—he defends himself by strangling her, suffocating her just as surely as the pills would have done. He discovers the limits of his own love for Maggie, and Maggie sees his human incapacity for unconditional love as a betrayal, just as Quentin interprets the limitations of his mother’s love as a betrayal of him. Thus, for Maggie, Quentin comes at “the end of a long, long line” of men who have degraded her, betrayed her, killed her. He is, in other words, an accomplice in the general evil of the world, and therefore his presence as an “accomplice” in the ultimate evil that is the concentration camp is not altogether unfitting. He has been his mother’s accomplice in the degradation of his father and an accomplice in the death of his friend, Lou, who sensed that Quentin could not wholeheartedly defend his reputation and that he was not, in fact, a true friend. Quentin craves his own safety, and he feels the guilt of the survivor as the concentration-camp tower “blazes into life.” Maggie has no identity to hold back, no reserves of self to compensate for her disappointment in Quentin. She thinks of herself as “nothing” and hopes to please everyone by becoming “all love.” (The metaphor’s abstractness virtually ensures her inability to develop a defined self.) Ironically, her generosity eats her up—people eat her up— because she does not possess the normal defenses of a separate ego. Maggie requires from Quentin the same selflessness she represents. She wants him to look at her “out of [his] self.” Quentin has abetted her by acting more like a child than an adult. Like William Faulkner’s Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury (1929), Miller’s Quentin is an idealist and something of a Puritan; he romanticizes Maggie’s innocence and believes that she must be saved from herself and from a corrupt world. In some ways, he seems as thoroughly innocent as Quentin Compson’s brother Benjy, an idiot—the word itself is applied to Miller’s protagonist more than once, and it recurs obsessively as he recalls how others have employed the term to deny and attack one another. No more than Benjy or Maggie can Quentin accept the separateness of the adult world of his mother, his friends, and his wives.

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These failures of love, of human connection, force Quentin to reexamine the moments of hopefulness that recur, one might say, idiotically—for no apparently sensible reason—throughout the play. From the concentration-camp tower and on “the mountain of skulls” where no one can be “innocent again,” Quentin observes the “fallen Maggie,” who once seemed like a proof of victory, and he realizes that his brothers both died in and built the camp, that Maggie’s fall is his fall, and that without that fall he would have no hope, for hope in the real world is “not in some garden of wax fruit and painted trees, that lie of Eden,” but in the knowledge of human destructiveness, of human idiocy, which will not go away and so must be taken to heart. In the full knowledge of his failures, Quentin embraces his life at the end of the play, whereas Maggie is seen rising from the floor “webbed in with her demons, trying to awake.” Maggie’s partial consciousness reflects her inability to take full responsibility for her life, to see that she was not simply a victim but in charge of her emotions. The hardest thing Quentin must do is reverse the force of the play’s dominant metaphor, making the idiot serve not as a rejection of the broken, fragmented facts of life but as an acceptance of the flawed face of all people. That reversal of rejection is accomplished by saying hello to Holga, his third partner in life, who has provided the dream—the metaphor, in truth—of how lives such as Quentin’s (“Why do I make such stupid statements!”) and Maggie’s (“I’m a joke that brings in money”) can tentatively approach redemption. After the Fall sometimes suffers from a vagueness of rhetoric and from overstatement, so that Quentin’s confessions overwhelm the dramatic action and diminish the substantiality of other characters. Miller restrains Quentin’s verbosity in the revised stage version quoted here (printed in 1964, the same year as the production of the original stage version, available in Collected Plays, Volume II ). A television adaptation (1974) removes nearly all of Quentin’s verbiage, but in none of these versions is Miller entirely successful in balancing Quentin’s subjective and objective realities. Edward Murray argues, for example, that not all scenes are consistently staged “in the mind, thought, and memory of Quentin,” as the play would have it. Hence it is difficult to find a “warrant,” a certifiable viewpoint, for some of the play’s action. In Death of a Salesman, on the contrary, the audience is compelled to move in and out of Willy’s mind and is thereby able to comprehend his reality both subjectively and objectively. In part, Murray’s objection may be met by carefully following Quentin’s struggle to know his past, not simply to repossess it as Willy does. How does one achieve a viewpoint, Quentin asks, when there is no objective basis on which to recreate one’s past? In the disagreements over Quentin’s motives (some critics emphasize his self-criticism, others his self-exculpation), Miller adumbrates an ambiguity of viewpoint explored more successfully in The Price. Incident at Vichy • Some reviewers of the first production of Incident at Vichy mistook it as a message play and faulted Miller not only for his didacticism but also for teaching a lesson already learned about Nazism and people’s inhumanity toward others. It is a very talky drama, and given the various arguments advanced, it is easy to regard the characters as representative figures rather than as whole personalities. That this is not the case, however, is evident in the play’s refusal to locate a winning argument, a resolution of the crisis of conviction besetting each character as his most cherished opinions are found wanting, are exposed as contradictory and self-serving. Even Leduc, who does a large amount of the debunking, discovers that he is not free of self-aggrandizing illusions. The Major reveals Leduc’s privileged sense of him-

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self, and Von Berg forces on him a pass to freedom, which he must take at the cost of another’s imprisonment. Von Berg’s self-abnegating act of love for another man— although a moving statement of his belief that there are people in the world who would sacrifice themselves rather than permit evil to be done to others—is not dramatized as a final answer to the self-interested pleas of the other characters, however, and it does not cause the reversal of belief Miller coerced from Joe Keller after his son Larry’s suicide in All My Sons. On the contrary, Von Berg is faced at the end of the play with an uncomprehending Major, a man who scorns gestures of self-sacrifice, except insofar as he is “an idealist” who ironically sacrifices himself for the perpetuation of the totalitarian system he serves. For all the characters, then, Vichy France during World War II is a place of detention where their self-justifications are demolished as they await their turns in the examination room, in which their release or their final fate in the concentration camps will be determined. Like Quentin, they are all vulnerable to the suspicion that they have not lived in “good faith.” In other words, it is their questionable integrity, not their shaky ideas, that is ultimately at stake. Incident at Vichy is Miller’s most existential play, in the sense that there is no exit from the dilemmas it portrays, no consoling truths to which characters can cling permanently; instead, there are only approximations of the truth, certain accurate perceptions, but there is nothing like the requiem, the coda, the summing up to be found in Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge. The Price • In The Price, Miller combines the best features of After the Fall and Incident at Vichy. Once again, the issue of coming to others in “good faith” is paramount, as Esther realizes in characterizing the surprise appearance of her husband Victor’s brother, Walter. Walter returns to their boyhood apartment, where Victor is selling the family possessions because the building has been condemned. Walter has not seen his brother in sixteen years and wants to explain to him why he chose such an independent course, why he failed to support their father as Victor had done, to the detriment of his career. The immensely successful Walter feels stymied by the past and suggests that he and Victor took “seemingly different roads out of the same trap” created by their father’s pose of helplessness after the failure of his business in the Crash of 1929. While Victor chose to “invent” a life of self-sacrifice, Walter chose to adopt a career of selfadvancement. “We’re like two halves of the same guy,” Walter insists. His point is well taken in terms of Miller’s dramatic development, for Victor and Walter are also opposite sides of Quentin, whose family background is somewhat similar to theirs and who engages in similar debates with himself concerning the calls of self-denial and selfpreferment; indeed, like Quentin, Victor and Walter are having what is essentially an argument with themselves in front of auditors (Esther and the furniture dealer, Gregory Solomon). Because Walter and Victor can go over the same ground of the past, their recollections are both arguable and utterly convincing as parallel but divergent interpretations. Thus, the audience responds to one character’s point of view in the context of the other’s and follows precisely the process by which these characters form their histories. Walter excuses himself by showing that in objective terms his father was not helpless; he had four thousand dollars he asked Walter to invest for him. Walter rejects the vision of family harmony that Victor worked so steadily to maintain; there was no love between their mother and father, only a business arrangement, as Walter brutally reveals with vivid memories of how their mother failed to support their father in his terrible need. Victor dismisses Walter’s narrowly conceived interpretation of his

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father and their family. “A system broke down,” he reminds Walter, referring to the Crash, “did I invent that?” Victor fights against Walter’s simplification of their father’s psychology. Embedded in Victor’s words is an echo of Miller’s original title for Death of a Salesman: “What about the inside of his head? The man was ashamed to go into the street!” In the dialogue between these “archetypal brothers,” as Neil Carson calls them, the nature of individual psychology and social reality, which Miller explores in all of his plays, is debated, and nowhere is that exploration more finely balanced, more convincingly conceived, than in The Price, where the two brothers—for all of their representativeness—steadfastly remain individual and irreconcilable. Moreover, the other two characters, Esther and Solomon (a kibitzer who is Miller’s funniest and wisest creation), are just as credibly presented, as they mediate between the hard positions held by Victor and Walter. Esther is one of Miller’s most complex female characters, as her lyric memory at the end of the play demonstrates, for her wistful words richly embody all the wonderful promise of a life gone sour, just as Solomon’s last actions—he is listening to a “laughing record” from the 1920’s, “sprawling in the chair, laughing with tears in his eyes, howling helplessly to the air”—recall all the characters’ hilarious and painful memories, leaving the audience perfectly poised in this drama of life’s alternative expressions. The Creation of the World and Other Business • The Creation of the World and Other Business—with its archetypal brothers (Cain and Abel), its battle between God and Lucifer (who stand as the alternatives between which Adam and Eve must choose), its feel for human beings in a state of natural but problematic innocence, and its grappling with injustice—is an inevitable outgrowth of themes Miller has pursued throughout his career. When the play first appeared, however, it startled reviewers with its departure from Miller’s realistic, domestic settings. They did not receive it favorably, and the play failed in its initial Broadway production, which is unfortunate, because it contains some of Miller’s shrewdest writing and a surprisingly innovative rendition of the Edenic myth. The play’s humor saves it from becoming a ponderous retelling of the familiar biblical account. The wide-ranging use of idiomatic expressions in English, Yiddish, and French mixed with the English of the Authorized Version of the Bible sets up a fascinating juxtaposition between the traditional story and the contemporary language that gives the whole play an uncanny freshness and irreverence. God calls Adam and Eve “my two idiotic darlings,” and the profoundly comic nature of their moral and sexual education gradually acquires credibility. Would not the experience of being the first man and woman constitute the first comedy as well as the first tragedy? This is the question Miller appears to have posed for himself in this play, for Adam and Eve do not know what to do. Not having a history of feelings about God, about humanity, and about their sexuality, they must discover their sentiments about all of these things, and Lucifer would like to show them the shortcuts, to rationalize life, to avoid conflict before it begins. In order to follow him, however, Adam and Eve must accept the primacy of intellect over love. Later plays • Several of Miller’s later plays, including The American Clock, The Archbishop’s Ceiling, and Danger: Memory!, proved far more successful in London than in New York, a fact the playwright attributed at one point to the discomfort his American producers felt in dealing with “psychopolitical themes.” Deeply cognizant of the dan-

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gers of social coercion and excessive conformity, Miller continued to hunger for the sense of community he described in one of his books of photo essays, In Russia: No one who goes to the theater in Russia can fail to be struck by the audience. . . . It is as though there were still a sort of community in this country, for the feeling transcends mere admiration for professionals doing their work well. It is as though art were a communal utterance, a kind of speech which everyone present is delivering together. Other major works long fiction: Focus, 1945; The Misfits, 1961. short fiction: I Don’t Need You Any More, 1967; Homely Girl: A Life, and Other Stories, 1995. screenplays: The Misfits, 1961; Everybody Wins, 1990; The Crucible, 1996. teleplay: Playing for Time, 1980. nonfiction: Situation Normal, 1944; In Russia, 1969 (photo essay; with Inge Morath); In the Country, 1977 (photo essay; with Morath); The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller, 1978, revised and expanded 1996 (Robert A. Martin, editor); Chinese Encounters, 1979 (photo essay; with Morath); “Salesman” in Beijing, 1984; Conversations with Arthur Miller, 1987 (Matthew C. Roudané, editor); Spain, 1987; Timebends: A Life, 1987; Arthur Miller and Company, 1990 (Christopher Bigsby, editor); The Crucible in History and Other Essays, 2000; Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1947-2000, 2000; On Politics and the Art of Acting, 2001. children’s literature: Jane’s Blanket, 1963. miscellaneous: The Portable Arthur Miller, 1995 (Christopher Bigsby, editor). Bibliography Bigsby, C. W. E. File on Miller. New York: Methuen, 1987. Contains a detailed, up-todate chronology, synopses of the major and minor plays and of the drama on television and radio, and excerpts from nonfiction writing, with each section accompanied by critical commentary. Also includes a comprehensive bibliography of Miller’s essays, interviews, and secondary sources (collections of essays, articles, chapters in books, and book-length studies). Bigsby, Christopher, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Contains a detailed chronology, an essay on the tradition of social drama, and chapters on the early plays, the major plays, and Arthur Miller in each of the decades from the 1960’s through the 1990’s. There follow chapters on Miller’s involvement with cinema, his fiction, and his relationship with criticism and critics. Includes a bibliographic essay and an index. Bloom, Harold, ed. Arthur Miller. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. This volume consists of essays on Miller’s major drama from All My Sons to The American Clock, a briefintroduction discussing Miller’s significance, a chronology, a bibliography, and an index. Includes important early essays (Raymond Williams and Tom F. Driver on the playwright’s strengths and weaknesses) and later criticism by Neil Carson, C. W. E. Bigsby, and E. Miller Buddick. _______, ed. Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” New York: Chelsea House, 1988. Contains critical discussions published between 1963 and 1987, a chronology of Miller’s life, a comprehensive bibliography of books and articles, and an index. In spite of reservations about Miller’s importance as a writer, Bloom explains in his in-

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troduction how the play “achieves true aesthetic dignity” and discusses the particular merits of the essays in this collection. Murphy, Brenda. Miller: Death of a Salesman. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1995. This comprehensive treatment of Miller’s play Death of a Salesman discusses its Broadway production, productions in English and in other languages, and media productions. Also provides a production chronology, a discography, a videography, and an extensive bibliography and index. Schleuter, June, and James K. Flanagan. Arthur Miller. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1987. Contains a comprehensive narrative chronology, a thorough first chapter on Miller’s literature and life to 1985, chapter-length discussions of his major plays (including The Archbishop’s Ceiling), and a concluding chapter on his later one-act plays. Extensive notes, bibliography of Miller’s work in all genres, select secondary bibliography of books and articles, and index. Carl Rollyson, updated by Victoria Price

Yukio Mishima Yukio Mishima

Kimitake Hiraoka Born: Tokyo, Japan; January 14, 1925 Died: Tokyo, Japan; November 25, 1970 Principal drama • Kantan, wr. 1950, pb. 1956 (English translation, 1957); Yoro no himawari, pr., pb. 1953 (Twilight Sunflower, 1958); Dfjfji, pb. 1953 (English translation, 1966); Aya no tsuzumu, pr. 1955, pb. 1956 (The Damask Drum, 1957); Aoi no ue, pr., pb. 1956 (The Lady Aoi, 1957); Hanjo, pb. 1956 (English translation, 1957); Sotoba Komachi, pb. 1956 (English translation, 1957); Kindai nfgakushn, pb. 1956 (includes Kantan, The Damask Drum, The Lady Aoi, Hanjo, and Sotoba Komachi; Five Modern Nf Plays, 1957); Tfka no kiku, pr., pb. 1961; Sado kfshaku fujin, pr., pb. 1965 (Madame de Sade, 1967); Suzakuke no metsubf, pr., pb. 1967; Waga tomo Hittor3, pb. 1968, pr. 1969 (My Friend Hitler, 1977); Chinsetsu yumiharizuki, pr., pb. 1969 Other literary forms • Yukio Mishima was a critic, an essayist, and a poet (though largely unpublished in the latter genre) as well as a dramatist. His aesthetic is carefully set forth in Taiyf to tetsu (1968; Sun and Steel, 1970) and Hagakure nyumon (1967; On Hagakure, 1977). No doubt, however, he is best known as one of Japan’s most accomplished and prolific novelists of the immediate post-World War II period, and it is as a novelist that he will be known to future generations. His major novels include Kamen no kokuhaku (1949; Confessions of a Mask, 1958), Kinkakuji (1956; The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, 1959), Gogo no eikf (1963; The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, 1965), and his tetralogy, Hfjf no umi, published between 1969 and 1971, and translated into English between 1972 and 1974 as The Sea of Fertility: A Cycle of Four Novels, comprising Haru no yuki (1969; Spring Snow, 1972), Homba (1969; Runaway Horses, 1973), Akatsuki no tera (1970; The Temple of Dawn, 1973), and Tennin gosui (1971; The Decay of the Angel, 1974). In addition to the above-named works and several other significant novels, Mishima published some fine short fiction and a large quantity of other writings, ranging from literary criticism to slick formula fiction produced strictly to maintain his expensive lifestyle. Achievements • The paradoxical Yukio Mishima brought to the West an awareness of modern Japan both as a unique culture and as a lively leader in the world, as a nation with much in common between its individuals and those of other cultures and an appreciation of the complexities of contemporary life. Most important, perhaps, he drew attention to human problems and human verities that stretch across the entirety of history. It was appropriate that he chose for much of his drama the ancient and classical No form as base, as its ultimate concerns are based in timelessness. The young Mishima early gained the attention of the established novelist Yasunari Kawabata. Kawabata, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, was to be an advocate of Mishima’s work throughout his career. He participated in Mishima’s wedding to Yoko Sugiyama on June 1, 1958, and himself committed suicide seventeen months after Mishima. It was Kawabata who said of Mishima’s work, “Such a 602

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writer appears once in three hundred years.” Biography • Yukio Mishima was born Kimitake Hiraoka, the son of a government bureaucrat. Mishima’s life was unusual from the outset. His physically ill grandmother, Natsuko, virtually kidnapped the firstborn of her son Azusa and his wife, Shizue, sequestering the child in her quarters. The young Mishima lived with her, enduring that strained situation. When he was ready for the seventh grade, however, she allowed him to move back to his parents’ section of the house. Mishima said that as early as the age of five, he learned to prefer an imaginary world, often of violence, to the real world. As early as the age of four he was to begin a pattern of falling in love with pictures in books. A favorite picture was of Joan of Arc, whom he assumed to be a male. Mishima candidly reported that his first erotic Yukio Mishima at his home in Tokyo, Japan, in arousal occurred when he was lookSeptember, 1966 (AP/Wide World Photos) ing at a photograph of Guido Reni’s portrait of Saint Sebastian pierced by arrows. Mishima attended the exclusive Peer’s School in Tokyo. He was too young for the draft in early World War II but was called up later, only to fail the physical, and so returned to work in the aircraft factory where he had been employed. Fame was to come to him following the publication of the novel Confessions of a Mask. He complemented his writing of plays and novels by creating his own persona, pursuing bodybuilding and mastering English. Mishima visited the United States on a world tour, which included Latin America and Greece, in 1951 and 1952. This trip was to be the first of several journeys to the United States, including one in 1957 and another, with his wife, Yoko, in 1960. Mishima and his wife had two children by the early 1960’s. By the middle of the decade, he was probably the best-known living Japanese with the exception of the emperor. Mishima was frequently a nominee for the Nobel Prize; one of his champions is said to have been the then-United Nations Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjöld. Nevertheless, in 1968, it was his mentor Kawabata who was named Nobel laureate for literature. Mishima was disappointed but nevertheless often appeared in public with his very shy teacher to help Kawabata cope with his unwanted fame. Among Mishima’s other close friends were novelist Kobo Abe, Kabuki actor Utaemon Nakamura, critichistorian Donald Keene, writer-film-producer Donald Richie, and popular female impersonator Akihiro Maruyama.

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On November 25, 1970, after delivering the last book of his tetralogy, The Decay of the Angel, to his publisher, Mishima, accompanied by a select squad of his Shield Society (a handpicked private legion of just under one hundred university men), seized the Eastern Military Headquarters in downtown Tokyo, spoke to the troops, urging an overthrow of the current government and a return of absolute power to the emperor, and then committed ritual suicide (seppuku). He was in his forty-fifth year. Analysis • Yukio Mishima’s dramatic works share with his others a concern with action in the face of the void. His conviction that every act is necessarily a political act is a significant one, and it provides a unifying force in the plays, as does his conviction that, in things great or small, any action, ultimately, is better than no action. This constant often leads to tortured situations reminiscent of Jean-Paul Sartre. Indeed, it is easy to see why Mishima preferred Sartre to Albert Camus, philosophically, despite Mishima’s dislike of the political Left and his outright contempt for bureaucracy. Mishima favored modern adaptation to extend great art through all time. Donald Keene, one of his foremost translators, has noted that Mishima believed that his modern No plays should be as effective in a performance in Central Park as on a traditional No stage. This belief reminds one of William Butler Yeats’s conviction that set properties and cast were too complex if all could not be fitted into a taxi, brought to a destination, and performed in a private home. Mishima’s negative critics point to the stiff nature of characters, as well as the restricted action in his conventional plays, claiming that he was overly influenced by the French period drama of Jean Racine. These so-called drawbacks, however, served a larger purpose in Madame de Sade and My Friend Hitler, which may be compared to the dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles, in which unspeakable, bloody, or violent acts are described rather than acted onstage. Flawlessly educated, Mishima had perfect command of the classical as well as the modern Japanese language. His grasp of Eastern and Western literature was equaled by few, if any, of his peers. The same was true of his understanding of history and politics, as well as philosophy. Jean Cocteau, whom he met in Paris, and Oscar Wilde were two writers who exercised great influence on him. Both, like Mishima, were flamboyant public figures. One is reminded that Mishima’s experiment with becoming a boxer parallels Cocteau’s becoming the manager of a professional prizefighter. Mishima also was interested in the multifaceted Italian writer Gabriele D’Annunzio, who not only wrote in a number of forms but also shared an interest in the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian and who became a military activist and daring airplane pilot. Mishima himself was eventually to help train Japanese self-defense force troops in parachute jumping (a skill that he taught himself), in addition to forming and financing his own small, private army, dedicated to the protection of the emperor. The plays published in Five Modern Nf Plays, written between 1950 and 1955, have been performed, in various groupings, by a number of small theater groups throughout the United States. Sotoba Komachi, The Lady Aoi, and Hanjo have probably been acted more frequently than The Damask Drum and Kantan. Similarities discovered in opposites and the dictatorship of desire—even beyond the grave—and the agonies attendant thereto are the motivating force behind them all. Sotoba Komachi • In Sotoba Komachi, the primary characters are an arrogant Poet (who remains nameless) and an ugly Old Woman, who is soon to be discovered by the audience as Komachi, the formerly devastating beauty, reincarnated. Beauty and tor-

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ment are welded in all the works of Mishima. Komachi historically tormented her suitor, refusing to give herself unless courted for one hundred nights. The suitor died on the ninety-ninth night. Both of the primary characters are developed sympathetically. The Poet, who at first harshly tells the Old Woman, whom he stumbles on in the park late at night, that someone as old and vile as she should leave that spot for young lovers, is destined to change his insult that she is “a profanation.” When Komachi tells him that she is ninety-nine years old, he recoils yet again, though he is drawn to look at her more closely. During the course of their exchange, the park empties, and Komachi reminisces about her love for Captain Fukakusa eighty years previously. Here Mishima is freer still with his modernization of the classic Komachi and introduces an onstage flashback to a ball at which Fukakusa was courting Komachi—but Viennese waltzes, not Japanese music, provide background as various couples appear and discuss the romance of Komachi and her captain. The audience suddenly realizes that fate is destined to repeat itself as the Poet begins to see the Old Woman as absolutely beautiful and begins to pay court to her. Komachi’s hundredth night has again come around. To her credit, she tries to warn the young man, but he is totally enthralled by his new vision of her. The play, carried by Mishima’s powerful dialogue, at once masterful in its timing and economical but eloquent in its progress, concludes with his dying and Komachi’s acceptance of “a hundred more years to wait,” as she returns to counting cigarette butts garnered that day. She is seen at the final curtain as she was when the curtain rose. The play is classic Mishima—including his obsessive interest in cycles, despite his personal disclaimer of belief in reincarnation. His claimed belief in active nihilism is seldom more accurately manifested than in this koanlike play. Bondage to an emotional state and/or obsession is a frequent theme for Mishima and probably goes back even to his preadolescent intoxication with Reni’s portrait of Saint Sebastian, ultimately leading to a commissioned series of portraits of himself in various dying situations—including one of himself as Saint Sebastian, arms bound above his head and arrows appearing to protrude from his torso. In The Damask Drum and Hanjo such pain and torture are enacted at an essentially intellectual-emotional level. The Lady Aoi also works at that level but features spirit possession, torture of a physical sort, and murder, too. The Damask Drum • The Damask Drum centers on an old janitor, Iwakichi, who falls madly and impossibly in love with a woman whom he has never met but has observed across the alley from the office building where he cleans. He has spied her repeatedly in a fashionable dress shop just across the way. Iwakichi confesses to the clerk Kayoko that he must have sent the mystery lady thirty unanswered love letters, in addition to seventy more that he has burned after writing. (The mystery of the hundredth occasion reminds one of Sotoba Komachi.) After their exchange, Iwakichi and Kayoko continue to spy on the adjacent office and observe the activity there during their night shift. Eventually tiring, Kayoko takes her leave of the old man, carrying with her yet another love letter for the mystery lady from him. Across the way, three sophisticated male customers and the proprietress of the shop discuss the old man’s obsessive passion. The proprietress confesses that she has used the old man’s letters as wipers for her dog’s combs, never showing them to Mrs. Hanako Tsukioka, who is the object of the old man’s passion. The girl Kayoko arrives with the thirtieth letter, which they read aloud.

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The discourse that follows concerns questions of romance, the erotic, and fashion— then returns to the old man, whom they decide to discipline for his cheeky courtship. They contrive to give Iwakichi a stage prop, a drum that is made of damask and therefore soundless. The drum is accompanied by a note that hints that Mrs. Tsukioka will grant the old man her favors when she hears the drum beating. On his failure to be heard, as they laugh at him from across the alley, Iwakichi commits suicide by jumping from his window ledge. Stage lighting soon indicates that night has come, and Mrs. Tsukioka is “back” at the scene to meet the ghost of Iwakichi. Now it is their turn to speak of love and its flaws. Responding to her challenge, yet again, to make the drum sound, the ghost pounds away, only to fall into despair on the hundredth beat and disappear. “I would have heard if he had only struck it once more,” avers the lady—less kind and less intelligent than the earlier Komachi but less cruel than Rokujo in The Lady Aoi. The Lady Aoi • In The Lady Aoi there are but four characters, the three major ones being Aoi, her husband, Hiraku, and Lady Rokujo. The action opens in a hospital, which, it seems, may use sexual therapy. This element is intended by Mishima to shock. Though Mishima was hostile to the theories of Sigmund Freud and his disciples, he was keenly, if unhappily, aware of their influence on the twentieth century; hence, that influence appears in this modern version of a tale from the Genji cycle. Spirit possession is the mainspring of this intense play’s action, which presents an effective story of love and of hate growing from betrayed love. Not the Genji figure, Hiraku, but his chosen, Aoi, is killed by the spirit of Rokujo, whose ability to manifest in both spirit and person is stunningly effective in this jarring masterwork. Kantan • Kantan, the earliest of the five plays in the collection, is perhaps the least effective of Mishima’s No plays. Although it may remind one of Eugène Ionesco’s L’Avenir est dans les œufs: Ou, Il Faut de tout pour faire un monde (pr. 1953; The Future Is in Eggs: Or, It Takes All Sorts to Make a World, 1960), or perhaps of the works of Harold Pinter or Samuel Beckett, the dialogue does not always cohere, and one is not quite sure if this incoherence is the playwright’s intention. Kantan does contain some delightful whimsy, and dreams and near-romps abound as eighteen-year-old Jiro imagines that he becomes a dictator and power broker. He awakens to a new love for real life and his doting nurse, Kiku, as magical flowers burst into bloom everywhere. Kantan is the stuff of opera or ballet and should be splendidly adaptable to such works. Hanjo • The homoerotic theme is dominant in Hanjo, one of the most powerful and economical of Mishima’s works. True to Mishima’s desire, it could well be played in any theater in the world—or even in Central Park. Hanjo is a drama of love and alienation, in which the loyal, long-suffering lesbian wins. Hanako, a beautiful girl, has gone mad after being deserted by her handsome lover, Yoshio. She is taken off the streets, loved (and painted) and nurtured by a middle-aged artist, Jitsuko Honda. Jitsuko’s idyll is jeopardized by a newspaper story, telling of her rescue of the girl and even providing her name and address. Her worst fears are soon realized, for Yoshio sees the story and subsequently finds them. His identification of Hanako is confirmed by matching a pair of fans that they had exchanged as symbols of undying loyalty. A brutal psychological battle between Yoshio and Jitsuko ensues, and which Jitsuko presumes that she has lost. Yet the tables turn when Hanako insists to the young man, “You are not Yoshio. Your face is dead.” She maintains this claim and eventually dismisses

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him. Jitsuko is gentle in dealing with Yoshio in his defeat but cannot resist exultantly exclaiming “Oh, wonderful life!” when he finally has gone. Dfjfji • It is in the No play Dfjfji, which first found print amid nine short stories of the volume Manatsu no shi (1953; Death in Midsummer and Other Stories, 1966), that Mishima perhaps stands more revealed than in any of his other plays, in the person of a young lady named Kiyoko. (It may be worth noting that Mishima’s female characters tend to have more dimensions than his men—unlike those of Ernest Hemingway, with whom he is often paralleled.) Dfjfji’s other characters are the Antique Dealer and the Apartment House Superintendent (both unnamed), and five nondescript men and women patrons of the antique shop. The setting is “a room in what is in fact a secondhand furniture shop, though it is so filled with antiques—both Oriental and Occidental—that it might properly be called a museum.” Like the classical version of this No play, Mishima’s version involves unabated passion. In the traditional play, Kanegamisaki (the cape of the temple bell), a hermit is loved by a stunning beauty. Rejecting her, he takes refuge by hiding under the huge Dojoji temple bell. Crazed by her desire for him, she transforms herself into a great and outraged serpent whose fire burns the ungrateful hermit as it coils around the bell. Mishima’s Kiyoko, a dancer, keeps to the passion with something of a plot reversal suitable to modern times. She desires a huge wardrobe (with, appropriately, the form of a bell carved into its doors) from the antique shop. The cabinet is about to be sold to the highest bidder among a number of interested, affluent parties, but the sale is spoiled by Kiyoko telling of the murder of a young lover who hid inside—obviously unsuccessfully—from a jealous husband. After the potential buyers have been driven away, Kiyoko reveals to the Dealer that indeed a man had died inside the wardrobe, but that it was her lover, Yasushi, who jilted her for an older woman because she (Kiyoko) was too beautiful. Yasushi chose to hide in the wardrobe to avoid the world, to live and, in fact, to die there (suicide is suggested). Kiyoko browbeats the Dealer but still cannot afford the wardrobe. She leaps inside and locks herself in, crying out that she will disfigure her features with acid. Panic ensues, but when she finally emerges, her face is unchanged. It is at the very end of the play that Mishima and his character seem to merge. Kiyoko says, “Nothing can bother me, no matter what happens. Who do you suppose can wound me now?” Soon the Dealer replies, “You’ll be ruined, your heart will be torn to shreds. You’ll end up no longer able to feel anything.” To this Kiyoko replies, “Still, nothing that happens can ever change my face.” Longer plays • The longer and more conventional plays, Madame de Sade and My Friend Hitler, have much in common. Like many plays, for all but an unusually specialized or attentive audience, they may be deemed to read better than they play. Ironically, this gives them a point in common with traditional No, which some prefer to have explicated rather than to attend. More traditional critics claim that the plays are sometimes overwhelmed by dialogue at the expense of action. In these two plays, the most horrible acts of violence and violation are described in frequently long, descriptive speeches, in which the actors simply face off and deliver— hence it is easy to lose a sense of outrage. Yet, as noted above, one may compare this type of play with the classical Greek drama, in which the violence was described instead of witnessed.

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Madame de Sade • Madame de Sade, the first of these two plays of the theater of tirade, was finished in 1965 and played successfully in Tokyo, opening in November of that year. Its five characters are all female. They are Renée, Sade’s wife; Mme de Montreuil, her mother; Anne, her younger sister; Baronesse de Simiane; the cruel Comtesse de Saint-Fonde; and Charlotte, who is housekeeper to the Montreuils. Much of the main debate of the play swings between the decadent Saint-Fonde, who states that God is both lazy and decrepit after proclaiming herself “utterly bored with the artifices of love and the nasty machinations . . . even my own bad reputation.” She describes love as a mixture of honey and ashes, announcing that she has concluded that the highly religious Montreuil was correct earlier when describing the truth as “whips and sweets, that’s all.” The fascinating exchanges and revelations proceed, often staggering in their implications. The third and final act, following a major soliloquy of Renée, ends after embracing the notion that Sade embodies the cruel essence of reality; the arrival of the Marquis de Sade, himself, is heralded by a knock at the door. The maid describes the bloated, down-at-heels, albeit dignified appearance of the man, who has been long in prison. Renée, Madame de Sade, seeming to have arrived at a sudden decision, stuns the audience by announcing her decision to “never see him again.” As the maid leaves to communicate this to the Marquis de Sade, the curtain falls. Remarkable as it is, there is a classic Zen koanlike quality to this play; a rap on the head by the playwright in the role as Zen master—and the audience is left to find the truth on its own. My Friend Hitler • My Friend Hitler, also in three acts, has as its characters Adolf Hitler, the arms magnate Alfried Krupp, the SA Captain Ernst Roehm, and left-wing Nazi Gregor Strasser. The play is set on the infamous “night of long knives,” when, in late June and early July of 1934, Hitler gave his blessing to the SS, led by Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hess, Joseph Goebbels, and others, to liquidate all leadership of the rival SA paramilitary organization. The SA, a less elite, though larger, group of Hitler’s backers, was headed by Captain Roehm, who believed himself to be Hitler’s best friend. The leftist Strasser, who also helped in Hitler’s rise to power, has become unable to tolerate Hitler’s leadership, while Roehm, like many of his men a motorcycle-riding, hard-drinking bully, believes that Nazi leadership will soften unless it rests on a continual revolution. The dialogue between them is spirited and fascinating, as is that between Hitler and Krupp, the only man before whom Hitler trembles. Donald Richie calls the work an “allegory in iron,” and that it is. It ran successfully in Tokyo in January, 1969, but has not been presented in English except as laboratory theater at St. Andrews College in 1982, in the Hiroaki Sato translation. Again, Mishima—who said that he could never identify with Hitler, though he had some sympathy for Benito Mussolini—leaves the spectator with tense irresolution at the play’s end. As gunfire continues in the background, signaling the continuing execution of SA leaders, Hitler, now recovered from his terror of the intimidating Krupp, accepts the latter’s congratulations for cutting down both the Left and the Right, walking to center stage to state, “Yes, government must take the middle road.” Other major works long fiction: Kamen no kokuhaku, 1949 (Confessions of a Mask, 1958); Kinjiki, 1951, and Higyo, 1953 (combined as Forbidden Colors, 1968); Shiosai, 1954 (The Sound of Waves, 1956); Kinkakuji, 1956 (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, 1959); Kyfko no ie, 1959; Utage

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no ato, 1960 (After the Banquet, 1963); Gogo no eikf, 1963 (The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, 1965); Haru no yuki, 1969 (Spring Snow, 1972); Homba, 1969 (Runaway Horses, 1973); Akatsuki no tera, 1970 (The Temple of Dawn, 1973); Tennin gosui, 1971 (The Decay of the Angel, 1974); Hfjf no umi, 1969-1971 (collective title for previous four novels; The Sea of Fertility: A Cycle of Four Novels, 1972-1974). short fiction: Kaibutsu, 1950; Tfnorikai, 1951; Manatsu no shi, 1953 (Death in Midsummer and Other Stories, 1966). nonfiction: Hagakure nyumfn, 1967 (The Way of the Samurai, 1977); Taiyf to tetsu, 1968 (Sun and Steel, 1970); Yukio Mishima on “Hagakure”: The Samurai Ethic and Modern Japan, 1978. edited text: New Writing in Japan, 1972 (with Geoffrey Bownas). miscellaneous: Hanazakari no mori, 1944 (short fiction and plays); Eirei no Koe, 1966 (short fiction and essays). Bibliography Miller, Henry. Reflections on the Death of Mishima. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra, 1972. A noted author’s comments on the death of Mishima. Napier, Susan Jolliffe. Escape from the Wasteland: Romanticism and Realism in the Fiction of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. A look at romanticism and realism in the works of Mishima and Kenzaburo Oe. Bibliography and index. Nathan, John. Mishima: A Biography. 1974. Reprint. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2000. The classic biography of Mishima, with a new preface by Nathan. Index. Scott-Stokes, Henry. The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima. Rev ed. New York: Noonday Press, 1995. The revised edition of Scott-Stokes’s 1974 biography of Mishima, covering his life and works. Bibliography and index. Starrs, Roy. Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence, and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994. A study of Mishima’s literary works, with emphasis on his philosophy. Wolfe, Peter. Yukio Mishima. New York: Continuum, 1989. A basic biography of Mishima that covers his life and works. Index. Yourcenar, Marguerite. Mishima: A Vision of the Void. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. This edition of a biography of Mishima published in 1986 contains a foreword by Donald Richie, a well-known critic and Japan expert. Ronald H. Bayes

Molière Molière

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Born: Paris, France; January 15, 1622 (baptized) Died: Paris, France; February 17, 1673 Principal drama • L’Étourdi: Ou, Les Contre-temps, pr. 1653, pb. 1663 (verse play; The Blunderer, 1678); Le Dépit amoureux, pr. 1656, pb. 1663 (adaptation of Niccolò Secchi’s L’Interessé; The Love-Tiff, 1930); Les Précieuses ridicules, pr. 1659, pb. 1660 (The Affected Young Ladies, 1732); L’École des maris, pr., pb. 1661 (verse play; The School for Husbands, 1732); L’École des femmes, pr. 1662, pb. 1663 (verse play; The School for Wives, 1732); La Critique de “L’École des femmes,” pr., pb. 1663 (The Critique of “The School for Wives,” 1957); L’Impromptu de Versailles, pr. 1663, pb. 1682 (The Versailles Impromptu, 1714); Tartuffe: Ou, L’Imposteur, pr. 1664, revised pr. 1667, pb. 1669 (verse play; English translation, 1732); Dom Juan: Ou, Le Festin de Pierre, pr. 1665, pb. 1682 (Don Juan, 1755); L’Amour médecin, pr. 1665, pb. 1666 (Love’s the Best Doctor, 1755); Le Misanthrope, pr. 1666, pb. 1667 (verse play; The Misanthrope, 1709); Le Médecin malgré lui, pr., pb. 1666 (The Doctor in Spite of Himself, 1672); Amphitryon, pr., pb. 1668 (verse play; English translation, 1755); L’Avare, pr. 1668, pb. 1669 (The Miser, 1672); Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, pr. 1670, pb. 1671 (The Would-Be Gentleman, 1675); Les Fourberies de Scapin, pr., pb. 1671 (The Cheats of Scapin, 1701); Les Femmes savantes, pr., pb. 1672 (verse play; The Learned Ladies, pr., pb. 1693); Le Malade imaginaire, pr. 1673, pb. 1674 (The Imaginary Invalid, 1732; also known as The Hypochondriac); Dramatic Works, pb. 1875-1876 (3 volumes); The Plays of Molière, pb. 1926 (8 volumes) Other literary forms • Molière is known only for his plays. Achievements • Molière possessed a brilliant imagination, constantly creating new characters and easily moving from one type of comedy to another. His imagination was, however, carefully controlled through reason, by which he avoided excess. Reality is the point of departure for his wildest creations, and his comedies owe their depth to his keen observation of humanity. When Molière began writing for the theater there was little comedy, except for that of Pierre Corneille’s first works, and what there was leaned heavily toward the extravagant. Molière soon realized that, more than any other genre, comedy required a basis in truth. Consequently, he was not particularly concerned with original subjects or careful plots, but rather with the portrayal of manners and the study of character. Therefore, Molière made free use of any subject or plot that came his way, borrowing in whole or in part from earlier French works of any genre, or from Latin, Italian, and Spanish sources. Although he was capable of devising clever plots, he believed that simple ones were better if the audience was to concentrate on the substance of the play. As for denouements, any or none would do, once he had said what he intended. Molière was thoroughly familiar with the milieus of his day and represented them all faithfully as settings for his characters and their foibles. What interested Molière more than sociological truth, however, was universal truth. His precious ladies, ped610

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ants, and nouveaux riches could be of any era. More important than a wealth of exterior detail was this portrayal of universal types. These were to replace the conventional figures—boastful captains, scheming parasites, sweet ingenues, young lovers, and the like—of traditional comedy. Despite their universality, however, Molière’s characters were not created according to simple formulas. On the contrary, they are complex to an extreme, each possessing the general traits of the type observed and abstracted by Molière from reality, yet endowed with enough of the particulars to make each a real human being. There is no one stock servant in Molière’s work, but a series of individualized servants. His Miser is a lover as well. The Hypocrite is also a lecher. Molière’s dramatic universe is a very real one. Molière made special use of those of his observations that could make the spectator laugh at humanity. Although the comedy almost always contains a serious meaning, its forms are extremely varied, and its tones range from the most farcical to the most subtle, all arranged with the utmost skill during the course of a single play. Thus, the spectator may remain unaware of how disagreeable a subject is until, the performance over, he reflects on it further. Especially telling is Molière’s device of making certain characters repeat words and gestures that reveal the vice or passion that controls each. By this technique, the characters are reduced almost to the status of machines and thus inspire, not sympathy or pity, but ridicule. Molière believed that human nature was basically good and sensible, and he opposed any artificial constraints placed on it. Such constraints came not from society, which is a collection of human natures whose discipline reasonable people accept; rather, they had their source in perverse individuals who conformed neither to human nature nor to society. Molière has been criticized for excessive optimism and conformism, but however conservative his solutions to the problems that he posed, there can be no doubt that he was forthright and courageous in posing them. Biography • Very little is known of the personal life of Molière, born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin. He left no diary, no memoirs, no correspondence, no autobiography. The first biography, J.-L. Le Gallois Grimarest’s Vie de Monsieur de Molière (1705), is interesting, but it was not published until thirty-two years after Molière’s death, and is therefore considered questionable by most modern scholars. Anything written by his contemporaries was polemical in nature. Molière was baptized January 15, 1622, on the rue Saint-Honoré. He was of a good bourgeois family that had recently come to Paris from Beauvais. His father was a merchant and “upholsterer by appointment of the King,” having received the title from his brother. Molière’s mother died in 1632, and his father soon remarried, only to become a widower again in 1636. Between 1632 and 1639, Molière attended the Collège de Clermont, studied law in Orléans, and became a lawyer. In addition, in 1637, his father arranged for his son to succeed him in his official charge. Molière was not much interested in the law, however, and his practice was not brisk, nor was he inclined to follow in his father’s footsteps. It is said that Molière’s grandfather often took him to the Hôtel de Bourgogne to see French tragedy and Italian comedy. Around 1640, Molière probably met Tiberio Fiurelli, known as Scaramouche in the Italian theater, and became closely associated with the Béjart family. Its members were involved in the arts, particularly theater, and were somewhat eccentric, but they lived in the fashionable Marais section of Paris and had some good connections. Their oldest daughter, Madeleine, known as an actress,

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was the sometime mistress of the Baron de Modène and mother of a child recognized by him. At a time when “actor” and “outlaw” were considered synonymous by many, Molière chose the life of the theater. He was giving up the security and respectability offered him, not only by the right to succeed his father, but also by the legal profession. At first, he chose not to write for the theater, instead pursuing a career as an actor. The Illustre Théâtre was founded in 1643 by the Béjarts and other actors, including Molière, not for profit at first but simply for their entertainment and that of the bourgeoisie of Paris. The troupe was under the protection of Gaston, the duke of Orléans, brother of Louis XIII, who did not always remember to pay his actors. They rented and appointed a former tennis court as a theater, opened their doors in 1644, and were soon in serious financial difficulty. Marie Hervé, mother of the Béjart girls, helped her children and Molière, who had by then taken this name and was head of the troupe. Despite all measures, matters grew worse. In 1645, Molière was sued by numerous creditors and experienced a brief sojourn in debtors’ prison. He had made many friends among Parisian men of letters and their noble patrons, however, and formulated his philosophy of the theater. He had not wasted his time. On his release from prison, Molière decided to leave Paris to try his luck in another troupe. Madeleine soon joined him. At the behest of a number of dramatic authors, the duke of Épernon received Molière, Madeleine, and her brother and sister into his troupe. They toured the provinces under the direction of Charles Dufresne until 1650, when the duke withdrew his support and Dufresne left the troupe. Molière assumed leadership during this awkward time, but in 1652 the troupe found a new patron in the prince of Conti. Again, the intercession of men of letters in Paris had been instrumental. The prince was an enlightened man who enjoyed such company, and he came to prize Molière’s intelligence and culture highly. Unfortunately, the prince’s spiritual advisers persuaded him to lead a more austere life, and in 1657 he withdrew his patronage. By this time, the troupe was doing well artistically and financially. It contained a number of artists who were or would become celebrated. A fine actor, Molière was an equally fine director. He was a hard taskmaster but earned his actors’ respect and affection, and the turnover in his troupe was always remarkably low. The players decided that, after a lengthy sojourn in Rouen, they would spend the winter of 1658 in Paris, which they had revisited sporadically, maintaining numerous contacts. In Paris, they rented the Marais Theatre for eighteen months and were granted the protection of Philippe, duke of Orléans, who paid (Library of Congress) them no more faithfully than had

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Gaston. On October 24, 1658, they played Corneille’s Nicomède (pr., pb. 1651; English translation, 1671) and then Molière’s The Love-Tiff before Louis XIV. The king was so pleased with Molière’s work that he accorded the troupe the use of the Petit-Bourbon on the days that the Italians did not play there. They performed in the fine hall there until 1660, when, for unknown reason, they moved to a smaller theater that was badly in need of repairs. Despite all efforts, the theater remained a makeshift affair. The troupe remained there, more or less permanently, until 1671, when it relocated to the Palais-Royal, which was properly remodeled and appointed. The old Corneillean repertoire was no longer successful. Moreover, there was considerable bias on the part of good dramatic authors against offering their works to any troupe until 1667, when Corneille allowed Attila (English translation, 1960) to be mounted at the Petit-Bourbon, and 1670, when he gave Molière Tite et Bérénice to perform. Molière had found it necessary to create his own repertoire, a task that he had already begun in a modest way in the provinces. His comedies were well received, and the troupe seemed firmly established. The players at the Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Marais became increasingly more disgruntled. The triumph of The Affected Young Ladies in 1659 brought its author the active enmity of his rivals as well as the admiration of his public. Molière would never leave Paris again. His most important plays remained to be written. They were to win for him the highest praise, his contemporaries’ and posterity’s, and engage him in the fiercest of polemics with certain factions. Molière was a short, rather ugly man with severe curvature of the spine, and he was by nature serious and somewhat taciturn. Nevertheless, his great art and talent brought him many friends, admirers, and patrons, and he enjoyed their company. He especially enjoyed being received by the notables of his day, whose invitations he insisted on reciprocating rather elegantly. During his life he had several mistresses, usually actresses, beginning with Madeleine Béjart, with whom he had a lifelong association, although he was not the most attentive of lovers. At about the age of forty, Molière married pretty Armande Béjart, then about seventeen years of age and said variously to be Madeleine’s sister or daughter (perhaps by Molière). As was to be expected, their life was not a happy one. He was jealous of her as he had been of no other, and she seems to have given him considerable cause. Three children were born during their marriage, but Esprit-Madeleine was the only one to whom he was greatly attached and perhaps the only one that he fathered. Despite all vicissitudes, he continued to love Armande, and she was with him when he died in 1673. Molière’s had always been a generous nature, emotionally as well as financially. Temperamental, not easy to live with, and always willing to engage in fierce polemic, he was nevertheless very forgiving. He was known not only to reconcile with but also to lend substantial sums of money to former enemies. Louis XIV was Molière’s greatest patron, showering him with money and favors and protecting him from powerful enemies. After 1665, Molière’s group was known as “the King’s troupe,” a name preferred to that of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, and was requested to perform at Versailles, Saint-Germain, and Chambord. For inexplicable reasons, Jean-Baptiste Lully, the Florentine composer and sometime collaborator with Molière, became Louis’s favorite with respect to theatrical entertainment in 1672, only one year before Molière’s death. Although he had protected Molière in some extremely delicate situations, the king now preferred Lully’s frivolous productions to Molière’s masterpieces, and he granted the Italian exclusive rights over all works in which he had had a part. In vain, Molière tried legal means to oppose Louis’s will. For-

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tunately, he had long had important protectors at court, such as the king’s sister-in-law, Henriette d’Angleterre, and the prince of Conti, as well as numerous influential friends in various Parisian circles, including men of letters such as Nicholas Boileau. After some initial difficulties concerning Lully’s rights and the search for another composer, The Imaginary Invalid, originally created for the court, was a success at the Palais-Royal. Despite his ill health, Molière played the title role. It was during the fourth performance that he fell seriously and visibly ill; however, the show continued because the prince of Conti and other notables were in the audience and the actors needed to work. After the performance, Molière was taken home, where his hemorrhaging grew worse. His wife was called, and his servants tried to find a priest who would come to an actor’s deathbed. When one finally arrived an hour later, Molière was dead. Analysis • Molière’s first comedies were composed of elements borrowed from a variety of comic genres, high and low, ancient and modern, foreign and domestic. In each, he revealed considerable skill in development of character, observation of manners, construction of plot, or a combination of all these laced with much amusing physical activity. There was little original invention until The Affected Young Ladies, which was a petite comédie, a short farce designed to be performed after a longer serious work, but a farce containing satire of the excesses of certain manners of the day. Still specializing in the farce, of which he would remain a master, Molière continued his search for originality. The School for Husbands, in three acts, is the first of his plays to add a social thesis, however disguised by humorous treatment, to the observation of manners and character. The School for Wives • The School for Wives, Molière’s first major play, centers on the vain Arnolphe, who has taken the aristocratic name of M. de la Souche. Hoping to acquire the peace and happiness of a conjugal life in his old age, he wishes to marry his young ward, Agnès, who is being reared in solitude and ignorance. He praises the virtues of this unnatural form of education to his friend, Chrysalde, who protests against his plan in the name of common sense. Meanwhile, Horace, the son of Oronte, a great friend of Arnolphe, has fallen in love with Agnès and has even been successful in communicating with her. He confides in Arnolphe himself, whom he does not know by the name of de la Souche, and of whose role as guardian and jailer he is unaware. In act 2, Arnolphe, after scolding his servants, Alain and Georgette, for having allowed Horace to enter the house, questions Agnès. She is innocent and docile and willingly gives him the details of her meeting with Horace, who has moved her, she admits ingenuously. Arnolphe decides to marry Agnès without delay and orders her to throw stones at the suitor if he dares to declare himself. In act 3, Arnolphe lectures Agnès further and makes her read the disagreeable “Maxims on Marriage”; later, Horace reports to Arnolphe the vain precautions taken by the jealous old man: Agnès had thrown Horace a stone, but only after attaching a love note to it. As act 4 reveals, Arnolphe is prepared to fight for Agnès and issues orders to his servants accordingly. Nevertheless, Horace informs him that he has been able to visit Agnès and that he intends to elope with her during the night. Arnolphe calls for the notary to draw up a marriage contract and plans an ambush for Horace. In the fifth and final act, Horace is surprised by Alain and Georgette and severely beaten. Feigning death, he succeeds in abducting Agnès but foolishly entrusts her to Arnolphe, whom he still does not connect with the jealous old man. Arnolphe’s declarations of love do

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not touch Agnès, however, who now knows what true love is. Agnès’s father, who opportunely returns from America, allows her to marry Horace. In five acts, this grande comédie exemplifies the formula that Molière had developed for his theater through a series of shorter pieces. As in The School for Husbands, the theme is the proper education of young women. The setting is a real one drawn from contemporary society. Arnolphe and Chrysalde are French bourgeois; Alain and Georgette are French peasants. At the same time, all the characters are highly personalized. Agnès is a remarkable portrait of a young woman who, acting on her instincts, becomes aware of her love for Horace and becomes aware of herself as a person. Arnolphe, the principal character, is both ridiculous, because of his obsession to keep Agnès in ignorance and be master of the house, and tragic, because of his unrequited love for Agnès and his despair at losing her, which ennobles him. In part through Chrysalde, one of his numerous mouthpieces, and in part through a conventional denouement, Molière reveals an important tenet of his philosophy: It is stupid and dangerous to try to suppress natural emotion, for it always wins out in the end. The Critique of “The School for Wives” • The School for Wives was so successful as to earn for its author additional favors from the king and more polemics from diverse factions. Supported by Louis and the honnêtes gens, Molière responded to his enemies’ attacks in The Critique of “The School for Wives,” a one-act play in prose, by means of a series of caricatures and his definition of art as the portrayal of truth. The setting is Uranie’s salon, where a discussion of Molière’s play is taking place. Célimène, a précieuse, attacks Molière’s immorality and vulgarity, and is in turn attacked by Uranie for her affected prudery. The marquis criticizes the play for having made the common people laugh, whereupon Dorante defends their common sense and good judgment. The pedant Lysidas considers the play an insignificant piece that cannot be compared with serious plays. He casts doubt on the judgment of the court in applauding Molière’s work, for it breaks all the rules of art. Once again, it is Dorante who acts as the author’s spokesman by stating that comedy is as difficult as tragedy to create and more true to life. For him the greatest rule is to please, and he sides with the court in its approbation of The School for Wives. Molière’s enemies were not stilled; they counterattacked with other short plays, accusing him of being too personal, impious, and immoral in his private life. The Versailles Impromptu • At the insistence of the king this time, Molière wrote another one-act piece in prose, The Versailles Impromptu, performed for Louis in October of 1663. Molière represents himself as director and actor in the midst of a rehearsal for a play to be given before the king. Having mocked the actors of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, Molière proceeds to give each of his players advice appropriate to his role and defends his theater, whose goal is to depict manners, not personalities. Whatever his enemies may say of his work does not disturb him, but he forbids them to intrude on his privacy. The piece concludes with an announcement from the king postponing the performance of the play under rehearsal. Tartuffe • Tartuffe, perhaps the most controversial of Molière’s comedies, was first given in its original version, now lost, as a part of Les Plaisirs de l’île enchantée, a week of the most extravagant entertainment offered by Louis XIV at Versailles in 1664 in honor of Louise de la Vallière. Tartuffe (then titled Tartuffe: Ou, L’Hypocrite) not only gave rise to another fierce polemic, but also was finally banned by the king at the insis-

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tence of the Company of the Blessed Sacrament, a secret society dedicated to reforming manners, who were concerned that Molière had them in mind when he presented his hypocrite as a cleric. Molière modified and expanded the play from three to five acts, and Louis authorized its performance (entitled L’Imposteur) at the Palais-Royal in 1667. Although Molière had made the hypocrite a layperson and softened his satire, the police and the Archbishop of Paris took advantage of the king’s trip to Flanders to shut down the successful play. After more efforts by Molière and Louis, the comedy was again authorized in 1669 and performed triumphantly as Tartuffe: Ou, L’Imposteur. As the play begins, Mme Pernelle, pleased that her son, Orgon, has welcomed such a pious man into his household, roundly criticizes each member of the family who accuses Tartuffe of hypocrisy, including the outspoken servant Dorine. Returning from the country, Orgon inquires most solicitously about Tartuffe’s health (not his wife’s) and gives his brother-in-law, Cléante, an evasive answer regarding the proposed marriage of his daughter to Valère. Complications develop in act 2: Despite Mariane’s dislike for Tartuffe, Orgon wants his daughter to marry him rather than the man whom she loves and who loves her. Dorine’s remonstrances are of no avail with Orgon, and she comforts the timid Mariane and settles the lovers’ quarrel that Orgon’s wishes have incited. In act 3, Orgon’s son Damis tries to intervene also, but Dorine makes him promise to leave matters to his stepmother, Elmire. The latter sends for Tartuffe, who finally appears. The young woman begs him to give up Mariane. The hypocrite takes advantage of the situation to try to seduce Elmire, who agrees not to reveal his scandalous behavior if he will favor the marriage of Mariane and Valère, but Damis, who overhears everything from a nearby closet, informs his father. Tartuffe feigns humility and deceives Orgon, who turns against his son and makes Tartuffe his heir. Tartuffe is evasive when, in act 4, Cléante begs him to reconcile Orgon and Damis. Orgon wishes to hasten his daughter’s wedding to Tartuffe despite the protests of Cléante and Mariane. In order to disabuse her husband, Elmire has him hide under a table, summons Tartuffe, and pretends to respond to his passion. Finally understanding that he has been tricked by an impostor, Orgon comes out of his hiding place and orders Tartuffe to leave the house. The hypocrite abandons his mask and threatens Orgon, for the house belongs to him now. The concluding act brings about the anticipated reversal. Orgon regrets having turned all his worldly possessions over to Tartuffe, including a strongbox containing the papers entrusted to him by a friend who is in political trouble. Mme Pernelle continues to have faith in Tartuffe when M. Loyal arrives with a court order to evict Orgon. Valère offers to help Orgon escape, for the incriminating strongbox has been turned over to the king’s officers. Tartuffe appears in person with an officer to have Orgon arrested, but it is Tartuffe who is arrested instead; the king had been alerted to the impostor’s fraudulent activities and knew of Orgon’s services to the royal cause during the rebellion of the Fronde. The deus ex machina ending finds the king praised and Valère and Mariane about to be married. In Tartuffe, Molière claimed to attack hypocrisy only and took pains to have Cléante, his spokesman, distinguish carefully between true and false piety. Despite praise of the former, the only avowed Christians in the work, Orgon and his mother, are depicted as ridiculous, whereas the principal characters shown in a good light, Elmire and Cléante, are not religious persons. The emphasis in Tartuffe is clearly on human rather than divine wisdom, very much in the spirit of the eighteenth century philosophes.

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Tartuffe’s is a skillful plot that maintains interest in its theme, the rise and fall of a religious hypocrite, from the lively, realistic exposition to the unlikely denouement. It is the perfect model of a comedy of character as well. Although all the characters are complex, drawn from life, it is Tartuffe who stands out, not only for his hypocrisy, but his keen intelligence, strong will, and great powers of dissimulation. For all his cleverness, however, he has a weakness, his sensuality coupled with greed, and this brutal passion causes his downfall. Don Juan • Between 1664 and 1669, Molière produced ten comedies in addition to reworking Tartuffe. Among them was Don Juan, whose Spanish subject had become popular in Italy and France. Molière’s version, a five-act play in prose, was very successful, but again, he was opposed by the religious faction. No doubt the libertine’s cynicism, his perverse seduction, his impious “articles of faith,” and his unrepentant sins were shocking to audiences of the time. Still more shocking was his novel recourse to hypocrisy in the last act, although in the end Don Juan remains an unregenerate sinner and is led off to Hell. As the play begins, Don Juan informs his valet, Sganarelle, that his happiness consists in seducing all women without becoming attached to any. Elvire, whom he has abandoned, attempts in vain to win him back. Shipwrecked on the coast during a storm, Don Juan and Sganarelle are taken in by some peasants. There, Don Juan seduces two young women, whom he deceives with promises of marriage. Pursued by Elvire’s brothers, he hides in the forest with Sganarelle. In act 3, to the horror of his valet, Don Juan explains his “articles of faith,” which may be summarized as “two and two are four.” He meets a poor man and tries to bribe him with alms to blaspheme. Then he saves the life of one of Elvire’s brothers. In an act of bravado, he invites the statue of a Commander whom he killed in the past to dine; the statue accepts with a gesture. In the fourth act, Don Juan is insolent to his father, Don Louis, who rebukes him for his scandalous life, and he remains insensitive to the prayers of Elvire, who, before retiring to a convent, would like to bring him to repentance. He sits down to dine, and the statue appears to remind him of his invitation. Sganarelle is terrified, but Don Juan retains his composure. In the final act, Don Juan, having pretended to repent before his father, explains to Sganarelle that henceforth he intends to wear the mask of a hypocrite; it is in this manner also that he responds to the challenge of Elvire’s brothers. At this point, a ghost appears to tell Don Juan that he has only a moment in which to repent if he wishes divine mercy. Hardhearted, he mocks this warning. The Commander’s statue arrives, takes him by the hand, and Don Juan is engulfed in the invisible flames of Hell. At first glance, Don Juan does not seem to be related to its author’s earlier works. Molière did wish to try something new. The play requires several changes of scene and machinery to achieve stage effects. It includes the supernatural along with the realistic, phantoms and an animated statue along with peasants drawn from real life. Similarly, the comedy of the almost burlesque scene with M. Dimanche alternates with the tragic qualities of Don Louis’s vehement speech to his son. Yet this work is related to Molière’s serious concerns. For the first time in the succession of versions of the Don Juan story, the principal character is not only debauched but also a hypocrite. As long as he is a seducer and blasphemer, divine mercy will spare him; when in the last act he pretends to be converted, he goes too far, and divine patience is exhausted. While in Tartuffe it is the king who intervenes to punish the hyp-

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ocrite, in Don Juan it is Heaven. Molière thus uses another occasion to attack his enemies’ false piety, but again religion, false or sincere, finds itself in a weak position. Atheism is defended by a vicious but intelligent and charming aristocrat, whereas the defender of religion is a sensible yet somewhat obtuse valet. The Misanthrope • A five-act comedy in verse, The Misanthrope, on which Molière had been working since 1664, finally appeared in 1666. Although well received by the intellectual elite, the work did not enjoy great favor with the general public, who preferred Molière’s farces, comedies with music and ballet, and satire. In the salon of a young widow, Célimène, whom he awaits, the misanthropic Alceste rails to his friend, the indulgent Philinte, against the worldly hypocrisy that makes him detest humankind. Nevertheless, he loves the coquettish Célimène. Oronte asks Alceste for his opinion of a love sonnet that he has composed. Reticent at first, Alceste finally blurts out his opinion of the piece, which he finds detestable. Furious, Oronte withdraws, followed by Alceste and Philinte, who leave together. As act 2 begins, Alceste has brought Célimène home, where he reproaches her for her fickleness and tries to make her declare her love. The arrival of two dandies, Acaste and Clitandre, suitors of Célimène, interrupts the scene between the lovers. Philinte and Eliante, Célimène’s cousin, arrive, and a conversation takes place in which the young widow draws satiric portraits of friends in their absence. Célimène’s clever but biting tongue makes Alceste indignant, and he is not spared her witty attacks. Alceste must leave, for he is being sued by Oronte because of his critical judgment of the sonnet. In act 3, Acaste and Clitandre make a pact: The one who can first give clear proof of Célimène’s love for him shall be declared the winner. During a visit with Arsinoë, Célimène is provoked by her guest’s innuendos regarding her flirtations into giving the prude her comeuppance. Her vanity wounded, Arsinoë tries in vain to charm Alceste, but she succeeds in troubling him with regard to Célimène’s love, offering to furnish him evidence that she is betraying him. The fourth act adds further complications. When Philinte tells Eliante how Alceste and Oronte have patched up their differences, she reveals her admiration for the misanthrope’s heroic sincerity; in turn, Philinte declares his love to her. Alceste, however, arrives in a rage, for Arsinoë has produced a note written by Célimène to Oronte. Alceste offers his heart to Eliante, and, when Célimène appears, he heaps reproach on her. Lying artfully, she justifies herself and triumphs over Alceste, who loves her more than ever despite shame for his weakness. Her explanation is interrupted by the arrival of the burlesque valet, Dubois, with the news that Alceste has lost an important lawsuit and risks arrest. The conclusion plays against comic conventions. Alceste decides to leave society, against Philinte’s advice, and he wants to know if Célimène is ready to accompany him. She arrives with Oronte, and when the two suitors demand that she choose between them, she is embarrassed and asks Eliante, who refuses, to judge. When Acaste and Clitandre appear and read notes that make it clear to all how false Célimène has been with her several suitors, her salon is deserted. Only Alceste remains to offer himself if she will follow him. She accepts him as a husband but refuses to leave Paris. Alceste will not marry her under these conditions, and, as Eliante agrees to marry Philinte, he prepares to go to his retreat alone. Unlike most of Molière’s plays, which take place in a bourgeois setting, The Misanthrope depicts the aristocracy of the period. The often crude humor of an earlier time

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has been replaced by refined manners. An elegant elite frequents Célimène’s salon where visiting, conversation, and gallantry are the preferred diversions. The charming young widow’s guests reveal their wit by improvising verbal portraits, engaging in subtle analyses of amorous themes, and judging one another’s latest verses. Molière reveals, however, that beneath this society’s brilliant exterior there lies mediocrity and profound hypocrisy: Polite manners thinly veil coldness; the art of conversation consists of clever but malicious gossip or sarcastic repartee between supposed friends; gallantry is coupled with contempt for women and love. The Misanthrope is a love story, too, told as it is ending. From the first scene between Alceste and Célimène one knows that they are incompatible, for they disagree on everything, especially love, which for her is only flirtation, for him total commitment. Love has blinded Alceste, and he indulges himself in the hope of reforming Célimène, until he begins to suspect that he has been betrayed. He then scorns Célimène, and he scorns himself for being unable to stifle his passion. When he is certain that Célimène does not love him, he rejects her as being unworthy of him and takes refuge in voluntary exile. Contrary to the traditions of comedy, the lovers separate at the end. Finally, The Misanthrope is a perfect comedy of character. The characters’ features are less striking than those found in Tartuffe, but they are more delicately modeled. Alceste, whose soul is noble, has a disagreeable temperament. He is the opposite of Philinte, who is a man of the world, outwardly indulgent to his fellows, although he really despises them. In contrast to Célimène, the eternal coquette, young, beautiful, and witty, but heartless, stand the wise Eliante and the prudish Arsinoë. Among the secondary figures at whom Molière points the finger of ridicule, Oronte, the would-be poet whose vanity leads him to commit nasty, cowardly acts, is outstanding. Each age sees The Misanthrope differently, according to its own preoccupations, and discovers a new wealth of emotions and ideas. Whereas the seventeenth century found Alceste odd and ridiculous, later periods have appreciated his heroic and pathetic side. Later works • Molière’s career changed direction when, in 1669, the ban on Tartuffe was finally lifted. He felt vindicated, and he took care thereafter not to write highly controversial works. Charged with the organization of royal entertainments, he produced the farces and comedies with music and dance that had always won for him general acclaim, as well as a number of novel pieces, often in collaboration with Lully and on one occasion with Corneille. There was, as always, much satire, but of politically powerless types. For example, because of his ill health, Molière found doctors an increasingly favorite object of his attacks. The actor and director • Molière’s worst enemies admitted that he was an extraordinary comedic actor. Despite the efforts of traditionalists to make him fit a classical mold, it is more accurate to say that he followed Gallic and Italian traditions. Not only did Molière know Scaramouche but also he was on familiar terms with the whole Italian troupe and their work; he imitated the costumes and traits of both Scaramouche and Sganarelle. Above all, he learned the art of caricature and mime, long popular in France and so necessary for the Italians in a foreign country, and applied their synthetic approach to re-create life in his theaters. Molière developed a stylized walk, posture, and facial expression by which he became known to his public for many years in whatever role he played. There were important modifications from time to time, depending on the roles and changes in Molière’s physical condition, but his basic philosophy remained the same.

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Molière governed his troupe with cordial familiarity and firm authority. He was a most exacting director at a time when directing had not advanced far, and he made fine actors and actresses of mediocre talents. As has been noted, Molière’s first efforts to recruit a repertoire met with small success; he was obliged to create his own, one that served as a model closely followed by his successors for many years. Among Molière’s many duties was that of keeping order among the spectators in his theater, not always an easy task at the time. It seems that Molière was as successful on this count as on the many others required to create the national theater in France that is his glory. Bibliography Calder, Andrew. Molière: The Theory and Practice of Comedy. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Athlone Press, 1993. An analysis of the comedic dramas of Molière. Bibliography and index. Carmody, James Patrick. Rereading Molière: Mise en scène from Antoine to Vitez. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. An examination of the production of Molière’s plays and their stage history. Bibliography and index. Finn, Thomas P. Molière’s Spanish Connection: Seventeenth Century Spanish Theatrical Influence on Imaginary Identity in Molière. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. A look at the influence of Spanish drama on identity in the works of Molière. Bibliography and index. Kroen, Sheryl. Politics and Theater: The Crisis of Legitimacy in Restoration France, 18151830. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. This look at Restoration France examines Molière’s Tartuffe and its influence. Bibliography and index. Lalande, Roxanne Decker. Intruders in the Play World: The Dynamics of Gender in Molière’s Comedies. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996. A critical analysis of Molière’s plays from the perspective of gender. Bibliography and index. Norman, Larry F. The Public Mirror: Molière and the Social Commerce of Depiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Norman examines depiction in the plays of Molière. Bibliography and index. Scott, Virginia. Molière: A Theatrical Life. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. A biography of the dramatist that examines his life as a member of the theater rather than as man of letters. Bibliography and index. Richard A. Mazzara

Sean O’Casey Sean O’Casey

John Casey Born: Dublin, Ireland; March 30, 1880 Died: Torquay, England; September 18, 1964 Principal drama • The Shadow of a Gunman, pr. 1923, pb. 1925; Cathleen Listens In, pr. 1923, pb. 1962; Juno and the Paycock, pr. 1924, pb. 1925; Nannie’s Night Out, pr. 1924, pb. 1962 (one act); Two Plays, pb. 1925 (includes The Shadow of a Gunman and Juno and the Paycock); The Plough and the Stars, pr., pb. 1926; The Silver Tassie, pb. 1928, pr. 1929; Within the Gates, pb. 1933, pr. 1934; A Pound on Demand, pb. 1934, pr. 1947 (one act); The End of the Beginning, pb. 1934, pr. 1937 (one act); Five Irish Plays, pb. 1935; The Star Turns Red, pr., pb. 1940; Purple Dust, pb. 1940, pr. 1944; Red Roses for Me, pb. 1942, pr. 1943; Oak Leaves and Lavender: Or, A World on Wallpaper, pb. 1946, pr. 1947; Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, pr., pb. 1949; Collected Plays, pb. 1949-1951 (4 volumes; includes Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, Bedtime Story, Hall of Healing, Time to Go); Bedtime Story, pb. 1951, pr. 1952; Hall of Healing, pr. 1951, pr. 1952 (one act); Time to Go, pb. 1951, pr. 1952 (one act); The Bishop’s Bonfire, pr., pb. 1955; Selected Plays of Sean O’Casey, pb. 1956; Five One-Act Plays, pb. 1958, 1990; The Drums of Father Ned, pr. 1959, pb. 1960; Behind the Green Curtains, pb. 1961, pr. 1962; Figure in the Night, pb. 1961, pr. 1962 (one act); The Moon Shines on Kylenamoe, pb. 1961, pr. 1962 (one act); Three More Plays, pb. 1965; The Complete Plays of Sean O’Casey, pb. 1984 Other literary forms • Along with his drama, Sean O’Casey wrote verse, political tracts, historical sketches, essays, dramatic criticism, short stories, and an extensive sixvolume autobiography: I Knock at the Door (1939), Pictures in the Hallway (1942), Drums Under the Windows (1945), Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well (1949), Rose and Crown (1952), and Sunset and Evening Star (1954). The autobiography is also available in a two-volume edition, Mirror in My House (1956). Early in his career, O’Casey published two volumes of poetry: Songs of the Wren (1918) and More Wren Songs (1918). His political pamphlets include The Story of Thomas Ashe (1918), The Sacrifice of Thomas Ashe (1918), and The Story of the Irish Citizen Army (1919). O’Casey’s two essay collections are The Flying Wasp (1937) and The Green Crow (1956). His essays, criticism, short stories, and verse have been collected in several anthologies, including Windfalls (1934), Feathers from the Green Crow: Sean O’Casey, 1905-1925 (1962), Under a Colored Cap (1963), and Blasts and Benedictions (1967). Achievements • Poet, playwright, essayist, and short-story writer Sean O’Casey stands as one of the major figures of the Irish Literary Renaissance. Though he began his career as a playwright late in life, he still managed to complete more than twenty plays, a six-volume autobiography, and numerous short stories and essays before his death in 1964. Along with the works of John Millington Synge, Lady Augusta Gregory, and William Butler Yeats, his plays sustained the Abbey Theatre during its early years, accounting for its greatest commercial successes, and they are still among the most popular works in the Abbey Theatre’s repertory. 621

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During his career, O’Casey moved beyond the confines of dramatic realism to create a new style of expressionism in Anglo-Irish theater. In this regard, he is among the most original and innovative of modern European playwrights. Perhaps only the epic realism of Bertolt Brecht’s works rivals the sheer spectacle and vitality of O’Casey’s stage. Though his early plays have continued in repertory, these later plays, especially, deserve to be performed more often, despite the demands of their Irish dialect and their variety of song-and-dance material. That they are not reflects the impoverishment of the modern stage, for O’Casey was a master of theatrical entertainment. Biography • The youngest child in a large Irish Protestant family of modest means, Sean O’Casey was born John Casey in Dublin on March 30, 1880. He was the third child in his family to be named John; two of his siblings with that name had died in infancy. Later, in his twenties, after he had become an Irish nationalist and a member of the Gaelic League, he adopted the Gaelic version of his name, Sean O’Cathasaigh (pronounced O’Casey). O’Casey’s father, Michael Casey, who came from a farming family in Limerick, worked as a clerk for the Anglican Irish Church Missions. He went to Dublin as a young man and married Susan Archer, of a respectable auctioneer’s family. Michael Casey was a literate man with a good library of English classics, while O’Casey’s mother was a woman of great fortitude and devotion to her children, especially her youngest, whom she sheltered because of his physical frailty and a severe eye affliction, which left his vision permanently impaired. Even in the difficult period after her husband’s death, she maintained her respectability and encouraged her children to enter professions. Michael Casey died after a protracted illness on September 6, 1886, when his youngest son was only six. With the loss of his income, the family started a gradual decline into poverty. The Caseys were forced to move to cheaper lodgings in a Dublin dockside neighborhood. There, O’Casey started to associate with working-class Roman Catholic boys who attended the local parochial school. He had been enrolled at St. Mary’s National School, where his sister Isabella taught, but when he reached the age of fourteen, his schooling came to an end. His family needed the extra income, so he began to work as a stock boy with a Dublin hardware firm. Though out of school, O’Casey continued his interest in books, and he certainly learned to read before the age of sixteen, contrary to what he later reported to Lady Gregory. O’Casey became active in the Church of Ireland during this time and was confirmed at the age of seventeen. In his free time, he read William Shakespeare and the Irish playwright Dion Boucicault. He also attended the Mechanics’ Theatre with his brother Isaac and even acted in at least one production. His love of drama was strengthened by these early productions, and after the group was later reorganized as the Abbey Theatre, he would see two of his early plays produced there in 1923. In 1902, O’Casey began work as a laborer on the Great Northern Railway of Ireland, where he was employed for the next ten years. His budding interest in Irish nationalism led him to join the Gaelic League, learn the Irish language, and change his name. Within a short time, he was also a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Through these associations, O’Casey began to shape his identity as Irish nationalist, laborer, and political activist. His interest in writing also emerged as he joined the St. Lawrence O’Toole Club, a local literary society. Above all, he forged the commitment to Irish nationalism that would occupy him for the next twenty years. O’Casey joined the Irish Transport and General Workers Union in 1909 and was dismissed from his job later that year for refusing to sign a nonstrike pledge during the

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railway strike. Left unemployed, he turned increasingly to politics while he supported himself as a laborer in the building trade. From his perspective, socialism began to look attractive as an alternative to British economic domination of Ireland. The six-month Dublin labor lockout of 1913 hardened his political views, as he helped organize a relief fund for destitute families. Becoming more militant, he drafted part of the constitution for the Irish Citizen Army, though recuperation from an operation and personal doubts kept him from taking part in the weeklong insurrection of Easter, 1916. Instead, he wrote poems, pamphlets, and broadsides in support of the Irish cause. His mother and sister died in 1918, leaving O’Casey to board temporarily with the family of his brother Michael. This period marked a low point in O’Casey’s fortunes because he was out of work and was forced to accept the charity of others. Yet he was determined to write. In 1921, while living in a small flat, he started work on his three Dublin plays: The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, and The Plough and the Stars. O’Casey reached the age of forty-three before The Shadow of a Gunman was finally produced, in April, 1923, but his career as a playwright had finally begun. Juno and the Paycock followed in March, 1924, and The Plough and the Stars, two years later. O’Casey’s Dublin play The Plough and the Stars presented such an unflattering view of the Easter Week uprising of 1916 that the audience rioted when it opened at the Abbey Theatre in February, 1926. Yeats stood up before the mob and defended the play, but O’Casey was embittered by its hostile reception and decided shortly afterward to leave Ireland for voluntary exile in England. In 1926, O’Casey won the Hawthornden Prize for Juno and the Paycock, and he left for London that spring to accept the award in person. There, he hoped to find greater artistic freedom as a playwright. During his first three years in London, he was introduced to George Bernard Shaw, had his portrait painted by Augustus John, and met the talented and attractive actress Eileen Reynolds (stage name Carey), whom he married on September 23, 1927. They were to enjoy a long and mutually supportive marriage for thirty-seven years, with their three children, Breon, Niall, and Shivaun. Marriage and life in London apparently had a salutary effect on O’Casey’s imagination, for he began to work almost immediately after their marriage on the expressionistic play The Silver Tassie, which marked a clear departure from his earlier work. O’Casey had been attracted to socialism as early as 1911, during the Irish railway strike, but the economic hardships of the 1930’s and the rise of Fascism drove him further to the left, to the point of tacitly accepting communism and serving as a member of the advisory board of the London Daily Worker. He also became increasingly anticlerical in regard to Ireland, viewing the Roman Catholic prelacy as the oppressor of the Irish people. After World War II, O’Casey spoke out vigorously in favor of the Soviet Union. He opposed the arms race and urged nuclear disarmament. In 1954, O’Casey moved with his family from London to the resort town of St. Marychurch, Torquay, in Devon. There, in 1956, the family suffered a deep personal loss when the younger son, Niall, died of leukemia. In his mid-seventies when this misfortune occurred, virtually blind and suffering from constant pain, O’Casey still possessed the strength of character to write a moving tribute to his son, “Under a Greenwood Tree He Died,” and to continue his playwriting. Friends remembered him from these last years as a thin, sharp-faced man with a gay spirit and an enchanting Irish brogue, who was usually dressed in a warm turtleneck sweater and one of the brightly colored caps that his daughter had knit for him. The last decade of O’Casey’s life showed an increasing American interest in his work and brought him numerous awards and honors, most of which he declined, including an

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appointment as Commander of the Order of the British Empire and several honorary doctorates from the Universities of Durham and Exeter and from Trinity College, Dublin. His eightieth birthday was celebrated with much fanfare. After suffering a heart attack, O’Casey died in Torquay on September 18, 1964, at the age of eighty-four. Analysis • In “O’Casey’s Credo,” an essay that appeared in The New York Times and was written in 1958 for the opening of an American production of Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, Sean O’Casey remarked that “the first thing I try to do is to make a play live: live as a part of life, and live in its own right as a work of drama.” This concern with the vitality of his plays marked O’Casey’s craftsmanship as a playwright throughout his career. “Every character, every life,” he continued, “[has] something to say, comic or serious, and to say it well [is] not an easy thing to do.” To express this vitality through his characters’ actions and dialogue was O’Casey’s goal as a dramatist. All of his plays share the blend of comic, serious, and poetic imagination that O’Casey believed should meld in any play worth staging. O’Casey’s three periods • O’Casey’s plays fall into three periods: the early naturalistic tragicomedies, the expressionistic plays of the middle period, and the exuberant, satiric comedies that mark his later work. O’Casey was forty-three years old when his first play, The Shadow of a Gunman, was accepted by the Abbey Theatre. Behind him lay four apprentice plays and more than twenty years of hard experience in Dublin as a laborer, nationalist, and political organizer. He might easily have failed to develop his talent but for the encouragement of Lady Augusta Gregory, Yeats, and Lennox Robinson, who read his early scripts and urged him to continue writing. O’Casey was drawn to the theater as a social medium—as the best way for him to express the impact on Dublin’s poor of Ireland’s struggle for independence. O’Casey’s first play, The Shadow of a Gunman, opened at the Abbey Theatre in April, 1923, and ran for only a few performances, but its modest success encouraged O’Casey to submit Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars within the next three years. O’Casey had lived through the bitter period when Ireland was torn first by insurrection and later by the bloody struggle between the Irish Republican Army and the notorious Black and Tans. In these plays, his Dublin trilogy, he expresses disillusionment and bitterness about the way in which the Irish struggle for independence degenerated into fratricidal bloodshed. Together, these plays present a chronicle history of the Irish conflict between 1916 and 1921. Naturalistic in style and approach, they are noted, as critics have remarked, for their tragicomic tone, their vivid depictions of Dublin tenement dwellers, and their lively and colorful speech. The second period of O’Casey’s playwriting career began after he left Dublin for London in 1926. Up to this point, he had been an Irish playwright writing for a national theater, but the response to The Plough and the Stars, which provoked a riot at the Abbey Theatre when it opened, may have led him to recognize the limitations of conventional dramatic realism. Seeking ways to expand his artistic vision, O’Casey turned to the expressionistic mode in his next play, The Silver Tassie. Inspired by a London coal vendor’s song, this ambitious play about World War I incorporates songs, chants, ritualistic scenes, allegorized characters, and stylized sets. The play’s action alternates between Dublin and the front as O’Casey depicts the cost of war for all the young men who departed as heroes and returned as cripples and invalids. Like John Millington Synge before him, O’Casey opened new possibilities for Irish theater, but unfortunately, the Abbey Theatre was unwilling to accept his stylistic in-

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novations. When O’Casey submitted The Silver Tassie to the Abbey Theatre in 1928, Yeats rejected it with a sharply worded reply that initiated a bitter exchange; the two were finally reconciled in 1935. Yeats attacked the play for its alleged introduction of propaganda into the theater, for, despite his own experiments with Japanese No theater, he was curiously unreceptive to O’Casey’s attempts to move beyond dramatic realism. O’Casey did not aspire to a “pure” art of theater or cherish a dramatic theory, as did Yeats. Instead, he merely intended to expand the range of tragicomedy using the devices of expressionism. He hoped to use the exuberance of music-hall entertainment—its melodrama, boisterous comedy, burlesque, and farce—to animate serious drama, just as Shakespeare had woven comic interludes into even his most somber tragedies. After the rejection of The Silver Tassie by the Abbey Theatre, O’Casey turned to a London producer to stage the play. Henceforth, he was to be a playwright without a permanent theater, often forced to publish his plays before they were staged and to depend on commercial productions of varying quality. Though The Silver Tassie enjoyed only a mixed success, O’Casey was committed to expressionism as an artistic direction, and his plays during the next decade show the gradual development of this style. The 1930’s were a period of diversity for O’Casey. Besides writing several one-act plays and the full-length morality play Within the Gates, he published drama reviews and short stories and began his six-volume autobiography. In his drama reviews and criticism, O’Casey defended other contemporary, experimental playwrights and called for the use of a wider range of theatrical techniques and for a drama criticism receptive to these innovations. He attacked the British critics’ taste for the light drawing-room comedies of Noël Coward and the general lack of variety in the London theater. By this time he had also become a committed left-wing thinker who actively sympathized with communist causes. His political ideology is evident in two plays of this period, The Star Turns Red and Oak Leaves and Lavender. Unfortunately, art and politics did not mix well for O’Casey, and these are largely inferior works. Perhaps O’Casey came to realize the limits of ideological drama, or he may simply have grown tired of the war theme, for in the most successful plays of his middle period, he returned to an Irish setting, combining expressionistic techniques with traditional Irish characters, scenes, songs, and material. Also written during the war years, Purple Dust and Red Roses for Me show the refinement of expressionistic techniques that O’Casey had introduced in The Silver Tassie almost fifteen years earlier. These two plays demonstrate the range and quality of O’Casey’s mature lyric imagination as he animates his stage with the song, pageantry, and spectacle of the Elizabethan theater. As he later observed about his plays, “Like [ James] Joyce, it is only through an Irish scene that my imagination can weave a way.” The third period of O’Casey’s career reflects a further enhancement of his artistic vision through a series of exuberant comic fantasies dramatizing the conflict between the affirmative and repressive forces in Irish culture. Here, he sharpened his critique of the provincialism, clericalism, materialism, and restrictive religious morality that he perceived in modern Irish life. Starting with Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, which O’Casey regarded as his favorite, and continuing with The Bishop’s Bonfire, The Drums of Father Ned, and Behind the Green Curtains, the plays of this period mark the height of his mature achievement. In these late plays, O’Casey perfected his distinctive blend of broad comedy, farce, song, fantasy, dance, satire, and melodrama. As his favorite dramatists, William Shakespeare and Dion Boucicault, had done before him, O’Casey made his plays infinitely richer and more varied than conventional realistic drama. His expres-

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sionism became a medium for his lyricism and gaiety of spirit. This determination to broaden the range of contemporary theater perhaps marks O’Casey’s most distinctive contribution to the modern stage. In his long and productive career, O’Casey reanimated the Anglo-Irish theater with a blend of tragicomedy, fantasy, and farce that drew from Elizabethan drama, the music hall, and expressionism to create a vibrant and innovative form of dramatic theater. Though his plays have been criticized for lacking a “pure” dramatic form, his vigorous mixture of theatrical elements has stood in marked contrast to other trends in contemporary theater through its sheer power of entertainment and affirmation. O’Casey had the creative power and vision to transcend the limitations of dramatic theory. His genius was for theatrical vitality rather than pure dramatic art. The Shadow of a Gunman • O’Casey’s first play to be accepted by the Abbey Theatre, The Shadow of a Gunman, is a two-act tragicomedy set in a Dublin tenement during the May, 1920, struggle between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the British Black and Tans. Two hapless young Irishmen, Seumas Shields (a Catholic peddler) and Donal Davoren (a poet manqué) are drawn into the guerrilla warfare when other residents mistake them for IRA fighters and a friend accidentally leaves a bag of terrorist bombs in their rooms. Davoren, the would-be poet, enjoys the hero-worship of his neighbors and the affection of young Minnie Powell, while he writes poor imitations of Percy Bysshe Shelley and pretends to be an insurgent. O’Casey uses the contrast between the self-deceiving appearance and the reality of the two men to debunk romantic myths of Irish heroism and valor. Shields and Davoren are both antiheroes, ordinary men who instinctively shun violence and try to live the semblance of normal lives amid the conflict. This antiheroic theme is the source of both comedy and pathos, for while Shields and Davoren act as cowards, Minnie behaves heroically. In act 2, when British soldiers arrive to search the apartments for snipers or weapons, she volunteers to hide the bag of bombs in her room and is discovered and captured. Sacrificing herself for a sham ideal, she is shot while trying to escape from the British, as Shields and Davoren, who form “the shadow of a gunman,” cower in their rooms, terrified of the gunfire. Juno and the Paycock • Juno and the Paycock is set in 1922 during the period of continued civil war after the Irish Free State had been established. The scene is once again a Dublin tenement, and the play depicts the misfortunes of the Boyle family, impoverished Dubliners temporarily lifted out of their squalor by a spurious legacy, which they quickly squander. This three-act tragicomedy parallels domestic and civil chaos; the Boyles struggle against the disintegration of their family, while outside the provisional Irish Republican Army continues its resistance against the Dublin government. “Captain” Jack Boyle and “Joxer” Daley are among O’Casey’s most memorable characters. The Captain struts from apartment to pub, accompanied by the ingratiating Joxer, embellishing on his past adventures, complaining about his hard luck, and deftly avoiding responsibility, while his wife, Juno, struggles both to work and to keep house. As the play progresses, their crippled son, Johnny, becomes an IRA informer, and their daughter, Mary, falls in love with the young lawyer who brings the family news of their supposed inheritance. Despite these misfortunes, the play generates rich humor from the garrulous, irresponsible behavior of the Captain and Joxer, who belong to a long tradition of the stage Irishman and the braggart soldier. Once their inheritance is discovered to be a sham, the family’s fortunes swiftly disintegrate, as their furniture is repossessed, Johnny is shot by the IRA, and Mary is left pregnant and de-

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serted by her lover. By the end of the play, bitter and defeated, Juno and Mary mourn Johnny’s death, while the Captain and Joxer stagger in, drunk and lugubrious, to lament “the terrible state o’ chassis” of the world. The Plough and the Stars • The title for O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars is taken from the original flag of the Irish Citizen Army, with its working-class symbols, but the focus is once again the folly and futility of war. This four-act tragicomedy is set before and during the Easter, 1916, uprising in Dublin and dramatizes the mixed motives of idealism, vanity, and folly that inspired Irish nationalism. The action in the play alternates between a Dublin boardinghouse and the streets and pubs of the city. It dramatizes the trauma of war in separating a young couple, Jack and Nora Clitheroe, recently married. When the call for the uprising takes place, Jack hurries to join his compatriots, while Nora desperately tries to prevent him from leaving and then wanders through the strife-torn city in search of him. After the battle, the city is filled with looters, and O’Casey creates some memorable scenes of rioters fighting over their plunder. The various boarders at the Clitheroes’s boardinghouse represent differing attitudes toward the insurrection, from patriotism to scorn. By the end of the play, Dublin is in flames and Jack has died heroically, although Nora, who has lost her baby, cannot be told. Her neighbor, the Unionist Bessie Burgess, is fatally shot by the British while nursing Nora, and the play ends with British soldiers drinking tea in the rooms they have just ransacked. The Silver Tassie • In style and technique, The Silver Tassie marks a clear departure from O’Casey’s earlier plays. Though he retains the tragicomic mode, he turns from a realistic to an expressionistic mode to convey the horrors of modern warfare. Symbols and abstractions of war bode large in this play, particularly in act 2, as O’Casey attempts to move his art beyond dramatic realism to a more poetic theater. The protagonist, Harry Heegan, leaves for the front in act 1 after he has won the Silver Tassie, or victory cup, for his Avondale Football Club. He departs as a hero, victorious and in love with Jessie Taite, and returns a crippled, embittered veteran, having lost his youth, vitality, and love. Act 2 invokes the carnage of the front through chant and ritual; an allegorical figure, the Croucher, dominates the action, while Harry is wounded in battle. Act 3 shifts to the army hospital during Harry’s recuperation from his injuries, and act 4 brings him back to a dance at the Avondale Football Club. Now a wheelchair invalid, and having lost Jessie to his friend Barney, he drinks the bitter cup of loss and smashes the Silver Tassie on the floor. The dramatic action is quite simple, but O’Casey’s expressionistic treatment makes this a powerful and compelling play. Purple Dust • After a period of unsuccessful propaganda plays, O’Casey’s next significant play was Purple Dust. He called the play a “wayward comedy,” though perhaps it is closer in form to a rollicking farce—a humorous confrontation between the English and the Irish national characters reminiscent of George Bernard Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island (pr. 1904, pb. 1907). The play is set in the Irish countryside, where two wealthy English dupes, Cyril Poges and Basil Stokes, try to restore a dilapidated Tudor mansion in Clune na Geera. O’Casey’s “stage Englishmen” are thwarted by their bungling mismanagement and by the unpredictable Irish weather. By the end of the play, their young Irish mistresses have run off with two Irish workmen and the mansion is about to be destroyed by a flood. Once again, the English are defeated in their attempt to dominate Ireland economically, and, as the title suggests, the pair are

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left in the ruins of their romantic and extravagant obsession with the “purple dust” of Tudor Ireland. Red Roses for Me • The most autobiographical of O’Casey’s plays, Red Roses for Me, presents a romantic, nostalgic evocation of his early manhood in Dublin. The protagonist, Ayamonn Breydon, is a young Protestant railway worker who helps organize a strike in the Dublin yards to win a small wage increase. Ayamonn is in love with a timid Catholic girl, Sheila Moorneen, who, along with Ayamonn’s mother, begs him to give up the strike, but Ayamonn is determined that the strike will occur, and he is killed in the labor violence that follows. Before his death, however, he enjoys a moment of ecstatic vision, as, from a bridge across the Liffey, he envisions Dublin transfigured from its drab dullness to a golden radiance. This magnificent scene and the rich language of the play save it from becoming a mere propaganda piece for the cause of Labour. Cock-a-Doodle Dandy • O’Casey often remarked that he considered Cock-a-Doodle Dandy his best play, although it is by no means the easiest to produce. Reminiscent of the fantastic comedies of Aristophanes, this play features a life-size apocalyptic Cock who comes to banish religious bigotry and puritanism from the small Irish village of Nyadnanave, inciting a series of magical and mysterious events. The village priest and older men are sure the Cock represents some malign spirit, though the young women, especially, are attracted to it. O’Casey himself commented that “the Cock is the joyful, active spirit of life as it weaves a way through the Irish scene.” In three long scenes, the play presents a parable of the Irish spirit in conflict, torn between the powers of affirmation and negation, as the puritanical Father Domineer musters the village forces of superstition, ignorance, and fear to suppress dance and merriment and, ultimately, to banish the most attractive young women from the region. Unfortunately, the enchantment of the Cock does not prevail in this play, although O’Casey implies that the spirit of human joy is irrepressible. The Bishop’s Bonfire • O’Casey continues his anticlerical theme in The Bishop’s Bonfire, a satirical farce in which Bishop Bill Mullarky’s visit to his hometown is marked by a ritual book-burning of objectionable literature. The forces of piety and respectability are once more in control, as Councillor Reiligan, the richest man in the village, prepares his house to welcome the bishop, while both the upper and lower classes celebrate the homecoming in their own ways. The pompous Reiligan also interferes with his daughters’ happiness by preventing them from marrying the men they love because he thinks these men are not respectable enough. Much of the play is farcical or melodramatic, particularly the death scene at the end of the play, in which Fooraun Reiligan is shot by her suitor, Manus Moanroe, when she discovers that he is stealing church funds from her house. Her suicide note absolves him, however, as the sight of burning books welcomes the bishop home. The Drums of Father Ned • O’Casey’s continuing satire of Irish morality irritated many of his compatriots, and the controversy surrounding his next play, The Drums of Father Ned, seems like a parody of the play itself in a strange instance of life imitating art. Set in the village of Doonavale during the Tostal, or national arts festival, the play depicts the healing of an old feud between two prosperous families, the Binningtons and the McGilligans, when their son and daughter fall in love during play rehearsals. A short “Prerumble,” or one-act prelude, reenacts the feud between Alderman Binning-

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ton and Councillor McGilligan, enemies since the Irish Civil War, who will talk with each other only about business matters. Through the evocative power of the “drums” of Father Ned, a life-affirming country priest, the families are reconciled, and joy and love of life are restored to the village of Doonavale during the Tostal celebration. Ironically, this seemingly innocuous comedy was scheduled to be performed at the 1958 Dublin Tostal until it was withdrawn at the behest of the archbishop of Dublin, who refused to celebrate Mass at the festival if works by O’Casey, Joyce, or Samuel Beckett were performed. The spirit of negation prevailed, unfortunately, and the festival continued without the works of three principal Irish artists. Other major works poetry: Songs of the Wren, 1918; More Wren Songs, 1918. nonfiction: The Story of Thomas Ashe, 1918; The Sacrifice of Thomas Ashe, 1918; The Story of the Irish Citizen Army, 1919; The Flying Wasp, 1937; I Knock at the Door, 1939 (autobiography); Pictures in the Hallway, 1942 (autobiography); Drums Under the Windows, 1945 (autobiography); Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, 1949 (autobiography); Rose and Crown, 1952 (autobiography); Sunset and Evening Star, 1954 (autobiography); Mirror in My House, 1956 (2 volumes; reissue of 6 volumes of autobiography above); The Green Crow, 1956; Under a Colored Cap, 1963; Blasts and Benedictions, 1967; The Letters of Sean O’Casey, 1975, 1978 (3 volumes; David Krause, editor). miscellaneous: Windfalls, 1934 (includes essays, plays, poems, and stories); Feathers from the Green Crow: Sean O’Casey, 1905-1925, 1962 (includes essays, plays, poems, and stories); The Sean O’Casey Reader: Plays, Autobiographies, Opinions, 1968 (Brooks Atkinson, editor). Bibliography Ayling, Ronald, and Michael J. Durkan. Sean O’Casey: A Bibliography. London: Macmillan, 1978. This volume is considered to be the standard bibliographic source on O’Casey’s work and the critical reaction to it. Kearney, Colbert. The Glamour of Grammar: Orality and Politics and the Emergence of Sean O’Casey. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. A study of the Irishness of the literary language of O’Casey, especially his early works. Krause, David. Sean O’Casey: The Man and His Work. 2d ed. New York: Macmillan, 1975. An enlarged edition of an earlier and useful scholarly study. Krause examines O’Casey’s life, drama, and experiences in the theatrical world. Mikhail, E. H. Sean O’Casey and His Critics: An Annotated Bibliography. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1985. Mikhail’s bibliography is the finest later survey of available sources on Ireland’s most celebrated playwright. Mitchell, Jack. The Essential O’Casey: A Study of the Twelve Major Plays of Sean O’Casey. New York: International Publishers, 1980. This volume provides a handy summary of O’Casey’s most popular works. O’Connor, Garry. Sean O’Casey: A Life. New York: Atheneum, 1988. The best and most readable biography, especially useful on the playwright’s rise, through self-education and life as a Dublin laborer, to a major role in the 1916 Easter Rebellion and his Abbey Theatre productions. Andrew J. Angyal, updated by Peter C. Holloran

Clifford Odets Clifford Odets

Born: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; July 18, 1906 Died: Los Angeles, California; August 14, 1963 Principal drama • Waiting for Lefty, pr., pb. 1935 (one act); Till the Day I Die, pr., pb. 1935; Awake and Sing!, pr., pb. 1935; Paradise Lost, pr. 1935, pb. 1936; I Can’t Sleep, pr. 1935, pb. 1936; Golden Boy, pr., pb. 1937; Rocket to the Moon, pr. 1938, pb. 1939; Six Plays of Clifford Odets, pb. 1939 (revised as “Waiting for Lefty” and Other Plays, 1993); Night Music, pr., pb. 1940; Clash by Night, pr. 1941, pb. 1942; The Russian People, pr. 1942, pb. 1946 (adaptation of Konstantin Simonov’s play The Russians); The Big Knife, pr., pb. 1949; The Country Girl, pr. 1950, pb. 1951; The Flowering Peach, pr., pb. 1954 Other literary forms • Clifford Odets is also known for his screenplays, which include The General Died at Dawn (1936), an adaptation of Charles G. Booth’s novel; Blockade (1938); None but the Lonely Heart (1944), an adaptation of Richard Llewellyn’s novel; Deadline at Dawn (1946), an adaptation of William Irish’s novel; Humoresque (1946), an adaptation of Fanny Hurst’s story, with Zachary Gold; The Sweet Smell of Success (1957), an adaptation, with Ernest Lehman, of Lehman’s novel; The Story on Page One (1960); and Wild in the Country (1961), an adaptation of J. R. Salamanca’s novel The Lost Country. Achievements • In the spring of 1935, Clifford Odets, a young playwright thitherto unknown, had the heady experience of seeing three of his plays produced in New York. Overnight, he was hailed as the rising star of American drama. Waiting for Lefty, a timely tour de force dealing specifically with the strike of New York taxicab drivers but more broadly with the stressful socioeconomic situation in which many working people found themselves during the Great Depression, was a pioneering effort in proletarian drama that made its point by presenting six vignettes around a controlling theme and by involving the audience directly in the play’s action—it is the audience that gives the strike call in the play’s dramatically intense ending. By March, 1935, the play had been brought to Broadway to play as part of a double bill with Till the Day I Die, written quickly as an accompaniment to it. By July, 1935, Waiting for Lefty had been performed in thirty cities across the United States. On February 19, 1935, the Group Theatre brought Awake and Sing! to Broadway some weeks after Waiting for Lefty had first gained its widespread popular acclaim, and this warm play of middle-class Jewish family life clearly established its author as a significant and effective playwright. If ever a dramatist were right for his time, the young Odets was right for the 1930’s. A nonconformist with a strong sense of outrage at social injustice, Odets drifted into various acting and radio jobs after he dropped out of high school at age seventeen. During this period, Odets learned a great deal about the struggle to survive and about theater. It was his association with the Group Theatre that gave Odets an identity, a satisfying surrogate family, and the motivation that he had until then been lacking. The Group Theatre, an outgrowth of the Depression, was to become the compelling force in the spirit and structure of Odets’s best work, the plays from Waiting for Lefty through 630

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Paradise Lost, excluding only the somewhat inconsequential Till the Day I Die. His plays reflected the philosophy of the Group Theatre that there should be no stars; in these early plays, Odets discovered and experimented with the theme of nonfulfillment, which was to be the controlling theme of most of his writing. The Depression gave Odets a strong subject, and when it ended, he had difficulty finding subjects about which he could write with the force and conviction of his early work. The Odets who could convincingly argue the case of young lovers unable to marry because of the economic pressures of the Depression was a much less persuasive social protester when, more than a decade later, in The Big Knife, he attacked Hollywood’s exploitation of Charlie Castle, an actor who had a fourteen-year contract for four million dollars. The social conditions out of which Odets’s best artistic achievement grew had largely ceased to exist by 1940, and he was never able to find another theme with which he could identify so fully or in quite the same way as he had with the themes that the Depression provided him. While his last three plays are dramatically sound and compelling, Odets was always forced to work in his own enormous shadow, and his public demanded more of him than he could deliver in his later years. Biography • Clifford Odets was born in Philadelphia to a twenty-year-old Lithuanian immigrant, Louis J. Odets, and his nineteen-year-old wife, Pearl Geisinger Odets, who had come to the United States from Romania, often called “Austria” by the Geisingers. Odets was the first of three children, and he was closer in many ways to his Aunt Esther and her husband than he was to his sickly, chronically depressed mother and somewhat combative father. “Tante Esther,” as he called her, had been just enough older than her sister Pearl when they arrived in the United States that she remembered Yiddish and was able to speak it. Her husband, Israel Rossman, read Yiddish newspapers, and in the Rossman household, the young Odets was exposed to cadences of language that were absent from his parents’ home and that he was to use effectively in dialogue throughout his career. Indeed, Odets was more successful than any playwright of his time in capturing the speech cadences and intonations of Jewish Americans. Odets’s father rose quickly to middle-class status. By the early 1920’s, Louis Odets was owner of a print shop in the Bronx. As the fortunes of the family improved, however, Odets began to feel spiritually alienated from the bourgeois values of his parents. He was moving gradually into what would be his vocation by affiliating himself with such theatrical groups as the Drawing-Room Players, Harry Kemp’s Poets’ Theatre, the Mae Desmond Stock Company, and, for a short time in 1929, the Theatre Guild. It was not until 1931, however, that he found his spiritual home in the newly formed Group Theatre. His writing was to be shaped by the philosophy of the Group Theatre, in which, as Harold Clurman wrote in The Fervent Years, “there were to be no stars . . . not for the negative purpose of avoiding distinction, but because all distinction . . . was to be embodied in the production as a whole.” Odets’s plays, reflecting this philosophy, generally contain no starring roles, but rather six or eight substantial roles of essentially equal importance. With his meteoric rise to fame in 1935, Odets’s commitment to the Group Theatre grew, and as the group faced financial difficulties, Odets reluctantly became a Hollywood screenwriter, primarily to earn enough money to keep it from financial collapse. Some argue that Odets compromised his talent by writing for the screen, that he was never again able to write with the force and the conviction that he had demonstrated before “selling out” to Hollywood. Although it is evident that he never again wrote as

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well as he had in the 1930’s, it is overly simplistic to attribute Odets’s artistic decline to any single causal factor. The times in which he lived and crucial events in his own life, including his 1937 marriage to and subsequent divorce in 1941 from Austrian film star Luise Rainer, both contributed to Odets’s artistic decline in the early 1940’s. Odets’s middle range of plays–Rocket to the Moon, Night Music, and Clash by Night— deal largely with questions of love, personal isolation, and nonfulfillment. None reaches the artistic level of the earlier plays. In the seven-year hiatus between Clash by Night and the 1949 production of The Big Knife, Odets produced three screenplays and an adaptation of Konstantin Simonov’s The Russians, a propaganda piece. Odets was unable to recapture in his later plays the freshness and the authentic social anger of his early plays. When he was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952, Odets admitted to having been a member of the Communist Party “from toward the end of 1934 to the middle of 1935, covering anywhere from six to eight months.” Never a very convinced party member, Odets favored having a third major political party in the United States but was quickly disenchanted with the rigidity of the Communist Party and dismissed it as a reasonable vehicle for dealing with the social problems that perplexed him. Odets’s last stage play, The Flowering Peach, reflects its author’s newly found interest in the biblical heritage of the Jewish people. A redaction of the Noah story, The Flowering Peach is warm and sensitive, reminiscent in its family orientation of Awake and Sing! It is a play of resignation rather than of revolution. In the last decade of his life, Odets produced little, although in the last year of his life he was working on an ambitious project to write four of the thirteen scripts for The Richard Boone Show, a dramatic television series. Odets had completed three of the four scripts he was to write before he succumbed to cancer in Los Angeles on August 14, 1963. The year after Odets’s death, the musical version of Golden Boy, on which he had been working with William Gibson, reached Broadway. Analysis • In an interview with Arthur Wagner conducted two years before Clifford Odets’s death but not published in Harper’s Magazine until September of 1966, Odets told Wagner, “The question is really not one of knowing how to write so much as knowing how to connect with yourself so that the writing is, so to speak, born affiliated with yourself.” When he was dealing with the pressing social problems of the 1930’s, which were times of great national pain that spilled over into the lives of individuals and into the conduct of families, Odets was connecting with himself. He was writing from deep personal conviction intensified by moral outrage at a society that could do no better for its members than to allow the economic and social dissolution that the Depression brought. Waiting for Lefty • Economic and social determinism is significantly present in all of Odets’s major plays, and Waiting for Lefty is no exception. Despite its brevity, it makes eloquent statements on a broad range of topics, ranging from family life to antiSemitism to collective bargaining to the ecological irresponsibility of capitalist producers of poison gas. The overwhelming question posed by the play is whether workers should have control over their own destinies, a question that recurs in Odets’s later plays. Although the last curtain leaves no doubt about the answer Odets proposes, it is clear that the social and economic pressure under which his characters are laboring will not magically disappear.

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As often happens with social drama, Waiting for Lefty, which Brooks Atkinson called “fiercely dramatic in the theater,” has become, as Michael Mendelsohn wrote, “as dead as last year’s newspaper.” This earliest of Odets’s plays, an agitprop piece written in great haste to be presented at workers’ meetings, was to catapult its author into public recognition and to offer him the opportunity to become a successful Broadway playwright. Waiting for Lefty was intended to be a play about “the stormbirds of the working class”; the play is more accurately described as being about “declassed members of the middle class,” as John Howard Lawson contends. The principals in the play are from various walks of life. They have two things in common: They are taxicab drivers, and they earn their living in this way because the Depression has made it impossible for them to follow other pursuits. The drivers and those close to them are examples of men with thwarted ambitions and broken dreams; external economic forces are determining their lives. They meet to consider whether they should strike, and as the strike is discussed, various drivers tell their stories in the several vignettes of which the play is composed. Mendelsohn rightly perceived that the play succeeds dramatically because of its “interplay between personal lives and collective action.” Odets was himself middle-class, his audiences were middle-class, and the play is essentially middle-class, despite Odets’s polemics to the contrary. This accounts for the play’s initial success with its audiences. A middle-class audience could feel empathy with middle-class protagonists who had been brought to the level of the working class by the Depression. Till the Day I Die • Waiting for Lefty, which plays in less than an hour, was too short to be taken to Broadway as an evening’s entertainment. The play and its writer were in great demand with all sorts of political groups, and the publicity generated by the play made producers eager to bring it to Broadway, where Awake and Sing! had just opened. In order to round out an evening of theater, Odets wrote Till the Day I Die, one of the early anti-Nazi plays to appear on Broadway. The play, which focuses on the situation of communists in Adolf Hitler’s Germany, is somewhat trivial, although in it one can recognize the beginning of themes that Odets was to develop later. For example, the protagonist, Ernst Tausig, is brought in for questioning by the storm troopers, who smash his right hand with a rifle butt. This leads eventually to amputation, a particularly difficult outcome for Ernst, who is a violinist. (Similarly, in Golden Boy, Joe Bonaparte is a promising violinist, but he destroys his hands by becoming a prizewinning boxer, led into this activity by economic necessity rather than by choice.) Ernst Tausig commits suicide, finally, and if any ray of hope is offered, it is a questionable one: Ernst’s mistress, Tilly, is pregnant and presumably will produce a child who will carry on. What this child is likely to become in Hitler’s Germany is doubtful. Till the Day I Die was dashed off in five days, and the play is less than convincing. As a curtain opener for Waiting for Lefty, it served its commercial purposes at the expense of artistic integrity; its value is historical rather than artistic. Awake and Sing! • The backdrop of the Depression pervades Awake and Sing! Those who expected another play with the political fervor and intense anger of Waiting for Lefty found instead that Awake and Sing! was an accurate view of Jewish family life and of the effect of the Depression on three generations of the Berger family, all living under one roof. The play focuses primarily on the two members of the youngest generation, Ralph and Hennie. Both are thwarted because of the economic pressures under which they live. Hennie is trapped in a marriage contrived by her mother, who cannot

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bear the thought of her daughter mothering an illegitimate child. Her brother, Ralph, the idealist, can proclaim, “We don’t want life printed on dollar bills,” but his whole existence is so economically determined that he has little control over his life. The grandfather, Jacob, also an idealist, complains, “This is a house? Marx said it—abolish such families.” Jacob commits suicide in the end, leaving to Ralph the small legacy that his insurance policy will provide: a slender but unconvincing thread of hope. Bessie Berger, the mother of the household, lives in fear that her family will collapse and her home be taken away: “They threw out a family on Dawson Street today. All the furniture on the sidewalk. A fine old woman with gray hair.” Ever concerned with appearances, Bessie proclaims ingenuously, “I like my house to look respectable,” and acts to keep it that way no matter what deceptions she must engage in to maintain the appearance. Odets is at his best in Awake and Sing! He is close to his blood ties: He knows his characters, and the play exudes authenticity. Paradise Lost • Speaking of Awake and Sing!, Odets said that his “interest was not in the presentation of an individual’s problems, but in those of a whole class.” One must bear this statement in mind when approaching Paradise Lost, in which the trials visited on the Gordon family are so numerous and so close together in time that they put one in mind of the most melodramatic of soap operas. In this play, which, like Awake and Sing!, is Chekhovian in its characterization and structure, Odets deals with an uppermiddle-class family caught in the grip of the Depression. As the threat of economic annihilation closes in on the Gordons, Leo, the father, loses his business, largely through the deception of an unscrupulous partner. One of his sons, Julie, is dying of encephalitis. The other son, Ben, a former Olympic runner, is felled by a policeman’s bullets in a chase following a robbery he committed in order to get money for his wife and family. Leo’s daughter, Pearl, frustrated in her musical and personal ambitions, becomes a virtual recluse. Ultimately, the family is evicted when Leo’s business plunges into bankruptcy. Odets considered Paradise Lost his most profound play. Most of the critics did not agree, with even such perceptive commentators as Joseph Wood Krutch suggesting that the play was a mere burlesque of Awake and Sing! Few could see through the melodrama and sentimentality of Paradise Lost to what Odets was struggling to communicate. Harold Clurman, writing in his introduction to the published version of the play, contended quite correctly that it is about middle-class people who have the “bewildering perception that everything [they intimately believe] is being denied by the actual conditions of contemporary society.” Metaphorically, the play, like Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing!, is about an entire class of people who are being wiped out by the Depression. The Bergers represent the lower range of this class; the Gordons, the upper range. The middle class, upper or lower, is being dragged down by economic conditions over which they have no control. As in most of his plays, Odets wrote in Paradise Lost about blocked aspirations. The theme of nonfulfillment controls the play, whose only shred of hope comes in Leo’s final lengthy oration, which, in the face of such encompassing despair, is somewhat out of place and unconvincing. The play, nevertheless, has strong vignettes, the best of which are found in the portrayal of Sam Katz, Leo’s dishonest business partner. Sam, sexually impotent, blames his long-suffering wife for their childlessness. Sam’s impotence can be taken to represent a general lack of the strength and will that might enable him to live as he desires. His wife-mother, Bertha, endures his taunts and his humiliation, comforting him at the end and calling him “a good boy.” In Sam and Bertha, Odets was beginning to develop

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the characters who emerged more fully developed as Ben and Belle in Rocket to the Moon and who reappeared in a somewhat different form in The Country Girl. His concern with a weak man in a childless marriage to a woman whose maternal feelings are directed at her spouse pervades these three plays. Golden Boy • In Golden Boy, Joe Bonaparte’s artistic nature and his desire to be a concert violinist are at odds with the economic realities of his life. Bonaparte goes into boxing to make money, and in so doing, he ruins his sensitive hands and destroys any possibility that he might ultimately achieve his artistic goal. On a metaphoric level, Odets is suggesting quite cynically a philosophy that Moe Axelrod espoused in Awake and Sing!: “One thing to get another.” Life kills the dreamer, the artist, in the same way that Odets’s father had done everything in his power to make his son practical, to kill the dreamer in him. Harold Clurman called Golden Boy Odets’s most subjective play. Odets held the play in some contempt, claiming to have written the play to be a hit in order to keep the Group Theatre together. Golden Boy, however, shows commendable control and artistic maturation. If one can overcome the early incongruity of a boxer who is also a sensitive violinist, the rest of the play is plausible and well made. Joe Bonaparte, the “golden boy” of the play’s title, falls victim to what Gerald Weales called “the disintegration brought on by success.” Joe makes the difficult decision to abandon his musical career in order to pursue a career in championship boxing. Ironically, he wins the championship fight but, in so doing, kills his opponent and forecloses all hope of returning to his music. Joe grows increasingly alienated from his society as he realizes that he has sold out. His trainer cautions him, “Your heart ain’t in fighting . . . your hate is.” Joe changes in the course of the play from a youth who is sensitive about being cross-eyed to a necessarily hardened figure: Sensitivity, an asset for a musician, is a liability for a boxer. Ultimately, Joe becomes a piece of property (this theme recurs forcefully in The Big Knife). Joe gets his Duesenberg, a clear and visible symbol of economic success, but he dies when the car crashes, a conclusion with a dramatic impact not unlike that left on audiences who learn at the end of Waiting for Lefty that Lefty has been found shot to death in an alley. Whereas the news of Lefty’s death forces the taxicab drivers to rise to action, the news of Joe Bonaparte’s death leaves audiences with a dull, pervasive ache for the human condition. Golden Boy was Odets’s first drama to underplay the Yiddish-English dialect of his earlier work. In this departure, one sees a playwright trying to broaden his range, trying to reduce his dependence on his Jewish heritage. Rocket to the Moon, Night Music, and Clash by Night represented a new direction for Odets. The years in which these plays were written were those during which Odets was married to and divorced from Luise Rainer, and the plays themselves are much concerned with questions of love and marriage. Night Music is concerned with young love and the effects of economic uncertainty on it, while the other two are concerned with romantic triangles. Odets is tentative in these plays. His personal concerns have shifted from those of an artist struggling to establish himself and to survive during the Depression to those of someone who is concerned primarily with the tensions that two people experience in a love relationship and in marriage. Rocket to the Moon • Rocket to the Moon is an unfocused drama about the tedious dalliance of a middle-aged dentist with Cleo, his receptionist. Unfortunately, Odets al-

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lowed himself to be sidetracked in this play, concentrating more on Ben Stark, the dentist, than on Cleo, the receptionist, who could have been drawn with sufficient psychological complexity to bring some intensity into the drama. The sensitivity with which Odets portrayed Sam and Bertha Katz in Paradise Lost was not repeated in Rocket to the Moon, although Ben and Belle indisputably resemble Sam and Bertha. This play is at best tawdry and represents an artistic setback for its author. Odets was at this time able neither to distance himself sufficiently from his own problems to practice his profession at its highest level, nor to use his own suffering and confusion to enrich his art. Some of Odets’s remarkable ability to sketch characters is, nevertheless, evident in Rocket to the Moon. Belle’s father, Mr. Prince, is drawn with great skill, and in him one sees a bit of what Odets was beginning to fancy himself to be—someone who had gained material security but who was essentially unloved. When Mr. Prince suggests that Cleo might marry him, she rejects the offer, saying, “Next week I’ll buy myself a dog.” Night Music • The theme of Night Music is homelessness. Steve Takis, the protagonist, is known as “Suitcase Steve” because he always carries a suitcase with him and constantly moves from place to place. He has been sent East on an incredible errand to pick up two apes for a Hollywood film studio and to accompany them back to the West Coast. One of the apes snatches a gold locket from Fay Tucker, the police become involved, and Steve is arrested and then released, his apes being held as security. He approaches Fay with indignation for the trouble she has caused him, and, predictably, the two fall in love. The play’s most sympathetic character, Detective A. L. Rosenberg, helps the couple, but Rosenberg, the symbol of good in a hostile world, is dying of cancer. The play’s didacticism overcomes its warmth and its occasional gentle tenderness. The symbols are heavy-handed, and the interesting themes of personal isolation, homelessness, and loneliness, which had been themes of some prominence in all of Odets’s earlier plays, here seem completely trivial. Clash by Night • Clash by Night was written as Odets’s marriage fell apart and as the Group Theatre was reaching the point of disbanding. Between the time the play opened out of town and the time it opened on Broadway, the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and national attention was on more serious matters than the sordid love triangle around which this play revolves. Clash by Night is about Mae Wilenski and her lackluster husband, Jerry. Mae is bored with her life, and before the end of act 1, she is involved in a love affair with Earl Pfeiffer, a boarder in the Wilenski household. The action plays out quite slowly, each act being interlarded with echoes of Odets’s social fervor; in a subplot, for example, Joe and Peggy have been engaged for two years and are unable to marry because Joe works only three days a week, a situation rather unconvincing to audiences in a society gearing up for war and recruiting every available able-bodied citizen to work in defense jobs. Ultimately, Jerry is led by jealousy to murder Earl, an interesting outcome in this love triangle involving two men and a woman as opposed to the two women-one man triangle in Rocket to the Moon. Whereas Belle takes Ben back, perhaps to nurture him but more likely to torture him for the rest of his days, Jerry must strike out in a manly way and seek vengeance through killing his rival. The Big Knife • A seven-year gap separated Clash by Night from Odets’s next Broadway production, The Big Knife. The play focuses on Hollywood’s exploitation of Char-

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lie Castle, an actor who has just been offered a fourteen-year movie contract worth four million dollars. Charlie, however, does not wish to sign. Like Joe Bonaparte in Golden Boy, he is in danger of becoming merely a piece of property, and Charlie recoils from allowing the studio to own him. The complication is that Charlie was involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident for which he and the studio have permitted his publicity man, Buddy Bliss, to take the rap. The studio now attempts to force Charlie to sign the contract under threat of revealing the real facts of the accident. In a sense, Odets was back to arguing the worker-management conflict with which he first dealt in Waiting for Lefty; the argument against management is somewhat less convincing, however, when management is paying the worker as handsomely as it is here, even though the principle may be similar. The play sheds some light on the false standards of Hollywood society, presenting interesting scenes that spotlight such realities of Hollywood life as the control that gossip columnists have over actors’ lives. Charlie Castle calls free speech “the highest-priced luxury in this country today,” and he attacks the superficiality of Hollywood relationships by saying, “I’ll bet you don’t know why we all wear these beautiful, expensive ties in Hollywood. . . . It’s a military tactic—we hope you won’t notice our faces.” Odets thus gave vent to the resentment that had been growing in him during the decade since he first went to Hollywood as a screenwriter. The Big Knife is tightly structured, and its dramatic intensity is at times superb, but its basic premise is difficult to accept, and Charlie Castle’s suicide at the end is more melodramatic than artistically valid. The Country Girl • The Country Girl followed The Big Knife in 1950, and in it Odets revived some of the controlling ideas of his earlier plays. The protagonist, Frank Elgin, is an aging actor who has fallen on hard times, largely because of his alcoholism, brought about by the accidental death of his young son, for which he blames himself. Frank’s wife, Georgie, is a wife-mother recalling Bertha Katz and Belle Stark. Bernie Dodd, a director, has given Frank one last chance for a comeback. He insists that if Frank begins drinking again, he will dismiss him immediately. Bernie, who first detests Georgie, later is strongly attracted to her, creating a love triangle. This love triangle differs from Odets’s previous ones, however, in that Georgie and Bernie are ironically united in their efforts to rehabilitate Frank. The psychological complexity of the play makes it conceptually stronger than Rocket to the Moon or Clash by Night. In numerous rewrites, the role of Georgie was drastically changed from that of a nagging wife to that of a firm but understanding and supportive marriage partner. The love relationship that grows between Georgie and Bernie is the timeworn love-hate relationship. Frank remains largely oblivious to it until near the end of the last act. In the end, despite lapses along the way, Frank succeeds in acting his part well and in paving the way for the comeback toward which he has been struggling. The role of Frank provides a challenging vehicle for an actor to play a weak, insecure character, a pathological liar who successfully undergoes a difficult rehabilitation. Still, Frank’s triumph at the end, accompanied by Georgie’s decision to stay with him, leaves doubts in the minds of the audience. Throughout the play, Georgie’s relationship to Frank has been based on her providing strength for a weak husband. If Frank has overcome his weakness, one must seriously question whether the relationship will give Georgie what she needs. If he has not overcome his weakness, then they are back exactly where they began. Odets himself viewed The Country Girl as a theater piece and disparaged the play’s artistry, although he was pleased with certain technical aspects of it, especially the much-revised ending.

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The Flowering Peach • In his last play, The Flowering Peach, Odets returned to his blood sources. The family in the play, reminiscent of the Bergers in Awake and Sing!, speaks in the Yiddish-English dialect of Odets’s earlier characters. The Flowering Peach is a version of the Noah story and largely concerns Noah, to whom God appears in a dream, predicting the Flood; Noah’s attempts to build the Ark; and his conflicts with his son, Japheth, who, even when he comes to believe the truth of his father’s dream, refuses to enter the Ark as a protest against a cruel God who would destroy the earth. Japheth finds himself on the Ark only because his father knocks him out and has him carried aboard. Once there, the father-son conflict, the conflict between faith and reason, again erupts. Japheth is convinced that the Ark should have a rudder; his father is equally convinced that God will direct the Ark as He intends. The Flowering Peach is a warm and satisfying play. In it, Odets again explores the family as a unit, and he does so with sensitivity and with a sentimentality that, in this play, is not unbecoming. The dialogue is easy and natural, and tensions are reduced by the inclusion of amusing wisecracks. The Flowering Peach was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the first time that such recognition had come to an Odets play, but the Pulitzer Prize’s advisory board overruled the jurors and gave the prize for the 1954-1955 season to Tennessee Williams for his Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The Flowering Peach, a play of great affirmation, has yet to receive the recognition that many believe it deserves. Odets wrote to Eugene Gross, “Nothing moves me so much as human aspirations blocked, nothing enrages me like waste. I am for use as opposed to abuse.” All of his plays, with the possible exception of The Flowering Peach, have a deep and controlling concern with the question of blocked aspirations, and this persistent concern with a universal human problem gives Odets’s work a lasting value, despite the dated topical themes of many of his plays. Other major works screenplays: The General Died at Dawn, 1936 (adaptation of Charles G. Booth’s novel); Blockade, 1938; None but the Lonely Heart, 1944 (adaptation of Richard Llewellyn’s novel); Deadline at Dawn, 1946 (adaptation of William Irish’s novel); Humoresque, 1946 (with Zachary Gold; adaptation of Fannie Hurst’s story); The Sweet Smell of Success, 1957 (with Ernest Lehman; adaptation of Lehman’s novel); The Story on Page One, 1960 (directed by Odets); Wild in the Country, 1961 (adaptation of J. R. Salamanca’s novel The Lost Country). nonfiction: The Time Is Ripe: The 1940 Journal of Clifford Odets, 1988. Bibliography Brenman-Gibson, Margaret. Clifford Odets: American Playwright; the Years from 19061940. New York: Applause, 2001. This biography of Odets focuses on the earlier part of his career, which many would argue was the better part. Cantor, Hal. Clifford Odets: Playwright-Poet. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2000. Rather than examining Odets from a political or biographical perspective, Cantor concentrates on eleven of his plays, reading closely and identifying common themes. He emphasizes Odets’s poetic style and also notes Odets’s influence on American theater. Bibliography and index. Cooperman, Robert. Clifford Odets: An Annotated Bibliography, 1935-1989. Westport, Conn.: Meckler, 1990. A useful bibliographic essay evaluates the listed entries, which are divided into primary works (plays, screenplays, teleplays, articles, journals, and diaries), critical studies (on individual plays and politics, and on the Group

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Theatre), and information on the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Includes a brief chronology and an index. Demastes, William W. Clifford Odets: A Research and Production Sourcebook. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. The book’s main features are summaries of characters and plots, along with overviews of the critical reception of Odets’s stage and radio plays. Includes a brief chronology, a biographical essay, a bibliography of Odets’s primary works (with unpublished archival sources), an annotated secondary bibliography (1935-1990), a list of major productions, and an index. Miller, Gabriel. Clifford Odets. New York: Continuum, 1989. Critical of the narrow interpretations of Odets as a political playwright of the 1930’s, Miller focuses primarily on the published plays, arranged thematically around several “visions”: Chekhovian, tragic, romantic, melodramatic, and political. The interest centers on both experimentation with form and the evolution of Odets’s “significant thematic and social concerns.” Index. __________, ed. Critical Essays on Clifford Odets. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. This anthology includes ten reviews of Odets’s productions (from Waiting for Lefty to The Flowering Peach), two 1930’s evaluations of Odets, three interviews with Odets dating from the 1950’s and 1960’s, and a collection of essays, most reprinted from earlier books. The introduction provides an evaluative chronological overview of primary and secondary sources. R. Baird Shuman, updated by Elsie Galbreath Haley

Eugene O’Neill Eugene O’Neill

Born: New York, New York; October 16, 1888 Died: Boston, Massachusetts; November 27, 1953 Principal drama • Bound East for Cardiff, wr. 1913-1914, pr. 1916, pb. 1919; Thirst, and Other One-Act Plays, pb. 1914; Chris Christophersen, wr. 1919, pb. 1982 (revised as Anna Christie); Beyond the Horizon, pr., pb. 1920; The Emperor Jones, pr. 1920, pb. 1921; Anna Christie, pr. 1921, pb. 1923; The Hairy Ape, pr., pb. 1922; All God’s Chillun Got Wings, pr., pb. 1924; Complete Works, pb. 1924 (2 volumes); Desire Under the Elms, pr. 1924, pb. 1925; The Great God Brown, pr., pb. 1926; Lazarus Laughed, pb. 1927, pr. 1928; Strange Interlude, pr., pb. 1928; Mourning Becomes Electra, pr., pb. 1931 (includes Homecoming, The Hunted, and The Haunted ); Nine Plays, pb. 1932; Ah, Wilderness!, pr., pb. 1933; Plays, pb. 1941 (3 volumes), pb. 1955 (revised); The Iceman Cometh, pr., pb. 1946; A Moon for the Misbegotten, pr. 1947, pb. 1952; Long Day’s Journey into Night, pr., pb. 1956; Later Plays, pb. 1967; The Calms of Capricorn, pb. 1981 (with Donald Gallup); The Complete Plays, pb. 1988 (3 volumes); Ten “Lost” Plays, pb. 1995; Early Plays, pb. 2001 Other literary forms • Although primarily known for his plays, Eugene O’Neill also wrote poetry and a large amount of correspondence, collected in several volumes and published posthumously. Among these are “The Theatre We Worked For”: The Letters of Eugene O’Neill to Kenneth MacGowan (1982), edited by Jackson R. Bryer and Ruth M. Alvarez and containing an introductory essay by Travis Bogard; “Love and Admiration and Respect”: The O’Neill-Commins Correspondence (1986), edited by Dorothy Commins; and “As Ever, Gene”: The Letters of Eugene O’Neill to George Jean Nathan (1987), edited by Nancy L. Roberts and Arthur W. Roberts. O’Neill’s poems were published in Poems, 1912-1944 (1979) and were edited by Donald Gallup. His unpublished or unfamiliar writings were published in The Unknown O’Neill (1988), edited by Travis Bogard. Achievements • Eugene O’Neill has been called, rightly, the father of modern American drama, not only because he was the first major American playwright but also because of the influence of his work on the development of American theater and on other dramatists. In addition to achieving both popular success and critical acclaim in the United States, O’Neill has achieved an international reputation. Produced throughout the world, his plays are the subject of countless critical books and articles. In many of his plays, O’Neill employed traditional themes such as the quest, while in others he treated subjects that had gone largely unexamined on the American stage, particularly subjects concerning human psychology. Although many of O’Neill’s works are now universally acclaimed, initial critical reaction to the emotional content of some of these plays was mixed. In addition to breaking new ground in theme and subject matter, O’Neill was innovative in his use of technical elements of the theater. He experimented with such devices as masks, “asides,” and even the stage itself as vehicles to further themes. Moreover, in an effort to achieve for the drama the broad temporal spectrum of the novel, he experimented with dramatic time, presenting two of his works in trilogies of nine acts each. Although some of O’Neill’s dramatic and theatrical experiments were less well received than others, his 640

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reputation is now secure; his plays continue to be widely produced throughout the world, both on the stage and on film, because they speak to the human experience that is shared by all. Biography • Eugene Gladstone O’Neill’s parents were James O’Neill, an actor imprisoned by the material success of his role as the Count of Monte Cristo, and Ellen Quinlan O’Neill, a romantic and idealistic woman similarly trapped for much of her life by an addiction to morphine. The complex psychologies of O’Neill’s parents and his brother, and the relationships among all the family members, figure significantly as subjects of many of O’Neill’s best plays, particularly Long Day’s Journey into Night. Educated in Roman Catholic schools, O’Neill entered Princeton University in 1906 but left before a year was over. His travels in 1910 and 1911 to South America and England provided background for his early plays of the sea, several of which he wrote during a six-month hospitalization for tuberculosis in 1912. The following year, he participated in George Pierce Baker’s Workshop 47 at Harvard University, where he formally studied playwriting. O’Neill was married three times: to Kathleen Jenkins in 1909, to Agnes Boulton in 1918, and to Carlotta Monterey in 1929. He had three children: Eugene, Jr., who was born to the first marriage and who committed suicide in 1950; and Shane and Oona, who were born to the second marriage. O’Neill won four Pulitzer Prizes for his plays: in 1920 for Beyond the Horizon, in 1922 for Anna Christie, in 1928 for Strange Interlude, and in 1957 for Long Day’s Journey into Night. In 1936, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Although ill for the last seventeen years of his life, O’Neill wrote several of his finest plays during that period. Analysis • Eugene O’Neill has often been criticized for his choice of characters, for their aberrant psychologies, and for their emotionalism. Certainly he dealt with emotions, but he did so because he believed that emotions were a better guide than thoughts in the search for truth. The struggles of his characters frequently take place, therefore, within themselves, so that there is little real action performed on the stage. Victories, consequently, are in the mind, not quantifiable. The ephemeral nature of such victories has been, for some critics, insufficient. The popularity of O’Neill’s work, however, continues to grow. His plays have been performed throughout the world and transformed into film and opera because they concern truths of human existence. For O’Neill, life is a tragedy—but human beings have the resources with

(© The Nobel Foundation)

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which to confront it. The dramatic presentation of that struggle was O’Neill’s lifework. The Emperor Jones • Although O’Neill was fortunate in having several of his earliest plays produced, his first real success was The Emperor Jones, produced by the Provincetown Players in 1920. The play was an immense success for the small theater, for O’Neill, and for Charles Gilpin, who performed as America’s first black tragic hero in a role later played by Paul Robeson. Devoted to the final hours in the life of Brutus Jones, a former convict who, in the course of two years, comes to be emperor of an island in the West Indies, O’Neill’s expressionist play won immediate acclaim, both popular and critical. The form of the play is particularly interesting, for it is composed essentially of one act with eight scenes. The six interior monologue scenes take place in the forest and in Jones’s mind and are peopled by the ghosts and phantoms that plague Jones. These six scenes are enveloped by opening and closing scenes that occur outside the forest and that present real characters. The movement of the play is thus a journey from the civilized world into the primitive world of the forest and of the mind, and a journey for Jones to self-knowledge and to death. The play’s expository opening scene reveals that Jones, who arrived on the island two years earlier as a stowaway and who has come to rule the island, has exploited the natives and has enriched himself by manipulation, thievery, and cruel taxation. As a consequence, he has become so hated that the natives have withdrawn into the hills to stage a revolution. Jones believes, however, that he is prepared for all possibilities: Should he need to escape suddenly, he has hidden food and has learned the paths of the forest. He has also removed vast amounts of money from the island to a safe place. As he explains, he has learned from white people to steal big, and he proudly asserts that he makes his own good luck by using his brain. Jones has also created among the islanders a mystique and a mythology for himself; distancing himself completely from the natives, whom he terms “bush niggers” and to whom he feels vastly superior, Jones has propagated the myth that he is magically protected from lead bullets and can be killed only by one of silver. Furthermore, having made for himself a silver bullet that he carries as the sixth in his gun, he has spread the companion tale that he is invulnerable to native assaults because he is the only man big enough to kill himself. Having learned that the natives are rebelling, he congratulates himself on his precautions, boasts about how easy it is to outwit them, and makes his way to the forest through which he must go that night in order to meet the boat that will take him to safety. When, in the second scene, Jones reaches the edge of the forest, the audience begins to see some of O’Neill’s experimental techniques. The edge of the forest, O’Neill tells the audience, is a “wall of darkness dividing the world,” a point at which Jones begins to understand the uselessness of his precautions: He cannot find his store of food, and more important, he is not even sure where he is, exactly. When the little Formless Fears appear, amorphous, black, child-size shapes that, with low sounds of laughter, advance writhingly toward him, he is terrified and fires a shot at them. Jones reveals his thought processes through a continuing monologue, a technique that seems to reflect the influence of August Strindberg on O’Neill. Jones’s monologue, which continues throughout the six forest scenes, reveals at this point his fear at having disclosed his location and his determination to make it through the forest. In addition, he begins to have, within his monologue, a dialogue with himself, a dialogue

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that symbolically suggests a duality within him, a dissociation between mind and body and between outer bravado and inner fear. The steadily increasing beat of the drum, which had begun with his departure from the palace in the first act, reflects Jones’s heightened emotional state and conveys not only the buildup of tension in him but also that in the distant natives. This first forest scene and the five that follow present a series of vignettes that derive both from Jones’s own life and mind and from the racial memory, or collective unconscious. Having first encountered the Formless Fears, he comes next on Jeff, the Pullman porter he killed with a razor in a fight over a crap game and for whose death he went to prison. Both furious and terrified, Jones fires his second bullet into the ghost, who disappears as the drumbeat’s tempo once again increases. When, in the fourth scene, Jones reaches a wide road that he does not recognize, his outer appearance is beginning to deteriorate: His glorious uniform is torn and dirty, and he removes his coat and his spurs for comfort. Castigating himself for his belief in ghosts, he reminds himself that he is civilized, not like “dese ign’rent black niggers heah.” He is nearly paralyzed with fright, however, when he sees another apparition, a chain gang with a guard who forces Jones to join the prisoners. When the guard beats Jones with his whip, Jones, reenacting his actual break from prison, fires his third bullet into the guard’s back. These first three forest scenes, concerned with aspects of Jones’s own life, represent troublesome elements from his individual consciousness. Making him aware of the evil to which he has committed himself, they are important stages in his journey to selfknowledge. Moreover, they indicate, beyond a doubt, the true criminality of his nature. The following scenes, concerned with aspects of his racial memory, present elements that are part of the collective unconscious and thereby reveal some of the cultural forces that have made him what he is. In the fifth scene, in a clearing in the forest, Jones comes on a dead stump that looks like an auction block. His appearance further deteriorating, his pants torn and ragged, he removes his battered shoes; the outer symbols of his exalted position, and of his difference from the natives, are virtually gone. As he sends an agonized prayer to Jesus, admitting his wrongdoing and acknowledging that as emperor he is getting “mighty low,” he is suddenly surrounded by a group of southern aristocrats of the 1850’s who are waiting for a group of slaves to come in. To Jones’s utter horror, the auctioneer compels Jones to stand on the auction block; when he is bought, Jones, suddenly coming to life and resisting this treatment, angrily pulls out his gun and fires at both the auctioneer and his purchaser, using his last two lead bullets, as the drum quickens and the scene fades. The sixth scene goes back to a time preceding the fifth; Jones finds himself in a clearing so overhung by trees that it appears as the hold of a ship. By this time, Jones’s clothes have been so torn that he is wearing only a loincloth. Discovering that he is among two rows of blacks who moan desolately as they sway back and forth, Jones finds himself inadvertently joining in their chorus of despair, crying out even more loudly than they. Having used all his lead bullets, he has nothing with which to dispatch them, since he needs his silver bullet for luck, for self-preservation. Jones is obliged, then, as he was obliged to recommit his crimes, to enter into the racial experience of slavery, to feel the grief and desperation of his ancestors. Unable to disperse this scene, Jones simply walks into the seventh and last of the forest scenes, which takes him to an even earlier time. Coming on an ancient altar by the river, Jones instinctively bows, even as he wonders why he does so. Although he prays for the

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Christian God’s protection, what appears is a witch doctor whose dance and incantations hypnotize Jones and force his participation in an ancient and mysterious ritual. O’Neill’s stage directions indicate that Jones is expected at this point to sacrifice himself to the forces of evil, to the forces that have governed his life and that are now represented by a huge crocodile emerging from the river. Urged onward by the witch doctor and unable to stop himself from moving toward the crocodile, Jones, in a last act of desperate defiance, shoots the crocodile with his last bullet—the silver bullet. The last act at the edge of the forest, an act that serves as an epilogue, is almost anticlimactic, describing how the natives enter the forest to kill the dazed Jones, who has wandered back (full circle) to the spot where he entered. The audience knows, however, that Jones has symbolically killed himself, destroying his evil and his identity with his own silver bullet. It is, moreover, particularly appropriate that the natives shoot Jones with silver bullets, bullets they have made out of melted money. The journey into the forest has been for Jones a journey to death, but it has also been a journey to understanding. He has come not only to understand the evil of his own life but also to destroy it symbolically by destroying the crocodile with the bullet that affirms his identity. In effect, he is obliged to confront his true nature when the structure he has created for himself collapses. He has also come, however, to understand both his membership in his race and his connection with those natives to whom he felt so superior. By being forced to undergo the primitive experiences of his people, he is able to move from individuation into the group, into an awareness of the experiences common to his race. He is able to return, by means of this backward and inward journey, to his essential self, the self he had denied out of greed and egotism. O’Neill in this way presents Jones as both a criminal and a victim, as a man whose own character and personality help to create his fate but whose racial and cultural experiences have also shaped him. Part of the play’s tragedy, though, is that the knowledge Jones gains is insufficient to save his life. Nevertheless, as the trader, Smithers, concludes at the end of the play, the Emperor Jones “died in the ’eighth o’ style, any’ow.” With this play, O’Neill established himself as an important and innovative American playwright. The play is also notable for its lack of autobiographical elements. It is an imaginative creation based on a blend of folktale and psychology that permitted O’Neill to enter the racial memory of another. Desire Under the Elms • A play differing considerably in kind is Desire Under the Elms, first performed by the Provincetown Players in 1924 and perhaps one of O’Neill’s most representative works. It reflects a number of the influences that worked significantly on him, including the Bible and classical mythology. It treats several of his favorite subjects, including the tension-ridden family, antimaterialism, and individuals’ participation in creating their own fate; and although the play was initially received with considerable skepticism and disapproval (it was banned in both Boston and England), its critical reputation and its popular acceptance have steadily increased with time, and it continues to be produced for appreciative contemporary audiences. The play is set on a New England farm in the mid-nineteenth century, a thematically important setting. Just as the New England land is rocky, unyielding, and difficult to manage, so is old Ephraim Cabot, who owns the farm, and so is the Puritan ethos that governs the lives of this patriarch and those around him. Accompanying this symbolism of hardness and coldness in the land and in Ephraim is the emotional symbolism associated with the farmhouse: O’Neill’s set directions specify that the farmhouse

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is flanked by “two enormous elms” that “brood oppressively over the house,” that “appear to protect and at the same time subdue,” and that possess “a sinister maternity in their aspect, a crushing, jealous absorption.” Clearly symbolic of Ephraim’s dead second wife, and typifying both her physical and mental exhaustion and her unavenged spirit, the elms are also symbolic of the restrictive nature of New England farm life. In signifying that restriction, they are symbolic also of Ephraim, who exercises a jealous and unrelentingly selfish control over everything and everyone within his reach. When the play opens, Ephraim is away from the farm on a trip, during which he marries Abbie Putnam, a young widow. By means of the marriage, Ephraim can prove his continuing virility and vigor and, he believes, achieve his paramount desire: to perpetuate his power and his hold over the land. His three grown sons, Simeon and Peter, children of Ephraim’s first wife, and the sensitive Eben, son of Ephraim’s second wife, dislike and distrust their father and recognize that his marriage to Abbie ensures that none of them will satisfy their desire to inherit the farm. One of the French naturalist writers whose work influenced O’Neill was Émile Zola, and this play seems to be particularly evocative of Zola’s La Terre (1887; The Soil, 1888; also as Earth, 1954) in dealing with the human greed for land. This shared desire for land, however, is not the only desire with which the play is concerned. Ephraim, who sees himself as an extension of the Old Testament God, desires to maintain his power forever. Abbie, who marries because of her initial desire for security, comes later to desire love instead, as does Eben, who initially desires revenge on his father for working his mother to death. Although Simeon and Peter also hope for a share in the farm, they are happy to accept Eben’s offer to buy them off, realizing that their expectations, because of their father’s new marriage, will probably go unrealized. The play establishes in the first act the many violent tensions existing between father and son. Blaming his father for the death of his mother, Eben also believes his father is cheating him out of the farm. Moreover, although Eben insists that he is like his mother and denies any similarity to his father and although Ephraim likewise considers his son weak and spineless, it is one of the play’s ironies that father and son are in fact much alike, as indicated symbolically by the fact that both patronize the same local prostitute. More significant, however, both father and son are governed by strong emotions: Both are quick to anger, stubborn, vengeful, proud, and hard, and both are the victims of seething animal passions that are covered by only a thin veneer of civilization. The psychologically normal conflict between any father and son is thus intensified by their temperamental similarities, and when Abbie, the catalyst, appears as the stepmother who is closer in age to son than to father, the stage is indeed set for a depiction of violent emotions that result in great tragedy. Because they both desire the farm, Abbie and Eben initially hate and mistrust each other, but their harsh and cruel behavior toward each other is counterpointed by a growing physical desire between them, a reflection, perhaps, of O’Neill’s interest in the classical myths of Oedipus and Phaedra. O’Neill’s use of a divided set permits the audience to watch this desire growing as they see simultaneously into the bedroom of Eben, as he moves half-unconsciously toward the wall beyond which Abbie stands, and into the bedroom of Ephraim and Abbie, where they continue to hope for the son who will fulfill Ephraim’s desire and ensure Abbie’s security. As the obvious but unspoken passion between Abbie and Eben mounts and the house grows correspondingly cold, Ephraim is driven to find solace in the barn, among the animals, where it is warm—an opportunity that Abbie uses to seduce Eben in the parlor, where the restless spirit of Eben’s mother seems to be concentrated.

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This lovemaking between stepmother and son, teetering as it does on the brink of incest, was, as one might expect, an aspect of the play to which censors objected. Abbie is, after all, Eben’s stepmother, and she uses her “maternal” relationship to Eben as a means of seduction. At the same time that she vows to kiss him “pure,” as if she were his mother, she passionately blurts out that loving him like a mother “hain’t enuf,” and that “it’s got to be that and more.” As O’Neill explains in his stage directions, there is in her “a horribly frank mixture of lust and mother love.” One further motive for Abbie that O’Neill leaves uncertain is her need to produce a son for Ephraim. It is one of the fine ambiguities of the play that viewers are unable to decide whether Abbie seduces Eben out of greed for the land, out of maternal caring, out of physical lust, or out of genuine love for him. Eben is moved by similarly discordant motives, by both a real desire for Abbie and a desire to avenge his mother by taking his father’s woman. He senses his mother’s spirit leaving the house and returning to her grave, finally at peace. Eben indicates his understanding of and his satisfaction with the retributive nature of this act the next morning when he offers his hand to his father, remarking to the uncomprehending Ephraim that they are now “quits.” Yet, despite the deliberate calculation with which this love affair begins, Abbie and Eben come in time genuinely to love each other. What was initially, at least in part, a mutually self-serving and opportunistic seduction results in the first warm human relationship the farm has seen. There is, however, no way for the drama to end happily, even though, at the beginning of the third act, all have attained what they at one time desired: Ephraim has a son to prove his virility, Abbie has earned the farm by providing that son, and Eben has avenged his mother. These desires are, to Abbie and Eben, at least, no longer of prime importance, and the party Ephraim gives to celebrate the birth of “his” son serves as an ironic backdrop to the play’s tragic climax. Ephraim, flushed with liquor and pride at producing a son at seventy-six and oblivious to the knowing sneers of the townspeople, in a brutal physical and emotional confrontation with Eben gloats that Abbie wanted a child only to preempt Eben’s claim to the farm. Believing that Abbie has seduced him only in order to become pregnant and cheat him, Eben turns violently against her, telling her that he hates her and wishes their son dead. The half-crazed Abbie, hysterically wishing to restore the time when Eben loved her and confusedly identifying the child as the cause of Eben’s present hate, smothers the child in its cradle in an appalling inversion of the myth of Medea: Whereas Medea murders her children as an act of revenge against her faithless husband, Abbie murders her child in order to recapture the lost love of Eben. Eben, however, does not respond with love, but with horror and revulsion, and he runs for the sheriff to arrest her. Returning before the sheriff, Eben in a change of heart acknowledges his own guilt and reaffirms his love for Abbie. The play ends with their mutual expression of love as they are taken off by the sheriff, who ironically remarks, with admiration, that “it’s a jim-dandy farm.” The play seems, then, to be unmitigatedly naturalistic and pessimistic as the lovers go off to be hanged and as Ephraim is left alone with his farm. Yet O’Neill poses the possibility of a spiritual victory in the play: Although the desire to possess has dominated their lives, Abbie and Eben are freed of that desire at the end—even though their victory is to be short-lived. It is also possible to see a victory over the forces of evil embodied in Puritanism and in the New England patriarchal society, because, even though Eben reacts initially to his father’s announcement and to the baby’s murder with all the violent self-righteousness one would expect of his father, he comes to transcend this attitude and to acknowledge both his love for Abbie and his own guilt. Al-

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though Abbie and Eben have lost everything in the worldly sense, in finding love and faith in each other they do perhaps escape, however briefly and symbolically, from the brooding, confining New England elms. In this play, O’Neill seems to return to the naturalism that informed his early plays of the sea. His characters are presented as bewildered, struggling beings, blown about like leaves in the gutter, compelled by the external forces of fate, chance, and environment and by the internal workings of their physical nature. It is indeed difficult for these characters to win, but for O’Neill, the salient point is that, in struggling, his characters can transcend their fate. The Iceman Cometh • The critics, who had difficulty with Desire Under the Elms because of its objectionable subject matter, were also troubled by The Iceman Cometh, but for different reasons; many considered the latter play unhealthy, pessimistic, and morbid in its depiction of the wasted lives of the habitués of Harry Hope’s New York saloon, modeled after those in which O’Neill spent considerable time in 1911 and in 1914-1919. A key theme in the play, and a recurring theme in O’Neill’s dramas, is the power and the necessity of illusion to give meaning to life. O’Neill develops this theme through expository conversation and monologues because there is very little onstage action during the two-day period that the play’s four acts encompass. Containing both comic and tragic elements, the play, set in 1912, takes place entirely in the back room of Harry Hope’s bar, where the regulars gather. The play opens on a gathering of regulars to await the arrival of Hickey, a hardware salesperson who is the most successful among them and who comes to the bar for periodic drunks, particularly on the occasion of Harry Hope’s birthday, when he funds a great drunken party for the regulars. Himself unfaithful to his wife, Hickey maintains a running gag that his apparently saintly wife must, in his absence, be having an affair with the iceman. Hickey and all the other characters live in a world of illusion, a world that ignores today: They all look backward to yesterday, to what they once were or to what their rosy rewriting of history now tells them they once were, just as they look forward to an equally rosy and improbable tomorrow. The illusion that they all have a future is part of the pipe dream each has, a pipe dream essential to their lives that helps them “keep up the appearances of life.” Although these people really have, in Robert Frost’s words, “nothing to look backward to with pride” and “nothing to look forward to with hope,” they somehow manage to live, to survive in the bleak, drunken world they inhabit, because they possess the illusion that they have a yesterday about which they can feel pride and a tomorrow about which they can hope. That illusion enables them to ignore the dark reality that is their today. Moreover, because they understand one another’s illusions and accept them, they can be sympathetic to and tolerant of one another’s failings as well as of their own. Among the characters who frequent the bar are Larry Slade, an elderly anarchist who believes he is uninvolved in life and who claims he wants only to die; Joe Mott, an African American who plans to open a gambling house one day; Piet Wetjoen, a former Boer War commander who believes he can return home; Pat McGloin, who plans to return soon to the police force; Harry Hope, a former Tammany politician who believes he will someday leave his saloon and walk the ward; Willie Oban, previously of Harvard Law School, who plans one day to go to the district attorney and get a law job; Rocky, the night bartender, who, because he works as a bartender, believes that he is not a pimp, even though he “manages” and takes money from two prostitutes; Margie and Pearl, Rocky’s two “girls,” who make the fine distinction that

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they are tarts but not whores—because they don’t have a pimp; Chuck, the day bartender, who believes he will go on the wagon, marry Cora, and buy a farm in the country; and Cora, who shares Chuck’s dream and who also believes that he will forgive her for making her living as a prostitute. Into the circle of regulars comes the eighteenyear-old Don Parritt, whose mother, part of the anarchist movement, is on trial out West for a bombing. Although many of these regulars stay up all night in the saloon to await Hickey, his arrival is disappointing and strangely troubling: When he appears, he is not the same as before. For one thing, he fails to make his usual joke about his wife and the iceman, and for another, he no longer drinks; he explains that he no longer needs it after he threw away “the damned lying pipe dream” that had made him feel miserable. Moreover, he wants very much to save his friends by persuading them to be honest, to stop lying about themselves, and to stop kidding themselves about their tomorrows. He believes that by giving up their illusions, they can attain peace and contentment, and he systematically embarks on a campaign to make them admit the truth about their pasts and to do immediately what they have always said they will do in the future—even though Hickey knows that they will fail. Hickey insists that if one faces reality and kills one’s dreams, then those dreams will not be there to nag or to cause guilt, not haunted by yesterday and not fooling oneself about tomorrow. Then, Hickey believes, his friends will have peace, as he does. As a result of his campaign, however, the friendly and tolerant atmosphere of the bar wears dangerously thin as the friends, stripped of their protective illusions and their defense mechanisms, become not only sober but also nervous, irritable, and belligerent with one another. Harry’s birthday party is a flop, spoiled by fights and bad feeling and finally by Hickey’s announcement that his wife is dead. Moreover, the peace that Hickey predicts will come, as an effect of facing reality, does not, even though the characters, with varying degrees of reluctance, attempt to give up their dreams, to leave the bar—actually as well as symbolically—and to face reality. Instead of providing them with peace, the act of facing reality robs them of tolerance for one another and therefore of companionship, of tolerance for themselves and therefore of self-respect, of hope for the future and therefore of happiness. As a result of Hickey’s efforts to save them from their illusions, as a result of his forcing them to face their tomorrows and to fail, the habitués of Harry Hope’s bar are miserable—quarrelsome, despondent, and hateful toward themselves and one another. Even alcohol loses its kick; it seems to have “no life in it,” and they can no longer even pass out. Hickey is genuinely puzzled by these results because his expectation was that, once they had “killed tomorrow,” they would have “licked the game of life.” The play’s fourth act, which begins by further demonstrating the unpleasantness that has derived from exposure to reality, centers on Hickey’s revelation of his new philosophy and how he acted out this philosophy in his marriage, finally murdering his wife. He killed her, he says, to give her peace by ending her pipe dream that he would one day be better, that he would stop drinking and whoring. Continually making vows to her that he was unable to keep, he was then obliged to feel guilty because his wife was continually hurt and disappointed. Juxtaposed to Hickey’s story of love and guilt is Parritt’s parallel narrative disclosing his betrayal of his mother. The two stories reach a climax when Parritt confesses that he betrayed the movement because he hated his mother as Hickey confesses that after killing his wife he laughed and called her a “damned bitch.” Unable to live with what he has admitted, Hickey seizes on the explanation that he

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must have been insane—insane, that is, to laugh at his wife’s death, because everyone surely knows that he has always loved her, and if he laughed at her death, then he must have been insane. The other characters seize on this explanation as well, because it means they can disregard what he has said before, reestablish their illusions, and thereby once again live with one another and themselves. Don Parritt, however, apparently unable to live with his betrayal of his mother and the reality that his betrayal was motivated by hate, commits suicide by jumping off the fire escape, as, in a sense, does Hickey by calling the police to come for him. He and Parritt, facing the reality about themselves, must destroy themselves because of the pain of that reality. In truth, Hickey hated his wife because she represented his conscience, because although she always forgave him, she also always expected him to try to be better, which he simply did not wish to do. When for one brief moment he admits the truth, that he wanted and was glad to be free of the burden of this conscience, he is unable to live with that truth and he immediately rationalizes that he must have been insane. He thus proves that illusion is, in fact, necessary, in order to accept oneself and in order to live not only with others in the world but also with the reality that death, the iceman, does indeed “cometh.” The play, then, while pessimistic in delineating human weaknesses, seems to hold out the possibility that those weaknesses can be transcended so long as life exists. O’Neill suggests that, in order for life to exist, there must be hope—and hope, very often, is created from illusion. Although Hickey is termed a “nihilist” at one point in the play, he serves, through the dramatic revelation of his own example, to reinforce the necessity, and the positive power, of illusion. Other major works poetry: Poems, 1912-1944, 1979 (Donald Gallup, editor). nonfiction: “The Theatre We Worked For”: The Letters of Eugene O’Neill to Kenneth MacGowan, 1982 ( Jackson R. Bryer and Ruth M. Alvarez, editors); “Love and Admiration and Respect”: The O’Neill-Commins Correspondence, 1986 (Dorothy Commins, editor); “As Ever, Gene”: The Letters of Eugene O’Neill to George Jean Nathan, 1987 (Nancy L. Roberts and Arthur W. Roberts, editors); Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill, 1988 (Travis Bogard and Bryer, editors); A Wind Is Rising: The Correspondence of Agnes Boulton and Eugene O’Neill, 2000 (William Davies King, editor). miscellaneous: The Unknown O’Neill: Unpublished or Unfamiliar Writings of Eugene O’Neill, 1988 (Travis Bogard, editor). Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Eugene O’Neill. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. As part of the Modern Critical Views series, this collection includes essays by Lionel Trilling, Doris Falk, Arnold Goldman, Robert Lee, Travis Boyard, Thomas Van Laan, Jean Chathia, C. W. Bigsby, and Michael Manheim, arranged in chronological order by their original publication dates. Bloom describes them as representative of the “best criticism available.” The theoretical slant is thematic and philosophical, with detailed characters and plot analyses. Contains a brief bibliography. Brietzke, Zander. The Aesthetics of Failure: Dynamic Structure in the Plays of Eugene O’Neill. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001. A controversial but insightful study of O’Neill’s literary theory, with particular attention to his “anti-theater” approach to character development and storytelling.

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Manheim, Michael, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O’Neill. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. A comprehensive reference work that contains a wealth of information on the life and works of O’Neill. Bibliography and index. Moorton, Richard F., Jr., ed. Eugene O’Neill’s Century. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. This collection includes excerpts from more than seventeen plays and collected notes, as well as articles ranging from Spencer Golub’s semiotic analysis of Long Day’s Journey into Night to biographical and psychological analyses by Lowell Swortzell, Jane Torrey, Georgia Nugent, Jeffrey Elliott Sands, and Linda Herr. Some essays focus on how and why O’Neill’s extensive stage directions have influenced dramatic practice. Six pages of works cited and thirteen pages of index are useful for scholars. Ranald, Margaret Loftus. The Eugene O’Neill Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984. The author has arranged in alphabetical order a complete compendium of plays, synopses, production histories, characters, personal and professional acquaintances, and critical analysis. Three appendices include a chronology of plays, adaptations, and a critical overview. Twenty-eight pages of notes and thirtyseven index pages make this work an invaluable, encyclopedia resource and guide to further study of O’Neill’s work. Robinson, James A. Eugene O’Neill and Oriental Thought: A Divided Vision. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982. Taking a philosophical approach to O’Neill’s work, Robinson’s 186-page work is a scholarly, detailed analysis of possible connections between O’Neill’s plays and Oriental mysticism, particularly Hindu, Buddhist, and Daoist belief systems. The bibliography and index offer more information on philosophy and religions of the East than on O’Neill, but Robinson’s analysis of individual plays, such as The Great God Brown, Lazarus Laughed, The Iceman Cometh, and Long Day’s Journey into Night, sheds new light on the often-stated view of O’Neill’s drama as “religious” and “romantic.” Sheaffer, Louis. O’Neill. 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1968-1973. This two-part biography is considered the most complete work on O’Neill’s life, and it stands as a model for the genre of literary biography. Including recollections by a variety of O’Neill’s colleagues and friends, this work reads smoothly and effectively combines scholarship and human interest. Generally acknowledged as both sympathetic and trustworthy. Notes, index. Wainscott, Ronald H. Staging O’Neill: The Experimental Years, 1920-1934. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988. This highly scholarly yet accessible historical work chronicles the production of O’Neill’s plays and the profound influence of his work on American theater practice. Written in a lively style, it is the most detailed work of its kind on O’Neill, although others may have greater scope. Evelyn S. Newlyn, updated by Rebecca Bell-Metereau

Joe Orton Joe Orton

Born: Leicester, England; January 1, 1933 Died: London, England; August 9, 1967 Principal drama • The Ruffian on the Stair, pr. 1964 (radio play), pr. 1966 (staged), pb. 1967 (one act); Entertaining Mr. Sloane, pr., pb. 1964; The Good and Faithful Servant, wr. 1964, pr. 1967 (staged and televised), pb. 1970 (one act); Loot, pr. 1965, pb. 1967; The Erpingham Camp, pr. 1966 (televised), pr. 1967 (staged), pb. 1967 (one act); Funeral Games, pr. 1968 (televised), pr. 1970 (staged), pb. 1970 (as television script; one act); What the Butler Saw, pr., pb. 1969; The Complete Plays, pb. 1976 Other literary forms • Joe Orton’s novel Head to Toe (originally entitled “The Vision of Gombold Proval”) was published posthumously in 1971. Up Against It, a screenplay written for the Beatles, was published in 1979, although it was never produced. He also collaborated on several novels with Kenneth Halliwell, entitled “The Last Days of Sodom,” “Priapus in the Shrubbery,” and “The Mechanical Womb”; these were never published. Achievements • Joe Orton’s meteoric rise as a dramatist during the mid-1960’s in Britain was the result of the unique and frequently outrageous tone and style of his plays. Called “the master farceur of his age” by John Lahr and “the Oscar Wilde of Welfare State gentility” by Ronald Bryden, Orton made a radical break with the currently popular naturalistic drama of John Osborne and Arnold Wesker. He was instead influenced by Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, although he rapidly moved away from Pinter’s “comedy of menace” to experiment with farce and the brittle epigrammatic style of Oscar Wilde. The verbal wit, aggressive sexuality, and black humor of Orton’s dramas created a new critical term, “Ortonesque,” to describe his own style and that of his imitators. The critical reaction to Orton’s drama was and remains mixed; the middle-class audiences that Orton worked so hard to affront frequently reacted with horror and shock to his plays, as did many reviewers. Playwrights as varied as Pinter and Terence Rattigan, however, were impressed by Orton. Loot won the best play of 1966 award from the Evening Standard and was voted the best play of 1966 by Plays and Players. Orton’s body of work is small, consisting of four one-act plays and three full-length dramas, but he gained an international reputation before his premature death. At the time of his murder, he had begun work on a play tentatively entitled “Prick Up Your Ears,” a farce about King Edward VII’s coronation. Biography • John Kingsley Orton (who later changed his name to Joe Orton to avoid any confusion with playwright John Osborne) was born to William and Elsie Orton in a working-class area of Leicester, England. After failing the eleven-plus examination, he enrolled in Clark’s College, a commercial school where one of his teachers described him as “semiliterate.” Seeing the theater as a way to escape the drudgery of the menial jobs he was forced to take, Orton joined the Leicester Dramatic Society in 1949 and acted in several small roles in other amateur theatrical groups. In 1950, he was accepted to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, which he entered in 1951. It was there 651

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that he met a fellow student-actor, Kenneth Halliwell, who became Orton’s friend, lover, and roommate for the rest of his life. After receiving his diploma from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Orton worked briefly as an assistant stage manager for the Ipswich Repertory Company and then rejoined Halliwell in London in 1953. They began collaborating on a series of novels, all of which were turned down for publication. In 1959, Orton, aided by Halliwell, began stealing and defacing books from the Islington and Hampstead libraries. Orton, who would remove the photographs and illustrations from the books and then replace them with his own creations, would also write false blurbs and summaries; after replacing the books on the shelves, he would stand and watch people’s reactions to his pranks. In 1962, Orton and Halliwell were arrested and convicted of theft and malicious damage, and both men were sentenced to six months in jail. The jail sentence was a turning point in Orton’s life, for it brought him a new sense of detachment from his own writing that had been lacking before this experience. After his release, he began writing plays and no longer collaborated to any great degree with Halliwell. Orton’s sudden fame and fortune during his brief career from 1963 to 1967 put a tremendous strain on his relationship with Halliwell, who, older and better educated than Orton, had considered himself the real creative artist. Deeply resentful of Orton’s literary success and sexual promiscuity, Halliwell became more and more deeply depressed and neurotic. On August 9, 1967, a chauffeur who had come to drive Orton to an appointment to discuss his screenplay, Up Against It, discovered the bodies of Orton and Halliwell. Halliwell had beaten Orton to death with hammer blows to his head and then committed suicide with sleeping pills. Orton’s murder, which was so similar in fashion to many of the events of his plays, made him even more famous in death than in life. Analysis • Joe Orton’s career was launched by the British Broadcasting Corporation’s acceptance of his first play, The Ruffian on the Stair. By the time the drama was broadcast in 1964, however, Orton had already achieved fame with the successful West End production of Entertaining Mr. Sloane. Orton revised The Ruffian on the Stair for its stage production in 1966; the revised version is less derivative of Harold Pinter’s The Room (pr. 1957), although it still shows Orton’s early debt to Pinter’s techniques. The Ruffian on the Stair • This one-act play involves three characters: Joyce, a former prostitute; Mike, a thief; and Wilson, the “intruder” who arrives at Joyce and Mike’s apartment ostensibly searching for a room to rent. During the course of the play, Wilson reveals that he has had a homosexual relationship with his own brother, whom Mike has recently killed. Wilson’s plan is to force Mike to kill him by pretending to sleep with Joyce; in this way, he hopes that Mike will be brought to justice for the murder. Wilson’s plan succeeds, and the drama concludes with Mike comforting Joyce, who is weeping not over Wilson’s murder but over the death of her goldfish. The play shows Orton, still strongly influenced by Pinter, moving toward the kind of verbal style that would characterize Entertaining Mr. Sloane—a style in which characters use media-influenced language to mask their real thoughts and emotions. The emotional sterility of the characters is reflected in the debased, meaningless language of cliché and the popular press, which they use almost exclusively. Although the play suffers from an ending that appears to be arbitrarily forced on the action, The Ruffian on the Stair does show Orton’s talent with dialogue and his ability to create a degree of emotional tension among his characters.

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Entertaining Mr. Sloane • Orton’s first full-length drama was Entertaining Mr. Sloane, a three-act play that showed that the playwright had made important advancements beyond The Ruffian on the Stair. In much firmer control of his material in this play, Orton perfected his characters’ use of media-influenced language and cliché. In addition, he was able to construct a relationship among the characters that made the play’s ending believable and inevitable, a problem he had been unable to solve satisfactorily in The Ruffian on the Stair. In Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Kath and Ed, Kath’s brother, battle for control and possession of Sloane, Kath’s young lodger. The double meaning of the play’s title becomes clear as the play progresses, for the insidious Sloane is at first wooed and entertained by Kath and Ed and later must provide entertainment in the form of sexual favors for both of them when they become witnesses to his second murder. At the beginning of the play, Sloane takes a room in Kath’s house, where she lives with her father, Kemp. Kemp soon recognizes Sloane as the young man who murdered his employer two years earlier. Kath, a middle-aged woman who coyly plays the role of Sloane’s “Mamma” while brazenly seducing him at the end of the first act, soon finds herself pregnant by Sloane. Sloane is also being pursued, in a less obvious fashion, by Ed, who gives him a job as his chauffeur. When Kemp threatens to expose Sloane as a murderer, Sloane accidentally kills him and is then at the mercy of Kath and Ed, who both want to possess him exclusively. The brother and sister finally agree to share Sloane, each taking him for six months at a time. Sloane, who at the play’s beginning was able to control Kath and Ed completely, is quickly reduced to an object. Orton insisted that the play should be acted as realistically as possible so that the characters would not degenerate into caricatures or stereotypes. “What I wanted to do in Sloane,” said Orton, “was to break down all the sexual compartments that people have.” Kath and Ed are deadly serious about their designs on the young lodger, and Orton resisted the two male leads being played as effeminate homosexuals, just as he did not wish Kath to be played as a nymphomaniac. Instead, the play is about individual personalities who are constantly maneuvering in their attempts to gain power. Despite the play’s realism, however, Entertaining Mr. Sloane is, like several of Orton’s later dramas, reflexive in the sense that the characters are aware of their own theatricality. Orton also uses the rhetoric of the detective film in the play, just as he would parody the genre of farce in later dramas. Present throughout the play is Orton’s fascination with a debased language that functions to obscure the characters’ real thoughts and deeds. John Lahr argues that Orton’s dialogue reveals the “sensory overload” of the effects of the media on the individual—what he calls “an eclectic brew of rhythms and idioms which captured and commented on the mutation of language.” Entertaining Mr. Sloane is the best example of Orton’s search for what he described as his “collage” literary style: His characters mix the language of newspaper headlines, scandal sheets, advertising, and cliché in a comical and meaningless speech that nevertheless manages to communicate their obsessions and desires. Pinter’s influence is still present in Entertaining Mr. Sloane, but Orton’s success with the play led him in new directions as a dramatist. His work became increasingly more outrageous and farcical as a result of the self-confidence he gained because of the success of Entertaining Mr. Sloane. The Good and Faithful Servant • Orton’s next play, The Good and Faithful Servant, was written in 1964 and appeared on television and stage in 1967. It was Orton’s first full-scale attack on authority and convention, represented in this case by the company

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from which the main character, Buchanan, is retiring after fifty years of service. At the time of his retirement, Buchanan is stripped of his uniform and given an electric clock and toaster, neither of which works. Buchanan also encounters Edith Anderson, an elderly maid who is working for the firm and who turns out to have given birth to their illegitimate twins many years ago. The one-act play concerns Buchanan’s adjustment to his retirement, his marriage to Edith, and the relationship between his grandson, Ray, and Debbie, who is pregnant with Ray’s illegitimate child. Buchanan’s broken-down physical condition is reflective of what his lifelong service to the company has given him. Although he claims to have led “a useful and constructive life,” he breaks down coughing at the end of this statement and, in addition to needing glasses and a hearing aid, has also lost an arm in the service of the firm. Buchanan’s pitiful reverence for the company is shared by the other employees. Edith is thrilled because she was able to sweep out the canteen one day in the distant past, and Buchanan states that the “high point” of his life came when he appeared in the company’s magazine. He also reverentially mentions that he was “almost Staff” and actually opened the door to the chairman of the board on one occasion. Buchanan’s death at the end of the play, which occurs after his disillusionment with the party for the elderly, which culminates in his smashing of the toaster and clock with a hammer, is ironically counterpointed by Ray’s induction into the corporate life after having been forced by the company’s representative, Mrs. Vealfoy, into marrying Debbie. Just as illegitimacy is handed down from generation to generation in the play, so is the grinding and mindless service to a corporation that remains an abstraction to its employees. Mrs. Vealfoy is the voice both of the corporate mentality and of the social conformity that it uses to manipulate its workers. She advises Ray to “say ‘yes’ as often as possible. . . . I always do. . . . Always,” and she organizes the darkly comic party for the retired workers in scene 16, forcing the dispirited elderly people to sing songs containing the word “happy” while a woman collapses and dies in the background. Mrs. Vealfoy’s genial intrusiveness and blind faith in the rightness of the company’s policies structure The Good and Faithful Servant, which is Orton’s most naturalistic assault on the world of authority and convention that he would lampoon in a much more anarchic and farcical style in his later drama. Loot • In his novel Head to Toe, Orton said that “To be destructive, words had to be irrefutable. . . . Print was less effective than the spoken word because the blast was greater; eyes could ignore, slide past, dangerous verbs or nouns. But if you could lock the enemy into a room somewhere and fire the sentences at them, you would get a sort of seismic disturbance.” Not surprisingly, Orton turned from fiction to the theater, where he could attack his audience directly with words, for Orton considered his audience to be his enemy. He chose farce as the most appropriate genre to create a “seismic disturbance,” to disturb his audience’s conventions and expectations. Loot was the first full-length play in which he allowed his taste for anarchic farce a free rein, and if it sometimes too exuberantly celebrates a farcical, outrageous, and topsy-turvy world of madness and corruption, it also shows Orton discovering the proper vehicle for his talent. Farce, observes John Lahr, is an act of “literary aggression,” and Orton used farce in order to vent his own anger and to assault a society that he believed to be hypocritical and stultifying. In his farces, he sought what he called in Head to Toe a “particularly dangerous collection of words” which could “explode,” creating “shock waves [which] were capable of killing centuries afterwards.” In Loot, Orton mercilessly lampoons authority, represented most clearly in the play

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by Detective Truscott. Truscott, who comes to the home of Mr. McLeavy, whose wife has just died, is investigating a theft in which Hal, McLeavy’s son, has been involved. McLeavy, the only character in the play with any real respect for authority, is also the only “innocent” character; ironically, it is McLeavy who at the play’s conclusion is arrested for a “crime” that Truscott refuses to define. McLeavy’s faith in authority is naïve and pitiful. Early in the play, he says that he likes “to be of assistance to authority” and that public servants can be relied on to behave themselves: “As a good citizen I ignore the stories which bring officialdom into disrepute.” All the events of the play work to underscore the irony of McLeavy’s blind trust in “officialdom,” and his statement in act 2 that “my personal freedom must be sacrificed” so that Truscott can continue with his investigation becomes chillingly significant later in the play. McLeavy’s amazement at his own arrest at the conclusion of the play leads to his incredulous comment, “You can’t do this. I’ve always been a law-abiding citizen. The police are for the protection of ordinary people.” Truscott’s reply, that he does not understand where McLeavy has picked up “such slogans,” sums up Orton’s view of authority and justice: The conventional law and order of society is merely a mask for corruption, intolerance, and irrationality. As a result, most of the play’s references to authority are couched in clichés that render the characters’ speeches ludicrous. Fay, the young nurse who has just murdered McLeavy’s wife for her money, reacts similarly to McLeavy when she is threatened with arrest: “I’m innocent till I’m proved guilty. This is a free country. The law is impartial.” Truscott’s response is reminiscent of his reply to McLeavy: “Who’s been filling your head with that rubbish?” As What the Butler Saw would later parody farce, Loot parodies the detective novel and film. Truscott’s comical conclusion that Fay shot her husband at the Hermitage Private Hotel because one of her wedding rings has a roughness associated with “powder burns and salt” shows Orton mocking the detective story’s emphasis on rational thinking and deductive reasoning. The world of Loot is instead one of madness and illogic in which relationships among people alter rapidly; there is no core of stability or predictability. McLeavy finally asks Truscott, “Is the world mad? Tell me it’s not”; his question is answered by Truscott’s statement that “I’m not paid to quarrel with accepted facts.” Loot shows that mysteries cannot be solved, for mysteries only lead to further mystification: Truscott tells the group that “the process by which the police arrive at the solution to a mystery is, in itself, a mystery.” In Loot, the plot becomes more rather than less complicated as it progresses; the true “criminals” are allowed to go free while the “detective” becomes part of the crime. Fay’s final statement in the play, “We must keep up appearances,” articulates an important theme: The world is composed of masks, false identities, and lies that exist not to conceal reality but to compensate for its nonexistence. There are only appearances, and the characters who can most effectively manipulate appearance are the most successful. McLeavy’s worship of authority reflects his ignorance of appearances. He assumes that those in power are what they claim to be, and he pays the price. The Erpingham Camp • In The Erpingham Camp, Orton continues to attack authority and convention and to develop the brilliantly epigrammatic style that culminated in What the Butler Saw. Much less naturalistic even than Loot, The Erpingham Camp is a oneact play composed of eleven short scenes. Its setting is a holiday camp in which chaos and anarchy erupt in what initially appears to be a rigidly organized situation controlled

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by the proud entrepreneur Erpingham. He is the major symbol of authority in the play and, like Orton’s other authority figures, has false notions about the predictability and rational nature of the world. Early in the play, he tells an employee, “We live in a rational world, Riley”; the rest of the drama functions to destroy the validity of this statement. Problems begin when Riley, who is organizing an evening of entertainment, slaps Eileen, a pregnant woman who is screaming hysterically. Although Riley’s action is an attempt to make her stop screaming, a melee ensues and the campers begin, in Erpingham’s phrase, to “destroy property,” which results in Erpingham refusing to feed them an evening meal. “We’ve no time for hedonists here. My camp is a pure camp,” Erpingham had said earlier, and he tries to punish his “underlings” in an effort to control their behavior. Erpingham, whose usual advice in any situation is to “consult the manual,” is unable to understand or deal with the campers’ rage and replies to their pleas for food with the statement, “You have no rights. You have certain privileges which can be withdrawn. I am withdrawing them.” Physical and verbal violence breaks out after this incident, with two groups of campers battling for their own “approach” to the situation. Lou and Ted, a right-wing young couple who claim to have met outside the Young Conservatives, call for moderation, remaining “within the law,” and adherence to “page twenty of the Civil Defense Booklet.” Kenny and Eileen, a working-class couple resentful of Lou and Ted’s “advantages,” instead want to take the “means of supply” into their own hands and encourage the campers to break into the food stores, screaming, “Have a bash, I say. Have a bash for the pregnant woman next door!” The play becomes increasingly anarchic and unrealistic until it concludes with Erpingham falling to his death down a hole in the floor. Attending at the funeral is the Padre, who has just returned from a court appearance in which he has been accused of molesting a young girl and who ironically notes, “As the little foxes gnaw at the roots of the vine, so anarchy weakens the fibers of society.” The play ends with one of Orton’s most famous epigrams, the Padre’s statement that “it’s Life that defeats the Christian Church. She’s always been well-equipped to deal with Death.” Although his themes in this play are similar to the dramas of the past, particularly the attacks on political and clerical authority, convention, and corruption, The Erpingham Camp shows Orton’s increasing confidence in his ability to write anarchic farce in the epigrammatic style and was an important step in his movement away from naturalistic drama. What the Butler Saw • Orton’s last completed drama, What the Butler Saw, was not performed until after his death, and as a result the play did not undergo final rewrites by the playwright. Nevertheless, What the Butler Saw is Orton’s most accomplished work. The play is a celebration of irrationality that also parodies the farce form by comically exaggerating its structure and characteristics: An absurdist genre is parodically made even more absurd. C. W. E. Bigsby suggests that the “byzantine complexities of the plot of What the Butler Saw can be seen as a deliberate attempt to parody the very structure of farce itself,” and certainly the play’s intricate plot makes summary almost impossible. Like Orton’s earlier work, What the Butler Saw attacks authority and tradition. In this drama, Dr. Rance, a government representative who has come to Dr. Prentice’s mental clinic to be “given details” about its operations, at first appears to be the voice of conventional authority that wishes to suppress the forces of chaos. Although Rance represents the “Commissioners,” however, he is also a spokesperson for unreason, mentioning to Dr. Prentice that he is a representative of “Her Majesty’s Government. Your immediate superiors in madness,” and opining that “the higher reaches of the

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Civil Service are recruited entirely from corpses or madmen.” In What the Butler Saw, Orton’s questioning of authority goes beyond that of religious or governmental institutions; here, he tries to destroy the very foundations of logic, reason, and predictability on which his audience’s assumptions are based. One of the most important themes of the play is the very thin line of demarcation between the sane and the insane. The setting is a madhouse in which no actual “insane” patients ever appear; rather, it is the ostensibly sane inhabitants, particularly the psychologists, who are mad. Rance tells the policeman Match that they are in a madhouse where “unusual behavior” is the prerogative of everyone: “We’ve no privileged class here. It’s democratic lunacy we practice.” “Democratic lunacy” aptly describes the world of What the Butler Saw, in which sanity and insanity are relative conditions that depend entirely on perspective. “The sane appear as strange to the mad as the mad to the sane,” Rance tells Dr. Prentice in a statement that echoes the play’s epigraph, drawn from Cyril Tourneur’s play The Revenger’s Tragedy (pr. 1606-1607): “Surely we’re all mad people, and they/ Whom we think are, are not.” Rance tells Mrs. Prentice that her husband’s behavior is “so ridiculous one might suspect him of being sane,” a Wildean paradox that sums up Orton’s view that sanity and insanity are actually mirror images of one another. In this play, sanity is dependent on a rejection of all evidence of reality; Rance, after denying that the blood on Mrs. Prentice’s hand is “real” while admitting that he sees it, says, “I’m a scientist. I state facts, I cannot be expected to provide explanations. Reject any para-normal phenomena. It’s the only way to remain sane.” Because reality is madness, sanity can exist only when reality is denied. In a sense, however, madness is to be preferred to sanity, for Rance tells Geraldine Barclay that the fact that her mind has “given way” will be an invaluable aid in her efforts to “come to terms with twentieth century living.” In a world in which irrationality and farcical absurdity rule, the most effective defense is insanity. Orton’s characters also lack any firm sense of their individual identities. Identities and sexes are exchanged with dizzying rapidity, with the result that the characters begin to lose their sense of who and what they are. Nicholas Beckett, in an attempt to verify his own existence, tells Rance, “If [my] pain is real I must be real,” a statement Rance counters with the observation that “I’d rather not get involved in metaphysical speculation.” Rance prefers to construct elaborate and illogical premises on which he bases even more outrageously illogical theories, at one point noting his own “law” that the “relations of apparitions are also apparitions.” In What the Butler Saw, characters are much like “apparitions” who disappear and reemerge as different people; lacking any core of intrinsic identity, they are capable of endless psychic transformations. This lack of immutable identity, however, is not necessarily a negative characteristic: Like madness, fluidity of identity is a means of survival. What the Butler Saw posits a universe in which irrationality must rule because all premises are illogical, erroneous, or nonexistent. Rance’s comically incorrect “theories” about the reasons for Geraldine Barclay’s neuroses and Dr. Prentice’s madness are blatant fictions that have, as he is well aware, no relationship to reality. In the play, there is no actual “reality” because there is no truth. Geraldine asserts to Dr. Prentice, “We must tell the truth!” and is answered, “That’s a thoroughly defeatist attitude.” Rance’s repeated admonishments to characters to “face facts” is ironic in this context, and near the end of the play, he admits to Geraldine, who is still trying to discover the “truth” about her situation, “It’s much too late to tell the truth,” a statement that could have been uttered at the play’s beginning.

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Indeed, Rance is adept at creating theories that satisfy his imagination much more than any simple truth could. When confronted with an actual “fact,” such as Dr. Prentice’s attack on Mrs. Prentice, he dismisses it by saying, “Oh, that was a mere physical act with no special psychological significance.” Rance, entranced with Freudian symbols and theoretical interpretations, sees the madness around him as culminating in the “final chapters” of his planned documentary novel, which will include “incest, buggery, outrageous women, and strange love-cults catering to depraved appetites. Rance’s fictive reworking of the “plot” of the drama is similar to the artistic process, and Orton the dramatist creates a character who imaginatively and fictively revels in the madness around him, just as Orton used his own chaotic lifestyle as fodder for his art. His early death ended a career that had, perhaps, only begun to approach its maturity. It is impossible to speculate, given his rapid development as a playwright, in which directions he might have gone. Other major works long fiction: Head to Toe, 1971; Between Us Girls, 1988 (wr. 1957); “Lord Cucumber” and “The Boy Hairdresser”: Two Novels, 1999 (Lord Cucumber, wr. 1960; The Boy Hairdresser, wr. 1954). nonfiction: The Orton Diaries, 1986, expanded 1996 ( John Lahr, editor). screenplay: Up Against It, 1979. Bibliography Bigsby, C. W. E. Joe Orton. London: Methuen, 1982. This brief study contends that Orton developed a style of anarchic farce that was deliberately subversive, not only of the authority figures appearing in his plays but also of language itself and conventionalities of plot and character. Bigsby also relates Orton’s work to developments in postmodern literature and contemporary art. Notes, bibliography. Charney, Maurice. Joe Orton. London: Macmillan, 1984. This introductory overview of Orton’s work concisely assesses not only all of his plays but also his novel Head to Toe and his unproduced screenplay for the Beatles, Up Against It. The final chapter offers a useful definition of “the Ortonesque.” Photographs, notes, bibliography. Lahr, John. Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton. 1978. Reprint. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. This definitive biography of the playwright, based in part on Orton’s diaries, is indispensable to any study of Orton’s work. It is not only a readable, detailed study of his life but also an insightful critical appreciation of the plays. The biography was the basis of a feature film of the same name, directed by Stephen Frears and released in 1987. Photographs, notes. Rusinko, Susan. Joe Orton. New York: Twayne, 1995. A basic biography of Orton that covers his life and works. Bibliography and index. Shepherd, Simon. Because We’re Queers: The Life and Crimes of Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton. Boston: Alyson, 1989. A biography that covers the lives of Orton and his partner Halliwell. Bibliography. Zarhy-Levo, Yael. The Theatrical Critic as Cultural Agent: Constructing Pinter, Orton, and Stoppard as Absurdist Playwrights. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. A look at the connection between absurdism and the theatrical works of Orton, Harold Pinter, and Tom Stoppard. Bibliography and index. Angela Hague, updated by William Hutchings

John Osborne John Osborne

Born: London, England; December 12, 1929 Died: Shropshire, England; December 24, 1994 Principal drama • Look Back in Anger, pr. 1956, pb. 1957; The Entertainer, pr., pb. 1957 (music by John Addison); Epitaph for George Dillon, pr., pb. 1958 (with Anthony Creighton); The World of Paul Slickey, pr., pb. 1959 (music by Christopher Whelen); Luther, pr., pb. 1961; Plays for England: The Blood of the Bambergs and Under Plain Cover, pr. 1962, pb. 1963; Inadmissible Evidence, pr. 1964, pb. 1965; A Bond Honored, pr., pb. 1966 (adaptation of Lope de Vega’s play La fianza satistecna); A Patriot for Me, pr., pb. 1966; The Hotel in Amsterdam, pr., pb. 1968; Time Present, pr., pb. 1968; A Sense of Detachment, pr. 1972, pb. 1973; Hedda Gabler, pr., pb. 1972 (adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play); A Place Calling Itself Rome, pb. 1973 (adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus); Four Plays, pb. 1973; The Picture of Dorian Gray, pb. 1973, pr. 1975 (adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novel); West of Suez, pr., pb. 1973; Watch It Come Down, pb. 1975, pr. 1976; Déjàvu, pb. 1991, pr. 1992; Plays, pb. 1993-1998 (3 volumes); Four Plays, pb. 2000 Other literary forms • John Osborne’s considerable output includes, besides his plays, a comparatively unsuccessful musical comedy about a gossip columnist with a dual personality, The World of Paul Slickey, and a series of dramatic scripts for television: A Subject of Scandal and Concern (1960, originally A Matter of Scandal and Concern); The Right Prospectus (1970); Very Like a Whale (1971); The Gift of Friendship (1972); Ms.: Or, Jill and Jack (1974, later published as Jill and Jack); The End of Me Old Cigar (1975); Try a Little Tenderness (1978); and You’re Not Watching Me, Mummy (1980). He adapted several plays and a novel for the stage and wrote the screenplays for several of his own plays. His adaptation of Tom Jones (1963) from Henry Fielding’s novel earned for him an Academy Award in 1964. He also wrote A Better Class of Person: An Autobiography, 1929-1956 (1981), and the second volume, titled Almost a Gentleman: An Autobiography, Volume Two, 1955-1966 (1991), covering his life to 1966. Achievements • John Osborne’s most generous critics credit him with having transformed the English stage on a single night: May 8, 1956, when Look Back in Anger opened at the Royal Court Theatre. He is celebrated as the principal voice among England’s Angry Young Men of the 1950’s and 1960’s, who railed vindictively against Edwardian dinosaurs and the empty-headed bourgeoisie; it should be noted, however, that his antiheroes rebel against their own frustrations and futility more than they do in the service of any substantial social or political reform. Indeed, they betray their envy of the stability and the “historical legitimacy” of the very generation they condemn. Perhaps Osborne’s most profound influence has been his leadership in bringing authenticity into contemporary English theater; a member of what has loosely been defined as the kitchen-sink school, he helped institute a new receptivity to social issues, naturalistic characterization, and the vernacular, thereby revitalizing a theater scene that had been dominated by the verse elevations of T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry and the commercial conventionality of Terence Rattigan. 659

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In addition to his achievements as a playwright, Osborne was also an accomplished actor, director, and screenwriter. Testimonies to his popular and critical successes include three Evening Standard awards (1956, 1965, 1968), two New York Drama Critics Circle Awards (1958, 1965), a Tony (1963), and an Oscar (1964). In the last twenty years of his life, Osborne devoted much of his energy to television plays for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Although some saw this as a confirmation of dwindling artistic resources, Osborne’s reputation as a prime mover of the postwar English stage held secure. He created some of the most arresting roles in twentieth century drama, and his career-long indictment of complacency is evident in every “lesson of feeling” he delivered to his audiences. Biography • John Osborne grew up in Fulham, Ventnor, and Surrey, leading a suburban childhood in somewhat less dire circumstances than one’s preconception of Jimmy Porter’s alter ego would lead one to expect. In fact, every class subtlety between “upper-lower” and “lower-middle” was represented in his own extended family; Osborne’s autobiography traces, with a gusto bordering on the vengeful, the Welsh and Cockney sides of his family, and characterizes, in the spirit of English low comedy, their attempts to sustain outworn Edwardian amenities after having “come down in the world.” His father was an advertising copywriter who suffered long spells of illness, and his mother was a barmaid, but the family tree included many connections to the music hall and the theater. (Grandfather Grove, for example, would be revived in the form of Billy Rice in The Entertainer.) Osborne was an only child, rather sickly and bookish. His most vivid memories of adolescence include listening in the air-raid shelter to German bombers and suffering the abuse of bullies at school. Eventually, he went to a boarding school, St. Michael’s, and after being expelled for striking back at the headmaster, turned toward journalism as a reporter for a trade journal, Gas World. After a failed engagement, he joined a struggling touring company, with which he gained his first experience in acting and playwriting, including an artistic and sexual collaboration with an older actress. The most important result of this picaresque period for the young Osborne was that he realized his ear for speech and developed his ambition to write for the stage. The early 1950’s led him into the vital world of provincial repertory—the background for Epitaph for George Dillon—and ultimately, to the acceptance of Look Back in Anger by George Devine and the English Stage Company. Thus began a prolific career that established Osborne as an influence on the style and subject of contemporary English theater, rivaled only by Harold Pinter. He was married four times, to Pamela Lane (1951-1957), actress Mary Ure (1957-1963), writer Penelope Gilliatt (1963-1968), and actress Jill Bennett, whom he married in 1968. He had one child. Osborne was a member of the Royal Society of Arts, and in 1970, he received an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art in London. In the mid-1970’s, after two decades of steady production for the stage, Osborne substantially reduced his playwriting, though he continued to turn out television dramas. Other than occasional adaptations, such as the 1991 televised revision (produced as a stage work in 1975) of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and an hour-long profile on British television’s South Bank Show, Osborne was not highly visible on the theater scene in these later decades of his life. His 1991 play, Déjàvu, which opened at the Comedy Theater in London to mixed reviews, was his first major new work to appear on the London stage in more than fifteen years. The 1991 publication of the second volume of Osborne’s autobiography, Almost a Gentleman, brought his memoirs up

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to the mid-1960’s and kept his name in the news for a short time. He died in 1994 at the age of sixty-five. Analysis • When the much-heralded John Osborne hero tore into an entire generation yet had no prospect for viable change, he discovered his own nakedness and vulnerability. He was inevitably a man in limbo, caught between nostalgia for the settled order of the past and hope for an idealized future he could not possibly identify. His rage was directed against his own inadequacy, not simply against that of his society. Because it was ineffectual, protesting against the ills of society became primarily a ritual complaint of the self against its own limitations. Every Osborne play deals with reality’s raids on self-esteem. His characters, even those who are most hostile to outworn conventions, are all in search of some private realm where they can operate with distinction. Sadly, that very search, which leads to isolation and denies communication, is as important a contributor to the contemporary malaise as is any governing body or social system. Angry young men and scornful old men, alike, feel disaffiliated and frustrated by the meager roles they occupy, but their greatest failure comes from not making a commitment to anything other than the justification of those feelings. Osborne wrote of a world that is immune to meaningful achievement. The degree to which his characters can move beyond complaint toward some constructive alternative that welcomes other people is the best measure of their heroism. Look Back in Anger • Look Back in Anger is less specifically about rebellion than it is about the inertia that overcomes someone when he feels helpless to rebel. To excuse his own inanition, Jimmy Porter cries that there are no “good, brave causes left”; in fact, he daily rails against dozens of enemies—the bomb, advertisers, the church, politicians, aristocrats, cinema audiences, and others—until one realizes that the problem is that there are too many causes worth fighting for, and their sheer magnitude renders Jimmy impotent. His anger, his irreverence, and his castigating wit are all an imposture, an attempt to shield himself from his failure to take meaningful action. While he pricks the illusions and damns the lethargy of those around him, he himself holds fast to the sense that only he suffers, that his anger betokens spiritual superiority over Alison, who irons incessantly and who only desires peace, and over Cliff, who buries his head in the newspaper and who only desires comfortable seclusion in the Porters’ flat. However justifiable his charges against the other characters, Jimmy’s anger is less a mark of privilege than it is a standing joke—part of the “Sunday ritual.” Jimmy at times seems almost envious of those he attacks. The man for whom he professes the greatest resentment, Colonel Redfern, is an illusion-ridden, displaced Edwardian whom Jimmy prefers to see as the tyrannical father from whose clutches he saved Alison; nevertheless, the colonel at least had a golden age, whereas Jimmy agitates in a vacuum. Similarly, Helena, Alison’s posh actress-friend, inspires in Jimmy equal portions of spite and sexual desire; he not only brings this officious snob down from her pedestal but also makes a place for her in his home after Alison’s departure. Even Alison’s political brother, Nigel, “the chinless wonder,” whose vagueness Jimmy loves to attack, reflects on Jimmy’s personal lack of commitment. The point is that Jimmy cannot afford to see himself as in any way implicated by his own attacks. He resents everyone else’s desperate evasion of suffering—he goes so far as to wish that Alison should witness the death of a baby, thereby unwittingly preview-

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ing her fate—but he, too, tends to leave the scene at times of crisis, going off to play his horn in the other room, for example, when Alison returns to confront the “traitorous” Helena. At this crucial juncture, Helena decides to opt out of the mess. Rather than risk dirtying her soul, she spouts convenient clichés about doing the decent thing and thus escapes her guilt. Alison’s return is itself a compromise made in order to reaffirm the only security she has ever had. To say that Jimmy Porter proves any more willing to handle the pain and difficulty of being alive, however, is to ignore the fact that his has been an exclusive self-interest throughout the play. He is childishly arrogant rather than righteously indignant. So long as some woman is there to iron his clothes, he will not be bothered about his responsibilities to either Alison or Helena. (After all, he reasons, by leaving him, they have betrayed his “love,” and so they deserve little more than scorn.) The image that concludes the play—Jimmy and Alison huddled together in a game of bears and squirrels—marks a final repudiation of the complications of adult life. “Let’s pretend we’re human” is Jimmy’s original suggestion at the beginning of Look Back in Anger, but the consequences of human thought and feeling are too great; only within the limited arrangement of a “brainless” love game can either of them function at the end of the play. Look Back in Anger portrays a world that lacks opportunities for meaningful achievement. Jimmy Porter loses his glibness and sarcasm as the “cruel steel traps” of the world close in on him; he trades in his anger for anesthesia. Ironically, even more obsolete than Colonel Redfern’s visions of bygone days is Jimmy’s own anger; Helena suggests that he really belongs “in the middle of the French Revolution,” when glory was available. Jimmy Porter, who embodies the failures of his society, can support no cause other than that of the self in retreat. An impotent reformer and would-be martyr, he is consumed by a burning rage that finds no outlet. The Entertainer • Osborne’s society is one that seems immune to creativity and inimical to full humanity. In The Entertainer, Archie Rice looks back on the past nobility of the music hall (his is now a tawdry striptease joint) and forward to the barren legacy he has to offer his alienated children, and he wonders where all the “real people” have gone. Like Colonel Redfern, he is an anachronism, a personification of degraded values, as exemplified by his adherence to a dead art. He lacks even the satisfaction of the dying Billy Rice, who can at least withdraw into memories of free pudding with a pint of beer and respectable women in elegant dresses. Instead, Archie must console himself as best he can with a pitiful affair, his “little round world of light” onstage, and the conviction that at least he has “had a go at life.” The music hall structure of “turns” on a bill is imitated in the structure of the play itself. In this way, the story of the Rice family becomes an elaborate sketch, including overture, comic patter, heartrending interludes, and skits of love and death. Like the music hall, which has been corrupted by nudity and obscenity, the family unit, once a bastion of British dignity, has fallen on hard times. Phoebe, Archie’s wife, indulges her husband’s adulteries and failures and seeks shelter in local movie houses (another degraded art form). His son Frank is a conscientious objector who can only manage a “relationship substitute” with his father. His daughter Jean is also estranged from her parents, as she nurses the pain of a failed engagement and teaches an art class to children she loathes. In short, the younger generation is embittered by an inheritance of disappointment and ruined values, and Archie is incapable of communicating with them naturally and openly. He chooses, rather, to relate to them through a contrived performance, as he would to one of his vulgar audiences. In the place of intimacy, there is ca-

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jolement and manipulation, so that it becomes impossible for characters to distinguish sincerity from routine, confession from monologue. “Everybody’s all right,” croons Archie, and the central tension of The Entertainer is that between his efforts to sustain happiness, Britishness, the welfare state, and the state of his private little world, all by sheer theatricality, and the steady deconstruction of those myths. The final blows are the deaths of Billy Rice and young Mick, the one seeming to pass away out of his own irrelevance to the contemporary world, and the other killed in an otherworldly war. The result is shell shock. All that Archie can turn to is a quiet drink and a few awkward old songs in the faded spotlight. Like Look Back in Anger, which concludes with a desperate desire for mindless retreat, The Entertainer shows the responses to crisis as the familiar patter and the old soft shoe. Luther • Luther was both a departure from and an expansion of familiar themes for Osborne. The move from contemporary middle-class England to sixteenth century Germany makes Luther seem an anomalous experiment, but Osborne was once again concerned with the psychology of a sensitive man who prefers to escape the world rather than cope with the burden of mammoth causes that he finds overwhelming. Luther is a direct ancestor of Jimmy Porter: He is frightened by the implications of his own anger. The realization of God’s enormous task sends him into an epileptic fit. By embracing a monastic alternative, Luther can rationalize, at least temporarily, his divestment of the trappings and complications of secular life in the protective bosom of the Lord. The Augustinian order is the religious equivalent of the psychological refuges in Osborne’s previous plays. It is not God alone who castigates Luther for his retreat. Luther’s father, a practical and rather blasphemous man of the world, argues that his son, who could have been a fine lawyer, has chosen to run away from such a challenge and is now “abusing his youth with fear and humiliation.” Luther’s response is that his father is narrow-minded and blind to the glory of God, but the indictment still plagues Luther. The other brothers, too, laugh at the intensity of his “over-stimulated conscience”; Brother Weinand says Luther always speaks “as if lightning were just about to strike” behind him. Even Luther’s sleep is infested by demons, and his days are soured by constipation and vomiting. Having entered the monastery to find security and certainty, Luther is instead faced with weakness and doubt. Not only does he fail to forge his soul into a human equivalent of sanctuary, but he also finds his worst traits are exaggerated within this restricted arena. As Staupitz will advise him years later, his fanaticism does not guarantee the order’s potency, it simply renders it ridiculous. It is paranoia, not faith, that underlies Luther’s devotion. One can appreciate the fact that, despite Luther’s ultimate role as world-shaker, he is not a social revolutionary. He consistently sides with the forces of law and order during the Peasants’ Revolt. Although he prefers to drink to his own conscience instead of to the pope, he is equally disdainful of the “empty” rampage of revolution, which he deems an affront to what is truly Christian. In short, Luther has never learned the last tool of good works—to hate his own will—and his one-man crusade in the play is not so much against Satan as it is against the devilish fears in his own heart. It is ironic that Luther contributes to the dismantling of the fortress that Cajetan calls a representation of the perfect unity of the world because Luther has never desired anything more than its unassailable safety. As he tries to bargain with God, he insists, “This cause is not mine but yours. For myself, I’ve no business to be dealing with the great lords of the world. I want to be still, in peace, and alone.” Luther concludes

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with the hero crawling into a substitute sanctuary, in the form of marriage to a nun, Katherina von Bora. One is left with a weary man cradling his sleeping son in his arms and praying that God grant both of them sweet dreams. Luther is no different from Osborne’s wholly fictional creations in that he is the one who appears to be most afflicted by the fires he has ignited; the fact that Luther is far more successful in having an effect on the world at large than is Jimmy Porter does not free him from the sense that all he has “ever managed to do is convert everything into stench and dying and peril.” Inadmissible Evidence • Inadmissible Evidence resumed Osborne’s contention that one can suffer more personal damage from one’s own attempts to insulate oneself than from those things—a hostile world, a guilty past, or simply other people—from which one desires insulation. Bill Maitland is an attorney who undergoes a play-long crossexamination about the quality of his own life. Although his detestation of computerized, deculturalized, dehumanized society may in part explain his callousness and conceit, it does not justify his personal inadequacies or his inability to maintain meaningful relationships. The most damaging evidence against him is that, however virulently he argues that the world has discarded him, he appears to be the instrument of his own isolation, and this is what he cannot admit to himself. The play records Maitland’s last hours in a process of collapse. It opens in a “dream-court,” in which he conducts an anxious, helpless defense; when he awakens to his real world, he is no longer capable of handling the trials there. Like so many of Osborne’s main characters, Maitland turns to rhetoric to defend himself and to convince himself of his own existence. With a lawyer’s expertise, he spins convoluted monologues. He proposes to obscure, if he cannot eliminate, the ambiguous “wicked, bawdy and scandalous object” of which he stands accused: a life lived at a distance. Inadmissible Evidence has the effect of a one-man play, for Maitland is so manipulative and exploitative that other characters in the play are reduced to two-dimensional fact files, existing solely as embodiments of reactions toward Maitland. Their limited existence is a result of his incapacity for engaging in relationships of any real complexity or depth. What he sees as betrayal by his friends and family—one by one they appear in his office or call up to confirm their desertion—is, from another perspective, Maitland’s steady disappearance into solipsism. Having treated everyone with the same cynical caution, he grows to feel more and more “like something in a capsule in space, weightless, unable to touch anything or do anything, like a groping baby in a removed, putrefying womb.” He is losing the control he once exerted over people both sexually and professionally, and now he cannot stem the tide of their retreat. Eventually, not even taxis notice him, and the newspapers feature the replacement of lawyers by computers that will render them obsolete. Ironically, the sentence for the crime of a practiced detachment is a suffocating anonymity. Maitland’s last clients serve as the most effective witnesses for the “prosecution.” The women who complain of the callousness and the adulteries of their men come for legal counsel, but their function in the play is to force Maitland to recognize his own crimes in those of their men. (That all the women are played by one actress seems to insist on their symbolic status; they represent a single indictment.) Maitland can no longer escape into his work, for his work presents further evidence against him. He becomes indistinguishable from his last client, the self-consumed Mr. Maples, who also wants to avoid the ugly issues he has helped to create for himself.

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The play ends in plea bargaining. It is no longer possible to keep from being “found out” (his fear in the opening dream sequence), so Maitland considers changing his plea to guilty in order possibly to mitigate the judgment against him. Perhaps he can salvage something by warning his daughter not to make the same mistakes and messes he did. Unfortunately, it may simply be too late to avoid his sentence; after all, can his daughter take to heart the didactic instruction of a man who has shown her nothing but insincerity? Inadmissible Evidence leaves one with the image of a man repenting his sins in solitary confinement. A new focus • Osborne never deserted the theme of life’s failure to measure up to human desires, and of people’s unwitting contribution to that failure by virtue of the self-interest that underlies their complaints. Thus, for example, does Pamela in Time Present take up the gauntlet from Jimmy Porter, ridiculing the tawdriness and banality of the 1960’s, the drugs, hippies, happenings, and the need to be “cool,” with the same fervor that Jimmy railed against the uninspiring prospects of life in the 1950’s. Osborne’s later approach to this theme, however, was from the point of view of the conservative forces that were the target of the younger heroes of his earlier plays. This approach was not so much the inevitable by-product of an aging playwright’s political reassessment as it was a change of focus that intensified his argument. In other words, the materially comfortable Establishment and the stolid aristocracy are as dissatisfied as the disenfranchised younger generation. In West of Suez, the first play designating this new focus, the shift from self-righteous anger to anxious unsettledness denotes not only nostalgia for the past and dissatisfaction with the present but also a fear of the future. West of Suez • West of Suez examines yet another cramped refuge: In this case, it is the garden of a villa in the West Indies meant to serve as a retreat from the “cold, uncertain tides and striving pavements. And the marriage of anxieties.” What had been intended as a reservation for the vestiges of the old British Empire is instead proof of its degradation. The Suez Canal is closed; the dreams of the empire it once exemplified are choked. The fiction cannot survive unless those who maintain it do so miles away from the reality, “in the West, among the non-descripts of the Bahamas.” Like their literary predecessors, Colonel Redfern and Billy Rice, the nostalgiaridden members of this “exclusive circle” have been trivialized into comedy. A brigadier is reduced to domestic chores; the aged writer, Wyatt Gillman, gives an interview “like a wounded imperial bull being baited by a member of the lesser breeds”; social gatherings are contaminated by hippies, homosexuals, and tourists. The only defense against this invasion is boorish prejudice, which the traditionalists exhibit throughout the play. The offspring of their obsolescence, represented by Edward and Frederica, are saddled with a useless legacy, and their marriage encompasses the tension and disappointment of people who must live vicariously on other people’s distant memories. Edward immerses himself in pathology because it affords him uncompromised detachment, and Frederica finds her self-possession in a kind of sneering sophistication. Their conversations are nothing more than highly stylized verbal exercises designed to take their minds off the supreme boredom of their lives. In a sense, they aspire to the state of blissful self-importance of Wyatt Gillman, the extreme version of which must be senility. Modern life is not something in which the couple would choose to involve themselves, but their island home is no escape from vulgarity. Tourists litter the place,

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cheapening it with their very presence, and the native blacks are charmless and sullen. Finally, there is the anarchist-hippie Jed, something of a reincarnation of Jimmy Porter, who lambastes the befuddled aristocrats with curses and threats of violence. His heavy-handed assault summarizes their ineffectuality, their pathetic irrelevance to the real world, while also demonstrating the ugliness of that world and almost justifying aristocratic stereotypes of the undignified lower classes. The response of Wyatt Gillman to all of this is to ask to go to bed, but there is no hiding from Jed’s vicious prophecy. Wyatt is murdered at the end of West of Suez by a band of natives. Nothing is sacred anymore, especially not the memory of colonial power and prestige. Wyatt’s children, friends, and associates, all of whom have staked claims in a world that no longer exists, stand over his corpse in stupefaction. Déjàvu • In 1992, Osborne returned to the London stage with Déjàvu, which brought Look Back in Anger’s Jimmy Porter back to life after two and a half decades. In Déjàvu, Jimmy, now a middle-aged drunk, still vents his spleen at all those around him. Few critics, though, thought that the new incarnation matched the power of the original. Other major works screenplays: Look Back in Anger, 1959 (with Nigel Kneale; adaptation of his stage play); The Entertainer, 1960 (with Kneale; adaptation of his stage play); Tom Jones, 1963 (adaptation of Henry Fielding’s novel); Inadmissible Evidence, 1968 (adaptation of his stage play); The Charge of the Light Brigade, 1968 (with Charles Wood). teleplays: A Subject of Scandal and Concern, 1960 (originally as A Matter of Scandal and Concern); The Right Prospectus, 1970; Very Like a Whale, 1971; The Gift of Friendship, 1972; Ms.: Or, Jill and Jack, 1974 (later published as Jill and Jack); The End of Me Old Cigar, 1975; Try a Little Tenderness, 1978; You’re Not Watching Me, Mummy, 1980; A Better Class of Person, 1985; God Rot Tunbridge Wells, 1985; The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1991 (adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novel). nonfiction: A Better Class of Person: An Autobiography, 1929-1956, 1981; Almost a Gentleman: An Autobiography, Volume Two: 1955-1966, 1991; Damn You, England: Collected Prose, 1994. Bibliography Banham, Martin. Osborne. Edinburgh, Scotland: Oliver and Boyd, 1969. Contains discerning essays on Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer, and nine other plays, discussed around the thesis statement that “most of Osborne’s targets are very clearly observed, defined, and, through his frontal assault, shaken to their foundations.” Rich with material for further inquiry, especially when compared with later work. Complemented by a list of first British productions and a select bibliography. Brien, Alan. “Snot or Not?” Review of Almost a Gentleman. New Statesman Society 4 (November 15, 1991): 47. In this review of Osborne’s second volume of his autobiography, Brien’s premise is that an “autobiography is not history. It is a form of entertainment.” He finds Osborne’s work hostile but valuable. Brien was one of the few defenders of Osborne’s aggressively straightforward second volume. Denison, Patricia D., ed. John Osborne: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1997. Several essays critically examine Osborne’s body of work, focusing on his form and technique, the construction of gender, and the relationships between his life and plays. Ferrar, Harold. John Osborne. New York: Columbia University Press, 1973. This booklet on Osborne’s first fifteen years of output notes that Jimmy Porter (in Look Back in

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Anger) is a portrait of “the body politic: one either defensively dismisses him or confronts the political implications of his protest and the social etiology of his anguish.” Discusses A Bond Honored, The Hotel in Amsterdam, and other more obscure works. Brief select bibliography. Gilleman, Luc. John Osborne: Vituperative Artist. New York: Routledge, 2002. Provides criticism and analysis of Osborne’s life and works. Bibliography and index. Hayman, Ronald. John Osborne. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1972. The World Dramatists series specializes in a factual overview, with play-by-play chapters, copious notes on stage productions, cast lists (here, both of London and New York premieres and productions), and a careful chronology. The introduction speaks of Osborne’s ability to “epitomize something important about England today, not just by expressing moods and stating attitudes but by summing up the condition that the country is in, almost personifying it.” Index. Hinchliffe, Arnold P. British Theatre, 1950-1970. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1974. The best book for putting Osborne in the context of the total revolutionary movement in British and European theater, and written when the movement was preparing for the second wave of playwrights. Particularly articulate on European influences, the Theater of the Absurd, and the relation of a national theater to the themes of Osborne and his contemporaries. Select bibliography but no index. _______. John Osborne. Boston: Twayne, 1984. A general introduction to Osborne, with an oddly dated discussion of his most influential works, and not much new. Chronology, index, and bibliography. Arthur M. Saltzman, updated by Thomas J. Taylor and Robert McClenaghan

Suzan-Lori Parks Suzan-Lori Parks

Born: Fort Knox, Kentucky; May 10, 1963 Principal drama • The Sinner’s Place, pr. 1984, pb. 1995; Betting on the Dust Commander, pr. 1987, pb. 1995; Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, pr. 1989, pb. 1995; The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, pr. 1990, pb. 1995; Devotees in the Garden of Love, pr. 1991, pb. 1995; The America Play, pr. 1993, pb. 1995; The America Play and Other Works, pb. 1995; Venus, pr. 1996, pb. 1997; In the Blood, pr. 1999, pb. 2000; Fucking A, pr. 2000, pb. 2001; The Red Letter Plays, pb. 2001 (includes In the Blood and Fucking A); Topdog/Underdog, pr., pb. 2001 Other literary forms • Though her literary reputation rests primarily on her dramatic writing, Suzan-Lori Parks has also written several screenplays: Anemone Me, an independent film released in New York in 1990, Girl 6, directed by Spike Lee and released in 1996, and two scripts for Jodie Foster and Danny Glover. Parks has also written several essays that have been published in theater journals. Achievements • Suzan-Lori Parks produced her first play, The Sinner’s Place, in 1984, as a student at Mount Holyoke College. Her second, Betting on the Dust Commander, debuted in a Brooklyn garage in 1987, with Parks purchasing five folding chairs to accommodate the audience. From these modest beginnings, Parks has become one of the most celebrated American playwrights of her generation. Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, produced in 1989, earned Parks her first Obie Award for best new American play, and The New York Times named her the year’s most promising playwright. Parks received her second Obie, for Venus, in 1996. Her next play, In the Blood, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2000. Parks has received numerous fellowships and grants, including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000 and the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2001. In 2002, Parks became only the fourth African American and the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in drama for her play Topdog/Underdog. She has taught at the University of Michigan, Yale University, and New York University. She also served as writer-in-residence at the New School for Social Research (now New School University) in New York from 1991 to 1992. In 2000, Parks became director of the Audrey Skirball Kernis Theatre Projects Writing for Performance program at the California Institute of the Arts. Biography • Suzan-Lori Parks was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky, in 1963, the daughter of a career army officer. She spent her early childhood in several cities across the United States and lived in Germany, where she attended high school. She began writing short stories as a third grader and continued to focus on prose writing until her undergraduate years at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. There, she met the distinguished author and essayist James Baldwin, who recognized her gift for dialogue and suggested that she explore drama. Parks wrote her first play, The Sinner’s Place, in 1984 as a student at Mount Holyoke. 668

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Though she earned an honors citation for her work, the college’s theater department refused to stage the play. Parks graduated with honors in 1985 and moved to London for a year to study acting. Betting on the Dust Commander, her first play to be produced in New York City, debuted in 1987. Two years later, Parks received an Obie Award for Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third KingImage not available dom, and The New York Times named Parks the most promising playwright of 1989. Following the successful production of The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World at the Brooklyn Arts Council’s BACA Downtown Theatre in 1990, Parks produced her next two plays, Devotees in the Garden of Love and The America Play on smaller stages in Lexington, Kentucky, and Dallas, Texas, respectively. The America Play (AP/Wide World Photos) later opened Off-Broadway at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre in New York City in 1994. Parks earned a second Obie Award in 1996, for her play Venus, which also debuted at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre. Also in 1996, Parks wrote the screenplay for director Spike Lee’s film Girl 6. The productions of In the Blood, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 2000, and Fucking A, both of which draw on elements in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel, The Scarlet Letter (1850), continued to earn Parks wide critical acclaim. She received the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000 and the MacArthur Fellowship (called the genius grant) in 2001. Parks’s growing reputation as a brilliant young playwright reached new heights in 2001 with the production of Topdog/Underdog. The play opened on July 22, 2001, at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre in New York City to rave reviews and earned Parks the Pulitzer Prize in drama in 2002, distinguishing her as the first African American woman and only the fourth African American to win the award. Topdog/Underdog opened on Broadway in April of 2002, the first Broadway opening for an African American woman since Ntozake Shange, whose for colored girls who have considered suicide/since the rainbow is enuf opened in 1976. “I think it’s a great moment for all African-American women writers,” Parks has explained about becoming the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in drama. “And anytime America recognizes a member of a certain group for excellence—one that has not traditionally been recognized—it’s a great moment for American culture.” Parks married Paul Oscher, a blues musician, in 2001, and joined the faculty of the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, as the director of the Audrey Skirball Kernis Theatre Projects Writing for Performance program.

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Analysis • “I am obsessed with resurrecting,” Suzan-Lori Parks explained in a 1996 interview, “with bringing up the dead . . . and hearing their stories as they come into my head.” Parks has often described the characters she creates as independent beings, as voices that relate their stories to her. Rather than writing them into existence, Parks allows the characters to speak themselves into being. Drawing on history, myth, and fantasy, she populates her plays with conventional and unconventional characters whose stories excavate the past in order to expose the truths and misconceptions about African American and American history. “Every play I write is about love and distance. And time,” she explained in 1994. “And from that we can get things like history.” She elaborates further in her essay “Possession,” collected in The America Play and Other Works. “Through each line of text, I’m rewriting the Time Line—creating history where it is and always was but has not yet been divined.” Language plays a vital role in this creation of history. Using what she calls “rep and rev” (repetition and revision), Parks often employs language as a musical refrain, with characters repeating phrases throughout her plays, the repetition of which adds different shades of meaning. In Topdog/Underdog, Booth rehearses his three-card monte street routine, addressing his imaginary audience: “Watch me close watch me close now: who-see-thuh-red-card-who-see-the-red-card?” As the words recur at various points in the play, they take on the quality of a chant, or a chorus that signifies the building tension between the brothers. The question of identity in Parks’s drama, as self-awareness and the identification of an individual within a group, is of central importance. As characters attempt to identify themselves, they must destroy the false identities and histories that have been attributed to them. In Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, the characters Mona, Chona, and Verona, whose names have been changed to Molly, Charlene, and Veronica, meditate on the apparent mutability of their characters. “Once there was uh me named Mona who wondered what she’d be like if no one was watchin,” Mona/Molly says. The Foundling Father of Parks’s The America Play, whose setting is the Great Pit of History, is obsessed by Abraham Lincoln and decides to reenact his assassination in a traveling show. Like the character of Lincoln in Topdog/Underdog, who earns his living by reenacting Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in a local arcade, the Foundling Father is a captive of history. Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom • Rather than separating her first major play into traditional acts, Parks creates four separate stories that provide a nonlinear and sometimes surreal look at aspects of the African American experience in her Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom. “Snails,” the first section of the play, looks at a contemporary group of women who possess two names, one they have chosen and another that has been imposed on them. The second section, “Third Kingdom,” re-creates the tragic Middle Passage, through which enslaved Africans journeyed on their way to America, and the details of which are narrated by characters like Kin-Seer, Us-Seer, and Over-Seer. “Open House,” the third section, depicts the life of Aretha Saxon, a black servant/slave in the household of the white Saxon family. Aretha’s departure from the family is occasioned by the removal with pliers of all of her teeth. The play’s final section, “Greeks,” is a modern interpretation of Homer’s Odyssey (c. 750 b.c.e.; English translation, 1614), with Mr. Seargant Smith in the role of Odysseus. Hoping to earn “his Distinction” in the army, Seargant Smith spends most of his life away from his family, who await his return and the honor he hopes to bring back with him.

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The four stories in Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom depict characters whose identity and culture are marginalized by others. From the three women in “Snails,” whose identities are studied and inevitably altered by the invasive Lutsky, to Miss Faith’s extraction of Aretha Saxon’s teeth in an act that functions metaphorically as a means of extracting Aretha from the Saxon family history, Parks dramatizes the struggle of African Americans against cultural, historical, and linguistic sabotoge. A critical and popular success, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom earned Parks her first Obie Award for best new American play. The New York Times also named her 1989’s most promising young playwright. Venus • Venus received mixed reviews for its portrayal of an African woman whose unconventional physiognomy becomes the basis for her exhibition in a traveling sideshow in Europe. Parks based her play on a historical character, Saartjie Baartman, a South African woman whose body was displayed publicly in London and Paris in the early nineteenth century. Dubbed the Hottentot Venus, Baartman became a popular spectacle for white audiences who were fascinated and revolted by her appearance. After her death, Baartman’s sexual organs and buttocks were preserved and housed in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris until the late twentieth century. As the play opens, Venus is a popular attraction in Mother Showman’s traveling show of Nine Human Wonders in London. Because slavery has been outlawed in England, Mother Showman’s captivity of Venus sparks a debate about whether such exhibitions constitute slavery. Venus eventually escapes to Paris, where she falls under the influence of the Baron Docteur, who falls in love with Venus but also assures his colleagues that he intends to make her the object of scientific study. A twisted custody battle ensues as Mother Showman and Baron Docteur fight over who has the right to exhibit Venus. In the character of Venus, Parks explores the objectification of human beings, and particularly African Americans, whose humanity was denied in the nineteenth century (and beyond) on the basis of pseudoscientific theories that reinforced prejudices against physical and cultural difference. Venus, a woman who desires to be treated with love and respect, becomes an oddity in a circus sideshow, reduced to little more in the public consciousness than her “great heathen buttocks.” In the Blood • A modern interpretation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter, In the Blood depicts a homeless woman’s struggle to care for herself and her family. Hester, La Negrita, and her five children, all from different fathers, live under a bridge, making what little money they have from collecting cans. Hester spends much of her time practicing her writing (she knows only the letter A). As her health declines, Hester appeals for assistance to a street doctor, her welfare case worker, a former lover and father of her first child, and eventually a local reverend, who is the father of her youngest child. The actors who portray Hester’s five children also double as adult characters. In a series of stage confessions that resemble the chorus of a Greek tragedy, these characters (Amiga Gringa, Chilli, The Doctor, The Welfare Lady, and Reverend D) explain the ways in which they have taken advantage of Hester, who has been sexually exploited by almost everyone whom she knows. In the Blood is a hopeless tale of a woman undone by poverty and a social system that cannot meet her needs. Individuals in a position to help Hester can think only of how to use her. The word “slut,” scrawled on the wall of Hester’s makeshift home under the

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bridge in the play’s opening scene, serves a purpose similar to Hawthorne’s scarlet letter on Hester Prynne’s chest. Both Hesters are defined almost exclusively by what their societies perceive as aberrant sexuality. When every means of salvation is exhausted, Hester is left, in the final scene of the play, with the word “slut,” this time on the lips of her oldest child. Hester’s murder of her son Jabber at the end of the play functions as an attempt to efface the word, and the identification, both of which have followed her throughout the play. A critical and popular success, In the Blood was named a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Topdog/Underdog • Departing from the unorthodox staging and characterization of her previous plays, Parks presents what appears on the surface to be a traditional tale of sibling rivalry in Topdog/Underdog, which opened at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre on July 22, 2001, and opened on Broadway at the Ambassador Theatre in New York less than a year later. However, Parks links the struggle of her two characters, named Lincoln and Booth, to more complex and historical struggles of race, family, and identity. The two brothers, Lincoln and Booth, share a seedy urban apartment. Lincoln, a former street hustler whose skill at the card game three-card monte is legendary, now works at an arcade where he impersonates Abraham Lincoln for patrons who pay money to reenact his assassination. Booth, who aspires to his brother’s greatness at three-card monte, relies on Lincoln’s paychecks and whatever he can steal to make ends meet. As Lincoln and Booth, so named as a joke by their father, try to plan for their future, they confront the realities of the past: their abandonment by their parents and the buried animosities toward each other. In the play’s final scene, Booth flies into a rage when Lincoln bests him at three-card monte, thereby winning the family legacy (five hundred dollars rolled in a stocking) left to each son when their parents fled. Lincoln’s violent end is foreshadowed by his job at the arcade and by his and Booth’s names. How each brother accepts and realizes the roles imposed by family history, circumstance, and the inherent opposition of their names, however, makes the play a deeply compelling one. In 2002, shortly after its debut on Broadway, Topdog/Underdog earned Parks the Pulitzer Prize in drama. Other major works screenplays: Anemone Me, 1990; Girl 6, 1996. radio plays: Pickling, 1990; The Third Kingdom, 1990; Locomotive, 1991. Bibliography Frieze, James. “Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom: Suzan-Lori Parks and the Shared Struggle to Perceive.” Modern Drama 41, no. 4 (Winter, 1998): 523. Frieze provides a detailed analysis of Parks’s Obie Award-winning play, emphasizing the significance of identity in shaping the actions and thoughts of the play’s characters. Garrett, Shawn-Marie. “The Possession of Suzan-Lori Parks.” American Theatre 17, no. 8 (October, 2000): 22. This essay provides some background on Parks’s beginnings as a playwright and her unconventional approach to the writing process. Garrett provides a good overview of Parks’s development as a playwright and the historical, political, and racial forces that inform her work. Parks, Suzan-Lori. The America Play and Other Works. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995. This volume combines a sampling of Parks’s early plays, includ-

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ing Betting on the Dust Commander and Devotees in the Garden of Love, with three essays that provide insight on the aims and methods of Parks’s writing. Pochoda, Elizabeth. “I See Thuh Black Card . . . ?” Nation 274, no. 20 (May 27, 2002): 36. A review of Parks’s Topdog/Underdog, following its Broadway debut at the Ambassador Theatre in New York, which touches on the major themes of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play. Wilmer, S. E. “Restaging the Nation: The Work of Suzan-Lori Parks.” Modern Drama 43, no. 3 (Fall, 2000): 442. Examines the postmodern elements of Parks’s drama and provides analysis of most of her major plays. Philip Bader

Arthur Wing Pinero Arthur Wing Pinero

Born: London, England; May 24, 1855 Died: London, England; November 23, 1934 Principal drama • £200 a Year, pr. 1877; Two Can Play at That Game, pr. 1877; La Comète: Or, Two Hearts, pr. 1878; Daisy’s Escape, pr. 1879; Bygones, pr. 1880; Hester’s Mystery, pr. 1880, pb. 1893; The Money Spinner, pr. 1880, pb. 1900; Imprudence, pr. 1881; The Squire, pr., pb. 1881; Girls and Boys, pr. 1882; Lords and Commons, pr. 1883; The Rector, pr. 1883; The Rocket, pr. 1883, pb. 1905; Low Water, pr. 1884, pb. 1905; The Ironmaster, pr. 1884 (adaptation of George Ohnet’s play Le Maître de forges); In Chancery, pr. 1884, pb. 1905; The Magistrate, pr. 1885, pb. 1892; Mayfair, pr. 1885 (adaptation of Victorien Sardou’s play Maison neuve); The Hobby Horse, pr. 1886, pb. 1892; The School Mistress, pr. 1886, pb. 1894; Dandy Dick, pr. 1887, pb. 1893; Sweet Lavender, pr. 1888, pb. 1893; The Weaker Sex, pr. 1888, pb. 1894; The Profligate, pr. 1889, pb. 1892; The Cabinet Minister, pr. 1890, pb. 1891; The Plays of Arthur W. Pinero, pb. 1891-1915 (25 volumes); Lady Bountiful, pr. 1891, pb. 1892; The Times, pr., pb. 1891; The Amazons, pr. 1893, pb. 1905; The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, pr. 1893, pb. 1895; The Benefit of the Doubt, pr. 1895, pb. 1896; The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, pr., pb. 1895; The Princess and the Butterfly: Or, The Fantastics, pr. 1897, pb. 1898; The Beauty Stone, pr., pb. 1898 (libretto, with J. Comyns Carr; music by Sir Arthur Sullivan); Trelawny of the “Wells,” pr., pb. 1898; The Gay Lord Quex, pr. 1899, pb. 1900; Iris, pr. 1901, pb. 1902; Letty, pr. 1903, pb. 1904; A Wife Without a Smile, pr. 1904, pb. 1905; His House in Order, pr., pb. 1906; The Thunderbolt, pr. 1908, pb. 1909; Mid-Channel, pr. 1909, pb. 1910; Preserving Mr. Panmure, pr. 1911, pb. 1912; The “Mind the Paint” Girl, pr. 1912, pb. 1913; The Widow of Wasdale Head, pr. 1912, pb. 1924; Playgoers, pr., pb. 1913; The Big Drum, pr., pb. 1915; Mr. Livermore’s Dream, pb. 1916, pr. 1917; Social Plays, pb. 1917-1922 (4 volumes); The Freaks: An Idyll of Suburbia, pr. 1918, pb. 1922; Monica’s Blue Boy, pb. 1918 (ballet-pantomime; music by Frederick Cowen); Quick Work, pr. 1919; A Seat in the Park, pr., pb. 1922; The Enchanted Cottage, pr., pb. 1922; A Private Room, pr., pb. 1928; Dr. Harmer’s Holiday, pr. 1930, pb. 1931; A Cold June, pb. 1931, pr. 1932; Three Plays, pb. 1985; “Trelawny of the ‘Wells’” and Other Plays, pb. 1995 Other literary forms • Unlike his great contemporary George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Wing Pinero wrote very little other than plays. His nondramatic works consist of less than a dozen essays and the collected letters. The essays contain comments on theatrical technique, appreciations and criticisms of his fellow playwrights, retrospective accounts of the late nineteenth century London stage, and vignettes of his own life in the theater. The letters constitute a more substantial document; written in a style that varies from the businesslike to the witty and urbane, they provide invaluable glimpses of London theatrical life during the several decades in which Pinero was a dominant figure in British drama. Achievements • During his extraordinarily productive career, Arthur Wing Pinero wrote more than fifty plays, nearly all of which were produced and most of which were popular successes. Although his reputation is no longer what it once was, during the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, he was one 674

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of Britain’s most acclaimed playwrights. His prolific output was the financial mainstay of many a London theater, and his plays brought him both great wealth and international fame. The foremost performers of his day acted the roles he created, often achieving triumphs that they could never again equal. Nothing in the career of Edward Terry, for example, could match his popularity as Dick Phenyl, the amiable drunkard of Sweet Lavender. Pinero achieved success in a variety of dramatic forms. He wrote a series of farces for the Court Theatre that brought that institution from the brink of financial collapse to immediate prosperity. The first of these, The Magistrate, set a London record by running for more than three hundred consecutive performances. The play is still occasionally revived, a retitled version having been produced in London as recently as 1983. His sentimental comedies were also immensely popular, especially Sweet Lavender, which outdid even The Magistrate with an unprecedented first run of 684 performances. More historically important were Pinero’s problem plays, which demonstrated that drama with a serious social purpose could succeed on the nineteenth century British stage. Such plays as The Profligate, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, and The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith lack the intellectual subtlety and dramatic power of the works of Shaw, but they did help to prepare the way for Shaw. Although Pinero never challenged his audience’s social assumptions as directly as Shaw did, he showed that British playgoers were willing to think as well as to be entertained. Another of Pinero’s accomplishments was his successful advocacy, along with Henry Arthur Jones, of dramatic realism. An admirer from his youth of Thomas William Robertson’s cup-and-saucer drama, Pinero wrote in a colloquial rather than a declamatory style and avoided extreme melodramatic flourishes. Like Robertson, he drew his characters and plots from ordinary life, especially the life of the uppermiddle class. He made meticulous use of place references and of speech mannerisms to establish dramatic verisimilitude, and because of its greater naturalness for the performance of social drama, he preferred the three-walled-box stage to all other arrangements. As director of his own plays, he insisted that his actors avoid artificiality in the delivery of their lines, a practice that helped rid the theater of its last vestiges of bombast. Pinero’s determination that his plays not be distorted during their preparation for performance induced him, in fact, to exert complete directorial control over the final product, and the key place of the director in modern theater owes much to Pinero’s thoroughness. The extreme care with which Pinero created his realistic effects did not preclude the occurrence in his plays of sentimental and sensational moments reminiscent of melodrama. Indeed, sentiment and surprise are vital elements in most, if not all, of Pinero’s works, but these elements develop with a logical inevitability from character portrayal and plot construction rather than springing up, as they so often do in melodrama, with inappropriate suddenness. Unfortunately, the plot construction necessary to bring about some of the effects at which Pinero aimed is not as realistic as other aspects of his writing, and his plots often seem contrived. In imitation of Eugène Scribe, Victorien Sardou, and Alexandre Dumas, fils, Pinero was a writer of well-made plays, plays that Shaw compared to “cats’-cradles, clockwork mice, mechanical rabbits, and the like.” Such plays relied heavily on compressed exposition through convenient exchanges of letters and unlikely conversations between characters. Their well-made plots contained obtrusive foreshadowings of later events, especially of the startling, but carefully prepared-for, plot reversal. They then moved to their inevitable denouement, in which every plot complication was resolved and every uncertainty clarified.

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Although Pinero’s fusion of realism, sentiment, and plot contrivance may sound like an unpromising amalgam, the craftsmanship with which he drew these elements together suited the taste of his audiences well enough to make him the most popular playwright in the English-speaking world for more than two decades and to earn for him, in 1909, a knighthood—the second to be granted to a playwright for his contributions to the theater; no one but W. S. Gilbert had been so honored previously. Moreover, the conventions of popular theater that Pinero helped shape are not drastically different from the conventions that exist today. It would take very little rewriting to transform The Magistrate into the most up-to-date of situation comedies, and it would take only slightly more effort to make Sweet Lavender a believable contemporary screen romance. For his considerable contributions to popular theater, then, and for his pioneering efforts in serious social drama, Pinero is worthy of more attention than he has, in the past, received. Biography • Sir Arthur Wing Pinero was born into an upper-middle-class family in London, England, on May 24, 1855. He was the youngest child and only son of Lucy Daines Pinero and John Daniel Pinero, a couple described by Pinero’s biographer, Wilbur Dunkel, as “liberal-minded.” Pinero’s maternal ancestors were of longestablished English stock. His paternal forebears, whose name was originally Pinheiro, were Portuguese Jewish immigrants who had arrived in England in the early eighteenth century. Pinero’s parents were frequent theatergoers, and one of his earliest memories was of attending a Grecian Theatre pantomime with his parents and his sisters, Frances and Mary. Very early, too, he discovered the wonders of Sadler’s Wells, where, for a mere eighteen pence, he could indulge his growing fascination with plays and actors. His parents never objected to this fascination, but it was always understood that Arthur, like his father and his grandfather, would become a lawyer. Because of family financial difficulties, Pinero was removed from school and began his legal apprenticeship at age ten. He worked in his father’s law office, without great enthusiasm, until his father’s retirement in 1870 and then found employment as a library clerk. He soon left that job to accept a position in a solicitor’s office, but he felt no more interest in the law while working for his new employer in Lincoln’s Inn Fields than he had felt while working for his father in Great James Street. Meanwhile, Pinero’s fascination with the theater continued to increase: He discovered Thomas William Robertson’s dramas at the Prince of Wales’s Theatre and became absorbed in the new theatrical realism. He learned much that would later be of great use to him from Marie Wilton’s purposely understated productions of Robertson’s plays, and he began to haunt the street outside the David Garrick Club in hopes of catching an occasional glimpse of the performers he so much admired. He wrote plays that no theater manager would produce, took elocution lessons that intensified his interest in the actor’s art, and decided finally to seek a theatrical career of his own. In 1874, soon after the death of his father, Pinero became an extra with the Edinburgh Theatre Royal. A year later, he moved on to Liverpool, where Wilkie Collins saw him and secured for him a part in his newest play, Miss Gwilt, which opened at the Globe Theatre, London, in April of 1876. Henry Irving liked Pinero’s unpretentious style of acting and offered him the role of Claudius in a Lyceum Theatre tour of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (pr. c. 1600-1601). Pinero accepted the part and spent most of the next five years performing in various Lyceum Theatre productions. Pinero also succeeded for the first time in having one of his own plays produced. In October of 1877, £200 a Year was performed as a curtain raiser at the Globe Theatre,

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which borrowed him back from the Lyceum for the evening to play the male lead. During the next three years, five more of his plays were produced, with varying degrees of success, followed at last by his first undeniable hit, The Money Spinner, which opened in Manchester during November of 1880 and moved to London the following January. His next several plays also turned a profit, and he retired from acting in 1882 to dedicate himself fully to the creation of new works for the stage. Pinero’s work habits were almost compulsive in their regularity, and even after marrying Myra Holme, a widowed actress, in 1883, he refused to deviate from his accustomed writing schedule. Between teatime and breakfast, he wrote and slept, a routine that he maintained with stubborn perseverance and that helped him turn out an amazing number of plays. Many of these early efforts were farces, farce being the first dramatic form of which Pinero was an acknowledged master. The Rocket and In Chancery, which premiered in December of 1883 and December of 1884 respectively, brought Pinero considerable success, but it was with the opening of The Magistrate, the first of the Court farces, on March 21, 1885, that his reputation soared. During the next several years, he supplied the Court Theatre with four more farces, The School Mistress, Dandy Dick, The Cabinet Minister, and The Amazons, all of which were resoundingly popular. In this same period, Pinero was also writing sentimental comedies and had begun to experiment with the problem play. Sweet Lavender commenced its record first run on March 21, 1888, and the more modestly successful but equally sentimental Lady Bountiful opened on March 7, 1891. The first of the significant problem plays, The Profligate, premiered in the spring of 1889 and caused a considerable critical stir. The play was hailed for its daring treatment of a serious social theme, and hope was expressed that further plays of the same sort, from Pinero or from others, might soon appear. This hope was realized on May 27, 1893, with the premiere of The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, Pinero’s most acclaimed play. Pinero had dedicated a year of his life to putting the play together and another several months to getting it staged. Despite Pinero’s prodigious reputation, none of the London theater managers was at first willing to touch it. Finally, with some reluctance, George Alexander accepted it for production at the St. James’s Theatre and cast an unknown actress, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, in the title role of Paula Tanqueray. In a part that was later to provide triumphs for Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, and Ethel Barrymore, Mrs. Campbell was brilliant, and the play was an unqualified critical and popular success. It was compared favorably to Dumas’s Camille (pr. 1852) and was declared to be superior to every English drama since the time of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. For the next fifteen years, Pinero was at the top of his profession. Theaters clamored for his work, his plays were performed throughout the world, and nearly everything he wrote gained an enthusiastic reception. There were occasional failures, such as The Princess and the Butterfly and the ill-advised Sir Arthur Sullivan collaboration, The Beauty Stone, but the successes far outnumbered the infrequent lapses. When Pinero’s knighthood was announced in 1909, there were few to cavil. After all, his two most recent plays, His House in Order (which earned for him an astounding £50,000) and The Thunderbolt, were among his very best works, and the immediately following MidChannel was equally fine. Preserving Mr. Panmure, however, was not so fine, and The “Mind the Paint” Girl was booed. The materials Pinero was shaping were not so very different from those he had used in the past, but he had begun to lose his craftsman’s touch, and his audience’s interests had begun to shift in ways he could not understand. He was becoming old-fashioned, and try as he might, he could never regain the knack for creating successful plays.

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The last twenty-five years of Pinero’s life were marked by a gradual decline. He wrote fewer and fewer plays, and they received less and less attention. He remained financially prosperous, but he was no longer the theatrical lion that he had once been. The death of his wife in 1919 reduced his creative energies still more, and when he died in London on November 23, 1934, it had been many years since he had experienced a theatrical triumph. Analysis • Because of its earnest self-importance and prudish restrictiveness, Victorian England was as ripe for comic deflation as the Rome of Plautus, and few of his contemporaries were as skillful as Arthur Wing Pinero at producing subversive, farcical laughter. In the typical Pinero farce, the young and uninhibited gain the upper hand over their proper, authoritarian elders with dazzling ease. In the course of the play, the well established and the vain, the powerful and the pompous are teased and tormented until nothing remains of their cherished propriety but a sheepish grin. All of this is accomplished without rancor, however, and even the figures of fun are treated with warmhearted sympathy. The Magistrate • In The Magistrate, the primary victims of comic deflation are the mock-heroically named Aeneas Posket, a stuffy but charitable police magistrate who fills his household with those convicted in his court, and his deceiving second wife, Agatha. The instigator of their discomfiture is Agatha’s delightfully irresponsible son, Cis Farringdon. The unlikely premise on which the plot depends is that, out of vanity and a desire to catch a second husband, Agatha has subtracted five years from her own age and five years from that of her son, thereby convincing both Aeneas and Cis that she is thirty-one and that Cis is fourteen. As she explains to her sister Charlotte in one of Pinero’s contrived expository dialogues, “If I am only thirty-one now, my boy couldn’t have been born nineteen years ago, and if he could, he oughtn’t to have been, because, on my own showing, I wasn’t married till four years later.” Because she lives in a society that has taught her that no man is likely to propose to a middle-aged woman and that no respectable woman has a child out of wedlock, Agatha has set a trap both for herself and for her unsuspecting husband. The trap is sprung by Cis, who, despite believing himself to be fourteen, cannot help acting nineteen. He flirts with his sixteen-year-old music teacher, gambles quite skillfully, and lures his dignified stepfather, at a key moment, into a night of carousing. The carousing is made possible through Pinero’s use of another of his favorite plot contrivances, the fortuitous arrival of important letters. One of these letters announces an upcoming visit by Colonel Lukyn, a friend of Agatha’s first husband, who will be sure to expose Agatha’s deceit unless she intercepts him. A second letter informs Agatha of the sickness of a friend, Lady Adelaide Jenkins, which gives Agatha the excuse she needs to leave the house in quest of Colonel Lukyn. A third contains an overdue bill for charges incurred by Cis and his friends at the Hotel des Princes, a bill that Cis decides to manipulate his stepfather into paying. The fourth, whose significance in Pinero’s jigsaw puzzle plot becomes clear only later in the play, declares the intention of Charlotte’s straitlaced, sententious fiancé, Captain Horace Vale, to break off their engagement because of the impulsive Charlotte’s flirtation with another man. What the characters are unaware of is that all of them are headed for the same place, the Hotel des Princes, where the intricately prepared comic reversal awaits them. Cis is there to get his bill paid for him and to have a good time; Aeneas is there to see his wondrous new fourteen-year-old son in his unlikely natural habitat; Colonel Lukyn is there

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to visit old haunts; Captain Vale is there because he knows Colonel Lukyn; Agatha is there to plead for Lukyn’s silence; and Charlotte is there because Agatha is. Pinero milks the scenes that follow for all of their humorous possibilities, and in the process, he puts his dignified characters through absurd torments. The proper Captain Vale, for example, is asked to step onto a rickety balcony during a torrential rainstorm when Agatha and Charlotte request a private meeting with the colonel. He later creeps back into the room, soaked to the skin and wearing a bedraggled, oversized hat, mistakenly handed to him by Lukyn, and hides behind a curtain. In the meantime, the colonel has peppered his speech with so many babbling asides about his poor friend on the balcony that Agatha suspects him of suffering the aftereffects of sunstroke. Nevertheless, she does win his pledge to keep her secret, and the three sit down to dinner, while the grumbling, half-starved captain acts as a disembodied waiter from behind the curtain. After an absurd discovery scene in which Vale, visible to the audience, converses from his hiding place with the principals, Pinero begins the true humbling of his characters. As Vale and Charlotte attempt a reconciliation and as the infuriated Agatha realizes for the first time that the voices from the next room are those of her husband and her son—both of whom, like Agatha herself, have lied about their plans for the evening— the hotel is raided for serving food and drink after hours. Aeneas, the ostensible upholder of the laws, and Cis escape by leaping through a window and falling through a roof, while the magistrate’s wife and her three companions are dragged off to jail. After several hours of running from the authorities, Aeneas again becomes a figure of authority himself and prepares, as best he can, to judge the wrongdoings of others. What a shock it is, however, when he finds that the first case before him involves his wife’s friend, Colonel Lukyn, and three of Lukyn’s comrades. In a face-to-face interview with the colonel before the trial begins, Aeneas refuses to give special treatment to any of the four, not even the two ladies, and he exclaims, in righteous indignation, “I am listening, sir, to the guiding voice of Mrs. Posket—that newly-made wife still blushing from the embarrassment of her second marriage, and that voice says, ‘Strike for the sanctity of hearth and home, for the credit of the wives of England—no mercy!’” The result is that he hears the four malefactors plead guilty to exactly the crime he himself has committed and sentences them to seven days in jail, at the very moment that his wife, who has lied about her identity, pulls back her veil. In a play of this sort, in which self-righteousness and rigid social conventions are held up to ridicule, the appropriate conclusion is a liberating relaxation of the rules, and Pinero chooses just such a conclusion for The Magistrate. Mr. Bullamy, Aeneas’s fellow magistrate, finds a way of skirting the letter of the law and secures the prisoners’ release. The warring parties, much chastened by their experiences, are reconciled, and every concealed truth is revealed. Pinero even makes use of that most ancient symbol of reconciliation, a marriage, to bring the play to an end. Aeneas agrees to bless the upcoming union of the music teacher and Cis, who was fourteen yesterday but is nineteen today, especially if the two will accept his gift of a thousand pounds and take themselves off to Canada. Sweet Lavender • Pinero’s most successful sentimental comedy, Sweet Lavender, also makes use of ego deflation to bring its characters to their senses, but here laughter is less important than pathos for winning the audience’s approval of the playwright’s resolution of his plot. The play centers on one of the themes dealt with in The Magistrate, the sometimes rocky progress of love, but Sweet Lavender manages to explore much more dangerous ground without giving the impression of considering controversial

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materials. Essentially, the play asks whether one should follow the dictates of one’s heart or the expectations of society when choosing a spouse; the emphatic, and unabashedly maudlin, answer is that, if it is sensitive to innocence and virtue, the heart is the better guide. The exposition is again handled through convenient conversations, but this time with less artificiality than in The Magistrate. From these conversations, the audience learns that Clement Hale, a law student and the adopted son of wealthy banker Geoffrey Wedderburn, is sharing rooms with Dick Phenyl, a drunken but kindly barrister, and that Clement loves Lavender Rolt, the young daughter of housekeeper Ruth Rolt. He has not yet told Lavender of his love, and Dick Phenyl is convinced that such a declaration would destroy Clement’s future. The simple, poverty-stricken young lady is an unworthy match for Clement, he argues, and Mr. Wedderburn expects Clement to marry his niece, Minnie Gilfillian. Dick himself is very familiar with poverty and failure and would hate to see his young friend ruin his own expectations. From Lavender’s first entrance, however, Pinero makes it clear that she and Clement are destined for each other and that whatever snobbishness interferes with their union is unjust and must be overcome. Barriers of rank and wealth are of no consequence when two people are as well matched as Clement and Lavender, and the audience is in perfect sympathy with the two lovers when Clement, early in the play, proposes marriage and Lavender accepts him. Their decision to marry is so obviously right that the Wedderburns and anyone who sides with them must be convinced of their error in resisting such a perfect union. Dick Phenyl is the first to be won over. An impractical romantic himself, and for that very reason an admirable character, he quickly succumbs to the sentiment of the situation and acts as the lovers’ ally. Minnie becomes a collaborator with equal ease; her love for Clement is more nearly sisterly affection than passion, and besides, she herself is too busy flouting social conventions by playing the coquette with an upstart American to worry about a lost match with Clement. Mr. Wedderburn and his sister, Mrs. Gilfillian, are more stubborn in their interference, and it is only after both have been humbled that the marriage can occur. In one of his most extreme reversal scenes, Pinero has Wedderburn deliver an ultimatum to Clement to abandon Lavender or be cut off without a cent at the very moment when his own ruin is about to be announced. Barely has Clement reaffirmed his loyalty to Lavender and Wedderburn cursed him as a penniless fool when Dick Phenyl carries in a telegram that tells of the collapse of Mr. Wedderburn’s bank. At the same instant, Ruth Rolt appears at the door, and Wedderburn stares at her in shock. He has just been using himself as an example of a man who escaped the consequences of an improvident love affair by leaving the woman he loved; that woman was Ruth. In fact, the young lady whom Wedderburn has branded as unworthy of his stepson is Wedderburn’s own daughter, and the poverty for which he despised her becomes, temporarily, his own. Mrs. Gilfillian, who performs the housekeeping tasks once taken care of by the Rolts, is also drawn down, by necessity, to the level of those whom she has scorned. Both learn respect for their erstwhile inferiors and drop all objection to Clement’s marriage to Lavender. Mrs. Rolt, who had taken Lavender away out of fear that her daughter would either enter an incestuous marriage or have to be told the closely guarded secret of her illegitimacy, also relents when she discovers that Clement is an adopted son and that Mr. Wedderburn, who still loves her, will never reveal the truth. Finally, Dick Phenyl crowns the play’s triumphant ending when he announces that he has it in his power to restore Mr. Wedderburn’s bank to solvency. He

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knew of the bank’s collapse because he had been informed of his unexpected inheritance of the estate of his Uncle George, all of whose money had been placed in Mr. Wedderburn’s bank. By withdrawing his claim to the money, he can put the bank back on its feet. With this announcement, the play comes to its ecstatic conclusion. Despite the play’s popular success, Pinero was well aware that Sweet Lavender is artistically flawed. It slips perilously close to pure melodrama, and its fairy-tale ending is outrageously contrived. Shakespearean comedy contains elements as unlikely as those found here, but as many commentators have pointed out, such plays as The Winter’s Tale (pr. c.1610-1611) and As You Like It (pr. c.1599-1600) make no claims to verisimilitude, whereas Sweet Lavender purports to be realistic. The incompatibility that exists between its real and its contrived elements hurts the play’s artistic integrity. Nevertheless, Sweet Lavender does contain elements of serious drama, however flawed it may be. In its contrast of happy and unhappy couples, it attempts to make a statement about male sexual irresponsibility and about the double standard that allows such irresponsibility to flourish. The victimizing male is forced to see the consequences of his insensitivity to the abandoned female, and he feels appropriately ashamed. A more idealistic male is then permitted to right the wrongs of the past by treating the virginal female with proper love and respect. The Profligate • Such a neatly symmetrical combination of parts, however, is not often reflective of the complexities and compromises of real life. Of much deeper human interest is the use Pinero makes of the same four character types in his fascinating, but again flawed, problem play, The Profligate. Here, innocence is married to experience, and the virginal female to the victimizing male, while the idealistic male and the abandoned female move into and out of their lives, sometimes in troublesome ways. Hugh Murray, a thirty-year-old solicitor, is selflessly in love with Leslie Brundenell, a naïve but charming schoolgirl. Unfortunately for Hugh, “a pale, thoughtful, resolutelooking man,” Leslie has fallen in love with the gallant and worldly Dunstan Renshaw, the sort of man that Hugh himself admits to be more often successful with the ladies than men of his own kind. Leslie and Dunstan are to be married, and Hugh has agreed to be best man at their wedding, but he has second thoughts about his participation in the ceremony when Dunstan’s friend Lord Dangars drops by to pick up his latest divorce decree. After all, how could the friend of such a libertine as Dangars, a friend whose past is probably as shameful as Dangars’s own, behave honorably toward the innocent Miss Brundenell? Hugh will not actively interfere with the young couple’s union, but he will also not help it take place. Almost as soon as the wedding party departs, Janet Preece appears, a woman in search of her seducer. He had called himself Lawrence Kenward when he had known her in the country, but Janet is well aware that that name was as false as the man himself. She wants Hugh Murray to help her find him, and when he guesses the man’s identity, he agrees. If the audience is unfamiliar enough with Pinero’s use of foreshadowing not to have discovered that Lawrence Kenward is Dunstan Renshaw, Murray makes that fact explicit during a later conversation with Renshaw. Leslie and Dunstan have been living together blissfully in an Italian villa for several weeks when Murray arrives to warn Renshaw of his danger. He has compromised his professional ethics for a month by concealing what he knows from Janet Preece, but the secret will soon be out, and for Leslie’s sake, Dunstan had best be prepared. Unfortunately, when the secret does come out, Dunstan is not the least prepared,

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and the results are disastrous. In a series of coincidences as unlikely as the events which bring the characters in The Magistrate together at the Hotel des Princes, Janet, Leslie, Dunstan, and Lord Dangars suddenly find themselves in a distressing confrontation at the Italian villa. Janet has been stranded at the villa by her former employer and has confessed her sordid past to the kindly Leslie, who has nursed her through a serious illness. Soon thereafter, Dunstan returns from a visit with Lord Dangars. Dangars has accompanied Dunstan to the villa, since Dangars’s latest fiancée, who is Leslie’s closest friend and the daughter of Janet’s former employer, is staying there. When Janet sees the two approaching, she shouts, “It’s the man—the man!” and Leslie’s imagination does the rest. In order to protect her affianced friend, she prepares for Lord Dangars’s unmasking and unmasks her own husband instead. Despite Dunstan’s pleas for mercy, Leslie leaves him, and Dunstan commits suicide. This summary of events seems to support the frequently enunciated interpretation of the play as an attack on the double standard, which makes its point by punishing the erring male as severely as the more conventional moral tale punishes the erring female. According to this view, then, men ought to guard their honor as diligently as women do, for who knows what the eventual consequences of sin may be? Such an interpretation undervalues the play’s complexity. First, Dunstan is not destroyed by his sin but by the moral rigidity of his wife. Dunstan has been cruel in his abandoning of Janet Preece, and it was his lust that led him astray, but he has changed since that premarital adventure and has become worthy of Leslie’s love. Because of her own upbringing as an overprotected Victorian young lady, however, Leslie cannot see this and classes Dunstan with the play’s one true profligate, Lord Dangars. So serious is this inability to discriminate, in fact, that, in the moment of her greatest distress over the discovery of Dunstan’s past, Leslie loses the power to protect her close friend from the truly dangerous male, and Dangars escorts his reluctant fiancée from the stage. Furthermore, human sexuality is not as one-sided as Leslie assumes, and in a startling confession toward the end of the play, Janet admits to having been the sexual aggressor in her affair with Dunstan, a confession that Leslie dismisses without considering its implications. She does finally forgive Dunstan, however, and in the final scene of the play, she exhibits a sadder but deeper humanity than she possessed at the play’s beginning. Unfortunately, the man to whom she speaks her forgiveness has already taken his life. The Second Mrs. Tanqueray • The dialogue in The Profligate is too wooden and a number of the scenes too sensational for the play to be a fully successful work of art. In The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, Pinero largely solved such aesthetic problems to produce what is generally regarded as his masterpiece. The play again concerns Victorian sexual mores, and it again centers on the confrontation between innocence and experience, with innocence once more learning the lesson of tolerance and humanity too late. In the play’s opening act, which contains some of Pinero’s most skillfully handled exposition and foreshadowing, Aubrey Tanqueray is bidding a tentative farewell to the friends of his single life, to whom he announces that tomorrow he will be married for the second time. The first Mrs. Tanqueray had been “one of your cold sort . . . all marble arms and black velvet.” She had had no lack of Victorian respectability, but sexually, “She was an iceberg! As for kissing, the mere contact would have given him chapped lips.” The second Mrs. Tanqueray will be different; just how different is implied by Aubrey’s uncertainty that his friends will continue to socialize with him after the marriage has occurred. It is also implied by the discomfort with which he listens to

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the account given by his best friend, Cayley Drummle, of Sir George Orreyed’s marriage to a woman of low repute. The best people will cut him dead, Cayley asserts. The man should have known better. At the end of the act, when the men have left, the audience is introduced directly to the future Paula Tanqueray and indirectly to her pure and innocent opposite, Aubrey’s daughter Ellean. Paula, who has been the mistress of many men, has arrived at an outrageously late hour to deliver a letter to Aubrey containing an account of her various sexual escapades. She wants Aubrey to enter married life with no illusions about his wife’s past, but Aubrey assures her that he has no doubts about the wisdom of marrying her and gallantly burns the letter. She begs him to be sure, very sure, of what he feels; reminds him of the suicide of one of her close friends; and leaves him for the evening. He then opens a letter from his daughter, who has treated him with the same bloodless coldness as her mother had done before her, and discovers that Ellean has suddenly decided to leave the convent in which she has been educated in order to come home to her father. The potential difficulties of his decision are immediately obvious. How can such a creature of the spirit as Ellean and such a creature of the flesh as Paula be brought under the same roof without tragic results? How, in the age of Victoria, can the soul and the body be reconciled? The confrontation between the two women develops gradually and occurs, ironically enough, after they appear to have made peace. During the first days of their acquaintance, Paula is constantly attempting to win Ellean’s friendship and is constantly being treated with a maddening, dutiful politeness. Paula’s self-respect is totally dependent on being accepted and understood by Aubrey’s virginal daughter, a fact of which Aubrey himself is partially aware, and when that acceptance and understanding are not forthcoming, Paula lashes out at those around her. As Aubrey had feared, he and Paula have not been received into polite society, and their ostracism has intensified Paula’s contradictory feelings of shame and anger. She wants very much to be an untainted woman, and despite the power of her personality, a power that sometimes suggests a Phaedra or a Hedda Gabler, she has a deep need for approval. If Ellean, the embodiment of the purity she herself had once possessed, can love her, all will be well. For that to occur, however, each woman needs to learn something about the other’s attitude toward human relationships. That reeducation takes place for Ellean when she accompanies Aubrey’s friend, Mrs. Cortelyon, on a trip to Paris, a trip that Paula mistakenly assumes is intended to separate her forever from her stepdaughter. Paula’s own reeducation occurs when, in retaliation for the carrying off of Ellean and in direct defiance of her husband’s wishes, she invites the Orreyeds to visit. Lady Orreyed had been a close friend during their days as mistresses to the wealthy, and Paula has frequently expressed a desire to see her again. What she sees, however, is a vulgar gold digger who has married a stupid drunkard and who seems well on her way to bankrupting him. The married Paula Tanqueray is no more like Lady Orreyed than the married Dunstan Renshaw is like Lord Dangars, but after watching Lady Orreyed in action, Paula can hardly fail to see why anyone whose situation even superficially resembles Lady Orreyed’s might have difficulty winning her way into the hearts of the respectable and the well-to-do. Sexual prudery is part of the problem, but not the whole problem. The more drastic transformation has taken place in Ellean. This cold, spiritual young lady has experienced a sexual awakening, and the drives that have determined so much of Paula’s life are suddenly comprehensible to her. While in Paris, she has fallen in love. The young man is reputed to have had a wild youth, but he has since per-

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formed an act of heroism in India, and no one is more dashing and handsome. She now understands and accepts Paula, or seems to, and she kisses her in acknowledgment of their shared womanhood. At last, Paula is happy. Then the catastrophe occurs. Ellean’s sweetheart was once Paula’s sweetheart, and out of a false sense of duty, Paula informs Aubrey. Aubrey forbids Ellean to see him again. Ellean guesses the reason, and her love for Paula becomes hatred. In response, Paula surrenders to the sense of worthlessness that society has tried for so long to force on her and kills herself. Ellean hears “the fall” of this fallen woman’s body and runs to tell her father, crying out as she does so, “But I know—I helped to kill her. If I had only been merciful!” The Second Mrs. Tanqueray exhibits Pinero’s talents at their best, but it also suggests why Pinero is not praised today as enthusiastically as he once was. His craftsmanship is there for all to see, no matter in which literary epoch they live, but his serious social statements come through in their full power only when one is familiar with their Victorian context. His pronouncements lack the ring of lasting truth of the words of a Shakespeare or a Shaw, whatever he might have taught his Victorian (and later his Edwardian) audiences. Nevertheless, he helped to prepare the way for modern English social drama, and he perfected many of the techniques of modern popular drama, accomplishments that assure his place in British dramatic history. Other major work nonfiction: The Collected Letters of Sir Arthur Pinero, 1974 ( J. P. Wearing, editor). Bibliography Beerbohm, Max. Around Theatres. London: Rupert Hart-Davies, 1953. A collection of theater pieces by one of England’s most brilliant and perceptive writers and cartoonists. Contains reviews of four Pinero plays, The School Mistress, Iris, Letty, and The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, valuable precisely because Beerbohm wrote them after he succeeded George Bernard Shaw as drama critic for the Saturday Review. Dawick, John. Pinero: A Theatrical Life. Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1993. Dawick provides a look at Pinero’s long history with the theater. Contains bibliography and index. Griffin, Penny. Arthur Wing Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Griffin examines English drama in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on a comparison of the works of Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones. Bibliography and index. Lazenby, Walter. Arthur Wing Pinero. New York: Twayne, 1972. A basic look at the life and works of Pinero. Bibliography. Shaw, G. B. Dramatic Opinions and Essays. 2 vols. New York: Brentano’s, 1907. These reviews, published when Shaw was still a drama critic, remain the most perceptive ever written about Pinero. Despite Pinero’s extraordinary popularity, Shaw exposed the conventionality of the playwright’s ideas and his inability to come to grips with the situations he had created. Smith, Leslie. Modern British Farce: A Selective Study of British Farce from Pinero to the Present Day. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1989. Smith examines British farce, with emphasis on Pinero and his legacy. Bibliography and index. Robert H. O’Connor, updated by Mildred C. Kuner

Harold Pinter Harold Pinter

Born: London, England; October 10, 1930 Principal drama • The Room, pr. 1957, pb. 1960 (one act); The Birthday Party, pr. 1958, pb. 1959; The Dumb Waiter, pr. 1959 (in German), pr., pb. 1960 (in English; one act); The Caretaker, pr., pb. 1960; The Collection, pr. 1961, pb. 1963; “A Slight Ache” and Other Plays, pb. 1961; The Lover, pr., pb. 1963 (one act); The Homecoming, pr., pb. 1965; Tea Party, pb. 1965, pr. 1965 (televised), pr. 1968 (staged); The Basement, pb. 1967, pr. 1967 (televised), pr. 1968 (staged); Landscape, pb. 1968, pr. 1968 (radio play), pr. 1969 (staged; one act); Silence, pr., pb. 1969 (one act); Old Times, pr., pb. 1971; No Man’s Land, pr., pb. 1975; Plays, pb. 1975-1981, revised pb. 1991-1998 (4 volumes); Betrayal, pr., pb. 1978; The Hothouse, pr., pb. 1980 (wr. 1958); Family Voices, pr., pb. 1981; Other Places: Three Plays, pr., pb. 1982 (includes Family Voices, Victoria Station, and A Kind of Alaska; revised in 1984, includes One for the Road and deletes Family Voices); Mountain Language, pr., pb. 1988; The New World Order, pr. 1991; Party Time, pr., pb. 1991; Moonlight, pr., pb. 1993; Ashes to Ashes, pb. 1996; The Dwarfs and Nine Revue Sketches, pb. 1999; Celebration, pr., pb. 2000; Remembrance of Things Past, pr., pb. 2000 (with Di Trevis; adaptation of Marcel Proust’s novel); Press Conference, pr., pb. 2002 (sketch) Other literary forms • In addition to his works for the stage, Harold Pinter has published poetry and a few short stories in magazines. Early in his writing career, he contributed poems to Poetry London under the pseudonym Harold Pinta. He has written a number of radio plays as well as screenplays adapted from his own works and those of other writers. In 1972, Pinter was approached by Joseph Losey, who had directed the films made from Pinter’s screenplays The Servant (1963), Accident (1967), and The GoBetween (1971), with the idea of adapting Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927; Remembrance of Things Past, 1922-1931, 1981) for the screen. The task of turning Proust’s monumental seven-volume novel into a workable screenplay was daunting, and although the screenplay was published in 1977, the film was never made. However, Pinter has written that the time devoted to the Proust project was the best working year of his life. Three collections of Pinter’s screenplays were published in 2000, and a collection of his prose and poetry, Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics, 19481998, was published in 1998. Achievements • Harold Pinter has won many awards, including the Evening Standard Award (1960, for The Caretaker), the Italia Prize (1963, for the television version of The Lover), the British Film Academy Award (1965, for The Pumpkin Eater), and the Commonwealth Award (1981). He has a long list of honorary degrees, and he was elected an Honorary Fellow in the Modern Language Association in 1970. Pinter has also been decorated by his government: He was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1966 and a Companion of Honour in 2002. Biography • Harold Pinter was born October 10, 1930, in England, the son of a hardworking Jewish tailor whose business eventually failed. Pinter grew up in a rundown working-class area, full of railroad yards and bad-smelling factories. When World 685

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War II broke out in 1939, Pinter, like most London children, was evacuated to the countryside to be safe from the German bombing. Living in the countryside or by the sea was not, for Pinter, as idyllic as it might have been: “I was quite a morose little boy.” He returned to London before the end of the war and remembers seeing V-2 rockets flying overhead and his backyard in flames. After the war ended, the violence did not cease; anti-Semitism was strong in his neighborhood, and Jews were frequently threatened. Perhaps these early brushes with war and violence decided him; when he was eighteen and eligible for National Service, he declared himself a conscientious objector. He was afraid he would be jailed, but in fact, he was merely fined. In grammar school, he was a sprinter and set a record for the hundred-yard dash. He was also an actor in school plays, playing Macbeth and Romeo, and he received a grant in 1948 to study acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Pinter did not stay at the Academy long, however, and spent the next year tramping the streets. He published a few poems in literary magazines (he was only nineteen when the first were published) and got an acting job with a Shakespearean company touring Ireland; other acting jobs followed. He met the actress Vivien Merchant and married her in 1956; she was to perform in a number of his plays. They were divorced in 1980, and in November of that year Pinter married Lady Antonia Fraser, a highly regarded writer of historical biographies and one of England’s great beauties. The match of the famous, working-class playwright and the beautiful, aristocratic biographer was the object of much attention in London literary circles and in the popular press. Pinter had one son, Daniel, from his first marriage. In 1957, a friend of Pinter who was studying directing at Bristol University told him he needed a play, and Pinter wrote The Room for him in four afternoons. The play was performed and was favorably reviewed by Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times. Pinter seemed to have found himself. Immediately after writing The Room, he wrote The Birthday Party and The Dumb Waiter. The plays were performed, and though Hobson continued to champion him, many drama critics gave the plays scathing reviews. The Birthday Party closed after a week. In the following years, though Pinter’s plays continued to be

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attacked, they also continued to be revived and performed, and his work began to receive considerable critical attention. After his play The Caretaker became his first commercial success, Pinter emerged as a productive and versatile writer for stage and screen, as well as a political activist and spokesperson for the arts in general. In 1989, he came to the United States to direct his play Mountain Language. Directing his own and others’ work and acting in such touring shows as Old Times (with Liv Ullmann, in 1986), he was to become very well respected in the theater community. His film work includes, in addition to adaptations of his plays, The Handmaid’s Tale (1990; adapted from Margaret Atwood’s novel), The Heat of the Day (1990; based on Elizabeth Bowen’s novel), and original works such as Reunion (1989). Politically and culturally, Pinter protested the imprisonment of writers through his activities with the International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists (PEN Club), donated proceeds to Václav Havel, protested against the Margaret Thatcher government in Great Britain and U.S. involvement in Central and South America, founded the Arts for Nicaragua Fund, delivered a speech by Salman Rushdie while the writer was in hiding, and raised funds for famine relief in Ethiopia. In 1990, he organized a celebration in honor of Samuel Beckett at the National Theatre. During the 1990’s, Pinter became less active as a playwright. Analysis • Harold Pinter is sometimes associated with the generation of British playwrights who emerged in the 1950’s and are known as the Angry Young Men. His first plays, with their dingy, working-class settings and surface naturalism, seemed to link Pinter with this group, but only the surface of his plays is naturalistic; most of a Pinter play takes place beneath the surface. His closest affinities are with a more centrally important movement, the Theater of the Absurd. As a young man, before he started writing plays, the works of Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett made a great impression on Pinter. Like Kafka, Pinter portrays the absurdity of human existence with a loving attention to detail that creates the deceptive naturalism of his surfaces. It is particularly with the meticulously rendered, tape-recorder-accurate language of his characters that Pinter pulls the naturalistic and absurdist strands of his drama all together. The language of his characters, bumbling, repetitive, circular, is actually more realistic—more like actual human speech—than the precise and rhetorically patterned dialogue found in what is considered to be “realistic” drama. Yet that actual language of human beings, when isolated on the stage, underlines the absurdity of human aspirations and becomes both wonderfully comic and pathetic as it marks the stages of human beings’ inability to communicate what is most important to them. Pinter, however, is more than an accurate recorder of speech; he is also a poet. The language of his characters, for all of their inarticulateness, is finally profoundly communicative of the human condition. What makes Pinter one of the most important modern British dramatists is his consummate skill as a dramatist; the fact that in language and pattern he is a poet, especially a poet of contemporary language, both its spoken expression and its expressive silences; and his existential insight into human beings’ place in the universe, which connects him with the most profound writers and thinkers of his time. The Room • Pinter’s first play, The Room, contained a number of features that were to become his hallmarks. The play is set in a single small room, the characters warm and secure within but threatened by cold and death from without. The Room is overtly symbolic, more so than Pinter’s later work, but the setting and characters are, for the most

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part, realistic. Rose sits in the cheap flat making endless cups of tea, wrapping a muffler around her man before she lets him go out into the cold; her husband, Bert, drives a van. Under the naturalistic veneer, however, the play has a murky, almost expressionistic atmosphere. The room is Rose’s living space on earth. If she stays within, she is warm and safe. Outside, it is so cold it is “murder,” she says. She opens the door, and there, waiting to come in, is the new generation, a young couple named Mr. and Mrs. Sands (the sands of time? Mr. Sands’s name is Tod, which in German means “death”). They are looking for an apartment and have heard that Rose’s apartment is empty. “This room is occupied,” she insists, obviously upset at this premonition of her departure. A man has been staying in the basement. She imagines it to be wet and cold there, a place where no one would stand much of a chance. The man wants to see her. Again the door opens, to reveal a terrifying intruder from the outside. He comes in. He is a black man—the color of death—and he is blind, tapping in with his stick, blind as death is when claiming its victims from the ranks of the good or the bad. “Your father wants you to come home,” he tells her. Rose’s husband comes in at this moment, shrieks “Lice!” and immediately attacks the man, tipping him out of his chair and kicking him in the head until he is motionless. On the naturalistic level of the play, the action seems motivated by racist hatred, perhaps, but at the symbolic level, Bert seems to have recognized death and instinctively engages it in battle, as later Pinter characters kick out violently against their fate. It is, however, to no avail: Rose has been struck blind, already infected by her approaching death. While this summary stresses the symbolic dimension of the play, it is Pinter’s genius to achieve such symbolic resonance at the same time that he maintains an eerily naturalistic surface—although less so in this first play than in later plays. Critics have objected to the heavy-handedness, the overt symbolism, of the blind black man, and characters with similar roles in later plays are more subtly drawn. The Birthday Party • The Birthday Party was Pinter’s first full-length play; in effect, it is a much fuller and more skillful working out of the elements already present in The Room. The scene once more is restricted to a single room, the dining room of a seedy seaside guesthouse. Meg, the landlady, and Petey, her husband, who has a menial job outside the hotel, resemble Rose and her husband of The Room. Meg is especially like Rose in her suffocating motherliness. In this play, however, she is no longer the main character. That role has been taken by Stanley, the only boarder of the house, who has been there for a year. He is pinned to the house, afraid to go out, feeling that intruders from outside are menacing bringers of death. Although he is in his late thirties, he is being kept by Meg as a spoiled little boy. He sleeps late in the morning, and when he comes down to breakfast, he complains querulously about everything she fixes for him. He is unshaven and unwashed, still wearing his pajamas. What is enacted symbolically by Stan’s refusal to leave the house is his fear of going out and engaging life, his fear that an acceptance of life—meaning going outside, having a job, having normal sexual relations with a woman his age—would also mean accepting his eventual death. He is refusing to live in an absurd world that exacts so high a price for life. It is an untenable position, and his refusal to live as an adult human being has left him a wrinkled and aging child. Further, it does him no good to remain in the house: If he does not go out into the world, the world will come in to him. In fact, he hears that two men have come to town and that they are going to stay at the guesthouse. He knows at once that they have come for him and is thrown into a panic. In the meantime, Meg decides that it is his birthday and gives him a present. The uninten-

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tionally chilling reminder of his aging is cut across by the present itself, a child’s toy drum, which Stan begins beating frenziedly as the first act ends. The symbolic action, though more complex, resembles that of The Room: What is new is the much finer texture of the realistic surface of the play. The relationship between Stan and his surrogate mother, Meg, beautifully handled, is both comic and sad—comic because it is ridiculous for this nearly middle-aged man to be mothered so excessively and to behave so much like a spoiled child; sad because one believes in both Meg and Stan as human beings. Both comedy and pathos, realism and symbolic undercurrents, grow out of the fully developed language of the dialogue. Its richness, its circumlocution—all elements that have come to be called “Pinteresque”—are evident even in this early play. It is obvious that the two men who come, Goldberg and McCann, have indeed come for Stan. There is no concealment between them and Stan. He is rude to them and tries to order them out. They make it equally clear to him that he is not to leave the premises. McCann is gloomy and taciturn; Goldberg, the senior partner, is glib and falsely jovial. His language is a wonderfully comic—and sinister—blend of politicians’ clichés, shallow philosophy, and gangster argot. There is a brilliant scene when they first confront Stan, cross-examining him with a dizzying landslide of insane questions (“Why did you kill your wife? . . . Why did you never get married? . . . Why do you pick your nose?”) that finally leaves him screaming, and he kicks Goldberg in the stomach, just as the husband in The Room kicks the blind black man. It is too late, however, for they have already taken his glasses, and he has had his first taste of the blindness of death. Meg comes in, and they stop scuffling, the two henchmen putting on a show of joviality. They begin to have a birthday party for Stan. Lulu, a pretty but rather vulgar young woman, is invited. Lulu in the past has frequently invited Stan to go outside walking with her, but he has refused. She and Goldberg hit it off together, and she ends up in his lap kissing him as everyone at the party drinks heavily. They begin a drunken game of blindman’s buff—“If you’re touched, then you’re blind”—and the recurring image of blindness serves as a foretaste of death. McCann, wearing the blindfold, comes over and touches Stan, so that it is Stan’s turn to be “blind.” To make sure, McCann breaks Stan’s glasses. The drunken Stan stumbles over to Meg and suddenly begins strangling her. They rush over to stop him, and suddenly the power goes out. In the darkness, Stan rushes around, avoiding them, giggling. The terrified Lulu faints, and when someone briefly turns on a flashlight, the audience sees that Stan has Lulu spread-eagled on the table and is on top of her. With his mortality approaching him anyway, then, Stan, buoyed up by drink, makes a desperate effort to get out of the house, out of his entrapment in sterile childhood. He struggles to strangle the mother who is suffocating him and to have a sexual relationship with an appropriate female—a taste of the life he has denied himself in order to escape paying the debt, death. It is too late. In the morning, a nearly catatonic Stan is brought downstairs by the two henchmen. He has been washed and shaved and dressed in a suit, as if for burial. A black limousine waits outside the door. Petey, Meg’s husband, makes a halfhearted attempt to save Stan from the henchmen, but to still his protests, they need only invite him to come along. One is reminded of the medieval morality play Everyman. When Death is carrying off Everyman, Everyman’s friends and family promise to be true to him and help him in any way, but the moment they are invited to come with him, they find some excuse to stay behind. The play in some ways points one back to other possible intentions in The Room.

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Perhaps Rose, like Stan, has denied life. Afraid to go out in the cold, she does not escape having the cold come in after her. What she has lost is the pleasure she might have had in actively engaging life. Her husband, for example, comes home after a cold, wintry day out driving his van and talks with almost sexual relish about the pleasure he has had in masterfully controlling his van through all the dangers of his route. The Dumb Waiter • The Dumb Waiter has much in common with The Room and The Birthday Party. Again, the setting is a single room in which the characters sit, nervously waiting for an ominous presence from the outside. The two characters are a pair of assassins, sent from place to place, job to job, to kill people. They are, then, rather like McCann and Goldberg of The Birthday Party. What is interesting is that the cast of The Birthday Party has been collapsed into only these two, for they are not only the killers who come from outside, they are also the victims who wait nervously inside. While they wait in an anonymous room for their final directions on their new job, a job in which everything begins to go wrong, they pass the time by talking. The conversation ranges from reports of what one character is reading in the paper to discussions of how to prepare their tea, but in this oblique fashion it begins circling around to much more pressing speculations on the nature of their lives, questions with which these semiliterate thugs are poorly equipped to deal. The dialogue is quite comical at first, the verbal sparring between the two Cockneys handled with Pinter’s customary assurance, but the play is also witty in a more intellectual, allusive manner. In the opening scene, a number of direct allusions are made to Beckett’s play, En attendant Godot (pb. 1952, pr. 1953; Waiting for Godot, 1954). There is, for example, a great deal of comic business made over putting on and taking off shoes and shaking things out of them, and at one point a character walks to the apron, looks over the audience, and says, “I wouldn’t like to live in this dump.” Ben and Gus (like Didi and Gogo) are waiting, with varying amounts of patience and impatience, for the arrival of a mysterious presence to reveal the meaning of things to them—the person who makes all the arrangements and sends them out on their jobs. Also Beckettian is the way an entire life is described in the most minimal terms: “I mean, you come into a place when it’s still dark, you come into a room you’ve never seen before, you sleep all day, you do your job, and then you go away in the night.” These parallels are intentional: The Dumb Waiter is Pinter’s urban, Cockney version of Waiting for Godot. In Waiting for Godot, there was at least a tree; here, there is only a squalid room, with no windows, in the basement of an old restaurant. The two characters do not have any intellectual or poetic aspirations, as do the two characters representing humankind in Beckett’s play. In Beckett’s play, Godot’s name suggests at least a remnant of belief in a benevolent, loving God—if only by parody. The Dumb Waiter lacks even such a remnant. The name of Gus and Ben’s boss, Wilson, is deliberately lacking in any allegorical resonance. Further, Wilson is depicted as being increasingly arbitrary in his treatment of them, even though they have been faithful and pride themselves on their reliability. If God exists in this contemporary world, he is God as a fascist. Early in the play, mysteriously, an envelope slides under the outside door. It contains twelve matches. Is a benevolent power giving them fire, the great civilizing agent, to help them stave off chaos? They use the matches to light a fire under their kettle, but a moment later, the gas fails, and they have no tea. It is not benevolence, but the power of chance, which rules their absurd world, as soon becomes manifest. There is a dumbwaiter in the room. A tray comes down to them from upstairs. They open the dumb-

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waiter and take it out. There is a message, ordering an elaborate meal. They do not know what to do, and a moment later the tray goes back upstairs. They are quite worried. When it comes down again, ordering an even more elaborate meal, they desperately fill it with everything they have—biscuits, tea, potato chips. A message comes down telling them that it is not good enough. Earlier in the play, Ben had read to Gus items from the newspaper, accounts of bizarre accidents and killings, and they had been astounded that such things could go on. The popular press represented their access—from their safe room—to the absurd goings-on in the arbitrary world outside. They try to go back to remarking on the news items now, but they are no longer really interested in the news from outside, because now the absurd has invaded their safe room. They have passed all of their tests, they have been reliable and faithful on the job—yet absurdity is still with them. Their good behavior has not, after all, been able to save them. Ben, the senior partner, falls back on what has been successful for him before: He follows instructions more and more rigidly, becoming increasingly punctilious over the least detail of formal instructions. Gus, who from the beginning has shown himself to be more sensitive, reacts in a quite different way. He begins questioning the absurdity; he begins, to Ben’s horror, to question authority. Gus’s first questions have to do with his job. He does not have the luxury of being a guiltless victim, such as the two tramps in Waiting for Godot. He lives in his modern society by being a part of its violence. Others die that he may live and hold his place in the world. This has already been bothering him, and when he finds out that on top of his burden of guilt, he will not even be treated fairly by authority, he begins to rebel; he criticizes Ben, his superior, and even shouts angrily up the dumbwaiter shaft. He wanders off stage left to get a glass of water. Then Ben is notified by the authority that the person he is to kill is coming in the door at stage right (to the audience’s left). He shouts for Gus, his partner, to come help him. The door at stage right flies open. Ben levels his revolver. It is Gus, thrust in, his coat and tie and revolver stripped from him, to stand there, stooped and awkward; he slowly looks up to meet Ben’s eyes. The play ends there, but it is clear that Ben, who, faced with absurdity, reacts by following orders all the more unquestioningly, will shoot his partner. He will be the ostensible winner, the survivor, although in an absurd world, what can really be won? He will in the end be nothing. When Gus spoke earlier about coming in at night, doing a job, and leaving at night—a realistic statement but also a metaphor of a human being’s life—he went on to say that he wanted a window, a bit of a view, before he left. His perceptions of absurdity and guilt, a first step toward moral choice, constitute his bit of a view, his wresting of some meaning out of life. The Caretaker • The Caretaker, generally considered to be Pinter’s greatest play, is in many ways an even more complex permutation of the elements that were developed in his first few plays. Though The Caretaker is much more realistic on the surface than the earlier plays and has much less overt violence, it retains its tie with absurdist theater in the fact that it readily lends itself to allegorical interpretation. The setting, again, is a single room, and once more, it is made clear that at least a degree of security exists within the room, and that outside, in the endlessly rainy weather, there is little chance for survival. Davies, the old tramp, is the man struggling to stay in the room, but he is ultimately thrown out to his destruction. The two young men, the brothers Aston and Mick, though in much more subtle and complex ways, occupy the role of the killers. It is they who throw Davies out.

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The setting is a run-down room in an old house, with a leaky roof and piles of miscellaneous junk stacked everywhere. As the scene opens, Mick, the younger brother, is scrutinizing the room. He hears a door slam and voices offstage, and he quietly exits. Aston, the older brother, enters. He has brought Davies, the old tramp, along. It is revealed that Aston had found him in a fight, had saved him from a bad beating, and is now taking him into his house and giving him a place to sleep. Davies is the worst kind of garrulous old man, puffed up with self-importance, constantly justifying himself, and running down everyone else, especially blacks and aliens. Aston seems kindly, ingenuous, almost a bit simple. Davies, who is wearing old sandals, says he needs shoes. Aston immediately rummages through his things and brings out a solid pair of shoes to give him. Davies regards them very critically and rejects them as too narrow, throwing them aside. In a nice bit of theatercraft on Pinter’s part, the audience initially tends to see the play from the kindly Aston’s point of view and wonders why he has taken in this tiresome and ungrateful old bum. Very shortly, however, as Aston begins to act more strangely and as his brother Mick shows his own erratic and unpredictable behavior, the audience slowly realizes that it is seeing the play from Davies’ point of view—that Davies, disagreeable as he is, is Everyman. Davies, who is shabby and bad-smelling, continues truculently to insist on his personal worth. He evidently does this no matter what the cost. He lost his job, which he sorely needed, and got in the fight, which might have killed him, because he was asked to carry out a bucket of slops when he had been hired to sweep up. He also values himself for not being a black or an alien and therefore, he believes, having a higher place in the scheme of things. He is rude and choosy when Aston offers him gifts. Obviously, however, these are all pathetic attempts by a man with nothing to preserve but a certain dignity. When Aston goes out the next morning, Davies is incredulous that Aston lets him remain behind, actually trusting him in the room alone. In other words, Davies knows that his position is low, but he desperately wants to keep it above the very bottom. It is all he has left. Aston, though apparently kindly, is very strange. He goes out every day and buys more worthless junk to pile up in the room. He is constantly tinkering with electric appliances, though obviously without a clue as to how to fix them. He plans eventually to fix up the room but obviously, from day to day, is accomplishing nothing. When he leaves, Mick comes in. If Aston is slow in everything he does, Mick is dazzlingly quick. He deluges Davies with torrents of language, holds Davies completely in his power, and torments him with words—threats alternating with attractive-sounding offers. It is his house, it turns out, in which Aston merely lives. Both Mick and Aston, at different times, offer Davies the job of being caretaker of the house. The offer is tempting. Davies keeps saying he needs shoes so he can get down to Sidcup and pick up his papers and get his life sorted out. Yet as he refuses offers of shoes, it becomes clear that he does not want to go; he wants to remain in this room, which, for all of its shortcomings, is at least out of the rain. One night, in a long monologue, the usually taciturn Aston tells Davies about the time he was committed to an asylum and given shock treatment. Davies, who knows that he is himself near the bottom, only marginally above the blacks, now decides that, being sane, he is also above Aston. Although Aston has befriended him and put him up, and Mick has only offered him extravagant promises, Davies decides he will be Mick’s man and perhaps work to ease out Aston. Aston has been waking Davies up in the middle of the night, complaining that his muttering and groaning make it impossible to sleep. Davies is fed up with this treat-

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ment, and the next time Aston wakes him up, Davies explodes and tells him that he is crazy and should go back to the asylum, and that he, Davies, and Mick will start running things—perhaps Aston had better leave. It is a typical outburst from Davies, overstepping himself, but he relies on Mick—though Mick has been erratic and unpredictable in the past—to back him up. At this point, Aston tells Davies that he had better look for a place somewhere else, and Davies is forced to leave. Davies comes back the next day to the room when only Mick is there, but Mick turns on him savagely, and Davies realizes he has been had. Aston comes in, and Mick exits. All Davies’ truculence is gone, and he begs Aston to take him back, but Aston ignores him, and it is clear that Davies must depart. The play is moving enough only on its surface, by turns comic, ominous, perhaps even approaching the tragic. It does not remain at the surface, however, but pushes toward allegorical interpretation. There are many possible readings of the play, none of which necessarily excludes the others. Martin Esslin, in The Peopled Wound: The Work of Harold Pinter (1970), sees the play as an Oedipal confrontation: The father lords it over the sons while he has the power, but when he gets too old to defend himself, their covert antagonism against him comes to the surface, and they destroy him, throwing out the old generation so that the new generation has room in which to live. An even older archetype, however, might fit the play more closely. A kindly God puts together a world for man and invites him to come live in it. Man, rather than being grateful, as he ought, becomes puffed up with self-importance and lets a tempting Satan (Mick) convince him that he, humankind, is the equal of God; as a result, he is thrown out of his paradise. Pinter has updated his allegory. It is a rather trashy and rundown paradise, a Cockney paradise in a London slum. Obviously, the temptation and fall, the ejection from paradise, is a pattern that can be read into many stories. There is evidence in the text, however, that Pinter intended this particular reading. Aston is referred to in terms that would suggest such an interpretation. “There was someone walking about on the roof the other night,” Davies says. “It must have been him.” Aston is the giver of all necessary things—a roof, money, bread. When Davies wakes in the morning, he is startled to find that Aston is sitting smiling at him. Davies, characteristically, immediately begins complaining that Aston’s gifts are not enough. Aston gives him bread but no knife with which to cut it (reminiscent of Wilson, in The Dumb Waiter, sending the two men matches to light the stove but providing no gas for the stove); gives him shoes with unmatching shoelaces; and does not give him a clock. Aston’s curious life history suggests an identification with Christ. He tells Davies that he used to talk to everyone, and he thought they listened, and that it was all right. He used to have hallucinations, in which he would see everything very clearly. When he had something to say, he would tell the others, but some lie got spread about him, and they took him away, and gave him shock treatment (the Crucifixion?), after which he was no longer able to work or get his thoughts together. After his long confessional monologue to Davies, Aston seldom speaks to him again, and Davies feels deserted. In suggestive words, Davies says: “Christ! That bastard, he ain’t even listening to me!” By this time, Davies has also deserted Aston. He listens to Mick, forgetting Mick’s previous bad treatment of him and forgetting Aston’s many kindnesses to him. It is a hopeless situation for Davies, because Aston does indeed seem feckless and unstable; Mick seems to own the world now, and in a world of increasing absurdity, Davies has to make his decision, has to struggle for survival and some sort of existential sense of personal value. In the final scene before Davies’ expulsion, Mick and Aston

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meet briefly and smile faintly, and there is almost, for the moment, the hint of collusion between them, as if God and the Devil worked in concert to destroy humankind, as if, working together, they were indeed the two hit men sent out to annihilate humankind after human beings’ brief sojourn in an absurd world. The Caretaker carries to full maturity the themes and techniques that Pinter first adumbrated in The Room and developed over his next few plays. With its characters, its allegory, and its brilliant language and stagecraft, it is a quintessentially Pinteresque play, the perfection of all he was feeling his way toward as a playwright. Thereafter, he had to change direction if he were going to avoid merely imitating himself. He felt increasingly that he “couldn’t any longer stay in the room with this bunch of people who opened doors and came in and went out.” He changed his milieu, writing plays with middle-class characters, leaving behind the Cockney language of the first plays but demonstrating that he had just as accurate an ear for the absurdities and banalities of middle-class speech and could hear just as clearly what was trying to be said under the affectations of its language. The Homecoming • The Homecoming, perhaps the most Kafkaesque of Pinter’s plays, firmly established his dramatic idiom as unique. In the play, a professor who has been teaching in the United States returns to his London home so that his wife might meet his father and his brothers. He is greeted with oblique suggestions of enmity and sexual overtures toward his wife. In the end, the detached professor (like so many of Kafka’s passive protagonists) acquiesces when his wife announces her decision to move in with the father and the two brothers. Later plays • With plays such as Landscape and Silence, Pinter began working with more lyrical language. In One for the Road, Mountain Language, and The New World Order, Pinter began writing overtly political works that reflected his growing activism as a self-styled “citizen of the world.” In each new direction he has taken, he has continued to show that the essence of Pinter is not one or another easily imitated mannerism, but rather his poetic brilliance with language, his flawless stagecraft, and his insights into the human condition. In February, 2002, nine of Pinter’s sketches, none longer than ten minutes, were performed at the Lyttleton Theatre. Seven dated from around 1959, but “Tess” was two years old, and “Press Conference” was new. “Tess” is a slight work featuring a smiling lady from a comically disreputable upper-crust family. In “Press Conference,” Pinter himself (battling cancer and chemotherapy) played the lead, a Minister of Culture who was recently head of the secret police. This sketch reveals the same skepticism of, even hostility toward, supposedly democratic governments as reflected in One for the Road and Ashes to Ashes. During the press conference, the urbane Minister blandly announces what his response will be to those people who resist the free market. Their women will be raped, and their children will be killed or abducted. Dissent will not be tolerated. The journalists greet the Minister’s program with chuckles and applause. In the latter part of his career, Pinter appears to draw little distinction between governments of the capitalistic West and brutal dictatorships elsewhere in the world. Other major works long fiction: The Dwarfs, 1990. poetry: Poems, 1968 (Alan Clodd, editor); I Know the Place, 1979; Ten Early Poems, 1992.

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screenplays: The Servant, 1963; The Guest, 1964; The Pumpkin Eater, 1964; The Quiller Memorandum, 1966 (adaptation of Adam Hall’s novel); Accident, 1967; The Birthday Party, 1968 (adaptation of his play); The Go-between, 1971; The Homecoming, 1971 (adaptation of his play); The Last Tycoon, 1976 (adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel); Proust: A Screenplay, 1977; The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 1981 (adaptation of John Fowles’s novel); Betrayal, 1983 (adaptation of his play); Turtle Diary, 1985; Reunion, 1989; The Handmaid’s Tale, 1990 (adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel); The Heat of the Day, 1990 (adaptation of Elizabeth Bowen’s novel); The Comfort of Strangers, 1991; Party Time, 1991 (adaptation of his play); The Remains of the Day, 1991 (adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel); The Trial, 1992 (adaptation of Franz Kafka’s novel); Collected Screenplays, 2000 (3 volumes). nonfiction: Pinter at Sixty, 1993; Conversations with Pinter, 1996. edited text: One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets, 1991 (with Geoffrey Godbert and Anthony Astbury). miscellaneous: Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics, 1948-1998, 1998. Bibliography Billington, Michael. The Life and Work of Harold Pinter. New York: Faber and Faber, 2001. This 432-page update of a 1997 study covers the life of Pinter and provides critical analysis of his major works. Burkman, Katherine H. The Dramatic World of Harold Pinter: Its Basis in Ritual. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971. A fairly early study dealing with mythic structures in the stylized staging of Pinter’s work, especially The Birthday Party (viewed as an agon) and The Caretaker, “a poignant portrayal of man’s self-destructive nature, his seeming compulsion to live his life in the image of the cruel ritual of the priesthood of Nemi.” Bibliography and index. Dukore, Bernard F. Harold Pinter. 2d ed. London: Macmillan, 1988. An updating of Dukore’s earlier 1982 work, this study serves as a condensation of the essential critical vision: the sense of menace, the acknowledgment of the absurd, struggles with realism, the nature of power, and the place of memory. Notes Pinter’s “minimalist theorizing.” Bibliography; index of proper names and play titles. Gale, Steven H. Butter’s Going Up: A Critical Analysis of Harold Pinter’s Work. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1977. After a brief biographical chapter, Gale examines “the comedies of menace,” a group of Pinter’s plays that “collectively . . . defines the themes and establishes the techniques which will be basic in all of his works.” Following chapters analyze the metaphor of “the room” and sum up Pinter’s writing patterns over a long and varied career. Contains lists of first performances, casts and directors, productions directed by Pinter, and several other valuable appendices. Strong chronology, annotated bibliography (including select reviews), and index. Gordon, Lois, ed. Harold Pinter: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1990. Honoring Pinter on his sixtieth birthday, this collection of insightful essays is a good source for later plays and revisionist criticism on earlier plays. Best is Gordon’s “observation,” full of contemporary information, of Pinter’s 1989 visit to the United States, where the playwright came to stage Mountain Language, among other projects. Appendix of photographs from Pauline Flanagan’s collection, select bibliography, and valuable index to all articles. Gussow, Mel. Conversations with Pinter. New York: Grove/Atlantic, 1996. The playwright discusses his technique and aesthetic.

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Merritt, Susan Hollis. Pinter in Play: Critical Strategies and the Plays of Harold Pinter. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990. Centering her discussion on “criticism as strategy” and comparing criticism to “playing” in Pinter’s work, Merritt puts a postmodern twist to her study. Divided into “Perspectives on Pinter’s Critical Evolution,” “Some Strategies of Pinter Critics,” and “Social Relations of Critical and Cultural Change,” this work is a major statement, sophisticated and astute. Supplemented by a list of works cited and an index. Morrison, Kristin. Canters and Chronicles: The Use of Narrative in the Plays of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Compares narrative movement and, especially, Pinter’s absurdist approach to dialogue with that of his early idol. Quigley, Austin E. The Pinter Problem. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975. This early study of Pinter’s “problems of identity, illusion, menace, and verification” is the first to examine the contradiction between the concrete and the abstract approaches to understanding Pinter’s work, up to Landscape. Bibliography and index of proper names only. Thompson, David T. Pinter: The Player’s Playwright. New York: Schocken Books, 1985. Taking a performance approach, and starting from Pinter’s own acting career, this short but information-packed work helps get the plays off the page and onto the stage. Subtleties of movement and dialogue, and Pinter’s concentration on “the positioning of characters” in the stage picture, are well discussed, with theatrical examples throughout. Claims more attention should be paid to stage directions. Includes a list of plays acted by Pinter in the 1950’s and a good index. Norman Lavers, updated by Thomas J. Taylor and Patrick Adcock

Luigi Pirandello Luigi Pirandello

Born: Girgenti (now Agrigento), Sicily, Italy; June 28, 1867 Died: Rome, Italy; December 10, 1936 Principal drama • La morsa, pb. as L’epilogo, 1898, pr. 1910 (The Vise, 1928); Scamandro, pb. 1909, pr. 1928; Lumìe di Sicilia, pr. 1910, pb. 1911 (Sicilian Limes, 1921); Il dovere del medico, pb. 1912, pr. 1913 (The Doctor’s Duty, 1928); Se non così . . . , pr. 1915, pb. 1916; All’uscita, pr. 1916, pb. 1922 (At the Gate, 1928); Liolà, pr. 1916, pb. 1917 (English translation, 1952); Pensaci, Giacomino!, pr. 1916, pb. 1917; Il berretto a sonagli, pr. 1917, pb. 1920 (Cap and Bells, 1957); Così è (se vi pare), pr. 1917, pb. 1918 (Right You Are [If You Think So], 1922); La giara, pr. 1917, pb. 1925 (The Jar, 1928); Il piacere dell’onestà, pr. 1917, pb. 1918 (The Pleasure of Honesty, 1923); Il giuoco delle parti, pr. 1918, pb. 1919 (The Rules of the Game, 1959); Ma non è una cosa seria, pr. 1918, pb. 1919; La patente, pb. 1918, pr. 1919 (The License, 1964); L’innesto, pr. 1919, pb. 1921; L’uomo, la bestia, e la virtù, pr., pb. 1919 (Man, Beast, and Virtue, 1989); Come prima, meglio di prima, pr. 1920, pb. 1921; La Signora Morli, una e due, pr. 1920, pb. 1922; Tutto per bene, pr., pb. 1920 (All for the Best, 1960); Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore, pr., pb. 1921 (Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1922); Enrico IV, pr., pb. 1922 (Henry IV, 1923); L’imbecille, pr. 1922, pb. 1926 (The Imbecile, 1928); Vestire gli ignudi, pr. 1922, pb. 1923 (Naked, 1924); L’altro figlio, pr. 1923, pb. 1925 (The House with the Column, 1928); L’uomo dal fiore in bocca, pr. 1923, pb. 1926 (The Man with the Flower in His Mouth, 1928); La vita che ti diedi, pr. 1923, pb. 1924 (The Life I Gave You, 1959); Ciascuno a suo modo, pr., pb. 1924 (Each in His Own Way, 1923); Sagra del Signore della nave, pb. 1924, pr. 1925 (Our Lord of the Ship, 1928); Diana e la Tuda, Swiss pr. 1926, pr., pb. 1927 (Diana and Tudo, 1950); L’amica della mogli, pr., pb. 1927 (The Wives’ Friend, 1949); Bellavita, pr. 1927, pb. 1928 (English translation, 1964); La nuova colonia, pr., pb. 1928 (The New Colony, 1958); Lazzaro, pr., pb. 1929 (Lazarus, 1952); O di uno o di nessuno, pr., pb. 1929; Sogno (ma forse no), pb. 1929, pr. 1936 (I’m Dreaming, But Am I?, 1964); Come tu mi vuoi, pr., pb. 1930 (As You Desire Me, 1931); Questa sera si recita a soggetto, pr., pb. 1930 (Tonight We Improvise, 1932); I giganti della montagna, act 1 pb. 1931, act 2 pb. 1934, act 3 pr. 1937 (The Mountain Giants, 1958); Trovarsi, pr., pb. 1932 (To Find Oneself, 1943); Quando si è qualcuno, pr. 1933 (When Someone Is Somebody, 1958); La favola del figlio cambiato, pr., pb. 1934; Non si sa come, pr. 1934, pb. 1935 (No One Knows How, 1960); Naked Masks: Five Plays, pb. 1952 Other literary forms • Luigi Pirandello wrote seven novels, more than three hundred short stories, a number of critical essays, and six volumes of poetry. The standard edition of his works, Opere (1966), published by Mondadori in Milan, consists of six volumes, including Novelle per un anno (1956-1957); Tutti i romanzi (1957); Maschere nude (1958); and Saggi, poesie, scritti vari (1960). Achievements • Italy’s most acclaimed modern writer, Luigi Pirandello is known in the United States primarily for three or four of his forty-four plays, written between 1917 and 1924 and collected by Eric Bentley in Naked Masks (1952). Of these plays, Six Characters in Search of an Author has earned for Pirandello a reputation as a major figure in the development of modern drama. Assessing the impact of that play’s 1923 produc697

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tion in Paris, Georges Neveux remarked that “the entire theatre of an era came out of the womb of that play.” Another critic affirmed Pirandello’s seminal importance by referring to his plays as the symbolic beginning of a new form of drama, for which the phrase “after Pirandello” has become a critical shorthand. Critics who have tired of plays that explore the theme of reality and illusion have complained that Pirandello is more philosopher than playwright, but his plays endure as theatrically surprising and provocative contributions to the modern stage. Himself influenced by Luigi Chiarelli and the teatro del grottesco, Pirandello in turn has influenced virtually every playwright of reputation writing since the 1920’s, including JeanPaul Sartre, Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Eugene O’Neill, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Thornton Wilder, Jack Gelber, Jean Anouilh, Jean Giraudoux, and Jean Genet. With Beckett, Pirandello stands as the most influential playwright of this century. Biography • Luigi Pirandello was born on June 28, 1867, at Villa del Caos in Girgenti (now Agrigento), Sicily, and moved to Palermo with his family when he was fourteen. Son of an owner of sulfur mines, Pirandello entered into an arranged marriage in 1894 with Maria Antonietta Portulano, the daughter of one of his father’s business associates. Their first son, Stefano (named after Pirandello’s father), was born a year later; Lietta, a daughter, was born in 1897, and Fausto, a son, in 1899. In 1903, when his father’s mines were flooded and Pirandello’s assets were lost, his wife suffered a shock that progressed into paranoia, finally necessitating her confinement in a nursing home (where she remained for forty years). Until 1919, however, when he consented to the transfer, Pirandello cared for his wife at home, an experience that undoubtedly stimulated the writer’s preoccupation with the distinctions between sanity and madness. Pirandello was a well-educated man, who studied at the universities of Palermo, Rome, and Bonn. In 1891, he completed a dissertation on his native Sicilian dialect, receiving the Doctor of Philosophy degree from Bonn. In 1898, he accepted a position as a professor of Italian at a normal school, Istituto Superiore di Magistero Femminile, in Rome. Ten years later, he was given that institution’s chair in Italian language. Pirandello published his first poems as early as 1883; he wrote his first play, “Gli uccelli dell’alto” (birds that fly), in 1886; his first novel, (© The Nobel Foundation) L’esclusa (The Outcast, 1925) in 1901;

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and he published his first collection of short stories, Amori senza amore (loves without love), in 1894. Until the early 1920’s, Pirandello’s work was known primarily in Italy. He gained international recognition, however, with performances of Six Characters in Search of an Author in Rome, London, New York City, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin between 1921 and 1924. Also active as the first director of the Teatro d’arte di Roma, Pirandello toured Europe, North America, and South America between 1924 and 1928. Pirandello’s frequent travel was followed by residences in Paris and Berlin and by a period of intense creativity. Two years before his death of pneumonia in Rome on December 10, 1936, Pirandello was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Analysis • In Each in His Own Way, Luigi Pirandello playfully has one of his characters ask another to justify his incessant “harping on this illusion and reality string.” So persistent is Pirandello’s dramatic examination of the multiplicity of personality, the nature of truth, and the interplay between life and art that the term “Pirandellian” has become synonymous with the complexities that result from any attempt to define the fluid line between what is illusory and what is real. In his inquiry into the nature of truth, Pirandello constructs and demolishes layers of illusion, probing the multiple perceptions and identities of his characters to reveal yet conceal the “naked mask.” In his fascination with his own power as artist-creator, he dramatizes the dialectic between the fluid, spontaneous, sprawling nature of life and the fixed, predictable, and contained nature of art. The typical Pirandellian character—Signora Ponza in Right You Are (If You Think So), for example, or Leone in The Rules of the Game—presents himself through both “mask” and “face,” a dichotomy that is more generally reflected in the playwright’s treatment of theater as both illusory and real. For Pirandello, character creation involves a lessthan-subtle but endlessly clever interplay among the psychological, the social, and the theatrical, which consistently reiterates the playwright’s preoccupation with the multiple facets of reality and illusion. The relationship between reality and illusion provided Pirandello with a seemingly inexhaustible fund of dramatic material. In part this is a tribute to his creative imagination, but it also suggests that this theme is not merely one among others, one that—as some critics have charged—has been worn out through overuse. Rather, the very nature of theater ensures that this theme will be forever fresh in the hands of a playwright who, like Pirandello, has the audacity to make it new. Right You Are (If You Think So) • Right You Are (If You Think So), also known as It Is So! (If You Think So), is at once a traditional melodrama and a clever investigation into the nature of truth. The dramatic question propelling the play’s action involves the identity of Signora Ponza, the woman whom Signor Ponza claims is his second wife and Signora Frola claims is her daughter. A group of curious members of the community into which the trio has recently moved is determined to discover the truth and, in a series of revelations, is led to believe first Signor Ponza and then Signora Frola. In order for either to be believed, however, the other must be thought to be mentally unstable. Signor Ponza’s story is that Signora Frola was the mother of his first wife, who died, but for her sake he has continued the pretense that his present wife is her daughter. Signora Frola’s story is that the woman is indeed her daughter and that during the daughter’s illness, which necessitated her stay at a nursing home, Signor Ponza went mad. Believing that his wife had died, he refused to accept her as his wife on her return, marrying her a second time as though she were another woman. The two claims are

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logically irreconcilable: Signora Ponza cannot be both Ponza’s second wife and Signora Frola’s daughter. The neatly constructed plot unfolds gradually as each new piece of information is revealed. Instead of adding to what has already been established, however, each new bit of information invalidates what was previously believed, leaving the town gossips, as well as the audience, suspicious and unsure. The promise of relief by forthcoming official records from the trio’s previous residence is short-lived, for an earthquake has destroyed all evidence. Encouraged by Laudisi, who is amused by the others’ insistence on one truth when he knows there may be several, the townspeople confront the veiled Signora Ponza herself, who reveals that she is both Signor Ponza’s second wife and Signora Frola’s daughter. The reply satisfies no one but Laudisi, but it is, as Signora Ponza understands, the only solution that compassion will allow. In his monograph on Modernism in Modern Drama (1966), Joseph Wood Krutch speaks of Pirandello as making the most crucial denial of all: the denial of the existence of a continuous, identifiable self. The play, however, is less a modern skeptic’s dramatization of the dissolution of self than it is a forceful suggestion that truth is not an external, objective fact but an internal, psychological reality. In demonstrating dramatically that Signora Ponza is both women, depending on what her perceiver chooses her to be, Right You Are (If You Think So) sets the stage for Pirandello’s subsequent, more complex inquiries into the nature of reality and illusion. Six Characters in Search of an Author • The first of a trilogy of stage plays that includes Each in His Own Way and Tonight We Improvise, Six Characters in Search of an Author is a spectacularly theatrical play that leaves its audience as confused as the Stage Manager and Actors whom a family of Characters interrupts, hoping that they will dramatize its story. Those Characters—the Father, his estranged wife, his son, and three stepchildren—claim to have been created by an author who, having given them life, has abandoned them. Driven by the need for self-actualization, the Father insists on enacting—or living—the family’s story onstage, which the Characters do in increasingly provocative episodes that culminate in the drowning of one child and the suicide of another. Some years earlier, when the couple had only one child, the Father recognized the attraction his wife had for an employee, so he sent the two of them off to live in a common-law relationship that resulted in three children. A number of years later, the Father visits Madame Pace’s brothel, where the Stepdaughter has been forced, by poverty, to work, and he then becomes her client. The Father insists that the Mother’s interruption of the encounter and the discovery of the young woman’s identity prevented a consummation, but the Stepdaughter’s bitterness hints otherwise. The family’s intensely emotional story constitutes the dramatic center of the play, but the play’s greatest interest rests in the interplay among the dimensions of reality and fiction it presents. Although the Characters insist that they are living, not reenacting, their story, the Stage Manager believes otherwise. His attempt to cast the Actors as the Characters, however, results in a patently false performance, lending curious authenticity to the presumably fictive Characters. For the Characters, the script, though unfinished, is their destiny, compelling them to define themselves through what their author has created and constantly to live their story and their suffering. As drama, Six Characters in Search of an Author is exceptionally self-conscious, dramatizing not only the relationship between reality and illusion in a philosophical sense but also the process of character creation. The play boldly presents character in the

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making, from the author’s conception through the independent, seemingly autonomous transformations that each character undergoes before achieving full realization. When the Actors play the Characters, it becomes evident that their interpretation of character does not coincide with that of the author, thus making the actor a participant in the creation as well. Still, the Father, who feels confident that he knows his own essential nature, argues that the fictive character’s life is fixed and identifiable, unlike the human life, which changes daily. In his preface to the play, Pirandello speaks of how the Characters surfaced in his imagination one day, but how, finding no special meaning in them, he decided to abandon them. The Characters, though, remained, virtually demanding that they live and making Pirandello realize it was no longer in his power to deny them life. Thereafter, they chose their own time to reappear in his imagination, each time enticing him to give them a story, until Pirandello found himself obsessed with them. It was then that he had the idea of dramatizing this peculiar, but artistically typical, situation itself, to present the autonomy of these dramatic characters. The result, he remarks, was a combination of “tragic and comic, fantastic and realistic” that finally suggested the conflict between an ever-changing life and a fixed, immutable form. Pirandello’s manipulative powers are at their best in this play, which ends with the Actors, as well as the audience, questioning whether the deaths of the children are real, and hence a onetime occurrence, or fictive, and hence performable night after night. The unsettling ending is a fitting climax to the ongoing dialectic between reality and illusion and life and art that the Characters’ invasion of the Actors’ stage has caused. Henry IV • A play as provocative dramatically and philosophically as Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry IV introduces an unnamed protagonist who, some twenty years earlier, suffered a fall during a masquerade party. Dressed as Henry IV at the time, he has since lived his life as though he were the eleventh century German king, with a host of retainers who support the pretense. The protagonist repeatedly replays one particular incident in the life of the historical king, Henry’s penitent journey to Canossa, where he knelt before Pope Gregory VII. At the masquerade, the woman whom the protagonist loved, Donna Matilda, was dressed as Matilda of Canossa, and she has remained that figure in the mind of the madman. Early in the play, Donna Matilda, along with four others—Carlo Di Nolli, the protagonist’s nephew; Frida, Donna Matilda’s daughter and Carlo’s fiancée; Belcredi, the rival for Donna Matilda’s affection; and Dionysius Genoni, a physician—visit the throne room, intending to administer a treatment that they hope will restore the protagonist’s memory. Through dressing the young woman as her mother in masquerade twenty years earlier, then presenting her along with the older woman, who has aged, they hope to telescope time and shock the protagonist into sanity. The group does not know, however, that the protagonist recovered his memory after twelve years and has for the past eight years only pretended to be Henry IV. The plan proceeds and backfires. When the protagonist sees the young woman looking exactly as her mother did twenty years earlier, he loses his sense of certainty in his sanity; thinking the younger woman to be Donna Matilda, he becomes obsessed with her, as he had been years before with her mother. As with the earlier play, the ending leaves the visitors and the audience questioning whether the final event occurs in the realm of reality or illusion, whether Henry IV is sane or insane when, in an act of revenge, he slays Belcredi. Either way, the protagonist must now remain in an “eternal masquerade,” permanently fixed in the identity of Henry IV. The love triangle is cen-

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tral to Henry IV, just as the family’s story was to Six Characters in Search of an Author, but as with the earlier drama, the play’s contribution to dramatic innovation rests in the philosophical and artistic questions that it raises. Henry IV is perhaps the richest of Pirandello’s plays in its treatment of the complexity of identity, for each of its characters possesses at least two distinct selves. In the case of Donna Matilda, the character moves among several identities as the action shifts from the distant past to the recent past to the present. Which of these several selves she is at any given moment depends on the director of the play-within-the-play, Henry IV. If the protagonist is playing the penitent, Donna Matilda must assume the role within that scenario. So also might Donna Matilda be the young woman of twenty years earlier, whom the masquerading protagonist loved, or the middle-aged woman of the present, depending on the protagonist’s perception of her. The protagonist is well aware of his manipulative powers and of the superiority that his position grants him. When the protagonist pretends to be mad, he is fully conscious that his role is an illusion, but he sustains the role to amuse and protect himself. Even when he is actually mad, though, he is curiously superior to the others, for then he is so totally committed to his one, fixed identity as Henry IV that for him no distinction exists between the mask and the face. Henry IV’s madness and sanity also serve to suggest the division between life and art that so fascinated Pirandello. As the playwright remarks in his 1908 essay, L’umorismo (revised 1920; partial translation On Humor, 1966; complete translation, 1974), we are constantly trying to stop the continuous flow of life and to fix it in determinate forms. In Henry IV, the protagonist, unlike the others in the play, succeeds through his selfcreated fiction, which, in its immunity to time, belies his own graying hair. Yet in his success, the protagonist has sacrificed the spontaneity that only the “continuous flow” of which Pirandello speaks can offer. The ongoing dialectic between motion and form that characterizes life is exemplified in the play’s final moments, when Frida steps out of the picture frame where she posed as the youthful Donna Matilda and the protagonist embraces her, in a ground swell of emotion that has been suppressed for twenty years. Within moments, however, the protagonist loses the possibility of embracing the pure life that Frida symbolizes, for in slaying Belcredi, he must reclaim and perpetuate his fictive role. Each in His Own Way • Though less often performed in the United States than the three plays discussed above, Each in His Own Way exemplifies the theatrical innovation on which Pirandello’s fame rests. In this play, the audience itself is involved in the action, informing the already complex dialectic between the fictive and the real with yet another dimension. The play being performed is presumably based on the recent scandal involving Amelia Moreno, an actress who betrayed her sculptor fiancé, Giacomo La Vela, by running off with Baron Nuti, leading the distraught sculptor to suicide. Onstage, two men attempt to blame the dramatic counterparts of the three involved in the love triangle. As with Right You Are (If You Think So), the audience vacillates between believing first one person and then another, but here the playwright has added reversals that leave the audience uncertain as to whether the young woman, Amelia Moreno, is to be blamed. At the moment when she has been vindicated, she appears to take full responsibility and to apologize. The first-act curtain falls in a seeming intermission, but before the audience can parade out into the lobby, the “intermission” begins to take form onstage, which is now set as a theater with audience members and critics discussing the Pirandello play. In a wonderful invasion of this already unusual

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performance, a woman who is apparently Amelia Moreno rushes onstage to protest this intrusion of her privacy. Act 2 begins with Amelia and the man for whom she left her artist fiancé arguing, embracing, then going off together as the guilty pair. Again, the curtain falls and is raised on the intermission set, and Amelia Moreno rushes onstage to protest. This time, however, the audience witnesses a presumably real-life scene among the characters on whom the drama is based. In a clever reversal, Pirandello has set up a situation in which life imitates art rather than the other way around. The annoyed actors refuse to perform the third act, and the play ends, presumably incomplete but having perfectly achieved Pirandello’s goal. Other major works long fiction: L’esclusa, 1901 (The Outcast, 1925); Il turno, 1902 (The Merry-Go-Round of Love, 1964); Il fu Mattia Pascal, 1904 (The Late Mattia Pascal, 1923); Suo marito, 1911 (Her Husband, 2000); I vecchi e i giovani, 1913 (The Old and the Young, 1928); Si gira . . . , 1916 (Shoot! The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator, 1926); Uno, nessuno, centomila, 1925 (One, None and a Hundred Thousand, 1933); Tutti i romanzi, 1941 (collected novels). short fiction: Amori senza amore, 1894; Beffe della morte e della vita, 1902-1903 (2 volumes); Quando’ero matto . . . , 1902; Bianche e nere, 1904; Erma bifronte, 1906; La vita nuda, 1910; Terzetti, 1912; Le due maschere, 1914; Erba del nostro orto, 1915; La trappola, 1915; E domani, lunedì, 1917; Un cavallo nella luna, 1918; Berecche e la guerra, 1919; Il carnevale dei morti, 1919; A Horse in the Moon and Twelve Short Stories, 1932; Better Think Twice About It! and Twelve Other Stories, 1933; The Naked Truth and Eleven Other Stories, 1934; Four Tales, 1939; The Medals and Other Stories, 1939; Short Stories, 1959; The MerryGo-Round of Love and Selected Stories, 1964; Selected Stories, 1964; Short Stories, 1964. poetry: Mal giocondo, 1889; Pasqua di Gea, 1891; Pier Gudrò, 1894; Elegie renane, 1895; Elegie romane, 1896 (translation of Johann von Goethe’s Römische Elegien); Scamandro, 1909 (dramatic poem); Fuori de chiave, 1912; Saggi, 1939. nonfiction: Arte e scienze, 1908; L’umorismo, 1908, revised 1920 (partial translation On Humor, 1966; complete translation, 1974); Saggi, 1939. miscellaneous: Opere, 1966. Bibliography Alessio, A., D. Pietropaolo, and G. Sanguinetti-Katz, eds. Ottawa, Ont.: Canadian Society for Italian Studies, 1992. A selection from the proceedings of the International Conference on Pirandello and the Modern Theatre, held in Toronto in November, 1990. Bibliography. Bassanese, Fiora A. Understanding Luigi Pirandello. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. In her scholarly examination of Pirandello’s works, Bassanese looks at the question of reality and illusion, focusing on Right You Are (If You Think So) and Henry IV. Bibliography and index. Biasin, Gian-Paolo, and Manuela Gieri, eds. Luigi Pirandello: Contemporary Perspectives. Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1999. This collection of essays provides modern perspectives on the work of Pirandello, including his quest for truth, his use of theater-within-the-theater, and use of characters and actors on the stage. Dashwood, Julie, ed. Luigi Pirandello: The Theater of Paradox. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996. This volume examines the works of Pirandello, particularly his creation of paradoxical scenes in his drama. Bibliography and index.

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O’Grady, Deidre. Piave, Boito, Pirandello: From Romantic Realism to Modernism. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000. O’Grady traces the development of Italian literature, from romantic realism to modernism, examining the works of Pirandello, Arrigo Boito, and Francesco Maria Piave, among others. Bibliography and index. Parilla, Catherine Arturi. A Theory for Reading Dramatic Texts: Selected Plays by Pirandello and García Lorca. New York: P. Lang, 1995. Parilla contrasts and compares Pirandello and Federico García Lorca, focusing on Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author and Henry IV and García Lorca’s Yerma (pr. 1934; English translation, 1941) and La casa de Bernarda Alba (wr. 1936, pr., pb. 1945; The House of Bernarda Alba, 1947). Stella, M. John. Self and Self-compromise in the Narratives of Pirandello and Moravia. New York: P. Lang, 2000. Stella examines the concept of self in literature, comparing and contrasting the works of Pirandello and Alberto Moravia. June Schlueter

Plautus Plautus

Born: Sarsina, Umbria (now in Italy); c. 254 b.c.e. Died: Rome; 184 b.c.e. Principal drama • External evidence suggests the following order for the plays of Plautus, but it is possible to give exact dates to only two of his plays: Asinaria (The Comedy of Asses, 1774); Mercator (The Merchant, 1767); Miles gloriosus (The Braggart Warrior, 1767); Cistellaria (The Casket, 1774); Stichus, 200 b.c.e. (English translation, 1774); Aulularia (The Pot of Gold, 1767); Curculio (English translation, 1774); Mostellaria (The Haunted House, 1774); Poenulus (The Carthaginian, 1774); Pseudolus, 191 b.c.e. (English translation, 1774); Epidicus (English translation, 1694); Bacchides (The Two Bacchides, 1774); Rudens (The Rope, 1694); Captivi (The Captives, 1767); Trinummus (The Three-penny Day, 1767); Truculentus (English translation, 1774); Amphitruo (Amphitryon, 1694); Menaechmi (The Twin Menaechmi, 1595); Persa (The Girl from Persia, 1774); Casina (English translation, 1774); The Comedies, pb. 1769-1774 (5 volumes); Works, pb. 1928-1938 (5 volumes); Plautus: The Comedies, pb. 1995 (4 volumes) Other literary forms • Plautus is remembered only for his plays. Achievements • Writing in the second century c.e., Aulus Gellius recorded that 130 plays of Plautus were in circulation, of which twenty-one were agreed on by all as genuine plays of Plautus, at least according to Marcus Terentius Varro, the most respected scholar of the first century b.c.e. It is this set of twenty-one that survives, though the twenty-first, the Vidularia (The Tale of a Travelling Bag ), is only four pages of fragments. In addition to the twenty complete plays, fragmentary lines from thirty-two plays ascribed to Plautus survive in the form of quotations in other writers’ works. Partly through merit and partly through fortune, Plautus stands as the fountainhead of comic drama. A central fact is that each play of Plautus is rendered from a Greek original; twice the prologue identifies which play of which Greek author Plautus is adapting or rendering. None of the Greek originals survives. In fact, until Menander’s Dyskolos (317 b.c.e.; The Bad-Tempered Man, 1921; also known as The Grouch) surfaced in a papyrus codex in the twentieth century, no Greek New Comedy survived at all. The work of Plautus—with the six similar plays of his countryman Terence—therefore represents an entire ancient genre and an unmatched source for modern drama. The contemporary critical wisdom is that the course of drama went from Euripidean tragicomedy to Greek New Comedy to Plautus to modern drama. Old Comedy refers to Aristophanes, whose plots are mythic and fantastic; the humor is bisexual and flatulent and ad hominem. For New Comedy, perhaps “boy meets girl” is the most succinct description. This is Plautus’s work in the main: His plots involve mortals, not gods, and though the humor may still be “indecent,” it is human rather than ad hominem. Plautus’s contemporary Gnaeus Naevius demonstrated that Rome was no market for Old Comedy: Assaying its ad hominem humor, he was jailed for calumny. Old Comedy is represented in Plautus by Amphitryon, a mythic burlesque. What Roman stylists appreciated about Plautus was savor. Aulus Gellius uses a verb 705

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of tasting to define what is “Plautine.” A line could “taste” like Plautus. This taste was a salty, direct simplicity, peppered with wordplay. Plautine Latin style has even been recognized, among scholars of Saint Jerome, as an influential factor in the Latin Vulgate. Saint Jerome’s versions are marked by a boisterous energy and a breadth of both meters and subject matter. On the larger scale of dramatic structure, the firmest evidence for Plautus’s originality lies in the prologue of Terence’s Andria (166 b.c.e.; English translation, 1598). From it, readers learn that Menander’s Andria and Perinthie “differed more in speech and style than in plot,” and that Terence took what he liked from the latter into his version of the former. When this was objected to as contamination of the original, Terence offered the precedent of Plautus in his defense. That Plautus was known to have mixed two plays into one strongly suggests that he was eclectically building, rather than simply translating, plays. Such weaving has been recognized in The Braggart Warrior and in The Carthaginian. Plautus’s material has been a gold mine for William Shakespeare, Molière, Henry Fielding, and others who have done unto Plautus as he did unto his Greek sources. Plautus, or Plautine material, still “plays,” as the success of The Boys from Syracuse (1938) and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962) attests. The Boys from Syracuse, a musical by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, follows Plautus’s The Twin Menaechmi much more closely than did Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors (pr. c. 1592-1594). A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum weaves together many Plautine plots, scenes, and ideas, principally from Casina, The Haunted House, The Braggart Warrior, and Pseudolus. The character names “Miles Gloriosus” and “Pseudolus” in fact pay homage to these last two sources. Mapping the scope of Plautus’s originality vis-à-vis his sources is an abiding scholarly quest. Though this will not be settled, it can be comprehended. Reading or viewing one of the two musicals named above helps, given familiarity with Plautus as a starting point, to understand the adaptive process. Some adaptive concept of Plautus’s originality is necessary: Axiomatically, pure translation of past drama produced for another culture would not play. It must be adapted to its own audience or that audience would walk away from it—which in fact happened the first two times Terence tried to present his Hecyra (165 b.c.e.; The Mother-in-Law, 1598). There is no record of an audience walking away from Plautus. Biography • The life of Titus Maccius Plautus is known from three ancient notices, two chance remarks in the works of Cicero, and a paragraph in Gellius’s Noctes Atticae (c. 180 c.e.; Attic Nights, 1927). While contending that old age is pleasant if intellectually productive, Cicero observes “how pleased . . . Plautus must have been with the Truculentus, with the Pseudolus!” The passage shows how flimsy a construction the life of Plautus must be: The original production notice, the didascalia, has survived for the Pseudolus. This provides the firm date 191 b.c.e. From Cicero, one can infer that Plautus was old in 191 b.c.e. The traditional date for his birth, 254 b.c.e., is owing to nothing more and arbitrarily defines “old” as the age of sixty-three. Several details of Plautus’s life come to light in Gellius’s Attic Nights: Varro and others relate that he wrote the Saturio and the Addictus, and a third one which I can’t remember, while working in a bakery turning a pushmill. The money he had saved working as a stage carpenter he had lost in business, and he came back to Rome looking for a living.

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Supposing that Varro was correct, Plautus first made a living as a stage carpenter. In that period, he would have been working on the Latin plays of a Greek slave named Livius Andronicus. This raises a point of contrast with the mainstream of Latin literature: Plautus was not an independently wealthy man writing in the leisure time that wealth afforded but a professional. As such, his market consisted of four Roman officials, called aediles, whose purview included organization and supervision of the public games, which were public holidays with public entertainments. Around the year 240 b.c.e., one aedile saw an intellectual and satisfyingly economical way of fulfilling his duties: Drama would not, like some other entertainments, cost the lives of perhaps half the trained personnel each performance. Livius Andronicus, the slave of Marcus Livius Salinator, was engaged to produce a Latinized script of a Greek play. Drama in Rome thus was established on a large scale. Building sets for these early hybrids was Plautus’s apprenticeship. After the failure of his business enterprise, Plautus’s ticket out of drudgery was the realization that he could sell plays to the aediles as competently as Andronicus, who may, in fact, have bought Plautus’s freedom—Plautus did end up a freedman. After three sales, Plautus was free, if Varro is right. The remaining relevant passage in Cicero names the consuls for the year Plautus died, giving a certain date, 184 b.c.e., for his death. Analysis • New Comedy is characterized by a program filled with certain stock roles. First, there is the adulescens, or youth. He is fickle, he is incompetent, he is in love; his father is rich and away on business. The adulescens’ modern acme is P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster. The senex, or old man, is befuddled, doddering, philandering, and irascible. He strikes terror in the heart of his son, the adulescens, and lives in terror of his wife, the matrona. The scortum, or courtesan, sometimes has a house of her own, and it is next door. Or she is owned by the leno, always a practical businessman. The money that the youth must pay to the leno comes from the danista, the moneylender, who will demand payment. The driving force is the essential character, servus callidus, the clever slave. The slave extemporizes intermediary solutions, finds ways for the youths, dupes the old men, and runs a gauntlet between them, for satisfying the young master means a whipping at the hands of the old one. The braggart soldier, miles gloriosus, rival for the hand of the maiden, is no match for him, even with an army. Virgo, the maiden, was kidnapped in early childhood but has kept with her always the tokens of her last day of freedom. These serve as the sufficient proofs of her identity: She is recognized as the freeborn daughter of a good family. This is the recognition scene, recognitio, which is New Comedy’s counterpart to the deus ex machina of tragedy in that it solves the insoluble and brings the play to its end. Where it is used, it makes the slave girl eligible to marry the adulescens. Of the plays described below, the relative uniqueness of Amphitryon, a holdover from an earlier age of drama; Casina, with melded adulescens-senex and vicarious fatherson rivalry; and The Twin Menaechmi, a comedy of mistaken identity, argues against the sameness of all Roman comedy, or at least of all Plautine comedy. Of these plays, The Haunted House most closely follows the type, with most of the stock characters appearing in their stock situations. A sustained metaphor from musical composition best answers the question of the perceived sameness, the question of Plautus’s originality with regard to his Greek sources, and the matter of Plautus’s place in the art of drama. When one thinks of Plautus’s originality, one should think of Johannes Brahms composing the Academic Festival Overture. He incorporated student songs into it, with

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the song “Gaudeamus Igitur” for climax. The audience knows that the song is old; that someone else wrote the melody; that the selection, orchestration, and the overture itself are Brahms. The matter of perceived sameness and the position of Plautus in the history of drama are both picked up in the inevitable question which the dilettante has ready for the contemporary composer, “You know what that reminds me of?” There are only eight notes in the scale. Plautus’s stock characters, senex, matrona, adulescens, virgo, scortum, danista, and miles gloriosus, are taken from life and resound all its centers and epicenters: family, love, power, money, and biological urges. Amphitryon • Though the above must serve as the dramatis personae and prologue for the twenty surviving plays, it would be misleading if from it one were to expect a sameness about them. Amphitryon, in fact, is not a New Comedy. Mercury, speaking the introduction, first calls it tragedy (the audience scowls), then comedy, then mixes them to call it tragicomedy. The title character of Amphitryon suggests divine ribaldry and mortal tragedy: He is the father of Heracles, or rather, the cuckolded husband whom Jupiter displaced for a night to sire the future hero and god. Its burlesque of myth and its adultery of a married woman make it unique in Roman comedy. It fulfills Mercury’s promise and is a sampling of the breadth in Plautus, who does not always write a simple variation of the boy-meets-girl story. The Captives • There is a thrill of the newness of the whole art in Plautus. The Captives is a very human comedy with the triumph in the end, not of lust, but of family, in the loyalty of slave to master and the reuniting of father and son. The prologue warns—or boasts—of the difference from the expected: “It is not the same as the others: no indecent, unrepeatable lines, no pimps, no whores, not even a braggart soldier.” Casina • Alone of the plays, Casina has a prologue that stems from a much later Roman production in a time that looks on Plautus as ancient, is nostalgic about him, and speaks of Casina as a perennial favorite. This comedy will show, then, what noble Romans on a holiday appreciated. Casina opens with two slaves, Olympio and Chalinus, challenging each other over the hand of Casina, a foundling reared in the house as a slave, who is now sixteen years old. Cleustrata, the lady of the house, knows that her husband, Lysidamus, wants Olympio, the overseer of his farm, to wed Casina, so he can, with Olympio winking, slake his “love,” as he calls it, for Casina. Part of the comedy is that the old man is in the role of the adulescens and is as unable as the inexperienced youth to discern between lust and love. Cleustrata would have the slave Chalinus, armor-bearer to her son, marry Casina. It is understood that Cleustrata’s son would then cuckold the groom. Father and son are thus vicarious rivals for the same woman. Lysidamus settles the issue by lot. His choice, Olympio, wins. Lysidamus next arranges an overnight detour for the wedding party on the route to the farm: The neighbor and his entire family are to spend the night in Lysidamus’s house, to leave the house next door vacant for Lysidamus’s seigneurial wedding night with Casina. The slave Chalinus overhears this detour plot and relates it to Cleustrata. A novelty here is a nonstock character, the clever matron: Cleustrata arranges a series of contretemps to vex and foil her errant husband. The series begins with neighborly altercations and culminates in the dressing and veiling of vengeful Chalinus as the bride. This results in bruises, puns, and bawdy jokes as the two intending husbands first conduct the “bride” away and then report their ardor-cooling expe-

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riences as each man attempts to be first with “Casina.” Their reports are the climax of the play. The resolution is that the husband, foiled, is forgiven by the matrona. Casina, the object of all desiring, never appears. Nor in fact does the son, Euthynicus: A closing speaker, in two lines before the request for applause, says that Casina will be acknowledged as the neighbor’s daughter and will marry the master’s son. Here Plautus has not even bothered to dramatize the recognitio; in asking the audience to pretend that he did, he practically boasts of not bothering with the typical fare. The play is Plautus at his salty and language-twisting best. The untranslatability of puns makes them, by definition, a measure of Plautine originality and individual contribution. He crowds them thickly. In Casina, as Olympio and Lysidamus conduct the “bride,” Lysidamus exclaims in pain, “She almost spread me out with her elbow!” Response: “Therefore she wants to go to bed.” “Cubito” means “with an elbow,” and “cubitum” is a supine form meaning “to go to bed.” The Twin Menaechmi • Shakespeare’s favorite play by Plautus, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, is The Twin Menaechmi. Before the action begins, twin sons, Menaechmus and Sosicles, were born to a Sicilian merchant. During a business trip to Italy, this merchant and his son Menaechmus became separated at the public games. The lost Menaechmus was adopted by a man from Epidamnus. The grieving father died of a broken heart, leaving a grandfather to rear Sosicles, whom he renamed Menaechmus after the lost twin. As the play opens, the renamed Menaechmus, grown to maturity, has searched the world for the lost Menaechmus and is disembarking at the home of Epidamnus. The Epidamnian twin, heir to his stepfather’s estate, is an established householder and henpecked husband. His heart belongs to the girl next door, a professional woman named Erotium. Her lines of greeting are laden with M’s. It is not simply that Erotium is greeting Menaechmus: Plautus typically crams a courtesan’s greeting lines with M’s: “Mmmmmmm.” It is part of his art. The local Menaechmus appropriates his wife’s best dress and gives it to Erotium. This dress becomes an Ariadne’s thread that winds through the labyrinth of the play, an audience guide to the action. At each turning, the wrong Menaechmus possesses it, whether it is a ticket to a good time or a lightning rod to attract trouble. Finally, the twin Menaechmi are onstage together, and the clever slave who proves to them that they are brothers wins his freedom. The Haunted House • The Twin Menaechmi is a jewel, complete and artistic in its balanced neatness. If such quality were everywhere maintained, it would be insufficiently appreciated, and some Plautine jewels lack such complete settings. The Haunted House, at least two scenes of which are reworked in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, has a scene deserving of comic immortality, but it nevertheless limps. Tranio, the clever slave, is left in charge of the master’s son while the master is absent on a long trip. A slave in charge of a young adult free citizen? The situation is an impossible one, comic in itself. Unhindered by Tranio, the adulescens has embarked on a nonstop party, has fallen in love with a slave girl, borrowed money from a danista, and bought the slave girl from her pimp. He gives her freedom. Amid his revelry, lovemaking, and the dunning administered by the danista, the breathless news comes from the harbor: His father is back. Tranio keeps the senex away for the moment by convincing him that his house is haunted. Tranio explains the moneylender’s inopportune dun by adding that because

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the haunt has made their house uninhabitable, his son had to go into debt to buy another one. One lie requires another, leading one scholar most aptly to call The Haunted House a house of cards, as the metaphor suggests onlookers just waiting to see which additional pasteboard will make the whole structure collapse. Tranio claims to have bought the neighbor’s house, and he must now lie to the senex next door: His master wants to inspect the house, to model his own remodeling after it. The tour of the house is the heart of the comedy. Once inside, Tranio takes the two old men—and the audience—in with their own bamboozling. He asks them to admire the painting of the two old donkeys being led around by the crow. Where? The two old men do not see any such painting, but the audience sees the play, and there is, clear as life, such a picture before them. Tranio, when the inevitable occurs, takes refuge at an altar. After much worthwhile comic repartee, there comes along a young man bringing the end of the play with him: As he had just slept off a drunk when the news came, the partiers selected him to face the returning father, suggesting that the others are in no condition to speak to anyone. He entreats the angry senex by stages first to forgive his son and then his rascal slave. Bibliography McCarthy, Kathleen. Slaves, Masters, and the Art of Authority in Plautine Comedy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. A look at the relation of slaves to their masters, with emphasis on the work of Plautus. Bibliography and index. Moore, Timothy. The Theater of Plautus: Playing to the Audience. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. A study of Plautus that focuses on his endeavors to adapt works to suit his audience’s taste and culture. Bibliography and indexes. Riehle, Wolfgang. Shakespeare, Plautus, and the Humanist Tradition. Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1990. A comparison of William Shakespeare and Plautus, examining Plautus’s influence on Shakespeare. Bibliography and index. Slater, Niall W. Plautus in Performance: The Theater of the Mind. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 2000. This study focuses on the production of the plays of Plautus. Bibliography and index. Sutton, Dana Ferrin. Ancient Comedy: The War of the Generations. New York: Twayne, 1993. An examination of early comedy that looks at Plautus, Aristophanes, Menander, and Terence. Thomas N. Winter

J. B. Priestley J. B. Priestley

Born: Bradford, England; September 13, 1894 Died: Stratford-upon-Avon, England; August 14, 1984 Principal drama • The Good Companions, pr. 1931, pb. 1935 (adaptation of his novel, with Edward Knoblock); Dangerous Corner, pr., pb. 1932; The Roundabout, pr. 1932, pb. 1933; Laburnum Grove, pr. 1933, pb. 1934; Eden End, pr., pb. 1934; Cornelius, pr., pb. 1935; Duet in Floodlight, pr., pb. 1935; Bees on the Boat Deck, pr., pb. 1936; Spring Tide, pr., pb. 1936 (with George Billam); People at Sea, pr., pb. 1937; Time and the Conways, pr., pb. 1937; I Have Been Here Before, pr., pb. 1937; Music at Night, pr. 1938, pb. 1947; Mystery at Greenfingers, pr., pb. 1938; When We Are Married, pr., pb. 1938; Johnson over Jordan, pr., pb. 1939; The Long Mirror, pr., pb. 1940; Goodnight, Children, pr., pb. 1942; They Came to a City, pr. 1943, pb. 1944; Desert Highway, pr., pb. 1944; The Golden Fleece, pr. 1944, pb. 1948; How Are They at Home?, pr., pb. 1944; An Inspector Calls, pr. 1946, pb. 1947; Ever Since Paradise, pr. 1946, pb. 1950; The Linden Tree, pr. 1947, pb. 1948; The Rose and Crown, pb. 1947 (one act); The High Toby, pb. 1948 (for puppet theater); Home Is Tomorrow, pr. 1948, pb. 1949; The Plays of J. B. Priestley, pb. 1948-1950 (3 volumes); Summer Day’s Dream, pr. 1949, pb. 1950; Bright Shadow, pr., pb. 1950; Seven Plays of J. B. Priestley, pb. 1950; Dragon’s Mouth, pr., pb. 1952 (with Jacquetta Hawkes); Treasure on Pelican, pr. 1952, pb. 1953; Mother’s Day, pb. 1953 (one act); Private Rooms, pb. 1953 (one act); Try It Again, pb. 1953 (one act); A Glass of Bitter, pb. 1954 (one act); The White Countess, pr. 1954 (with Hawkes); The Scandalous Affair of Mr. Kettle and Mrs. Moon, pr., pb. 1955; These Our Actors, pr. 1956; The Glass Cage, pr. 1957, pb. 1958; The Pavilion of Masks, pr. 1963; A Severed Head, pr. 1963, pb. 1964 (with Iris Murdoch; adaptation of Murdoch’s novel); An Inspector Calls and Other Plays, pb. 2001 Other literary forms • J. B. Priestley’s plays may be his most lasting contribution to literature, yet as a consummate man of letters, he mastered many genres in a canon consisting of nearly two hundred works. Beginning his writing career as critic and essayist on subjects ranging from William Shakespeare to Thomas Love Peacock, from the art of conversation to political theory, Priestley became a household name in 1929 with the extraordinarily popular success of The Good Companions, a picaresque novel about a concert party, which, translated into many languages, was an international best-seller. In all, Priestly wrote more than thirty novels, eighteen books of essays and autobiography, numerous works of social commentary and history, accounts of his travels, philosophical conjectures on the nature of time, even morale-boosting propaganda during World War II, as well as an occasional screenplay and an opera libretto. Poetry was the only genre he neglected, after publishing, at his own expense, a single slim volume of verse in 1918, The Chapman of Rhymes. He was a popular professional writer, vitally concerned with every aspect of human life, and no subject escaped his scrutiny. As a result, the gruff, pipe-smoking Yorkshireman held a unique position in English letters as a highly respected sage who was also a man of the people. For more than half a century, he remained loyal to a single publishing house, William Heinemann, which brought out nearly all of his massive output in various genres. Heinemann published single editions of most of his plays as well as thematically linked 711

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collections of two, three, and four plays. Heinemann’s major collection of his drama, consisting of twentyone of his plays, both comedies and dramas, was published as The Plays of J. B. Priestley in three volumes from 1948 to 1950. Achievements • J. B. Priestley’s achievements as a dramatist outshine his work as a novelist. If he was a mainstream figure, albeit a minor one, in a vastly rich period of the English novel, in drama, he was the single serious English writer of the first half of the twentieth century, bridging the gap between George Bernard Shaw and John Osborne. Only Sean O’Casey, an Irishman like Shaw, had a reputation as dramatist greater than Priestley’s in the same period. The plays of John Galsworthy were quickly dated, while much of the work of Sir James Barrie, aside from the 1904 production of (Library of Congress) the immortal Peter Pan, was too cloying to survive its own generation. The plays of W. Somerset Maugham and Noël Coward may have been more successful with contemporary audiences, but they remain monuments to triviality rather than attempts to illuminate the plight of twentieth century humankind. Priestley’s focus was England and the Englishman, not the aristocrats and idle wastrels who people Maugham’s and Coward’s elegant drawing rooms but the middle classes, the workers—the backbone of the country, England’s defenders and its hope for a workable future. Priestley was an optimist who believed that human beings working in and for the community can overcome any obstacle. A socialist, he firmly believed throughout a long career that the golden world in which he grew up before World War I could be reestablished once people rid themselves of sloth and greed and willingly accept responsibility for others. His view, which may seem overly romantic to modern readers, was fueled by a belief in a quasi-scientific theory of the coexistence of all time, popularized by J. W. Dunne in An Experiment with Time (1927), and was tempered by a clear-sightedness concerning his compatriots’ failings, which may have caused a decline in his popularity at home after World War II at the same time that his plays were embraced in the communist world. Priestly was offered a knighthood and a life peerage but insisted on remaining a man of the people and refused them. In 1973, however, he received the conferment of the Freedom of the City of Bradford. In 1977, he accepted membership in the Order of Merit, a prestigious honor limited to twenty-four living Britons, privately expressing the opinion that it had come too late to bring him satisfaction for very long. Nevertheless, Priestley lived to enjoy the honor for seven years.

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After attempting comedies of manners in such works as The Roundabout and Duet in Floodlight but rejecting the mode as a shallow one, Priestley revealed that the influences on his drama were more Continental than native. Specifically, he attempted to demonstrate, like dramatist Henrik Ibsen, that the present is the inevitable result of the deeds and actions of one’s past. The present, in turn, inevitably colors the future. Here, too, the reader can detect the effect of theorizing about time as a fourth dimension in which human beings live. The single most important influence on Priestley’s drama, however, was the dramatist Anton Chekhov. Like Chekhov’s dramas, Priestley’s best plays capture and sustain an elegiac atmosphere in which imperfect individuals lose their way but also touch others and their families with love. Again like Chekhov, the dramatist could love his characters despite their failings, but unlike Chekhov, Priestley did not always successfully universalize his situations. Whereas Vishnyovy sad (pr., pb. 1904; The Cherry Orchard, 1908) becomes a metaphor reaching beyond Russia to evoke a world, Eden End remains a view of provincial England. As a result, Priestley never touched American audiences as he did his own people. Nevertheless, in such plays as Eden End, Cornelius, and The Linden Tree, Priestley evoked a sense of loss more subtly than any dramatist since Chekhov. Exploring the family circle in such early plays as Laburnum Grove and Eden End, Priestley eventually widened his focus to the nation as family in They Came to a City and How Are They at Home? and inevitably to the world as family in Home Is Tomorrow and Summer Day’s Dream. The unifying thread through these works is the Jungian concept of the unity of all human beings, a concept most clearly expressed in such innovative plays as Johnson over Jordan and Music at Night, works that enabled Priestley to handle time and place in the fluid manner of the expressionists. Priestley, however, denied that his work was expressionistic; he preferred to believe instead that his theory of coexisting time, in which persons are at all times beyond mere chronological time, proved that expressionist “distortion” does not take place in his work. Priestley’s experimental dramas, again influenced by Continental writers, as well as his insistence on thrusting the common person to the very center of the stage in his realistic plays, were important blows in freeing the English theater from a stultifying conservatism. Never losing sight of the fact that a dramatist must be able to entertain his audience, Priestley found the way to make audiences think as well, to face hard truths about themselves, and to confront these truths with love rather than with anger. Although the Angry Young Men who came after him mistakenly thought him to be, as Osborne has stated, an Edwardian relic, Priestley’s plays are in fact precursors of their own. Their concerns were his before them, but his voice was gentler and, unlike theirs, forgiving. Biography • Bradford, once the wool-merchandizing center of northern England, provided the perfect atmosphere for a budding writer. A commercial hub on a more human scale than sprawling London, the city nurtured the arts. There were two theaters, two music halls, a concert hall visited by the world’s most renowned musicians, playreading societies, arts clubs, a good library, and a local paper that accepted contributions from young writers. Nearby were the Yorkshire dales, providing solace from the city’s bustle. John Boynton Priestley, encouraged by his Socialist schoolmaster father and his kindly stepmother, took advantage of all that his native city had to offer. He lived a culturally rich childhood balanced by long weekend walks on the moors. The environment of his home, where his father led discussions on the arts, education, and

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politics, stimulated him as well. To Richard Pendlebury, his English master, Priestley attributed his awakening interest in literature and his early desire to be a writer. Priestley furtively wrote poetry and short stories in his notebooks during the days he spent as a junior clerk in a wool firm. Unable to concentrate on commerce, he began placing his pieces in popular London weekly magazines. In 1913, he became a regular contributor to The Bradford Pioneer, a Labour weekly, with a cultural column he called “Round the Hearth.” World War I interrupted a tranquil, idyllic, if directionless, existence, and, in 1914, Priestley enlisted in the duke of Wellington’s West Riding Regiment. Shipped to France, he was wounded near Souchez and returned to England. In 1917, after his recuperation, he received a commission as lieutenant. Back in France, Priestley, along with several members of his Devon Regiment, was gassed. In his writing, he hardly mentioned the wartime horrors that he witnessed and suffered, yet World War I remains the key to an understanding of his work. Priestley never shed his sense of waste and loss. The war spelled an end to a simpler life, which, in retrospect, always seemed to him a better life. The world he was brought up to inhabit no longer existed, and Priestley’s own boyish innocence died with it. Much of his work was a romantic attempt to recapture the vitalizing spirit of an earlier time, of a world in harmony. After three unsatisfying years at Cambridge, from 1919 to 1922, where he studied literature, history, and political science, Priestley abandoned plans for a teaching career and moved to London to try his luck as a freelance writer. At the time, he and his wife, Pat Tempest, whom he married in 1919, were expecting their first child. Aided by J. C. Squire, who ran The London Mercury, he established himself as essayist and critic. In 1925, after a long illness, his first wife died. A year later, he married Mary (Holland) Wyndham Lewis. As a result of the two marriages, Priestley had five children: four daughters and a son. The almost immediate worldwide success of The Good Companions in 1929 made it possible for Priestley to live the life he had chosen, that of a professional writer. He began to travel widely at home and abroad to find new subjects to explore and entered the world of the commercial theater, which had seemed, until his success, too much of a risk for a family man. Beginning a new phase of his career in 1931 with the adaptation (in collaboration with Edward Knoblock) of The Good Companions, the novel that had won for him fame and a newfound security, Priestley achieved theatrical success on his own a year later with a well-crafted melodrama, Dangerous Corner, which was soon produced around the world. Shortly afterward, he formed a company for the production of his own work. In addition to writing various types of plays, Priestley occasionally directed them as well, and even acted in one, When We Are Married, while a leading actor was indisposed. For a time Priestley thought of himself as primarily a dramatist, but in later life, he left the theater to concentrate again on novels and essays. Priestley became one of his nation’s most beloved figures during World War II, rivaling Sir Winston Churchill in popularity, with the weekly broadcasts of his “Postscripts” for the British Broadcasting Company. These began in 1940 after Dunkirk and ended the next year when the Germans launched their blitz on London. The talks stirred a nation and comforted those who, like Priestley, hoped that a better world would be the outcome of this devastating war. In 1952, Priestley divorced his second wife and a year later married Jacquetta Hawkes, the distinguished anthropologist with whom he occasionally collaborated. The two lived in a gracious Georgian home, Kissing Tree House, in Alveston, just out-

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side Stratford-upon-Avon. After a short illness in 1984, he died in his home one month before his ninetieth birthday. Analysis • Much of J. B. Priestley’s drama explores the oneness of all human beings. That notion leads the dramatist to view individuals as members of a charmed or magic circle. The circle is continually broken, but Priestley, the essential optimist, believed that the circle can and must be mended as people accept responsibility for their fellow human beings. The family, then, with its temporary victories, its too frequently dashed dreams, its individuals pulling the circle out of shape only to have it reshaped by the family’s wiser members, becomes the microcosm of the world. That world, however, is continually buffeted by time. Priestley therefore viewed the family through a multiple time perspective. He was conscious of time past, time present, even future time. Occasionally he enabled an especially perceptive character to understand his place in flowing time, but he always led his audience to an awareness that all time is one. Even in an early commercial success such as the melodramatic Dangerous Corner, Priestley implied that a family shattered by the sordid past deeds of one of its members can find life anew. It need not be bound by the past, and a new awareness in the present may even reshape a past. The return to the beginning and a second chance for the characters of Dangerous Corner, though perhaps a mere theatrical gimmick in this early play, foreshadows Priestley’s more thoughtful view of the Family of Man in time in Eden End, Time and the Conways, Johnson over Jordan, and An Inspector Calls. Eden End • Time provides Eden End its richest dimension. Eschewing the gimmickry of Dangerous Corner’s celebrated time twist, Priestley made extraordinary use of dramatic irony in Eden End, a realistic family drama set in 1912. Not only are his characters about to lose their innocence but also an entire world is about to be plunged into the horrors of a war from which it can never recover. As characters speak of a better time to come, the audience is fully aware of darkening shadows on the horizon. Time itself evokes Eden End’s autumnal atmosphere, making the play a threnody for a glorious but doomed world, which must inevitably give way to a material, technological advancement, spelling the end of the safe and sane values of love and loyalty and the quiet pleasures of a life lived in the service of others. As the Kirby family inevitably breaks apart, Eden comes to an end. The widower Dr. Kirby, a general practitioner who has always longed for something more from his career, is suffering from a heart condition that will soon kill him. He has with him in Eden End, in northern England, his younger daughter, Lilian, who serves as his housekeeper, and crotchety old Sarah, who was nurse to his three children and has been retained beyond her years of usefulness. Expected to arrive is Wilfred, the youngest of the children, home on leave from the British West Africa Company. However, an unexpected arrival, Stella, Lilian’s older sister and the family prodigal, disrupts a stable family situation. Stella had left the limited horizons of Eden End to pursue an unsuccessful career as an actress. Aware now that the only happy period in her life was her youth in Eden End, she learns before the play ends that one’s youth cannot be recaptured; to expect miracles is a pointless pastime. Eden End can no longer be for her the haven she has imagined, and she must return to the actress’s life of tiring railway journeys, uncomfortable lodgings, and dusty dressing rooms. Before her departure, which signals a return to normalcy for the others, Stella attempts to rekindle the love of Geoffrey Farant, who runs a nearby estate. Lilian, however, herself interested in Geoffrey, retaliates by bringing Charlie Appleby, another

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second-rate actor and Stella’s estranged husband, to Eden End to confront her. On learning that Stella is married, Geoffrey plans to relocate in New Zealand, inadvertently dashing the hopes of Lilian, who has for many years been quietly contemplating a home of her own with the man she loves. Reconciled, Stella and Charlie make a seemingly futile attempt to renew their life together, while Wilfred, frustrated by an aborted relationship with a local barmaid, takes his disappointment back with him to Nigeria, where he will wait patiently for his next unfulfilling leave. Knowing that his own death is approaching, Dr. Kirby ironically comforts himself with the mistaken notion of a bright future that he believes life holds in store for his children and for the baby he has just delivered. If no dreams come true, if life holds only the promise of hardship and heartbreak in Eden End, it is left to Charlie Appleby to proclaim the reward that life offers to all. That he is inebriated at the time does not diminish the truth of his observation that life is full of wonder. Pain is part of life’s wonder, and humankind is the richer for experiencing it, especially in those moments in which the experience is shared with others. Dr. Kirby is not the failure he believes himself to be, but a good man who has shared the life of family and community. In a brief critical study, Anton Chekhov (1970), Priestley makes clear his admiration and affection for the plays of the Russian master, and in Eden End he demonstrates that he has been an apt pupil. Priestly’s method is Chekhov’s own as he sustains a mood dependent on depth of characterization and wealth of detail. Stella incorporates the qualities of Madame Ranevskaya of The Cherry Orchard, Nina of Chayka (pr. 1896, rev. pr. 1898; The Seagull, 1909), and Elena of Dyadya Vanya (pb. 1897; Uncle Vanya, 1914) as she tries to win the man loved by her more practical sister Lilian, who recalls Uncle Vanya’s Sonia and Varya of The Cherry Orchard. Lilian even has a brief exchange with Geoffrey Farant in which, like Varya and Lopakhin, they avoid any discussion of their personal relationship by talking about the weather instead. Wilfred is as much the idle dreamer as Gaev, and Dr. Kirby recalls a number of Chekhov’s sad and wise doctors. Like old Firs, Sarah emphasizes a bewildering, rapidly changing world. She still thinks of her charges as children and fails to come to terms with the technology of motorcars and phonographs. When the others go off to the station at the play’s end, Sarah, like Firs, is left behind and ignores the ringing telephone that replaces Chekhov’s breaking string. Despite the similarities, however, Eden End is no mere imitation of Chekhov. The play exquisitely evokes the life of provincial England in the second decade of the twentieth century, and English audiences, deeply moved by it, responded enthusiastically. The minute details of English life in another era, however, may finally work against the play’s achieving universality, and it has not found favor abroad. Acknowledging that Chekhov has influenced many English dramatists, Priestley himself suggested that he and others were better for that influence. Eden End ranks among the finest plays of the Chekhovian mode. Time and the Conways • Priestley, who called himself “a Time haunted man,” inevitably turned again to time as the controlling factor in human life in Time and the Conways, a play highly influenced by the theories of Dunne. In An Experiment with Time, Dunne, the designer of Great Britain’s first military aircraft, attempts to explain the experience of precognition, that sense of déjà vu in which human beings, through the distortion of dream, receive foreknowledge of future events displaced in time. Dunne’s quasi-scientific theory provides for a series of observers within every person existing in

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a series of times. To a person’s ordinary self, Observer One, the fourth dimension appears as time. The self within dreams, however, is Observer Two, to whom the fifth dimension appears as time. Unlike the three-dimensional outlook of Observer One, Observer Two has a four-dimensional outlook that enables him or her to receive images from the coexisting times of past and future. Part of the appeal of Dunne’s so-called theory of Serialism is its provision for immortality: Observer One dies in time one but lives on within Observer Two in time two, and so on to “infinite regression.” Time and the Conways is Priestley’s rendering of abstruse theory into poignantly effective literature. Revisiting the world of his own past, he infuses it with an awareness of the effects of time on all human beings, a sense of waste and loss tempered with a note of hope and an intimation of immortality. The play begins in 1919 in the Conway home, in a prosperous suburb of a manufacturing town, where a party is under way to celebrate Kay’s twenty-first birthday. An aspiring novelist, Kay is joined by her widowed mother, five brothers and sisters, friends, and neighbors. With the war ended, all of them look forward to a bright future. Madge is eager to be part of a new Socialist order; Robin, home from the Royal Air Force, expects to make his fortune in car sales; Hazel, the family beauty, awaits her Prince Charming, while Carol, the youngest, is bursting with an overflowing sense of life. Alan, a clerk in the Rate Office and the only member of the family with no great hopes or plans, is the most contented of the lot as he savors what seems to the others to be merely a humdrum existence. Once their game of charades is over and the costumes are put away, everyone goes into the next room to hear Mrs. Conway’s rendering of Robert Schumann’s “Der Nussbaum.” Kay, however, returns to the sitting room. She cannot let go of this moment of blissful happiness, the happiest moment any of the young Conways will ever experience. Sitting on a window seat, her head bathed in moonlight, Kay, with the special sensitivity of the artist, is about to be granted a vision of her family’s future as the curtain falls on the first act. The action of act 2 seems to be continuous as the rising curtain reveals Kay in the same position. When Alan enters and turns on the lights, however, it is obvious that several years have passed. It is again Kay’s birthday, but the year is 1937, the year in which the play was written, and Kay is now forty. Act 2, as Priestley explained it, is Kay’s precognition or glimpse of the future. In terms of Dunne’s Serialism, her Observer Two sees what will happen to her Observer One. Mrs. Conway, as impractical as Madame Ranevskaya, has called her children together to discuss her financial difficulties but has attempted to turn the homecoming into a party. Her children, however, are not in a party mood this time. Kay, no celebrated novelist, merely a hack journalist, is involved in an unhappy affair with a married man. Madge is an embittered schoolmistress, and Robin is unable to hold on to a job. He has frittered away much of the family funds and has deserted his wife and children. Hazel, too, has changed. Married to a wealthy mill owner who resents the family for snubbing him years before when he had first come to town, she is terrified of her husband. Conspicuously absent from the family group is Carol. On the threshold of life in the first act, she has been dead for sixteen years in the second. The air is full of insult, accusation, and recrimination. Once the others have gone their separate ways, a miserable Kay tells her brother Alan that life seems pointless to her now as she remembers the happiness of their younger days. At forty, she is constantly aware of every tick of the clock, of that great devil in the universe called time. Alan, still the one stable element in the family, manages to soothe her. She is again alone at the window as the act ends.

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Act 3 continues the action of act 1. Mrs. Conway can be heard singing as Kay is again discovered at the window. It is again 1919 and her twenty-first birthday. The events of act 2 have not yet taken place; life has not yet exacted its toll. Kay, however, has an awareness the others do not share. For her and for the audience, act 3 has a terrible poignancy as the carefree Conways unwittingly plant the seeds of their future unhappiness and destroy one another in ignorance and innocence. The doomed Carol tells the rest how full her life will be. She will act, paint, travel, but the point of it all, she explains with Priestley’s acquiescence, is to live. Moved, Kay begins to cry and asks Alan for comforting words. As the play ends, Alan replies that one day he will have something to tell her that may comfort her. What Kay needs to hear, what Alan will tell her in eighteen years, he has already told her at the end of Kay’s precognitive vision that is act 2—that all human beings are at any moment only a cross-section of their real selves. At the end of their lives, they are all of themselves in all of their times and may find themselves in yet another time that is another kind of dream. If the ideas are Dunne’s, Priestley transcends theory in a profoundly moving play that affords insight into a person’s plight in a bewildering age and offers an audience something to cling to in the midst of the pain of life. Pseudoscientific explanations are beside the point. The play is no bag of tricks, as some critics have complained, with a third act where the second ought to be. Performed chronologically, the three acts would not have the meaningful impact that Priestley’s dramatic irony unleashes. In Time and the Conways, Priestley revealed himself as innovator, liberating the stage from the limiting convention of realism, paving the way for such later works as Harold Pinter’s 1971 production of Old Times and his 1975 production of No Man’s Land, in which past and present coexist on the stage. Johnson over Jordan • The enthusiastic acceptance and understanding of Time and the Conways convinced Priestley that audiences were ready for more daring experimentation, that he could challenge himself and them with the form and content of untried materials. In Johnson over Jordan, which he called “a biographical morality play,” Priestley made maximal use of all the resources the theater offered in a drama stressing the timelessness that was one of his favorite themes. The play calls for intricate musical effects requiring a full orchestra, even ballet sequences, as characters are taken outside time and presented four-dimensionally. Influenced by the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Priestley was especially struck by an account of the Bardo, a dreamlike state after death, filled with hallucinatory visions. Johnson over Jordan is an attempt to simplify the complex Bardo into a Westernized version in which Robert Johnson, an English Everyman, moves back and forth in time examining the quality of the life he has just departed. The manager of a small business firm, Johnson cannot let go of his material concerns even after death. He wanders through a distorted landscape of documents, ledgers, and tax forms, a nightmare world with which he cannot cope. Like the officer in August Strindberg’s A Dream Play, he becomes a schoolboy again, confused by life’s contradictions, reminded of his petty deeds and thoughtless actions. Eventually he takes refuge, like Ibsen’s Peer Gynt in the land of the trolls, in the Jungle Hot Spot. Here, he confronts his animal self as he mingles with men and women in grotesque, piglike masks. A mysterious figure, who, like Peer’s Button Moulder, reappears throughout his spiritual journey, directs him on to the Inn at the End of the World. All who have illuminated Johnson’s mind and touched his heart, members of his immedi-

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ate family and characters from beloved books, reappear to him through a window at the inn. He recognizes his wife, like Peer’s Solveig, as Eternal Woman. His love for her, stronger than material desires, is a lasting one that makes him finally aware of life’s wonders and its prosaic joys. At last Johnson, acknowledging himself a less than perfect being, is granted entry into an unknown universe. Despite a now legendary performance by Sir Ralph Richardson, effective music by Benjamin Britten, and inventive choreography by Antony Tudor, Johnson over Jordan failed to find its audience. To some extent Priestley attributed that failure to the critics who dwelled on the work’s expressionistic style, frightening away its potential audience. Priestley’s own view of the expressionistic theater is that it is peopled entirely by symbolic figures and flattened characters. In the case of Johnson over Jordan, he believed, the realistic portrayal of the protagonist, despite the distorted trappings of his environment, made a mockery of the dreaded label. His own explanation of what he was attempting, however—to make use of objective form to present material that was deeply subjective—suggests that the work in fact derives from the expressionist tradition. Like those of expressionist drama, the characters, apart from Johnson himself, are types. All, Johnson among them, speak a heightened language, and the play, in its exploration of a dreamworld devoid of time and space, deals abstractly with a basic expressionist theme—the worth of human beings. The play’s very theatricality is the measure of its achievement. Without becoming a commercial success, Johnson over Jordan was a landmark occasion in a London theater long resistant to dynamic change. It encouraged others to press on with efforts to expand the limits of a too confining stage. An Inspector Calls • Priestley’s work for the theater during World War II expressed his lifelong theme of commitment to community. Plays such as Desert Highway and How Are They at Home? appear to have been written more from a sense of duty than from a spark of creativity, but one play of the war years stands apart from the rest. Written during the last winter of the war, An Inspector Calls was first performed by two Soviet theater companies in Moscow at a time when no London theater was available for its production. When the play was produced at home in 1946, in a weighty production full of realistic detail, it was dismissed with indifference. Priestley believed that acclaim with which Russian audiences had greeted it resulted from a more sympathetic symbolic production. There were no walls to the set, only an illuminated acting area. The symbolic setting made the audience aware that the play concerned more than its immediate and continuous action, was in fact concerned with the history of a generation that had just come through a worldwide conflagration. Sharing with Dangerous Corner the form of a conventional melodrama, An Inspector Calls is a committed social drama that focuses on one man’s family while insisting inevitably on the Family of Man. On an evening in 1912 in an industrial city in the North Midlands, the Birlings are celebrating their daughter Sheila’s engagement to Gerald Croft. The coming wedding will signal the merger of Birling and Company and Crofts Limited. Dashing the festive mood of the occasion is the visit of an Inspector Goole, new to the district, to announce the death that evening of a young woman, Eva Smith, who swallowed a disinfectant and died in agony in the infirmary. One by one the Birlings are shown a photograph of the girl, and each recognizes her. By the time Goole departs, everyone is implicated in the girl’s death. Birling had fired her for her part in a strike at his factory, and Sheila had had her discharged from a dress shop for impertinence. Croft, who knew her as Daisy Renton, had made her his mistress for a time, but she had later become pregnant

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by Birling’s son Eric. When she had asked for assistance from a charity organization, she had been denied by the interviewing committee, chaired by Mrs. Birling. Frustrated at every turn, she had committed suicide. The Birling children are shaken by Goole’s statement that the world is full of Eva Smiths, and that everyone is responsible for his or her own destiny. The elder Birlings and Croft, on the other hand, are more concerned with their reputations and with covering up the scandal than they are convinced of their guilt and responsibility. It even occurs to them that they may have been shown different photos, that Eva Smith and Daisy Renton may not have been the same girl. Checking with the police a few minutes later, they are overjoyed to learn that there is no Inspector Goole on the force and that no girl has died in the infirmary. Believing that they have been the victims of an elaborate hoax, they prepare to carry on as before, much to the dismay of Sheila and Eric. Suddenly the phone rings, and Birling reports his telephone conversation to the others. The police have just informed him that a girl has died on the way to the infirmary after swallowing disinfectant. An inspector is on his way to ask some questions. The curtain abruptly falls on five stunned characters. In one of Priestley’s tautest and best-crafted works, what seems to be a realistic drama suddenly moves outside time. No particular time theory is under illustration here. Instead, time reinforces the notion that human beings must take responsibility for their actions and their consequences. In the present, individuals prepare their future. Even Inspector Goole is taken outside time. Is he police officer or imposter? Perhaps he is the very embodiment of the Birlings’ collective guilt, which has been called forth by their need to account for their actions. Like Eden End, An Inspector Calls is set in 1912, enabling the dramatist to make astonishing use of dramatic irony. The Birlings’ world, like the Kirbys’, is about to disintegrate. The Kirbys were victims of their own innocence, but the Birlings, no innocents, have caused the demise of their comfortable world through a lack of compassion, a disregard for those members of their community less fortunate than themselves. Priestley added a further dimension to the play, which he wrote as World War II was ending, by setting it on the eve of World War I. When will humankind benefit, he was asking, from the lessons of the past? Later plays • Priestley’s wartime despair eventually gave way to a cautious optimism, despite the uncertainties of the future, in such later plays as Summer Day’s Dream and The Linden Tree. After collaborating with Iris Murdoch on a successful adaptation of her novel A Severed Head in 1963, he abandoned the theater. Other major works long fiction: Adam in Moonshine, 1927; Benighted, 1927; Farthing Hall, 1929 (with Hugh Walpole); The Good Companions, 1929; Angel Pavement, 1930; Faraway, 1932; I’ll Tell You Everything, 1933 (with George Bullett); Wonder Hero, 1933; They Walk in the City: The Lovers in the Stone Forest, 1936; The Doomsday Men: An Adventure, 1938; Let the People Sing, 1939; Blackout in Gretley: A Story of—and for—Wartime, 1942; Daylight on Saturday: A Novel About an Aircraft Factory, 1943; Three Men in New Suits, 1945; Bright Day, 1946; Jenny Villiers: A Story of the Theatre, 1947; Festival at Farbridge, 1951 (published in the United States as Festival); Low Notes on a High Level: A Frolic, 1954; The Magicians, 1954; Saturn over the Water: An Account of His Adventures in London, South America, and Australia by Tim Bedford, Painter, Edited with Some Preliminary and Concluding Remarks by Henry Sulgrave and Here Presented to the Reading Public, 1961; The Thirty-first of June: A Tale of

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True Love, Enterprise, and Progress in the Arthurian and Ad-Atomic Ages, 1961; The Shape of Sleep: A Topical Tale, 1962; Sir Michael and Sir George: A Tale of COMSA and DISCUS and the New Elizabethans, 1964 (also known as Sir Michael and Sir George: A Comedy of New Elizabethans); Lost Empires: Being Richard Herncastle’s Account of His Life on the Variety Stage from November, 1913, to August, 1914, Together with a Prologue and Epilogue, 1965; Salt Is Leaving, 1966; It’s an Old Country, 1967; The Image Men: “Out of Town” and “London End,” 1968; The Carfitt Crisis, 1975; Found, Lost, Found: Or, The English Way of Life, 1976; My Three Favorite Novels, 1978. short fiction: The Town Major of Miraucourt, 1930; Going Up: Stories and Sketches, 1950; The Other Place and Other Stories of the Same Sort, 1953; The Carfitt Crisis and Two Other Stories, 1975. poetry: The Chapman of Rhymes, 1918. screenplay: Last Holiday, 1950. nonfiction: Brief Diversions: Being Tales, Travesties, and Epigrams, 1922; Papers from Lilliput, 1922; I for One, 1923; Figures in Modern Literature, 1924; Fools and Philosophers: A Gallery of Comic Figures from English Literature, 1925 (published in the United States as The English Comic Characters); George Meredith, 1926; Talking: An Essay, 1926; The English Novel, 1927, 1935, 1974; Open House: A Book of Essays, 1927; Thomas Love Peacock, 1927; Too Many People and Other Reflections, 1928; Apes and Angels: A Book of Essays, 1928; The Balconinny and Other Essays, 1929 (published in the United States as The Balconinny, 1931); English Humour, 1929, 1976; The Lost Generation: An Armistice Day Article, 1932; Self-Selected Essays, 1932; Albert Goes Through, 1933; English Journey: Being a Rambling but Truthful Account of What One Man Saw and Heard and Felt and Thought During a Journey Through England During the Autumn of the Year 1933, 1934; Four-in-Hand, 1934; Midnight on the Desert: A Chapter of Autobiography, 1937 (published in the United States as Midnight on the Desert: Being an Excursion into Autobiography During a Winter in America, 19351936, 1937); Rain upon Godshill: A Further Chapter of Autobiography, 1939; Britain Speaks, 1940; Postscripts, 1940 (radio talks); Out of the People, 1941; Britain at War, 1942; British Women Go to War, 1943; The Man-Power Story, 1943; Here Are Your Answers, 1944; The New Citizen, 1944; Letter to a Returning Serviceman, 1945; Russian Journey, 1946; The Secret Dream: An Essay on Britain, America, and Russia, 1946; The Arts Under Socialism: Being a Lecture Given to the Fabian Society, with a Postscript on What Government Should Do for the Arts Here and Now, 1947; Theatre Outlook, 1947; Delight, 1949; Journey Down a Rainbow, 1955 (with Jacquetta Hawkes); All About Ourselves and Other Essays, 1956; The Writer in a Changing Society, 1956; The Art of the Dramatist: A Lecture Together with Appendices and Discursive Notes, 1957; The Bodley Head Leacock, 1957; Thoughts in the Wilderness, 1957; Topside: Or, The Future of England, a Dialogue, 1958; The Story of Theatre, 1959; Literature and Western Man, 1960; William Hazlitt, 1960; Charles Dickens: A Pictorial Biography, 1962; Margin Released: A Writer’s Reminiscences and Reflections, 1962; The English Comic Characters, 1963; Man and Time, 1964; The Moments and Other Pieces, 1966; All England Listened: J. B. Priestley’s Wartime Broadcasts, 1968; Essays of Five Decades, 1968 (Susan Cooper, editor); Trumpets over the Sea: Being a Rambling and Egotistical Account of the London Symphony Orchestra’s Engagement at Daytona Beach, Florida, in July-August, 1967, 1968; The Prince of Pleasure and His Regency, 1811-1820, 1969; Anton Chekhov, 1970; The Edwardians, 1970; Over the Long High Wall: Some Reflections and Speculations on Life, Death, and Time, 1972; Victoria’s Heyday, 1972; The English, 1973; Outcries and Asides, 1974; A Visit to New Zealand, Particular Pleasures: Being a Personal Record of Some Varied Arts and Many Different Artists, 1974; The Happy Dream: An Essay, 1976; Instead of the Trees, 1977 (autobiography). children’s literature: Snoggle, 1972.

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edited texts: Essayist Past and Present: A Selection of English Essays, 1925; Tom Moore’s Diary: A Selection, 1925; The Book of Bodley Head Verse, 1926; The Female Spectator: Selections from Mrs. Eliza Heywood’s Periodical, 1744-1746, 1929; Our Nation’s Heritage, 1939; Scenes of London Life, from “Sketches by Boz” by Charles Dickens, 1947; The Best of Leacock, 1957; Four English Novels, 1960; Four English Biographies, 1961; Adventures in English Literature, 1963; An Everyman Anthology, 1966. Bibliography Atkins, John. J. B. Priestley: The Last of the Sages. New York: Riverrun Press, 1981. Atkins’s attempt to illustrate Priestley’s development as essayist, critic, novelist, dramatist, autobiographer, social commentator, historian, and travel writer in a “leap-frogging method” leads inevitably to overlapping and repetition. The 309page book is most useful on the political, social, and economic background of the late 1920’s and 1930’s, the period of Priestley’s most significant contributions to literature. Brome, Vincent. J. B. Priestley. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988. Brome offers an affectionate but candid portrait of the writer in public and private life. Brome rightly argues that the prolific writer has been denied his proper niche by overly harsh critics who do not deal fairly with those who write for a wide, general audience. Brome points to the popularization of Carl Jung’s theories as an important aspect of Priestley’s work. Cook, Judith. Priestley. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. Cook provides a biography of Priestley, examining both his prose and dramatic works. Includes bibliography and index. DeVitis, A. A., and Albert E. Kalson. J. B. Priestley. Boston: Twayne, 1980. After a biographical chapter that includes a discussion of Priestley’s time theories, the 257page book divides into two sections, the first half dealing with Priestley as novelist, the latter half dealing with Priestley as dramatist. All Priestley’s works in the two genres are discussed, the more significant ones in some detail. Includes a chronology of the important events in the writer’s life and a useful bibliography. Gray, Dulcie. J. B. Priestley. Stroud, England: Sutton, 2000. This volume in the Sutton Pocket Biographies series provides a concise look at Priestley’s life and many works. Includes bibliography. Klein, Holger. J. B. Priestley’s Plays. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Klein states that his goal is “to further an understanding” of Priestley’s “dramatic objectives and methods,” but his seeming inability to differentiate between Priestley the serious dramatist and Priestley the occasional hack working to order occasionally invalidates his findings in the confusing first section of the book that deals with dramatic structure. Klein’s study is more useful in its latter half in its discussion of Priestley’s ideas concerning contemporary issues, pointing especially to The Linden Tree as the dramatist’s condemnation of Great Britain’s post-World War II malaise. Albert E. Kalson

Jean Racine Jean Racine

Born: La Ferté-Milon, France; December, 1639 Died: Paris, France; April 21, 1699 Principal drama • La Thébaïde: Ou, Les Frères ennemis, pr., pb. 1664 (The Theban Brothers, 1723); Alexandre le Grand, pr. 1665, pb. 1666 (Alexander the Great, 1714); Andromaque, pr. 1667, pb. 1668 (Andromache, 1674); Les Plaideurs, pr. 1668, pb. 1669 (The Litigants, 1715); Britannicus, pr. 1669, pb. 1670 (English translation, 1714); Bérénice, pr. 1670, pb. 1671 (English translation, 1676); Bajazet, pr., pb. 1672 (English translation, 1717); Mithridate, pr., pb. 1673 (Mithridates, 1926); Iphigénie, pr. 1674, pb. 1675 (Iphigenia in Aulis, 1700); Phèdre, pr., pb. 1677 (Phaedra, 1701); Idylle sur la paix, pb. 1685 (libretto, with Jean-Baptiste Lully); Esther, pr., pb. 1689 (English translation, 1715); Athalie, pr., pb. 1691 (Athaliah, 1722); The Dramatic Works of Jean Racine, pb. 1889; The Best Plays of Racine, pb. 1936; Five Plays, pb. 1960; The Complete Plays, pb. 1967 Other literary forms • Jean Racine’s reputation rests on a relatively limited body of dramatic works. Nevertheless, Racine published a number of other works during his literary career. Among these are several odes celebrating Louis XIV in the early 1660’s; a polemical letter attacking his Jansenist mentors in 1666; a collection of religious poems, Cantiques spirituels (1694); and an unfinished defense of the Jansenists, Abrégé de l’histoire de Port-Royal (1742, 1767). To accompany his plays, Racine also wrote critical prefaces in which he vigorously defended himself against his detractors. Achievements • Racinian tragedy is the supreme expression of French seventeenth century classical literature, a period called le grand siècle (the grand century), a golden age of French art, literature, and architecture. This cultural efflorescence centered on the Sun King, Louis XIV, whom the ambitious Jean Racine assiduously courted. For the playwright, the famous rules of French drama were not fetters that hampered the full realization of his genius but rather intrinsic elements of what only can be called the Racinian “tone.” Racine offers, as he states in the preface to Britannicus, “A simple action, charged with little subject matter, necessary in an action which must occur in a single day, and which, moving forward by degrees, is sustained only by the interests, the sentiments, and the passions of the characters.” The simplicity, violence, and elegance of Racine’s style create a tone of “majestic sadness” (an expression of Racine) concerning the human condition. His noble and grandiose protagonists confront their tragic destiny with lucidity and humanity. The result is a fusion of psychological realism and a restrained grandeur that is the soul of classical art. Like all great artists, Racine has enjoyed periods of adulation alternating with periods of scorn and derision. In his own century, he rapidly eclipsed Pierre Corneille’s renown with apparently simple plays in which pathos and emotion replaced Corneillian intellectuality and complexity. It is significant that the great codifier of French classicism, Nicolas Boileau, defined tragedy according to the Racinian model in his L’Art poétique (1674). The struggle between disciples of Corneille and Racine continued in the eighteenth century, but most commentators looked on Racinian tragedy 723

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as a model of perfection. Its adherence to the rules of reason and nature, according to the Age of Voltaire, made it the quintessence of the French spirit. With the rise of Romanticism in the nineteenth century, however, a polemical criticism developed that declared that the slavish imitation of the Racinian model had impeded the evolution of French theater in the eighteenth century. This reaction saw Racine as too cramped by convention and courtly etiquette to permit a true depiction of human emotions. Later in the century, however, a new nationalistic fervor elevated Racine to the status of a national idol, the epitome of le grand siècle. In numerous and varied studies, the twentieth century, for the most part, rescued Racine from the purely historical approach of the preceding century. Most recent studies adopt a sociological, theological, or psychoanalytical premise that serves to elucidate Racine’s life and work. Thus, Racine’s plays emerge as an expression of Jansenist theology, a firm rejection of the baroque style, or as a genuine reflection of Racine’s psyche. Other studies have focused on the recurrent elements and structural patterns that are then used to define Racine’s work. Biography • Born in December, 1639, to a bourgeois family of La Ferté-Milon (about forty miles northeast of Paris), Jean Racine was left an orphan at the age of four and was adopted by his paternal grandmother. In 1649, his penurious grandmother sought refuge at the celebrated center of Jansenism, Port-Royal, where Racine received an excellent education in Latin as well as Greek. Jansenism, which upheld the doctrine of predestination and insisted on the helplessness of humankind without divine grace, can be described as a kind of Calvinistic Catholicism. Denying free will and practicing a very rigorous code of morality, the Jansenists reproved the more relaxed tenets of the dominant and rival Jesuits. Although many critics have focused on a Jansenist orientation in the plays, it is uncertain whether Racine was a Jansenist during his literary career or indeed whether his teachers actually inculcated their theology in their pupils. After four years at Port-Royal, Racine spent two years at the Collège de Beauvais, then three more at Port-Royal, and finally completed his education in Paris at the Collège d’Harcourt. Racine’s austere and scholarly masters (called solitaires, the solitary persons) introduced the young Racine to the Bible and ancient literature. In an age in which education was based on Latin, Racine was fortunate to acquire a thorough knowledge of Greek. He read in the original ancient Greek tragedy, notably Sophocles and Euripides, and most critics point to the Hellenistic simplicity and the mysterious force of destiny so characteristic of Racine’s plays. In Paris, the ambitious Racine wrote poetry and cultivated many literary acquaintances. His first published piece, an ode in honor of Louis XIV’s marriage, appeared in 1660, and earned for Racine a small royal gratification. Racine’s first play, “L’Amasie,” now lost, was rejected; a second attempt at the theater, “Théagène et Chariclée,” remained unfinished. Torn between worldly ambition and the lingering influence of Port-Royal, which condemned a literary career as frivolous and sinful, Racine spent an unhappy year in southern France, at Uzès, where he had hoped to gain an ecclesiastic sinecure. His decision to return to Paris in 1663 was rewarded by some literary success; the publication of several poems put Racine on a list of royal pensioners. Although Racine’s first two dramatic ventures did not reach the stage, they brought him into closer contact with Molière, who, as director of an important theatrical troupe—the Théâtre du Marais—was to premiere Racine’s first two performed dramas, The Theban Brothers, a success, though a mediocre one, and Alexander the Great, an

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instant popular success. After several performances, Racine, apparently feeling that Molière’s troupe was misinterpreting Alexander the Great, gave the play to the rival, more prestigious troupe of the Hôtel de Bourgogne without informing Molière, an act of ingratitude characteristic of Racine’s overwhelming desire to arrive as a dramatist. This ambition also explains his break with his Jansenist mentors at Port-Royal. Realizing that the Jansenists, deeply suspect as dissenters by the government, would never help him in his literary career, Racine took great care to dissociate himself from the solitaires in two sarcastic letters (one of which was published) attacking Port-Royal, which had condemned a writer as a “public poisoner.” In 1667, Racine was secretly mar(Library of Congress) ried to Thérèse Du Parc, a famous actress whom he had lured away from Molière’s troupe. In the same year, Andromache premiered, with Du Parc in the leading role. The popular and critical acclaim of what is considered Racine’s first masterpiece helped him to replace the aging Pierre Corneille as supreme French tragedian. Racine’s triumph occasioned a series of personal and critical attacks from the partisans of Corneille, initiating a prolonged and bitter polemic. After his only comedy The Litigants, Racine responded to his detractors with Britannicus, called by some a Corneillian tragedy because of its Roman subject and political emphasis. In the play’s preface, Racine virulently attacked his adversary. Racine’s next play, Bérénice, was performed in direct competition with Corneille’s Tite et Bérénice (1670), over which Racine’s version won a clear victory. Elected to the French Academy in 1673 and finding himself in possession of a growing fortune and elevated social standing, Racine continued to present a string of hits when in 1677 he produced Phaedra, which, because of a rival play on the same subject, appeared at first to be a failure. The superiority of the Racine play asserted itself, however, and Phaedra became a huge success. At the age of thirty-seven, at the height of his renown, Racine retired from the theater, a retirement he thought definitive at the time. Much speculation has centered on this withdrawal. Historians emphasize a reconciliation with Port-Royal or simply a reasoned career move: Just married to Catherine de Romanet (with whom he had seven children), and appointed with Nicolas Boileau to the lucrative position of the king’s historiographer, Racine, ever the shrewd courtier, may simply have decided that higher social elevation and greater security would come if he abandoned the theater. At any rate, Racine led the life of a courtier, a permanent resident at Versailles, in constant contact with Louis XIV, while remaining the best-known and most popular playwright in France.

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In 1689, Racine made a modest return to the stage, composing, at the request of the king’s morganatic wife, Mme de Maintenon, Esther, a biblical drama to be performed by the young ladies at the school at Saint-Cyr. In 1691, he composed another sacred drama, Athaliah, also for Saint-Cyr. Written and performed for an extremely limited audience of courtiers, Racine’s last two plays are nevertheless judged masterpieces by most critics. Racine developed closer ties to Jansenism in his last years, composing the unfinished “Abrégé de l’histoire de Port-Royal”; he died in April, 1699, and was buried at the feet of a former master at Port-Royal. A destitute orphan at his origins, Racine died “fabulously rich.” Biographers see contradictory images of the man: a calculating, cruel arriviste and courtier in opposition to the pious family man of the later years. Analysis • The outer form of Racinian tragedy differs little from that of his predecessors. His five-act plays are written in regular twelve-syllable Alexandrine verse; Jean Racine adheres to the three unities of time, place, and action, to the concept of bienséance, which prohibited vulgarity of language and overt violence on the stage, and to the required “unity of tone,” a sustained elegance and dignity proper to tragedy. The concept of gloire, which informs the work of Corneille, however, is modified in Racine. An exulted self-esteem and worldly fame arising from the exercise of total freedom, gloire in Racine loses its compelling force. Whereas in Corneille, the hero achieves selfrealization through the domination of his or her love, the hero in Racine accepts fully this passion and the destiny that it entails. The dependent, yet far from weak, lover in Racine knows and acknowledges that he or she cannot exist without the beloved. This “demolition of the hero” reveals a new psychological realism that spurns the illusory ambition of complete self-mastery and independence. From a social and historical viewpoint, this new perspective bears witness to the decline of the ancient aristocratic ideals after the subjugation of the nobility during the absolutist regime of Louis XIV. Andromache • Although famous after the resounding success of Alexander the Great in 1665, Racine created in his next play, Andromache, what is unanimously called his first true masterpiece. This play presented something new to contemporary audiences: love as an overwhelming, ultimately destructive passion in both men and women, who, under its sway, are bereft of honor, pride, resolve, and self-control. This play proved beyond doubt that Corneillian heroism was passé, and Racine was generally hailed as the great man’s successor despite vehement criticisms leveled at the play by Corneille’s supporters. Evoking the epic grandeur of Vergil’s Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e.; English translation, 1553), Andromache, set at the court of Pyrrhus in Epirus, opens with Oreste sent by the vengeful and fearful Greeks to demand Hector’s son, Astyanax, who has been held captive by Pyrrhus since the Fall of Troy one year earlier. Because of his passionate love for the captive Andromache, Pyrrhus refuses to deliver the boy to the Greeks. He intends to use Astyanax as blackmail: He will turn him over to the Greeks if Andromache does not marry him. Oreste, ostensibly on a diplomatic mission, has other motives for visiting Epirus: He loves Hermione, Pyrrhus’s betrothed, whom Pyrrhus has neglected because of his passion for Andromache. Oreste hopes that his mission will fail so that he will be able to persuade Hermione to renounce the unfaithful Pyrrhus and return with him to Greece. Pyrrhus’s blackmail means that the entire situation revolves on Andromache’s decision: If she accepts his offer, he will reject Hermione, thus making her available to Oreste; if she refuses, Pyrrhus will accept

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Hermione, Andromache will lose Astyanax—the last vestige of her dead husband Hector—and Oreste will lose all hope of winning Hermione. While Andromache ponders this momentous decision, Pyrrhus, angered by her hesitations, has a change of heart. He will fulfill his official duty by marrying Hermione and delivering Astyanax to the Greeks. Thinking that he must now yield Hermione to Pyrrhus, Oreste is disconsolate when he learns of this. Andromache is in despair; Hermione, who is apparently triumphant, exults. The depth of Pyrrhus’s passion, however, forces him to weaken. In a fateful interview with Andromache, he again falls under her spell, allowing her more time to choose between marrying him or losing her son. Andromache’s long-awaited decision emerges at the beginning of act 4: To save her son, she will marry Pyrrhus, then commit suicide. Neglected once again, Hermione, in a jealous rage, demands that Oreste murder the double-dealing Pyrrhus. In act 5, scene 3, the deed is done; Oreste, believing that this act has earned for him possession of Hermione, is astounded when she bitterly blames him for the murder of her beloved Pyrrhus. He goes mad after learning that Hermione has killed herself over the body of Pyrrhus. Of the four principal characters, Andromache, the Trojan captive, alone survives, indeed triumphs, at the play’s close, for she has assured the survival of her son, and, as widow of Pyrrhus, assumes control over Epirus. The outward simplicity of the play’s plot structure belies the complex psychology at work. Because the action of the play is psychological, time and space play no role: Racine has made use of the unities to create a taut work that concentrates on the emotional crisis provoked by Oreste’s arrival. Once this occurs, the dominant emotions of the individuals affected inexorably lead to the final catastrophe. Aside from the Greeks’ demand, revealed in act 1, scene 1, no external event influences the emotional interplay among the four protagonists. The three Greek characters are at the mercy of their passions: Pyrrhus, son of the great Achilles, is a horribly tormented king who, almost despite himself, is ready to sacrifice all for Andromache. Oreste, son of Agamemnon, whose incipient madness is suggested in the opening scene, actually hopes that his diplomatic mission will fail so that he might win Hermione. Hermione, daughter of the beautiful and celebrated Helen, is overwhelmed by Pyrrhus’s rejection of her. She, like Oreste and Pyrrhus, can rule neither her heart nor her mind. Illumined by the grandeur that was Troy, Andromache, however, does not belong to the psychological universe of the Greek characters. Her fidelity to her destroyed city and above all to her dead husband, Hector, both incarnate in the person of Astyanax (who never appears onstage, thereby reinforcing his value as symbol), is the keystone of her complex character. Her dilemma—to marry Pyrrhus or to see her son die— entails in each case treason against Troy. Her solution, which, she says, the spirit of Hector has ordered, constitutes a heroic self-sacrifice in the name of a higher value. The irony of Andromache’s triumph—a captive who imposes her will on the others—reflects the more general theme of revenge in the play. Troy, in the person of Andromache, avenges itself on its Greek enemies. Repeated allusions to the destruction of Troy and to its hero Hector reinforce this interpretation. The means of revenge is the insurmountable power of passion. Pyrrhus, a cruel warrior who played a major role in Troy’s final destruction, now suffers the intolerable pangs of unrequited love as well as remorse for his murderous barbarism at Troy. The seemingly conventional image of love’s flame is rejuvenated by Racine to evoke Troy’s revenge on Pyrrhus; he is “Brûlé de plus de feux que je n’en allumai” (“Burned by more fires than I lit”). Just as he had burned Troy in a passion of hatred, he himself now “burns” in a passion of love that Andromache’s eyes have kindled within him. Racine’s mastery of imagery and vo-

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cabulary is also apparent in what one critic calls the “poetics of the glance”: The eyes of the lover can only imperfectly “grasp” the beloved, yet the latter’s eyes maintain an inescapable power over he who loves. The situation in which one character has absolute physical control over another, yet loves passionately and without recompense the same character, exists in many of Racine’s plays. The main structure of Racinian tragedy appears to be based on a relationship of force and authority. As a consequence, a trial of strength lies at the foundation of his theater. Although the characters in Andromache—and in this they are characteristically Racinian—appear to be carried away with their emotions, they arrive at essential decisions lucidly: Pyrrhus, in wishing to marry a Trojan captive, knows very well that he is disowning his country and repudiating his past deeds as well as those of his father Achilles. Like Oreste, he accepts fully his passion and its tragic consequences. His acquiescence to blind destiny constitutes his self-realization. Unlike the autonomous, strong-willed heroes of Corneille, Racinian heroes enjoy no genuine freedom. The Litigants • The Litigants, Racine’s only comedy, is an anomaly in his rather unified tragic works, and for this reason it has been relatively neglected by scholars. A scathing satire of the French legal system, the play exhibits, by its parodies, puns, and acrobatic versification, Racine’s mastery of language and poetry. Britannicus • The huge success of Andromache prompted the partisans of Corneille to charge that Racine was merely a poet of love and tenderness and that he would never master the more significant historical and political subjects of Corneille’s drama. To answer these criticisms, Racine presented Britannicus, a political play of jealousy and ambition set in Nero’s Rome. At first a failure, Britannicus later established itself; it ranks third, after Phaedra and Andromache, in the number of performances at the Comédie-Française. As in Andromache, the plot is rather simple. Intending to continue her own rule, Agrippine, mother of Néron, has put her own son on the throne in place of Britannicus, its rightful heir. Néron, however, does not prove to be the obedient and docile son: At the opening of the action, he has just abducted the young princess Junie, whom Agrippine had intended for Britannicus, and with whom Néron, finding himself in a loveless political marriage, has fallen in love. Junie loves Britannicus, which Néron will not tolerate: In a famous scene (act 2, scene 6), the hidden Néron watches as Junie, under his command, must reject the stunned Britannicus. At a critical moment in his infamous career, Néron oscillates between two antithetical political conceptions: Burrhus counsels a policy based on morality, respect of law, and trust in the basic virtue of the people, whereas the Machiavellian Narcisse maintains that Néron must subdue the capricious mob and all those who oppose him. Warned by Narcisse, Néron discovers that Junie, aided by Agrippine, has been able to inform Britannicus of the real reason for her rejection. In this key scene (act 3, scene 8), Néron has the defiant Britannicus arrested on the spot while Agrippine and Junie are put under house arrest. In act 4, Narcisse finally prevails over Burrhus: Néron makes the momentous decision to murder his rival and to marry Junie. In act 5, during a feast of reconciliation, Britannicus is poisoned. Junie flees to the Vestal Virgins: Agrippine curses Néron, who lapses into a despair verging on madness. The play thus closes just as Néron is beginning his murderous career. Racine in his preface describes the play as the depiction of a monstre naissant, a nascent monster. The political conflict among Néron, Agrippine,

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and Britannicus ends with Néron’s victory: He now has the absolute power required for a reign of tyranny and terror. Like other Racinian heroes, Néron is predestined, determined by heredity to sadistic cruelty and madness. External circumstances converge to force him to reveal this fatality to all. In the course of the play, Néron’s behavior is unpredictable—which undoubtedly creates great suspense—yet the logic of his actions becomes clear after the entire plot unfolds: Néron unmasks himself, revealing the true character that had been hidden during his three years of rule before the opening of the play. The image of the glance, so important in Andromache, also emerges in Britannicus: Néron seeks to seize and possess another by means of his eyes (act 2, scene 6, for example); his constant avoidance of Agrippine’s formidable presence, his desire to escape her glance and its influence, stress the power of the eyes. Despite his efforts to escape his mother’s tutelage, Néron never succeeds in gaining control over others or events: His adviser Narcisse is killed by a mob, and Junie escapes. Inasmuch as Néron is probably the play’s most dynamic, interesting character, critics have questioned its title. Britannicus is a courageous, noble, yet extremely naïve and imprudent young man whose political ineptitude makes his murder inevitable. Yet in his preface, Racine insisted on the innocence of Britannicus. A sympathetic character who, through political machinations cannot inherit his rightful place, arouses the compassion and pity of the audience: hence the title of the play. With the longest role in the play, Agrippine presents an intelligent, proud, unscrupulous, and hugely ambitious woman, a typically formidable Racinian heroine. Her fall is inextricably tied to the death of Britannicus, and, as such, it forms a major subject of the play. She is the outsider, rejected by the young lovers as well as her newly independent son. Just as Pyrrhus in Andromache is torn between Hermione and Andromache, Néron is torn between Agrippine and Junie. In both cases the male character loves, and is rejected by, the gentler woman; each is trying to escape from a domineering, violent woman, a possessive fiancé in one play, a possessive mother in the other. The basic structure of an all-powerful protagonist (Néron) who loves a weaker character ( Junie), who in turn has other emotional loyalties, also obtains in this play. Bérénice • Racine’s success continued in the 1670’s. His next play, Bérénice, is remarkable for its extreme simplicity. In his preface, the author expresses his thoughts on simplicity of action: “There are some who think that this simplicity [of Bérénice] is evidence of little inventiveness. They don’t believe that, on the contrary, all inventiveness lies in making something from nothing.” Written, apparently, as a challenge to Corneille’s Tite et Bérénice (pr. 1670), this play contains only three main characters and their confidants, whose roles are minor. Set in ancient Rome, the action is intimate: The new emperor Tite, whose father Vespasien has recently died, has loved the queen of Palestine, Bérénice, for five years. Although he wishes to marry her, the Senate opposes the marriage of a head of state with a foreign queen. After much pain and hesitation, Tite sacrifices Bérénice and his love to the reason of state. Thus a strangely Corneillian denouement, in which duty triumphs over passion, closes this most Racinian of Racine’s dramas; it is in effect a play of personal sacrifice, quite different in this respect from Racine’s other works. Bajazet • After creating a play in which nothing happens, Racine in Bajazet, his next work, presented the violent, even sadistic world of the Turkish court in the 1630’s. Bajazet was Racine’s first play published without a polemical, apologetic preface, sug-

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gesting, perhaps, that his self-confidence was increasing. Full of suspense, court intrigues, and bloody passions, Bajazet, like Andromache and Britannicus, depicts a character (Roxane) whose power of life or death over another character (Bajazet) is mocked by the enslaving power of love. Roxane swings violently between love and hatred—allied emotions in the complex of Racinian passion—depending on whether she believes that Bajazet returns her love or not and finally has him killed. Despite her cruelty and deceit, Roxane remains a pathetic figure: All of her power cannot erase the fact that her happiness is utterly dependent on Bajazet. Although set in an exotic locale, Bajazet, like Racine’s other plays, is a psychological study revealing the eternal truth of the human heart. Mithridates • A huge success from its first performance, Mithridates, Racine’s only serious play with what could be called a happy ending, enjoyed the acclaim of the court, the city, and even of the Corneille clique. Set in Rome, the work depicts the cagey, longtime foe of the Romans, Mithridates, at the end of his life. The relatively involved plot and large number of dramatic surprises or coups de théâtre, the heroic apotheosis of Mithridates, whose generosity wins over others who had feared and despised him, and generally strong characters who put duty before sentiment, mark this play among all Racine’s works as the most strongly influenced by Corneille. Iphigenia in Aulis • Racine’s next play, Iphigenia in Aulis, once again demonstrated his supremacy on the French stage. Returning to Greek myth for his subject matter, Racine imitated Euripides’ Iphigeneia 4 en Aulidi (405 b.c.e.; Iphigenia in Aulis, 1782). It was necessary, however, to adapt the ancient story to the tastes of the seventeenth century French audience. To accomplish this, Racine invented the character of Eriphile, who, because of an ambiguity in the oracle that apparently demands the sacrifice of Iphigenia before the Greek fleet can depart for Troy, is substituted for her and dies on the altar, thus allowing the Greeks to continue their voyage. By substituting a more vraisemblance—or verisimilar—denouement for the miraculous ending of Euripides, Racine satisfied the demand for bienséance (propriety or decorum), for the treacherous and ungrateful Eriphile is much less sympathetic than the virtuous Iphigenia. The enormous suspense generated just before the audience learns that Iphigenia is saved attests Racine’s skill in plot construction. Alternately savage and lyric, Iphigenia in Aulis has been called Racine’s most Homeric play. Phaedra • Racine’s greatest masterpiece, easily his most celebrated play, Phaedra, was presented in January, 1677, at the same time as a competing “Phaedra.” Jacques Pradon had composed a rival Phèdre et Hippolyte (competing authors often wrote in direct competition), which was at first more successful. After several months, however, Racine’s Phaedra surpassed Pradon’s in popular acclaim. That the play was the inaugural performance of the Comédie-Française in 1680 confirmed its appeal. As in Iphigenia in Aulis, in Phaedra, the mythic element dominates; humanity is in eternal opposition to the seemingly perfidious gods. At the opening of the play, Thésée, king of Troezen, has been absent for six months. The king’s son Hippolyte, apparently concerned about his father, wishes to leave Troezen in search of Thésée. In fact, other reasons motivate Hippolyte’s departure: his love for Aricie, whom Thésée has forbidden him to marry because of her link to the rebellious Pallantides, and his desire to flee the overt hatred of his stepmother Phaedra. After Hippolyte’s revelation that he loves Aricie, a dying Phaedra takes the stage and

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confesses to her confidante Oenone that she loves Hippolyte and that her enmity toward him has been a means of avoiding an unwilling declaration of her love. A peripeteia closes the first act: News (Aricie calls it “incredible”) arrives that Thésée is dead. This external event effects profound changes in the internal situation: Hippolyte is now free to woo Aricie, and Phaedra can now pursue Hippolyte without fear of incest and adultery. On the urging of Oenone, Phaedra determines to speak privately to Hippolyte on a political pretext relating to the rights of succession. In perhaps the most famous scene in French classical theater (act 2, scene 5), Phaedra, carried away by her passion, declares her love. While Hippolyte stands dumbfounded, Phaedra seizes his sword, thinking to kill herself but does not. In act 3, the humiliated, rejected Phaedra oscillates between love and hatred for Hippolyte. In her confused state, against the advice of Oenone, she decides to use political blackmail to gain Hippolyte’s love. Devastating news then arrives: Thésée is alive. The desperate and helpless Phaedra, fearful that Hippolyte will tell his father of her incestuous love, is persuaded by Oenone that she must accuse Hippolyte of attempting to seduce her before he can reveal the truth. Putting herself in the hands of Oenone, Phaedra greets Thésée coldly, refusing to accept his sincere affection. Stunned and suspicious, Thésée demands an explanation from Hippolyte, who has naïvely vowed never to reveal Phaedra’s shame to his father. This oath puts Hippolyte in an untenable position, for he has no effective means of defending himself against Oenone’s lies. The violent, vengeful, and quick-tempered Thésée is convinced by Hippolyte’s sword, left in the hands of Phaedra after act 2, scene 5, and by his son’s diffident behavior. In a stormy interview, Thésée asks Neptune to wreak vengeance on his son; in an attempt at self-defense, Hippolyte confesses his real love for Aricie, which Thésée judges a cowardly ruse. Phaedra, who now realizes that Hippolyte is in mortal danger, resolves to reveal the truth to Thésée. Her regret and pity, however, change to furious hatred and jealousy when Thésée tells her that Hippolyte told him that he loves Aricie. This news makes her continue to hide the truth. Although Thésée begins to guess that Hippolyte was not lying, inexorable destiny is played out in act 5. Hippolyte kills a sea monster sent by Neptune, but then Neptune himself causes the horses of Hippolyte’s chariot to stampede, killing the innocent young hero. Overwhelmed by the enormity of her crime, Phaedra poisons herself. Right before she dies, Phaedra finally tells the truth; the desolate Thésée determines to protect the bereft Aricie. A malevolent destiny hovers over the action of Phaedra. A descendant of the Sun, daughter of Minos and Pasiphaé, Phaedra bears the curse of Venus. Her mother’s indomitable passion for the White Bull of Crete, the issue of this passion, the Minotaur and its Labyrinth, the doomed love of Phaedra’s sister Ariadne for Thésée—all figure prominently in the play and serve as background to the fateful, “monstrous” passion of Phaedra for Hippolyte. The gods in Phaedra, if one wishes to consider them such (they have been interpreted as symbols for humanity’s unbridled passions), emerge as incomprehensible powers with no moral purpose. Phaedra, who wishes to die throughout the play, knows that escape from her anguish is impossible, for her own father Minos sits as judge at the gates of Hades. Racine presents a universe in which the innocent are punished for uncommitted crimes, in which people are forced by the gods to commit crimes for which they will suffer eternal torment. Such a universe seems absurd; it is truly a tragic vision of the human condition. True to the Aristotelian concept of the tragic hero, Racine emphasized in his preface that Phaedra is “neither totally guilty nor totally innocent.” Victim of an unre-

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lenting divine vengeance, Phaedra condemns herself for a passion to which she has never yielded. She feels herself responsible for a love over which she has absolutely no control. Phaedra aspires to good, but the gods force her to submit to evil. Both Phaedra and Hippolyte view their respective passions as a mal, a kind of sickness that destroys sovereign reason and thus transforms he who loves. Racinian passion is inimical to self-control and equilibrium, a monster that destroys independence and harmony. Critics have frequently declared that Phaedra summarizes all Racine’s drama. The universality of the play, its unremitting depiction of human nature aspiring to virtue but condemned to vice, has undoubtedly contributed to its status as Racine’s crowning achievement. The play poses the fundamental problem of liberty. Predetermined, whether by the gods, heredity, or other forces, humanity is unable to escape the monsters that pursue it. Nevertheless, humankind never ceases to assume responsibility and thus affirms an illusory freedom. Phaedra’s awareness of her crime and its shame constitutes, perhaps, a kind of individual liberty and tragic grandeur. Key words and images converge in the play to reinforce the major themes and conflict. Poison plays a central role as symbol for the fatal passion that courses through the veins of Phaedra. A complex network of images relating to light and darkness also pervades the work. Unable to face her formidable ancestor the Sun, Phaedra retreats from the accusing light of purity and innocence like a furtive nocturnal creature; Phaedra’s desire for darkness evokes not only her shame but also her wish to discover in death eternal darkness. Hippolyte and Aricie, however, share an innocence and purity that revel in the light: “Every day rose clear and serene for them,” whereas Phaedra says of herself: “I hid from the day, I fled from the light.” Phaedra is also a play of monsters: The fruit of Pasiphaé’s passion, the Minotaur, was destroyed by the heroic monsterkiller Thésée, whom Hippolyte wishes to emulate. Hippolyte kills the sea monster sent by Neptune, yet dies a victim of Phaedra, whose love, like that of her mother for the White Bull, is against nature, monstrous. Esther and Athaliah • After Phaedra, twelve years passed before Racine’s next play. Whatever the true reasons for his long silence, it is clear that he became reconciled with his Jansenist masters at Port-Royal. Racine’s second wife, whom he married in 1677, the year of Phaedra, never read her husband’s tragedies; their seven children received a most austere Jansenist upbringing. Racine’s last two plays, Esther and Athaliah, attest the piety of his later years; overtly didactic, both derive from the Old Testament. Although some scholars have hesitated to view these religious plays as integral components of Racine’s work, all agree that both obviously bear the imprint of Racine; many consider Athaliah one of his best plays. Other major works poetry: Cantiques spirituels, 1694. nonfiction: Abrégé de l’histoire de Port-Royal, 1742 (first part), 1767 (full text). Bibliography Barthes, Roland. On Racine. 1983. Reprint. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. A French scholar discusses Racine’s tragedies. Bibliography and index. Caldicott, Edric, and Derval Conroy, eds. Racine: The Power and the Pleasure. Dublin, Ireland: University College Dublin Press, 2001. This study examines the concepts of power and pleasure in Racine’s dramas.

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Goodkin, Richard E. Birth Marks: The Tragedy of Primogeniture in Pierre Corneille, Thomas Corneille, and Jean Racine. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Goodkin examines the works of Racine and the two Corneilles, placing special emphasis on their treatments of primogeniture. Hawcroft, Michael. Word as Action: Racine, Rhetoric, and Theatrical Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Hawcroft examines Racine’s use of language in his dramatic works. Bibliography and indexes. Parish, Richard. Racine: The Limits of Tragedy. Seattle, Wash.: Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, 1993. An examination of the tragedies written by Racine. Bibliography. Phillips, Henry. Racine: Language and Theatre. Durham, England: University of Durham, 1994. A look at the language of Racine and how he used it in his dramas. Bibliography. Tobin, Ronald W. Jean Racine Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1999. A basic biography of Racine that covers his life and works. Bibliography and index. Robert T. Corum, Jr.

Terence Rattigan Terence Rattigan

Born: London, England; June 10, 1911 Died: Bermuda; November 30, 1977 Principal drama • First Episode, pr. 1933; French Without Tears, pr. 1936, pb. 1937; Flare Path, pr., pb. 1942; While the Sun Shines, pr. 1943, pb. 1944; Love in Idleness, pr. 1944, pb. 1945 (also as O Mistress Mine, pr., pb. 1946); The Winslow Boy, pr., pb. 1946; Playbill: “The Browning Version” and “Harlequinade,” pr. 1948, pb. 1949 (2 one-acts); Adventure Story, pr. 1949, pb. 1950; The Deep Blue Sea, pr., pb. 1952; The Collected Plays of Terence Rattigan, pb. 1953-1978 (4 volumes; Hamish Hamilton, editor); The Sleeping Prince, pr. 1953, pb. 1954; Separate Tables: “Table by the Window” and “Table Number Seven,” pr. 1954, pb. 1955 (two playlets; commonly known as Separate Tables); Ross, pr., pb. 1960; Man and Boy, pr., pb. 1963; A Bequest to the Nation, pr., pb. 1970 (adaptation of Rattigan’s teleplay Nelson, pr. 1964); In Praise of Love: “Before Dawn” and “After Lydia,” pb. 1973, pr. 1974 (as In Praise of Love); Cause Célèbre, pr. 1977, pb. 1978 (adaptation of his radio play); Plays, pb. 1981-1985 (2 volumes) Other literary forms • Terence Rattigan wrote many screenplays, including a number of adaptations of his own plays. For the film of The Browning Version, he won the 1951 Cannes Film Festival Award for best screenplay. In 1958, the screenplay of Separate Tables, adapted from Rattigan’s play in collaboration with John Gay, was nominated for an Academy Award. The triumvirate of Rattigan, cowriter/producer Anatole de Grunwald, and director Anthony Asquith created a number of films, including Quiet Wedding (1941, based on Esther McCracken’s play), English Without Tears (1944, based on French Without Tears; also as Her Man Gilbey), The Way to the Stars (1945; also as Johnny in the Clouds, 1946), While the Sun Shines (1946, adapted from Rattigan’s play), and The Winslow Boy (1948, adapted from Rattigan’s play). The films were significant contributions to Great Britain’s postwar film renaissance. The Sound Barrier (1952; also as Breaking the Sound Barrier), from Rattigan’s screenplay, is considered by some aficionados the finest film ever made about aviation. His bestknown films are probably Separate Tables (for which David Niven won an Academy Award as Best Actor), The Prince and the Showgirl (1957, starring Marilyn Monroe and Sir Laurence Olivier in the adaptation of Rattigan’s stage comedy The Sleeping Prince), and The VIPs (1963, with an all-star cast headed by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton). Of Rattigan’s seven original television scripts and one radio script, The Final Test (1951) was released as a film in 1954; Nelson—A Portrait in Miniature (1964) was adapted as the play A Bequest to the Nation in 1970, with the film version appearing in 1973 under that title; and the radio script Cause Célèbre (1975) was adapted for the stage. Rattigan also wrote numerous theoretical essays. Most important to his career were “Concerning the Play of Ideas” and “The Play of Ideas,” both published in 1950 in The New Statesman and Nation, and the prefaces he wrote for the first three volumes of The Collected Plays, published by Hamish Hamilton. In The New Statesman and Nation, Rattigan defended story and character—as opposed to intellectual debate and propagandizing—as the timeless values of drama. He was rebutted, wholly or partly, by 734

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James Bridie, Benn Levy, Peter Ustinov, Sean O’Casey, Christopher Fry, and George Bernard Shaw. In his second and third prefaces, Rattigan invented a prototypical theatergoer, Aunt Edna, intended as a humorous salute to the good common sense of audiences throughout the ages but attacked as evidence of his own pandering to lowbrow sensibilities. His theoretical essays are too gentlemanly in tone to persuade with the sheer moral fervor of Shaw’s, yet Rattigan was as sincere in his convictions and as true to his own values. His championship of the craft of playwriting and of the judgment of the dedicated theatergoer, his exploration in his first preface of the significance of dramatic implication, his musings in American newspaper articles on why plays suffer a “sea change” when produced in foreign countries, and his concept of the “farce of character” (in a 1947 Strand magazine article) are all valuable contributions to the literature of dramatic theory. Achievements • The first author ever to have had two plays (French Without Tears and While the Sun Shines) run for more than one thousand performances each on London’s West End, Terence Rattigan was one of the most commercially successful playwrights in theater history. With striking versatility, he achieved his goal of moving audiences to laughter or tears in romantic comedy, comedy of manners, farce, fantasy, history plays, courtroom drama, and dramas about troubled middle-class characters. He also attracted many of the finest acting and directing talents of his period. Roles in Rattigan plays made stars of such young actors as Rex Harrison, Paul Scofield, and Kenneth More, and enhanced the careers of such luminaries as Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir Alec Guinness, Margaret Sullivan, Margaret Leighton, and Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne (a couple who had enjoyed the longest run of their stage careers in the American version of Love in Idleness). Rattigan’s success, however, was often held against him by critics, who did not bother to look beyond Image not available the polished surfaces of his plays. Failing to grasp the depth of psychological insight and the serious themes that usually characterized even his light comedies, most critics rated him as a good boulevard playwright at best. During the 1950’s and the 1960’s, the heyday of the Angry Young Men and the Theater of the Absurd, Rattigan’s work was derided as representing the establishment culture that younger playwrights and critics sought to demolish. London (AP/Wide World Photos) revivals of five of his plays between

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1970 and 1977, the year of Rattigan’s death, led to a greater appreciation of his worth. With the widely hailed National Theatre’s production of Playbill in 1980 and the Roundabout Theatre Company’s acclaimed New York revivals of The Winslow Boy in 1980 and The Browning Version in 1982, Rattigan began to be recognized as an artist of high stature. Biography • Terence Mervyn Rattigan was born in Kensington, London, on June 10, 1911, to William Frank Rattigan and Vera Houston Rattigan, ten days before the coronation of George V. His father, a career diplomat, was a minor functionary in the coronation and his mother missed the ceremony because of her confinement. Forty-two years later, when Rattigan wrote his sophisticated fantasy The Sleeping Prince as a pièce d’occasion for Elizabeth II’s coronation, he said that he used George V’s coronation for the background of the play as a present to his mother for having missed the real thing. Both of Rattigan’s parents came from distinguished families of Irish lawyers, a heritage that fascinated Rattigan and showed itself not only in the characters of the lawyers in The Winslow Boy and Cause Célèbre but also in such scenes as the hotel residents’ “trial” of Major Pollock in Table Number Seven. Rattigan’s father, who failed in his own career and was pensioned off in 1922, hoped that Rattigan would find a career in the diplomatic service. From early boyhood, however, when his parents first took him to the theater, Rattigan was determined to be a playwright. He hoarded his allowance and sneaked off to the theater, began writing plays at eleven, and read plays avidly while on scholarship at Harrow from 1925 to 1930. At Oxford on a history scholarship, he acted, wrote criticism for the Cherwell, and collaborated with fellow student Philip Heimann on a play about Oxonian high jinks and their sad consequences entitled First Episode, which enjoyed respectful reviews and a brief run on the West End in the 1933-1934 season. On the strength of this success, he persuaded his father to give him a modest allowance to enable him to write for two years, at the end of which he either would be a successful playwright or would bow to his parents’ wishes for his career. Rattigan’s Oxford years were far from wasted; his reading of history helped inspire his studies of Alexander the Great (Adventure Story, 1949), T. E. Lawrence (Ross), and Lord Nelson (A Bequest to the Nation), and summers spent taking language courses in Germany and France prompted French Without Tears, whose spectacular success enabled Rattigan to win his career gamble with his father. From then until the last decade of his life, even though he suffered his share of flops and personal sorrows, Rattigan was depicted in the press as fortune’s favorite, an image enlarged by his exceptional good looks and elegant lifestyle. Virtually all of Rattigan’s work was influenced directly or indirectly by his personal experience. Several of his wartime plays and film scripts, for example, grew out of his service as a Royal Air Force flight lieutenant. In Praise of Love was dually inspired by his friendship with Rex Harrison and Harrison’s wife, Kay Kendall, when she was dying of leukemia and by a false diagnosis of leukemia in Rattigan himself in 1962. Examples of more pervasive influences are his parents’ unhappy marriage, his attempts to love and be loyal to both his mother and his father, and his own homosexuality. Rattigan’s comedies and dramas often feature compassionate portraits of mismatched couples, bewildered youths in contention with their elders, and individuals tortured by sexual repression, deviation, or frustration. Rattigan’s protagonists generally meet their problems with the dignity and courage that he brought to his own life, particularly during his two-year battle with bone cancer. After a self-imposed seven-year exile to write

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film scripts during the period of his greatest vilification by younger critics and colleagues, Rattigan lived to see himself welcomed back into the British theater community with his knighthood in 1971, the beginning of his artistic renaissance through revivals of his earlier plays, and the positive reception of a new work, Cause Célèbre, only months before his death. Analysis • In a 1962 Theatre Arts interview, Terence Rattigan told John Simon that playwrights were born Ibsenites or Chekhovians and that he was the former longing to be the latter. In fact, he blended the influences of both. Like Henrik Ibsen in his problem plays, Rattigan reshaped the Scribean well-made play to his own ends, imbuing it with psychological complexity and moral passion. Unlike Ibsen, he seldom allowed his characters to debate ideas and issues, taking instead a firm stand against ideological drama. Like Anton Chekhov, Rattigan focused on the personal problems of predominantly middle-class characters who are left with no neat solutions; his comedies end with a respite instead of a celebration; his dramas, with a delicate balance of losses and gains. Rattigan’s characters are, like Chekhov’s, bound in a rich tapestry: Their fates are to varying degrees interrelated, but their essential aloneness is poignantly conveyed. Unlike Ibsen or Chekhov, Rattigan was not a radical innovator, and as yet there is no evidence of his direct influence on successors. Each of Rattigan’s plays displays innovative touches, however, and the body of his work reveals an artist with a distinct personal vision that he expressed in both the content and the form of his plays. Rattigan’s attacks on doctrinaire drama and his dismissal by most critics as an ideologically empty playwright are ironic, for his work is deeply ideological. His pervading theme is a passionate defense of the most oppressed minority throughout history: the individual. In a 1982 Contemporary Review retrospective, a writer recalled Rattigan’s saying: “People should care about people, and I’ve some doubts that the ideologists do. They may care about the starving millions, but they’re not worried too much about those millions’ particular concerns.” Rattigan was. All but three of his plays are set in the twentieth century, most in the period from the 1930’s to the 1960’s. Rattigan captured the bewilderment of people living in a world without a firm moral and social structure to give them a sense of place and security. Theirs is a stark existence in which confusion and loneliness predominate, compounded by stale ideas and conventions. The philosophical idea Rattigan implicitly condemned throughout his work was the mind-body dichotomy, or the belief that human beings’ physical and spiritual natures are irreconcilable, that one can be satisfied only at the expense of the other, and that spiritual love is superior to physical love. The social conventions Rattigan most abhorred were the prohibition against expressing emotion and the ostracism of individuals for deviating from various norms. His plays show that the individual’s best resources are self-reliance and self-respect, understanding and compassion for others, and the healing bonds of kindness and friendship. Rattigan’s characters are influenced by outside factors, but all have a range of choice in their values and actions. His plots delineate the cause-and-effect relationship between the nature of the values that individuals pursue, evade, or betray and their psychological and existential well-being. The form of a Rattigan play is determined by and inseparable from its content. In a Daily Telegraph tribute after the playwright’s death, William Douglas-Home likened the beauty of Rattigan’s structures to those of classical architecture and the symphony. The Contemporary Review writer stated that Rattigan’s plays have “’good bones’—a prime requisite for aging well.” The

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sinews of his plays are his extraordinarily rich dialogue—naturalistic but so precisely stylized that a few simple words can, as Harold Hobson frequently pointed out, convey a world of meaning. Rattigan’s personal signature on the form and content of his work may be seen by surveying one play from each of the five decades of his playwriting career. French Without Tears • Even when one recalls that Rattigan had been writing plays diligently from the age of eleven, the artistic wholeness of French Without Tears, his first produced solo effort, seems remarkable. In varying degrees, the characteristics of his body of work are all present in this early work. The innovative element of this romantic comedy is Rattigan’s reversal of the cliché of a femme fatale who turns friends into enemies. At a small language program in France, several young Englishmen try to learn French while one student’s alluring sister, Diana, tries to distract them. She entraps Kit, much to the distress of the French tutor’s daughter, Jacqueline, and then entices a newly arrived, more mature naval commander. Alan, a diplomat’s son yearning to be a novelist (an autobiographical touch), feigns indifference to Diana, cheers Kit, and ridicules the Commander. In a scene reminiscent of the Elyot-Victor clash in Noël Coward’s Private Lives (pr. 1930), Kit and the Commander fight until they discover that Diana has used the same “line” on them. They unite in friendship, accompanied by Alan, and confront Diana with her perfidy. She confounds them all by declaring that she really loves Alan. Kit turns to Jacqueline, and Diana chases Alan as he, taking the Commander’s advice, bolts to London to tell his father that he is taking up writing instead of diplomacy. Although structured on the Chekhovian model of short scenes between groups of characters, building up a central situation through accumulation of detail, the plot has the vitality of a mixed-doubles grudge match in tennis, with changes of partners topped by one player taking off after the referee. The play examines the relationship of love and sex at a depth unusual in light comedy. Alan and Kit are caught in the mind-body dichotomy, desiring an attractive girl with little character and feeling only friendship for the plainer but more worthy Jacqueline. At the end, she and Kit decide timidly to see if love and friendship, sex and liking, can mix. For all of his sophisticated airs, Alan is a little English gentleman who can sail only calm waters. He feels comfortable in friendship with Jacqueline but panics over Diana, afraid of sex and of having his emotions aroused. Friendship is a bond bridging social and economic gaps and changing people’s lives throughout Rattigan’s work. When they stop fighting with the Commander, Kit and Alan discover that he is not the stodgy figure they mocked but a sensitive and sensible man. This revelation is also an instance of Rattigan showing characters as individuals, not types. He accomplishes this with Diana in a sequence in which she admits to Jacqueline that she cannot give up the chase because she knows that men can only love but never like her. Rattigan’s use of dramatic implication is illustrated by a short scene in which Alan describes the plot of his rejected novel to Kit and the Commander. His story not only mirrors the conflict between his listeners and its resolution but also foreshadows the war clouds gathering around the students—a point reinforced by other touches in the play. Historically, the comedy is a sunny look at the youth of a generation soon to fight World War II. Rattigan’s biographers, Michael Darlow and Gillian Hodson, cite French Without Tears as the best comedy of the 1930’s and the representative British play of that decade.

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Playbill • In spite of the success of his war drama Flare Path, his comedy of manners and romance Love in Idleness, and his courtroom-like drama set entirely in a drawing room, The Winslow Boy, Rattigan had difficulty finding a producer for Playbill. Most managements thought bills of one-acts commercial folly. T. C. Worsley noted in a London Magazine essay that Rattigan’s defense of the artistic integrity of the one-act form and his reintroduction of it to the West End after the war proved boons to his successors. Though The Browning Version and Harlequinade are often produced separately, their coupling in Playbill represents an artistic design. The overall structure is psychological, encompassing studies of vastly different personalities—the severely repressed and the flamboyantly theatrical. They are embodied in plots ingeniously similar enough—in each play, errors from the past press on the protagonists—to highlight the contrast between psychologies. The Browning Version, which won the Ellen Terry Award for best play of 1948, probes a psychological state that Rattigan had used as a leitmotif of characterization in his earlier plays. As Kay Nolte Smith pointed out in a 1971 Objectivist essay, the drama’s theme is the tragedy of emotional repression. This is Rattigan’s most original theme, and a difficult one to dramatize. His genius lay in making the causes and effects of repression intelligible and dramatic in a classically severe plot, without the use of soliloquy, of a narrator or raisonneur figure to offer explanations, or even of the word “repression.” The setting is the living room of a schoolmaster’s apartment at a British boy’s school. Andrew Crocker-Harris, once a brilliant and idealistic Greek master but now a dessicated pedant, is retiring early because of ill health. Visits by his young successor, the Headmaster, a pupil, and a colleague, and constant taunts by his sexually and socially frustrated wife, recall Crocker-Harris to his hopes and failures as a teacher and as a husband. Two gestures of kindness—the pupil’s parting gift of Robert Browning’s version of Aeschylus’s Agamemnfn (458 b.c.e.; Agamemnon, 1777) and the colleague’s offer of friendship—help Crocker-Harris to overcome what he calls his state of being a spiritual corpse, to break with his wife and to assert himself to the Headmaster. The play’s penultimate line, when Crocker-Harris claims from the Headmaster his right to speak last at a school ceremony, “I am of opinion that occasionally an anti-climax can be surprisingly effective,” is a characteristic Rattigan understatement, conveying his protagonist’s recovery of self-respect in a simple phrase. Reviewing a 1976 London revival in the Sunday Times, Harold Hobson called The Browning Version “a masterpiece if ever there was one, the best one-act in the language.” Crocker-Harris was inspired partly by Rattigan’s Greek master at Harrow. The famed acting team playing an aging Romeo and Juliet, whose dress rehearsal is interrupted by unwelcome visitors in Harlequinade, bore resemblances to Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, with whom Rattigan had worked so closely on Love in Idleness. The focus is on the Romeo, a quintessential actor-manager oblivious of events outside the theater, who embodies Rattigan’s theory that farce may be based on character. The comedy has been compared favorably with George Villiers’s The Rehearsal (pr. 1671, pb. 1672), Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Critic: Or, A Tragedy Rehearsed (pr. 1779), and Arthur Wing Pinero’s Trelawny of the “Wells” (pr., pb. 1898) as a classic play about theater life. The Deep Blue Sea • Though usually cited as one of Rattigan’s finest works, The Deep Blue Sea has yet to be fully appreciated. Eleven years before the women’s move-

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ment began with the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), Rattigan produced a prescient drama about the effects of a woman’s “raised consciousness.” The play is structured like a thriller, beginning with a landlady’s discovery of Hester Collyer, unconscious from a suicide attempt, in a run-down London boardinghouse. Hester no longer feels worthy or desirous of living; gradually, the action reveals why. Daughter of a clergyman, wife of a judge honored with knighthood, she has fallen passionately in love with a feckless younger man and run off with him. A war pilot who has never found an equivalent challenge in civilian life, Freddie Page loves Hester in his way but is incapable of returning her ardor sexually or emotionally, and determines to leave rather than ruin Hester’s life further. Hester’s loving husband, Sir William, views her attachment as an ignoble but pardonable sex obsession and wants her to return to being his companionable wife. Hester’s sexual awakening with Freddie has released her need for more intense relationships than either man can offer. She feels deep shame at the pain she has caused, terror at the prospect of losing Freddie, and anger at the religious and societal view— pressed by her background, Sir William, and a young neighbor—that spiritual love is superior to physical. Another neighbor, a former doctor who lost his license and bears his disgrace with dignity, is able from his perspective as a social outcast to help Hester view herself as a worthy individual. In the end, after saying goodbye to her husband and lover, Hester takes her first step toward independence by lighting the gas heater she may still decide to use to escape life. The Deep Blue Sea was ahead of its time not only in Rattigan’s sympathetic portrait of a woman who must virtually start life again almost at middle age, but also in his equally compassionate portrayals of men who are bewildered, wounded, and threatened by women’s changing needs. The Adventure Story and Ross • Rattigan applied principles of craftsmanship from the well-made play to the epic form with impressive results. Although his portraits of Alexander the Great in Adventure Story and T. E. Lawrence in Ross are marred by earnest but ultimately unconvincing attempts to explain each man’s motivations, Rattigan captures the personal charisma of both figures and the sweep of their lives through world history with narrative mastery. Like Adventure Story, Ross traces the psychological destruction of a brilliant military leader. The first three scenes dramatize Lawrence’s attempt to find peace after World War I as a Royal Air Force aircraftman enlisted under the pseudonym of Ross. Recognized and awaiting expulsion, he drifts into a malarial dream that becomes a bridge to scenes depicting the wartime exploits that made him famous but sickened him spiritually. He is torn by exulting in his triumphs while wading through carnage to achieve them and then destroyed psychologically by being awakened to his homosexual and masochistic tendencies in his (offstage) beating and rape by Turkish soldiers. Lawrence had trusted in the supremacy of his will and cannot face the realization that behind his will are not strength and integrity but inclinations that shame him. In the end, he decides to seek sanctuary in the service again under another assumed name. In terms of Rattigan’s attempt to integrate an expansive narrative structure with a comprehensive character study, Ross is his most complex and ambitious play. There is a density in its texture because of the sheer weight of material it encompasses. Rattigan had to explain the British, Arab, and Turkish positions during the World War I Middle Eastern conflict while simultaneously exploring the inner conflicts of a character who is both a man of action and a deeply repressed, tormented intellectual. Without narra-

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tion, Rattigan was able to organize his mass of material in theatrical terms, judiciously balancing humor, suspense, and pathos. In Praise of Love • The last third of In Praise of Love, Rattigan’s penultimate play, contains some of his finest writing. About an East European war refugee dying of leukemia, her apparently callous British husband, their sensitive son, and an old family friend, the work is structured as a psychological suspense story. Two-thirds of the play are devoted to creating a negative picture of the husband as a childish, boorish, selfish man. The wife confides her illness to the friend because she fears boring her husband, as she thinks she once bored him with her refugee tales, and tries to reconcile the contentious husband and son, both of whom she adores. In a coup de théâtre, the husband is forced to tell the friend that he has known of his wife’s illness all along and is determined to keep it from her lest she relive her wartime anticipation of death at any moment. His callousness, once a habit, is now a mask he dons to foster the illusion that all is normal. He finds the mask torturous to wear because he has realized how much he loves his wife yet cannot tell her. He remarks that the English people’s worst vice is their refusal to admit to their emotions. Rattigan’s condemnation of emotional repression is explicit in In Praise of Love, but particularly noteworthy in the play is the most daring use he ever made of implication. Rattigan’s dramas are all dotted with comic dialogue and business that further his goals without undercutting the seriousness of his subjects. With In Praise of Love, he used comic dialogue and action throughout to build a picture of a household under almost unbearable emotional pressure, a household in which characters use banter to mask their own feelings and to try to spare the feelings of others. The contrast between the characters’ veneer and the depth of their love and grief is profoundly poignant. On Rattigan’s death in 1977, the Guardian’s Michael Billington, representative of a post-Angry-Young-Man generation of theater critics, maintained that Rattigan was misunderstood as an exemplar of the cool and gentlemanly school of English playwriting: “The real truth is that his plays are a remorseless attack on English emotional inhibition, and a moving plea for affection and kindness and understanding in the everyday business of life. . . . Few dramatists [in the twentieth] century have written with more understanding about the human heart.” Giving evidence that this revaluation is not confined to British critics, Susan Rusinko concludes in her 1983 study of Rattigan for Twayne’s English Authors series: “Polished without being slick, natural without untidiness, Rattigan’s art has given firm shape to the mid-twentieth century mainstream of English life, chronicling the sweeping changes in the moods and attitudes of the time, as [did] Chekhov for his time.” Other major works screenplays: Quiet Wedding, 1941 (based on Esther McCracken’s play); English Without Tears, 1944 (with Anatole de Grunwald; also known as Her Man Gilbey); The Way to the Stars, 1945 (with de Grunwald; also known as Johnny in the Clouds); While the Sun Shines, 1946; The Winslow Boy, 1948 (with de Grunwald); Bond Street, 1948; Brighton Rock, 1948 (later as Young Scarface; with Graham Greene; based on Greene’s novel); The Browning Version, 1951; The Sound Barrier, 1952 (also known as Breaking the Sound Barrier); The Final Test, 1954; The Prince and the Showgirl, 1957 (adaptation of The Sleeping Prince); Separate Tables, 1958 (with John Gay; adaptation of Rattigan’s play); The VIPs, 1963; The Yellow Rolls-Royce, 1965; A Bequest to the Nation, 1973.

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teleplays: The Final Test, 1951; Heart to Heart, 1964; Nelson—A Portrait in Miniature, 1964. radio play: Cause Célèbre, 1975. Bibliography Darlow, Michael, and Gillian Hodson. Terence Rattigan: The Man and His Work. London: Quartet Books, 1979. A 360-page critical biography, thoroughly researched, using archives from the British Broadcasting Corporation. In this eminently readable narrative of Rattigan, his plays, and their times—all three led inexorably to one another—the authors write with authority and with permission from Rattigan to reveal much of what he had been unable to write about directly in his own plays. Includes photographs, a bibliography, a list of British and American opening dates and casts, and an index. O’Connor, Sean. Straight Acting: Popular Gay Drama from Wilde to Rattigan. Washington, D.C.: Cassell, 1998. A look at homosexuality and literature that traces gay writers from Oscar Wilde and W. Somerset Maugham to more modern writers such as Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan. Bibliography and index. Rusinko, Susan. Terence Rattigan. Boston: Twayne, 1983. A chronological summaryanalysis of the complete stage, film, and television plays, analyzing Rattigan’s major plays, from his early sunny comedies to his later dramas about dysfunctional families in a dysfunctional society. Photograph, chronology, bibliography, index. Wansell, Geoffrey. Terence Rattigan. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. A biography of the British dramatist that covers his works for the stage as well as those for television and the movie theater. Bibliography and index. Young, B. A. The Rattigan Version: The Theatre of Character. New York: Atheneum, 1988. A personal memoir by an author who knew Rattigan. Leisurely in pace and impressionistic in style, it raises some questions, as in the descriptions of Rattigan’s manner of throwing “his dialogue down on the page, caring only for its gist rather than its style.” Includes index, cast lists, and photographs that tell their own story. Holly Hill, updated by Susan Rusinko

Edmond Rostand Edmond Rostand

Born: Marseilles, France; April 1, 1868 Died: Paris, France; December 2, 1918 Principal drama • Le Gant rouge, pr., pb. 1888 (with Henry Lee); Les Romanesques, pr., 1894, pb. 1917 (verse play; The Romantics, 1899); La Princesse lointaine, pr. 1895, pb. 1908 (verse play; The Far Princess, 1899); La Samaritaine, pr. 1897, pb. 1898 (verse play; The Woman of Samaria, 1921); Cyrano de Bergerac, pr. 1897, pb. 1898 (verse play; English translation, 1898); L’Aiglon, pr., pb. 1900 (verse play; The Eaglet, 1898); Chantecler, pr., pb. 1910 (verse play; Chanticleer, 1910); La Dernière Nuit de Don Juan, pb. 1921, pr. 1922 (verse play; The Last Night of Don Juan, 1929); Plays of Edmond Rostand, pb. 1921 Other literary forms • Although his greatest success was as a dramatist, Edmond Rostand was first of all a poet. All of his plays are written in verse, and despite his real flair for dramatic situations, it is the wit and lyricism of his verse that raise his best plays above the level of ordinary melodrama. His first published work was a volume of poetry, Les Musardises (1890). The title is untranslatable. Its basic meaning is “daydreams,” but in a preface, Rostand explained that he also meant to evoke a kind of melancholy– muzer, in the Walloon dialect, meaning “to be sad”—as well as the source of poetic inspiration—the Muse. He published two later volumes of verse, Le Cantique de l’aile (1910; the canticle of the wing), including a paean to the first aviators, and Le Vol de la Marseillaise (1914; the flight of the Marseillaise), a collection of patriotic poems inspired by World War I. He wrote little prose, but a boyhood essay on Honoré d’Urfé and Émile Zola, which won for him first prize in a contest sponsored by the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of Marseilles, proved important because it introduced him to the strain in French literature known as préciosité, of which d’Urfé’s work was a classic expression. Rostand’s speech on his induction into the Académie Française is also revealing; in it, he discusses the notion of panache, the “spirit of bravura” central to his masterpiece, Cyrano de Bergerac. Achievements • Edmond Rostand is remembered, and will probably continue to be remembered, exclusively as the author of a single play, Cyrano de Bergerac. Its first production, in Paris in 1897, was greeted with wild enthusiasm (the ovation on opening night lasted almost an hour) and made the twenty-nine-year-old author famous overnight. His popularity did not diminish during his lifetime, and he became the youngest man ever elected to the Académie Française, but most of his plays are marred by sentimentality and have not been much revived since his death. Only one, The Eaglet, enjoyed a reception comparable to that of Cyrano de Bergerac, but this was partly because of the popularity of its theme (the fate of Napoleon II) among Rostand’s contemporaries, and partly because of the acting of Sarah Bernhardt, who appeared in the title role. Rostand cannot be said to have influenced subsequent French drama, for his style was anachronistic in his own day, a reaction against what was perceived as the pessimism of the realistic theater. Cyrano de Bergerac, however, has proved to be a perennial favorite on the world stage and has been translated into languages as disparate as Turkish, Russian, Hebrew, and Japanese. In addition, a musical comedy, The Fantasticks, based on 743

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The Romantics, ran at an Off-Broadway theater from 1960 to 2002 and has been produced in fifty-seven countries. Biography • Edmond Eugène Alexis Rostand was born into an upper-middle-class family with deep roots in the south of France that can be traced back to the sixteenth century. His father, Eugène, and his paternal uncle Alexis were distinguished economists who also managed to cultivate their gifts for poetry and music, respectively: Eugène translated Catullus and wrote the librettos for Alexis’s oratorios. The young Rostand was a shy and studious child who loved to read and play with marionettes; his favorite authors were Sir Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas, père. During long summer vacations in the Pyrenees, he developed a deep attachment for the region; there he also wrote his first poems. After completing primary school and six years at the Marseilles Lycée, he was sent to the Collège Stanislas in Paris to complete his secondary education. His teachers there introduced him to the work of William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Alfred de Musset (some echoes of Musset’s comedies may be detected in The Romantics and The Far Princess). Rostand’s other literary heroes were Miguel de Cervantes and Victor Hugo. Untouched by the naturalists and Symbolists, he was not drawn into any of the literary circles of Paris. Through his future wife, Rosemonde Gérard, he made the acquaintance of the poet Leconte de Lisle, her godfather, but received no encouragement from him. At his father’s urging, he began to study law while making his first attempts at playwriting. Le Gant rouge (the red glove), a comedy written in collaboration with Henry Lee, his future brother-in-law, was staged in 1888 but was not well received. Les Musardises met with mixed reviews in 1890. In the same year Rostand married Gérard, who was herself a poet (her collection Les Pipeaux was published in 1889). According to Rostand’s biographer Émile Ripert, Gérard was responsible in large measure for bringing her husband’s work to the attention of the public. A perfectionist, Rostand revised his work repeatedly and was reluctant to publish. The couple had two sons, Maurice, a dramatist, and Jean, an eminent biologist. With The Romantics and The Far Princess, Rostand gained some recognition. The former play won for him the Toirac Prize, and the latter, the friendship and admiration of Sarah Bernhardt, who produced the work and played the princess. The title role of The Woman of Samaria was created especially for Bernhardt. The appearance of Cyrano de Bergerac proved a watershed in the poet’s life; from that time until his death, he was a famous man, besieged by admirers and, as Ripert notes, acutely conscious of his “spiritual mission” as poet, patriot, and idealist. In spite of the nationalist tendency observable in The Eaglet (Rostand’s father was a Bonapartist), Rostand did not support the nationalist parties of his day and, in fact, risked his popularity by maintaining the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus. In politics as in literature, he refused to align himself with a particular movement; he admired quixotic daring against all odds—the bravura of Cyrano—wherever he saw it, and wrote poems in praise of both the Greeks and the Boers in their bids for independence. Rostand was plagued by recurrent pulmonary infections, and, after the success of The Eaglet, he moved with his family to Cambo in the foothills of the Pyrenees, where the weather and the relative privacy were better for his health. He returned to Paris for short periods only—for example, to deliver an acceptance speech at the Académie Française in 1903 and to supervise the staging of Chanticleer. Even in Cambo, where he built a villa and lived in semiretirement for the remainder of his life, the mantle of unofficial poet laureate weighed heavily on him. He was forced to hire a secretary to an-

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swer the flood of mail he received, and he spent ten years revising Chanticleer, for fear of disappointing his public (the play was only a partial success). A compulsive worker who suffered from insomnia, Rostand was a rather distant father to his two sons. As Maurice Rostand put it, “Glory makes homes empty.” By contrast, he corresponded with hundreds of young soldiers during World War I and visited others in the trenches. The war cast a deep gloom over his last years, during which he wrote a collection of labored patriotic verse and The Last Night of Don Juan, which he termed a “dramatic poem.” The latter was staged in 1922, four years after his death, but without success. He died of pneumonia on December 2, 1918, shortly after the Armistice. Analysis • Despite his debt to the romantics, the strain in French literature to which Edmond Rostand really belongs is that of préciosité, “precious” or elaborately refined writing, usually on the subject of love. An outstanding trait of préciosité is the prominence it gives to form, often at the expense of content. Therefore, Rostand wrote his dramas in the regular rhymed couplets of the classical and romantic French theater, even insisting on rime riche in the manner of the Parnassian poet Théodore de Banville. His diction and imagery were equally studied and at times rather farfetched. When deployed with wit and grace, as in his best plays, this fastidious technique served Rostand well, but it was not equally suited to all the subjects he treated. At heart, Rostand—like most of his protagonists—was an idealist who shunned what he saw as the negativism of modern literature. Like Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Miniver Cheevy, he was in a real sense “born too late”; only instead of drinking as Miniver did, he “kept on writing” in his own vein, oblivious of his naturalist and Symbolist contemporaries. He was at his best, however, when he tempered his romantic flights with a dose of humor or with a trace of the irony that characterized his own age. Therefore, his masterpiece, Cyrano de Bergerac, takes as its hero a seventeenth century wit (himself a précieux) whose tendency to take himself too seriously is perfectly tempered by his ludicrous appearance. In Cyrano, Rostand was able to fuse his idealism and his polished wit in a character who is by turns heroic and comical—to resounding dramatic effect. Indeed, Rostand was not only a meticulous versifier but also a man of considerable dramatic gifts. In particular, he knew how to vary the moods of successive scenes and achieve striking stage effects with surprise reversals. He was also capable of clever plot development, as his best plays, Cyrano de Bergerac and The Romantics, demonstrate. Yet because his characters are only sketchily developed, their actions can appear insufficiently motivated, and the interplay of character and action characteristic of most great drama is missing. Nor is there a structure of ideas in Rostand’s plays that might compensate for this shallowness of characterization. In his dramatic effects, as in his verbal craftsmanship, he is above all a superb entertainer—albeit an idealistic one. Indeed, préciosité is, in essence, a form of highly refined entertainment. It is not a school but rather a tendency that runs through much of French poetry, though its heyday was in the early seventeenth century. (Its origins may be traced to the courtly lyrics of the troubadors, and it is visible in the poetry of the sixteenth century “Pléïade” as well as in that of the nineteenth century Parnassians.) The context in which the seventeenth century précieux flourished was that of the salons, exclusive social circles that noble and, later, bourgeois women gathered about themselves. The members of such circles met to discuss literary topics and often to compete with one another in actual poetic contests. One of Rostand’s best poems, a period piece called La Journée d’une précieuse (1898; a day in the life of a précieuse), describes such a contest, in which the

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requirement is to compose a rondeau with rhymes in -al and -oche “to accompany the gift of a seal of rock-crystal.” Rostand’s poem manages to poke gentle fun at the extravagances of his heroine and her salon while conveying some of the genuine wit and charm that such circles fostered. In most of the salons, wit and worldly graces were prized above true erudition; writers of a “precious” cast tended to seek new, entertaining ways of saying things rather than new things to say. In general this is true of Rostand, whose imagery, diction, and versification all display the studied (recherché) quality proper to the précieux. Rostand’s decision to write verse dramas in the last decade of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth centuries was itself a relative anachronism (the realistic theater confined itself to prose) and as such called attention to his virtuosity. He allowed himself romantic license in his use of the Alexandrine (the twelve-syllable line that had been the medium for classical French drama): Enjambments are frequent, and single lines are routinely divided among three, four, or even more different characters. Even in crowd scenes, however, there are no lapses into prose, and the effect is often that of a tour de force. Such a tour de force works well when the theme is love or bravado, as in the famous balcony scene or in Cyrano’s duel with the Vicomte de Valvert, during which he composes a ballade, finishing off his opponent at the end of the refrain; it is less successful when more banal topics are involved, and especially when, as in Chanticleer, the necessary suspension of disbelief cannot be maintained: Twentieth century farm animals cannot be made to speak heroic couplets except in farce, and Rostand exceeds the limits of his form by freighting the play with serious themes. Even in plays set in a distant or legendary past, such as The Far Princess and The Woman of Samaria, there are lapses of taste, for the finely chiseled lines and rime riche (rhyme involving not only the last syllable of a word but also the preceding consonant or syllable) can easily ring false outside certain contexts. The same may be said of Rostand’s diction, which—largely as a result of his insistence on “rich” rhyme—includes rare and occasionally grotesque words, some of them coinages. These qualities suit the burlesque scenes to perfection but give a labored or awkward tone to some serious scenes, especially in The Far Princess. Where imagery is concerned, Rostand is a true précieux, working best on the small scale of the individual line or speech; his recurrent or governing images are often banal (thus light is symbolic of glory, wings of daring or aspiration, lilies of chastity, and roses of fulfilled love). Even these can be effective in specific contexts—when, for example, the “Far Princess,” Mélissinde, acknowledges that the strong yet overrefined scent of the lilies with which she surrounds herself may reinforce her own “solitary pride.” By insisting that the stage be strewn with lilies, however—to be exchanged for roses in act 3, when Mélissinde has fallen in love with Bertrand—Rostand makes the symbolism too emphatic and obvious. Granted that hyperbole or exaggeration is also a feature of the “precious” style, this overworking is a temptation to which Rostand, like many précieux, succumbs all too readily. One of his loveliest images compares the Samaritan woman’s gesture, as she balances a water jar on her head with one hand, to the jar itself with its graceful handle; yet instead of letting the image stand on its own, he goes on to freight it with a grandiloquence (“Immortal splendor of this rustic grace!”) and a sentimentality beneath which it all but founders. The far-fetched quality proper to “precious” imagery makes it most appropriate to, and effective in, burlesque or self-consciously witty passages. Here Rostand is in his element and can make the sparks fly. Perhaps the most famous example is the “nose tirade” in act 1 of Cyrano de Bergerac, in which the hero puts a man who has insulted him

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to scorn by improving on the insult. Instead of saying baldly, “You have a very big nose,” the man might have compared the nose to a peninsula, a scissors-case, a conch, a monument—even, “when it bleeds, the Red Sea!” This kind of virtuosity is already visible in Rostand’s early poem, “Charivari à la lune” (mock-serenade for the moon, in Les Musardises), which compares the moon to scores of different objects, including a cymbal, a mushroom, an egg, and a fingernail. More striking than the images themselves is the grace and wit with which Rostand arranges them: At first, each quatrain encompasses a single image, then two, then four, until the last frenetic strophe of the “serenade” is made to hold eight different images. Lapsing into Alexandrines, the poet admits that he is out of breath and hopes for a response from the moon—but all he hears is an ironic, “Go on!” Here as elsewhere, wit is Rostand’s great redeeming grace, the pinprick deflating what otherwise might become intolerably artificial and hollow. This is not to deny Rostand’s properly dramatic talents. Even his most sentimental plays contain effective scenes, in which a sense of dramatic movement is sustained by artful development or sudden reversals. Thus, the woman of Samaria, recognizing Jesus as the Messiah, bursts into the same profane love song with which she had approached the well; thus Metternich, entering the Duke of Reichstadt’s bedroom late at night, is confronted by a French grenadier standing guard and half believes for a moment that Napoleon is occupying the palace as he had twenty years earlier. Indeed, the entire plot of The Romantics is built on a double reversal of romantic conventions, which Rostand arranges to maximum theatrical effect. The Romantics • The Romantics might be described as an anti-Romeo and Juliet (pr. c. 1595-1596; deliberately so on Rostand’s part—as it opens, the hero is reading Romeo’s speech from the balcony scene). In the first act, two fathers foster an attachment between their children, Sylvette and Percinet, by pretending to be mortal enemies; like Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe, the young couple meet in secret by the wall dividing the two estates. The fathers put a contrived end to their contrived hatred by hiring a knockabout named Straforel to stage an “abduction” of Sylvette, whom Percinet “rescues.” As act 2 opens, the wall is down and the marriage, imminent, but a second (and this time realistic) reversal is in store: The fathers, finding each other’s daily company irritating, are on the way to becoming enemies in earnest. They find it still harder to bear the condescension of their children, who believe that their own romantic ideal has won the day over the obtuse self-interest of their elders. At last unable to contain themselves, the fathers tell Sylvette the truth; she tries to hide it from Percinet but finds herself losing interest in his romantic excesses, which now strike her as pretentious and hollow. Then Percinet stumbles on Straforel’s bill for the “abduction” (a masterfully comic touch, including items such as “Rumpled clothing, ten francs; Hurt pride, forty”). Though their first reaction is to reaffirm their love, which they insist is real even if their situation has been false, they soon quarrel, and Percinet runs off to seek “real” adventure. Straforel, who has yet to be paid, decides to patch it up between the two; he begins by proposing a real elopement to Sylvette, describing the hardships she will face in terms that make her long for a quiet life with Percinet. Meanwhile, her fiancé returns, disenchanted by his brushes with “adventure” in the form of barmaids and thugs, and the two lovers are reconciled. As can be seen from this summary, the plot is clever, and Rostand unfolds it artfully, making the most of every reversal. He also maintains a consistent tone throughout the poetic dialogue—light and graceful, as in La Journée d’une précieuse, with exactly the right shade of gentle irony. After Cyrano de Bergerac, The Romantics is the play of

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Rostand that holds up best for a modern-day audience. This is largely a result of the universal appeal of its stock characters, which can be traced back as far as Menander (young lovers, burlesque fathers, jacks-of-all-trades), but it is also attributable to the essential modernity of the play’s theme: the ironic unmasking of romantic ideals. The fact that Rostand arranges a happy ending—in effect, a kind of re-masking—makes it all the more stageworthy; it is a comedy in the classical mold. Yet it portrays middleclass disillusionment in a manner that rings true. In this respect, The Romantics is unique among Rostand’s plays. Most of the time, he prided himself on resisting the disillusionment of his contemporaries, choosing as heroes men whose great aim in life was to distinguish themselves. The means to this end differ considerably from play to play (poetry, fidelity in love, even, in Chanticleer, a rooster’s crowing), yet in each case the hero justifies his endeavor by maintaining its value on an ideal plane. The distinction he seeks is not so much public recognition— though most of Rostand’s heroes crave recognition as well—but rather the singularity of the romantic idealist, often purchased at the price of loneliness and self-doubt. Love is also an important theme in the plays, but it is always subordinate to the hero’s struggle for distinction and is tinged with the idealism of that struggle. Hence the platonic character of the great “love affairs” in Rostand—Jaufré Rudel and Mélissinde, Cyrano and Roxane. (An extreme example can be seen in the Samaritan woman’s response to Jesus, who replaces the imperfect former objects of her love.) Even Rostand’s Don Juan exhibits no real sensuality; the reasons he gives for a lifetime of seduction are all intellectual, amounting to perverted or negative ideals. It is in his idealism, which stems from the nineteenth century romantics, that Rostand least resembles the seventeenth century précieux; for while the latter also engaged in platonic love affairs and professed a consuming interest in “things of the spirit,” the salons in which they sought to distinguish themselves were above all social circles, little courts formed in emulation of the royal court. As such, they could be stepping-stones to worldly recognition and influence. The emphasis on form in the writings of the précieux thus stems from a desire to please; theirs is the art of the courtier. Rostand was far more ambivalent in his attitude toward the public for which he wrote. Though anxious lest he disappoint his audience, he believed that the poet’s mission was not only to please but also to inspire. This sense of mission unfortunately had a pernicious effect on his last works, replacing the easy grace of The Romantics with an uneven tone that fluctuates between heavy humor and preachiness. In Cyrano de Bergerac, however, Rostand managed to strike the perfect compromise between his préciosité and his idealism. Cyrano de Bergerac • Never was his sense of properly theatrical values keener than in Cyrano de Bergerac. The plot moves briskly, keeping the audience amused while engaging its sympathies in favor of the hero, then building to a double climax of considerable pathos. Each of the five acts has a dramatic unity of its own, yet together the acts form an almost seamless whole. A poet and soldier of uncompromising ideals, Cyrano has been cursed with an outlandish nose that he himself freely ridicules but will allow no one else to mention. His bravado dominates the first act, in which he composes a ballade while fighting a duel then goes alone to face one hundred men whom he learns are waiting to ambush his friend Lignière. There is one person, however, before whom Cyrano trembles: his cousin Roxane, whom he secretly loves but fears to woo because of his ugliness. He is on tenterhooks when, in the second act, she asks to meet with him in private and confesses that she is

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in love; but it emerges that her infatuation is for Christian de Neuvillette, a new member of Cyrano’s company in the Guards, and whom she wants her cousin to befriend and protect. This Cyrano resolutely promises to do, though he warns Roxane—herself a précieuse—that Christian, with whom she has never spoken, may prove a fool for all of his beauty. When this prediction turns out to be true, Cyrano takes his self-sacrifice a step further and offers to coach Christian, providing him with witty and tender words that enchant Roxane. In act 3, Christian tries to speak for himself, but his awkwardness offends Roxane; in an attempt to put things right again, Cyrano has him call her to her balcony, and he himself addresses her from the shadows below. Overcome with emotion, he pours out his heart—still in Christian’s name—and Roxane arranges a secret wedding for that very night, during which time Cyrano stands guard, detaining yet another of Roxane’s suitors, the powerful Count de Guiche. Enraged, the count dispatches the Guards to the siege of Arras; in act 4, Roxane manages to join them there, drawn by the beauty of “Christian’s” daily letters. When Roxane tells Christian that she would love him even if he were ugly, Christian urges Cyrano to tell her the truth, but a few minutes later Christian is killed, and Cyrano resolves to keep the secret. It is not until the end of act 5 (which takes place fourteen years later) that he reveals the truth, half involuntarily, on the verge of his own death. What makes the play so compelling is the thoroughly romantic contrast between the “inner” and “outer” man: Like the dwarf Triboulet (the original of Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto) in Victor Hugo’s play Le Roi s’amuse (1832; The King Amuses Himself, 1842), Cyrano may be tender and passionate in spite of his ridiculous face. (Similarly, in The Eaglet, the Duke of Reichstadt may be considered “a great prince” although he accomplishes nothing.) The weakness of Rostand’s work is that the singularity of the soul that he claims for his heroes is merely assumed, never substantiated by depth or complexity of characterization. Even Cyrano, his most successful creation, is incompletely developed. One has only to ask what it is that Roxane loves in Cyrano (or, still more pointedly, what it is that Cyrano loves in Roxane) to realize that Rostand never tells. Roxane learned to love Cyrano’s “soul,” she says, by reading his letters, yet the only real taste that the audience gets of his eloquence is the balcony scene, in which form (witty phrasing, precious imagery) predominates and the real poignancy stems from the contrast—of which Roxane is unaware—between the beauty of Cyrano’s words and the ugliness of his face. In fact, as a survey of his other plays reveals, Rostand had only a limited repertory of characters, types to which he reverted again and again: the romantic idealist, usually his protagonist; the desirable but fickle woman, confused about what qualities are worth loving; and the hard-headed realist, who serves as foil and often friend to the hero. Because his dramas hinged on these ideal types, Rostand sought exotic settings such as twelfth century Tripoli or seventeenth century Paris; he himself admitted that he set Chanticleer in a barnyard because no contemporary human setting would suit his purpose. Much of Rostand’s purpose becomes clear if one compares his Cyrano with the real Cyrano, Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, whose life is well documented and many of whose writings survive. The greatest surprise is to discover that this Cyrano would in fact have made a very good contemporary hero—or antihero: He gave up a military career in disgust after being wounded twice; he changed sides (possibly for pay) during the Fronde, the struggle between some nobles and the regent Cardinal Mazarin; and he almost certainly died of syphilis (like Rostand’s Cyrano, he was also struck on the

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head by a log, but this preceded his death by some time and may have been an accident rather than an ambush). Admittedly, the real Cyrano was a man of the seventeenth century as well: An avowed “libertine” or freethinker, he is said to have returned to the faith on his deathbed, at the urging of his friend Lebret and his relative, Mother Marguérite of Jesus. Rostand, however, did not want a seventeenth century hero any more than he wanted a twenty-first century one. His Cyrano is larger than life—a great lover and a great fighter, a man of immutable ideals, impossible courage, and matchless wit. He lacks psychological depth and plausibility precisely because the ideal that Rostand would have him sustain has something inhuman about it. Why, the audience may ask, does Cyrano remain silent for fourteen years? If it were out of loyalty to Christian, he betrays his friend just as surely by speaking at the end of that time as he would have by speaking at the beginning—and, in the meantime, he has deprived not only himself but also Roxane of happiness. The answer Rostand would have given, to judge by his other plays and poems, is that the essence of Cyrano’s (and Roxane’s) love was not denied but preserved by his silence: There could be no disillusionment, no imperfection, in such an idealized passion. This means that Roxane, too, must be something less than a real woman, because she also is expected to be something more; as Charles Pujos puts it, “The beloved has to remain unpolluted to the very end, since she represents an Idea more than she does a woman, and only the [author’s] symbolic intention can justify that.” Given its wholly platonic conception of love, how does the play continue to hold the stage in the late twentieth century? In fairness to Rostand, it must be added that questions such as that of Cyrano’s silence suggest themselves to a reader sooner than they do to a spectator, and perhaps to a spectator only after the play is finished. It should also be noted that Rostand has always found his most ardent admirers among the young, who see in Cyrano the courageous nonconformist and the tragic lover. Because of the play’s wit, its carefully articulated plot, and the delicate balance it maintains between idealism and préciosité, Cyrano de Bergerac is a superb dramatic entertainment. As such, it will probably remain a perennial favorite with theatergoers around the world. Other major works poetry: Les Musardises, 1890; La Journée d’une précieuse, 1898; Le Cantique de l’aile, 1910; Le Vol de la Marseillaise, 1914. Bibliography Amoia, Alba della Fazia. Edmond Rostand. Boston: Twayne, 1978. In this concise biography, Amoia discusses Rostand’s life and works. Bibliography and index. Chweh, Crystal R., ed. Readings on “Cyrano de Bergerac.” Literary Companion to World Literature series. San Diego, Calif.: Greenhaven Press, 2001. This book of essays, intended for young adults, presents literary criticism of Rostand’s best-known work. Freeman, E. J. Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac. Glasgow, Scotland: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1995. Freeman looks at Rostand and his most popular work. Bibliography. Lillian Doherty

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MAGILL’S C H O I C E

Notable Playwrights Volume 3 George Ryga — Paul Zindel 751 – 1131 Indexes

Edited by

Carl Rollyson Baruch College, City University of New York

Salem Press, Inc. Pasadena, California

Hackensack, New Jersey

Copyright © 2005, by Salem Press, Inc. All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address the publisher, Salem Press, Inc., P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, California 91115. All the essays in this set originally appeared in Critical Survey of Drama, Second Revised Edition, 2003, edited by Carl Rollyson. Some new material has been added. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Notable playwrights / editor, Carl Rollyson. p. cm. — (Magill’s choice) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 1-58765-195-5 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-58765-196-3 (vol. 1 : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-58765-197-1 (vol. 2 : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-58765-198-X (vol. 3 : alk. paper) 1. Drama—Bio-bibliography—Dictionaries. 2. Drama—Biography—Dictionaries. 3. Drama—History and criticism—Dictionaries. I. Rollyson, Carl E. (Carl Edmund) II. Series. PN1625.N68 2005 809.2’003—dc22 2004011762

First Printing

printed in the united states of america

Contents — Volume 3 Complete List of Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxiii Ryga, George . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 751 Sartre, Jean-Paul . . . . . . Schiller, Friedrich . . . . . Shaffer, Peter . . . . . . . . Shakespeare, William . . . Shange, Ntozake . . . . . . Shaw, George Bernard. . . Shepard, Sam . . . . . . . Sheridan, Richard Brinsley Simon, Neil . . . . . . . . . Sondheim, Stephen . . . . Sophocles . . . . . . . . . Soyinka, Wole . . . . . . . Stoppard, Tom . . . . . . . Strindberg, August . . . . . Synge, John Millington . .

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760 773 783 795 827 835 850 861 873 885 890 901 914 925 935

Terence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 944 Tremblay, Michel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 950 Valdez, Luis Miguel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 961 Vega Carpio, Lope de . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 969 Voltaire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 979 Wasserstein, Wendy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 988 Wilde, Oscar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 994 Wilder, Thornton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1004 Williams, Tennessee. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1016 Wilson, August . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1032 Wilson, Lanford . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1039 Wycherley, William . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1048 Yeats, William Butler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1057 Zindel, Paul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1064 xxxi

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Dramatic Terms and Movements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1074 Time Line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1098 Geographical Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1103 Categorized Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1107 Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1113

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Complete List of Contents Contents—Volume 1 Abe, Kfbf, 1 Aeschylus, 6 Albee, Edward, 15 Anouilh, Jean, 30 Aristophanes, 42 Ayckbourn, Sir Alan, 51 Baraka, Amiri, 61 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de, 74 Beckett, Samuel, 83 Behan, Brendan, 91 Bogosian, Eric, 99 Brecht, Bertolt, 104 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 116 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 131 %apek, Karel, 142 Chekhov, Anton, 153 Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 166 Chin, Frank, 173

Churchill, Caryl, 181 Cocteau, Jean, 187 Congreve, William, 195 Corneille, Pierre, 210 Coward, Noël, 222 Dryden, John, 230 Durang, Christopher, 241 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, 248 Eliot, T. S., 257 Euripides, 270 Farquhar, George, 283 Foote, Horton, 289 Friel, Brian, 295 Frisch, Max, 306 Fugard, Athol, 315 García Lorca, Federico, 329 Genet, Jean, 342 Gilbert, W. S., 356 Glaspell, Susan, 367

Contents—Volume 2 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 373 Goldsmith, Oliver, 385 Gray, Simon, 395 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 404 Hakim, Tawfiq al-, 412 Handke, Peter, 422 Hansberry, Lorraine, 431 Havel, Václav, 440 Hellman, Lillian, 447 Henley, Beth, 457 Howe, Tina, 464 Hwang, David Henry, 471 Ibsen, Henrik, 480

Inge, William, 493 Ionesco, Eugène, 501 Jonson, Ben, 516 Kushner, Tony, 526 Lagerkvist, Pär, 531 McCullers, Carson, 542 Mamet, David, 551 Marlowe, Christopher, 563 Middleton, Thomas, 578 Miller, Arthur, 587 Mishima, Yukio, 602 Molière, 610 O’Casey, Sean, 621 xxxiii

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Odets, Clifford, 630 O’Neill, Eugene, 640 Orton, Joe, 651 Osborne, John, 659 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 668 Pinero, Arthur Wing, 674 Pinter, Harold, 685

Pirandello, Luigi, 697 Plautus, 705 Priestley, J. B., 711 Racine, Jean, 723 Rattigan, Terence, 734 Rostand, Edmond, 743

Contents—Volume 3 Ryga, George, 751 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 760 Schiller, Friedrich, 773 Shaffer, Peter, 783 Shakespeare, William, 795 Shange, Ntozake, 827 Shaw, George Bernard, 835 Shepard, Sam, 850 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 861 Simon, Neil, 873 Sondheim, Stephen, 885 Sophocles, 890 Soyinka, Wole, 901 Stoppard, Tom, 914 Strindberg, August, 925 Synge, John Millington, 935 Terence, 944 Tremblay, Michel, 950 Valdez, Luis Miguel, 961

Vega Carpio, Lope de, 969 Voltaire, 979 Wasserstein, Wendy, 988 Wilde, Oscar, 994 Wilder, Thornton, 1004 Williams, Tennessee, 1016 Wilson, August, 1032 Wilson, Lanford, 1039 Wycherley, William, 1048 Yeats, William Butler, 1057 Zindel, Paul, 1064 Dramatic Terms and Movements, 1074 Time Line, 1098 Geographical Index, 1103 Categorized Index, 1107 Subject Index, 1113

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George Ryga George Ryga

Born: Deep Creek, Alberta, Canada; July 27, 1932 Died: Summerland, British Columbia, Canada; November 18, 1987 Principal drama • Indian, pr. 1962 (televised), pb. 1962, pr. 1964 (staged); Nothing but a Man, pr., pb. 1966; The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, pr. 1967, pb. 1970; Grass and Wild Strawberries, pr. 1969, pb. 1971; The Ecstasy of Rita Joe and Other Plays, pb. 1971 (includes Indian and Grass and Wild Strawberries); Captives of the Faceless Drummer, pr., pb. 1971 (music and lyrics by Ryga); Sunrise on Sarah, pr. 1972, pb. 1973 (music by Ryga); A Portrait of Angelica, pr. 1973, pb. 1976; A Feast of Thunder, pr. 1973 (music by Morris Surdin); Paracelsus and the Hero, pb. 1974, pr. 1986; Twelve Ravens for the Sun, pr. 1975 (music by Mikis Theodorakis); Ploughmen of the Glacier, pr., pb. 1976; Seven Hours to Sundown, pr., pb. 1976; Country and Western, pb. 1976 (includes A Portrait of Angelica, Ploughmen of the Glacier, Seven Hours to Sundown); Laddie Boy, pb. 1978, pr. 1981; Prometheus Bound, pb. 1981 (adaptation of Aeschylus’s play); A Letter to My Son, pr. 1981, pb. 1982; Two Plays: “Paracelsus” and “Prometheus Bound,” pb. 1982; One More for the Road, pr. 1985 Other literary forms • In addition to stage plays, plays for radio and television, poems, film scripts, and song lyrics, George Ryga wrote four novels and one fictionalized memoir of a journey through China. Ryga’s first published novel, Hungry Hills (1963), is a story of a young man who returns to the cruel, barren prairie community that had exiled him three years earlier. Like many of Ryga’s plays, Hungry Hills describes the suffering and isolation of the outcast whose social and spiritual alienation is further embittered by a “desperate climate which parch[es] both the soil and heart of man.” Ryga’s second novel, Ballad of a Stone-Picker (1966), tells of two brothers, one of whom stays to work on the family farm so that his younger brother can go to the university, where he becomes a Rhodes scholar; a revised edition was published in 1976. In Night Desk (1976), Ryga’s third novel, the city (as always, in Ryga, a symbol of antilife) is given extended treatment. In the Shadow of the Vulture (1985), Ryga’s fourth novel, is set in the desert at the Mexico-U.S. border and focuses on the hope and despair of immigrant laborers. In a series of scenes narrated by a tough-talking Edmonton fight promoter, the city’s grim and shabby underside is revealed. Beyond the Crimson Morning: Reflections from a Journey Through Contemporary China (1979) is based on Ryga’s trip to China in 1976. Achievements • In The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, George Ryga wrote one of Canada’s bestknown and most widely produced plays. On July 9, 1969, less than two years after its premier performance in Vancouver during Canada’s centennial, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe was performed at the festival opening of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. The play was next produced by the Fondation Nationale de la Comédie Canadienne, Montreal, in a French version by Gratien Gélinas, Quebec’s leading dramatist. Adapted as a ballet by Norbert Vesak and produced by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe was performed on tour in 1971 throughout Canada, the United States, and Australia. Ryga received additional acclaim on accepting the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Award 751

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for his play in 1974. Widely reprinted, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe has established itself as a classic of the Canadian dramatic repertoire. As one of English Canada’s major dramatists, Ryga received considerable recognition in a country in which artists, even those of his stature, have had to struggle to have their work officially acknowledged. In 1972, he was awarded a Canada Council Senior Arts Grant to work on Paracelsus and the Hero. In 1979 he was nominated for an ACTRA Award for the Newcomers television series, while also in 1979 and in 1980, he received the Frankfurt Academy of Performing Arts Award for Ploughmen of the Glacier (Ryga had a substantial foreign audience). In 1980 he was invited to serve as writer-in-residence at the University of Ottawa. Biography • George Ryga grew up in what he has referred to as “the internal thirdworld of Canada”—the rugged, depression-ridden prairie land of northern Alberta. He was born in Deep Creek on July 27, 1932, the first child of George Ryga and Maria Kolodka, new immigrants from Ukraine. Though formally educated in a one-room schoolhouse, and only up to the eighth grade, Ryga read widely as a child while nurturing himself on the songs, myths, and folktales of his heritage. Ryga’s Ukrainian background, the severe poverty in which he was reared, and the dominating reality of the northern landscape were all of enduring significance to his development as an artist. Of the land and language with which he grew up, Ryga commented: The language took the form of the land—uncompromising, hard, defiant—for three seasons of the year the long months of winter isolation made the desire for human contact a constant ache. Having grown up beside a Cree reservation, Ryga soon discovered another kind of poverty from the one that he knew: the social and spiritual degradation of the indigenous community, alongside of whom Ryga would work as a laborer on his father’s farm. Ryga drew heavily from this experience in writing his first play, Indian, a play that Ryga described as a “milestone” in his development as a playwright. (The play was broadcast as part of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Quest television series in November, 1962.) In an interview, Ryga discussed his experience: You know I grew up on the outskirts of a Cree reservation. The demoralization and degradation was about as total as any society can experience anywhere in the world. These people had been worked over by the Church; they had been worked over by the Hudson’s Bay Co.; there was nothing left. There was no language left anymore. Even their heroes they picked up on from the dominant culture, like a chocolate-bar wrapper dropped in the street that’s picked up as a piece of art and taken home and nailed on the wall. Ryga’s keen awareness of social injustice continued to develop throughout his teens and early twenties, a period of casual labor, artistic exploration, and deepening political commitment. The early to mid-1950’s in particular saw Ryga performing political gestures of various kinds: In 1952, he wrote a controversial antiwar script for the Edmonton radio show Reverie; in 1953, he demonstrated in response to the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg trial; in 1955, he represented the Canadian peace movement at the World Peace Assembly in Helsinki, meeting the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, the soviet writer Ilya Ehrenberg, and other communist writers. In the same year, he traveled to Poland and Bulgaria. Though he left the Commu-

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nist Party as a result of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, Ryga claimed, in 1982, that “there has been no departure from the initial socialist commitment that I made a long time ago.” In his plays, Ryga’s “socialist commitment” emerges as a deep and abiding concern for the individual outcast, the person dispossessed economically, culturally, and spiritually who struggles to maintain dignity in the face of an impersonal system of domination, discrimination, and charity. The early 1960’s for Ryga marked the beginning of a great period of productivity and accomplishment. In 1960, he married Norma Lois Campbell, adopting her two daughters, Lesley and Tanya, and fathering, in 1961 and 1963, two sons, Campbell and Sergei. The early 1960’s, moreover, saw Ryga coming to the theater via radio and television drama, where he had served his apprenticeship. Throughout the 1950’s and into the early 1960’s, Ryga had written short plays and stories for radio broadcasts in Edmonton. After the television production of Indian in 1962, Ryga turned to the stage, again with Indian, in 1964. There followed a period of major accomplishment, Ryga writing in succession Nothing but a Man, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, Grass and Wild Strawberries, Captives of the Faceless Drummer, and Sunrise on Sarah. During the year that A Portrait of Angelica and A Feast of Thunder were produced, Ryga spent six months in Mexico working on Paracelsus and the Hero, and then, in 1976, he wrote two more plays, Ploughmen of the Glacier and Seven Hours to Sundown, both of which were produced that year. Also in 1976, Ryga traveled to China and later wrote his memoir of the journey, Beyond the Crimson Morning: Reflections from a Journey Through Contemporary China (1979). On his own development as an artist, Ryga spoke of Edward Albee and Robert Burns, the Scottish poet, as having been major influences. Of Albee, Ryga commented: I credit a large part of the fact that Indian was written at all, to seeing The Zoo Story on television, and watching how that particular play was constructed. It was the freedom that Albee was exercising in departing from the traditions as then practiced, and taking theatre into a kind of arid area, which I found fascinating and which to a great extent I have used ever since. Ryga had gone to Dumfries in 1955 to study Burns’s poetry, and while there, he discovered drafts of unpublished manuscripts, learning much from them about the interconnections of poetry and music. In Burns’s rural origins and in his artistic resistance to English culture, Ryga also recognized much with which to identify: I began to see . . . that the English dominance of Scotland, and Burns’ contribution in retaining a semblance of language, and around that language developing a rallying point for Scotland’s national aspirations, were translatable indirectly to the Canadian experience. Ryga was a guest professor at the University of British Columbia, at Banff School of Fine Arts, and at Simon Fraser University. As an active member in the Association of Canadian Television and Radio Artists, and an honorary member of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, he brought his liberal ideas to the political format. The travelogue, Beyond the Crimson Morning, published in 1979, was one of his last published works. He died in Summerland, British Columbia, November 18, 1987, of undisclosed causes, at the age of fifty-five. Analysis • George Ryga’s achievements were fueled by his fierce, often embattled commitment to a national theater in Canada. From his earliest days as a dramatist,

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Ryga resisted the imposition of British and American styles on the Canadian theater and sought to establish a living theater fully responsive to his own country’s heterogeneous culture. By his own admission, however, Ryga had equivocal success in establishing such a theater in Canada: “I have known electrifying national prominence, and I have known a decade of exclusion from the theatres of my country. . . .” Nevertheless, Ryga’s plays, which transform Canadian myth and experience into a vivid dramatic language, have been of major significance in the struggle to establish a national theater. He was a major dramatist who dug into his Canadian material and reached through to some universal truths. Indian • In his first play, Indian, the dramatist compressed into one powerful act many basic materials of Canadian language, myth, and experience that he would develop in later plays. The play examines the poverty and despair of the variously named and ultimately anonymous “Indian,” who elicits the intended guilt and sympathy from the members of the audience and who then rejects them violently in an outburst of rage, anguish, and guilt of his own. In the process, the play shatters the distorted and clichéd image of the native Canadians that has often been preserved in the Canadian consciousness. Of the play’s three characters, Indian, the boss Watson, and the Agent (a “comfortable civil servant” from the Department of Indian Affairs), it is the Agent who represents the “white man’s” guilt over the Indians’ degradation and who symbolizes the white man’s attempts, primarily through impersonal charity and social welfare, to repair a tragic, structural flaw in Canadian society. Indian, however, is not interested in charity: “I want nothing from you—jus’ to talk to me—to know who I am. . . .” In particular, Indian needs to tell of his brother, whom he was forced to kill in an act of mercy. The Agent, who is unable to conceive of Indian’s essential humanity and who lacks, therefore, the emotional and moral strength to receive Indian’s confession, is coerced, rather more violently than Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s wedding guest in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), into hearing a story of great sin and suffering. Against the Agent’s cries of “No . . . no! This I don’t understand at all,” Indian describes how he killed his own brother (his brother had been trapped and left to die at the bottom of a well he was digging for a white “bossman,” only to be finally rescued more dead than alive), how he “stole” his clothes, and how he allowed a “half-breed” to take the dead man’s name so that he could collect the reservation subsidy on it (“All Indians same—nobody”). As he tells his story, the stereotyped image of the drunken and worthless Indian with which the play opened must be correlated with the profound humanity and existential integrity of the man who chose, at the cost of immense anguish, to save his own brother by murdering him: I . . . kill . . . my . . . brother! In my arms I hold him. He was so light, like small boy. I hold him . . . rock ‘im back and forward like this . . . like mother rock us when we tiny kids. I rock ‘im an’ I cry . . . I get my hands tight on his neck, an’ I squeeze an’ I squeeze. I know he dead, and I still squeeze an’ cry, for everything is gone, and I am old man now . . . only hunger an’ hurt left now. . . . Although the play is fundamentally realistic, its skillful compression of language, setting, and events produces powerful symbolic effects. The setting is a “flat, grey, stark non-country,” a “vast empty expanse” that is at once the northern Albertan landscape and a spiritual wasteland, reminiscent of the elemental settings in Samuel

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Beckett or T. S. Eliot. This simultaneous realism and symbolism in setting is matched on the levels of language and event, where the cadences of Indian dialect or the harsh hammer blows with which the play ends resonate with poetic force. The fusion of realism and symbolism at key points of Indian anticipates the more ambitious, sustained, and experimental techniques of The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, Ryga’s more wide-ranging treatment of indigenous experience. The Ecstasy of Rita Joe • The vibrant combination of dance, song, mime, recorded voices, and special lighting effects in The Ecstasy of Rita Joe signals Ryga’s departure from the basic naturalism of Indian. Ryga dramatizes both the inner and the outer experience of Rita Joe by making use of a variety of impressionistic, expressionistic, and symbolic techniques. Thus, on a forceful and realistic groundwork he builds a poetic structure in which Rita’s subjective experience and inevitable doom emerge in flashbacks, shadow plays, and interludes of music, mime, or dance. The groundwork of the play is the basic tragedy of Rita’s life and death. Having left her father, the reserve, and her sexual innocence behind, Rita comes to the city, where she becomes trapped in a closing circle of poverty, theft, and prostitution—until she is raped and murdered by three white men. (The Three Murderers shadow Rita’s presence throughout the play until they emerge, clearly illuminated, to murder Rita and her lover Jamie at the end.) The play’s poetic structure, however, transforms this linear, deterministic plot into a mythical, often allegorical elaboration of Rita’s fate, whereby the murder of the Indian woman becomes the ecstasy and apotheosis of the martyr. The fusion of realism and symbolism is pure and lacks sentimentality. Appropriately, the play ends with the poignant words of Rita’s sister Eileen, which focus on the human being at the heart of the myth: “When Rita Joe first come to the city—she told me. . . . The cement made her feet hurt.” The main action revolves around a recurring courtroom scene in which Rita stands accused—of vagrancy, prostitution, theft, and other crimes—before a sentimental and ineffectual Magistrate, symbol of white society’s superficial understanding of Indian experience. By administering lectures and jail sentences, the Magistrate rests the blame for Rita’s degradation and despair on Rita herself, evading whatever responsibility he might have both as a man and as an official representative of white society. He tries unsuccessfully to harmonize the image of a tiny Indian girl he once saw in the Cariboo country with the woman Rita, whom he accuses of carrying a venereal disease, a symbol of her permanent condemnation. The courtroom scenes are touchstones of a present reality that Rita strives to evade via memories and fantasies. In these imaginative interludes, the people of her past and the materials of her oppressed spirit emerge. In one scene of dramatic counterpoint, her old dead father, David Joe, speaks beautifully of a dragonfly emerging from its shell while her lover, Jamie Paul, rails against the white oppressors and advocates violence against them. Torn by this conflict of generations, trapped between impossible alternatives of urban despair and powerlessness and an extinct pastoral majesty, Rita stands paralyzed and doomed. When she recalls scenes of warmth and inspiration, as when she and her sister Eileen comforted each other after a storm, the Three Murderers loom menacingly in the background. Memory, then, is fraught with pain and contains the seeds of her inevitable doom. Other significant characters who appear out of Rita’s past are a Teacher, a Priest, a Policeman, and a welfare worker, Mr. Homer, all of whom, as representatives of white society, stand as accusers of Rita Joe. Throughout, Rita’s essential isolation is drama-

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tized as she is torn violently from her memories by a court policeman or as she stands alone in a shaft of light, separated by a barrier of memory from her surroundings. Often, the dialogue assumes a contrapuntal rhythm as the characters talk across one another’s meanings, each alone in a fading world. As the play progresses, it becomes more and more dominated by Rita’s imagination, which strains against the tragic inevitability of events. Increasingly, as she emerges from her memories and imaginings, the present reality assumes a more hallucinatory quality, shaped as it has become by Rita’s disorientation, fear, hunger, and exhaustion. At times the boundaries of time and space, of inner and outer reality, vanish completely. In a scene that approaches the nightmarish intensity of the Circe episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), all the testimonies of white authority—of Priest, Policeman, Teacher, Magistrate—fuse into one “nightmare babble” of perpetual condemnation. Out of this babble comes the searing cry of the Magistrate, a cry that is also the voice of Rita’s self-accusation, the bitter acknowledgment of her forced betrayal of sexual innocence and Indian heritage: Magistrate: Have you any boils on your back? Any discharge? When did you bathe last? The Three Murderers appear, and circle Rita. Magistrate: Answer me! Drunkenness! Shoplifting! Assault! Prostitution, prostitution, prostitution, prostitution! In Indian, the Agent represents the audience’s point of view and dramatizes its violent discovery of Indian’s complex and painful reality. In The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, the audience almost exclusively shares Rita’s point of view, which accounts for the play’s nonsequential, associative order, its blending of Rita’s spirit and memory with the nightmare-present from which she struggles in vain to escape. The play inhibits a complete identification with Rita, however, by insistently recalling the members of the audience to their own identity. Before the play begins, for example, the players make their entrances in a “workmanlike and untheatrical way” with the houselights up, thus enforcing a sense of common reality and frustrating the audience’s desire to escape into the suspension of disbelief that a darkened theater encourages. Even when the lights are lowered and the play is long under way, the audience continues to be reminded of its status, sometimes rudely so. At one stunning moment, for example, Ryga calls for Jamie Paul to cross downstage and confront a member of the audience: “You know me? . . . You think I’m a dirty Indian, eh? Get outa my way!” At another equally uncomfortable moment, David Joe, Rita’s father, gestures angrily toward the audience exclaiming, “And tell her what? . . . Of the animals there . . . who sleep with sore stomachs because . . . they eat too much?” Structural among the play’s alienating devices, however, is Rita’s alter ego, the Singer, “a white liberal folklorist” who weaves the scenes together with wistful songs that bespeak her “limited concern and understanding of an ethnic dilemma.” If the audience wishes to identify with Rita, it must simultaneously come to terms with the Singer, who sits, appropriately, off to the side and “turned away from the focus of the play.” The Singer, consequently, serves as an alter ego of the audience as well. Thus, between the poles of intimacy and alienation, between the life and final ecstasy of Rita Joe and the superficial and sentimental songs of the Singer, the audience must steer in this most demanding of Ryga’s plays. Ploughmen of the Glacier • After The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, Ryga wrote several plays

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on subjects ranging from psychedelic culture to urban terrorism, small-town politics, and the Titan Prometheus. As might be expected, these plays use a wide variety of techniques, blending realism with myth, song, or dance while experimenting with both fluid and static settings. Among the plays Ryga wrote after 1967, however, Ploughmen of the Glacier, an exploration of the myth of the Canadian West, was his most profound. In Ploughmen of the Glacier, Ryga is a virtuoso who masters continuously the development of his materials, creating a play that is rich in character, language, and symbolism. In the stage directions, Ryga called for a “possibly surrealistic” mountainside setting in which “all is staged and designed to highlight the elemental loneliness of the protagonists.” Although the setting resembles that of Indian in its isolation and foreboding, the effect here is more dramatic as the Canadian Rockies loom unseen but felt in the background. The suggested mountainside functions in the play like the vast, mountainous range of the landscape painting: In both cases, the artist places human figures in the foreground of the vast scene to express human evanescence and isolation before nature’s permanence and sublimity. At times, however, the lust and spirit of Ryga’s characters succeed in dominating their surroundings. The loneliness of the three protagonists is further reinforced by their distance from civilization. High on the mountain, the world below assumes a distant and obscure shape, formed only by the characters’ infrequent allusion to the Gold Rush, the town, or the business “bandits” from Ontario. Thus isolated, the mountainside is free to open into abodes of myth, though its bearded, coughing men, moving about in clouds of real dust and speaking their raucous frontier language, suggest a particular history and region. The action is structured on the periodic meeting of Volcanic and Lowery—the natural, elemental man and the bookish man of culture—who disguise their suppressed affection for each other in zealous, occasionally violent, and often bitter arguments about the best way to live. Their spirited and voluble antagonism is interrupted, however, on the entrance of Poor Boy, who wanders up and down the mountain with a pair of leaky water buckets in a futile attempt to hoard water against the coming fire. (Wandering through the scene playing his harmonica, Poor Boy pauses to speak wistfully and discontinuously about a dimly remembered Western legend.) As the play’s Sisyphus, Poor Boy brings with him a whiff of the abyss that stops Volcanic and Lowery cold. From this prospect of madness and futility, Volcanic and Lowery avert their faces, infected by a doubt that leaves them spiritually exhausted though somehow closer as men. When Poor Boy leaves, however, they resume their argument. According to this rhythm of spirited argument, despair, and brief communion, the play progresses. The play’s bleak existentialism is substantially countered throughout by its lusty language and humor. Responsible for the finest displays of both, Volcanic is also the Old West personified, a symbol of its tireless energy. As his name suggests, he is at once flowing lava and petrified rock—a living fossil from another time. Like the West itself, he combines the grandeur of the pioneering imagination with its ignorance and brutality (Volcanic once shot a man who trespassed unknowingly on his land), and like most grand personifications, he is slightly absurd: For all Volcanic’s dreams of wealth and talk of founding a city in his name, he, like Anse Bundren of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930), is dominated by the homely and pressing need for a set of false teeth. Nevertheless, Volcanic’s vigorous speech achieves the force and resonance of poetry. When he rails against Lowery, he is at his best:

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You’re worn out by poverty . . . you depress me! . . . You’re like a preacher in a whorehouse. I want to dress up like a monkey to show the world I’m livin’. . . . I want to bleed myself . . . show God I can do without Him . . . that I can spill my life on the ground an’ still have more left in me than men like you! . . . I want to smell out a claim an’ go after it . . . all alone . . . just my body with a hammer an’ chisel against the whole goddamned mountain! To eat what nobody’s ever cooked for me . . . to stand on a cliff, pants aroun’ my ankles . . . an’ shake the sperm in me over the cliff into the valley . . . an’ laugh to see a gull scoop down an’ swallow it before it hits the ground . . . Hah! The seeds for children I could’ve had . . . eaten by a seagull! An aged and failed editorialist and languid spokesman of civilization, Lowery is impelled periodically to climb the mountain to berate Volcanic and to assail him with issues from “down below”—from the society and culture of mankind that Lowery has increasingly come to doubt. Though he is attracted by Volcanic’s tireless optimism and arrogant independence, he is also dumbfounded and deeply annoyed by it. Unable to live like Volcanic but no longer at home in civilization, Lowery is the most isolated and pathetic of the play’s characters. Lacking the robust constitution of Volcanic or the single-minded purpose of Poor Boy, Lowery is alone between the frontier and society, living primarily with a painful memory of the beautiful woman with whom he declined to make love, so ashamed was he of his own nakedness. The argument of Volcanic and Lowery continues until they die facing each other in their tracks. When they are finally still, Poor Boy comes on to deliver the eulogy for the dead whom he is already beginning to forget. As Poor Boy wanders off playing his harmonica, he will have yet another half-remembered tale to ponder as he carries his leaky water buckets up the mountain. Other major works long fiction: Hungry Hills, 1963; Ballad of a Stone-Picker, 1966, revised 1976; Night Desk, 1976; In the Shadow of the Vulture, 1985. teleplays: The Storm, 1962; Bitter Grass, 1963; For Want of Something Better to Do, 1963; The Tulip Garden, 1963; Two Soldiers, 1963; The Pear Tree, 1963; Man Alive, 1965; The Kamloops Incident, 1965; A Carpenter by Trade, 1967 (documentary); Ninth Summer, 1972; The Mountains, 1973 (documentary); The Ballad of Iwan Lepa, 1976 (documentary). radio plays: Reverie, 1952; A Touch of Cruelty, 1961; Half-Caste, 1962; Masks and Shadows, 1963; Bread Route, 1963; Departures, 1963; Ballad for Bill, 1963; The Stone Angel, 1965; Seasons of a Summer Day, 1975; One Sad Song for Henry Doyle Matkevitch, 1981. nonfiction: “Theatre in Canada: A Viewpoint on its Development,” 1974; “Contemporary Theatre and Its Language,” 1977; “The Need for a Mythology,” 1977; Beyond the Crimson Morning: Reflections from a Journey Through Contemporary China, 1979; “The Artist in Resistance,” 1982. miscellaneous: The Athabasca Ryga, 1990 (collection); Summerland, 1992 (Ann Kujundzic, editor). Bibliography Boire, Gary. “Tribunalations: George Ryga’s Postcolonial Trial ‘Play.’” Ariel 22, no. 2 (April, 1991): 5-20. A “clumsily beautiful trial play,” The Ecstasy of Rita Joe is compared with Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) and other anticolonial literature as a paradigm for examining the “encoding of class violence under the guise of social contract . . . [a] crucial feature of anti-colonial literatures.”

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Strong postmodern, semiotic deconstructionist look at “what postcolonial theorists call the reclamation of a world through irony.” Burgess, Patricia, ed. Annual Obituary 1987. Chicago: St. James Press, 1990. A good recapitulation of Ryga’s themes, approaches to character, and patterns of composition during his career, along with an updated biography. “The lack of integration between land and people and between the individual and the group is the essential duality in Ryga’s work,” states the anonymous writer of this obituary. In his earlier life, before making a living as a writer, Ryga was concerned “with the degradation of human beings who are displaced and isolated, who lack a spiritual origin,” a trait connected to Canadian life and society and one that informs Ryga’s dramatic characterizations. Carson, Neil. “George Ryga and the Lost Country.” In Dramatists in Canada: Selected Essays, edited by William H. New. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1972. Discusses The Ecstasy of Rita Joe. Carson’s opinion is that the play “establishes Ryga as the most exciting talent writing for the stage in Canada today.” He believes that Ryga “rejects romantic and physical love, but does not preclude all meaningful human relationships.” Grace, Sherrill. “The Expressionist Legacy in the Canadian Theatre.” Canadian Literature, no. 118 (Autumn, 1988): 47-58. This study of Ryga and Robert Gurik examines the non-naturalistic aspects of both writers. Mentions the influences of Edward Albee, Fyodor Dostoevski, Eugene O’Neill, Franz Kafka, and Bertolt Brecht. Details The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, especially the characters identified by function, and the fragmented structure. Hoffman, James. The Ecstasy of Resistance: A Biography of George Ryga. Toronto: ECW Press, 1995. Describes major events in Ryga’s life, especially those that relate to his writing. Bibliography and index. Saddlemyer, Ann. “Crime in Literature: Canadian Drama.” In Rough Justice: Essays on Crime in Literature, edited by M. L. Friedland. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Ryga’s Indian is discussed as drama that “involves the process of judgment, assigning responsibility for action, distinguishing truth from fiction.” Michael Zeitlin, updated by Thomas J. Taylor

Jean-Paul Sartre Jean-Paul Sartre

Born: Paris, France; June 21, 1905 Died: Paris, France; April 15, 1980 Principal drama • Les Mouches, pr., pb. 1943 (The Flies, 1946); Huis clos, pr. 1944, pb. 1945 (In Camera, 1946; better known as No Exit, 1947); Morts sans sépulture, pr., pb. 1946 (The Victors, 1948); La Putain respectueuse, pr., pb. 1946 (The Respectful Prostitute, 1947); Les Jeux sont faits, pr., pb. 1947 (The Chips Are Down, 1948); Les Mains sales, pr., pb. 1948 (Dirty Hands, 1949); Le Diable et le Bon Dieu, pr. 1951, pb. 1952 (The Devil and the Good Lord, 1953); Kean: Ou, Désordre et génie, pb. 1952, pr. 1953 (adaptation of Alexandre Dumas, père’s play; Kean: Or, Disorder and Genius, 1954); Nekrassov, pr. 1955, pb. 1956 (English translation, 1956); Les Séquestrés d’Altona, pr. 1959, pb. 1960 (The Condemned of Altona, 1960); Les Troyennes, pr., pb. 1965 (adaptation of Euripides’ play; The Trojan Women, 1967) Other literary forms • A philosopher by trade and training, Jean-Paul Sartre is best known as the principal exponent of existentialism, a philosophical attitude developed from the work of such earlier thinkers as Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl, and Sartre’s older contemporary Martin Heidegger. Initially developed across such fictional texts as the early novel La Nausée (1938; Nausea, 1949) and the collected short stories of Le Mur (1939; The Wall and Other Stories, 1948), Sartre’s existentialism received full academic exposition in the massive L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness, 1956). In the meantime, Sartre had discovered in the immediacy of theater a vehicle almost ideally suited to the expression of his ideas. Further experiments with prose fiction, somewhat less successful than his playwriting, resulted in the unfinished tetralogy The Roads to Freedom (1947-1950), which includes L’Âge de raison (1945; The Age of Reason, 1947), Le Sursis (1945; The Reprieve, 1947), and La Mort dans l’âme (1949; Troubled Sleep, 1950). Sartre also achieved distinction with speeches and essays contained in the several volumes of the journal Situations, published from the 1940’s through the 1960’s, as well as with highly personal literary criticism devoted to such authors as Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, and Jean Genet. In 1964, Sartre declined the Nobel Prize in Literature on grounds deemed both political and personal. His autobiographical essay Les Mots (The Words) had appeared earlier in that year to considerable critical acclaim. Achievements • With the possible exception of his younger contemporary Jean Anouilh, Jean-Paul Sartre emerged as the most accomplished and noteworthy French playwright of the 1940’s and early 1950’s. Interested in the stage since childhood, Sartre soon found in the theater an ideal vehicle for his otherwise ponderous philosophical speculations on the nature of humankind and society. Indeed, the rapid spread and acceptance of Sartre’s profound and challenging ideas can be almost entirely attributed to the success of his plays, in the best of which the complex is rendered not only simple but also visible and audible. At times almost too close to such popular forms as melodrama to be considered literature, Sartre’s characteristic dramatic style nevertheless provides for highly enter760

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taining, accessible, and effective theater. Animated through rapid-fire dialogue exchanged among generally well-rounded and credible characters, Sartre’s notions of truth and falsehood, of authentic and inauthentic behavior become both perceptible and memorable. In the best of his plays, most notably The Flies and No Exit, Sartre achieves the enviable goal of almost instantaneous communication with his audience. Perhaps even more remarkable, the strongest of his efforts remain valid as theater even without direct consideration of the ideas that they were written to express. In this respect, Sartre’s achievement by far exceeds that of his erstwhile friend Albert Camus, an experienced actor and director whose efforts at playwriting failed, in general, to reach an audience secured in advance by the success of his essays and novels. As a student and critic of the drama, with the best of his articles collected in Situations and elsewhere, Sartre advocated political commitment in the theater while stopping somewhat short of the “thesis drama,” best exemplified by the work of Bertolt Brecht. In his own plays, Sartre, unlike Brecht, invites the participation and identification of his audience, even in the case of those characters who are to be weighed in the balance and found wanting. Indeed, such efforts as The Flies, No Exit, and The Condemned of Altona have managed to survive most post-Brechtian thesis dramas precisely because of Sartre’s basically conventional, or Aristotelian, approach to character and plot. Biography • Closely related on his mother’s side to the Alsatian thinker and physician Albert Schweitzer, Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris on June 21, 1905. As he would later recall in The Words, Sartre grew up alongside his young, widowed mother in a household dominated largely by women who spoiled him, eventually provoking a virile reaction in his mature thought and prose style. After completing his secondary studies at the highly esteemed Lycée Henri IV, Sartre went on to the even more prestigious École Normale Supérieure as a student of philosophy. Failing in his initial attempt to gain the coveted, competitive agrégation, or secondary teaching credential, Sartre took the examination again in 1929 and was accepted. In the meantime, he had made the acquaintance of Simone de Beauvoir, a fellow philosophy student who was to remain his friend, companion, and occasional partner for life, although they never married. During the 1930’s, Sartre taught philosophy in lycées at Le Havre and elsewhere, and he also did some traveling before settling into the life of a professional thinker and writer. Jean-Paul Sartre in 1964 (Library of Congress) Around 1932, Sartre became ac-

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quainted with the eminent actor and director Charles Dullin, a member of the famous Cartel des Quatre that had revolutionized serious French drama during the 1920’s. Although Sartre would not emerge as a dramatist for another decade or so, his abiding friendship with Dullin as early as his mid-twenties must be seen as a major influence on his life and career. During the Occupation, around the time of Sartre’s first efforts at playwriting, Dullin hired Sartre as a lecturer on Greek drama in his School of Theatre Arts. Actively involved in resistance to the Nazi Occupation after the fall of France in 1940 (and a brief period of incarceration as a prisoner of war), Sartre read widely, wrote extensively, and emerged, after the Liberation in 1944, as one of the most articulate and persuasive spokespeople of the postwar French Left, expressing his ideas in plays and novels as well as in essays. As founder and guiding spirit of the liberal periodical Les Temps modernes, Sartre expanded both his audience and his influence. It was this journal, for example, that served as Sartre’s forum for his well-publicized break with Camus after the latter’s publication of L’Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel, 1956). Unable to find a satisfactory conclusion to his projected tetralogy of novels, Sartre, during the 1950’s, continued writing essays and plays, beginning work also on the autobiographical project The Words. Although personally committed to Marxist theory, Sartre throughout his career shunned international communism as he did most other orthodoxies; still, he remained identified with what most foreigners considered to be the French Radical Left. After publication of The Words, Sartre devoted his attention almost exclusively to the life and work of Gustave Flaubert, in whom he found a most suitable context (or pretext) for his own reflections on philosophy, psychology, and art. By the time of Sartre’s death in 1980, his work on Flaubert covered several thousand printed pages. Analysis • Outside philosophical circles, it is likely that Jean-Paul Sartre’s reputation will ultimately be determined by the success or failure of his theater. His works of literary criticism, impressive though they may be, lie somewhat outside the critical mainstream and are perhaps more profitably read either as essays or as philosophy. With the notable exception of the early Nausea, his novels, although well written and occasionally rewarding, fall far short of the communication established almost without apparent effort in the plays. The best of his plays, although somewhat superseded in fashion during the 1950’s by the antirationalist efforts of Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and the early Arthur Adamov, are still considered among the strongest and most effective dramatic efforts of the twentieth century. Unlike most of the philosophers and other thinkers who, over the centuries, have attempted to write for the stage, Sartre was endowed with a basically theatrical imagination, heavily weighted toward the visual and psychological. In the strongest of his plays, the verbal element occurs as if spontaneously and by afterthought, the inevitable and hence quite plausible result of placing particular characters in a given situation. Language, instead of forming the basis of the action, arises from it as dialectic turns to dialogue. No Exit, in particular, was and remains a rousing piece of theater owing mainly to almost preverbal interaction among the ironically matched characters. Although acquainted with Charles Dullin and other personalities of the Parisian stage from the early 1930’s onward, Sartre did not attempt playwriting until 1940, when, as a prisoner of war, he saw the stage as a suitable vehicle for thinly veiled propaganda directed toward his fellow prisoners. The result was Bariona, ostensibly a

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Christmas play about historical events surrounding the birth of Christ. Sartre’s captors, predictably sidetracked by Bariona’s Roman characters and setting, allowed the play to be performed as planned. The Flies • Sartre’s earliest performed play, The Flies, brings forth in memorable, generally clear theatrical terms the distinctions between “essence” and “existence,” en-soi and pour-soi, explained at great length in his contemporary treatise Being and Nothingness. Of all beings, Sartre maintains, only human beings are capable of creating themselves through continuous acts of choice, proceeding beyond mere essence (which humans share, at birth, with stones, plants, and animals) toward uniquely human existence. Those persons who refuse to choose or to accept responsibility for choices that they have already made are guilty of “bad faith” (mauvaise foi) and are indeed renouncing their truly human potential for existence in favor of subhuman, or at least nonhuman, essence or “definability” that is little more preferable than death. Indeed, as the prefigured Hell of No Exit makes even clearer, those who reject the anguish of choice for the comfort of convenient self-definition and labels are in fact already dead, insofar as their lives could be presumed to make a difference. Only after death, contends Sartre, should it be possible to take the measure of a human life; what it then “adds up to” is beyond progress or repair. Until that point, any effort to complete the phrase “I am . . .” with either a predicate adjective or a predicate noun is the mark of a person “in love with death” who has relinquished the privilege of existence. By contrast, those who “exist,” in keeping with Sartre’s apparent ideal, are too busy choosing their lives and are changing too rapidly for labels to be applied by themselves or by anyone else. The Flies, conceived in part as a rebuttal to Jean Giraudoux’s Électre (pr., pb. 1937; Electra, 1952), presents an Orestes who arrives in Argos quite unaware of his identity, only to choose the life and deeds of Orestes after weighing the evidence of Clytemnestra’s crime against his own intentions. Intended also as a political statement, its topical import, thinly veiled by Sartre’s then conventional use of antique characters and setting, The Flies portrays an Argive people crushed beneath the weight of a collective guilt, imposed on them from without by their self-serving and murderous rulers. Even Electra, perceived as a rebel in most prior retellings of the myth, is portrayed as inauthentic in her behavior: At the moment of crisis, she remains trapped in the acceptance (or perhaps even enjoyment) of an image of herself as seen by the usurpers. Only Orestes, having opted to define himself by choice alone, is capable of meaningful action. Trading on a current vogue for Greek myth on the French stage, Sartre in The Flies managed both forceful anti-Nazi polemic and a reasonably effective presentation of his developing existentialist theories. Over the years since the play was first performed, even critics friendly to Sartre and to existentialism have perceived major flaws in the play that appear to have escaped notice for at least the first decade of its performed and published life; still, The Flies remains deservedly among the best-known and most frequently revived French plays. No small part of the play’s effectiveness derives from Sartre’s confident use of imagery and language bordering frequently on crudity. The central image of predatory insects reflected in the play’s title reverberates often throughout the dialogue, supported by complementary allusions to garbage, filth, and tender, vulnerable flesh. Taking as his real object of scorn the collective guilt that had haunted the French people since the fall of France in 1940, and the subsequent establishment of a collabora-

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tionist government at Vichy, Sartre in The Flies effectively exploits the murder of Agamemnon and the tyrannical rule of Aegistheus to draw parallels between the Argives and the French. In Sartre’s version, Aegistheus and Clytemnestra have consolidated their rule by imposing on their subjects a collective guilt symbolized in a national tradition of mourning. At the start of the play, each subject, encouraged by the rulers, believes himself or herself to be vicariously guilty of Agamemnon’s murder, having willed the event in advance; annually, on the anniversary of Agamemnon’s death, ruled and rulers join in an act of ritual penance, groveling and fawning in gestures made vividly real by Sartre’s pungent imagery and language. Such is the scene beheld by the young and callow Orestes, who arrives in Argos as the foreign student Philebus, accompanied by his tutor. It remains therefore for the disinterested, detached Philebus voluntarily to choose his identity as Orestes, delivering the Argive people from their collective guilt with two additional assassinations for which he alone will bear the blame and guilt. Although managed perhaps as effectively as possible within the limits of legend, Sartre’s portrayal of Orestes’ choice constitutes one of the play’s more fundamental and abiding weaknesses. Much as Sartre would have the audience accept Orestes as the archetypal existential hero, choosing his own existence above the comforting eventuality of essence, what remains at the play’s end, even in “existential” terms, is the sum of his deeds, precisely those deeds attributed to Orestes by several thousand years of legend and theatrical experience. Considerably more effective is Sartre’s presentation of Electra, a truly archetypal Sartrean coward who, at the moment of crisis, disastrously lacks the courage of her frequently spoken convictions. Long identified as a rebellious child who hates her mother and stepfather, Electra prefers the comfort of collective guilt to individual responsibility for their assassination. Almost equally effective is Sartre’s evocation of Jupiter, a suitably decadent Roman deity who materializes in response to Orestes’ repeated appeals for help from the Greek god Zeus. Displaying all the bonhomie of a corrupt political manipulator, Jupiter shows off his superhumanity with impressive parlor tricks, only to admit after Orestes’ deeds that the gods are in fact inventions of mankind, powerless against truly free men. At the very end of The Flies, Sartre’s mixed metaphors run somewhat out of control as Orestes leaves Argos pursued by a horde of buzzing flies, defining himself by his current behavior as a curious blend of the Paraclete and the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Claiming that he has expiated the guilt of the Argives by taking the full burden on himself, he still refuses the additional burden of government. Self-defined as “a King with neither land nor subjects,” Orestes then trudges, as it were, off into the sunset, leaving each of his putative subjects free to create his or her own destiny. Perhaps impressive as polemic, the ending of The Flies proves a bit too weak, on reflection, to carry the full burden of Sartre’s existentialist exposition. No doubt confined within the restrictions of his chosen material, Sartre in The Flies still fails to provide the convincing illustration of human freedom that he appears to have had in mind. Notwithstanding, The Flies remains a perennially rousing and thought-provoking play, even when divorced from the historical context of its conception. No Exit • With No Exit, first performed within fifteen months after The Flies, Sartre so far transcended his earlier effort as to prove that prior success to have been no accident. Here, unbound by the constraints of established legend, Sartre exercised his own freedom to bring forth an utterly human interpersonal hell for which physical death is

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no prerequisite. Although supposedly dead and hence incapable of changing the sum of their lives, the womanizer, lesbian, and nymphomaniac who find themselves locked uneasily together in the eternal torture of interdependence merely replicate the suffering endured, through implied consent, by those who consistently refuse to alter or even question their daily approach to life. Pursuing the penchant for crude if apt imagery that had transformed Orestes’ Furies into a horde of biting flies, Sartre, in No Exit, went even further to assure himself of an audience through his use of shock tactics, including explicit if still printable speech. Although some observers continue to see in the play a reasonably successful attempt at Camus’s stated goal of “modern tragedy,” Sartre’s most perceptible method is that of melodrama as commonly interpreted, and practiced, by the producers of broadcast serials. No Exit, although often read in literature courses, might well be described as subliterary; on the stage, however, it remains both audacious and compelling. The French title of No Exit is drawn from legal terminology (of which the British translation, In Camera, is no doubt a more faithful rendering than the American) to denote a trial or hearing conducted behind closed doors. No Exit is in all likelihood Sartre’s one true dramatic masterpiece. Its action necessarily compressed into a single act of a little more than one hour’s playing time, Sartre’s second professional dramatic effort goes considerably further than The Flies toward illustrating the author’s philosophy in memorable theatrical terms. Even without consideration of the ideas involved, No Exit remains one of the most effective and affecting plays to emerge from France in the twentieth century. Intended as communication rather than as literature, No Exit achieves its remarkable effect at what might well be considered the level of soap opera, thanks in part to the brutal frankness of expression that Sartre had all but perfected in The Flies. Set in an imagined Hell that, by Sartre’s own admission, need not be the afterlife, No Exit portrays the mutual torture of three individuals defined as “dead” by their individual resistance to change or even to self-interrogation. Within the terms of the play, the three principals are portrayed as physically dead as well; yet it is soon clear that such death has merely fixed and confined a reality of long standing. Even Inès, the strongest of the three main characters and the one among them who most clearly speaks for the playwright, remains condemned by her early and unquestioning acceptance of a label applied to her from without, by perceived public opinion. Significantly, at least two of the three main characters of No Exit are little surprised to find themselves in Hell. Both Garcin and Inès have died violently; moreover, the conduct of their lives has led them to expect the worst. What they have not anticipated, however, is the precise nature of the place; Garcin, first to arrive, is somewhat nonplussed to find a Second Empire drawing room instead of a medieval torture chamber. As Inès will soon observe, however, whoever is in charge has decided to save on staff by having the “clients” torture one another themselves; indeed, the three eternal inhabitants of the overdecorated room have been diabolically well matched. Garcin, formerly a journalist, is a self-styled “tough guy” who believes himself to be in Hell because of the way he treated his long-suffering wife: On at least one occasion, he recalls, he brought his mulatto mistress into their home and had his wife serve them breakfast in bed. Inès, perhaps even tougher, admitted her lesbianism early in life and has since nourished few, if any, illusions. Only the third arrival, an incipient nymphomaniac and would-be socialite named Estelle, appears surprised to find herself in Hell; she is also the only member of the trio to have died from natural causes. Although Estelle has actually committed murder, her presence in Sartre’s Hell derives rather from her pas-

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sive, shallow, and, above all, unexamined life: Born poor, she married for money and became an unreflective snob. Inès, although sexually attracted to Estelle, despises her because she never had to work for a living; Inès, meanwhile, remains bitterly proud of her own long service as a postal clerk. As the action progresses, it soon becomes clear that Garcin has the most to hide. As editor of a pacifist journal in Rio de Janeiro, he left for Mexico City as soon as World War II was declared; arrested for desertion, he was subsequently executed by a firing squad. Inès, considerably more honest with herself than Garcin has ever been, loses little time in exploiting Garcin’s inner fears that he has died a coward’s death, thus proving that he has lived a coward’s life as well. Regardless of his hopes or motivations, the line has now been drawn, and his life adds up to nothing more or less than the sum of his proven actions. In the cold light of Inès’ lucidity, Garcin stands all but revealed as a coward; his only hope, as it were, is to persuade Inès that he is a hero. Inès, although no doubt the most exemplary of the three characters portrayed in No Exit, proves deserving of her fate because, although lucid, she has accepted without question the condemnation of society. Trading on the French expression femme damnée (literally, “damned woman”) to denote a lesbian, Sartre here presents a woman who has allowed society’s negative judgment of her sexual preference not only to dominate her life but also to define it. Most of Inès’ life has indeed been spent living up (or down) to her bad name—disrupting marriages and causing suicides. Apparently, it has never occurred to her to choose any identity or existence other than that chosen for her by perceived public opinion. Of the three characters, Estelle is deliberately portrayed as the least interesting, the object of mildly political satire insofar as she is a mindless, useless member of the bourgeoisie. For Estelle, the greatest torture to be found in Hell is the absence of mirrors, on which she has come to depend for confirmation of her essence. In one of the play’s most effective conceits, Inès is able to manipulate Estelle completely by telling her that her lipstick is off-center or that she has a pimple on her chin. Only gradually does Estelle, a woman overfond of euphemisms, come to admit that she was guilty of drowning her love child, born of a relatively poor man who later committed suicide. Outspoken not only in her preference for women but also in her parallel antipathy toward men, Inès provides the play with most of its perceptible action. As the most lucid of the trio, she is also the most emotional and the most articulate. Garcin’s inept, halfhearted efforts to make love to Estelle elicit from Inès shrill cries of envy and denunciation. Estelle, meanwhile, proves resistant to Inès’s amorous advances so long as there is a man in the room. Garcin, although attracted to Estelle, insists on her reassurance that he is not a coward, but Estelle remains too flighty and shallow to care whether he is a coward, “so long as he kisses well.” When the door pops open unexpectedly, however, none of the characters leaves; each has by then become too dependent on the purely negative tensions that bind them together. Garcin, for example, “needs” Inès because she alone can understand him, her judgment an immovable object against which he must continually try his supposedly irresistible force. Although, as Sartre concedes, the principals of No Exit need not be physically dead, the assumption of their demise allows for the inclusion of certain theatrical tricks that enhance the play’s effectiveness. Being dead, the characters therefore cannot kill one another. As the conversation continues, moreover, it becomes increasingly evident that time in Hell has been somehow compressed (or perhaps stretched). Soon after

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their arrival, still somewhat attached to their lives, the characters can still see their erstwhile friends and surroundings; with time, however, their vision grows dimmer, and it soon becomes clear that each minute of their conversation is equivalent to several weeks on earth. At one point, for example, Garcin observes that his widow, alive at the start of the play, has been dead for about six months. By then, however, such details are quite without importance, as all three are well settled into the hell of mutual incomprehension that they have long since chosen through their actions. Perennially popular with both professional and amateur theater groups, No Exit remains quite probably the most widely disseminated of Sartre’s plays, its few flaws generally well concealed by the tightness and efficiency of its construction. Never again would Sartre the playwright express himself with such unerring aptness and economy, although at least two of his subsequent plays also give convincing dramatic form to his ideas. Having discovered, with No Exit, the apparent secret of reaching and keeping an audience, Sartre continued to direct the remainder of his plays toward the same real or imagined public, with varying degrees of success. His next two plays, produced on a double bill in 1946, are deemed by most to have been failures and are seldom read or revived: The Victors, dealing with captured Resistance fighters during World War II, is an unconvincing blend of near-tragedy and melodrama; The Respectful Prostitute, incongruously set in an America that Sartre had not yet seen and based on the Scottsboro race trials of the 1930’s, falls considerably short of Sartre’s apparent intention of social satire with comic overtones. In both plays, however, Sartre’s expressed thought remains consistent with his earlier and more successful dramatic efforts, stressing the difference between authentic and inauthentic behavior as exemplified in the individual character’s perception between ends and means. Dirty Hands • In 1948, Sartre undertook to combine the best of his approaches to theater with such existing conventions as the political thriller and the murder mystery. The result was Dirty Hands (also known as Red Gloves), later successfully filmed, an inversion of traditional procedure in that both victim and assassin are identified from the start. Consistent with Sartre’s philosophy and general outlook, the suspense—and it can be considerable, provided that the play is competently directed—resides not in the identity but rather in the motive of the murderer, who himself participates in searching for the truth. A reluctant assassin at the very least, Hugo Barine must decide to his own satisfaction whether the shooting for which he has served time in prison was motivated by simple passion or by politics. Unsparing in its satire of expediency in leftist politics or indeed in any politics, Dirty Hands was interpreted by many contemporary observers, no doubt inaccurately, as Sartre’s “anticommunist” play. In fact, Dirty Hands is both less and more than that, a philosophical play with strong psychological overtones, which, in a sense, simply happens to be about politics. Although perhaps excessive in length, Dirty Hands has proved over the years to be both less topical and more durable than was at first supposed, a powerful and memorable character study evoking the thin line between the psychological and social dimensions of the individual, here exemplified by the indulged, immature, and irresolute Hugo. Dirty Hands remains one of Sartre’s more noteworthy and satisfying efforts, a vigorous melodrama with undertones of both the comic and the tragic. Psychological rather than political in substance, Dirty Hands offers as its central character a considerably lessthan-tragic hero, one who has committed murder without quite knowing why. Based in part on the known facts surrounding the assassination of Leon Trotsky in 1940, the

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murder of Hoederer was planned long in advance as a political act by members of his own party; the problem, however, derives from the party’s ironic choice of an assassin. Hugo Barine, a pampered rich boy with strong radical leanings no doubt motivated by guilt, finds in the gruff, avuncular Hoederer a surrogate father figure to exceed his wildest dreams. For the longest time he cannot bring himself to kill the man, even as the party regulars grow increasingly impatient with his hesitation and plan an assault of their own. When at last Hugo does bring himself to kill Hoederer, his motives lie concealed beneath a tangled web of conflicting emotions, not the least of which is cuckoldry. In order to live with himself, however, Hugo must try to disentangle the web even after serving time in prison for the murder. By the time that Hugo regains his freedom, matters are complicated still further by the fact that Hoederer has been posthumously rehabilitated by the same political forces that engineered his death. Exposed largely through flashbacks, the action of Dirty Hands involves a large cast of varied and interesting characters, ranging from the radical Olga (who probably loves Hugo but will not intervene to save his life) to the two inadvertently humorous hired thugs assigned to Hoederer as bodyguards. It is Hoederer himself, however, who emerges somewhat incongruously as the true hero of the play, one of the few truly decent and admirable characters in all of Sartre’s theater. True to his character, he has done nearly all in his power to avoid romantic involvement with Hugo’s wife, Jessica, who, without his knowledge, has volunteered to commit the murder herself so long as her husband refuses to do so. With the possible exception of Hugo, Jessica is in all likelihood the most complex and fascinating character in Dirty Hands, although she often appears to have been cast by Sartre in the wrong play: Although her flirtatious and enigmatic behavior will provide one of the possible motivations for Hugo’s act of murder, Jessica more often appears extraneous to the action, included more for her intrinsic interest than for her importance to the plot. Perhaps a borderline psychotic, Jessica is able to relate to her husband only during scenes of childish game playing that closely resemble folies à deux; such scenes, although they cast some doubt on Hugo’s sanity, shed little light on his possible motivations. Perhaps the major weakness of the play is that Hugo, for all his clinical interest as a psychological phenomenon, is simply not sufficiently interesting as a character to involve the spectator’s interest in his possible thoughts as he pulls the trigger. His final, retrospective gesture of heroism—or suicide—thus strikes many audiences as either anticlimactic or gratuitous, robbing Dirty Hands of much of its apparently intended impact. Too particularized, and in a negative way, to be seen as Everyman, yet viewed too closely for Brechtian objectivity, the character of Hugo ultimately fails to bear the burden of exposition placed on his slender shoulders by an author then enamored of psychological case histories. Heavily cut and adapted almost beyond recognition, Dirty Hands enjoyed a long, successful run in New York during the late 1940’s as Red Gloves, an “anti-communist play by Jean-Paul Sartre.” Sartre, believing his intentions to have been betrayed, protested vigorously, but the play went on to achieve a reputation perhaps ill-deserved. In the original French, Dirty Hands remains a better play than it at first may seem, but it is surely not a political play except to the extent that Sartre, like any effective satirist, casts aspersions on all sides. The Devil and the Good Lord • Sartre’s subsequent stage effort, The Devil and the Good Lord, is perhaps best remembered as the last play to be mounted by the eminent

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director Louis Jouvet, who died some two months after the play opened to somewhat mixed reviews. Perhaps overly ambitious both in theme and scope, The Devil and the Good Lord shares the historical setting and characters of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand (pb. 1773; Goetz of Berlichingen, with the Iron Hand, 1799), which Sartre scrupulously avoided reading in order to guarantee, or prove, the authenticity of his own dramatic statement. Although considered by some critics to be among the author’s finest dramatic efforts, Sartre’s portrayal of Goetz and his uprising has generally failed to withstand the test of time and is seldom read or revived. Kean • Somewhat more successful is Kean, adapted from Alexandre Dumas, père’s version of the British actor’s life at the request of the French actor Pierre Brasseur, who had appeared in Jouvet’s production of The Devil and the Good Lord. Couched, like the original, within the framework of a play-within-a-play, Sartre’s adaptation successfully transforms the Romantic hero of Dumas into an anguished existentialist in search of his own authenticity. As interpreted by Brasseur, the play was not without its comic dimensions, and Sartre, thus encouraged, went on to attempt an original comedy for the first time since The Respectful Prostitute. Nekrassov • The result was Nekrassov, a slight but generally successful satire of politics, the press, and the institution of celebrity. The protagonist, a petty criminal and confidence man named Georges de Valéra, endeavors to avoid capture by assuming the identity of one Nekrassov, a high-ranking Soviet politician who has mysteriously dropped out of sight. Abetted by the staff of a highly conservative evening newspaper, the fugitive plays his role of defector with consummate skill, only to find his authenticity compromised by right-wing political interests even after the real Nekrassov is discovered to have been sunning himself in the Crimea on a longoverdue vacation. Given the need for a Nekrassov who has defected to the West, de Valéra finds himself trapped in an unwelcome and increasingly uncomfortable role. For all its merits, Nekrassov nevertheless fell somewhat below the level of enlightened entertainment that audiences and critics alike had come to expect from Sartre, and in what turned out to be his last original play, Sartre appeared determined to offer something more. The Condemned of Altona • The Condemned of Altona, first performed in 1959, ranks by any standard among Sartre’s more impressive and memorable efforts, treading a thin line between realism and allegory in its evocation of contemporary history. The central character of the play is Franz von Gerlach, an erstwhile Nazi officer who has spent the postwar years in the apparent grip of madness, carefully hidden from view by his wealthy and influential family, while it is assumed by everyone else that he has died in Argentina. Determined to justify at all costs behavior that is now deemed abominable, Franz continually explains himself in taped addresses to the “tribunal of history,” represented by hallucinated crabs on the ceiling that Franz sees as the future inhabitants of Earth. Like Dirty Hands, The Condemned of Altona is perhaps excessively long and somewhat confused in its plotting; yet it amply justifies the reputation that Sartre had earned with his earliest plays. Sartre’s last original play repays the spectator’s attention with an ingenious, closely reasoned inquiry into the lessons of contemporary history. Although explicitly set in post-Nazi Germany, with strong topical allusions to the French presence in Algeria as well, The Condemned of Altona, like Dirty Hands, deals less with politics than with

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psychology. Franz von Gerlach, elder son of a wealthy shipbuilder, initially resists the Nazis with both his conscience and his deeds, until he learns to his chagrin that his inherited wealth renders true resistance impossible. Thereafter, he goes to war against the Allies with every expectation of meeting an early death in battle. Instead, he survives just long enough to inflict the torture of two captured Russian partisans and thereafter to become the Butcher of Smolensk, a full-fledged Nazi war criminal. Believed dead, Franz has in fact spent the better part of fifteen years in the shelter of his family home, protected from the world (in all senses of the term) by an apparent wall of madness. The only member of the family who even sees him in his attic lair is his sister Leni, with whom he has long since conceived an incestuous relationship. Leni, whose personality has by now all but fused with his own, participates willingly in his delirium and nurtures his illusion that the war is still in progress, with Germany losing all its wealth and strength to the Allies. It is the elder von Gerlach’s impending death from cancer that causes a long overdue rent in the antisocial fabric of Franz’s isolation. Determined that he and his elder son should die together, the old man begins hatching desperate schemes to entice Franz out of hiding. In the main, these efforts involve his daughter-in-law Johanna, with whom the crafty old fellow correctly predicts that Franz will fall in love. As the outside world begins to invade his life in the person of Johanna, it becomes increasingly clear to characters and spectator alike that Franz’s insanity is largely willful, if indeed not totally feigned. As a basically decent man formed in a tradition of Protestant faith and practice, Franz simply cannot bring himself to admit that he has been the Butcher of Smolensk. Instead, he recites the “last messages of a dying Germany” to an imagined audience of crabs on the ceiling, taking care to tape his messages for posterity. Presumably, in Franz’s semilucid consciousness, the inhuman crustaceans represent the future inhabitants of earth, successors to a humankind that is about to bungle its last chance. As in Dirty Hands, exposition occurs largely in vivid flashbacks, evolving toward a crisis in the present as Franz learns that the war is over and Johanna, who has just succeeded in fanning Franz’s last latent spark of humanity, renounces him forever on learning the guilty secret of his past. The double suicide will then take place as old von Gerlach has planned it, with only his own body to be buried with funeral honors. After all, Franz has been “buried” for years under a headstone bearing his name in Argentina. For all the unwieldiness and implausibility of its plot, The Condemned of Altona is, on balance, a rather more successful and satisfying play than Dirty Hands, owing in part to the generally credible and not-unsympathetic character of Franz. Indeed, the conflict between memory and ideals as one contemplates the unthinkable might well lead to madness, either willful or involuntary. In any event, Franz is a more dimensional and fully realized character than is Hugo Barine of Dirty Hands. Together with Johanna, the spectator, even as he finds Franz ultimately repellent, cannot fail to have found him more than a little fascinating as well. Aided by some of the most compelling dialogue that Sartre had written since No Exit, the play tends to linger in the spectator’s mind, raising questions of guilt and innocence that can never truly be resolved. Indeed, suggests Sartre, the image of humankind in the mid-twentieth century is hardly preferable to that of the crabs on Franz von Gerlach’s ceiling. Whether Sartre intended this play to be his last, it nevertheless closed his playwriting career on an impressive note approximating that of triumph.

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The Trojan Women • By 1959, however, Sartre had all but lost interest in the stage as a vehicle for his thought and expression, preferring instead to practice the type of literary criticism that had occupied him earlier in his career. The Trojan Women, his adaptation of Euripides’ Trfiades (415 b.c.e.; The Trojan Women, 1782), first performed in 1965, contains relatively few personal touches and was, in any case, his last attempt at writing for the stage. Other major works long fiction: La Nausée, 1938 (Nausea, 1949); L’Âge de raison, 1945 (The Age of Reason, 1947); Le Sursis, 1945 (The Reprieve, 1947); La Mort dans l’âme, 1949 (Troubled Sleep, 1950; also known as Iron in the Soul; previous three novels collectively known as Les Chemins de la liberté, in English The Roads to Freedom). short fiction: Le Mur, 1939 (The Wall and Other Stories, 1948). nonfiction: L’Imagination, 1936 (Imagination: A Psychological Critique, 1962); Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions, 1939 (The Emotions: Outline of a Theory, 1948); L’Imaginaire: Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination, 1940 (The Psychology of Imagination, 1948); L’Être et le néant, 1943 (Being and Nothingness, 1956); L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme, 1946 (Existentialism, 1947; also as Existentialism and Humanism, 1948); Réflexions sur la question juive, 1946 (Anti-Semite and Jew, 1948); Baudelaire, 1947 (English translation, 1950); Qu’est-ce que la littérature?, 1947 (What Is Literature?, 1949); Situations I-X, 19471975 (10 volumes; partial translation 1965-1977); Saint-Genet: Comédien et martyr, 1952 (Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, 1963); Critique de la raison dialectique, précédé de question de méthode, 1960 (Search for a Method, 1963); Critique de la raison dialectique, I: Théorie des ensembles pratiques, 1960 (Critique of Dialectical Reason, I: Theory of Practical Ensembles, 1976); Les Mots, 1964 (The Words, 1964); L’Idiot de la famille: Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857, 1971-1972 (3 volumes; partial translation The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857, 1981, 1987); Un Théâtre de situations, 1973 (Sartre on Theater, 1976); Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre, 1983 (The War Diaries of Jean-Paul Sartre: November, 1939-March, 1940, 1984); Le Scénario Freud, 1984 (The Freud Scenario, 1985). Bibliography Anderson, Thomas C. Sartre’s Two Ethics: From Authenticity to Integral Humanity. Chicago: Open Court, 1993. This work, while focusing on Sartre’s ethics, provides an explanation of the themes that pervaded his dramatic works. Bibliography and index. Bloom, Harold, ed. Jean-Paul Sartre. Phildelphia: Chelsea House, 2001. A collection of critical essays on Sartre, with an introduction by Harold Bloom. Bibliography and index. Howells, Christina, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Sartre. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. A comprehensive reference work devoted to Sartre and his life, times, and literary works. Bibliography and index. _______. Sartre. Modern Literatures in Perspective. New York: Longman, 1995. Editor Howells presents critical analyses of the literary works of Sartre. Bibliography and index. Kamber, Richard. On Sartre. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2000. Although this volume focuses on Sartre as philosopher, it explicates the thought and viewpoints that permeate his literary works. Bibliography. McBride, William L., ed. Existentialist Literature and Aesthetics. Vol. 7 in Sartre and Existentialism. New York: Garland, 1997. This volume, part of a multivolume series on

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Sartre and his philosophy, examines his literary works and how existentialism was expressed in them. Bibliography. _______. Sartre’s Life, Times, and Vision du Monde. Vol. 3 in Sartre and Existentialism. New York: Garland, 1997. This volume, one in a multivolume work on Sartre and existentialism, looks at his life, the times in which he lived and wrote, and his worldview. Bibliography. Thody, Philip Malcolm Waller. Jean-Paul Sartre. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. An examination of Sartre as novelist, with some reference to his dramatic works. Wardman, Harold W. Jean-Paul Sartre: The Evolution of His Thought and Art. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1992. A critical examination of the literary works of Sartre that traces his philosophical development through his writings. Bibliography and index. David B. Parsell

Friedrich Schiller Friedrich Schiller

Born: Marbach, Württemberg (now in Germany); November 10, 1759 Died: Weimar, Sace-Weimar (now in Germany); May 9, 1805 Principal drama • Die Räuber, pb. 1781, pr. 1782 (The Robbers, 1792); Die Verschwörung des Fiesko zu Genua, pr., pb. 1783 (Fiesco: Or, The Genoese Conspiracy, 1796); Kabale und Liebe, pr., pb. 1784 (Cabal and Love, 1795); Don Carlos, Infant von Spanien, pr., pb. 1787 (Don Carlos, Infante of Spain, 1798); Wallensteins Lager, pr. 1798, pb. 1800 (The Camp of Wallenstein, 1846); Die Piccolomini, pr. 1799, pb. 1800 (The Piccolominis, 1800); Wallensteins Tod, pr. 1799, pb. 1800 (The Death of Wallenstein, 1800); Wallenstein, pr. 1799, pb. 1800 (trilogy includes The Camp of Wallenstein, The Piccolominis, and The Death of Wallenstein); Maria Stuart, pr. 1800, pb. 1801 (Mary Stuart, 1801); Die Jungfrau von Orleans, pr. 1801, pb. 1802 (The Maid of Orleans, 1835); Die Braut von Messina: Oder, Die feindlichen Brüder, pr., pb. 1803 (The Bride of Messina, 1837); Wilhelm Tell, pr., pb. 1804 (William Tell, 1841); Historical Dramas, pb. 1847; Early Dramas and Romances, pb. 1849; Dramatic Works, pb. 1851 Other literary forms • George Joachim Göschen in Leipzig published most of Friedrich Schiller’s early work, including the early plays and the Historischer Kalender für Damen (1790, 1791), which included many of Schiller’s essays and was his only bestseller during his lifetime. After Don Carlos, Infante of Spain, Schiller’s plays were published by Johann Friedrich Cotta in Tübingen. Schiller’s poems, reviews, and short stories appeared in literary journals such as the Musenalmanach (edited by Schiller), Die Horen (edited by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Schiller in Weimar), Die Thalia, and Merkur. Schiller’s letters, published posthumously, not only are an indispensable key to the philosophical and historical background of his works, but also are autobiographical documents evocative of the man Schiller, his daily life, and his great gift for friendship. Schiller’s collected works are available in several editions. Achievements • Friedrich Schiller’s audience might not have been ready to make the transition from the wildly emotional Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) of his first play, The Robbers, to the more philosophical and idealistic fervor of subsequent plays, but Schiller won them over with his ever more complex dramas. Schiller’s work spans two literary periods, Sturm und Drang and classicism, and it paves the way for a third, Romanticism. At the same time, his work clearly has ties to the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on the perfectibility of humankind. In Schiller’s work, German idealism attained its highest form. The lonely poet who wrote from his sickbed, however, never lost sight of the wishes of his audience. After his plays had accustomed later generations to his system of thought, Schiller became for them a poet of the people. He was acclaimed particularly by the middle class of the nineteenth century, which did not appear to notice the radical quality of freedom demanded by Schiller. Schiller threw himself into his sources and settings, mostly historical, in order to demonstrate their true range and potential—what they might have been. His plays, showing his dialectical consciousness, express the struggle between reality and the ideal. His heroes are larger than life, their struggles overshadowing their time. The fi773

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ery younger generation was his first audience, but his idealism determined the intellectual horizon of the era. The romanticists turned away from Schiller’s political idealism to pursue mysticism and the indefinable, but even among them, Friedrich Hölderlin and Novalis were profoundly influenced by Schiller. The German drama was dominated by Schiller’s plays for almost a century, until the advent of naturalism. Then the theater of expressionism rediscovered the revolutionary passion and the power of Schiller’s tragic pathos. Georg Kaiser and Bertolt Brecht, among others, brought Schiller’s influence to bear on twentieth century drama. Schiller equated the concept of (Library of Congress) patriotism with such ideals as truth, beauty, nobility, love, freedom, and immortality. He bound all these ideals with a religious sense of duty, as in his latter dramas, in which history appears as the fulfillment of a divine plan. Schiller was a subject of several absolute monarchs in a time of democratic and republican revolutions and reactionary wars and upheavals. He created, for the Germany that did not yet exist, a model of the political tragedy. In it the hero is seen not only as an energetic but also as a suffering human being, living out a metaphysical tragedy, a conflict between ideals and fate. Schiller gave German literature basic concepts of structure, both of the art of tragedy and of aesthetics. The history of tragedy to the present day has been, to a great extent, a confrontation with Schiller. Biography • The early years of Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller were deeply imprinted with the tyranny of two fathers. Johann Kaspar Schiller, barber-surgeon, military officer, and later, Royal Head Forester, ruled his family with an iron hand. Duke Karl Eugen, founder of a military academy for promising young men, considered himself the father of the talented boys he chose to attend the school. After two invitations, Johann Schiller no longer had any choice about sending his son, who had wanted to become a pastor, to the duke’s academy. The academy was strict in a sense of the word no longer meaningful today. Every moment of the day was organized. No boy had any time to himself, not even on the compulsory “pleasure” strolls. Army officers maintained discipline. Duke Karl had a discriminating eye for talented men; many of the teachers he brought to his new school were gifted. Professor Abel, for example, who taught Latin and Greek, expounded principles of the Enlightenment, particularly a quest for the ideal not dependent on religious conviction. The duke’s academy was unusual for its time because it admitted both Protestant and Roman Catholic boys. The atmosphere of religious tolerance, when combined

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with the secular idealism of the Enlightenment, tended to dilute the students’ religious convictions, including Schiller’s. Young Schiller was Professor Abel’s finest student of Latin and Greek. He learned French partly to communicate with some of his fellow students from the French-speaking section of the Duchy of Württemberg. Soon, as the reputation of the school grew, boys began to appear from northern German areas, Switzerland, Scandinavia, and even from England. Young Schiller studied law, but it was the duke’s choice, not his, and after a few years, illness began making serious inroads into his accomplishments. As a result he was allowed to study medicine, including surgery. Anatomy classes never bothered Schiller, and it is possible that he escaped rigorous supervision because the military watchdogs were less vigilant in the dissection room. He was not permitted to visit his family more than one or two days a year. These ties were cut early; by age twelve, he was already at the academy. By age twenty, Schiller had written one dissertation, which had been turned down as too speculative and theoretical, had seen himself relegated to another year at the academy to write another research paper, and had finished a manuscript of his first play, The Robbers, which was well in hand. The battle of sons against fathers, both in a political sense and in a familial sense, finds expression in this wildly emotional play. Above everything else, however, the protagonist is ruled by a morality that is not less strict for being his own, rather than society’s. The play was written clandestinely, probably by candlelight late at night. Schiller kept it concealed, except from a few friends. After presentation of a more technical dissertation, Schiller was graduated. Although he had every reason to expect favorable treatment from the duke, he was assigned a position as military surgeon, no higher than his unstudied father. Schiller was not well paid, was extremely restricted, and was bored. He borrowed money to publish The Robbers privately, the beginning of a lifetime of worry with creditors. He made several trips out of the country to Mannheim, to present his play for performance. Sometimes he traveled with official permission, sometimes not. The subject of his play was considered dangerously controversial in its contemporary context. Because Mannheim’s censor might not have permitted it to be performed, Schiller had to rewrite the play as if it were happening in the 1400’s, the end of the age of knighthood. Although Schiller had based his story on a contemporary robber chieftain, the theater director insisted that bands of marauders were simply not believable in eighteenth century Europe. After the performance of The Robbers in Mannheim, Duke Karl Eugen forbade Schiller to publish anything further except medical research. Schiller fled the country, became a nearly penniless refugee in Mannheim until he was given a position of playwright for the theater, then contracted malaria and nearly died. His health, never robust, was permanently undermined. He was not able to fulfill some of the conditions of his contract, and the play he did complete, Fiesco: Or, The Genoese Conspiracy, puzzled the Mannheim audience with its political subtlety. They had been expecting more bombast. Schiller’s contract was not renewed. Schiller spent the next years, during the writing of Cabal and Love and Don Carlos, Infante of Spain, moving from the refuge of one set of friends to another, ever more deeply in debt, often despairing of finding a home. During this time he met Christian Gottfried Körner. Their letters offer insight into Schiller’s life and thought. The friendship lasted for the rest of his life. In 1787, Duke Karl August of Saxony-Weimar, impressed by Schiller’s historical essays, called him to the new university at Jena and later knighted him for his accom-

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plishments. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a high official in the duchy, had suggested that Schiller be named professor of history. He did not know Schiller, but as time passed Goethe and Schiller were to become working partners, inspiration for each other, and close friends. Schiller’s and Goethe’s works from this point bear the mark of each other’s genius, as well as their own. Schiller’s work also influenced Wilhelm von Humboldt, Heinrich von Kleist, Hölderlin, and Novalis. He was kindness itself to the visiting Madame de Stäel, who “discovered” for the French, and ultimately for the rest of the world, the giants of German classicism, Schiller and Goethe. During the Weimar years, Schiller was ill so often that he seemed to live in bed. The Wallenstein trilogy, Mary Stuart, The Maid of Orleans, William Tell, and the others were composed in the rare moments Schiller felt well enough to work. He had to stop lecturing at the university because his small store of energy would not permit it. At the age of forty-six he died, presumably of a combination of pneumonia and tuberculosis. Analysis • It is not necessary to have studied Friedrich Schiller’s theoretical writings or Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781; Critique of Pure Reason, 1838), which influenced him profoundly, to understand Schiller’s works, but it is helpful to understand two concepts that are the source of tragic conflict in most of his plays: the concept of the “naïve” and of the “sentimental.” For each word, a special sense is intended: “Sentimental” means reflective, analytical, conscious of oneself, intellectual; “naïve” means unselfconscious, natural, original, pure, unreflective. There can be sentimental modes of existence as well as sentimental art. In referring to people, Schiller used the terms “dignity” (roughly corresponding to sentimentality) and “grace” (naïveté). Homer’s is an example of naïve art—that is, an outpouring of natural gifts. Eighteenth century art, with its conventions and rules, could only be sentimental. In terms of the artistic process, although the original act of creation is always naïve, it acquires a sentimental aspect as it is analyzed, structured, and contemplated by the artist. A naïve work of art is the outpouring of genius. A sentimental work of art has goals. Where a sentimental work of art has a moral, a naïve work of art is itself moral. Art is to be valued for its own sake and by its own rules. Schiller’s essays Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, 1795 (On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1845), Über Anmut und Würde (1793; On Grace and Dignity, 1875), and Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung (1795; On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, 1845), delineate this system of thought exemplified in the plays. The Robbers • In Schiller’s first play, The Robbers, critic Ilse Graham sees a version of the biblical Jacob and Esau conflict. The younger brother, who by virtue of his talent and charm has unintentionally stolen the father’s affection, is tricked by the cunning, analytical older brother, and is eventually disinherited and disowned. Stunned, the younger brother takes charge of a group of marauders, looking to avenge social and political injustice in a very concrete manner. Meanwhile, the older brother uses the political power of feudalism to ruin the already weak father, while keeping the feared younger brother at bay. Although the robber chieftain makes a considerable effort to disclaim responsibility for his men’s atrocities by holding himself aloof from scenes of carnage, his realization that he has become incurably tainted with moral degeneracy— that there is no way back—forms the central crisis of the play. In this moment of reflection on his actions, the robber chieftain crosses the boundary from naïve to sentimental. Like Hamlet, he contemplates suicide, but decides from pride in his own greatness to live out his bitter choice to the end: “I am my Heaven and my Hell.” “Revenge is my trade.” “Two such as I would bring down the whole structure of the civilized world.”

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Fiesco • The masks in Schiller’s next play, Fiesco, are not confined to the operalike costume ball of the first scene. Andreas Doria, illegal dictator of Genua, is about to be toppled by another member of the hereditary oligarchy, a Machiavellian republican leader named Fiesco. Fiesco must be seen as an artist, rather than a politician, for he manipulates people much as a stage director moves actors. As the aesthetic mode of existence in which human genius can reach its full potential is possible only in the perfect freedom of play, Fiesco plays with his opponents, just as Schiller plays with the plot, drawing out the denouement with one complication after another. Fiesco, a sentimental artist in the sense of combining natural genius and reflection, is a charismatic villain with more than a hint of the subsequent century’s Napoleon Bonaparte. If the robber chieftain’s downfall was his naïve reaction—choosing outlawry—to a blow of fate, then Fiesco’s downfall is his excessive commitment to sentimental artistry, playing with his own coup until at last he is murdered by a republican fellow-conspirator. Incredibly, the assassin rushes away from the scene to the side of the previous dictator. This is the last stroke of Schiller’s “republican tragedy.” Cabal and Love • Cabal and Love includes many features of the comedy. Before Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s bourgeois tragedy Miss Sara Sampson (1755; English translation, 1933) and the subsequent Emilia Galotti (1772; English translation, 1786), only members of the nobility served as protagonists in tragedy. The middle classes were considered more suitable for comedy. Schiller, a lifelong believer in the aristocracy of art and intellect, rather than birth, brought a Shakespearean mixture of comic doings and tragic conflict to the stage in Cabal and Love. In this play, the potential of ideal love cannot be realized. Those who would pursue it are destroyed, on one level by their membership in diverse social classes, on another by their membership in the corrupt human race. The play, retitled by the actor August Wilhelm Iffland, had been named after the main character, Luise Millerin, the first figure in Schiller’s dramas to exemplify the schöne Seele (beautiful soul). Just as a naïve work of art is beautiful in and of itself, so the beautiful soul is the epitome of the naïve in a human life, a naturally pure and unspoiled being. Cabal and Love contains some of Schiller’s harshest social criticism. A despotic court conspires to deprive the lovers of any vestige of hope, seeking to destroy their vision of love and each other as well as to deprive them of the opportunity to marry. In another abuse of courtly power, the prince manages to pay for his latest gift of jewels to his mistress by selling many hundreds of young recruits to the English to be sent to fight in America. After the first few who protest are shot, their brains splashing on the pavement, the rest cheer, “Off to America! Hurrah!” Don Carlos, Infante of Spain • The transitional play Don Carlos, Infante of Spain has an uneven plot, but is one of Schiller’s most popular plays. “Geben Sie Gedankenfreiheit!” (give freedom of thought) a character demands of the startled King Philip of Spain in perhaps the most famous single line in all of German literature. As the scene develops, however, it becomes obvious that such a change would bring about the inevitable end of absolutism, and that on the other hand, anyone who became king would of necessity become a Philip. It was not until the Wallenstein trilogy that Schiller showed that the unwillingness to act is a fateful action in itself. Thought by many to be Schiller’s greatest work, the trilogy covers four days in the life of Wallenstein, duke of Friedland and supreme com-

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mander of the Imperial armies, during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). Having started his career as a naïve, naturally gifted military genius, Wallenstein was deposed as general for a period of time as a result of political conniving by the emperor and others. As things began to go badly for the Imperial armies in the so-called religious wars between Protestants and Roman Catholics, Wallenstein was recalled. At the time of his fall from power, however, the general became aware of the treachery and ungratefulness of the emperor in contrast to his own loyalty and incomparable achievements for the Roman Catholic side. All of this has taken place before the action of the trilogy: Wallenstein has already made the transition from naïve to sentimental. As Schiller depicts him in the drama, he relies on the counsel of the stars, broods on destiny, and negotiates with the Swedes (Protestants) to change his and his armies’ allegiance, thus forcing the emperor to accept a compromised peace. The Camp of Wallenstein • The calculating realist Wallenstein never appears in the first play, The Camp of Wallenstein, which shows the bright color and comedy of the military universe solely subject to, and dependent on, Wallenstein. In legends and anecdotes, the troops pay homage to their general, the charismatic god of the camp. Neither language, patriotism, nor religion can serve as a common point of allegiance for the camp, only Wallenstein. Although Wallenstein’s greatness is obvious, he is not a virtuous man. The intellectual, sentimental characteristics of the general come into sharp contrast with the naïve qualities of Max Piccolomini, a young officer who idolizes Wallenstein. For Max, the final judge of any matter is the heart, which in Schiller’s works is the organ of religion as well as love, a direct connection with a divine realm. The Piccolominis • In the second play, The Piccolominis, Wallenstein’s downfall has been planned and ordered by the emperor. All that remains is to determine the manner of execution. At the same time Wallenstein, ignorant of approaching doom, is fully prepared to sacrifice the ideal love between two young people very dear to him, his daughter Thekla and Max Piccolomini, in order to arrange a politically propitious marriage for her. Max and Thekla, two beautiful souls, speak with the voice of the playwright in sadly prophesying the general’s downfall at the end of the play. If The Camp of Wallenstein is a comedy, then The Piccolominis, with its plot exposition lacking fulfillment, is reminiscent of William Shakespeare’s historical plays. The Death of Wallenstein • The Death of Wallenstein is a tragedy. At the time he was working on the Wallenstein trilogy, Schiller translated a play by Jean Racine. He seems to have taken seriously literary journal editor Christoph Martin Wieland’s call for German drama to adhere more closely to Aristotelian unities of time and place. Also, by this time Schiller and Goethe, with Egmont (1788; English translation, 1841) and Don Carlos, Infante of Spain, had established iambic pentameter as the meter of classical German tragedy. Mary Stuart • Mary Stuart, containing a face-to-face confrontation never recorded in history between Elizabeth I and the Scottish queen, is also restricted in time and place, as in classical French tragedy. Schiller portrays the two queens as young women, Mary basically naïve—guilty of sexual transgressions and sins of impulsiveness—Elizabeth conniving and sentimental. Both love and are wooed by the same man, Leicester. Where enough humility and docility from Mary toward Elizabeth might have saved

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Mary from her death sentence, the Scottish queen seizes the freedom to assert her integrity and pride. Some critics, including Ilse Graham, see the two queens as two halves of the same being or personality, neither able to function without the other. The Maid of Orleans • “This play flowed from my heart,” Schiller wrote in 1802 about The Maid of Orleans, “and it ought to speak to the hearts of the audience. It is not always true, unfortunately, that others have a heart.” Where The Death of Wallenstein and Mary Stuart had demanded intellectual discipline from the playwright, the material concerning Joan of Arc also enjoyed his affection and sympathy. Goethe considered it Schiller’s best play. Although Schiller wrote The Maid of Orleans in Weimar, it opened in Leipzig, Berlin, and Hamburg. Duke Karl August of Saxony-Weimar thought the play ridiculous in comparison to Voltaire’s satiric mock-epic poem La Pucelle d’Orleans (1755; La Pucelle: Or, the Maid of Orleans, 1785-1786). In addition, the only actress in Weimar suitable for playing the lead was the duke’s mistress. The duke did not want her lack of qualifications for the role of a holy maiden to become the subject of gossip. Schiller did not strive for an episodic style and frequent changes of scene, as did the romantic Ludwig Tieck in his Leben und Tod der heiligen Genoveva (pb. 1800, pr. 1807). Actually, Schiller missed the simplicity and structural unity of the Mary Stuart material. To convey the Joan of Arc material, Schiller had to let the demands of the plot determine the structure of the play, a procedure bringing him closer again to Shakespearean than to French models. Even so, Schiller felt free to let the Joan of his play differ from the historical Joan, probably most markedly in the manner of her death. Instead of a witchcraft trial and a heretic’s death at the stake, Schiller’s Joan dies a victorious, glorious death from the wounds of battle. Schiller’s Joan speaks more words of prophecy than the historical Joan, taking on some of the qualities of a heathen seeress. Saints Catharine and Margaret, who appeared to the historical Joan, are replaced by the repeated dream of the Virgin as Queen of Heaven. Where the historical Joan, although garbed in battle dress, limited herself to carrying a banner at the head of her troops, Schiller’s Joan is commanded by God to kill the enemy mercilessly, and she does so with supernatural efficiency and cold-bloodedness. The English, typified by Montgomery, call her “terrible, dreadful.” Some critics saw in the play Schiller’s intention to let the ideal qualities of form triumph over the violence of the plot in order to propel the audience into a sudden insight about the nature of beauty. Schiller used some techniques of the romantics in orchestrating the spoken voice, moving from dramatic speeches to lyric arias with their additional musical element, rhyme. There are iambic and folk-song stanzas, but also lines reminiscent of the classical hexameter and trimeter. Schiller must have called his tragedy “romantic” because of the presence of miracles and the story’s proximity to medieval Christian mythology. The play also contains the motif of national liberation dear to the romantics. Although Schiller’s Joan is a heroic figure, she is not a sympathetic protagonist. She is characterized by a kind of inhuman heartlessness, required of her by God, but also proclaimed by her repeatedly. The pure and obedient shepherdess soon becomes an amazon, who even calls herself a pitiless spirit of terror. In the heat of battle she says, “My armor does not cover a heart. . . . Defend yourself; death is calling you. . . . Don’t appeal to my sex; don’t call me woman.” She is in the human world, but not of it, her allegiance and activities forming a direct conduit from a supernatural realm. Indeed, The Maid of Orleans, according to some critics, shows the fate of the transcendent in the

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midst of a vain, impure, degrading world; its reconciliation with and return to its origin forms the culmination. Schiller himself stated explicitly that the Joan of the last act and the shepherdess Joan of the prologue reflect each other. In 1801, he wrote in a letter to Goethe: I predict a good and proper effect for my last act; it explains the first act, and so the snake bites itself on the tail. Because my hero stands alone, quite deserted by the gods in her misfortune, quite free and independent, her worthiness for the role of prophet is demonstrated. The end of the fourth act is very theatrical, and the thundering deus ex machina will bring about the desired result. The end of the fourth act, when the unprotesting Joan is cast out from the French army, is indeed theatrical, but also provides the point of departure for the process of tragedy: previous worldly adoration and internally, a steep fall. On the one side is the sumptuous coronation parade led by Joan with her banner of the Holy Virgin, on the other, the subsequent bitter accusations. Joan’s speechlessness gives rise to the belief by all that the accusations are true, but Joan cannot deny that the enemy is in her heart—not the Devil but the Englishman Lionel. She is deeply conscious of her transgression against God, not in the form of witchcraft but in the form of love. Seldom are Schiller’s characters completely silent. Luise Miller in Cabal and Love is an example. Her silence might be seen as powerlessness at the beginning of the play, later the result of a forced oath to deny her love, and finally as an expression of helplessness. Joan is intransigent in her silence, which is emphasized by the clap of thunder from on high. Unfortunately, this sign from Heaven is just as subject to misinterpretation as Joan’s speechlessness. Joan is mute as a sign of the fissure in her soul: She belongs neither in this world nor in the next. That is the tragic moment in this play, Joan’s total isolation; not even those who love her and believe in her are able to break through it. Everyone believes that she is guilty of witchcraft, including her infatuated companion-in-exile. Thus, Joan remains uncanny—whether in love or hate—and inaccessible to other people, a figure from an alien world, yet human enough to awaken passion in others and succumb to it herself. Joan’s silence is also an indication that she accepts her downfall and humiliation as a just punishment for her transgression, although the nature of her sin is completely misunderstood by her human judges. The process of reflection by which she arrives at this point shows that the faculty of sentimentality is added to her previous naïveté, much the same as the sentimentality of Mary Stuart. Although not guilty of the crime with which she is charged, like Mary, Joan accepts the punishment to expiate another sin. Just as Mary Stuart receives absolution in the religious rites of the execution scene, so Joan, the outcast, finds her way back to God. By honoring and accepting her just punishment Joan again becomes God’s prophet and messenger. Her love for Lionel cannot distract her from the immediacy of France’s peril and her mission. The final scene of the play is not one of martyrdom but of resplendence. Joan is not seen as a figure of Christian charity, but rather as a warrior as fierce and deadly as was Achilles. Schiller created her from many sources, not only from the historical Joan but also from Shakespeare, Greek antiquity, German classicism and romanticism, the Christian Middle Ages, and the Old Testament. Through Joan of Arc’s glorious death, Schiller exalted the tragedy to a religious rite. Joan is immortal because art triumphs with her over earthly restrictions and imperfections, because humanity sees in her its own potential for transcendence. Schiller’s morality, like his characteristic victories over illness in order to create,

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had a Promethean cast. He was consistently moral to the point of impetuosity, trying to transform his bourgeois era into an age receptive to the demanding aesthetic values and radical idealism of his work. It seemed to him the duty of human beings surrounded by a materialist and rationalist environment, on an earth haunted by evil and lacking in religion, to rediscover divine values and concepts that had lain hidden, and to bring them out and to make them visible in a new way. The tragedy as religious celebration would serve this purpose. In tragedy, Schiller believed, ideals celebrate their purest triumph over the material world. William Tell • If William Tell seems like a collection of clichés to people in the Germanspeaksing world, it is because this greatly beloved last play of Schiller’s is perhaps the most quoted work of German literature. Schiller’s lines have been repeated so often for so many decades and generations that they have become part of the German language, just as many lines of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (pr. c. 1600-1601) might hardly seem original to a speaker of English. Schiller’s William Tell was originally performed March 17, 1804, under the personal direction of Schiller’s great collaborator and friend, Goethe. So beloved did the play become that in a performance at the court of William II, emperor of Germany, the emperor and the entire audience stood during the oath-taking scene, repeating from memory with the actors the words of the pledge of allegiance of republican Switzerland. In this, Schiller’s own favorite play, one sees that his realization of ideal humanity is the unity of nature and the psyche. Where the conflict of a natural drive (love) with heroic ideals nearly destroyed Joan of Arc in The Maid of Orleans, the unity of naïve and sentimental forces in the hero moves William Tell away from tragedy and into the realm of pageantry or ritual. Other major works long fiction: Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre, 1786 (The Criminal, in Consequence of Lost Reputation, 1841); Der Geisterseher, 1789 (The Ghost-Seer: Or, The Apparitionist, 1795). poetry: Anthologie auf das Jahr 1782, 1782; Xenien, 1796 (with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe); Gedichte, 1800, 1803; The Poems of Schiller, 1851; The Ballads and Shorter Poems of Fredrick v. Schiller, 1901. nonfiction: Die Schaubühne als eine moralische Anstalt betrachtet, 1784 (The Theater as a Moral Institution, 1845); Historischer Kalender für Damen, 1790, 1791; Geschichte des dreissigjährigen Krieges, 1791-1793 (3 volumes; History of the Thirty Years’ War, 1799); Über den Grund des Vergnügens an tragischen Gegenständen, 1792 (On the Pleasure in Tragic Subjects, 1845); Über das Pathetische, 1793 (On the Pathetic, 1845); Über Anmut und Würde, 1793 (On Grace and Dignity, 1845); Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, 1795 (On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1845); Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung, 1795-1796 (On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, 1845); Über das Erhabene, 1801 (On the Sublime, 1845); Briefwechsel Zwischen Schiller und Goethe, 1829 (The Correspondence Between Schiller and Goethe, 1845); Aesthetical and Philosophical Essays, 1845; Schillers Briefwechsel mit Körner von 1784 bis zum Tode Schillers, 1847 (Schiller’s Correspondence with Körner, 1849). miscellaneous: Sämmtliche Werke, 1812-1815 (12 volumes; Complete Works in English, 1870). Bibliography Graham, Ilse. Schiller’s Drama: Talent and Integrity. London: Methuen, 1974. Graham provides an analysis of Schiller’s plays, including The Robbers and Mary Stuart. He looks at both content and technique. Bibliography.

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Hammer, Stephanie Barbé. Schiller’s Wound: The Theater of Trauma from Crisis to Commodity. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 2001. Hammer examines Schiller’s plays from a psychological standpoint, analyzing the thought behind them. Bibliography and index. Miller, R. D. A Study of Schiller’s “Jungfrau von Orleans.” Harrogate, England: Duchy Press, 1995. Miller provides a close examination of Schiller’s play about Joan of Arc, The Maid of Orleans. Bibliography and index. Pugh, David. Schiller’s Early Dramas: A Critical History. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2000. One volume in the series Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture: Literary Criticism in Perspective. Focuses on the early works of Schiller, their impact and controversies. Reed, T. J. Schiller. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. A biography of the German writer, which sheds light on his writing of dramas. Bibliography and index. Sharpe, Lesley. Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought, and Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Part of the Cambridge Studies in German series, this scholarly study looks at Schiller’s views and how they infused his drama and other works. Bibliography and index. Fredericka A. Schmadel

Peter Shaffer Peter Shaffer

Born: Liverpool, England; May 15, 1926 Principal drama • Five Finger Exercise, pr., pb. 1958; The Private Ear, pr., pb. 1962 (one act); The Public Eye, pr., pb. 1962 (one act); The Merry Roosters Panto, pr. 1963 (music by Stanley Myers, lyrics by Lionel Bart); The Royal Hunt of the Sun, pr., pb. 1964; Black Comedy, pr. 1965, pb. 1967 (one act); The White Liars, pb. 1967, 1968 (one act; originally as White Lies, pr., pb. 1967); Shrivings, pb. 1973 (with Equus; originally as The Battle of Shrivings, pr. 1970); Equus, pr., pb. 1973; Amadeus, pr. 1979, pb. 1980; The Collected Plays of Peter Shaffer, pb. 1982; Yonadab: The Watcher, pr. 1985, pb. 1988; Lettice and Lovage, pr., pb. 1987; The Gift of the Gorgon, pr. 1992, pb. 1993 Other literary forms • Peter Shaffer began his writing career with a teleplay, The Salt Land (1955), and a radio play, The Prodigal Father (1955). Shaffer has also written several novels. With his twin brother, Anthony Shaffer, he wrote The Woman in the Wardrobe (1951), published in England under the collective pen name Peter Antony. The two brothers also collaborated on two more novels: How Doth the Little Crocodile? (1952), likewise issued under the pen name Peter Antony, and Withered Murder (1955), published under both authors’ real names. Macmillan published Withered Murder (1956) and How Doth the Little Crocodile? (1957) in the United States, using the authors’ real names. Shaffer also wrote the screenplays for The Public Eye (1972), Equus (1977), and Amadeus (1984), the last of which won the 1985 Academy Award for Best Screenplay Adaptation. Achievements • Once Peter Shaffer settled on playwriting as a career, most of his plays succeeded on both sides of the Atlantic. Five Finger Exercise, his first work for the stage, earned the London Evening Standard Drama Award for 1958 and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Play of the season in 1960. The one-act comedies The Private Ear and The Public Eye sustained Shaffer’s reputation as a skilled playwright, as did the exceptional pageantry of The Royal Hunt of the Sun. Equus won the Tony Award for Best Play of the 1974-1975 season, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Drama Critics Award. With 1,207 performances on Broadway, Equus ranks among the top twenty-five longestrunning plays in the history of New York theater. Amadeus again took the Evening Standard Drama Award, the Plays and Players Award, and the London Theatre Critics Award for Best Play. The New York production won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award for 1981. The film version of Amadeus won eight Oscars in 1984, including Best Film and Best Adapted Screenplay. In 1987, Shaffer was honored with the title of Commander of the British Empire. Biography • Peter Levin Shaffer was born to Orthodox Jewish parents, Jack and Reka Shaffer, in Liverpool, England, on May 15, 1926, with a twin brother, Anthony. Another brother, Brian, was born in 1929. Anthony is also a writer, author of the prizewinning play Sleuth (pr. 1970). Brian is a biophysicist. 783

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A middle-class British family, the Shaffers moved to London in 1936. World War II brought several relocations, in part because of safety concerns and in part because of the demands of Jack Shaffer’s real estate business. In 1942, Shaffer was enrolled in St. Paul’s School in London. In 1944, the twin brothers were conscripted for duty in the coal mines, working first in Kent, then in Yorkshire. Shaffer entered Trinity College, Cambridge University, on a scholarship in 1947. At Cambridge, Shaffer discovered his talent and taste for writing while editing a college magazine. Taking his degree in history in 1950, he sought employment with various publishers in England, to no avail. He moved to New York in 1951. From a brief stint as a salesperson in a Doubleday bookstore, he moved to a job in the acquisitions section of a branch of the New York Public Library. Shaffer returned to London in 1954 and worked for the music publisher Boosey and Hawkes for about a year. With the broadcast of his teleplay The Salt Land and his radio play The Prodigal Father in 1955, he decided to turn to writing as a full-time career. The 1958 success of Five Finger Exercise at London’s Comedy Theater in the West End brought Shaffer renown as a serious playwright. The play opened in New York in December, 1959, setting a pattern followed by most of his subsequent stage plays. His pair of one-act plays, The Private Ear and The Public Eye, opened in London in 1962 and in New York in 1963. The Christmas season of 1963 saw the production of The Merry Roosters Panto in London. During 1964, Shaffer and Peter Brook worked on a film script of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), but it was not used for the eventual film version of the novel. Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun opened at the National Theatre in Chichester, England, in July, 1964; in London in December of that year; and in New York in October of 1965. At the behest of Sir Laurence Olivier, the director of the National Theatre, Shaffer wrote Black Comedy. It played at Chichester in July, 1965, then in London, and was presented in tandem with White Lies in 1967. This second pair of one-act plays was staged again in London in 1968, by which time Shaffer had rewritten White Lies and retitled it The White Liars. For Shaffer, the 1970’s began with a lull: The Battle of Shrivings opened in London in February, 1970, but did not run for long. July, 1973, however, saw the London premiere of Equus, which in October, 1974, opened in New York for its remarkably long run. When Atheneum issued its edition of Equus in 1973, Shaffer included in it the book Shrivings, his revised version of The Battle of Shrivings, which had not survived onstage. In this general time period, Shaffer also developed the screenplay for the film version of Equus, which was released in 1977. Finishing the 1970’s with the highly successful Equus, Shaffer moved into the 1980’s with the equally noteworthy Amadeus, which opened at the National Theatre, Chichester, in November, 1979, and subsequently opened in London. Shaffer revised his already very successful script during a run of the production in Washington, D.C., prior to its December, 1980, opening at New York’s Broadhurst Theater. A film version was released in 1984 under the direction of Miloš Forman. After the unsuccessful Yonadab, based on biblical themes, Shaffer returned to comedy with a star vehicle written for Maggie Smith, Lettice and Lovage, which received favorable reviews. Shaffer calls New York City home, despite his British citizenship and frequent returns to England. Analysis • Writing for Theatre Arts in February, 1960, Peter Shaffer made a declaration of independence: “Labels aren’t for playwrights.” His independence shows in both

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his life and his art. Shaffer admits in a 1963 article in Transatlantic Review, “All art is autobiographical inasmuch as it refers to personal experience,” but the adolescent torment in Five Finger Exercise and the passions he stages in other works stem from his personal experience only in a general sense. Shaffer does tell of seeing, hearing, or reading of events that trigger ideas for his plays. Seeing, in 1968 and 1969, pro- and antiVietnam War demonstrations in New York and watching the American people agonize over the war led him to write Shrivings. Still, he maintains a degree of distance between his personal life and his plays. John Russell Taylor sees in Five Finger Exercise the sort of detachment other critics agree is characteristic of Shaffer’s work: “The playwright does not seem to be personally involved in his play. . . . This balance of sympathy in a dramatist . . . makes for effective drama.” Within the mainstream of theatrical tradition, Shaffer maintains his artistic independence, varying conventional form or shifting his approach to a theme in almost every play. Five Finger Exercise is a middle-class domestic drama written at a time when numerous domestic dramas were in vogue, but Shaffer did not repeat himself. He moved on to romantic triangles in his one-act plays, then to epic drama with The Royal Hunt of the Sun, to psychological drama in Equus, and to a historical play, Amadeus. Sets of the earlier plays are realistic. The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Equus, and Amadeus, however, use impressionistic sets, rely on varying amounts of flashback technique, and employ varying amounts of coordinate action. Besides varying set types and play genres, Shaffer varies emphasis in theatrical appeal. Sounds or music are important secondary factors in Five Finger Exercise, The Royal Hunt of the Sun, and Equus and are central to the plots of The Private Ear and Amadeus. Seeing in silence is the proposed cure for a troubled marriage in The Public Eye, visual display is lavish in The Royal Hunt of the Sun, and the sight of characters groping and stumbling through the action as though in pitch dark makes Black Comedy a vivid farce. Common trends • Given Shaffer’s drive for fresh rendering of theatrical matter, various trends do appear in his plays. One such trait is cultural or ethnic variety. Possibly, being reared by Orthodox Jewish parents in nominally Protestant England sensitized him to the assets of ethnic identities and the liabilities of stereotypes. Whatever the reason, Shaffer commonly includes multicultural groupings of characters. Five Finger Exercise includes Louise, overly proud of her French ancestry, and Walter, the young German tutor who wants desperately to become a British subject. The protagonist of The Public Eye, Julian Christoforou, is Greek. To emphasize his foreignness, Christoforou was played in the film version by Topol, an Israeli actor. Black Comedy includes both an electrician and a prospective buyer of a young sculptor’s art who are German. Shrivings includes an American secretary and an English poet who spends most of his time on the island of Corfu. Amadeus features an Italian composer in the Austrian court at Vienna, and the dialogue occasionally includes Italian and French exchanges. Generally, Shaffer’s northern European characters are identified with more rational or more placid behavior, while the Mediterranean characters are posed as more vivacious or romantic. Whatever the specific mix in a given play, each cultural alternative usually exposes a deficit in the status quo or brings a valuable influence to compensate for some perceived lack. The Greek private detective, Christoforou, is able to explain to the older, middle-class accountant that the young wife he suspects of infidelity really only needs some excitement in her life with her mate. Martin Dysart, the controlled, rational psychiatrist, tells of traveling each summer through Greece,

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yearning for the wild passion of the ancient festivals of Dionysus. Mozart, bored with writing opera according to the dominant Italian conventions, is glad for a commission from the Austrian King Joseph to write opera in German. Despite the cosmopolitan flavor of Shaffer’s work, his plays are consistently maledominated. Significant conflicts tend to be between males. In The Private Ear, Tchaik loses Doreen to Ted. In The Public Eye, while following the wife is a major factor in the action, it is reported in dialogue between the two men. The wife does appear and interact with her husband and the detective, but she does not have equivalent exposure onstage. The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Equus, and Amadeus all feature conflicts between males. Only in White Lies, one of Shaffer’s less notable efforts, is there a female protagonist. While she achieves a moral victory in that she sees and tells the truth in the end, she is forced to return her fortune-telling fee to the belligerent male antagonist and thereby faces an ethical defeat. In rewriting Shrivings, Shaffer strengthened the conflict by removing Sir Gideon Petrie’s wife altogether, leaving the American secretary, Lois Neal, as the sole female party in a struggle primarily among men. Significantly, Shaffer’s strongest plays have usually included either more female characters or more active female characters than have the less successful plays. Even in their activity, however, the women may not be wholly ideal types. Louise in Five Finger Exercise is a domineering mother. Her daughter Pamela is aware of the family politics but is never permitted significant access to the actual struggles played out among the older members of the family, since she is only fourteen. Black Comedy features young Brindsley contending with Carol, his current and very superficial fiancée, on the night his former lover, Clea, returns. His upstairs neighbor, Miss Furnival, helps build the farce as a typical middle-aged spinster getting tipsy during the action, but she remains a convenient comic stereotype. All three women are actively involved in the plot, and all three have considerable dialogue. The protagonist, though, is a male. Equus and Amadeus, Shaffer’s strongest works, include women as supporting characters. Dysart turns several times to Hester Salomon for emotional support during the course of Equus. Wise and compassionate, she is the most wholesome of Shaffer’s female characters. Constanze Mozart, too, is a support for her husband in Amadeus and is the only woman in the play who has a speaking role. The few others onstage are seen but not heard. Because Shaffer is a twin, Jules Glenn suggests that his various pairs of male characters embody the conflicts and complementary satisfactions typical of twins. Although none of the character-pairs is portrayed as biological twins in the plays, their roles often have parallel aspects. Two men are involved with a single woman in The Private Ear, The Public Eye, and White Lies; two men in Equus, Martin Dysart and his patient Alan Strang, are inadequate in their sexual relationships with women. In Amadeus, both Mozart and Salieri have affairs with Katherina Cavalieri. The Royal Hunt of the Sun features two men who claim the role of a god. Role of self-disclosure • The key to an overview of Shaffer’s work is his talent for revelation of character through self-disclosure. Five Finger Exercise, conventional in many respects, is outstanding for its characters’ multiple levels of self-disclosure, from Stanley, who rants without understanding, to Walter, who understands both the Harringtons’ needs and his own and attempts suicide when fulfillment of his needs seems impossible. Shaffer’s other plays take their depth and texture from this technique, if not their basic purpose. Self-disclosure is the major structural pattern for The

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Royal Hunt of the Sun, Equus, and Amadeus, each of which is presented by a narrator recalling past events. Similarly, Shaffer’s choice of themes as his craft matures leads to a progressive revelation of the human condition. Clive, Shaffer’s first stage protagonist, searches for individual identity and independence. Protagonists in the one-act plays, both the serious and the comic, are generally reaching for satisfactory relationships with other individuals. Leading characters in the major serious plays probe the ambitions, ideals, and institutions of humankind in the world at large. Shaffer’s comments on The Royal Hunt of the Sun reveal a salient concern obvious in that play and others overtly dealing with worship: He is disturbed that “man constantly trivializes the immensity of his experience” and “settles for a Church or Shrine or Synagogue . . . and over and over again puts into the hands of other men the reins of oppression. . . .” Even his earliest play, though portraying domestic rather than political or religious struggles, shows that revelation of character, the self-disclosure essential to informed, mature relationships, makes the individual human being vulnerable to another’s control. Five Finger Exercise • Dennis A. Klein observes that “there is not one happy marriage in all of Shaffer’s plays . . . and the prototype is the marriage between Louise and Stanley Harrington.” Clive Harrington, the protagonist of Five Finger Exercise, is his mother’s pet; he is also the target of his father’s criticism because he lacks “practical” or “useful” interests. Struggling for identity and independence, Clive is never safe in the family bickering. Agreeing with Stanley that the new tutor is a needless expense draws reproach from Louise. Admitting that he is writing a review of a performance of the Greek play Electra triggers one more paternal lecture on the really useful pursuits in life. Clive shows contradictory responses to Walter Langer, the young German whom his mother has hired as the family tutor. Clive needs and wants the contact with an understanding, mature role model. At the same time, he is jealous of his mother’s attraction to Walter, and therefore opposes Walter’s efforts to become part of the Harrington family. Home from Cambridge, Clive drinks to avoid parental control. Walter advises him to get out on his own but declines to travel with him during the coming holidays. Seeing Louise cradle Walter’s head in her arms during a tender moment, Clive reports to Stanley that the two were engaged in lovemaking. Warmed by Walter’s Continental graces—he is fluent in French, plays classical music on the piano and on his phonograph, and brings her wildflowers—Louise enjoys toying with the young man in somewhat the same fashion as she toys with Clive. When Walter makes it clear that he esteems her as a mother, though, Louise urges Stanley to fire Walter for being “a bad influence on Pamela.” Stanley, although he doubts that Clive’s accusation is true, resents Walter’s advice to Clive and uses the claim of an illicit relationship as a reason for dismissal. The lie is a very versatile weapon. It can help rid Stanley of the unwanted cost of the tutor and simultaneously serve vengeance on the young German for counseling Clive to leave home. It will punish Louise for her affectations. It will embarrass Clive—due vengeance for the boy’s lack of filial piety—and weaken Clive’s relationship with his mother, a bond Stanley could never match in his attempts at fathering and could never before attack so severely. Though he still understands his family no better than before, Stanley can dominate them all in one stroke. Clive is shocked that the lie he told in private becomes his father’s bludgeon in public. He realizes that his capacity to injure others is as great as that of his parents. Walter,

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who has opened himself to Clive and Louise in his bid for acceptance as a family member, cannot tolerate the betrayal, the victimization, resulting from his vulnerability. Walter’s suicide attempt shows Clive the need for all the Harringtons to change: “The courage. For all of us. Oh God—give it.” The Royal Hunt of the Sun • Pairs of one-act plays bracket Shaffer’s epic drama The Royal Hunt of the Sun, which turns squarely to the issue of worship in both institutional and individual dimensions. Old Martin, the narrator, tells of his youthful adventure as page boy to Pizarro, conqueror of Peru. To Young Martin, Pizarro is a hero to worship. To the priests Valverde and De Nizza, military conquest is a necessary evil that will bring the Incas the good of institutional Christianity. To Estete, the Royal Overseer, Pizarro’s personal ambition and the blessings of the Church are the necessary tools for advancing the dominion of King Carlos and thus for increasing his personal status within the king’s domain. Pizarro takes the noble justifications of Church and State and the outright greed of his soldiers as the means for attaining personal glory. A hard man, he warns Young Martin never to trust him: He will surely betray anyone and anything in his drive for fame. Atahuallpa, god-king of the Incas, believes the approaching Pizarro must be the White God of ancient legend returning as foretold. Estete declares to the Inca general, Challcuchima, that the Spanish come in the names of King Carlos of Spain and of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Challcuchima insists that it is he who comes to them in the name of the Son of God—Atahuallpa, Son of the Sun. The two leaders are fascinated with each other. When cautioned against blasphemy in this duel of rank, Pizarro exclaims, “He is a God: I am a God.” Young Martin’s faith in his hero and their cause is challenged when the Spanish massacre three thousand unarmed Inca warriors and capture Atahuallpa. Hernando de Soto gives the boy the stock rationale for the “huntsmen of God”: “There must always be dying to make new life.” Young Martin replaces a treacherous native translator for Pizarro and Atahuallpa and witnesses their growing kinship. The thirty-threeyear-old Inca ruler learns Spanish and swordsmanship from his sixty-year-old captor. In return, Atahuallpa teaches Pizarro Inca songs and dances as the subdued empire collects gold to ransom its god-king. Once the ransom is paid, Pizarro demands that Atahuallpa pledge that the Spanish will have safe passage out of Peru. He refuses, and Pizarro’s officers insist that Atahuallpa must die. Though he himself has found no special meaning in his mother Church, Pizarro persuades the Inca to accept Christian baptism. Without it, he would be burned to ashes. The god-king does not fear death; he believes his Father Sun will resurrect him. By accepting the rites of the Spanish Church, he earns death by strangulation and will leave a body to be restored. There is no resurrection. Pizarro, however, weeps for his personal loss for the first time in his life and takes solace in the humanistic observation that at least Atahuallpa and he will be buried in the same earth under the same sun. For Young Martin, Pizarro’s betrayal of Atahuallpa is the end of faith: “Devotion never came again.” Thus, Shaffer poses the high personal cost of trusting individuals and institutions further than they merit. The conquest was possible because Church and State accepted each other as justifications for destroying competing systems—and both fed on human greed and ambition. The Inca empire fell because its supreme ruler was convinced of his own divinity and was fascinated by the invader’s claim of equal status. He never ordered a significant counterattack.

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Equus • Shaffer gives a macrocosmic study of worship through the conflict of whole systems in The Royal Hunt of the Sun, with glimpses of the personal cost of faith in such systems in the lives of Atahuallpa, Pizarro, and Young Martin. Equus, by contrast, provides a detailed microcosmic study of the elements of worship. Seventeen-year-old Alan Strang has blinded six horses in the stable where he works. Hester Salomon, a magistrate and friend of psychiatrist Martin Dysart, brings the boy to Dysart for treatment. The psychoanalyst uncovers, little by little, the attitudes and symbols Alan has fashioned into a mysterious personal religion—worship of Equus, the horse-god. Alan Strang is more than the average troubled adolescent of the usual domestic drama. He is the most isolated, most disturbed of all Shaffer’s characters. The son of a printer and former schoolteacher, Alan is practically illiterate. His father forbids television in the home, so Alan sneaks off to watch Westerns at the neighbors’ house. An avowed atheist, Frank Strang considers the religious instruction Dora gives to Alan just so much “bad sex.” Dora, for her part, assures Alan that God sees him everywhere; she has read the Bible to him often. Alan especially enjoyed passages from Job and Revelation that refer to the strength and power of horses. Not wanting to interfere with her son, Dora allowed him to have a graphic poster of Christ being flogged by Roman centurions even though she believed it was a little “extreme.” After an argument over religion, Frank once stormed into Alan’s room and ripped the poster off the wall. Alan was devastated. A few weeks later, Frank gave Alan a picture of a horse, which Alan hung in the same spot at the foot of his bed. Frank once observed Alan chanting a genealogy, haltering himself with string, and beating himself with a coathanger before the horse picture. Frank never discussed sex with his son; Dora did so only in generalities that linked it with the love of God. Shaffer opens both the first and second acts of Equus with Dysart pondering what the horse might want of Alan, and why, of all the things in the world “equal in their power to enslave . . . one suddenly strikes.” When Dysart questions the propriety of “curing” Alan, whose exotic worship is “the core of his life,” Hester Salomon assures the doctor that the boy must be relieved of his pain and helped to normal living. Expert in his profession, Dysart knows what he must do in order to lead the minds of troubled children into normal patterns, but he is himself led back to the borders of the rational, sensing something vital beyond: “that boy has known a passion more ferocious than I have felt in any second of my life. . . . I envy it.” The self-disclosure integral to Shaffer’s drama, which built the dialogue and plot of Five Finger Exercise and which became a structural device as well via the narrator in The Royal Hunt of the Sun, rises to full force in Equus. Dysart is both narrator and protagonist. He relates the numerous episodes that present and then unravel the mystery of Alan’s attack on the horses. Through his speeches to the audience about the plot and through his confidences shared with Hester Salomon as the protagonist within the action, Dysart exposes his own character, just as he exposes Alan’s. Shaffer’s use of games—which appears in the follow-the-leader ploy of The Public Eye, the pretended shock-treatment scene of Shrivings, and so on—is important in Equus as well. As Dysart elicits one disclosure after another from Alan, the boy extracts significant answers from Dysart in return. The methods of revelation become more intimate as the plot advances. Alan at first sings commercials when Dysart asks questions. He later divulges information via tape recordings. He finally responds in direct encounters, first with resistance, then relying on supposed hypnosis, and finally under the pretended use of a truth drug that allows him to reenact the events of the night he attacked the horses.

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Alan had been out with Jill Mason, who suggested a tryst in the stable—the Holy of Holies for Equus. Alan’s worship was so exclusive that his god blocked intimacy with any other. Caught between passion for another human being and passion for his horsegod—which, like his mother’s God, could see him everywhere—Alan struck out to blind the god who thwarted his relationship with Jill Mason. Martin Dysart concludes that he can lead Alan into a normal existence, but it will probably be a drab, routine life. He himself remains drawn to the nonrational source of human passion: “I need—more desperately than my children need me—a way of seeing in the dark.” His need is marked with a remnant of the worship he is taking away from Alan; “There is now, in my mouth, this sharp chain. And it never comes out.” For Pizarro, the late attraction of a meaningful, dominating force appeared and died with Atahuallpa, a confident believer in an alien faith, but a faith with numerous parallels to the Christian tradition familiar to the conquistador. Pizarro had used his own religious heritage as a weapon for so long that he could only hope for meaning among a new set of symbols enlivened by a personal contact with the god-king the symbols supported. Martin Dysart’s relationship with his patient also draws him into confrontation with passionate worship. The motion from Pizarro to Dysart, however, is an ideological step from a protagonist who concludes that human beings make their own gods to one who can destroy a god and still sense some force beyond human reason that endures regardless of whether the belief-system of a given worshiper is destroyed. Shaffer’s next protagonist steps further into premises consistent with those of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Amadeus • Antonio Salieri continues Shaffer’s trend of self-disclosing characters by serving as both narrator and protagonist of Amadeus. Old Martin and Young Martin in The Royal Hunt of the Sun give the narrator’s view and the more passionate view of Pizarro’s page, respectively, and are cast as separate characters who both may be onstage at once. Dysart serves as narrator and protagonist in turn for Equus, not needing a distinction in age for the separate facets of the character, because the story Dysart tells took place in the recent past. His explanations and deliberations unify the flow of cinematic scenes, which include recent events retold from Dysart’s viewpoint and flashbacks to some more distant events in Alan’s past. Salieri, too, serves as both narrator and protagonist, but he must bridge a temporal gap of decades, as must Old Martin. Shaffer keeps Salieri a single character, similar to Dysart, but has Salieri change costume onstage and specify the shifts in time—covering two different eras in his life through changes in the character before the eyes of the audience. The transitions are yet one more method for effecting character revelation without simply repeating a narrative technique. Salieri is Shaffer’s first protagonist to operate so nearly within traditional premises of religious devotion. Salieri interacts with a God anthropomorphic enough to respond to his prayers—but a deity shaped by the Salieri family’s mercantile values. In his youth, Salieri knelt “before the God of Bargains” and prayed to be a composer. In return, he would live virtuously, help other musicians, and “honor God with much music.” Mozart’s appearance in Vienna threatens the established Salieri’s self-esteem. Mozart the man is rash, vulgar, and obnoxious. For all the faults of the man, however, Salieri hears the voice of God in some of Mozart’s music. He prays for such inspiration in his own work, since “music is God’s art,” but to no avail. Salieri’s star voice pupil, Katherina Cavalieri, sings the lead in Mozart’s opera The Abduction from the Seraglio and has an affair with him as well. A jealous Salieri considers

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seducing Mozart’s fiancée, Constanze, in revenge. Mozart marries Constanze, despite his father’s objections, and struggles to support himself and his wife. Constanze Mozart approaches Salieri for help in securing an appointment for her husband. Salieri nearly exacts her virtue as the price for any assistance, but in the musical scores she has brought to further her husband’s cause, Salieri has seen Absolute Beauty. He recognizes his own mediocrity and rages at his God, “To my last breath, I shall block You on earth as far as I am able!” Narrator Salieri introduces act 2 as his “battle with God” in which “Mozart was the battleground.” Salieri soon breaks his vow of virtue. Although he turns away a resentful offer of an interlude with Constanze, he takes Katherina Cavalieri as his mistress. Breaking his vow to help fellow musicians, he hinders Mozart’s career whenever possible. He recommends that Mozart not be appointed to tutor the Princess Elizabeth. He does suggest that Mozart be appointed chamber composer after the death of Christoph Gluck—but at one tenth the former salary. Salieri is determined to “starve out the God.” As Mozart thinks through the plot of The Magic Flute, Salieri raises the notion of using the rites and ideals of the Masonic order in the opera. The two composers were among many notables in Vienna who belonged to the lodge. As all the rituals and doctrines are to be kept secret, Mozart’s stage parallels of Masonic practices alienate the very lodge brothers who have helped him to find what work he can get. Alone and ailing, Mozart begs God for time to complete his Requiem Mass. He asks Salieri to speak for God and to explain the continual suffering of his adult years. Salieri declares, “God does not love! He can only use!” Salieri lives to see Mozart’s music come into vogue after the composer’s death. His own music dies before he does. He takes this as his punishment; “I must survive to see myself become extinct.” His claim to be Mozart’s murderer is his last attack on God. If his fame cannot last, perhaps his infamy can. Even so negative a grasping for glory proves vain: No one really believes him. Salieri’s actions are reminiscent of those of the ancient Hebrew heroes who were held to covenants with their God. Salieri’s assertion that his virtue merits blessing while Mozart’s vices deserve punishment echoes a plaint recurrent in the Psalms. The pattern of Israel’s God favoring the unworthy or the unlikely candidate for leadership—the naïve Gideon, the young shepherd David, and so on—also has its reflex in Amadeus as the esteemed court composer finds the voice of God in the music of an immature, foulmouthed upstart. In a sense, Salieri also is a failed Cain. Jealous of God’s favor to Mozart regardless of all of Salieri’s musical and moral efforts, the aging narrator cannot even secure for himself the name of murderer. The biblical Cain bore a mark to signify his archetypal fratricide. Salieri cannot even invent the curse for himself. His God of Bargains wins the battle. Salieri gets no more and no less than he asked for when the bargain was struck, and he is punished for failing to keep his part of the covenant. Thus, the trend of character revelation begun in the Harrington household persists. The issues of self-control versus domination by authority are broached from varying perspectives, institutional and individual, as Shaffer moves from a protagonist searching for self, through others searching for meaningful relationships with individuals, to characters exploring the human being’s relationship to the structures and forces of the world at large. From The Royal Hunt of the Sun to Shrivings (which probes the limits of secular humanism as thoroughly as other plays challenge aspects of traditional religion) and on through Equus and Amadeus, Shaffer’s protagonists become more overtly self-revealing and steadily more concerned with a focused search for meaning. Shaffer’s

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mature use of a character’s personal disclosures culminates in the award-winning cinematic narratives of Equus and Amadeus, in which there is a great passion to pursue, and in which the revelation of character shapes form, theme, and technique all at once. The Gift of the Gorgon • The Gift of the Gorgon combines naturalism of plot and dialogue with highly imaginative staging. Through the use of lighting, screens, and a wall that can part centrally into halves, one set becomes half a dozen or so locales. The action takes place during the years 1975 to 1993. The role of the playwright and the plays he or she writes is combined with elements of Greek mythology and the contemporary phenomenon of terrorism. The Gift of the Gorgon opened to mixed reviews in December 1992. Peter Hall, who directed the play, praised Shaffer for undertaking such a bold, ambitious task at his age (Shaffer was sixty-six years of age at the time). Hall asserts that most dramatists in their sixties are content to sit and collect their royalties. The setting is a villa on the Greek island of Thera but often becomes England during scenes of recollection. The protagonist is Edward Damson, a once successful but now reclusive English playwright. He has Anglicized his name from Damsinski, that of his father, a whining, bigoted Russian émigré. Edward’s wife is the former Helen Jarvis, whose father is a liberal Cambridge professor, a prominent member of the Peace League. Helen was a promising classical scholar until she gave up her own pursuits to devote herself totally to her husband and his career. Edward despises academic critics. Ironically, that is what his illegitimate son, Philip—never acknowledged by him—has become. As the play opens, Edward has recently died, and Philip has traveled to Thera to learn more about the father he never met. Helen is at first unwilling but does eventually review the Damson’s eighteen-year relationship in a series of flashbacks. One of Edward’s curious practices over those years was communicating with his wife through unpublished dramatic scenes he would leave on her pillow or in his desk where she would find them. In these scenes, Perseus, the Greek hero, represents Edward, and Athena, the goddess of wisdom, represents Helen. Early in their relationship, Athena-Helen empowers Perseus-Edward to slay the Gorgon, a monster so horrible that the beholder is turned to stone. The Gorgon represents Edward’s initial inability to complete a play without his wife’s inspiration. Edward is a man of extremes, violent in language if not in behavior. The rational Helen persuades him to tone down violent scenes in his plays Icons and Prerogative, which become great successes. Later, after Edward has come to believe that Helen is more stultifying than inspiring, he writes a play, I.R.E., about an Irish terrorist and a mother whose child he has killed. In the climactic scene (against which Helen has strongly recommended), the mother ritually murders the terrorist, then dances around his bloody corpse. The audience is repulsed, the play fails, and Edward exiles himself to Thera for the last five years of his life. There, he drinks, hangs about bars with pretty young tourists, and abuses Helen through total neglect. Eventually, the couple experiences something of a role reversal. The once pacific Helen writes a scene and leaves it in her husband’s desk. In the scene, Athena tongue-lashes a cowering Perseus, concluding with the accusation that Perseus himself has become the Gorgon. Edward appears contrite but plots to have his wife deal him a mortal blow. The scene mimics Clytemnestra’s murder of her husband, Agamemnon, in his bath in the classical tragedy, an act that Edward has earlier characterized as totally justified. He persuades Helen to give him a ritually cleansing shower, but he secretes a razor blade in the soap with which she will scrub his body. Philip, who has worshiped his father from afar, is forced to face the reality of his life and death.

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As usual, Shaffer explores a moral subject, in this case vengeance in conflict with an all-encompassing forgiveness. He skillfully merges the classical and the contemporary. The choice of Helen’s name is suggestive of classical restraint. Edward’s surname (which he has consciously chosen, changing it from Damsinski) is evocative of his fate. The same is true for Philip, who has taken his father’s name, as Edward complains, without permission. The play is almost fiendishly clever and ambiguous, so that at the final curtain the audience may ask: Just what is the gift of the Gorgon, and just who is the Gorgon? Other major works long fiction: The Woman in the Wardrobe, 1951 (as Peter Antony; with Anthony Shaffer); How Doth the Little Crocodile?, 1952 (as Peter Antony; with Anthony Shaffer); Withered Murder, 1955 (with Anthony Shaffer). screenplays: The Public Eye, 1972; Equus, 1977; Amadeus, 1984. teleplays: The Salt Land, 1955; Balance of Terror, 1957. radio play: The Prodigal Father, 1955; Whom Do I Have the Honour of Addressing?, pr. 1989. Bibliography Beckerman, Bernard. “The Dynamics of Peter Shaffer’s Drama.” In The Play and Its Critic: Essays for Eric Bentley, edited by Michael Bertin. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1986. A structural study, especially of Equus, by one of the best dramatic critics of the twentieth century. Examines Shaffer’s “binary form . . . the tendency of plays to be a sequence of scenes between two characters” in his work. This essay was originally given in 1983, in Shaffer’s presence, at the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in New York. Cooke, Virginia, and Malcolm Page, comps. File on Shaffer. London: Methuen, 1987. An indispensable source of information in the Methuen series format. Contains brief comments, play by play (not including, however, Lettice and Lovage), and Shaffer’s own comments on his methods of work, sedulous rewrites, film adaptations, and more. The production dates and publication information are more accessible here than in Eberle Thomas’s work (below). Gianakaris, Constantine J., ed. Peter Shaffer: A Casebook. New York: Garland Press, 1991. Volume 10 in the Casebooks on Modern Dramatists Series. Consists of a collection of essays on the playwright’s work. Klein, Dennis A. Peter Shaffer. Rev. ed. New York: Twayne, 1993. A combination of biographical and critical information. Plunka, Gene A. Peter Shaffer: Roles, Rites, and Rituals in the Theatre. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988. Disappointing in the absence of coverage of later plays but strong on The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Equus, and Amadeus. This work is part sociology and part mythology, and it is fed by an interview with the playwright in 1986. It contains occasional insights but is generally too scholarly to get at the essence of Shaffer’s examination of the ways of God to humankind. Taylor, John Russell. Peter Shaffer. London: Longman, 1974. A brief but provocative essay on Shaffer’s contributions through Equus. Taylor sees detachment in this work and “a tendency to analyze emotions without too far engaging himself in them as a dramatist.” He concludes, however, that “there is no guessing what he can do next, but it seems inevitable that it will be grand and glorious,” a foresight of Amadeus and Lettice and Lovage. Select bibliography.

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Thomas, Eberle. Peter Shaffer: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1991. A thorough checklist of work on Shaffer, from full-length studies (four) to dissertations and theses (six), to individual studies of plays through Lettice and Lovage. The introduction outlines the scope of the book and notes the paucity of biographical information on this private playwright, “the most widely produced and most popular of England’s playwrights during the post-World War II era.” A general chronology follows, but exact production information is found at each play’s entry. Page-number index. Trussler, Simon, et al., eds. File on Shaffer. Methuen Writer-Files series. Westport, Conn.: Methuen, 1988. A concise (eighty-eight-page) treatment of the plays through Lettice and Lovage. Ralph S. Carlson, updated by Thomas J. Taylor andPatrick Adcock

William Shakespeare William Shakespeare

Born: Stratford-upon-Avon, England; April 23?, 1564 Died: Stratford-upon-Avon, England; April 23, 1616 Principal drama • Henry VI, Part I, wr. 1589-1590, pr. 1592, pb. 1623; Edward III, pr. c. 1589-1595, pb. 1596; Henry VI, Part II, pr. c. 1590-1591, pb. 1594; Henry VI, Part III, pr. c. 1590-1591, pb. 1595; Richard III, pr. c. 1592-1593, pb. 1597; The Comedy of Errors, pr. c. 1592-1594, pb. 1623; The Taming of the Shrew, pr. c. 1593-1594, pb. 1623; Titus Andronicus, pr., pb. 1594; The Two Gentlemen of Verona, pr. c. 1594-1595, pb. 1623; Love’s Labour’s Lost, pr. c. 1594-1595 (revised 1597 for court performance), pb. 1598; Romeo and Juliet, pr. c. 1595-1596, pb. 1597; Richard II, pr. c. 1595-1596, pb. 1600; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, pr. c. 1595-1596, pb. 1600; King John, pr. c. 1596-1597, pb. 1623; The Merchant of Venice, pr. c. 1596-1597, pb. 1600; Henry IV, Part I, pr. c. 1597-1598, pb. 1598; The Merry Wives of Windsor, pr. 1597 (revised c. 1600-1601), pb. 1602; Henry IV, Part II, pr. 1598, pb. 1600; Much Ado About Nothing, pr. c. 1598-1599, pb. 1600; Henry V, pr. c. 1598-1599, pb. 1600; Julius Caesar, pr. c. 1599-1600, pb. 1623; As You Like It, pr. c. 1599-1600, pb. 1623; Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, pr. c. 1600-1601, pb. 1603; Twelfth Night: Or, What You Will, pr. c. 1600-1602, pb. 1623; Troilus and Cressida, pr. c. 16011602, pb. 1609; All’s Well That Ends Well, pr. c. 1602-1603, pb. 1623; Othello, the Moor of Venice, pr. 1604, pb. 1622 (revised 1623); Measure for Measure, pr. 1604, pb. 1623; King Lear, pr. c. 1605-1606, pb. 1608; Macbeth, pr. 1606, pb. 1623; Antony and Cleopatra, pr. c. 1606-1607, pb. 1623; Coriolanus, pr. c. 1607-1608, pb. 1623; Timon of Athens, pr. c. 16071608, pb. 1623; Pericles, Prince of Tyre, pr. c. 1607-1608, pb. 1609; Cymbeline, pr. c. 16091610, pb. 1623; The Winter’s Tale, pr. c. 1610-1611, pb. 1623; The Tempest, pr. 1611, pb. 1623; The Two Noble Kinsmen, pr. c. 1612-1613, pb. 1634 (with John Fletcher); Henry VIII, pr. 1613, pb. 1623 (with Fletcher). Other literary forms • William Shakespeare’s primary reputation is based upon his status as the foremost playwright of the English language. He also produced a highly respected body of poetry, however, and his sonnets in particular are frequently included as appendices to collections of his dramatic works. In addition to the sonnets, Shakespeare wrote several other major poems, including Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). Achievements • Few dramatists can lay claim to the universal reputation achieved by William Shakespeare. His plays have been translated into many languages and performed on amateur and professional stages throughout the world. Radio, television, and film versions of the plays in English, German, Russian, French, and Japanese have been heard and seen by millions of people. The plays have been revived and reworked by many prominent producers and playwrights, and they have directly influenced the work of others. Novelists and dramatists such as Charles Dickens, Bertolt Brecht, William Faulkner, and Tom Stoppard, inspired by Shakespeare’s plots, characters, and poetry, have composed works that attempt to re-create the spirit and style of the originals and to interpret the plays in the light of their own ages. A large and 795

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flourishing Shakespeare industry exists in England, America, Japan, and Germany, giving evidence of the playwright’s popularity among scholars and the general public alike. Evidence of the widespread and deep effect of Shakespeare’s plays on English and American culture can be found in the number of words and phrases from them that have become embedded in everyday usage: Expressions such as “star-crossed lovers” are used by speakers of English with no consciousness of their Shakespearean source. It is difficult to imagine what the landscape of the English language would be like without the mountain of neologisms and aphorisms contributed by the playwright. Writing at a time when English was quite pliable, Shakespeare’s linguistic facility and poetic sense transformed English into a richly metaphoric tongue. Working as a popular playwright, Shakespeare was also instrumental in fusing the materials of native and classical drama in his work. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, with its revenge theme, its ghost, and its bombastic set speeches, appears to be a tragedy based on the style of the Roman playwright Seneca, who lived in the first century c.e. Yet the hero’s struggle with his conscience and his deep concern over the disposition of his soul reveal the play’s roots in the native soil of English miracle and mystery dramas, which grew out of Christian rituals and depicted Christian legends. The product of this fusion is a tragedy that compels spectators and readers to examine their own deepest emotions as they ponder the effects of treacherous murder on individuals and the state. Except for Christopher Marlowe, the predecessor to whom Shakespeare owes a considerable debt, no other Elizabethan playwright was so successful in combining native and classical strains. Shakespearean characters, many of whom are hybrids, are so vividly realized that they seem to have achieved a life independent of the worlds they inhabit. Hamlet stands as the symbol of a man who, in the words of the famous actor Sir Laurence Olivier, “could not make up his mind.” Hamlet’s name has become synonymous with excessive rationalizing and idealism. Othello’s jealousy, Lear’s madness, Macbeth’s ambition, Romeo and Juliet’s star-crossed love, Shylock’s flinty heart—all of these psychic states and the characters who represent them have become familiar landmarks in Western culture. Their lifelikeness can be attributed to Shakespeare’s talent for creating the illusion of reality in mannerisms and styles of speech. His use of the soliloquy is especially important in fashioning this illusion; the characters are made to seem fully rounded human beings in the representation of their inner as well as outer nature. Shakespeare’s keen ear for conversational rhythms and his ability to reproduce believable speech between figures of high and low social rank also contribute to the liveliness of action and characters. In addition, Shakespeare excels in the art of grasping the essence of relationships between husbands and wives, lovers, parents and children, and friends. Innocence and youthful exuberance are aptly represented in the fatal love of Romeo and Juliet; the destructive spirit of mature and intensely emotional love is caught in the affair between Antony and Cleopatra. Other relationships reveal the psychic control of one person by another (of Macbeth by Lady Macbeth), the corrupt soul of a seducer (Angelo in Measure for Measure), the twisted mind of a vengeful officer (Iago in Othello), and the warm fellowship of simple men (Bottom and his followers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream). The range of emotional states manifested in Shakespeare’s characters has never been equaled by succeeding dramatists. These memorable characters have also been given memorable poetry to speak. In fact, one of the main strengths of Shakespearean drama is its synthesis of action

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and poetry. Although Shakespeare’s poetic style is marked by the bombast and hyperbole that characterize much of Elizabethan drama, it also has a richness and concreteness that make it memorable and quotable. One need think only of Hamlet’s “sea of troubles” or Macbeth’s daggers “unmannerly breech’d with gore” to substantiate the imagistic power of Shakespearean verse. Such images are also worked into compelling patterns in the major plays, giving them greater structural unity than the plots alone provide. Disease imagery in Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, repeated references to blood in Macbeth, and allusions to myths of children devouring parents in King Lear represent only a few of the many (Library of Congress) instances of what has been called “reiterated imagery” in Shakespearean drama. Wordplay, puns, songs, and a variety of verse forms, from blank verse to tetrameter couplets—these features, too, contribute to the “movable feast” of Shakespeare’s style. In a more general sense, Shakespeare’s achievement can be traced to the skill with which he used his medium—the stage. He created certain characters to fit the abilities of certain actors, as the role of Falstaff in the Henry IV and Henry V plays so vividly demonstrates. He made use of every facet of the physical stage—the trapdoor, the second level, the inner stage, the “heavens”—to create special effects or illusions. He kept always before him the purpose of entertaining his audience, staying one step ahead of changes in taste among theatergoers. That both kings and tinkers were able to find in a Shakespearean play something to delight and instruct them is testimony to the wide appeal of the playwright. No doubt the universality of his themes and his deep understanding of human nature combined to make his plays so popular. These same strengths generate the magnetic power that brings large audiences into theaters to see the plays today. Biography • William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England, descended from tenant farmers and landed gentry. His traditional birth date, April 23, 1564, is conjectural. Baptism was on April 26, so April 23 is a good guess—and a tidy one, since that date is also St. George’s Day as well as the date of Shakespeare’s own death. One of Shakespeare’s grandfathers, Richard Shakespeare of Snitterfield, rented land from the other, Robert Arden of Wilmcote. Shakespeare’s father, John, moved to nearby Stratford-upon-Avon, became a prosperous shop owner (dealing in leather goods) and municipal officeholder, and married his former landlord’s youngest daughter, Mary Arden. Thus Shakespeare—the third of eight children but the first to survive infancy—was born into a solidly middle-class family in a provincial market town. Dur-

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ing Shakespeare’s infancy, his father was one of the town’s leading citizens. In 1557, John Shakespeare had become a member of the town council and subsequently held such offices as constable, affeeror (a kind of assessor), and chamberlain (treasurer). In 1568, he became bailiff (mayor) and justice of the peace. As the son of a municipal officer, the young Shakespeare was entitled to a free education in the town’s grammar school, which he probably entered around the age of seven. There, he studied Latin grammar, literature, rhetoric and logic for between eight and ten hours a day, six days a week. William Lily’s largely Latin text, A Short Introduction of Grammar (1527), was the staple of the course, but Shakespeare also read Cicero, Plautus, Terence, Vergil, and Ovid. Many of these authors influenced the playwright’s later work; Ovid in particular was a favorite source of material, used in such plays as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare probably knew very little of other languages, although he does exhibit an understanding of French in such plays as Henry V and All’s Well That Ends Well. (The sources for most, if not all, of the plays existed in English translations published during Shakespeare’s lifetime.) When Shakespeare was a teenager, his family fell on hard times. His father stopped attending town council meetings in 1577, and the family’s fortunes began to decline. Matters were not improved in 1582 when Shakespeare, at the age of eighteen, hastily married Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a farmer from the nearby village of Shottery. She was eight years his senior and pregnant at the time of the wedding. The child, Susanna, was born in May, 1583. In 1585, the couple also became the parents of twins, Hamnet and Judith. (It is interesting to note that by 1670, the last of Susanna’s descendants died, thereby ending the Shakespeare family line.) There is no evidence concerning Shakespeare’s activities between 1585 and 1592. Legend asserts that he was forced to leave Stratford in order to escape punishment for poaching deer on the estate of Sir Thomas Lucy, one of Stratford’s leading citizens. Another popular story has Shakespeare taking a position as schoolmaster at the grammar school, where he supposedly improved his Latin. None of these accounts can be substantiated by fact, yet they continue to seduce modern readers and playgoers. One intriguing suggestion is that Shakespeare joined a troupe of professional actors that was passing through Stratford in 1587. This company, called the Queen’s Men, may have been in need of a new performer, since one of their members, William Knell, had been murdered in a brawl with a fellow actor. Whatever his path may have been, however, by 1592, Shakespeare was working as an actor and playwright in London. When Shakespeare arrived in London, he found the dramatic theater dominated by a group known as the University Wits: John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Lodge, Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, and Christopher Marlowe. Shakespeare learned his art by imitating these Oxford and Cambridge men, but for him they were a difficult group to join. They looked down on most actors and on those playwrights, such as Thomas Kyd, who had not attended a university. Shakespeare offended on both counts, and Robert Greene expressed his resentment in the posthumously published book Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance (1592), which included a famous warning to three fellow “gentlemen” playwrights: Yes, trust them [the players] not: for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger’s heart wrapt in a player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.

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Greene’s literary executor, Henry Chettle, later published an apology for this slur on Shakespeare, with its pun on his name and its parody of a line from Henry VI, Part III. On meeting him, Chettle found Shakespeare’s “demeanor no less civil than he, excellent in the quality he professes. Besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing, that approves his art.” Shakespeare’s early plays—notably the Henry VI plays—achieved a measure of success, but his greatest early popularity came from two long narrative poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). Shakespeare wrote these two poems during the two years that the plague closed down the London theaters. He dedicated the poems to a patron, the young Henry Wriothesley, third earl of Southampton, who may have granted him a substantial monetary reward in return. In any event, when the theaters reopened in 1594, the acting companies were almost decimated financially, but Shakespeare was in a position to buy or otherwise acquire a one-tenth interest in one of the newly reorganized companies, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Henceforth, Shakespeare earned money not only from the plays he had written or in which he acted but also from his share of the profits of every company performance. Shakespeare continued as both member and shareholder of this essentially stable company until he retired from the stage in 1611 or 1612. In part because of the popularity of Shakespeare’s plays and in part because of the strong support of Elizabeth and James I, the company achieved considerable financial success. The company was able to stop renting theaters and built its own, the Globe, in 1599. In 1603, they were renamed the King’s Men by King James himself. The company also began performing most of the plays of Ben Jonson, who ranked second only to Shakespeare and who excelled at satiric comedy, thus increasing their profits. Shakespeare remained in close contact with his family in Stratford-upon-Avon throughout his career, and he used his newfound wealth to change their status as well. By 1596, he was able to purchase a coat of arms for his father, and in the next year, he acquired New Place, the second-best house in Stratford. Indeed, he made the Shakespeares into one of the leading families in the area. In 1596, however, they became a family bereaved, when Hamnet Shakespeare died at the age of eleven. The degree of prominence and success achieved by Shakespeare in his lifetime was unusual for someone in a profession that was not highly regarded in Renaissance England. Actors and playwrights were in fact regarded as entertainers whose companions were bearbaiters, clowns, and jugglers. Confirmation of this fact comes from evidence that some public theaters were used both for plays and for bearbaiting and bullbaiting. After 1590, moreover, the playhouses had to be constructed in the Bankside district, across the Thames from London proper. City fathers afraid of plague and opposed to public entertainments felt that the Bankside, notorious for its boisterous inns and houses of prostitution, was the fitting locale for “playing” of all kinds. Indeed, theatrical productions were not regarded as high art; when plays were published, by the company or by individual actors, apparently no effort was made to correct or improve them. Shakespeare himself never corrected or took to the printer any of the plays attributed to him. Poetry was valued as true literature, and there is considerable evidence that Shakespeare hoped to become a recognized and respected poet like Sir Philip Sidney or Edmund Spenser. Despite the immense popularity of his early poems, however, Shakespeare eventually chose to become a public entertainer. Shakespeare continued to write poetry alongside his drama. At about the time he composed Romeo and Juliet (pr. c. 1595-1596, pb. 1597) and Richard II (pr. c. 1595-1596,

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pb. 1600), he probably also began his great sonnet sequence, not published until 1609. The 154 sonnets, tracing a friendship with a young man, sometimes called the “Fair Youth,” and a romance with a “Dark Lady,” raise the question of how Shakespeare lived when he was away from Stratford, where his wife and children presumably remained. The young man might be a patron—perhaps Southampton, though other names have also been proposed—and the Dark Lady strictly imaginary, created to overturn the sonnets’ trite Petrarchan conventions. Other speculations favor a more personal interpretation, seeing an actual ménage à trois of the poet, the Fair Youth, and the Dark Lady. All the questions raised by the sonnets remain open, and the only evidence about how Shakespeare spent his spare time in London indicates that he sometimes frequented taverns (notably the Mermaid) with his fellow playwrights and players. The company to which he belonged was relatively small—fifteen or twenty players at most. The actors were generally well known to the audience, and their particular talents were exploited by the playwrights. Richard Burbage, the manager of Shakespeare’s company for many years, was renowned for his skill in acting tragic parts, while William Kemp and Robert Armin were praised for their talents as comic actors. Shakespeare composed his plays with these actors in mind, a fact borne out by the many comedies featuring fat, drunken men such as Sir John Falstaff (of the Henry IV and Henry V plays) and Sir Toby Belch (of Twelfth Night). Shakespeare could not compose his works for an ideal company; he suited his style to the available talent. Because his company was underwritten to some degree by the government, Shakespeare and his fellows were often called on to perform at court: 32 times during Elizabeth’s reign and 177 times under James I. The king and queen did not venture to the Theatre or the Globe to mingle with the lower classes, depending instead on the actors to bring their wares to them. Macbeth was written as a direct compliment to James I: Banquo, the brave general treacherously murdered by the villainous hero, was one of James’s ancestors. Shakespeare had to change the facts of history to pay the compliment, but the aim of pleasing his and the company’s benefactor justified the change. There were no women actors on Shakespeare’s stage; they made their appearance when Charles II returned to the throne in 1660. Young boys (eleven to fourteen years old) played the female parts, and Shakespeare manipulated this convention with considerable success in his comedies, where disguises created delightful complications and aided him in overcoming the problem of costuming. The lady-disguised-as-page device is worked with particular effect in such plays as As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Cymbeline. Because there were few actors and sometimes many parts, members of the company were required to double (and sometimes triple) their roles. The effect of this requirement becomes evident when one notes that certain principal characters do not appear in consecutive scenes. One should likewise remember that performance on the Elizabethan stage was continuous; there was no falling curtain or set change to interrupt the action. No scenery to speak of was employed, although signs may have been used to designate cities or countries and branches may have been tied around pillars to signify trees. The absence of scenery allowed for a peculiar imaginative effect. A place on the stage that had been a throne room could within a few seconds become a hovel hiding its inhabitants from a fierce storm. Shakespeare and his contemporaries could thereby demonstrate the slippery course of Fortune, whose

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wheel, onstage and in real life, might turn at any moment to transform kings into beggars. The apronlike stage jutted out into an area called “the pit,” where the “groundlings,” or those who paid the lowest admission fee (a penny), could stand to watch heroes perform great deeds. The octagon-shaped building had benches on the two levels above the pit for customers willing to pay for the privilege of sitting. Although estimates vary, it is now generally believed that the Globe could accommodate approximately twenty-five hundred people. The design of the stage probably evolved from the model of innyards, where the traveling companies of actors performed before they took up residence in London in the 1570’s. On either side of the stage were two doors for entrances and exits and, at the back, some kind of inner stage behind which actors could hide and be discovered at the right moment. A trapdoor was located in the middle of the apron stage, while above it was a cupola-like structure that housed a pulley and chair. This chair could be lowered to the stage level when a deus ex machina (literally, a “god from a machine”) was required to resolve the action. This small house also contained devices for making sound effects and may have been the place from which the musicians, so much a part of Elizabethan drama, sent forth their special harmonies. The little house was called “the heavens” (stars may have been painted on its underside), while the trapdoor was often referred to as “hell.” For Shakespeare’s Globe audience, then, the stage was a world in which the great figures of history and imagination were represented doing and speaking momentous things. In 1608, the King’s Men purchased an indoor theater, the Blackfriars, which meant that the company could perform year-round. This theater was located within the city proper, which meant that a somewhat more sophisticated audience attended the plays. Seating capacity was approximately seven hundred; there was no pit to stand in, and there is some evidence that the stage machinery was more elaborate than the equipment at the Globe. Some historians therefore argue that the plays written after 1608–Cymbeline; Pericles, Prince of Tyre; The Winter’s Tale; The Tempest—were composed especially for performance at the Blackfriars. These tragicomedies or romances teem with special effects and supernatural characters, and this emphasis on spectacle differentiates them from Shakespeare’s earlier comedies. Although such a theory is attractive, at least a few of these plays were also performed at the supposedly “primitive” Globe. Along with the Blackfriars, the King’s Men acquired the services of two playwrights who wrote for it, the collaborators Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. With their light, witty comedy and melodramatic tragicomedy, represented by such plays as The Knight of the Burning Pestle (pr. 1607), Philaster: Or, Love Lies A-Bleeding (pr. c. 1609), and A King and No King (pr. 1611), Beaumont and Fletcher introduced a new “cavalier” style into Renaissance English drama that ultimately eclipsed even Shakespeare’s popularity and perhaps hurried his retirement. By 1608, Shakespeare had achieved the fame and recognition for which he had no doubt hoped. He was in a position to reduce his output to one or two plays per year, a schedule that probably allowed him to spend more time in Stratford with his family. In 1607, his elder daughter had married Dr. John Hall, the local physician, and in 1608, with the birth of their daughter, Elizabeth, Shakespeare became a grandfather. In 1611, he left London for Stratford, returning from time to time to see plays performed at both theaters and possibly to engage in collaborative efforts with new playwrights such as John Fletcher. His last play, Henry VIII, was a collaboration with Fletcher; it was produced on June 29, 1613, a fateful day for the Globe. A spark from one of the cannon

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shot off during the performance set the thatched roof on fire and burned the building to the ground. On February 10, 1616, Shakespeare’s thirty-one-year-old daughter, Judith, married Thomas Quiney, a member of another prominent Stratford family. On March 25, 1616, Shakespeare made out his last will and testament, leaving most of his estate to Susanna, a substantial amount of money to Judith, and his “second best bed” to his wife, Anne. He died on April 23, 1616, and was buried in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon. In 1623, Shakespeare’s surviving partners in the King’s Men, John Heminge and Henry Condell, published a collection of his plays now known as the First Folio. The portrait included in the First Folio depicts Shakespeare with a short mustache, large, staring eyes, and an oval face accentuated by his high, balding forehead and the remaining hair that almost covers his ears. The bust erected above his grave is similar, except that he has a goatee and the balding has progressed further. The First Folio portrait resembles a soulful intellectual, while the Stratford bust suggests a prominent burgher. Analysis • The two portraits of Shakespeare portray the two parts of his nature. On one hand, he possessed immense intellectual curiosity about the motives and actions of people. This curiosity, plus his facility with language, enabled him to write his masterpieces and to create characters who are better known than some important figures in world history. On the other hand, reflecting his middle-class background, Shakespeare was himself motivated by strictly bourgeois instincts; he was more concerned with acquiring property and cementing his social position in Stratford than he was with preserving his plays for posterity. If his partners had not published the First Folio, there would be no Shakespeare as he is known today: still acted and enjoyed, the most widely studied and translated writer, the greatest poet and dramatist in the English and perhaps any language. Besides his ability to create a variety of unforgettable characters, there are at least two other qualities that account for Shakespeare’s achievement. One of these is his love of play with language, ranging from the lowest pun to some of the world’s best poetry. His love of language sometimes makes him difficult to read, particularly for young students, but frequently the meaning becomes clear in a well-acted version. The second quality is his openness, his lack of any restrictive point of view, ideology, or morality. Shakespeare was able to embrace, identify with, and depict an enormous range of human behavior, from the good to the bad to the indifferent. The capaciousness of his language and vision thus help account for the universality of his appeal. Shakespeare’s lack of commitment to any didactic point of view has often been deplored. Yet he is not entirely uncommitted; rather, he is committed to what is human. Underlying his broad outlook is Renaissance Humanism, a synthesis of Christianity and classicism that is perhaps the best development of the Western mind and finds its best expression in his work. This same generous outlook was apparently expressed in Shakespeare’s personality, which, like his bourgeois instincts, defies the Romantic myth of the artist. He was often praised by his fellows, but friendly rival and ferocious satirist Ben Jonson said it best: “He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature,” and “He was not of an age, but for all time.” The history plays • William Shakespeare began his career as a playwright by experimenting with plays in the three genres—comedy, history, and tragedy—that he would

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perfect as his career matured. The genre that dominated his attention throughout his early career, however, was history. Interest in the subject as proper stuff for drama was no doubt aroused by England’s startling victory over Spain’s vaunted navy, the Armada, in 1588. This victory fed the growing popular desire to see depictions of the critical intrigues and battles that had shaped England’s destiny as the foremost Protestant power in Europe. This position of power had been buttressed by the shrewd and ambitious Elizabeth I, England’s “Virgin Queen,” who, in the popular view, was the flower of the Tudor line. Many critics believe that Shakespeare composed the histories to trace the course of destiny that had led to the emergence of the Tudors as England’s greatest kings and queens. The strength of character and patriotic spirit exhibited by Elizabeth seem to be foreshadowed by the personality of Henry V, the Lancastrian monarch who was instrumental in building an English empire in France. Because the Tudors traced their line back to the Lancastrians, it was an easy step for Shakespeare to flatter his monarch and please his audiences with nationalistic spectacles that reinforced the belief that England was a promised land. Whatever his reasons for composing the history plays, Shakespeare certainly must be seen as an innovator of the form, for which there was no model in classical or medieval drama. Undoubtedly, he learned much from his immediate predecessors, however—most notably from Christopher Marlowe, whose Edward II (pr. c. 1592) treated the subject of a weak king nearly destroying the kingdom through his selfish and indulgent behavior. From Marlowe, Shakespeare also inherited the idea that the purpose of the history play was to vivify the moral dilemmas of power politics and to apply those lessons to contemporary government. Such lessons were heeded by contemporaries, as is amply illustrated by Elizabeth’s remark on reading about the life of one of her predecessors: “I am Richard II.” Shakespeare’s contribution to the history-play genre is represented by two tetralogies (that is, two series of four plays), each covering a period of English history. He wrote two other plays dealing with English kings, King John and Henry VIII, but they are not specifically connected to the tetralogies in theme or structure. Edward III, written sometime between 1589 and 1595, is, on the other hand, closely related to the second tetralogy in theme, structure, and history. Edward III is the grandfather of Richard II, and his victories in France are repeated by Henry V. Muriel Bradbrook has pointed out the structural similarities between Edward III and Henry V. Like the second tetralogy as a whole, Edward III deals with the education of the prince. King Edward, like Prince Hal, at first neglects his duties and endangers the realm by placing personal pleasure above his country’s needs. The Countess of Salisbury begins his education in responsibility, and Queen Philippa completes the process by teaching him compassion. By the end of the play, Edward has become what Shakespeare calls Henry V, “the mirror of all Christian kings.” Henry VI, Part I • The first tetralogy concerns the period from the death of Henry V in 1422 to the death of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Although he probably began this ambitious project in 1588, Shakespeare apparently did not compose the plays according to a strict chronological schedule. Henry VI, Part I is generally considered to have been written after the second and third parts of the Henry story; it may also have been a revision of another play. Using details from Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577) and Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1548)—his chief chronicle sources for

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the plays in both tetralogies—Shakespeare created in Henry VI, Part I an episodic story of the adventures of Lord Talbot, the patriotic soldier who fought bravely to retain England’s empire in France. Talbot fails and is defeated primarily because of a combination of intrigues by men such as the Bishop of Winchester and the indecisiveness of young King Henry VI. Here, as in the other history plays, England appears as the central victim of these human actions, betrayed and abandoned by men attempting to satisfy personal desires at the expense of the kingdom. The characters are generally two-dimensional, and their speeches reveal the excesses of Senecan bombast and hyperbole. Although a few of the scenes involving Talbot and Joan of Arc—as well as Talbot’s death scene, in which his demise is made more painful by his having to witness a procession bearing his son’s corpse—aspire to the level of high drama, the play’s characters lack psychological depth, and the plot fails to demonstrate the unity of design that would mark Shakespeare’s later history plays. Joan’s nature as a strumpet-witch signals the role of other women characters in this tetralogy; Margaret, who will become England’s queen, helps to solidify the victory that Joan cleverly achieves at the close of Henry VI, Part I. Henry V’s French empire is in ruins and England’s very soul seems threatened. Henry VI, Part II • Henry VI, Part II represents that threat in the form of what might be called “civil-war clouds.” The play focuses on the further degeneration of rule under Henry, whose ill-considered marriage to the French Margaret precipitates a power struggle involving the two houses of York and Lancaster. By eliminating wise Duke Humphrey as the chief protector of the king, Margaret in effect seizes control of the throne. In the meantime, however, a rebellion is broached by Jack Cade, the leader of a group of anarchist commoners. This rebellion lends occasion for action and spectacle of the kind that is lacking in Henry VI, Part I. It also teaches a favorite Shakespearean lesson: The kingdom’s “children” cannot be expected to behave when their “parents” do not. Scenes involving witchcraft, a false miracle, and single combat seem to prove that the country is reverting to a primitive, chaotic state. Though the uprising is finally put down, it provides the excuse for Richard, duke of York, and his ambitious sons to seize power. York precipitates a vengeful struggle with young Clifford by killing his father; in response, Clifford murders York’s youngest son, the earl of Rutland. These murders introduce the theme of familial destruction, of fathers killing sons and sons killing fathers, which culminates in the brutal assassination of Prince Edward. Henry VI, Part III • As Henry VI, Part III begins, England’s hopes for a strong successor to weak King Henry are dashed on the rocks of ambition and civil war. When Henry himself is murdered, one witnesses the birth of one of Shakespeare’s most fascinating villain-heroes, Richard, duke of Gloucester. Although Richard’s brother Edward becomes king and restores an uneasy peace, Shakespeare makes it clear that Richard will emerge as the political force of the future. Richard’s driving ambition also appears to characterize the Yorkist cause, which, by contrast with the Lancastrian, can be described as self-destructive on the biblical model of the Cain and Abel story. While one is made to see Richard’s wolfish disposition, however, Shakespeare also gives him a superior intellect and wit, which help to attract one’s attention and interest. Displaying touches of the irony and cruelty that will mark his behavior in Richard III, Richard declares at the close of Henry VI, Part III: “See how my sword weeps for the poor king’s death.”

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Richard III • In order to present Richard as an arch-villain, Shakespeare was obliged to follow a description of him that was based on a strongly prejudiced biographical portrait written by Sir Thomas More. More painted Richard as a hunchback with fangs, a beast so cruel that he did not flinch at the prospect of murdering the young princes. To More—and to Shakespeare—Richard must be viewed as another Herod; the imagery of the play also regularly compares him to a boar or hedgehog, beasts that know no restraint. Despite these repulsive features, Richard proves to be a consummate actor, outwitting and outperforming those whom he regards as victims. The most theatrical scene in the play is his wooing of the Lady Anne, who is drawn to him despite the knowledge that he has killed her husband (Prince Edward) and fatherin-law, whose corpse she is in the process of accompanying to its grave. Many of the audacious wooing tricks used in this scene suggest that one of the sources for Richard’s character is the Vice figure from medieval drama. Richard III documents the breakneck pace and mounting viciousness of Richard’s course to the throne. (Steeplechase imagery recurs throughout, culminating in the picture of Richard as an unseated rider trying desperately to find a mount.) He arranges for the murder of his brother Clarence, turns on former supporters such as Hastings and Buckingham, whom he seemed to be grooming for office, and eventually destroys the innocent princes standing in his path. This latter act of barbarism qualifies as a turning point, since Richard’s victories, which have been numerous and easily won, now begin to evaporate at almost the same rate of speed. While Richard moves with freedom and abandon from one bloody deed to another, he is hounded by the former Queen Margaret, who delivers curses and prophecies against him in the hope of satisfying her vengeful desires. She plays the role of a Senecan fury, even though her words prove feeble against her Machiavellian foe. Retribution finally comes, however, in the character of the Lancastrian Earl of Richmond, who defeats Richard at Bosworth Field. On the eve of the battle, Richard’s victims visit his sleep to announce his fall, and for the first time in the play, he experiences a twinge of conscience. Unable to respond by confessing and asking forgiveness, Richard fights fiercely, dying like a wounded animal that is finally cornered. With Richmond’s marriage to Elizabeth York, the Wars of the Roses end, and England looks forward to a prosperous and peaceful future under Henry Richmond, founder of the Tudor line. King John • Whether Shakespeare wrote King John in the period between the first and second tetralogies is not known, but there is considerable support for the theory that he did. In the play, he depicts the career of a monarch who reigned into the thirteenth century and who defied papal authority, behavior that made him into something of a Protestant hero for Elizabethans. Shakespeare’s John, however, lacks both the dynamism and the charisma of Henry V; he is also guilty of usurping the throne and arranging for the death of the true heir, Arthur. This clouded picture complicates the action and transforms John into a man plagued by guilt. Despite his desire to strengthen England and challenge the supremacy of Rome, John does not achieve either the dimensions of a tragic hero or the sinister quality of a consummate villain; indeed, his death seems anticlimactic. The strongest personality in the play belongs to Faulconbridge the Bastard, whose satiric commentary on the king’s maneuvering gives way to patriotic speeches at the close. Faulconbridge speaks out for Anglo-Saxon pride in the face of foreign challenge, but he has also played the part of satirist-onstage throughout much of the action. Some-

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thing of the same complexity of character will be seen in Prince Hal, the model fighter and king of the second tetralogy. In King John, Shakespeare managed only this one touch of brilliant characterization in an otherwise uninteresting and poorly constructed play. He may have been attempting an adaptation of an earlier chronicle drama. Richard II • Shakespeare began writing the second tetralogy, which covers the historical period from 1398 to 1422, in 1595. The first play in this group was Richard II, a drama which, like the Henry VI series, recounts the follies of a weak king and the consequences of these actions for England. Unlike Henry, however, Richard is a personage with tragic potential; he speaks the language of a poet and possesses a self-dramatizing talent. Richard invites his fall—the fall of princes, or de casibus virorum illustrium, being a favorite Elizabethan topic that was well represented in the popular A Mirror for Magistrates (first published under Elizabeth I in 1559, although printed earlier under Queen Mary)—by seizing the land of the deceased John of Gaunt to pay for his war preparations against Ireland. This dubious act brings Henry Bolingbroke, Gaunt’s son, rushing back from France, where he had been exiled by Richard, for a confrontation with the king. The result of their meeting is Richard’s sudden deposition—he gives up the crown almost before he is asked for it—and eventual death, which is so movingly rendered that many critics have been led to describe this as a tragedy rather than a political play. Such a reading must overlook the self-pitying quality in Richard; his actions rarely correspond to the quality of his speech. Yet there has been little disagreement about Shakespeare’s achievement in advancing the history-play form by forging a world in which two personalities, one vacillating, the other resourceful, oppose each other in open conflict. Richard II likewise qualifies as the first play in which Shakespeare realizes the theme of the fall by means of repeated images comparing England to a garden. Richard, the gardener-king, has failed to attend to pruning; rebels, like choking weeds, grow tall and threaten to blot out the sun. Because Bolingbroke usurps the crown and later arranges for Richard’s death, however, he is guilty of watering the garden with the blood of England’s rightful—if foolish—ruler. The result must inevitably be civil war, which is stirringly prophesied by the Bishop of Carlisle as the play draws to a close: “The blood of English shall manure the ground,/ And future ages groan for this foul act.” Henry IV, Part I • The civil strife that Carlisle predicted escalates in Henry IV, Part I. Bolingbroke, now King Henry IV, is planning a crusade in the midst of a serious battle involving rebels in the north and west of Britain. This obliviousness to responsibility is clearly motivated by Henry’s guilt over the seizing of the crown and Richard’s murder. It will take the courage and ingenuity of his son, Prince Hal, the future Henry V, to save England and to restore the order of succession that Shakespeare and his contemporaries saw as the only guarantee of peaceful rule. Thus, Henry IV, Part I is really a study of the rise of Hal, who in the opening of the play appears to be a carefree time waster, content with drinking, gambling, and carousing with a motley group of thieves and braggarts led by the infamous coward Sir John Falstaff. Using a kind of Aristotelian mode of characterization, Shakespeare reveals Hal as a balanced hero who possesses the wit and humanity of Falstaff, without the debilitating drunkenness and ego, and the physical courage and ambition of Henry Hotspur, the son of the earl of Northumberland and chief rebel, without his destructive choler and impatience.

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The plot of Henry IV, Part I advances by means of comparison and contrast of the court, tavern, and rebel worlds, all of which are shown to be in states of disorder. Hal leaves the tavern world at the end of the second act with an explicit rejection of Falstaff’s fleshly indulgence; he rejoins his true father and leads the army in battle against the rebels, who are unable to organize the English, Welsh, and Scottish factions of which they are formed. They seem to be leaderless—and “fatherless.” Above all, Hal proves capable of surprising both his own family and the rebels, using his reputation as a madcap to fullest advantage until he is ready to throw off his disguise and defeat the bold but foolish Hotspur at Shrewsbury. This emergence is nicely depicted in imagery associated by Hal himself with the sun (punning on “son”) breaking through the clouds when least suspected. Falstaff demonstrates consistency of character in the battle by feigning death; even though Hal allows his old friend to claim the prize of Hotspur’s body, one can see the utter bankruptcy of the Falstaffian philosophy of selfpreservation. Henry IV, Part II • In Henry IV, Part II, the struggle against the rebels continues. Northumberland, who failed to appear for the Battle of Shrewsbury because of illness, proves unable to call up the spirit of courage demonstrated by his dead son. Glendower, too, seems to fade quickly from the picture, like a dying patient. The main portion of the drama concerns what appears to be a replay of Prince Hal’s reformation. Apparently Shakespeare meant to depict Hal’s acquisition of honor and valor at the close of Henry IV, Part I, while Part II traces his education in the virtues of justice and rule. Falstaff is again the humorous but negative example, although he lacks the robustness in sin that marked his character in Part I. The positive example or model is the Lord Chief Justice, whose sobriety and sense of responsibility eventually attract Hal to his side. As in Part I, Shakespeare adopts the structure of a medieval morality play to depict the rejection of the “bad” angel (or false father) and the embracing of the “good” one (or spiritual father) by the hero. The banishment of Falstaff and his corrupt code takes place during the coronation procession. It is a particularly poignant moment—to which many critics object, since Hal’s harshness seems so uncharacteristic and overdone—but this scene is well prepared for by Hal’s promise, at the end of act 2 in Part I, that he would renounce the world and the flesh at the proper time. The example of Hal’s father, whose crown Hal rashly takes from his pillow before his death, demonstrates that for the king there can be no escape from care, no freedom to enjoy the fruits of life. With the Lord Chief Justice at his side, Hal prepares to enter the almost monklike role that the kingship requires him to play. Henry V • It is this strong and isolated figure that dominates Henry V, the play that may have been written for the opening of the Globe Theatre. Appropriately enough, the Chorus speaker who opens the play asks if “this wooden O” can “hold the vasty fields of France,” the scene of much of the epic and episodic action. Hal shows himself to be an astute politician—he outwits and traps the rebels Scroop, Cambridge, and Grey—and a heroic leader of men in the battle scenes. His rejection of Falstaff, whose death is recounted here in tragicomic fashion by Mistress Quickly, has transformed Hal’s character into something cold and unattractive. There is little or no humor in the play. Yet when Hal moves among his troops on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, he reveals a depth of understanding and compassion that helps to humanize his character. His speeches are masterpieces of political rhetoric, even though

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Pistol, the braggart soldier, tries to parody them. “Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more . . .” introduces one of the best-known prebattle scenes in the language. With the defeat of the French at Agincourt, Hal wins an empire for England, strengthening the kingdom that had been so sorely threatened by the weakness of Richard II. Both tetralogies depict in sharp outline the pattern of suffering and destruction that results from ineffective leadership. In Henry VII and Henry V, one sees the promise of peace and empire realized through the force of their strong, patriotic identities. At the close of Henry V, the hero’s wooing of Katherine of France, with its comic touches resulting from her inability to speak English, promises a wedding that will take place in a new garden from which it is hoped humankind will not again fall. The lesson for the audience seems to be that under Elizabeth, the last Tudor monarch, England has achieved stability and glory, and that this role of European power was foreshadowed by the victories of these earlier heroes. Another clear lesson is that England cannot afford another civil war; some capable and clearly designated successor to Elizabeth must be chosen. Henry VIII • Shakespeare’s last drama dealing with English history, a probable collaboration with Henry Fletcher, is Henry VIII, which is normally classed with romances such as The Tempest and Cymbeline. It features none of the military battles typical of earlier history plays, turning instead for its material to the intrigues of Henry’s court. The play traces the falls of three famous personages, the duke of Buckingham, Katherine of Aragon, and Cardinal Wolsey. Both Buckingham and Queen Katherine are innocent victims of fortune, while Wolsey proves to be an ambitious man whose scheming is justly punished. Henry seems blind and self-satisfied through much of the play, which is dominated by pageantry and spectacle, but in his judgment against Wolsey and his salvation of Cranmer, he emerges as something of a force for divine justice. The plot ends with the christening of Elizabeth and a prophecy about England’s glorious future under her reign. Shakespeare’s audience knew, however, that those atop Fortune’s wheel at the close—Cranmer and Anne Bullen, in particular—would soon be brought down like the others. This last of Shakespeare’s English history plays, then, sounds a patriotic but also an ironic note. The comedies • Of the plays that are wholly or partly attributed to Shakespeare, nearly half have been classified as comedies. In addition, many scenes in plays such as Henry IV, Part I and Romeo and Juliet feature comic characters and situations. Even in the major tragedies, one finds scenes of comic relief: the Porter scene in Macbeth, the encounters between the Fool and Lear in King Lear, Hamlet’s inventive punning and lugubrious satire. There can be little doubt that Shakespeare enjoyed creating comic situations and characters and that audiences came to expect such fare on a regular basis from the playwright. The Comedy of Errors • In his first attempt in the form, The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare turned to a source—Plautus, the Roman playwright—with which he would have become familiar at Stratford’s grammar school. Based on Plautus’s Menaechmi (The Twin Menaechmi, 1595), the comedy depicts the misadventures of twins who, after several incidents involving mistaken identity, finally meet and are reunited. The twin brothers are attended by twin servants, compounding the possibilities for humor growing out of mistaken identity.

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Considerable buffoonery and slapstick characterize the main action involving the twins—both named Antipholus—and their servants. In one hilarious scene, Antipholus of Ephesus is turned away from his own house by a wife who believes he is an impostor. This somewhat frivolous mood is tempered by the presence of the twins’ father in the opening and closing scenes. At the play’s opening, Egeon is sentenced to death by the Duke of Ephesus; the sentence will be carried out unless someone can pay a ransom set at one thousand marks. Egeon believes that his wife and sons are dead, which casts him deep into the pit of despair. By the play’s close, Egeon has been saved from the duke’s sentence and has been reunited with his wife, who has spent the many years of their separation as an abbess. This happy scene of reunion and regeneration strikes a note that will come to typify the resolutions of later Shakespearean comedy. Providence appears to smile on those who suffer yet remain true to the principle of family. Shakespeare also unites the act of unmasking with the concept of winning a new life in the fifth act of The Comedy of Errors. Both Antipholus of Syracuse, who in marrying Luciana is transformed into a “new man,” and Dromio of Ephesus, who is freed to find a new life, acquire new identities at the conclusion. The characters are, however, largely interchangeable and lacking in individualizing traits. Types rather than fullblown human beings people the world of the play, thus underscoring the theme of supposing or masking. Shakespeare offers a gallery of familiar figures—young lovers, a pedantic doctor, a kitchen maid, merchants, and a courtesan—all of whom are identified by external traits. They are comic because they behave in predictably mechanical ways. Dr. Pinch, the mountebank based on Plautus’s medicus type, is a good example of this puppetlike caricaturing. The verse is designed to suit the speaker and occasion, but it also reveals Shakespeare’s range of styles; blank verse, prose, rhymed stanzas, and alternating rhymed lines can be found throughout the play. This first effort in dramatic comedy was an experiment using numerous Plautine elements, but it also reveals, in the characters Egeon and Emilia, the playwright’s talent for humanizing even the most typical of characters and for creating life and vigor in stock situations. The Taming of the Shrew • In The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare turned to another favorite source for the theme of transformation: Ovid’s Metamorphoses (c. 8 c.e.; English translation, 1567). He had already used this collection for his erotic poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece; now he plundered it for stories about pairs of lovers and the changes effected in their natures by the power of love. In The Taming of the Shrew, he was also improving on an earlier play that dealt with the theme of taming as a means of modifying human behavior. Petruchio changes Kate’s conduct by regularly praising her “pleasant, gamesome” nature. By the end of the play, she has been tamed into behaving like a dutiful wife. (Her sister Bianca, on the other hand, has many suitors, but her father will not allow Bianca to marry until Kate has found a husband.) The process of taming sometimes involves rough and boisterous treatment—Petruchio withholds food from his pupil, for example—as well as feigned madness: Petruchio whisks his bride away from the wedding site as if she were a damsel in distress and he were playing the role of her rescuer. In the end, Kate turns out to be more pliant than her sister, suggesting that an ideal wife, like a bird trained for the hunt, must be instructed in the rules of the game. Shakespeare reinforces the theme of transformation by fashioning a subplot featuring a drunken tinker named Christopher Sly, who believes he has been made into a

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lord during a ruse performed by a fun-loving noble and his fellows. The Sly episode is not resolved because this interlude ends with the play’s first scene, yet by employing this framing device, Shakespeare invites a comparison between Kate and Sly, both of whom are urged to be “better” than they thought they were. The Two Gentlemen of Verona • The Two Gentlemen of Verona takes a comic tack that depends less on supposing than on actual disguise. Employing a device he would later perfect in As You Like It and Twelfth Night, Shakespeare put his heroine Julia in a page’s outfit in order to woo her beloved Proteus. The main theme of the comedy is the rocky nature of love as revealed in male friendship and romantic contest. Valentine, Proteus’s friend, finds him to be fickle and untrue to the courtly code when Proteus tries to force his affections on Silvia, Valentine’s love. Although Proteus deserves worse punishment than he receives, he is allowed to find in Julia the true source of the romantic love that he has been seeking throughout the play. These pairs of lovers and their clownish servants, who engage in frequent bouts of punning and of horseplay, perform their rituals—anatomizing lovers, trusting false companions—in a forest world that seems to work its magic on them by bringing about a happy ending. As in the other festive comedies, The Two Gentlemen of Verona concludes with multiple marriages and a mood of inclusiveness that gives even the clowns their proper place in the celebration. The passion of love has led Proteus (whose name, signifying “changeable,” symbolizes fickleness) to break oaths and threaten friendships, but in the end, it has also forged a constant love. Love’s Labour’s Lost • After this experiment in romantic or festive (as opposed to bourgeois) comedy, Shakespeare next turned his hand to themes and characters that reflect the madness and magic of love. Love’s Labour’s Lost pokes fun at florid poetry, the “taffeta phrases [and] silken terms precise” that typified Elizabethan love verses. There is also a satiric strain in this play, which depicts the foiled attempt of male characters to create a Platonic utopia free of women. The King of Navarre and his court appear ludicrous as, one by one, they violate their vows of abstinence in conceits that gush with sentiment. Even Berowne, the skeptic-onstage, proves unable to resist the temptations of Cupid. As if to underscore the foolishness of their betters, the clowns and fops of this comic world produce an interlude featuring the Nine Worthies, all of whom overdo or distort their roles in the same way as the lover-courtiers have distorted theirs. (This interlude was also the playwright’s first attempt at a play-within-a-play.) When every Jack presumes to claim his Jill at the close, however, Shakespeare deputizes the princess to postpone the weddings for one year while the men do penance for breaking their vows. The women here are victorious over the men, but only for the purpose of forcing them to recognize the seriousness of their contracts. Presumably the marriages to come will prove constant and fulfilling, but at the end of this otherwise lighthearted piece, Shakespeare interjects a surprising note of qualification. Perhaps this note represents his commentary on the weight of words, which the courtiers have so carelessly— and sometimes badly—handled. A Midsummer Night’s Dream • In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare demonstrates consummate skill in the use of words to create illusion and dreams. Although he again presents pairs of young lovers whose fickleness causes them to fall out of, and

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then back into, love, these characters display human dimensions that are missing in the character types found in the earlier comedies. The multiple plots concern not only the lovers’ misadventures but also the marriage of Duke Theseus and Hippolyta, the quarrel between Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairy band, and the bumbling rehearsal and performance of the play-within-a-play Pyramus and Thisbe by Bottom and his companions. All of these actions illustrate the themes of love’s errant course and of the power of illusion to deceive the senses. The main action, as in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, takes place in a wood, this time outside Athens and at night. The fairy powers are given free rein to deceive the mortals who chase one another there. Puck, Oberon’s servant, effects deception of the lovers by mistakenly pouring a potion in the wrong Athenian’s eyes. By the end of the play, however, the young lovers have found their proper partners, Oberon and Titania have patched up their quarrel, and Bottom, whose head was changed into that of an ass and who was wooed by the enchanted Titania while he was under this spell, rejoins his fellows to perform their tragic and comic interlude at the wedding reception. This afterpiece is a burlesque rendition of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, whose tale of misfortune bears a striking resemblance to that of Romeo and Juliet. Through the device of the badly acted play-within-the-play, Shakespeare instructs his audience in the absurdity of lovers’ Petrarchan vows and in the power of imagination to transform the bestial or the godlike into human form. In design and execution, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its variety of plots and range of rhyme and blank verse, stands out as Shakespeare’s most sophisticated early comedy. The Merchant of Venice • The Merchant of Venice shares bourgeois features with The Taming of the Shrew and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, but it has a much darker, neartragic side, too. Shylock’s attempt to carve a pound of flesh from the merchant Antonio’s heart has all the ingredients of tragedy: deception, hate, ingenuity, and revenge. His scheme is frustrated only by the superior wit of the heroine Portia during a trial scene in which she is disguised as a young boy judge. Requiring Shylock to take nothing more than is specified in his bond, while at the same time lecturing him on the quality of mercy, Portia’s speeches create the elements of tension and confrontation that will come to epitomize the playwright’s mature tragedies. With the defeat and conversion of Shylock, the pairs of lovers can escape the threatening world of Venice and hope for uninterrupted happiness in Belmont, Portia’s home. Venice, the scene of business, materialism, and religious hatred, is contrasted with Belmont (or “beautiful world”), the fairy-tale kingdom to which Bassanio, Antonio’s friend, has come to win a fair bride and fortune by entering into a game of choice involving golden, silver, and leaden caskets. Though the settings are contrasted and the action of the play alternates between the two societies, Shakespeare makes his audience realize that Portia, like Antonio, is bound to a contract (set by her dead father) which threatens to destroy her happiness. When Bassanio chooses the leaden casket, she is freed to marry the man whom she would have chosen for her own. Thus “converted” (a metaphor that refers one back to Shylock’s conversion), Portia then elects to help Antonio, placing herself in jeopardy once again. Portia emerges as Shakespeare’s first major heroine-in-disguise, a character-type central to his most stageworthy and mature comedies, Twelfth Night and As You Like It. Much Ado About Nothing • Much Ado About Nothing likewise has a dark side. The main plot represents the love of Claudio and Hero. Hero’s reputation is sullied by the

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melodramatic villain Don Juan. Claudio confronts his supposedly unfaithful partner in the middle of their wedding ceremony, his tirade causing her to faint and apparently expire. The lovers are later reunited, however, after Claudio recognizes his error. This plot is paralleled by one involving Beatrice and Benedick, two witty characters who in the play’s beginning are set against each other in verbal combat. Like Claudio and Hero, they are converted into lovers who overcome selfishness and pride to gain a degree of freedom in their new relationships. The comedy ends with the marriage of Claudio and Hero and the promise of union between Beatrice and Benedick. A central comic figure in the play is Dogberry, the watchman whose blundering contributes to Don Juan’s plot but is also the instrument by which his villainy is revealed. His behavior, especially his hilariously inept handling of legal language, is funny in itself, but it also illustrates a favorite Shakespearean theme: Clownish errors often lead to happy consequences. Like Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Dogberry and his men are made an important part of the newly transformed society at the end of the play. As You Like It • As You Like It and Twelfth Night are widely recognized as Shakespeare’s wittiest and most stageworthy comedies; they also qualify as masterpieces of design and construction. In As You Like It, the action shifts from the court of Duke Frederick, a usurper, to the forest world of Arden, the new “court” of ousted Duke Senior. His daughter Rosalind enters the forest world in disguise, along with her friend Celia, to woo and win the young hero Orlando, forced to wander by his brother Oliver, another usurping figure. Although his florid verses expressing undying love for Rosalind are the object of considerable ridicule, Orlando earns the title of true lover worthy of Rosalind’s hand. She proves successful in winning the support of the audience by means of her clever manipulation of Orlando from behind her mask. His inept poetry and her witty commentary can be taken “as we like it,” as can the improbable conversions of Oliver and Duke Frederick that allow for a happy ending. Two characters—Touchstone, the clown, and Jacques (pronounced JAYK weez), the cynical courtier—represent extreme attitudes on the subjects of love and human nature. Touchstone serves as Rosalind’s protector and as a sentimental observer, commenting wistfully and sometimes wittily on his own early days as a lover of milkmaids. Jacques, the trenchant commentator on the “Seven Ages of Man,” sees all this foolery as further evidence, along with political corruption and ambition, of humankind’s fallen state. He remains outside the circle of happy couples at the end of the play, a poignant, melancholy figure. His state of self-centeredness, it might be argued, is also “as we like it” when our moods do not identify so strongly with youthful exuberance. Twelfth Night • Twelfth Night also deals with the themes of love and self-knowledge. Like As You Like It, it features a disguised woman, Viola, as its central figure. Motifs from other earlier Shakespearean comedies are also evident in Twelfth Night. Viola and Sebastian are twins (a motif found in The Comedy of Errors) who have been separated in a shipwreck but, unknown to each other, have landed in the same country, Illyria. From The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Shakespeare took the motif of the disguised figure serving as page to the man she loves (Duke Orsino) and even playing the wooer’s role with the woman (Olivia) whom the duke wishes to marry. Complications arise when Olivia falls in love with Viola, and the dilemma is brought to a head when Orsino threatens to kill his page in a fit of revenge. Sebastian provides the ready solution to

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this dilemma, but Shakespeare holds off introducing the twins to each other until the last possible moment, creating effective comic tension. The play’s subplot involves an ambitious and vain steward, Malvolio, who, by means of a counterfeited letter (the work of a clever servant named Maria), is made to believe that Olivia loves him. The scene in which Malvolio finds the letter and responds to its hints, while being observed not only by the theater audience but also by an audience onstage, is one of the funniest stretches of comic pantomime in drama. When Malvolio attempts to woo his mistress, he is thought mad and is cast in prison. Although he is finally released (not before being tormented by Feste the clown in disguise), Malvolio does not join the circle of lovers in the close, vowing instead to be revenged on all those who deceived him. In fact, both Feste and Malvolio stand apart from the happy company, representing the dark, somewhat melancholy clouds that cannot be dispelled in actual human experience. By this stage in his career, Shakespeare had acquired a vision of comedy crowded by elements and characters that would be fully developed in the tragedies. The Merry Wives of Windsor • The Merry Wives of Windsor was probably composed before Shakespeare reached the level of maturity reflected in As You Like It and Twelfth Night. Legend suggests that he interrupted his work on the second history cycle to compose the play in two weeks for Queen Elizabeth, who wished to see Falstaff (by then familiar from the history plays) portrayed as a lover. What Shakespeare ended up writing was not a romantic but instead a bourgeois comedy that depicts Falstaff attempting to seduce Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, both wives of Windsor citizens. He fails, but in failing he manages to entertain the audience with his bragging and his boldness. Shakespeare may have been reworking an old play based on a Plautine model; in one of Plautus’s plays, there is a subplot in which a clever young man (Fenton) and his beloved manage to deceive her parents in order to get married. This is the only strain of romance in the comedy, whose major event is the punishment of Falstaff: He is tossed into the river, then singed with candles and pinched by citizens disguised as fairies. Critics who see Falstaff as the embodiment of Vice argue that this punishment has symbolic weight; his attempted seduction of honest citizens’ wives makes him a threat to orderly society. Regardless of whether this act has a ritual purpose, the character of Falstaff, and the characters of Bardolph, Pistol, and Justice Shallow, bear little resemblance to the comic band of Henry IV, Part I. In fact, The Merry Wives of Windsor might be legitimately seen as an interlude rather than a fully developed comedy, and it is a long distance from the more serious, probing dramas Shakespeare would soon create. All’s Well That Ends Well • All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure were composed during a period when Shakespeare was also writing his major tragedies. Because they pose questions about sin and guilt that are not satisfactorily resolved, many critics have used the terms “dark comedies” or “problem plays” to describe them. All’s Well That Ends Well features the familiar disguised heroine (Helena) who pursues the man she loves (Bertram) with skill and determination. The play differs from the earlier romantic comedies, however, because the hero rejects the heroine, preferring instead to win honor and fame in battle. Even though Helena is “awarded” the prize of Bertram by the King of France, whom she has cured of a near-fatal disease, she must don her disguise and pursue him while undergoing considerable suffering and hardship. In order to trap him, moreover, she must resort to a “bed trick,” substituting her body for that of another woman whom Bertram plans to

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seduce. When Bertram finally assents to the union he bears little resemblance to comic heroes such as Orlando or Sebastian; he could be seen in fact as more a villain (or perhaps a cad) than a deserving lover. The forced resolution makes the play a “problem” for many critics, but for Shakespeare and his audience, the ingenuity of Helena and the multiple marriages at the close probably satisfied the demands of romantic comedy. Measure for Measure • Measure for Measure has at the center of its plot another bed trick, by which a patient and determined woman (Mariana) manages to capture the man she desires. That man, Angelo, is put in the position of deputy by Duke Vincentio at the opening of the action. He determines to punish a sinful Vienna by strictly enforcing its laws against fornication; his first act is to arrest Claudio for impregnating his betrothed Juliet. When Isabella, Claudio’s sister, who is about to take vows as a nun, comes to plead for his life, Angelo attempts to seduce her. He asks for a measure of her body in return for a measure of mercy for her brother. Isabella strongly resists Angelo’s advances, although her principled behavior most certainly means her brother will die. Aided by Vincentio, disguised as a holy father, Isabella arranges for Mariana to take her place, since this woman is in fact Angelo’s promised partner. Thus, Angelo commits the deed that he would punish Claudio for performing. (Instead of freeing Claudio, moreover, he sends word to have him killed even after seducing his “sister.”) Through another substitution, however, Claudio is saved. In an elaborate judgment scene, in which Vincentio plays both duke and holy father, Angelo is forgiven— Isabella being required by the duke to beg for Angelo’s life—and marries Mariana. Here, as in All’s Well That Ends Well, the hero proves to be an unpunished scoundrel who seems to be in fact rewarded for his sin, but the biblical “Judge not lest ye be judged” motivates much of the action, with characters finding themselves in the place of those who would judge them and being forced to display mercy. Some critics have argued that this interpretation transforms Duke Vincentio into a Christ figure, curing the sins of the people while disguised as one of them. Whether or not this interpretation is valid, Measure for Measure compels its audience to explore serious questions concerning moral conduct; practically no touches of humor in the play are untainted by satire and irony. The tragedies • For about four years following the writing of Measure for Measure, Shakespeare was busy producing his major tragedies. It is probably accurate to say that the problem comedies were, to a degree, testing grounds for the situations and characters he would perfect in the tragedies. These tragedies include the famous Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Othello, the Moor of Venice, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra. His earliest—and clumsiest—attempt at tragedy was Titus Andronicus. Titus Andronicus • The plot of Titus Andronicus no doubt came from the Roman poet Ovid, a school subject and one of the playwright’s favorite Roman authors. From Seneca, the Roman playwright whose ten plays had been translated into English in 1559, Shakespeare took the theme of revenge: The inflexible, honor-bound hero seeks satisfaction against a queen who has murdered or maimed his children. She was acting in retaliation, however, because Titus had killed her son. Titus’s rage, which is exacerbated by the rape and mutilation of his daughter Lavinia, helps to classify him as a typical Senecan tragic hero. He and the wicked queen Tamora are oversimplified charac-

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ters who declaim set speeches rather than engaging in realistic dialogue. Tamora’s lover and accomplice, the Moor Aaron, is the prototype of the Machiavellian practitioner that Shakespeare would perfect in such villains as Iago and Edmund. While this caricature proves intriguing, and while the play’s structure is more balanced and coherent than those of the early history plays, Titus’s character lacks the kind of agonizing introspection shown by the heroes of the major tragedies. He never comes to terms with the destructive code of honor that convulses his personal life and that of Rome. Romeo and Juliet • With Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare reached a level of success in characterization and design far above the bombastic and chaotic world of Titus Andronicus. Based on a long narrative and heavily moralized poem by Arthur Brooke, this tragedy of “star-crossed lovers” excites the imagination by depicting the fatal consequences of a feud between the Veronese families of Montague and Capulet. Distinguished by some of Shakespeare’s most beautiful poetry, the style bears a strong resemblance to that of the sonnets: elaborate conceits, classical allusions, witty paradoxes, and observations on the sad consequences of sudden changes of fortune. Some critics have in fact faulted the tragedy because its plot lacks the integrity of its poetry; Romeo and Juliet come to their fates by a series of accidents and coincidences that strain credulity. The play also features abundant comic touches provided by the remarks of Romeo’s bawdy, quick-witted friend Mercutio and the sage but humorous observations of Juliet’s nurse. Both of these “humor” characters (character types whose personalities are determined by one trait, or “humor”) remark frequently, and often bawdily, on the innocent lovers’ dreamy pronouncements about their passion for each other. With the accidental murder of Mercutio, whose last words are “A plague on both your houses!” (referring to the feuding families), the plot accelerates rapidly toward the catastrophe, showing no further touches of humor or satire. The tireless Friar Lawrence attempts, through the use of a potion, to save Juliet from marrying Paris, the nobleman to whom she is betrothed, but the friar proves powerless against the force of fate that seems to be working against the lovers. Although it lacks the compelling power of the mature tragedies, whose heroes are clearly responsible for their fate, Romeo and Juliet remains a popular play on the subject of youthful love. The success of various film versions, including Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 feature film, with its teenage hero and heroine and its romantically moving score, proved that the play has a timeless appeal. Julius Caesar • At least three years passed before Shakespeare again turned his attention to the tragic form. Instead of treating the subject of fatal love, however, he explored Roman history for a political story centering on the tragic dilemma of one man. In Julius Caesar, he could have dealt with the tale of the assassination of Caesar, taken from Plutarch’s Bioi paralleloi (c. 105-115 c.e.; Parallel Lives, 1579), as he did with material from English history in the chronicle dramas he had been writing in the 1590’s. That is, he might have presented the issue of the republic versus the monarchy as a purely political question, portraying Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, and Antony as pawns in a predestined game. Instead, Shakespeare chose to explore the character of Brutus in detail, revealing the workings of his conscience through moving and incisive soliloquies. By depicting his hero as a man who believes his terrible act is in the best interest of the country, Shakespeare establishes the precedent for later tragic heroes who likewise justify their destructive deeds as having righteous purposes.

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The tragic plot is developed by means of irony and contrast. Cassius, jealous of Caesar’s achievements, seduces Brutus into taking part in the conspiracy by appealing to his idealism. This political naiveté stands in sharp contrast to Antony’s Machiavellianism, which is so brilliantly demonstrated in his crowd-swaying funeral oration (“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears . . .”). Antony’s transformation from playboy to power broker displays Shakespeare’s belief that the historical moment shapes the natures of great men. Caesar appears to be a superstitious, somewhat petty figure, but in typical fashion, Shakespeare makes his audience see that, just as the conspirators are not free of personal motives such as jealousy, so Caesar is not the cold and uncompromising tyrant they claim he is. With the visit by Caesar’s ghost to Brutus’s tent on the eve of the final battle at Philippi, Shakespeare foreshadows the ultimate revenge of Caesar in the character of his grandson, Octavius, who emerges as a strong personality at the close of the play. Brutus and Cassius quarrel before the end, but they nevertheless achieve a kind of nobility by committing suicide in the Roman tradition. For Brutus, the events following the assassination demonstrate the flaw in his idealism; he could not destroy the spirit of Caesar, nor could he build a republic on the shifting sand of the populace. In Julius Caesar, one witnesses a tragedy that is both politically compelling and morally complex. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • Although the revenge theme is an important part of Julius Caesar, it dominates the action of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Learning from his father’s ghost that Claudius, the new king, is a brother-murderer and a usurper, the hero sets out passionately to fulfill his personal duty by destroying the villain-king. Like Brutus, however, Hamlet is a reflective man, given to “saucy doubts” about the veracity of the ghost, about the effect on his soul of committing regicide, and about the final disposition of Claudius’s soul. As a result, Hamlet delays his revenge—a delay that has preoccupied audiences, readers, and critics for centuries. Numerous reasons have been proposed for the delay: Hamlet is melancholic; his morality does not condone murder; he is a coward; he is secretly envious of Claudius for murdering his “rival” for his mother’s affections. These explanations, while appealing, tend to shift attention away from other, equally significant elements in the play. Hamlet’s soliloquies illustrate the range of Shakespearean blank verse and provide the means for exploring character in detail. The play’s trap motif can be seen to represent effectively the doomed, claustrophobic atmosphere of the play. Indeed, those who deliberatively set traps in the play—Polonius, Claudius, Laertes, and Hamlet—find that those traps snap back to catch the “inventor.” Hamlet’s relationships with Ophelia and with Gertrude amply reveal his self-destructive belief that his mother’s marriage to Claudius has tainted his own flesh and transformed all women into strumpets. Throughout the action as well, one becomes aware that Shakespeare is using the theatrical metaphor “All the world’s a stage” to illustrate the way in which deceit and corruption can be masked. In another sense, Hamlet’s behavior is that of a bad actor, one who either misses his cues (as in the accidental murder of Polonius) or fails to perform when the audience expects action (as in his behavior following the play-withinthe-play). There is a good deal of reflection on death and disease in Hamlet, Prince of Denmark as well; the hero’s preoccupation with these images seems to mirror the sickness of the state and of his own enterprise. When Hamlet finally acts, however, he does so in the role of an avenger and scourge. He murders Claudius after the king has arranged for Laertes to slay him in a duel and after the queen has fallen dead from a poisoned drink intended for Hamlet. With Hamlet’s death, the kingdom reverts to the

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control of young Fortinbras, whose father Hamlet’s father had killed in another duel. Though Fortinbras stands as a heroic figure, one cannot help but observe the irony of a situation in which the son, without a struggle, inherits what his father was denied. Troilus and Cressida • In Troilus and Cressida, one encounters another kind of irony: satire. This strange play, which may have been composed for a select audience, possibly of lawyers, was placed between the histories and tragedies in the First Folio. The dual plot concerns the political machinations among the Greeks during their siege of Troy and the tortured love affair between Troilus and the unfaithful Cressida. There are no epic battles in the play; indeed, the murder of Hector by a band of Achilles’ followers might easily be viewed as cowardly or ignominious at best. Much of the political action consists of debates: Hector argues eloquently that Helen should be sent back to Menelaus; Ulysses produces many pithy arguments urging the reluctant Achilles to fight. Many of these scenes, moreover, end in anticlimax, and action is often frustrated. Throughout, Thersites, the satirist-onstage, bitterly attacks the warring and lecherous instincts of men; even the love affair between Troilus and Cressida seems tainted by the general atmosphere of disillusion. Although the two lovers share genuine affection for each other, one cannot ignore the truth that they are brought together by Pandarus and that their passion has a distinctly physical quality. When Cressida proves unable to resist the advances of Diomedes, Troilus becomes a cuckold like Menelaus; his bitterness and misogyny push one toward Thersites’ assessment that the “argument” of the war “is a whore and a cuckold.” Still it is possible to see tragic dimensions in the characters of both Hector and Troilus—one the victim of treachery in war, the other the victim of treachery in love. Timon of Athens • Although probably written after the other major tragedies, Timon of Athens shares a number of similarities with Troilus and Cressida. Here again is an ironic vision of humanity, this time in a social rather than martial setting. That vision is expanded by the trenchant comments, usually in the form of references to sexual disease, of Apemantus, another cynical choric commentator. Timon appears to be a tragic rather than misanthropic figure only if one sees him as the victim of his idealistic reading of humankind. When those on whom he has lavishly bestowed gifts and money consistently refuse to return the favor, Timon then becomes a bitter cynic and outspoken satirist. This exploding of a naïve philosophy or political idea, with its attendant destructive effect on the believer, would seem to be the basis for tragedy in a character such as Brutus or Hamlet, but even Hamlet fails to achieve the degree of misanthropy that typifies Timon’s outlook. Although he is loyally followed to the end by his servant Flavius, he dies alone and not as a result of someone else’s direct attack. One cannot say that the hero acquires a larger view of humanity or of himself as the result of his experience; he simply seems to swing from one extreme view to its opposite. A comparison of Timon with more sympathetic “railers” such as Hamlet and Lear shows how narrow and shallow are his character and the dimensions of the play. The fragmented nature of the text has led some critics to question Shakespeare’s authorship, but it is probably closer to the truth to say that this was an experiment that failed. Othello, the Moor of Venice • An experiment that clearly succeeded is Othello, the Moor of Venice, an intense and powerful domestic tragedy. Based on an Italian tale by Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio, the story concerns a Moor, a black man who is made to

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believe by a treacherous, vengeful ensign that his new Venetian bride has cuckolded him with one of his lieutenants, Cassio. In a rage, the Moor suffocates his bride, only to discover too late that his jealousy was unfounded. Rather than face the torture of a trial and his own conscience, he commits suicide as he bitterly accuses himself of blindness. In its simple outline, this story has the appearance of a crude melodrama, but Shakespeare brilliantly complicates the play’s texture through skillful manipulation of scenes, characters, and language. He also creates a world with two distinct symbolic settings: Venice and Cyprus. In Venice, Othello shows himself to be a cool, rational captain, deserving of the respect he receives from the senators who send him to Cyprus to defend it from the Turks. Once Othello is on the island, however, Iago begins to chip away at the hero’s veneer of self-control until he transforms him into a terrifyingly destructive force. Iago’s success depends not only on his close contact with Othello on the island but also on the generally held opinion that he, Iago, is an “honest man.” He is thus able to manipulate all the central characters as if he were a puppeteer. These characters share information with Iago that he later uses to ensnare them in his web, as when Desdemona begs him to find some way to reinstate Cassio in Othello’s favor. Iago is especially adept at using the handkerchief Othello gave to Desdemona but which she dropped while trying to ease her husband’s headache. When Iago’s wife Emilia dutifully hands her husband this handkerchief, he easily makes Othello believe that Desdemona gave it to Cassio as a love token. Although some critics have ridiculed Shakespeare for depending so heavily on one prop to resolve the plot, they fail to note the degree of psychological insight Shakespeare has displayed in using it. The handkerchief represents Othello’s wife’s honor and his own. She has given both away, in Othello’s mind, as if they were trifles. This play features a hero whose reason is overwhelmed by the passion of jealousy— “the green-eyed monster,” in Iago’s words. This theme is realized through numerous sea images, by which Shakespeare likens Othello’s violent reaction to a storm or tidal wave that drowns everything in its path. Like Shakespeare’s other great villains, Iago is a supreme individualist, acknowledging no authority or power beyond himself. That this attitude was a copy of the fallen angel Satan’s would not have escaped the attention of Shakespeare’s audience, which no doubt interpreted the plot as a replay of the Fall of Man. It may be especially important to perceive Iago as another Satan, since commentators have suspected the sufficiency of his motive (he says he wants revenge because Othello passed over him in appointing Cassio as his lieutenant). The extreme evilness of Iago’s nature and the extreme purity of Desdemona’s have led others to claim that Shakespeare was simply intent on fashioning a contemporary morality play for his audience. Such a reading tends to simplify what is in fact a thoroughgoing study of the emotions that both elevate and destroy humankind. As Othello discovers before his suicide, he was one “who loved not wisely but too well”; one might observe ironically that it was Iago, and not Desdemona, whom he loved “too well.” King Lear • If Othello’s tragedy results from the corrosive disease of jealousy, the hero of King Lear suffers from the debilitating effects of pride and self-pity. When the play opens, he is in the process of retiring from the kingship by dividing his kingdom into three parts, basing his assignment of land on the degree of affection mouthed by each of the three daughters to whom he plans to assign a part. Cordelia, his youngest and favorite, refuses to enter into this hollow ceremony, and Lear responds by suddenly and violently banishing her. Left in the hands of his evil and ambitious daughters

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Goneril and Regan, Lear quickly discovers that they plan to pare away any remaining symbols of his power and bring him entirely under their rule. This theme of children controlling, even destroying, their parents is echoed in a fully developed subplot involving old Gloucester and his two sons, Edmund and Edgar. With Cordelia and Edgar cast out—the former to live in France, the latter in disguise as Poor Tom—Lear and Gloucester suffer the punishing consequences of their sins. Lear runs mad into a terrible storm, accompanied by the Fool, a witty and poignant commentator on the unnaturalness of his master’s decision. There, Lear goes through a “dark night of the soul” in which he sees for the first time the suffering of others whom he has never regarded. Gloucester, who is also lacking insight into the true natures of his sons, is cruelly blinded by Regan and her husband and cast out from his own house to journey to Dover. On the way, he is joined by his disguised son, who helps Gloucester undergo a regeneration of faith before he expires. Cordelia performs a similar task for Lear, whose recovery can be only partial, because of his madness. After Cordelia is captured and killed by the forces of Edmund, whose brother conquers him in single combat, Lear, too, expires while holding the dead Cordelia in his arms. This wrenching ending, with its nihilistic overtones, is only one of the elements that places this play among the richest and most complex tragedies in English. Lear’s blindness, which is expertly represented in image clusters dealing with sight and insight, leads to cataclysmic suffering for his family and the state. More than any other Shakespearean tragedy, King Lear also succeeds in dramatizing the relationship between the microcosm, or little world of humankind, and the macrocosm, or larger world. One sees how the breakdown of the king’s reason and control leads to the breakdown of control in the state and in nature. At the moment when Lear bursts into tears, a frightening storm breaks out, and civil war soon follows. Images of human suffering and torture likewise crowd the action, the most compelling of which is the representation of the hero tied to a “wheel of fire” and scalded by his own tears as the wheel turns. The Wheel of Fortune emblem is clearly evoked by this image, revealing Shakespeare’s purpose of depicting the king as another fallen prince brought low by his own mistakes and by the caprice of the goddess. That Lear has created the circumstances of his own fall is underscored by the antic remarks of his companion the Fool, the choric speaker who early in the play tries to keep Lear’s mind from cracking as he comes to realize how wrong was the banishment of Cordelia. The Fool speaks in riddles and uses barnyard analogies to make the point that Lear has placed the whip in the child’s hand and lowered his own breeches. Gloucester must learn a similar lesson, although his dilemma involves a crisis of faith. Lear must strip away the coverings of civilization to discover “unaccommodated man,” a discovery he begins to make too late. Just as he realizes that Cordelia represents those qualities of truth and compassion that he has been lacking, she is suddenly and violently taken from him. Macbeth • Macbeth treats the de casibus theme of the fall of princes, but from a different perspective. Unlike Lear, Macbeth is a usurper who is driven to kill King Duncan by the witches’ prophecy, by his own ambition, and by his wife’s prompting. Once that deed is done, Macbeth finds himself unable to sleep, a victim of conscience and guilt. Although Lady Macbeth tries to control his fears, she proves unsuccessful, and her influence wanes rapidly. Evidence of this loss of power is Macbeth’s plot to kill Banquo, his fellow general, to whom the witches announced that he would be the father of kings. During the climactic banquet scene, Duncan’s ghost enters, invisible to the

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other guests, to take Macbeth’s place at the table; when the host reacts by raging and throwing his cup at the specter, the celebration is broken up and the guests scatter. Immediately, Macbeth rushes to the witches to seek proof that he is invincible. They tell him that he will not be conquered until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane and that no man born of woman can kill him. They also show him a procession of eight childkings, all of whom represent Banquo’s descendants, including the last king, who is meant to be James I. (This procession has helped many critics to conclude that Macbeth was written as an occasional play to honor James, who became the company’s protector in 1603.) Seeking to tighten his control of Scotland and to quiet his conscience, Macbeth launches a reign of terror during which his henchmen kill Lady Macduff and her children. Macduff, exiled in England with Duncan’s son Malcolm, learns of this vicious deed and spearheads an army that returns to Scotland to destroy the tyrant. In the final battle, which commences with the attacking army tearing down branches from trees in Birnam Wood to camouflage its advance, Macbeth discovers that his nemesis, Macduff, “was from his mother’s womb/ Untimely ripped.” Thus standing alone (Lady Macbeth commits suicide) and defeated, Macbeth represents himself as a “poor player” who has had his moment onstage and is quickly gone. This use of the theatrical metaphor looks back to the world of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark at the same time that it underscores the villain-hero’s role as an impostor king. Macbeth is also depicted as a Herod figure (recalling Richard III) when he murders the innocent children of Macduff in an obsessive fit brought on by the realization that he is childless and heirless. Two strains of imagery reinforce this perception, featuring recurring references to blood and to children. When Macbeth kills Duncan, he describes his blood as “gilding” his flesh, suggesting that the king is God’s anointed representative on earth. Shakespeare also depicts Macbeth’s nemesis as a bloody child; this image hints at the strength-in-innocence theme that dominates the latter part of the play. That is, as Macbeth grows into the “man” that Lady Macbeth claimed he should be, he becomes more destructive and less humane, the caricature of a man. Macduff, on the other hand, in tears over the brutal murder of his wife and children, emerges as a stronger and more compassionate man because he has shown himself capable of deep feeling. The bloody-babe image might also be defined as a Christ emblem, with the attendant suggestion that Macduff comes to free the land from a tyrant’s grasp by spreading a philosophy of goodness and mercy. If the play was written to honor James I, it might also be argued that the comparison between his reign and that of Christ was intended. Whatever the intention of these image patterns, they help one to trace the transformation in Macbeth’s character from battlefield hero to usurping tyrant, a transformation brought about by the powerful motive of ambition. Antony and Cleopatra • Written soon after Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra again traces the complex psychological patterns of a male-female relationship. Like Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra appears to control and direct the behavior of her man, Antony, but as the play progresses, she, too, begins to lose power. Unlike Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra outlasts her love, gaining from Antony’s death the spirit and stature of rule that was not evident throughout much of the play. Indeed, most of the action involves quarrels between these two mature but jealous and petulant lovers as they struggle to escape the harsh political world created by Octavius Caesar, Antony’s rival. Angered by Antony’s reveling in Egypt and later by his desertion of Caesar’s sister Octavia, whom Antony married only to buy time and an unsteady truce, Octavius be-

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gins to move against Antony with a powerful army and navy. During a first encounter between the two forces, in which Antony foolishly decides to fight at sea and also depends on Cleopatra’s untested ships, Antony leaves the field in pursuit of the retiring Cleopatra. Angered by her withdrawal and his own alacrity in following her, Antony rages against his “serpent of old Nile” and vows to have nothing further to do with her, but Cleopatra’s pull is magnetic, and Antony joins forces with her for a second battle with Caesar. When a similar retreat occurs and Antony finds Cleopatra apparently arranging a separate peace with one of Caesar’s representatives, he has the messenger beaten and sent back to Octavius with a challenge to single combat. These wild and desperate moves are commented on by Enobarbus, associate of Antony and choric voice. After the threat of single combat, Enobarbus leaves his master to join forces with Octavius. (Overcome by remorse, however, Enobarbus dies on the eve of battle.) Believing that Cleopatra has killed herself, Antony decides to commit suicide and calls on his servant Eros to hold his sword so that he can run himself on it. Instead, Eros kills himself, and Antony must strike the blow himself. Still alive, he is carried to the monument where Cleopatra has decided to take up residence. There, Antony expires, “a Roman, by a Roman/ Valiantly vanquished.” Almost immediately, Cleopatra’s character seems to change into that of a noble partner; her elegant speeches on Antony’s heroic proportions are some of the most powerful blank verse in the play. It is also clear that she intends to escape Octavius’s grasp, knowing that he intends to parade her and her children before a jeering Roman crowd. Putting on her royal robes and applying the poison asps to her breast, Cleopatra hurries off to join her lover in eternity. This complicated story is brilliantly organized by means of placing in balance the two worlds of Rome and Egypt. While Rome is presented as a cold, calculating place, reflective of the character of Octavius, Egypt stands out as a lush paradise in which the pursuit of pleasure is the main business of the inhabitants. This contrast is particularly telling because Antony’s status as a tragic hero depends on one’s seeing him as caught between the two worlds, at home in neither, master of neither. Water and serpent imagery dominate the play, creating a picture of Cleopatra as a Circe figure or a spontaneously generated creature that has seduced the once heroic Antony. Although this is the Roman view of the “gypsy” queen, Shakespeare requires his audience to appreciate her infinite variety. She is beautiful and playful, demanding and witty, cool and explosive. On the other hand, the assessment of Octavius as a puritanical, unfeeling man of destiny is also oversimplified; his reaction to Antony’s death reveals genuine emotion. At the close of the play, one realizes that Antony and Cleopatra’s vast empire has been reduced to the size of her monument—Caesar must attend a while longer to make this discovery himself. Antony and Cleopatra, however, have found a world of love that Octavius could never enter, and the tragedy is as much concerned with tracing the boundaries of that empire as it is with marking the triumphs of Octavius. Coriolanus • While reading the story of Antony and Cleopatra in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, to which the play reveals a number of similarities, Shakespeare found another Roman figure whose career he saw as appropriate matter for tragedy: Coriolanus. Composed in the period between 1607 and 1608, Coriolanus dramatizes the career of a general in Republican Rome. He proves to be a superhuman figure in battle, earning his name by single-handedly subduing the town of Corioles and emerging from its

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gates covered in blood. (This birth image has a mixed meaning, since the blood is that of his victims.) Unfortunately, Coriolanus refuses to humble himself before the Roman plebeians, whom he despises, as a requirement for holding the office of consul. Indeed, many of his bitter comments about the fickleness and cowardice of the populace remind one of characters such as Thersites and Apemantus. Such contempt and condescension make it hard to identify with Coriolanus, even though one is made aware that the Roman crowd is set against him by the jealous and ambitious tribunes, Brutus and Sicinius. Driven by his pride and anger, Coriolanus challenges the citizens’ rights and is subsequently banished. He then joins forces with his former enemy Aufidius, and the two of them lead an army to the very gates of Rome. Coriolanus’s mother comes out to plead with her son to spare Rome—and his family—in the most emotional scene of the play. Deeply moved by his mother’s arguments, Coriolanus relents and urges his companion to make peace with their enemy. Aufidius agrees but awaits his opportunity to ambush his partner, whom he regards as a lifelong enemy. In a masterstroke of irony, Coriolanus is brought down by the citizens of the very town—Corioles—that he conquered in acquiring his name. Because the play is so heavily laden with swatches of Coriolanus’s vitriol and instances of irony such as the final one, it is difficult to classify this tragedy with those in which the heroes present richly complex characters. If Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and Lear possess tragic flaws, those flaws are only a part of their complicated makeup. Coriolanus, on the other hand, can be understood only in terms of his flaw, and the character and play are therefore one-dimensional. There is little argument, however, that Shakespeare’s tragedies constitute the major achievement of his career. These dramas continue to appeal to audiences because their stories are intriguing; because their characters are fully realized human beings, if somewhat larger than life; and because their poetic language is metaphorically rich. Shakespeare possessed a profound insight into human nature and an ability to reveal what he found there in language unequaled in its power and beauty. The romances • In the later years of his career, Shakespeare returned to writing comedy of a special kind: tragicomedy or romance. The four plays usually referred to as “the romances” are Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. Three of these portray situations in which fathers are separated from daughters, then are rejoined through some miraculous turn of fortune. The plays also involve travel to exotic locales by the heroes and heroines, and, except for The Tempest, they portray events which occur over a span of many years. Sharp contrasts between court and pastoral settings vivify the theme of nature as the ideal teacher of moral values. In Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale, the plots move inexorably toward tragedy, but through some form of intervention by Providence—or in some cases, by the gods themselves—happiness is restored and characters are reunited. All the plays witness the power of faith as instrumental in the process of regeneration; the loyal counselor or servant is a regular character type in the plays. The general outlook of the romances is optimistic, suggesting that humankind is indeed capable of recovering from the Fall and of creating a new Paradise. Pericles • Pericles recounts the adventures of a good king who seems hounded by fortune and forced to wander through the Mediterranean. The plot is faintly reminiscent of that of The Comedy of Errors, suggesting that Shakespeare was returning to tested ma-

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terials from his earliest comedies. During a storm at sea, Pericles’ wife, Thaisa, apparently dies in childbirth and is set ashore in a coffin. He then leaves his daughter Marina in the care of a scheming queen, who tries to have her murdered. Instead, Marina is captured by pirates and eventually is sold to a brothel owner. After many years of lonely sojourning, Pericles is finally reunited with his daughter; later, through the offices of a doctor figure named Cerimon, they find Thaisa in the temple of Diana at Ephesus, where she has been resting for years. Throughout, the sea represents both a threatening and a peaceful force; Marina’s name points to the theme of the sea as a great restorative power. She “cures” her father aboard a ship. Cymbeline • Cymbeline, set in ancient Britain, recounts the misfortunes of its characters against the background of the Roman invasion of England. The tragicomedy has strong patriotic overtones, but it does not qualify as a history play such as those in the two tetralogies. The play depicts the moral education of Posthumus, the hero, whose desire to marry Imogen, Cymbeline’s daughter, is frustrated by his low birth. While in exile in Italy, Posthumus brags to an Italian acquaintance, Iachimo, that his beloved would never consider deceiving him. Thus challenged, Iachimo visits Imogen’s room while she sleeps and, through a clever ruse involving a ring and a birthmark, convinces Posthumus that he has slept with her. As a result of numerous plot turns, one of which calls for Imogen to disguise herself as a page, the two lovers are finally reunited when Iachimo confesses his sin. Comingled with this strain of plot is another involving two sons of Cymbeline who have been reared in the rugged world of caves and mountains by an old counselor banished by the king. (He originally kidnapped the boys to seek revenge against Cymbeline.) In a climactic scene brought about by the Roman invasion, the mountain-men heroes are reunited with their father and sister, whom all believed was dead. So complex is the plot that many readers and audiences have found the play confusing and sometimes unintentionally humorous. The characters are not fully developed, and it is difficult to determine just what is the central story. Here, too, spectacle overpowers dialogue and characterization, with little or no attention paid to plausibility. Shakespeare seems preoccupied with demonstrating the healthfulness of pastoral life, the patriotic spirit of Englishmen, and the melodramatic quality of evil. Clearly, this agenda of themes and values places one in a comic world that is distinct from the one that typifies the mature comedies. The Winter’s Tale • In The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare again explores the motif of the daughter separated from her father, but in this play, the father, King Leontes, must be seen as a potentially tragic figure. His jealousy leads him to accuse his wife, Hermione, of unfaithfulness with his friend and fellow king Polixenes. When Leontes confronts her, even after consultation of the oracle indicates her honesty, she faints and apparently expires. Leontes banishes the child Perdita, who is his daughter but whom he refuses to acknowledge because of his suspicions, and the third act ends with a loyal servant depositing the baby on the shore of Bohemia to be favored or destroyed by Fortune. (A bear pursues and kills the servant, thus destroying any link between Leontes’ court and the baby.) Perdita, “the lost one,” is found and reared by a shepherd. As sixteen years pass, she grows into a kind of pastoral queen, revealing those traits of goodness and innocence that Shakespeare associates with the Golden Age. When Polixenes repeats Leontes’ sin by banishing his son Florizel for falling in love with a lowly shepherdess, the couple,

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with the help of a rejected servant still loyal to Leontes, returns to Sicilia to seek the aid of the now repentant king. Through a series of revelations and with the help of the old shepherd, Perdita’s identity is discovered. She and Florizel are married, and the two kings are reunited in friendship. As a final tour de force, Hermione, who has been hidden away for the whole time by another loyal servant, comes to life as a statue supposedly sculpted by a famous artist. As in the other romances, some divine force has obviously been operating in the affairs of humans to bring about this happy reunion of families, friends, and countries. The Winter’s Tale comes closer than the earlier romances to a realistic treatment of emotion, with all of its destructive possibilities, and to a more nearly honest vision of the pastoral world. Autolycus the clown, for example, pretends to be nothing other than a successful thief, “a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles.” The Tempest • The Tempest is the only romance in which father and daughter are together from the beginning. It also possesses the only plot that observes the classical unities of time and place. Many commentators believe that the play represents Shakespeare’s greatest dramatic achievement, blending together beautiful verse, richly realized characters, and the moving wonders of the imagination. There can be no question that The Tempest is a refined and elevating statement of the themes of Providence and of order and degree. Prospero, the duke of Milan, exiled by his usurping brother Antonio, vows to punish both Antonio and his chief supporter, King Alonso. The two are aboard a ship sailing near the island on which Prospero and his daughter Miranda reside. Using magical power and the aid of a spirit named Ariel, Prospero apparently wrecks the ship, saving all the voyagers but supposedly drowning Ferdinand, Alonso’s son. Once on the island, the party is tormented by disorienting music and distracting sights, especially when Prospero’s brother Antonio attempts to persuade Alonso’s brother Sebastian to kill him and seize the crown. Another rebellion is attempted by Caliban (his name an anagram for “cannibal”), the half-human, half-bestial servant of Prospero. Both rebellions fail, but instead of punishing his victims further, Prospero, moved by the compassion displayed by Ariel, decides to give up his magic and return to civilization. The decision proves crucial, since Prospero was on the verge of becoming a kind of Faust, forgetting his identity as a man. When he acknowledges Caliban, “this thing of darkness,” as his own, one realizes that this gesture betokens an internal acceptance of the passions as a legitimate part of his nature. Instead of revenging himself on Alonso, Prospero allows Ferdinand to woo Miranda in a mood and manner that recall Eden before the Fall. It should also be noted that Prospero creates a marriage masque featuring Iris, Ceres, and Juno, at the close of which he delivers the famous “Our revels now are ended” speech. Some critics claim that Prospero’s words constitute Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage, but there is considerable evidence that he continued to write plays for at least another year. The Two Noble Kinsmen • The Two Noble Kinsmen was probably one of the plays composed during that period. It is not included in the First Folio (published 1623). It appeared in print in 1634 and bearing a title page ascribing the comedy to John Fletcher and William Shakespeare. Although collaboration was common among Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, it was not a form of composition in which Shakespeare regularly engaged. Because Henry VIII was also most likely a collaborative effort, there seems to be compelling evidence that Shakespeare was enjoying a state of

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semiretirement during this period. Based on Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale” (from his Canterbury Tales), The Two Noble Kinsmen depicts the love of Palamon and Arcite for Emilia in a polite and mannered style that can easily be identified with Fletcher’s other work. The play is similar to the other romances in its emphasis on spectacle. It opens with a magnificent wedding ceremony before the Temple of Hymen, and there are excursions to the shrines of Mars and Diana as well. However, there are no scenes of regeneration involving fathers and daughters, no emphasis on the forgiveness of sin. If this was Shakespeare’s last play, it shows him returning to old sources for oft-told tales; his interest in developing new comic forms had obviously waned. On the whole, the romances represent a more sophisticated but less playful and inventive style than that of the character-oriented comedies, such as Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing. They are the work of a playwright at the height of his powers, and they perhaps reveal the issues with which Shakespeare came to grapple in his later years: familial relationships, faith and redemption, and the legacy of each generation to its successors. Other major works poetry: Venus and Adonis, 1593; The Rape of Lucrece, 1594; The Passionate Pilgrim, 1599 (miscellany with poems by Shakespeare and others); The Phoenix and the Turtle, 1601; A Lover’s Complaint, 1609; Sonnets, 1609. Bibliography Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead, 1998. A drama-by-drama analysis of William Shakespeare’s plays, focusing on character development and the playwright’s contribution to the modern understanding of the human experience. Brown, John Russell. Shakespeare: The Tragedies. New York: Palgrave, 2001. A study of the tragedies in chronological order. Danson, Lawrence. Shakespeare’s Dramatic Genres. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Danson’s scholarly study examines Shakespeare’s philosophy and how it was demonstrated in his dramas. Bibliography and index. De Grazia, Margreta, and Stanley Wells, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. This work provides an extensive guide to Shakespeare’s life and works. Dobson, Michael, and Stanley Wells, eds. The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2001. An encyclopedic treatment of the life and works of Shakespeare. Draper, Ronald P. Shakespeare, the Comedies. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Draper provides an analysis of the playwright’s comedies. Bibliography and index. Duncan-Jones, Katherine. Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001. Duncan-Jones portrays Shakespeare as a man influenced by the political, social, and literary climate in which he found himself. She also examines speculative stories such as his love for a Dark Lady. Bibliography and index. Holderness, Graham. Shakespeare: The Histories. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Holderness examines the historical plays of Shakespeare and the historical events on which they were based. Bibliography and index. Honan, Park. Shakespeare: A Life. 1999. Reprint. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Honan’s life of Shakespeare shuns the mythology that has grown up around the playwright and places him in the context of his age.

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Kermode, Frank. Shakespeare’s Language. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2000. Between 1594 and 1608, Kermode argues, the language of Shakespeare’s plays was transformed, acquiring a new complexity that arose out of the playwright’s increasingly successful attempts to represent dramatically the excitement and confusion of thought under stress. McConnell, Louise. Dictionary of Shakespeare. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000. A basic reference. McLeish, Kenneth, and Stephen Unwin. A Pocket Guide to Shakespeare’s Plays. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. This concise guide summarizes the plots and characters of Shakespeare’s plays, providing an easy reference. Marsh, Nicholas. Shakespeare, the Tragedies. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Marsh analyzes the tragedies of Shakespeare, providing study guides. Bibliography and index. Proudfoot, Richard. Shakespeare: Text, Stage, and Canon. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001. A study of Shakespeare’s plays, with emphasis on their stage history and how they were produced. Bibliography and index. Richards, Jennifer, and James Knowles, eds. Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. A collection of essays focusing on the playwright’s later plays, including The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Bibliography and index. Southworth, John. Shakespeare, the Player: A Life in the Theatre. Stroud, England: Sutton, 2000. A biography that focuses on the dramatist as a member of the theater, writing for the theater in collaboration with the theater company. Thomson, Peter. Shakespeare’s Professional Career. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Thomson examines the theatrical world of Elizabethan England to illuminate William Shakespeare’s life and writings. Wells, Stanley. Shakespeare: A Life in Drama. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. A critical introduction to William Shakespeare’s life and work. Wilson, Ian. Shakespeare: The Evidence: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Man and His Work. London: Headline, 1993. Wilson draws on documents discovered during the excavation of the site of the Globe Theatre to delve into the mysteries surrounding Shakespeare’s life, including authorship of his plays, his sexuality, his religion, and the curse he set on his own grave. Robert F. Willson, Jr., additional material by Harold Branam, updated by John R. Holmes and Joseph Rosenblum

Ntozake Shange Ntozake Shange

Paulette Williams Born: Trenton, New Jersey; October 18, 1948 Principal drama • for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf, pr., pb. 1975; A Photograph: Still Life with Shadows; A Photograph: A Study in Cruelty, pr. 1977 (revised as A Photograph: Lovers in Motion, pr. 1979, pb. 1981); Where the Mississippi Meets the Amazon, pr. 1977 (with Thulani Nkabinde and Jessica Hagedorn); From Okra to Greens: A Different Kinda Love Story, pr. 1978, pb. 1985; Black and White Two Dimensional Planes, pr., 1979; Spell #7: Geechee Jibara Quik Magic Trance Manual for Technologically Stressed Third World People, pr. 1979, pb. 1981; Boogie Woogie Landscapes, pr. 1979, pb. 1981; Mother Courage and Her Children, pr. 1980 (adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s play); Three Pieces, pb. 1981; Betsey Brown, pr. 1991 (based on her novel); The Love Space Demands: A Continuing Saga, pb. 1991, pr. 1992; Plays: One, pb. 1992; Three Pieces, pb. 1992 Other literary forms • Ntozake Shange’s three genres—plays, poems, and novels— so overlap that one might say she has invented a new genre, which she has named the “choreopoem.” She has published several volumes of poetry, including Nappy Edges (1978), parts of which were included in her 1975 play for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf; Natural Disasters and Other Festive Occasions (1979); A Daughter’s Geography (1983); Ridin’ the Moon in Texas: Word Paintings (1987); and I Live in Music (1994). Among her novels are Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo (1982) and Betsey Brown (1985). She has gathered writings about her work from 1976 to 1984 into See No Evil: Prefaces, Essays, and Accounts, 1976-1983 (1984), the study of which is essential to an understanding of her art. Shange has also distinguished herself as a director, of both her own work and that of others, notably Richard Wesley’s The Mighty Gents in 1979. In 1980, Shange adapted Bertolt Brecht’s Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (1941; Mother Courage and Her Children, 1941), changing the scene from mid-seventeenth century Europe to post-Civil War America, making the protagonist an emancipated slave doing business with the army oppressing the Western Indians, and changing the language to black English. Achievements • Ntozake Shange’s work embodies a rich confusion of genres and all the contradictions inherent in a world in which violence and oppression polarize life and art. These polarizations in Shange’s work both contribute to her artistry and complicate it. She has been criticized and praised for her unconventional language and structure, for her almost religious feminism, and for her stand on black/white and male/female issues. Her first play, for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf, produced in 1976 by Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival, was honored in that year by the Outer Critics Circle, which consists of those who write about the New York theater for out-of-town newspapers. That play also received Obie and Audelco Awards as well as Tony and Grammy Award nominations in 1977. Shange’s 1980 adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children won one of 827

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the The Village Voice‘s Obie awards. Among her many other awards are a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry and a Pushcart Prize. Biography • Ntozake Shange (pronounced “En-to-zaki Shong-gay”) was born Paulette Williams in Trenton, New Jersey, on October 18, 1948, daughter of a surgeon and a psychiatric social worker and educator. She grew up surrounded by music, literature, art, and her parents’ prominent friends, among them Dizzy Gillespie, Chuck Berry, and W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as Third World writers and musicians. Her (Jules Allen) ties with her family were strong; she also was close to her family’s live-in black maids. She was graduated from Barnard College with honors in 1970, then received a graduate degree at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. While in California, she began studying dance, writing poetry, and participating in improvisational works (consisting of poems, music, dance, and mime) at bars, cabarets, and schools. These gradually grew into for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf, which she carried across the country to perform in workshops in New York, then at the Public Theatre, and eventually on Broadway. The contrasts between her privileged home and education and the realities of the lives of black women led her, in 1971, to change her name legally from what she called the “slave name” of Paulette Williams to Ntozake Shange, meaning “she who comes with her own things” and “she who walks like a lion” in Xhosa (Zulu). Her two failed marriages, her suicide attempts, and her contact with city violence resulted in an anger that found its outlet in her poems. During the late 1970’s, she lived in New York City, but she later moved to Houston, Texas, with her daughter, Savannah. She has taught and lectured at many colleges and universities, including Mills College in Oakland California; The State University in Rutgers, New Jersey; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Houston; Rice University; Yale University; Howard University; and New York University. Her work with Emily Mann on the script version of Betsey Brown brought her into prominence among feminists and experimental theaters. Working under the auspices of the New York Shakespeare Festival, the two women brought the play into its production form through a series of staged readings, workshops, and tryouts, and their collaboration techniques were the subject of forums among dramaturges in 1990. Shange’s poetic “reading/performance” piece The Love Space Demands, in which she reads her own work (accompanied by guitarist Billie Patterson), was performed in New Jersey at the Crossroads Theatre and in San Francisco at the Hansberry Theatre in 1992. Analysis • In Ntozake Shange’s introduction to the volume Three Pieces, she makes this statement about drama:

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as a poet in american theater/ i find most activity that takes place on our stages overwhelmingly shallow/ stilted & imitative. that is probably one of the reasons i insist on calling myself a poet or writer/ rather than a playwright/ i am interested solely in the poetry of a moment/ the emotional & aesthetic impact of a character or a line. Her plays have evoked a range of critical responses commensurate with their unconventional nature. Should her work be characterized as poetry or drama, prose or poetry, essay or autobiography? Her choreopoems, made up of poetry, drama, prose, and autobiography, are unified by a militant feminism in which some critics have seen a one-sided attack on black men. Others, however, point out the youthful spirit, flair with language, and lyricism that carry her plays to startling and radical conclusions. Her style and its seeming contradictions, such as the use of both black English and the erudite vocabulary of the educated, are at the heart of her drama. Influenced by their method of development—public poetry reading in bars, cafés, schools, Off-Off-Broadway theaters—the plays are generally somewhere between a poetry reading and a staged play. First among the contradictions or contrasts is her blending of genres: Her poems shade into drama, her dramas are essentially verse monologues, and her novels incorporate poetic passages. Second, her language varies radically—on a single page and even in a single phrase—from black dialect (“cuz,” “wanna,” “awready,” “chirren”) to the language of her middle-class upbringing and education (“i cant count the number of times i have viscerally wanted to attack deform n maim the language that i waz taught to hate myself in/”). In the published texts of her poetry, plays, and essays, in addition to simplified phonetic spellings, she employs the slash instead of the period and omits capitalization. Many recordings of her work are available, and these provide the listener with a much fuller sense of the dynamic quality of her language in performance. Shange’s bold and daring use of language, her respect for people formerly given little value, and her exploration of the roles of black men and women have opened a new dimension in theater. Her blendings of poetry, music, and dance bring theater back to its origins and simultaneously blaze a trail toward the drama of the future. for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf • Shange’s first dramatic success, for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf, is the recital, individually and in chorus, of the lives and growth of seven different black women, named according to their dress colors: “lady in red,” “lady in blue,” “lady in orange,” “lady in brown,” “lady in yellow,” “lady in purple,” and “lady in green.” The term “colored girls” in the title evokes a stereotype of black women yet also contains a germ of hope for the future (the “rainbow,” both of color and of eventual salvation). These seven stylized figures are representative voices of black women, and they express their fury at their oppression both as women and as blacks. The first segment shows high school graduation and the social and sexual rite of passage for “colored girls” in the working-class suburbs. Some of the women who have been cruelly disappointed in relationships with men discuss their spiritual quests. A black woman pretends to be Puerto Rican so that she can dance the merengue in Spanish Harlem. A woman breaks up with her lover by returning to him his plant to water. The scenes become more somber, portraying rape, abuse, city dangers, and abortion. Ties with a more heroic black past appear in “Toussaint,” while the glamorized prostitute evicts her lover from her bed. The women begin to analyze their predicaments and to assert

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their independence in segments entitled “somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff” and “pyramid,” in which three women console one another for the actions of the faithless lover whom they share. In the brutal culminating scene, a crazed Vietnam veteran, Beau Willie Brown, abuses his woman Crystal and kills their infant children, dropping them from a window. The recurrent motif of the recitation is the thwarting of dreams and aspirations for a decent life by forces beyond one’s control: war, poverty, and ignorance. There is, however, a saving grace. Toward the end of the play, the seven women fall into a tighter circle of mutual support, much like a religious “laying on of hands” ceremony, in which they say, “i found god in myself/ & i loved her/ i loved her fiercely.” Their bitter pain, shown throughout the dramatic episodes, turns into a possibility of regeneration. Thus, the play is a drama of salvation for women who do not receive their full value in society. Though it was a landmark in the emergence of new black women playwrights, for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf has been criticized for its lack of discussion of black traditions in religion, family, and ordinary work, and for its omissions of both black literary and political history and the influence of whites. Its style, considered as an attack on language, part of blacks’ “enslavement,” has also been criticized. Later plays, however, include these elements in a constantly enriching network of allusions. A Photograph • In A Photograph, a set of meditations and sketches involving an ideal black woman named Michael and her lover Sean, a failed photographer, Shange explores her idea of art—“the poetry of a moment”—as well as representative stages of the African American experience. Photography, dance, and drama are shown to be art forms that capture meaningful moments and present them to viewers and readers so that they might behold and understand the essence and the value of art and life. The young professionals that reside in or pass through Sean’s San Francisco apartmentstudio are shown to examine the psychological factors that impede and that motivate them and other African Americans. The five figures of this piece are representative of other aspects of black life than those put forward in her first play. Nevada, a lawyer and lover-supporter of Sean, the struggling artist, sets herself above other “common” African Americans: Her family, she boasts, “was manumitted in 1843/ [when] yall were still slaves/ carrying things for white folks . . . /” The upwardly mobile Earl, also a lawyer, former lover of Claire and long-time friend of Sean, pleads Nevada’s case to Sean when the latter rejects her. Claire is a dancer who dances seductively for Sean as he photographs and then ravishes her. Michael is a dancer and the woman Sean comes truly to love as she shares herself and her ideas of art and of the African experience with him. Early in the drama Sean tells Michael, “i’m a genius for unravelling the mysteries of the darker races/. . . i know who we are.” After he rejects Nevada and is rejected by her, Sean reveals his insecurities as a son, a man, an African American, and an artist. The self- and race-assured artist Michael challenges her temporarily broken lover. Sean soon responds to this and to a poetic story danced and told by Michael with his own story and assurances. yes. that’s right. me. i’ma be it. the photographer of all time. look out ansel/ . . . i can bring you the world shining grainy focused or shaking/ a godlike phenomenon/ sean david . . . i realize you’re not accustomed to the visions of a man of color who

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has a gift/ but fear not/ I’ll give it to ya a lil at a time. i am only beginning to startle/ to mesmerize and reverse the reality of all who can see. I gotta thing bout niggahs/ my folks/ that just wont stop/ & we are so correct for the photograph/ we profile all the time/ styling/ giving angle & pattern/ shadows & still life. if somebody sides me cd see the line in niggahs/ the texture of our lives/ they wda done it/ but since nobody has stepped forward/ here I am . . . Sean seems obviously representative of Shange the artist in his coming-into-his-own response to Michael, who is yet another representative of Shange the artist. This choreopoem seems a particularly significant statement made by Shange, poet and writer: She, like Sean, presents “the contours of life unnoticed” and she, like Michael, speaks “for everybody burdened.” Boogie Woogie Landscapes • After examining the identity of isolated young black women in for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf and of couples in A Photograph, Shange concentrates on one woman’s visions, dreams, and memories in Boogie Woogie Landscapes, which was first produced as a one-woman poetry piece in 1978 and then cast as a play in 1979, with music and dance. Layla, a young black woman, entertains in her dreams a series of nightlife companions who exemplify her perceptions of herself and her memories. “Layla” in Arabic means “born at night,”and the entire drama exists in Layla’s nighttime subconscious. Layla’s dreams of Fidel Castro’s Cuba, of primitive cruelties to African women, and of rock and roll and blues interweave with her feelings about growing up, family, brothers and sisters, parents, maids (some of which appear later in Shange’s semiautobiographical novel Betsey Brown). Spell #7 • Shange’s 1979 play Spell #7, like her first play, is structured like a highly electric poetry reading, but this time the cast is mixed male and female. A huge blackface mask forms the backdrop for actors and actresses of an imitation old-time minstrel show, where actors did skits, recited, and joked, all under the direction of a Mr. Interlocutor. The actors come offstage, relax at an actors’ bar, and gradually remove their masks, revealing their true selves. Lou, the “practicing magician,” reveals that his father gave up his role as magician when a colored child asked for a spell to make her white. The actors tell each other and the audience tall stories. One of these involves a child who thought blacks were immune to dread diseases and disease-ridden passions such as polio and pedophilia. She is disillusioned when, as an adult, she finds that blacks not only can but also do hurt one another, so she buys South African gold to remind the black people that it cost a lot for us to be here our value/ can be known instinctively but since so many black people are having a hard time not being like white folks i wear these gold pieces to protest their ignorance their disconnect from history. Another woman loves her baby, which she names “myself,” while it is in the womb but kills it after it is born. Still another girl vows to brush her “nappy” hair constantly so that she can toss it like white girls. By these contrasts and by wry lists and surprising parallels, Shange shows the pain and difficulty, as well as the hopefulness, of being black. Lou refers to the spell that caused his father to give up magic as he (Lou) casts the final spell of Spell #7:

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The others join him in celebration of “bein colored”; but the minstrel mask drops down and Lou’s final words contain anger as well as celebration: crackers are born with the right to be alive/ i’m making ours up right here in yr face/ & we gonna be colored & love it From Okra to Greens • Shange’s From Okra to Greens draws together and expands on the themes of her earlier theater pieces. The discovery by the lovers Okra and Greens of the beauty and strength—the god—within the individual is like that of the women who populate for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf. Similarly, the lovers’ discovery of what is sacred—of the fullness and color of life versus the “skinny life” of black and white—is the goal of Layla in Boogie Woogie Landscapes, of the actors in Spell #7, and of the artists of A Photograph. The love between two fully realized human beings, like that experienced by Sean and Michael in A Photograph, is fully expanded on in this two-character drama of Okra and Greens. The theme of the responsibility of the artist touched on by Sean and by Michael is also fully developed by the poets Okra and Greens. In the opening scenes of From Okra to Greens, Greens speaks of Okra’s plight as single black woman as Okra acts/dances the role. This scene is reminiscent of Sean and Michael speaking in unison about Sean’s and then Michael’s art in the final scene of A Photograph and Ross’s talking while Maxine acts out the role that the two are creating together, on the spot, in Spell #7. In From Okra to Greens, as in her other choreopoems, Shange turns her dramatic poetry into staged drama. She presents verbatim much of the poetry of her collection A Daughter’s Geography. Although her feminist protests are dramatized in this play as in for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf and in Boogie Woogie Landscapes, here her feminist protest is given voice by the male character Greens. That both Okra and Greens are poets allows them to have an understanding of one another and of the roles forced on too many African American women and men as well as an understanding of the role that human beings should play in the world. Okra first dances as “the crooked woman” as Greens speaks, showing his and society’s distorted view of black women. Okra’s dance reflects both her pain and her potential strength and beauty. As the two come together, Greens admits his own crookedness in telling Okra that before their encounter he had not known “what a stood/up straight man felt like.” Together the two characters create and present portraits of “some men” who degrade women (as they are encouraged to do by the patriarchy). Once married, the two continue their dialogue, which includes their consideration of one another and of the sociopolitical climate in which they and, later, their daughter, must reside. Shange’s Okra and Greens celebrates, as do Sean and Michael in A Photograph, the

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richness of African American life. Her love story extends to the poor of not only her own country but also the world. Okra pleads for the return of Haitian liberators Dessalines, Petion, and L’Ouverture with their visions of “la liberte, l’egalite, la fraternite.” As in her other theater pieces, Shange calls here, too, for the return of American visionaries, among them W. E. B. Du Bois. As the hope of the world’s visionaries is shown to have dimmed, so the relationship between the lovers Okra and Greens dims momentarily. Abandoned by Greens, Okra says that “the moon cracked in a ugly rupture.” Joined once more, the two encourage each other and others to “rise up” and to “dance with the universe.” This story of the love between two poets is a love song to a universe in sad need of hope. The refrain of Boogie Woogie Landscapes, that “we dont recognize what’s sacred anymore,” is revealed in From Okra to Greens in the portrait of the “pretty man” whose pretty floors are covered with the kind of rug that “little girls spend whole/ lives tying.” Lack of recognition of the sacred is a theme repeated throughout the work. However, the love between Okra and Greens and their hope for their daughter and for the oppressed peoples of the world shows recognition of the sacred is possible for aware, thinking, and caring individuals. The memory of other visionaries also shows the poets’ and others’ recognition of the sacred. It is clear here and throughout her writing that Shange would have her audience recognize the sacred in themselves and in others and do their part in telling the story—in spreading the word—and in fighting for liberty, equality, and fraternity for all. Betsey Brown and The Love Space Demands • In 1991, Shange adapted her novel Betsey Brown into a play. The semiautobiographical work tells the story of a thirteenyear-old African American girl growing up in a middle-class household in 1950’s St. Louis. The Love Space Demands, a loosely connected series of poems and monologues Shange herself performs with musical accompaniment, revolves around sexual relations in the age of AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome). Other major works long fiction: Sassafras: A Novella, 1976; Sassafras, Cypress, and Indigo, 1982; Betsey Brown, 1985; Liliane: Resurrection of the Daughter, 1994. poetry: Nappy Edges, 1978; Natural Disasters and Other Festive Occasions, 1979; A Daughter’s Geography, 1983, 1991; From Okra to Greens: Poems, 1984; Ridin’ the Moon in Texas: Word Paintings, 1987; I Live in Music, 1994. nonfiction: See No Evil: Prefaces, Essays, and Accounts, 1976-1983, 1984; If I Can Cook, You Know God Can, 1998. edited text: The Beacon Best of 1999: Creative Writing by Women and Men of All Colors, 2000. Bibliography Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. A good study of Shange, along with Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry. Analyzes for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf at considerable length, as well as the 1979 trilogy, Spell #7, Boogie Woogie Landscapes, and A Photograph. Effiong, Philip Uko. In Search of a Model for African American Drama: A Study of Selected Plays by Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, and Ntozake Shange. New York: University Press of America, 2000. Analyzes the historical and sociopolitical considerations

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that determine the choices made by each dramatist. Considers the ritualization of black theater by each dramatist. Lester, Neal A. Ntozake Shange: A Critical Study of the Plays. New York: Garland, 1995. Lester examines critically Shange’s contributions to the American stage, suggests aspects of her work for further study, and contextualizes Shange’s drama within appropriate literary traditions. A thorough and insightful study of Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf, Spell #7, A Photograph, Boogie Woogie Landscapes, and From Okra to Greens. Russell, Sandi. Render Me My Song: African American Women Writers from Slavery to the Present. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Supplies a list of Shange’s work up to Betsey Brown. Good biography and comments on the “choreopoem” format. Discusses the trilogy of plays ending with A Photograph and examines Shange’s version of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. Puts Shange in context with Alexis DeVeaux, Rita Dove, and Toni Cade Bambara, writers using blues styles fed by oral traditions, of which for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf is exemplary. Shange, Ntozake, and Emily Mann. “The Birth of an R&B Musical.” Interview by Douglas J. Keating. Inquirer (Philadelphia), March 26, 1989. Follows the story of how Emily Mann and Shange took Shange’s Betsey Brown from book to stage, in a long interview with both playwrights to mark the opening of the play at the Forum Theater in Philadelphia, as part of the American Music Theater Festival. Sommers, Michael. “Rays of Hope in a Sky of Blues.” Review of The Love Space Demands by Ntozake Shange. Star-Ledger (Newark, N.J.), March 12, 1992. This appreciative review of The Love Space Demands provides an insightful overview of how Shange takes her poetry to the stage. Sommers finds the work “[a] very accessible, dramatically gripping and altogether handsomely-done theater piece.” “Spell #7 Takes Us on Magical Trip.” Review of Spell #7 by Ntozake Shange. Times (Washington, D.C.), May 9, 1991. This descriptive review of Spell #7 places the piece in the context of a continuing struggle of black women for a dignified place in society: “After all the tribulations and outpourings of feeling, the lingering message is one of racial pride.” Anne Mills King, updated by Thomas J. Taylor and Judith K. Taylor

George Bernard Shaw George Bernard Shaw

Born: Dublin, Ireland; July 26, 1856 Died: Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire, England; November 2, 1950 Principal drama • Widowers’ Houses, wr. 1885-1892, pr. 1892, pb. 1893; Mrs. Warren’s Profession, wr. 1893, pb. 1898, pr. 1902; The Philanderer, wr. 1893, pb. 1898, pr. 1905; Arms and the Man, pr. 1894, pb. 1898; Candida: A Mystery, pr. 1897, pb. 1898; The Devil’s Disciple, pr. 1897, pb. 1901; The Man of Destiny, pr. 1897, pb. 1898; You Never Can Tell, pb. 1898, pr. 1899; Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, pr. 1900, pb. 1901; Caesar and Cleopatra, pb. 1901, pr. 1906; The Admirable Bashville, pr. 1903, pb. 1909 (based on Shaw’s novel Cashel Byron’s Profession); Man and Superman, pb. 1903, pr. 1905; How He Lied to Her Husband, pr. 1904, pb. 1907; John Bull’s Other Island, pr. 1904, pb. 1907; Major Barbara, pr. 1905, pb. 1907; Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction, pr., pb. 1905; The Doctor’s Dilemma, pr. 1906, pb. 1911; The Interlude at the Playhouse, pr., pb. 1907 (playlet); Getting Married, pr. 1908, pb. 1911; Press Cuttings, pr., pb. 1909; The Shewing up of Blanco Posnet, pr. 1909, pb. 1911; The Fascinating Foundling, wr. 1909, pb. 1926, pr. 1928; The Glimpse of Reality, wr. 1909, pb. 1926, pr. 1927; The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, pr. 1910, pb. 1914; Misalliance, pr. 1910, pb. 1914; Fanny’s First Play, pr. 1911, pb. 1914; Androcles and the Lion, pr. 1912 (in German), pr. 1913 (in English), pb. 1916; Overruled, pr. 1912, pb. 1916; Pygmalion, pb. 1912, pr. 1914 (in English), pr. 1913 (in German); Beauty’s Duty, wr. 1913, pb. 1932 (playlet); Great Catherine, pr. 1913, pb. 1919; Heartbreak House, wr. 1913-1919, pb. 1919, pr. 1920; The Music Cure, pr. 1914, pb. 1926; The Inca of Perusalem, pr. 1916, pb. 1919; O’Flaherty, V.C., pr. 1917, pb. 1919; Augustus Does His Bit, pr. 1917, pb. 1919; Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress, pr. 1918, pb. 1919; Back to Methuselah, pb. 1921, pr. 1922; Jitta’s Atonement, pr. 1923, pb. 1926; Saint Joan, pr. 1923, pb. 1924; The Apple Cart, pr. 1929, pb. 1930; Too True to Be Good, pr. 1932, pb. 1934; How These Doctors Love One Another!, pb. 1932 (playlet); On the Rocks, pr. 1933, pb. 1934; Village Wooing, pr., pb. 1934; The Six Men of Calais, pr. 1934, pb. 1936; The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, pr., pb. 1935; Arthur and Acetone, pb. 1936; The Millionairess, pr., pb. 1936; Cymbeline Refinished, pr. 1937, pb. 1938 (adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, act 5); Geneva, pr. 1938, pb. 1939; In Good King Charles’s Golden Days, pr., pb. 1939; “The British Party System,” wr. 1944 (playlet); Buoyant Billions, pb. 1947, pr. 1948 (in German), pr. 1949 (in English); Shakes Versus Shaw, pr. 1949, pb. 1950; FarFetched Fables, pr., pb. 1950; The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, pb. 1970-1974 (7 volumes) Other literary forms • Although George Bernard Shaw is generally thought of as a dramatist, he wrote a considerable amount of nondramatic prose. He completed, for example, several novels before turning to the stage, and even though none of them is likely to be remembered for its own sake, all show Shaw’s gift for witty dialogue. His The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928), written for his sister-in-law, is one of the clearest expositions of socialism or communism ever written. The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), The Perfect Wagnerite (1898), and The Sanity of Art (1908) are representative of his criticism in drama, music, and art, respectively. The prefaces to his 835

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plays—some of which are longer than the plays they preface and which often explain little about the plays themselves—are brilliantly written criticisms of everything from the four Gospels to the contemporary prison system. Other notable Shaw works include Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889), The Common Sense of Municipal Trading (1904), Dramatic Opinions and Essays (1907), The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932), and several collections of letters: Letters to Miss Alma Murray (1927), Ellen Terry and Shaw (1931), Correspondence Between George Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell (1952), Collected Letters (1965-1988, 4 volumes; Dan H. Laurence, editor), and The Nondramatic Literary Criticism of Bernard Shaw (1972; Stanley Weintraub, editor). Achievements • George Bernard Shaw came to an English theater settled into the well-made play, a theater that had not known a first-rate dramatist for more than a century. The pap on which its audiences had been fed, not very different from television fare today, provided a soothing escape from the realities of the working world. Instead of fitting himself to this unreal mold, Shaw offered reality in all its forms: social, political, economic, and religious. He was a didact, a preacher who readily acknowledged that the stage was his pulpit. In startling contrast to his contemporary Oscar Wilde and Wilde’s fellow aesthetes, Shaw asserted that he would not commit a single sentence to paper for art’s sake alone; yet he beat the aesthetes at their own artistic game. Though he preached socialism, creative evolution, the abolition of prisons, and real equality for women, and railed against the insincerity of motives for war, he did so as a jester in some of the finest comedy ever written. He had no desire to be a martyr and insisted that, though his contemporaries might merely laugh at his plays, “a joke is an earnest in the womb of time.” The next generation would get his point, even if the current generation was only entertained. Many of the next generations have gotten his point, and Shaw’s argument—that he who writes for all time will discover that he writes for no time—seems to have been borne out. Only by saying something to the age can one say something to posterity. Today, evolution and creationism and Shaw’s ideas on creative evolution and the Life Force remain timely issues. In Shaw’s own day, as Dan Laurence points out, Henri Bergson changed the dramatist’s Life Force into the élan vital four years after Shaw wrote of it in Man and Superman, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s evolutionary ideas, so appealing to moderns, about the movement of the “noosphere” toward an omega man, show the timeliness of Shaw’s evolutionary theory that humankind is in the process of creating a God. Shaw’s condemnation of the prison system as a vindictive, not a rehabilitative force, matches the widespread concern with the ineffectiveness of that system today. His struggle for the genuine equality of women with men before the law also gives his work a surprisingly contemporary thrust. Shaw brought serious themes back to the trivialized English stage, creating a body of drama that left him second to none among twentieth century dramatists. Biography • George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin, Ireland, at No. 3 Upper Synge Street on July 26, 1856. The house still stands, though the address became 33 Synge Street, and the residence is marked by the surprisingly understated plaque, “Bernard Shaw, author of many plays, was born in this house.” Shaw’s father was a cheerful drunk, and the son’s loss of faith in the father might have affected his faith in general. In any event, though he was baptized into the Church of Ireland, he became a lifelong scoffer at organized religion while always remaining a profoundly religious thinker.

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Shaw’s mother and sister were fine singers and eventually left Shaw’s father to move in with the eccentric music teacher, George Vandeleur Lee. From Lee, Shaw himself learned the voice control that would later stand him in good stead as a public debater. He also learned a great deal from respected uncles: From one, a curate at St. Bride’s in Dublin, he learned Latin; another, a ship’s surgeon, taught him that the Bible was the greatest pack of lies ever invented. Shaw left secondary school because of boredom. The Latin he had learned early put him too far ahead of his classmates to make the instruction profitable, and by the time the others caught up, he had lost interest and formed poor study habits. He worked for a firm of land agents before finally leaving Ireland when he was nineteen years old, joining his mother and Vandeleur Lee in London. For a time after arriving in London, Shaw wrote music criticism that Lee had been commissioned to write but turned over to Shaw. Shaw was later to write music criticism (under the pen name “Corno di Bassetto”) that qualified him, in the judgment of W. H. Auden and other observers, as the finest music critic ever. By the time he was twenty-three years old, Shaw was convinced that he could not return to office work, and he began a career as a novelist. He wrote five novels, none of which was immediately published, although later, all but the first novel would find publishers. Around 1884, Shaw made the acquaintance of William Archer at the British Museum. The meeting launched Shaw on his career as a critic, first as an art critic, then as a music critic (as mentioned above), and finally as a drama critic for more than three years for the Saturday Review. While Shaw was a struggling novelist and critic, he became a vegetarian and a socialist; both of these causes were to color his writing for the rest of his life. The conversion to vegetarianism came when he was twenty-five years old and under the influence of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Idealism. His conversion to socialism came somewhat later, probably through the influence of a lecture by Henry George and subsequent reading of Karl Marx. In 1884, Shaw helped Beatrice and Sidney Webb found the Fabian Society, a socialist organization later joined by H. G. Wells. When Shaw’s nervousness made him stumble badly during a lecture on John Stuart Mill for the society, he determined to make a public speaker of himself by promptly planting his soapbox for socialism in Hyde Park. Considering the ex(© The Nobel Foundation) traordinary public speaker and de-

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bater Shaw became, it is hard to believe that he began as a young man who was so shy he could not visit a friend without pacing up and down the street trying to gain courage to ring the door bell. In 1892, the Independent Theatre was about to open and needed plays. Shaw quickly finished Widowers’ Houses, which he had begun seven years earlier with William Archer. The noted drama critic, however, decided Shaw was no playwright and was never to change his mind. Although Shaw had accepted Archer’s opinion at first, he gave the play a second try and began a career that was to continue until 1950. When Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925, he refused it at first, but, on learning he could donate the money to a fund for popularizing Scandinavian literature, he accepted the award and gave the money away. This award marked the high point of his career, though he was still to write seventeen plays. In September, 1950, Shaw, who seemed on the way to becoming the ageless superman he proclaimed, fell from an apple tree he was pruning. He died in November of that year, of complications stemming from that injury. His ashes were mingled with his wife’s and spread on his garden. Analysis • A religious thinker, George Bernard Shaw saw the stage as his pulpit. His major interest was to advance the Life Force, a kind of immanent Holy Spirit that would help to improve and eventually perfect the world. Shaw believed that to help in this conscious purpose, human beings must live longer in order to use their intellectual maturity. They must be healthier, without the debilitating force of poverty, and—most important—they must be interested in purpose, not simply pleasure. As the giraffe could develop its long neck over aeons because of a need to eat from the tops of trees, so can human beings, with a sense of purpose, work toward the creation of healthier, longerlived, more intelligent individuals. According to Shaw, evolution is not merely haphazard but is tied to will. Human beings can know what they want and will what they know. Certainly, individuals cannot simply will that they live longer and expect to do so. Such desire might help, but it is the race, not the individual, that will eventually profit from such a common purpose. Ultimately, Shaw believed, this drive toward a more intelligent and spiritual species would result after aeons in human beings’ shucking off matter, which had been taken on by spirit in the world’s beginning so that evolution could work toward intelligence. When that intelligence achieves its full potential, matter will no longer be necessary. Humankind is working toward the creation of an infinite God. Shaw’s plays are not restricted to such metaphysics. They treat political, social, and economic concerns: the false notion that people help criminals by putting them in jail or help themselves by atonement (Major Barbara, Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles), the need for tolerance (On the Rocks, Androcles and the Lion), the superstitious worship of medicine and science (The Philanderer, The Doctor’s Dilemma), the superiority of socialism to capitalism (Widowers’ Houses, The Apple Cart, The Inca of Perusalem), the evils of patriotism (O’Flaherty, V.C., Arms and the Man), the need for a supranational state (Geneva), the necessity for recognizing women’s equality with men (In Good King Charles’s Golden Days, Press Cuttings), and so on. Nevertheless, all of Shaw’s efforts to question social and political mores were subsumed by his religious purpose. All were meant to help free the human spirit in its striving toward the creation of a better and more intelligent person, the creation of a superman, the creation, finally, of a God.

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Arms and the Man • In 1894, two years after completing his first play, Shaw wrote Arms and the Man. Although lighter and less complex than later plays, it is typical of the later plays in that Shaw uses comedy as a corrective—a corrective, as Louis Crompton effectively puts it, that is intended to shame the audience out of conformity, in contrast to Molière’s, which is intended to shame the audience into conformity. The year is 1885. Bulgaria and Serbia are at war, the Serbs have just been routed, and the play opens with one of the Serbs’ officers, Captain Bluntschli, climbing through the window of a Bulgarian house. The house belongs to Major Petkoff, and Raina Petkoff lies dreaming of her lover, a dashing Byronic hero, Sergius Saranoff, who has led the cavalry charge that routed the Serbs. Bluntschli comes into her room, gun in hand, but persuades her not to give him away, more because a fight will ensue while she is not properly dressed than for any fear she has of being shot. Bluntschli turns out to be Saranoff’s opposite. He is a practical Swiss who joined the Serbs merely because they were the first to enlist his services, not because he believed either side to be in the right. When the Bulgarian soldiers enter the house and demand to search Raina’s room, she hides Bluntschli on impulse. After the soldiers’ departure, he describes for Raina the recent battle in which some quixotic fool led a cavalry charge of frightened men against a battery of machine guns. All were trying to rein in their horses lest they get there first and be killed. The Serbs, however, happened not to have the right ammunition, and what should have been a slaughter of the Bulgarians turned out to be a rout of the Serbs. Yet for his irresponsible foolishness, this “Don Quixote” is sure to be rewarded by the Bulgarians. When Raina shows Bluntschli the picture of her lover, and Saranoff turns out to be “Quixote,” Bluntschli is duly embarrassed, tries to cover by suggesting that Saranoff might have known in advance of the Serbs’ ammunition problem, but only makes it worse by suggesting to this romantic girl that her lover would have been such a crass pretender and coward as to attack under such conditions. This is Shaw’s first ridicule of chivalric notions of war. The viewpoint is corroborated in the next act by Saranoff when he returns disillusioned because he has not been promoted. He did not follow the scientific rules of war and was thus undeserving. Saranoff has discovered that soldiering is the cowardly art of attacking mercilessly when one is strong and keeping out of harm’s way when weak. In this second act, which takes place at the war’s end only four months later, the audience is treated to some satire of Victorian “higher love,” which Saranoff carries on with Raina before more realistically flirting with her maid, Louka. Later, in a momentary slip from his chivalric treatment of Raina, Saranoff jokes about a practical Swiss who helped them with arrangements for prisoner exchange and who bragged about having been saved by infatuating a Bulgarian woman and her mother after visiting the young woman in her bedroom. Recognizing herself, Raina chides Saranoff for telling such a crass story in front of her, and he immediately apologizes and reverts to his gallant pose. Finally in act 3, after Bluntschli has returned for an overcoat and Saranoff discovers that Raina and her mother were the women who saved the Swiss, Saranoff challenges Bluntschli to a duel. Bluntschli, however, will not return the romantic pose and calls Saranoff a blockhead for not realizing that Raina had no other choice at gunpoint. When Saranoff realizes that there is no romance in fighting this prosaic shopkeeper, he backs off. Bluntschli wins Raina’s hand, Saranoff wins Louka’s, and all ends happily. Yet at the very point at which the audience might expect the play to use its romantic, well-made plot to criticize romanticism, Shaw again changes direction by showing his

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antihero Bluntschli to be a romantic. To everyone’s consternation, Saranoff’s in particular, Bluntschli points out that most of his problems have been the result of an incurably romantic disposition: He ran away from home twice as a boy, joined the army rather than his father’s business, climbed the balcony of the Petkoff house instead of sensibly diving into the nearest cellar, and came back to this young girl, Raina, to get his coat when any man his age would have sent for it. Thus, Shaw uses Arms and the Man not only to attack romanticism about war or love but also to assert the importance of knowing and being true to oneself, to one’s life force. It matters little whether Bluntschli is a romantic. He knows and is true to himself. He does not pose and does not deceive himself, as do Saranoff and Raina. Only one who is true to himself and does not deny himself can attune himself to the Life Force and help advance the evolutionary process. Although Saranoff changes his career when he renounces soldiering, he does so because he was not justly rewarded for his dashing cavalry charge. He does not abandon his habitual self-deception. Even his marriage to the servant girl, Louka, has something of the romantic pose about it; it is rebellious. Raina’s marriage to Bluntschli has more potential; at least she has come to see her own posing. Although the play seems light when set beside the later, more complex triumphs, Shaw’s “religious” purpose can be seen here at the beginning of his career. It will be better argued in Man and Superman and more fully argued in Back to Methuselah, but the failure of the latter, more Utopian work shows that Shaw’s religious ideas most engaged his audience when they were rooted in the social, political, or economic criticism of his times, as they were in Arms and the Man. Candida • A year after Arms and the Man, Shaw wrote Candida, his version of Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 play, Et dukkehjem (A Doll’s House, 1880). Candida showed that, while Shaw was as much a proponent of equality as was his early mentor, he saw women’s usual familial role from an opposite perspective. As Ibsen saw it, women suffer in marriage from being treated like children; a wife is denied the larger responsibilities that are the province of her husband. As a consequence, the wife’s personal maturity is arrested. She becomes, in a word, a doll. Shaw did not think this the usual marital paradigm; his view of marriage included a husband who does tend to see himself as the dominant force in the family, but the wife is seldom the petted child that Ibsen’s Nora is. Much more frequently, she is like Candida, the real strength of the family, who, like her husband’s mother before her, allows her husband to live in a “castle of comfort and indulgence” over which she stands sentinel. She makes him master, though he does not know it. Men, in other words, are more often the petted, indulged children, and women more often the sustaining force in the family. Candida is set entirely in St. Dominic’s Parsonage, and the action is ostensibly a very unoriginal love triangle involving the parson, James Morell, his wife, Candida, and a young poet, Eugene Marchbanks. The originality comes from the unique twist given this stock situation. Morell is a liberal, aggressive preacher, worshiped by women and by his curate. Marchbanks is a shy, effeminate eighteen-year-old, in manner somewhat reminiscent of a young Percy Bysshe Shelley, and he is possessed too of Shelley’s inner strength, though this is not immediately apparent. The young poet declares to Morell his love for Candida, Morell’s beautiful thirty-three-year-old wife. The self-assured Morell indulges the young man and assures him that the whole world loves Candida; his is another version of puppy love that he will outgrow. The ethereal Marchbanks cannot believe that Morell thinks Candida capable of inspiring such trivial love in him.

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He is able, as no one else is, to see that Morell’s brilliant sermons and his equally brilliant conversation are nothing but the gift of gab; Morell is an inflated windbag. Marchbanks forces Morell to see himself in this way, and Morell shows that the poet has hit home when he almost throttles him. Morell broaches the subject of Marchbanks’s love to Candida, at the young man’s insistence, and Candida assures her husband that she already knows Eugene is in love with her. She is surprised, however, to find Morell upset by it. Nevertheless, the two foolish men force a crisis by making Candida choose between them. When she plays their game and asks what each has to offer, Morell offers his strength for her defense, his honesty for her surety, his industry for her livelihood, and his authority and position for her dignity. Eugene offers his weakness and desolation. Candida, bemused that neither offers love and that each wishes to own her, acknowledges that the poet has made a good offer. She informs them that she will give herself, because of his need, to the weaker of the two. Morell is desolate, but Eugene is, too, since he realizes that Candida means Morell. Eugene leaves with the now famous “secret in his heart.” The secret the poet knows is that he can live without happiness, that there is another love than that of woman—the love of purpose. The twist Shaw gives the standard triangle, then, is not merely that the effeminate young poet is stronger than the commanding figure of Morell, but also that Candida is stronger than both. Morell is clearly the doll in this house. Even so, to identify Shaw with Marchbanks, as his fine biographer Archibald Henderson does, makes little sense. Marchbanks is an aesthete like Wilde or the young William Butler Yeats, and the poetic sentiments he expresses to Candida sound very like Shelley’s Epipsychidion. Shaw, who did not share Shelley’s rapture about romantic love and who liked aestheticism so little that he swore he would not face the toil of writing a single sentence for art’s sake alone, clearly cannot be confused with Marchbanks. He has more in common with Morell, who is socialistic and industrious. It is Morell who voices Shaw’s sentiments when he tells Marchbanks that people have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than they have to consume wealth without producing it. The character in this play who comes closest to Shaw, however, is Candida herself. Much stronger than Ibsen’s Nora, she is the only character who does not deceive herself. Morell does not realize that he needs to be coddled in order to play his role as a dynamic, liberal clergyman. Only at the play’s end and with Candida’s help, does Marchbanks discover the truth she has known all along. Candida is subtitled A Mystery, and, though Shaw is treating a dramatic convention with humor, there is perhaps a more serious sense in which he uses the subtitle: There is some mystery involved in the ties that bind people together in marriage. In the climactic scene, in which Candida is made to choose between the two men, a traditional dramatist might have demonstrated the lover to be a cad and have thrown him out. A more romantic dramatist would have shown the husband to be a tyrant and had the wife and lover elope. Shaw chooses neither solution. He has the wife remain with the husband, but not because the lover is a cad or because she owes it to her husband contractually or for any of the standard reasons Morell offers, but because he needs her and she loves him. In this mystery about what binds partners in marriage, Shaw seems to suggest that it is not the contract, still less any ideal of purity, but simply mutual love and need. What connects Candida with Arms and the Man, as well as with the later plays, is the demand that persons be true to themselves. Morell taught Candida to think for herself, she tells him, but it upsets him when that intellectual independence leads to conclu-

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sions different from his own. Candida will not submit to Christian moralism any more than she will to poetic romanticism. If there is any salvation for Marchbanks, it is that he has learned from Candida the secret that lies hidden in his heart: He is not dependent on happiness or on the love of a woman. In becoming aware of this, he has the potential to be a true artist, one attuned to purpose and not to self-indulgence. Thus, the play leads to the more lengthy dramatization of the struggle between the philosopherartist and the woman-mother that is evident in Man and Superman. Man and Superman • Man and Superman promotes Shaw’s philosophy of the Life Force more explicitly than do any of his previous plays. Indeed, much of the play is given to discussion, particularly during the long dream sequence in act 3; Shaw never thought that a play’s action need be physical. The dynamics of argument, of intellectual and verbal exchange, were for Shaw much more exciting than conventional action. The drama originated in a suggestion by Arthur Bingham Walkley that Shaw write a Don Juan play. After all, did not Shaw suffer as a playwright from an excess of cerebration and a lack of physicality? Surely, Walkley reasoned, the subject of the amours of Don Juan would force him off his soapbox and into the boudoir. In response to this challenge, Shaw wrote a much more cerebral play than he had ever written before. In his lengthy “Epistle Dedicatory” to Walkley, Shaw explains why. The essence of the Don Juan legend is not, like Casanova’s, that its hero is an “oversexed tomcat.” Rather, its essence lies in Juan’s following his own instincts rather than law or convention. The play is as diffuse and difficult to stage as Candida is concise and delightful to produce. Most of the difficulty has to do with the lengthy Don Juan in Hell dream sequence during act 3, which causes the play to run more than four hours. More often than not, the sequence has been separated from the play. Not until 1964, in fact, when the Association of Producing Artists staged the play at New York City’s Phoenix Theatre was the entire play produced in the United States. As the delightful first act opens, Ann Whitefield has lost her father, and everyone is waiting to learn from the will who her guardian will be. Roebuck Ramsden, close friend of her father and self-styled liberal, is the leading candidate and is at the moment lecturing Ann’s young suitor, Octavius, on his friend, Jack Tanner, who is not fit to be seen with Octavius, much less with Ann. Tanner has scandalized this Victorian liberal by his newly published “The Revolutionist’s Handbook,” whose entire text Shaw appends to the play. “The Revolutionist’s Handbook” is a didact’s device for getting across some of the ideas that would have been unpalatable in the play, as when Tanner argues (here without opposition) that the Life Force would be served better if people were given more freedom in mating. That is to say, people who might not be compatible as marriage partners might nevertheless produce the finest offspring. When Tanner appears, the audience is delighted by his wit. He good-humoredly but repeatedly scandalizes Ramsden, particularly when he announces that he and Ramsden have been named joint guardians of Ann. Tanner is not eager to undertake his role; he knows how manipulative Ann can be, but he does not yet recognize what even his chauffeur could have told him: Ann has designs on him and not on his friend, Octavius. Ann is in the grip of the Life Force, which drives all women in their capacity as mothers to want to reproduce, and she implicitly knows that Tanner would be the proper father for her offspring, not the romantic but spiritually flabby young Octavius.

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Tanner, however, is Shaw’s philosopher-artist and, as such, Tanner knows that he must flee the stifling bliss of marriage and domesticity to pursue his own purpose—something that Marchbanks learned at the end of Candida. When Tanner learns of Ann’s designs, he flees to Spain. Here, he and his chauffeur are captured by a group of brigands led by an Englishman named Mendoza. While captive, Tanner dreams the lengthy dream that constitutes the Don Juan in Hell scene. The scene is a brilliant debate involving Don Juan (looking like John Tanner), the Devil (looking like Mendoza), Doña Ana (looking remarkably like Ann Whitefield), and Ana’s father, Don Gonzalo (looking like Roebuck Ramsden). The debate centers on the relative merits of Heaven and Hell. Doña Ana, “a good Catholic,” is astonished to find herself a newcomer to Hell and has to have it explained to her that some of the best company are here. One can go to Heaven if he or she wishes, but one must remember that the gulf between the two is really a matter of natural inclination or temperament. Hell is a place for those in whom enjoyment predominates over purpose, desires over reason, the heart over the head, the aesthetic over the ideological, and romance over realism. Don Juan is about to depart for Heaven because he is sick of the Devil’s cant about the aesthetic values, the enjoyment of music, the pleasures of the heart. An eternity of enjoyment is an intolerable bore. He wishes not to enjoy life but to help it in its struggle upward. The reason Juan went to Hell to begin with was that he thought he was a pleasure-seeker, but he has discovered, as Shaw indicates in the dedicatory epistle, that his amours were more a form of rebellion than of pleasure-seeking. Realizing that he is temperamentally a philosophical man, who seeks to learn in contemplation the inner will of the world, to discover in invention the means of achieving that will, and to follow in action those means, he prefers Heaven. The dream sequence is also concerned with woman’s maternal role in advancing the Life Force. If it seems, at first glance, that the ardent feminist who authored Candida has here turned his coat and relegated women to a merely sexual role, it must be remembered that for the moment Shaw is speaking only of one side of woman. When Ana corrects Don Juan’s view of woman’s mind, he points out to her that he speaks not of woman’s whole mind but only of her view of man as a separate sex. Only sexually is woman’s nature a contrivance for perpetuating its highest achievement. She too can be the philosopher-artist attuned to the work of advancing the Life Force. Thus, two ways of achieving the inner will of the world are open to her. In the fourth and final act, having awakened from his dreams, Tanner shows that he is not yet as forceful as his ancestor, Don Juan, when he gives in to Ann’s superior force and agrees to marry her. Ironically, the romantic Octavius is the one who resigns himself to bachelorhood. The play, then, is a philosophical comedy whose theme is that the Life Force is dependent on man and woman if it is to move creation upward. A man or woman possessed of a sense of purpose must attune himself or herself to the Life Force, since the only true joy lies in being used for its purposes, in being willing to burn oneself out and heap oneself on the scrap pile at the end without any promise of a personal reward. Although a number of critics see Tanner as the epitome of Shavian man, Tanner does capitulate to Ann. He lacks the fiber of Don Juan, who realizes the boredom of a life of pleasure. Indeed, Marchbanks of Candida is more truly Shavian than Tanner. Notwithstanding Shaw’s overt didacticism in this play, he is true to his belief that, like the Ancient Mariner, he must tell his tale entertainingly if he is to hold the attention of the wedding guest. Consequently, he claims full responsibility for the opinions

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of Don Juan but claims equal responsibility for those of the other characters. For the dramatic moment, each character’s viewpoint is also Shaw’s. Those who believe there is an absolutely right point of view, he says in the “Epistle Dedicatory,” usually believe it is their own and cannot, in consequence, be true dramatists. Major Barbara • In Major Barbara, published not long after Man and Superman, Shaw’s dramatic means of advancing his theory of the Life Force was to assert that poverty was the world’s greatest evil. What critics, even astute ones such as G. K. Chesterton, thought materialistic in Shaw, the author would insist was spiritual. Only with money could one save one’s soul. Major Barbara opens in the home of Lady Britomart Undershaft, whose estranged millionaire husband has been invited to the house for the first time since the children, now adults, were toddlers. Her purpose in inviting this scandalous old atheist to her house is to get more money for her daughters, Barbara and Sarah, who are about to marry. Moreover, she would like Andrew Undershaft to break the ridiculous custom of having the Undershaft munitions business go to an orphan and instead give it to his own son, Stephen. When Undershaft meets his family, he is favorably impressed by Barbara, who is a major in the Salvation Army, and by Adolphus Cusins, her suitor, who is a professor of Greek. He recognizes that Stephen is hopelessly inept and that Charles Lomax, Sarah’s young man, is less pompous than Stephen but no less foolish. Barbara invites her father to West Ham so that he might see the constructive work of the Salvation Army, and he agrees, provided that she come to see his munitions plant at Perivale St. Andrews. Thus, the play’s structure is neatly determined, with a second act at West Ham and a third at Perivale St. Andrews. In act 2, Barbara shows her father the Salvation Army’s good work, only to learn from her father and the Army’s Commissioner, Mrs. Baines, the painful fact that the Army—like all religious organizations—depends on contributions from whiskey distillers and munitions owners such as her father. When Barbara is told that the Army could not subsist without this “tainted” money, she realizes that she is not changing the essential condition of the poor but simply keeping them alive with a bowl of soup; she is helping the capitalists justify themselves with conscience money. She thus serves capital rather than God. When in act 3 the family visits the munitions factory, Undershaft surprisingly reveals the existence of a model socialist community at Perivale St. Andrews. Though Undershaft lives off the need of people to conduct war, he accepts that need and uses it to destroy society’s greatest evil, poverty. In his community, all men work, earn a decent wage, and can thus turn to matters of the soul, such as religion, without being bribed to do so. Since Barbara has come to realize that religious organizations exist by selling themselves to the rich, she decides to get Peter Shirley a job rather than feed him and ask him to pray in thanksgiving at West Ham. She herself joins her father’s model village, especially since Cusins is conveniently discovered to be an orphan and the ideal person to inherit the munitions factory. Shaw’s lengthy preface to the play sets out a good deal of his ethical philosophy: Poverty is the worst evil against which man struggles; religious people should work for the betterment of the one world they have and not turn from it for a vision of private bliss in the hereafter. The world will never be bettered by people who believe that they can atone for their sins and who do not understand that their misdeeds are irrevocable. While society should divide wealth equally, no adult should receive his allowance unless he or she produces by personal exertion more than he or she

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consumes. Society should not punish those guilty of crime, especially by putting them in prisons that render them worse, but neither should it hesitate to put to death anyone whose misconduct is incorrigible, just as people would not hesitate to destroy a mad dog. Though these ideas are familiar to Shavians, and though most of them are fleshed out in the play itself, Major Barbara may first take a reader by surprise. Can the pacifist and socialist Shaw be making a hero of a capitalist who makes his living on the profits of warfare? It is not enough to answer that the capitalist uses his capital to create an ideal socialist community; for this, Shaw could have chosen a banker. On the contrary, he deliberately chooses a munitions manufacturer because the irony helps make his point. However horrid warfare is, it is not so horrid as poverty. Undershaft tells Barbara and Cusins in the final act that poverty is the worst of crimes, for it blights whole cities, spreads pestilence, and strikes dead any souls within its compass. Barbara cannot save souls in West Ham by words and dreams, but if she gives a West Ham ruffian thirty-eight shillings a week, with a sound house in a handsome street and a permanent job, she will save his soul. When Barbara turns from the Salvation Army to Undershaft’s community at Perivale St. Andrews, she is not giving up religion. She is turning, Shaw would have it, from a phony religion dependent on a bribe to the poor and on the maintenance of inequitable present conditions, to a genuine religion that will bring significant social change. Her conversion is completely consistent with her character. When her father asks her to tell Cusins what power is, she answers that before joining the Salvation Army, she was in her own power and, as a consequence, did not know what to do with herself. Once she joined the Army, she thought herself in the power of God and did not have enough time for all that needed to be done. Undershaft helps her to transfer this commitment to a more realistic cause, which will genuinely improve the lot of the poor, but a cause that is still essentially spiritual. Because Undershaft sees his work in the same light as Barbara sees hers, he can insist that he is not a secularist but a confirmed mystic. Perivale St. Andrews is driven by a will of which he is a part. Thus, once again, Shaw’s hero is chosen because he is attuned to the Life Force. It matters little that he is a munitions maker. In Saint Joan, the heroine is a saint, yet she is chosen not as a representative of Christian orthodoxy but because she was mystic enough to see that she served a will greater than her own. In Major Barbara, Shaw also makes use of a host of lesser characters to dramatize his political, moral, and ethical theories. When Stephen Undershaft is asked by his father what he is able to do in life, so that Undershaft can give him a fair start, he makes it evident that he is capable of nothing, except—he asserts defensively—of knowing the difference between good and evil, something he implies his father does not know. With this, Undershaft has great fun. Stephen knows nothing of law, of business, of art, or of philosophy, yet he claims to know the secret that has baffled philosophers for ages. Because Stephen knows nothing but claims to know everything, Undershaft declares him fit for politics. To this remark, Stephen takes exception; he will not hear his father insult his country’s government. Undershaft once again, however, reflects Shaw’s conviction that big business rules government when he sputters, “The government of your country! I am the government of your country.” Peter Shirley, rather than Barbara, provides the real contrast with Undershaft. Barbara shares her father’s “heavenly” temper, his sense of purpose. The Army shares with him the recognition that it needs money. Peter Shirley, the unemployed visitor at

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West Ham, plays Lazarus to Undershaft’s Dives, as Shaw puts it. Because the majority of the world believes that an “honest” poor man such as Shirley is morally superior to a “wicked” rich one such as Undershaft, the misery of the world continues. It is significant that when Undershaft gives Shirley a job, the man is unhappy. Bill Walker, who beats up an old woman visiting the West Ham shelter and then a young woman member of the Army itself, tries to atone by having himself beaten up in turn by a professional boxer, Todger Fermile. Such a grotesque instance of atonement is no more grotesque than any other attempt at atonement, Shaw believes, and both Barbara and Cusins agree with Undershaft that one cannot atone for evil; one does good only by changing evil ways. It can be argued, as in the case of many other Shavian criticisms of Christianity, that Shaw did not understand the Christian doctrine. Perhaps, however, he understood de facto Christianity all too well. Adolphus Cusins also plays a significant role in the drama, certainly the most significant after those of Undershaft and Barbara, and he eventually takes over the munitions factory. A man of greater intelligence and more humane sympathies than Undershaft, he may be the hope for the Life Force taking a significant step forward. Undershaft repeatedly refers to this professor of Greek as “Dionysius,” which suggests in Cusins a capacity to stand outside himself to achieve union with the Life Force. Clearly, Undershaft invites him to make war on war when he turns over the munitions works to him. Major Barbara is perhaps freighted with too much paradox to do its job convincingly. Certainly, act 1 is sparkling comedy as Undershaft meets his family without knowing who is who. Moreover, the contrast between Undershaft’s “gospel” and Barbara’s is convincingly set forth. Act 2 is occasionally excellent comedy, and comedy fused with meaning, as when Barbara deals with the bully Bill Walker, but Walker’s part becomes a bit too obtrusive a vehicle for attacking atonement, and Undershaft’s demonstration of how all religious organizations exist by selling themselves to the rich is somewhat more asserted than dramatized. Perhaps the concluding act is the least successful, since Barbara’s and Cusins’s conversion is necessarily hurried to preserve the unities, and Shaw has difficulty making his Utopia convincing, a difficulty he later experienced more keenly in Back to Methuselah. To do Shaw justice, he acknowledged that, while one can know that the Life Force is driving upward, one cannot know precisely how. Thus, attempts to dramatize future points of progress in creative evolution present insuperable obstacles. Saint Joan • More than in Major Barbara and perhaps more than in Man and Superman, Shaw found in Saint Joan a fit medium to dramatize his major religious ideas. He had intended to write a play about Christ, but he was not permitted to portray divinity on the English stage. Yet no play by Shaw succeeds more unobtrusively in carrying his ideas about the Life Force. As captivating a play as Major Barbara is, Undershaft has straw men with whom to do battle, and, though such was not the case in Man and Superman, Shaw needed for his purposes the lengthy dream sequence that has made the play so difficult to stage. Candida might be a more perfectly structured play, but it does not carry so much of Shaw’s mature philosophy. Among Shaw’s major dramas, then, Saint Joan is perhaps the finest blend of matter and form. Saint Joan is divided into six scenes and an epilogue. In the first scene, Joan appeals to Robert de Baudricourt for horse and armor to aid in the siege of Orleans and to see to the coronation of the Dauphin. Although he at first scoffs at this request, made through his servant, when faced with Joan, he is persuaded by the strength of her per-

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son, as everyone else is. In scene 2, the courtiers try to dupe her and pretend that Gilles de Rais is the Dauphin. Not taken in, she carries the Dauphin, too, by her force of persuasion and convinces this weakling that he, too, has a divine mission that he must be strong enough to accept. In scene 3, Joan joins Dunois, the leader of the French forces, and under their combined leadership, France enjoys a series of victories. In scene 4, the Earl of Warwick and the Bishop of Beauvais plan Joan’s eventual execution. The Englishman wants her dead for obvious military reasons; the Frenchman, because she is a dangerous heretic. In scene 5, she is told to give up fighting, that there is no need for more victories. She is told to let the English have Paris. Her sense of destiny, however, convinces her that the English must be driven from French soil. In scene 6, Joan has been arrested. She is given by the Inquisition what Shaw considers a fairer trial than is available to defendants today. She finally recants what the clergymen consider her heresy, but when told that she must remain forever in prison as punishment for her spiritual offenses, she tears up her recantation and goes to the stake under Warwick’s authority. The epilogue gets the play back into the comic frame and allows Joan and the rest of the cast of characters to appear twenty-five years later before Charles, now King, and discuss the Church’s recent reversal in favor of Joan. There is even a time-shift of several centuries, to the year 1920, so that Joan’s canonization can be mentioned. Yet the epilogue ultimately suggests that, were she to return to France in the twentieth century, Joan would again be put to death by the very people who now praise her. The greatness of Saint Joan lies in its scrupulous dramatization of a universal problem. The problem of how one reconciles the dictates of the individual conscience with the demands of authority is one without easy solutions, whether the individual stands against ecclesiastical, civil, military, or familial authority. The sympathy Shaw extends to Joan in declaring her one of the first “Protestant” saints he extends also to the Inquisitors, who, he asserts, tried Joan more fairly than they themselves were later tried when the judgment on Joan was reversed. Shaw’s fairness is evident in scene 4, for example, when Peter Cauchon makes clear to the Earl of Warwick that, even though both men want Joan captured, they differ in every other respect. Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, does not believe that Joan is a witch and will not allow Warwick to get rid of her on this trumped-up charge. Joan is a heretic, much more dangerous than a witch, but he would prefer to save her soul. She is a pious and honest girl who, through pride, is caught up in the Devil’s mighty purpose: to wrack the Church with discord and dissension—the same purpose for which the Devil used John Huss and John Wycliffe. If a reformer will not finally effect reform within the pale of Church authority, every crackpot who sees visions will be followed by the naïve populace, and the Church will be wrecked beyond repair. These arguments are completely familiar to the present age, in which soldiers are told they must obey commanding officers who order the extinction of noncombatants. Can one obey such orders? Yet there surely must be obedience to authority, despite doubts about its wisdom, or there will be anarchy. Humankind has come no closer to finding a solution to the tensions between individual conscience and authority than it had in Joan’s day, and it is that insoluble problem that forces audiences to move beyond easy condemnation of the Inquisition and equally easy sanctification of Joan. Critics have often objected to Shaw’s epilogue on the ground that Joan’s tragedy is trivialized by it, yet the epilogue is necessary for Shaw’s theme: that from the same elements, the same tragedy would come again. The trial at which Joan’s judges were judged and she was exonerated was a much more unscrupulous affair than was Joan’s

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trial. Ladvenu, who had been the most sympathetic of those who tried Joan, tells King Charles that the old trial was faultless in every respect except in its unjust verdict, while the new trial is filled with perjury and corruption yet results in a just verdict. Charles, who is concerned only about his having been crowned by a woman who was considered a witch and a heretic, and who is relieved now by having his reign validated, asserts that no matter what the verdict, were Joan brought back to life, her present admirers would burn her within six months. In his preface, Shaw argues that there was no inconsistency in the Church’s reversal on Joan. Although the Roman Catholic Church does not defer to private judgment, it recognizes that the highest wisdom may come to an individual through private revelation and that, on sufficient evidence, the Church will eventually declare such an individual a saint. Thus, many saints have been at odds with the Church before their canonization. In fact, Shaw contends, had Francis of Assisi lived longer, he might have gone to the stake, while Galileo might yet be declared a saint. Thus, the epilogue helps dramatize the complexity inherent in Joan’s struggle with the Church. In none of the plays discussed—perhaps nowhere else in his canon, with the possible exception of Caesar and Cleopatra—does Shaw present an example of a character in the grip of the Life Force so convincingly as he does in the character of Joan. Bluntschli is an amusing soldier-adventurer; Marchbanks, a callow poet; Tanner, a failed revolutionary; and Undershaft, a munitions maker who has built a socialist community. Joan is both a Christian and a Shavian saint. She is caught up in a sense of purpose to a degree none of Shaw’s other characters is. Saint Joan, then, is the culmination of Shaw’s art. Although other plays might embrace more of his standard literary and philosophical obsessions, none takes his most central obsessions, those relating to the Life Force and creative evolution, and fleshes them out with such dramatic integrity. Other major works long fiction: Cashel Byron’s Profession, 1886; An Unsocial Socialist, 1887; Love Among the Artists, 1900; The Irrational Knot, 1905; Immaturity, 1930. short fiction: The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, 1932. nonfiction: The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891; The Perfect Wagnerite, 1898; The Common Sense of Municipal Trading, 1904; Dramatic Opinions and Essays, 1907; The Sanity of Art, 1908 (revised from 1895 serial publication); Letters to Miss Alma Murray, 1927; The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, 1928; Ellen Terry and Shaw, 1931; Everybody’s Political What’s What, 1944; Sixteen Self Sketches, 1949; Correspondence Between George Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell, 1952; The Matter with Ireland, 1961; Platform and Pulpit, 1961 (Dan H. Laurence, editor); Collected Letters, 1965-1988 (4 volumes; Laurence, editor); An Autobiography, 1856-1898, 1969; An Autobiography, 18981950, 1970; The Nondramatic Literary Criticism of Bernard Shaw, 1972 (Stanley Weintraub, editor); Shaw: Interviews and Recollections, 1990 (A. M. Gibbs, editor); Bernard Shaw’s Book Reviews, 1991 (Brian Tyson, editor). edited text: Fabian Essays in Socialism, 1889. miscellaneous: Works, 1930-1938 (33 volumes); Short Stories, Scraps, and Shavings, 1932; Works, 1947-1952 (36 volumes). Bibliography Davis, Tracy C. George Bernard Shaw and the Socialist Theatre. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Davis examines Shaw’s belief in socialism and how it affected and was demonstrated in his dramatic works. Bibliography and index.

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Dukore, Bernard Frank. Shaw’s Theater. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 2000. Part of the Florida Bernard Shaw series, this volume explores the production of Shaw’s dramatic works. Bibliography and index. Holroyd, Michael. The Search for Love, 1856-1898. Vol. 1 in Bernard Shaw. New York: Random House, 1988. In this superb beginning to his authoritative biography, Holroyd describes Shaw’s Irish origins and trials of following his mother to London. His journalistic and musical career is interwoven with various love affairs, culminating in marriage in 1898. Sensitive analyses of political and aesthetic ideas are balanced with insights into early drama. Includes illustrations, a bibliographic note, and an index. _______. The Pursuit of Power, 1898-1918. Vol. 2 in Bernard Shaw. New York: Random House, 1989. Describes the complicated interrelationships of Shaw’s middle plays (from Caesar and Cleopatra to Heartbreak House) with ethics, politics, economics, medicine, religion, and war. The popularity of his drama is explained and analyzed, while the sophistication of his personality is narrated through his friendships with such persons as G. K. Chesterton, H. G. Wells, and Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Illustrations, index. _______. The Lure of Fantasy, 1918-1950. Vol. 3 in Bernard Shaw. New York: Random House, 1991. The final volume covers Shaw’s drama from Saint Joan, with late plays such as Geneva and In Good King Charles’s Golden Days receiving balanced attention. Also surveys Shaw’s films from his plays, including Pygmalion and Major Barbara. Shaw’s interest in communism and the Soviet Union receives attention, as does his criticism of American culture. Illustrations, bibliographic note, and index. Innes, Christopher, ed. The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. This reference work in the Cambridge series provides an in-depth look at Bernard Shaw’s life, works, and philosophy. Bibliography and index. Larson, Gale K., ed. Shaw: Volume 21 in the Annual Bernard Shaw Series. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. This collection of essays is part of an annual series that examines various aspects of Shaw. This volume contains essays on Shaw’s stagecraft, Shaw’s and Mark Twain’s revisions of Genesis, and Shaw in Sinclair Lewis’s writings. Bibliography. Lenker, Lagretta Tallent. Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare and Shaw. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. Lenker examines the fathers and daughters portrayed in the plays of William Shakespeare and Shaw. Bibliography and index. Henry J. Donaghy, updated by Richard D. McGhee

Sam Shepard Sam Shepard

Samuel Shepard Rogers VII Born: Fort Sheridan, Illinois; November 5, 1943 Principal drama • Cowboys, pr. 1964 (one act); The Rock Garden, pr. 1964, pb. 1972 (one act); Up to Thursday, pr. 1964; Chicago, pr. 1965, pb. 1967; Dog, pr. 1965; Icarus’s Mother, pr. 1965, pb. 1967; Rocking Chair, pr. 1965; 4-H Club, pr. 1965, pb. 1971; Fourteen Hundred Thousand, pr. 1966, pb. 1967; Melodrama Play, pr. 1966, pb. 1967; Red Cross, pr. 1966, pb. 1967; La Turista, pr. 1966, pb. 1968; Cowboys #2, pr. 1967, pb. 1971; Forensic and the Navigators, pr. 1967, pb. 1969; The Unseen Hand, pr., pb. 1969; Operation Sidewinder, pb. 1969, pr. 1970; Shaved Splits, pr. 1969, pb. 1971; The Holy Ghostly, pr. 1970, pb. 1971; Back Bog Beast Bait, pr., pb. 1971; Cowboy Mouth, pr., pb. 1971 (with Patti Smith); The Mad Dog Blues, pr. 1971, pb. 1972; Nightwalk, pr., pb. 1972 (with Megan Terry and Jean-Claude van Itallie); The Tooth of Crime, pr. 1972, pb. 1974; Action, pr. 1974, pb. 1975; Geography of a Horse Dreamer, pr., pb. 1974; Little Ocean, pr. 1974; Killer’s Head, pr. 1975, pb. 1976; The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill on the Eve of Killing His Wife, pr. 1975, pb. 1983; Angel City, pr., pb. 1976; Curse of the Starving Class, pb. 1976, pr. 1977; Suicide in B Flat, pr. 1976, pb. 1979; Buried Child, pr. 1978, pb. 1979; Seduced, pr. 1978, pb. 1979; Tongues, pr. 1978, pb. 1981; Savage/Love, pr. 1979, pb. 1981; True West, pr. 1980, pb. 1981; Fool for Love, pr., pb. 1983; A Lie of the Mind, pr. 1985, pb. 1986; States of Shock, pr. 1991, pb. 1992; Simpatico, pr. 1994, pb. 1995; Plays, pb. 1996-1997 (3 volumes); When the World Was Green, pr. 1996, pb. 2002 (with Joseph Chaikin); Eyes for Consuela, pr. 1998, pb. 1999; The Late Henry Moss, pr. 2000, pb. 2002 Other literary forms • Sam Shepard has written a number of screenplays, including the ill-fated Zabriskie Point (1970) for Michelangelo Antonioni and the award-winning Paris, Texas (1984). He also wrote and directed Far North (1988) and Silent Tongue (1994). Shepard has also written poetry and short fiction, in Hawk Moon: A Book of Short Stories, Poems, and Monologues (1973) and Motel Chronicles (1982), and recorded the major events of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour in a collection of essays titled Rolling Thunder Logbook (1977). Achievements • Sam Shepard is one of the United States’ most prolific, most celebrated, and most honored playwrights. Writing exclusively for the Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway theater, Shepard has nevertheless won eleven Obie Awards (for Red Cross, Chicago, Icarus’s Mother, Forensic and the Navigators, La Turista, Melodrama Play, Cowboys #2, The Tooth of Crime, Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, and Fool for Love). In 1979, he received a Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child. His screenplay for Wim Wenders’s film Paris, Texas won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and Shepard himself received an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Colonel Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff (1983). A Lie of the Mind was named the outstanding new play of the 1985-1986 season by the Drama Desk. In 1998 Public Broadcasting Service’s (PBS) Great Performances devoted an hour-long TV program to Shepard’s life and plays. 850

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Biography • Born Samuel Shepard Rogers VII, on an army base in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, on November 5, 1943, Sam Shepard’s early years were marked by repeated moves from one place to another: South Dakota, Utah, Florida, Guam, and eventually Southern California. Shepard’s father was severely wounded during World War II, became an alcoholic, and progressively withdrew from the family until he became a desert-dwelling, storytelling recluse. Shepard recalls that his mother, Jane Schook Rogers, would fire her army-issued Luger pistol at the Japanese soldiers sneaking out of the jungle on Guam in the years following World War II. After Shepard’s father retired from the army, the family moved to an avocado ranch in the San Bernardino valley in Southern California, where Shepard spent his adolescent years. In 1962, Shepard joined a barnstorming acting company with a religiously based repertory, the Bishop’s Repertory Company. When the company reached New York, Shepard, nineteen years old, dropped out of the company and into the Lower East Side bohemian lifestyle, busing tables at the Village Gate, dabbling with acting, doing drugs, and running the streets with Charles Mingus, Jr., an old California friend. In 1964, the twin bill of Shepard’s first two plays, the original Cowboys and The Rock Garden, premiered at one of Off-Off-Broadway’s most important theaters, Theater Genesis, and Shepard’s career was launched. Shepard wrote prolifically for the OffOff-Broadway theater during the last half of the 1960’s, gaining recognition and critical acclaim with each play, many of which contained made-to-order parts for his girlfriend, Joyce Aaron. By 1967, Shepard had gathered three Obie Awards, produced his first full-length play, and could boast of plays being produced on the West Coast, in New York, and in London. In 1969, Shepard married O-Lan Johnson (they had one son, Jesse Mojo), the actress who played the eponymous Oolan in Forensic and the Navigators. The following year, however, brought many difficulties for Shepard: Operation Sidewinder was produced at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at New York’s Lincoln Center, but the frustrations posed by an expensive Broadway production and the generally unfavorable reaction to the play prompted Shepard to return to Off-Off-Broadway. Further, Shepard’s romance with the emerging rock star Patti Smith severely taxed his nascent domestic life. Finally, losing patience with the New York theater scene, Shepard and his family moved to London in 1972. On his return to the United States in 1976, Shepard joined Bob Dylan on his Rolling Thunder Revue Tour and then moved to San Francisco, where he began working (Martha Holmes) with Joseph Chaikin and the Magic

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Theatre. The move to California also marked the beginning of Shepard’s career as a film star; his portrayal of Colonel Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff earned for him an Oscar nomination. While on the set of the film Frances (1982), Shepard met Jessica Lange; they later bought a ranch together in New Mexico and subsequently moved to Virginia and later to Minnesota. Shepard and Lange had two children together. Analysis • Nearly all Sam Shepard’s plays examine the functions (and dysfunctions) of the relationships between individuals that constitute either family structures or social structures that approximate family structures—close friendships or tight-knit business alliances. The conflict between the two halves of what can be considered a single unit (brother and brother, father and son, husband and wife, boyfriend and girlfriend) as they struggle either for supremacy or for survival amid surrounding pressures can be found at the core of most of Shepard’s plays. Further, his principal characters tend not only to be alienated from their immediate circumstances but also to be victimized by their drive toward a destructive self-isolation. The wake of devastation left by figures who are incapable of bridging the abysses they have created shapes the central conflict in many of Shepard’s plays. The pulsating rhythms of those conflicts can be tracked through Shepard’s unique use of dramatic language. Instead of the series of natural exchanges between characters found in plays constructed on the principle of mimetic realism, the language in Shepard’s plays reflects his extensive musical background. His dialogue ranges from realistic banter to highly metaphoric and figurative speech, to the beat and patter of rock and roll, to free-form, yet highly complex, jazz-like improvisational riffs. Characters frequently disrupt the flow of the dialogue with abrupt shifts in voice (such as Hoss’s switch from the street talk of a rock and roll star to the argot of an old Delta blues singer in The Tooth of Crime), sudden shifts in character (such as Chet’s and Stu’s metamorphosis from modern urban cowboys to old-time prospectors in Cowboys #2), or unexpected irruptions into convoluted soliloquies that arrest the flow of the action (such as Wesley’s recollection of his drunken father’s return in Curse of the Starving Class). Even when it is primarily realistic, the plays’ language is highly figurative, establishing a layer of metaphoric significance that points toward each play’s thematic center. The settings of Shepard’s plays also contribute figurative significance to their dominant themes. The action often unfolds against a backdrop composed of commonplace materials such as bathtubs, old wrecked cars, kitchen tables, refrigerators, living-room sofas, hotel beds, children’s bedrooms, or hospital rooms, but these articles suggest an environment that is primarily metaphoric, not realistic. Shepard uses the icons of American pop culture to represent the mythic landscape of the American psyche, thereby demonstrating how personal identity is so often assembled out of the bits and pieces of the social iconography that dominates American culture. His figurative settings also underscore the predominant tensions dramatized, as in Curse of the Starving Class, where the lack of food in the refrigerator represents the lack of love and nurture in the family. Because Shepard is primarily interested in depicting figurative conflicts and actions, he is free to draw on a wide variety of materials in the physical setting, as well as the dialogue, in order to create his mythic landscapes. Hence, Shepard’s plays are filled with borrowings from, and allusions to, what he sees as the core of the United States’ mythology: rock and roll and country-western music, Hollywood and films of all kinds (Westerns in particular), the trappings of middle-class suburbia, the physical geography of the West (the desert in particular), science fiction, and the conflict be-

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tween generations that shredded American society and culture during the Vietnam era. Although Shepard has spoken of his personal aversion for the 1960’s and early 1970’s, the pulsing beat of his scintillating dramatic language, the resonant depth of the mythic images that permeate his plays, and the unwavering intensity of the conflicts that give his plays an unmatched toughness all have their ultimate source in the turmoil both caused and embraced by the sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll generation. The center of Shepard’s work moves steadily and inexorably toward a distinctly American version of the domestic drama defined by his predecessors Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, and Eugene O’Neill, but the conflicts between siblings, husbands and wives, or parents and children are consistently played out against the backdrop of the icons that created the American national identity during the Vietnam era: cowboys, rock and roll music, Hollywood films, middle-class suburbia, science fiction, and the West. It is Shepard’s consistent ability, however, to use the particular to suggest the universal that indicates his greatness. In a play written by Shepard, the foreground and shading of a conflict between father and son will inevitably be couched in terms of rock music, cars, gunfights, and liquor, but the outline of that conflict is as old and as evocative as Sophocles’ Oidipous Tyrannos (c. 429 b.c.e.; Oedipus Tyrannus, 1715). One-act plays • Shepard’s earliest extant play, The Rock Garden, sketches many of the themes that resonate throughout his work. In the first of the play’s three scenes, Shepard defines the estrangement between generations: A Boy and a Girl sit in silence, sipping milk, while a Man, absorbed in his magazine, ignores them. In the second scene, the Boy signals his alienation from the mother figure (the Woman) by donning more and more clothing, which metaphorically suggests the barriers erected between the family members. The third scene repeats this figurative action, with the mother replaced by the father figure, the Man, who bores his son almost to death. Finally, the Boy shatters the superficial complacency of the relationships with a graphic and intensely personal recounting of his sexual preferences and prowess. Thus, the rock garden metaphorically defines this typical Shepardian family: sterile, arid, and empty. Most of the one-act plays that Shepard wrote for the Off-Off-Broadway theater during the 1960’s explore themes that emerged in The Rock Garden. Chicago examines the dynamics of isolation. The alienation of Stu—who reposes in a bathtub naked from the waist up but wearing jeans and tennis shoes—from the other cast members cannot be overcome by the figurative barriers that Stu creates through his active imagination. In 4-H Club, three men, Joe, John, and Bob, take turns imposing improvised antics on the other two; in Red Cross, Jim, a tourist infested with crab lice, imposes imaginative scenarios on two women: Carol ( Jim’s girlfriend) and a hotel maid. All three plays present characters who are markedly alienated from their selves and their surroundings; moreover, Shepard suggests that the imposition of personal desires on others leads typically to irreversible alienation. Cowboys #2 is perhaps Shepard’s best depiction of the ability of the imagination to assert a separate reality, as Chet and Stu, two urban cowboys, take turns imposing imaginative vistas on each other. For example, Chet assumes the voice and posture of an Old West prospector and addresses Stu as Mel, who plays along. The two urban cowboys and old-time prospectors rollick through a number of fanciful incidents: calisthenics, a rainstorm, an Indian attack, a descant on the decay of the modern West, and a trek across the desert. The play suggests that the imaginative world is just as “real” as the actual world.

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In a series of plays from the late 1960’s to the early 1970’s, Shepard explores isolation and alienation by employing metaphoric sets, characterizations, and actions. Icarus’s Mother depicts a conflict between five metaphorically “grounded” characters and a jet pilot—a transcendent Icarus figure. When the two females ( Jill and Pat) respond to the pilot sexually, the pilot reacts sexually, looping, rolling, climbing, and finally plunging to an explosive climax in the ocean. The play suggests that sexual desire is both irresistible and destructive, that permanent transcendence is not possible, and that males and females cannot communicate successfully. Forensic and the Navigators examines the American antiwar movement of the 1960’s. Two would-be revolutionaries, Forensic (whose name suggests talk but no action) and Emmet, ineptly attempt to chart out a revolutionary action. When the radicals’ hideout is suddenly invaded by California Highway Patrol-like exterminators, the fundamental distinctions between the revolutionaries and the forces of oppression progressively disintegrate, since neither side is capable of significant action. La Turista • Shepard’s first full-length play, La Turista, examines the inexorable decay of American society. Set in a Mexican hotel room for the first act, La Turista depicts the inability of two middle-class Americans, Kent and Salem, to overcome their cultural and spiritual sickness, symbolized by the dysentery they have contracted. Kent and Salem’s internal malaise contrasts sharply with the vitality of the Mexican Boy, who symbolizes both the underdeveloped nations’ peoples exploited by American materialism and the son caught in an Oedipal conflict with his father. Moreover, Kent’s symbolic role as the epitome of American cultural dominance is undercut by Kent’s ironic attack on the obsessions that have made the United States irrecoverably weak. After Kent faints on seeing the Boy in bed with Salem, the remainder of the first act consists of an attempt to revive Kent (who is described as dead), which involves a Witch Doctor, his son, and sacrificial chickens. The second act of La Turista duplicates the first in action, although it employs a separate metaphorical structure. Set in a drab American hotel room, Kent’s revival continues. The Witch Doctor and the Boy from the first act enter, dressed now like country doctors from the Civil War era. Kent’s disease is the result of a psychological and emotional starvation endemically linked to the structure of the typical American family. Kent and the Doctor become enmeshed in a mutually imposed Frankenstein scenario that recalls the father/son conflicts of the first act with Kent in the role of monster/son and the Doctor as the creator/father. As the imaginative play reaches its peak, Kent transforms into the monster and escapes his repressive society by crashing through the upstage wall, leaving a cutout of his body. La Turista compellingly suggests that the barren American family and its disposable society are incurably diseased structures that produce generation after generation of monsters. The Unseen Hand and Operation Sidewinder • The Unseen Hand and Operation Sidewinder also explore unresolvable conflicts. The Unseen Hand, a cross between a sciencefiction adventure and a television Western, pits Willie the Space Freak and the Morphan brothers (a trio of Old West outlaws) against the High Commission of Nogoland with its powerful Unseen Hand, a force that squeezes the mind. The conflict unfolds on a stage cluttered with the detritus of the American consumer society (symbolized by the play’s setting: Azusa, everything from A to Z in the United States). Nogoland and Azusa are but two different names for the tyrannizing force of established culture that opposes those who seek true freedom. Willie’s ability to escape the

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Unseen Hand’s power seems to be a qualified endorsement of revolutionary action. Operation Sidewinder, Shepard’s big-budget Broadway production, develops the structure sketched in The Unseen Hand. The plot brings together a group of revolutionaries consisting of Mickey Free (an Indian), a hippie known as the Young Man (who symbolizes all the impatience, violence, and frustrations of American youths during the 1960’s and 1970’s), and Blood (a Black Panther type), all of whom struggle against the forces of political oppression led by a Central Intelligence Agency goon (Captain Bovine), a mad scientist (Dr. Vector), and Dr. Vector’s gigantic and deadly missile/computer shaped like a sidewinder rattlesnake. When Mickey Free liberates Honey, the play’s only significant female, by cutting off the Sidewinder’s head, the action suggests that violent political confrontation can lead to true liberation, but the remainder of the play does not fulfill that promise. Shepard uses satiric language and irony to undercut the pretentiousness of both the anti-establishment and the establishment. Only Mickey Free’s desire to use the Sidewinder’s head as a source of spiritual renewal provides a viable alternative to the sterile and debilitating social mythologies embraced by both the revolutionaries and the establishment. The play ends with a pyrotechnic encounter between a group of Desert Tactical troops who futilely discharge their machine guns into Mickey Free, the Young Man, Honey, and a group of Hopi Indians who are caught up in the spirituality of the snake dance and have thereby achieved a higher level of existence. Although the play preaches too much, Operation Sidewinder is perhaps Shepard’s most hopeful offering, suggesting that the futility of political and generational conflict can at last be transcended. Geography of a Horse Dreamer • Although Geography of a Horse Dreamer is on the surface a play about a group of gamblers who are trying to squeeze information from Cody, an artistically minded young man with the ability to dream the winners of horse or dog races, it is really an extended metaphor that reproaches the tendency of a culture to treat its most gifted artists like disposable goods, demanding that they produce more and more until the artists themselves are consumed. Cody’s abilities steadily wither, since he cannot meet the demands of the Mafia-like gangsters, until he is liberated from them by his shotgun-wielding brothers from the West in a violent scene at the play’s end. Angel City • Angel City also examines the role of the artist in society. Rabbit, a filmscript fixer, is hired by a motion-picture studio to repair the script of the company’s latest big-budget disaster film. The line between films and the “real,” however, is a tenuous distinction in Angel City. Miss Scoons, the type of the vacuous American female, desires beyond all else to become the people she sees on the silver screen since she believes their lives to be more “real” than hers. Further, the great disaster that Rabbit is supposed to script becomes the cataclysm that destroys both the world without and the world within the play; Angel City’s apocalyptic ending suggests that the American film industry, and the mythology it creates, are primary sources of the United States’ cultural and spiritual corruption. The Tooth of Crime • The Tooth of Crime is best described as a rock-and-roll gunfight between a top-of-the-charts but aging rocker, Hoss, and his up-and-coming rival, Crow. Set in a stylized future where rockers mark out territory through acts of violence much like members of rival gangs stake out their turf, The Tooth of Crime examines the

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dynamics by which males relate to one another when establishing their fundamental identities. As Hoss and Crow square off in the musical battle that dominates the play’s second act, it becomes clear that Hoss and Crow, like so many of Shepard’s other male characters, are locked into the battle of identity that pits father against son. Hoss quickly recognizes that “father” and “son” are locked into a generational cycle in which the younger will inevitably usurp the place of the elder, and the play’s conclusion, in which Crow takes possession of Hoss’s entourage, goods, and status, suggests that father and son are locked in an endless cycle in which the younger generation is doomed to repeat patterns of its forebears. Curse of the Starving Class • The cyclical pattern etched into the relationship between the generations provides the dominant structure for what have been called Shepard’s “family” plays: Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, True West, Fool for Love, and A Lie of the Mind. The “curse” in Curse of the Starving Class is quite clearly the curse of generational repetition: Children inevitably duplicate the actions of their parents. The natures of the parents are planted within the psyches of the children and emerge in actions that emphasize the familial curse passed down from generation to generation. Weston, the father, recalls the poison of his father’s alcoholism; Wesley, the son, provides a chilling account of Weston’s drunken attack on the home’s locked front door; and in the third act, Wesley dons Weston’s discarded clothes and admits that his father’s essence is beginning to control him. Ella, the mother, passes on to her daughter Emma the curse of menstruation as well as the mother’s desire to escape her family. The curse of starvation is overtly symbolized by the perpetually empty refrigerator, which underscores the family’s physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual starvation. Further, the curse of denial pervades all the play’s relationships and colors almost every action. Clearly beset from within, this typical Shepardian family is also beset from without by those forces that Shepard believes threaten the mythic (and therefore true) West: the march of progress that wants to destroy the natural world and replace it with shopping malls, freeways, and tract housing developments. There is, obviously, no salvation for this family. Weston runs off to Mexico with the money he has received from the sale of the farm; Emma is blown up in Weston’s car by thugs who are looking to extort money from Weston; Ella refuses to acknowledge what happens right in front of her and repeatedly addresses Wesley as Weston; Wesley completes the transformation into his father by adopting his father’s attitudes and behaviors. The anecdote that Ella and Wesley jointly tell to close the play becomes the play’s second great symbol: An eagle and a tomcat, tearing at each other in a midair struggle, crash to earth. Like that pair of animals, there is no salvation or escape that awaits the family in Curse of the Starving Class, only inevitable destruction. Buried Child • Shepard’s vision of the family in Buried Child is even darker; long and deeply buried familial secrets constitute the hereditary curse in Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize winner. The family patriarch, Dodge, spends all of his time wrapped in an old blanket on the sofa, staring at the television. His wife, Halie, speaks at her husband (not to him) of trivial matters when she is not busy soliciting the local clergyman, Father Dewis. Their eldest son, Tilden, is a burned out and mentally defective semimute who brings armload after armload of corn onto the stage. The second son, Bradley, had one leg cut off by a chain saw and now spends most of his time wrestling with Dodge for control of the blanket and television set or threatening to cut Dodge’s hair.

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In a series of statements that recalls the pattern of denial that occurs in Curse of the Starving Class, Dodge refuses to acknowledge that Bradley is his own son, claiming that his flesh and blood are buried in the backyard. To complicate matters, Halie frequently mentions yet another son, Ansel, who (according to Halie and Halie alone) was a hero and basketball star. Into the midst of this dysfunctional home comes Vince, Tilden’s son, who wants to reestablish his family ties, and Shelly, Vince’s girlfriend. Tilden, however, refuses to recognize Vince, claiming that the son he once had is now dead and buried. The denial of family connections suggests both the physical and the emotional rejection that pervades the home in Buried Child. On a physical level, the dead child refers to Halie and Tilden’s incestuously conceived child who was killed by Dodge and buried in the field behind the house. Metaphorically, the dead child represents all the children in the family, all of whom are dead to their father and mother and to one another. Unable to gain recognition from any of his progenitors, Vince stomps out one evening and goes on an alcoholic binge, leaving Shelly at the mercy of Bradley, who menaces her sexually. When Vince returns the next morning, thoroughly drunk, his open violence provides Halie and Dodge with the clue to Vince’s identity, once again suggesting that behavior is mechanically passed from generation to generation. When Dodge dies, Vince proclaims himself the family’s new patriarch just as Tilden enters carrying the exhumed body of the buried child. The play’s highly equivocal ending juxtaposes the hope symbolized by the rebirth of a new generation against despairing images of denial, disease, and death. True West • True West explores the conflict between two brothers: Lee, a reclusive and violent thief who has been living in the Mojave desert, and Austin, a suburban Yuppie and screenwriter. Austin is trying to close a motion-picture deal with a Hollywood movie mogul, Saul Kimmer, but when Kimmer hears Lee’s impromptu outline for a motion picture about two cowboys chasing each other across the plains of Texas, Kimmer decides to drop Austin’s project and develop Lee’s. True West, in addition to analyzing the fate of the artist in a manner that recalls Angel City and Geography of a Horse Dreamer, questions which version of the West is indeed true. Lee claims that the desert, with its brutally harsh environment that forces its denizens to live by their wits and strength, is the true West, while Austin claims that suburban California, with its shopping malls, highways, and tract housing, constitutes the real West. Further, the numerous references to famous Western films suggest that the only true West is Hollywood’s West. The pressure of Kimmer’s decision to pursue Lee’s screenplay causes the brothers to switch roles: Austin, responding to Lee’s taunts, steals a variety of toasters from the neighbors; Lee slaves over the typewriter roughing out the dialogue. The reversal of roles indicates the fundamental similarities that bind the brothers. On the abrupt return of their Mother from Alaska, (who, showing rare good sense for a Shepardian mother, claims to recognize nothing and immediately leaves), Lee and Austin square off in a physically violent but unresolved confrontation. True West not only questions the mythology that defines the American West but also probes the violence spawned by the fundamental psychological and behavioral equivalence of family members. Fool for Love • Shepard also examines the equivalency of siblings in Fool for Love, replacing the brother-brother conflict of True West with a love/hate relationship between half-brother and half-sister, Eddie and May. Reared in different towns by different

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mothers, Eddie and May meet, fall in love, and begin their incestuous relationship before discovering that they share the same father, the Old Man. Although the friction dramatized in Eddie and May’s emotional and sexual relationship points toward Shepard’s signature characterization of men and women as two opposite animals who cannot coexist, Fool for Love also examines how the same event is often shaped and reshaped by different individuals to create widely divergent memories and understandings of what happened. Eddie and May do not share the same recollection of their meeting and cannot come to terms with the implications of their relationship; moreover, none of their stories agrees with versions of the same incidents told by the Old Man, who at times seems to be Eddie’s and May’s mental projection but who at other times seems to be an independent character. Despite her attempt to establish a different lifestyle with Martin, the new man in her life, May is as inextricably bound to Eddie as he is to her. Even though Eddie leaves at the end of the play and May believes that he is not coming back, the play suggests that the audience has witnessed but one episode in a continually repeating cycle in which Eddie and May are victimized by their repetitive actions just as surely as Wesley and Weston were by theirs in Curse of the Starving Class. A Lie of the Mind • A Lie of the Mind explores the dysfunctional structure of the American family as well as the delusions that individuals impose on others and themselves. Beaten nearly to death by her husband Jake, Beth creates lies of the mind— fictions that permit her to survive. The play suggests that each character assembles a personal reality in his or her mind. For example, Jake’s mother, Lorraine, blocks out the pain of being abandoned by her husband by pretending indifference; Beth’s father, Baylor, hides from his family by erecting a facade of the crusty frontier hunter; Jake represses all of his memories of the race in Mexico that led to his father’s death. Further, A Lie of the Mind suggests that the “two opposite animals,” the male and the female, even when yoked together by an irresistible and consuming love, are torn apart by the violence of their fundamental incompatibility. Both Beth and Jake are trapped by their love—neither can be complete without the other—and their obsessive need to be reunited thrusts Beth into delusions of marriage and propels Jake to Montana to find Beth. Their drive for reunification, however, at last proves futile. After kissing Beth, Jake exits into the darkness, and Beth compulsively turns to Jake’s wounded brother, Frankie. A Lie of the Mind suggests that the American family, like Beth, is fundamentally crippled. States of Shock • States of Shock is a heavily symbolic exercise in antiwar sentiment that pits a demented, saber-waving colonel against Stubbs, a wheelchair-bound armedservices veteran (who still has a conspicuously large and bloody hole in his chest) in a battle over the symbols and myths that permeate and define large-scale war. Set in a thoroughly American family restaurant, States of Shock exposes all the contradictions that surround the concept of war in post-Vietnam America without offering any more than the violence of the inevitable collisions. Simpatico • Simpatico concerns two Californian friends, Carter and Vinnie, who fifteen years earlier had used Vinnie’s wife Rosie to blackmail Ames, a horse racing official, into overlooking a race track scam involving look-alike horses. Carter and Rosie then ran off to Kentucky together where they became wealthy. Vinnie uses photographs of Rosie with Ames to extort money from Carter, who returns to California to

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retrieve the photographs. As in True West, the main characters undergo role reversals during the play’s progress. Carter becomes an alcoholic ne’er-do-well while Vinnie shaves, puts on a suit, and flies to Kentucky to seek his fortune. Eyes for Consuela • Eyes for Consuela is based on the short story, “The Blue Bouquet,” by Octavio Paz. Henry, a middle-class American whose marriage has disintegrated, flees to a decrepit hotel in a Mexican jungle. There he meets a philosophical Mexican bandit Amado, who threatens to cut out Henry’s blue eyes as a gift to his wife Consuela. Henry insists that his eyes are brown, not blue, but this does not impress Amado. Throughout two acts the men argue, drink tequila, and trade life histories, as Amado contends that Henry’s despair is an example of anxiety caused by the complexity of American civilization. The Late Henry Moss • The Late Henry Moss begins with two brothers, Ray and Earl, sharing a whiskey bottle and memories of their father, who lies dead in the bed behind them. Ray sets out to discover how his father died by interrogating everyone who knows anything about his last day. The story is told in flashbacks as Ray interviews the taxi driver who took Henry Moss on a fatal fishing trip; Esteban, a kindly next-door neighbor; and Conchalla, a sensuous Mexican woman who shared a drinking binge with Henry. Other major works short fiction: Cruising Paradise, 1996; Great Dream of Heaven: Stories, 2002. screenplays: Me and My Brother, 1969 (with Robert Frank); Zabriskie Point, 1970; Ringaleevio, 1971; Renaldo and Clara, 1978; Paris, Texas, 1984 (with L. M. Kit Carson); Fool for Love, 1985 (adaptation of his play); Far North, 1988; Silent Tongue, 1994. nonfiction: Rolling Thunder Logbook, 1977. miscellaneous: Hawk Moon: A Book of Short Stories, Poems, and Monologues, 1973; Motel Chronicles, 1982 (poetry and short fiction); Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard: Letters and Texts, 1972-1984, 1989. Bibliography Auerbach, Doris. Shepard, Kopit, and the Off-Broadway Theater. Boston: Twayne, 1982. One of the first important academic analyses of Shepard’s plays, Auerbach’s book provides a valuable analysis of Shepard’s work as Off-Broadway drama. Auerbach also provides extensive information on the directors, actors, and theatrical spaces that made up the Off-Broadway theater during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Bottoms, Stephen J. The Theatre of Sam Shepard: States of Crisis. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Along with a thorough examination of Shepard’s plays, Bottoms presents an impartial comparison of Shepard’s work with that of other leading contemporary dramatists. Contains detailed chronology and bibliography. DeRose, David J. Sam Shepard. New York: Twayne, 1992. DeRose provides a brief overview of Shepard’s life and work, analyzing his theatrical and thematic goals. Includes an annotated bibliography of secondary sources and a detailed list of important play reviews. Hart, Lynda. Sam Shepard’s Metaphorical Stages. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987. Hart argues that Shepard’s plays from Cowboys #2 to A Lie of the Mind are influenced by techniques developed by the Theater of the Absurd, particularly by the

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work of Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, and Eugène Ionesco. The book contains a brief chapter on Shepard’s work for the television and film industries as well as a pithy biography and an extensive bibliography. King, Kimball, ed. Sam Shepard: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1988. This collection of essays written mostly by academics approaches Shepard’s work from many angles and demonstrates the range of response the plays evoke. The casebook includes a solid annotated bibliography and a piece by Patrick Fennel that identifies and discusses Shepard’s unperformed and unpublished works. Marranca, Bonnie, ed. American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1981. A compendium of essays written by academics, directors, and actors, this volume is a good introduction to Shepard’s early work for the Off-Broadway theater. A number of short pieces by Shepard himself round out the volume, including Shepard’s influential short essay, “Language, Visualization, and the Inner Library.” Mottram, Ron. Inner Landscapes: The Theater of Sam Shepard. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984. Perhaps the best sustained examination of Shepard’s plays, Mottram’s biographical analysis offers many insightful readings of Shepard’s work by comparing incidents in the plays to parallel episodes from Shepard’s life or to stories from Hawk Moon or Motel Chronicles with similar characters or incidents. Mottram also includes a brief chronology of Shepard’s work to 1985. Gregory W. Lanier, updated by Milton Berman

Richard Brinsley Sheridan Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Born: Dublin, Ireland; October 30, 1751 Died: London, England; July 7, 1816 Principal drama • The Rivals, pr., pb. 1775; St. Patrick’s Day: Or, The Scheming Lieutenant, pr. 1775, pb. 1788; The Duenna: Or, The Double Elopement, pr. 1775, pb. 1776 (libretto; music by Thomas Linley the elder and Thomas Linley the younger, and others); A Trip to Scarborough, pr. 1777, pb. 1781 (adaptation of Sir John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse); The School for Scandal, pr. 1777, pb. 1780; The Critic: Or, A Tragedy Rehearsed, pr. 1779, pb. 1781; Pizarro: A Tragedy in Five Acts, pr., pb. 1799 (adaptation of August von Kotzebue’s Die Spanier in Peru); Complete Plays, pb. 1930; Plays, pb. 1956 (L. Gibbs, editor); The School for Scandal and Other Plays, pb. 1998 (Michael Cordner, editor) Other literary forms • Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s other literary efforts, all minor, include the early poems “Clio’s Protest” and “The Ridotto of Bath,” published in The Bath Chronicle (1771); a youthful translation, Love Epistles of Aristaenetus (1771), in collaboration with Nathaniel Brassey Halhed; and later occasional verses in connection with the theater—such as prologues and epilogues to other writers’ plays—the most important being “Verses to the Memory of Garrick, Spoken as a Monody” (1779). Of far greater significance, especially to biographers and historians, are Sheridan’s speeches in Parliament, collected in five volumes (1816), and his letters, collected in three volumes, entitled The Letters of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1966). Unfortunately, his speeches are preserved only in summary or imperfect transcript. Achievements • Richard Brinsley Sheridan was the best playwright of eighteenth century England, a time of great actors rather than great playwrights. Judged on theatrical rather than strictly literary merit, Sheridan also ranks with the best English writers of comedy: William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, William Congreve, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw. Until the era of Wilde and Shaw, only Shakespeare’s plays had held the stage better than Sheridan’s. Of Sheridan’s plays, The School for Scandal, a comedy of manners, is universally acclaimed as his masterpiece. Also applauded are The Rivals, another comedy of manners; The Duenna, a comic opera; and The Critic, a burlesque. The two comedies of manners have fared better over time than have the two more specialized works, perhaps because their attractions are apparent even in printed form and perhaps because changes of taste have gone against the specialized works. The topical allusions in The Critic are mostly lost on modern audiences, and The Duenna affronts modern sensibilities with episodes of anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism. In Sheridan’s own opinion, his best piece of work was act 1 of The Critic. In recent times, Sheridan’s reputation has waned: His “artificial” comedies lack the high seriousness that the modern age demands. Yet the basis of his appeal remains: effective theater embodied in smooth traditional plots, stock characters fleshed out by Sheridan’s observations of his time, and some of the wittiest dialogue ever written. Sheridan has never been known for the originality of his plots and characters, some of which can be traced through Shakespeare and Jonson all the way back to Roman com861

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edy, but—like Shakespeare and Jonson—he had the assimilative genius to transform the old into something lively and new. Revolving around a trickery motif, chronicling the age-old battles of the sexes or the generations, culminating in a marriage or marriages, his plots still entertain with their well-paced intrigues and discoveries. Onto the old stocks he grafted such memorable characters as Mrs. Malaprop, Joseph Surface, Lady Teazle, and Sir Fretful Plagiary. One reason why Sheridan does not seem dated is his language, a distinctly modern prose idiom, supple, utilitarian, informal, expressing the hopeful coherence of the early modern era. Sheridan’s achievement is even more impressive when one considers that he wrote all of his plays (except for the adaptation of Pizarro) during a period of five years when he was in his mid-twenties and during a period of severe restrictions on the theater. The upper- and upper-middle-class establishment controlled the theater with an iron grip through limitations on the number of theaters, official censorship, and the unofficial censorship of its tastes. No play could be presented that did not satisfy the political and social assumptions of the ruling classes. It is remarkable that, under these restrictions, Sheridan could get away with saying as much as he did. Biography • In eighteenth century Great Britain, Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s lot was pretty much cast when he was born into a genteelly poor Irish theatrical family. All of these social disadvantages, however, worked to his advantage in the theater. Being Irish has given numerous British writers of comedy special insight into the vices and follies of their fellow Britons, as well as the rhetorical skills to air their observations. Being in a theatrical family was obviously an advantage for the aspiring playwright. Finally, being genteelly poor sparked his ambitions with both positive and negative charges. Combined, these factors made Sheridan acutely aware of the disparity between his personal worth and his actual place in society—always a great aid to developing a sense of comic incongruity. Although lacking wealth and social position, Sheridan’s family was both well educated and talented. Both his father and mother were children of scholarly clergymen. On being graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, Sheridan’s father, Thomas, already a playwright, entered the theater as an actor and soon advanced to manager. Sheridan’s mother, the former Frances Chamberlaine, wrote novels and plays. After initial prosperity, the family of six (Richard was the third son) ran into hard times when a minor political indiscretion—reminiscent of an indiscreet sermon that ruined his own father—forced Thomas out of his position. He suppressed some antigovernment lines in a play, thus antagonizing the Irish public. After two years of acting in London, Thomas tried to reestablish himself in Dublin, but without success. Taking his family with him, he returned to England, where, moving from place to place, he pursued an impecunious existence as actor, author, editor, lecturer on elocution, and projector of ambitious undertakings. After attending Sam Whyte’s Seminary for the Instruction of Youth in Dublin, Richard was entered into Harrow School, despite the family’s precarious financial situation. How precarious that situation was became evident when, to escape creditors, the rest of the family fled to France, where they lived for several years and where Frances Sheridan died. Left behind at Harrow, Sheridan, lonely and destitute, suffered the abuse heaped on him by his well-bred schoolmates and masters. The unhappy scholar later maintained that he learned little at Harrow. When his family returned to London, Sheridan, by then a young man, rejoined them. There his education continued informally, and it was completed when, in the

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fall of 1770, the family moved to Bath, where the father presented entertainments and tried to establish an academy of oratory. The favorite spa of eighteenth century England, Bath gave young Sheridan a closeup study of le beau monde, the fashionable world later depicted in his comedies of manners. He managed to join this scene on the basis of few credentials except a ready wit and charm. In Bath, he also met young Elizabeth Ann Linley, a great beauty and singing member of the musical Linley family, which sometimes collaborated with the Sheridans on entertainments. Elizabeth’s public performances brought her the unwanted attentions of numerous suitors, most notably one Thomas Mathews. The boorish Mathews importuned her so closely that, to escape him, Elizabeth (already the subject of a racy play, Samuel Foote’s The Maid of Bath, 1771) ran away to France—accompanied by Richard Brinsley Sheridan as her protector. After a few weeks, the couple returned, Sheridan fought two duels with Mathews, and, on April 13, 1773, Sheridan and Elizabeth were married. With this background, Sheridan wrote his plays. He and Elizabeth settled in London, where the need to make a living turned him, like his father, toward the theater. In 1775, he took London by storm, presenting three plays, the first (The Rivals) reflecting his recent romantic past. By 1780, however, his playwriting career was over. Although he owned a managing interest in Drury Lane Theatre, he was beginning a distinguished career in Parliament, which consumed much of his efforts. Sheridan’s long service in Parliament has no bearing on his playwriting (aside from the fact that it stopped) but much on his reputation. A liberal Whig, Sheridan sympathized with the American and French revolutions and supported such programs as Roman Catholic emancipation. A principled politician, he could not be bribed despite his constant need for money to pay for elections and entertaining. An independent thinker, he sometimes bucked his own party. Such a man was obviously dangerous, especially when he was also such a powerful speaker. Therefore, the leaders of his party used his powers but never allowed him to become a leader. Sheridan even became an adviser and a friend to the prince of Wales, later George IV, but it was the snobbish prince who led the establishment’s strategy against the upstart Sheridan. That strategy was to depict Sheridan as an unreliable lightweight—a strategy dictated at first by Sheridan’s background and later by his drinking and debts. When Drury Lane Theatre burned in 1809, Sheridan’s debts drained his resources so that he lacked sufficient funds to win an election in 1812, and his political and princely associates swiftly fell away. Although he died in poverty, he was honored with a lavish funeral in Westminster Abbey, attended by scores of solemn dignitaries and peers of the realm. He is buried in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. Analysis • “Poor Sherry,” said the prince of Wales, a line echoed by other noble contemporaries of Richard Brinsley Sheridan and even by Sheridan’s admirer Lord Byron. Unhappily, the verdict of the prince of Wales and his crowd still represents the official response to Sheridan, coloring understanding of his plays with an argumentum ad hominem. This official line runs something as follows: “Poor Sherry was motivated by overwhelming vanity and self-interest. That is why he entered the theater and why he left the theater to enter politics. A poor Irish actor’s son, he always wanted to hobnob with the rich and powerful, to be part of le beau monde, whose attitudes he reflects in his plays. There was something calculating, something insincere and insubstantial, about the fellow. Same thing about his plays.” This is the establishment Sheridan safely tucked away in the Poets’ Corner. There is also, however, an antiestablishment Sheridan—the penniless child suffer-

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ing at Harrow, the spirited young man dueling for his girl, the member of Parliament sympathizing with the American and French revolutions, whose servants in his plays are smarter than their masters. True, Sheridan’s leading characters are usually gentry or better, and Sheridan usually exhibits the doings of le beau monde. In addition, he does not issue a clarion call for revolution and the institution of a republic. He was working within the restrictions of accepted traditions, theatrical tastes, and official censorship. Within those restrictions, however, he exhibited le beau monde as vain, moneygrabbing, and scandalmongering. As a playwright, Sheridan enjoyed the satisfaction of seeing the fashionable world pay and applaud to see itself pilloried. Sheridan lived in the midst of what one of his characters calls “a luxurious and dissipated age,” but the people enjoying the luxuries and dissipations were standing on the heads of a mass of poor people. He could not attack the upper classes directly, even though they offered big targets for satire. In particular, their illusions about themselves, their pretensions of nobility and gentility, made them vulnerable. Sheridan knew a whoring society when he saw one, and he satirized its illusions and pretensions relentlessly. Sheridan’s satire is milder in tone, however, than that of cynical Restoration comedy or the savage attacks Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift could deliver. The tone of Restoration comedy harks back to the dark, stinging satire of Ben Jonson, who presented the world as little better than a zoo. Such satire incorporates the conservative vision of the Great Chain of Being, wherein human nature is permanently flawed, half angel, half animal. The animal side must be cynically accepted or flogged into good behavior by Church, State, and satirists. Sheridan’s satire is more optimistic, softened by the influence of the sentimental mode that grew up in the eighteenth century as the main competitor of the satiric mode, especially in the novel and drama. Originating in Nonconformist religious thought and maturing in Romanticism, sentimentalism rested on the revolutionary doctrine that human nature is essentially good. Stressing empathy and the humane emotions, sentimentalism was susceptible to hypocrisy. It also had a devastating effect on drama: Tragedy turned into melodrama, and comedy turned to provoking sympathetic tears. The two most notorious examples of sentimental literature, Henry Mackenzie’s novel The Man of Feeling and Richard Cumberland’s play The West Indian both came out in 1771, just before Sheridan began writing. Like his fellow countryman Oliver Goldsmith, Sheridan accepted the underlying doctrine of sentimentalism but reacted against its excesses. Not unnaturally, Goldsmith and Sheridan thought comedy ought to provoke laughter. To produce “laughing comedy,” Sheridan returned to the witty, satiric comedy of manners of the Restoration, but without the Restoration cynicism and sexual license. Whereas the Restoration offered refinement and style as a substitute for goodness, Sheridan still believed in its possibilities. The result is a warmly human balance similar to that in Henry Fielding’s novels. As William Hazlitt said of The School for Scandal, “it professes a faith in the natural goodness, as well as habitual depravity, of human nature.” Human frailties are laughed at and, if acknowledged, usually forgiven. Among prominent failings is hypocrisy, and anyone too good is suspect. Most of all, empathy has become a sense of participation—the author’s and the audience’s—in the vices and follies of humankind. This laugh of recognition is perhaps Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s greatest gift to “high seriousness.” The Rivals • Sheridan’s first play, The Rivals, reflects his own experiences—his life in Bath, his elopement with Elizabeth Linley, his duels—but it is not strictly autobio-

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graphical. Nor was it only a succès de scandale, although being the talk of the town probably helped Sheridan at the time. Rather than seeing parallels to Sheridan’s life in The Rivals, modern audiences are more likely to notice parallels to Shakespeare’s plays, for Sheridan drew unashamedly not only on his own experiences but also on his predecessors’ work. These two seams in the play reveal Sheridan’s apprentice patchings, but what is amazing is that he sewed them all up so well. When the play failed in its first performance, Sheridan revised it within a few days and turned The Rivals into one of the great English comedies of manners. Set in the fashionable resort town of Bath, The Rivals concerns the efforts of Captain Jack Absolute, “son and heir to Sir Anthony Absolute, a baronet of three thousand a year,” to win the hand of Miss Lydia Languish, an heiress who “could pay the national debt.” Miss Languish, however, entertains romantic notions of marrying only for love: She is determined to wed a penniless suitor who will elope and live with her in blissful poverty. To humor her fantasies, Captain Absolute pretends to be Beverley, “a halfpay ensign.” His wooing is further complicated by the opposition of Mrs. Malaprop, Lydia’s battle-ax guardian aunt; and by two rivals, bumbling country squire Bob Acres and duelist Sir Lucius O’Trigger (whose love letters are actually being delivered to Mrs. Malaprop by the maid, Lucy). The final complication is the appearance of Sir Anthony with news of an arranged marriage for Jack. After a heated confrontation between father and son, this complication proves to be the resolution of the plot: The young lady intended for Jack Absolute is Miss Lydia Languish. The discovery of Beverley’s true identity alienates Lydia, but she is brought around when Jack’s life is threatened by a duel with the rivals. Averted at the last moment, the threatening duel also persuades Julia Melville to forgive Mr. Faulkland, Jack’s friend, for doubting her love. Drawn out too long, Mr. Faulkland’s almost psychotic behavior mars the tone of the play, but his fantasies of doubt correspond to Lydia’s fantasies of romance, perhaps pointing up the theme that a good marriage must be rooted in reality: true love and a solid bank account. The other characters provide a display of diverse human nature. Reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Sir Andrew Aguecheek, the cowardly suitor Acres contrasts with the equally ridiculous O’Trigger, whose name describes his ready disposition. Lydia’s whims and Sir Anthony’s commands typify the ludicrous demands that sweethearts and fathers can make, and Mrs. Malaprop’s comical misuse of words (“a nice derangement of epitaphs”) epitomizes the cavalier misunderstanding of reality that the characters exhibit. The play is full of notable examples of human illusion—O’Trigger’s “honor,” Sir Anthony’s parental authority, Bob Acres’s “polishing” (that is, new clothes, hairdo, dancing lessons, and swearing), Mrs. Malaprop’s vanity, Faulkland’s doubts, and Lydia’s romance. Their illusions make them easy marks for one another and for the streetwise servants. To manipulate them, one simply plays up to their fantasies. For example, Jack is “Beverley” to Lydia, a dutiful son to Sir Anthony, and a flatterer to Mrs. Malaprop. All the characters with illusions are worthy of study, but perhaps the most important are Mrs. Malaprop, Faulkland, and Lydia. On the periphery of the action, Mrs. Malaprop is symbolically at the play’s center. She provides a simplified example of how illusion works. Her funny misuse of words, symbols of reality, epitomizes the break with reality. She thinks her big words make her, as O’Trigger says, “a great mistress of the language,” “the queen of the dictionary,” or, as Jack says, a leader in “intellectual accomplishments, elegant manners, and unaffected learning.” The reality is summed up in Jack’s intercepted letter: “I am told that

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the same ridiculous vanity, which makes her dress up her coarse features, and deck her dull chat with hard words which she don’t understand, does also lay her open to the grossest deceptions from flattery and pretended admiration.” To Sir Lucius O’Trigger, she is “Delia,” a female counterpart of romantic Beverley. When Sir Lucius sees the real thing, however, he turns her down—as do Jack and Acres. Clinging to her illusions, Mrs. Malaprop stomps off the stage, huffing that “men are all barbarians.” The illusions of Faulkland and Lydia are essentially overreactions of the young to the sterile social order represented by Mrs. Malaprop and the older generation: Their illusions are examples of sentimentalism, the gross exaggeration of feeling that Goldsmith and Sheridan deplored. Faulkland is a man of sensibility, but unfortunately, as he notes, love “urges sensibility to madness.” His “too exquisite nicety” leads him constantly to question and torture Julia, a “mild and affectionate spirit” any man would be lucky to find. The least suggestion can send him into paroxysms of doubt: Jack and even the “looby” Acres are able to play on his sensibility at will. He is, as he finally admits, a “fool.” Lydia’s overreaction contrasts with that of Faulkland, but she would agree with him that “when Love receives such countenance from Prudence, nice minds will be suspicious of its birth.” Fed by sentimental novels, her overheated mind throws prudence to the wind. Jack easily deceives her by playing her romantic games and speaking the language of the novels she has read. Thinking to outwit and shock her relatives, she is shocked to discover herself “the only dupe at last.” The young lady who had hoped for a “sentimental” elopement with all the trimmings must settle for being “a mere Smithfield bargain.” Actually, she gets more than she bargained for: When confronted by the reality of a truly romantic situation—men dueling to the death over her—she comes to her senses. The illusions of all these characters in The Rivals say something about the society in which they live. First, being born in the upper strata apparently encourages illusions about oneself: Only wealth and privilege could create a Mrs. Malaprop. Second, to sustain those illusions apparently requires a lot of lying and deceiving. Third, with all the lying and deceiving, it becomes difficult to find anything genuine—hence the hard search of Faulkland and Lydia for true love. That Sheridan himself sought the genuine is suggested by his repeated use throughout the play of the word “sincerity,” apparently a quality he found in short supply in eighteenth century England. The Duenna • Musically untalented, Sheridan wrote the comic opera The Duenna in collaboration with his father-in-law and brother-in-law (both named Thomas Linley) and probably with the help of his wife. Despite this piecemeal method of composition, the completed opera was an immense success. In particular, the opera is a testimony to Sheridan’s patchwork skill and to the talented Linleys, whose tunes were hummed about London streets. Typically, however, the words of the songs are bland, and so are the opera’s stock characters, some of whom are almost indistinguishable from one another. Of all Sheridan’s works, The Duenna most requires performance, since it depends so much on acting, spectacle, and music (twenty-seven songs in all). Set in Seville, The Duenna features not one but two pairs of lovers thwarted by tyrannical parents. Donna Louisa’s father has arranged an unsuitable match for her, notwithstanding her love for Don Antonio, and Donna Clara’s father and stepmother are forcing her into a convent, even though she is loved by Don Ferdinand. Both young ladies run off and, assisted by bribed nuns and priests (the latter also drunk), marry their lovers in a convent. Louisa tricks her father, Don Jerome, with the help of her governess, old Margaret the Duenna. When Don Jerome vows “never to see or speak to”

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Louisa until she marries his choice, Louisa and the Duenna trade places, and the penniless old Duenna marries Louisa’s intended, Isaac Mendoza, a rich Jew who has never seen Louisa and who thinks he is adding to his coffers. Like most of Sheridan’s works, The Duenna offers sparkling intrigue and dialogue. Here again, a female servant masterminds the plotting, but to a great extent the fathers and the villain outsmart themselves. The scheming Mendoza, recently converted to Christianity and hence standing “like the blank leaves between the Old and New Testament,” is well known for being “the dupe of his own art.” Of the characters, only the ugly Duenna, the obnoxious Mendoza, and the drunken priest Father Paul stand forth with any distinction, and they are stereotypes. The broad strokes of the stock characters and action do provide simplified versions of some of Sheridan’s themes. For example, the hypocritical nuns and priests show, as Louisa notes, that “in religion, as in friendship, they who profess most are ever the least sincere”—a forewarning of Joseph Surface in The School for Scandal. Louisa herself seems of two minds on the relationship of love and wealth. Early in the opera, she sings that she loves Don Antonio “for himself alone,” since he has no wealth. Later in the play, faced with the prospect of being disinherited, she changes her tune: “There is a chilling air around poverty that often kills affection that was not nursed in it. If we would make love our household god we had best secure him a comfortable roof.” At least Louisa’s aims are different from her father’s, who sets forth his marriage as a proper example: “I married her for her fortune, and she took me in obedience to her father, and a very happy couple we were. We never expected any love from one another, and so we were never disappointed.” Such cold-blooded reasoning is a reminder of how often, in Sheridan’s plays, the older and younger generations are at odds on the subject of marriage. The two views presuppose radically different ideas not only of marriage but also of personality and society: The vital difference is between valuing someone “for her fortune” and “for himself alone.” Thus, in Sheridan’s plays, the struggle within the family is a microcosm of the larger struggle between the old and new order in society. There is no doubt about which side Sheridan took, as his own father opposed his marriage to Elizabeth Ann Linley (old Thomas had the absurd notion that the Sheridans were too good for “musicians”). Another theme in The Duenna revolves around the idea of “seeing.” There are a number of observations on how subjective states, especially love, affect one’s seeing, especially of the beloved. The merging of subject and object here, encouraged perhaps by eighteenth century empathy, foreshadows Romantic “seeing,” wherein what is observed takes its coloring from the imagination. The Duenna also contains a number of warnings about such “seeing”: Don Jerome gets so angry that he does not recognize his daughter posing as the veiled Duenna, and Don Ferdinand gets so jealous he does not recognize his beloved dressed as a nun. In the opera’s most philosophical song, however, Don Jerome gets the final word on “seeing”: Truth, they say, lies in a well, Why, I vow I ne’er could see; Let the water-drinkers tell, There it always lay for me; For when sparkling wine went round, Never saw I falsehood’s mask; But still honest truth I found In the bottom of each flask.

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He seems to say that people need their illusions, or at least their opiates. Possibly Don Jerome was speaking for Sheridan, since the opium of entertainment is precisely what Sheridan provided in The Duenna. The first English comic opera to use specially composed music, The Duenna was a forerunner of the operettas by W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan and the Broadway musical, which by now have institutionalized sentimental “seeing.” The School for Scandal • If The Rivals shows the fashionable world on vacation, The School for Scandal shows it back home in London, working hard to “murder characters” and “kill time.” If the duelist O’Trigger is deadly, he is nothing to this school of piranhas, which renders “a character dead at every word.” The difference between vacation and work is precisely the difference in tone, theme, and achievement between The Rivals and The School for Scandal. No seams or weaknesses obtrude in The School for Scandal, the title of which sums up the play’s prevailing imagery and unity. The play begins with a marvelous expository device: The “scandalous college” is in session, headed by its “president,” Lady Sneerwell. As the pupils gather—Snake, Joseph Surface, Mrs. Candour, Crabtree, Sir Benjamin Backbite—the audience hears juicy bits of scandal about the president and each pupil. The key information is that Sir Peter Teazle has a pack of trouble. The Surface brothers, to whom Sir Peter is “a kind of guardian,” are competing for Maria, Sir Peter’s rich ward. Joseph, the older brother, is a scheming knave who, with “the assistance of his sentiment and hypocrisy,” passes for a paragon of virtue, while Charles is “the most dissipated and extravagant young fellow in the kingdom.” Joseph enjoys the favor of Sir Peter, and Charles, that of Maria. During a recess, Sir Peter is also shown having fits with his young wife. Country-bred Lady Teazle has blossomed into a London woman of fashion, even joining Lady Sneerwell’s group and carrying on a flirtation with Joseph. The scandalmongers, however, have linked her to Charles. The Surfaces are unmasked when Sir Oliver Surface, a rich uncle, returns from many years in the East Indies and puts the brothers to the test. Posing as a moneylender, Sir Oliver observes Charles’s dissipation, even purchases the family portraits from him—but forgives the young man when Charles will not part with the portrait of dear Uncle Oliver. Charles also sends some of the money to old Stanley, a poor relation in distress, but when Sir Oliver, posing as Stanley, applies to Joseph, he is given the brush-off. In a famous scene, Joseph is also discovered hiding Lady Teazle behind a screen and Sir Peter Teazle in a closet, where each has heard an earful. The screen symbolizes Joseph’s character and the nature of the society in which he flourishes, and the closet suggests where Sir Peter has been hiding. The truth comes out, however—confirmed by the confessions of Snake—and the people have to live with it. Now the centerpiece of a raging scandal, stodgy Sir Peter mellows; Lady Teazle and Charles will reform; Joseph’s punishment is being “known to the world”; and Snake hopes his good deeds will not spoil his professional reputation. Meanwhile, the audience, schooled by a master, has been treated to a delightful exposition of illusion and reality in society. Sheridan exposes a shallow society in which appearances rule: It is not what you are but what you appear to be that counts; reputation is all. The main proponent of this philosophy—still not entirely discredited even in modern society—is the well-spoken Joseph Surface, whose hypocrisy illustrates another danger inherent in sentimentalism. Actually, the talented Joseph represents both types prominent in his society: the hypocrite, who manipulates appearances to enhance his own reputation, and the scan-

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dalmonger, who manipulates appearances to tear down the reputations of others (as Joseph shows, the two callings go together). Behind facades of gentility, both types feel free to indulge their basest instincts. For example, the motives acknowledged by scandalmongers include bitterness over being slandered oneself, personal spite, impersonal malice, fun, and following the fashion, though the dullness of their lives is also a factor. They have nothing better to do than sit around and gossip about other people’s lives, with perhaps a touch of envy. As Lady Teazle makes clear, these “are all people of rank and fortune.” They represent a society rotten at the core. Luckily, this decadent society includes a saving remnant that is not fooled by appearances. There is the faithful old servant Rowley, who believes in the goodness of a reprobate’s heart. There is crusty Sir Oliver, who is sickened by scraps of morality and who believes that a man is not sincere if he has not made any enemies. There is Lady Teazle, whose personal development through the play marks the course of the plot. At first she is drawn to the world of appearances, of high fashion and rich furnishings, of the circle of scandalmongers and Joseph. Her turning point comes when Joseph suggests that she go to bed with him, literally and figuratively. She returns to her country wisdom and rejects him. When the screen is pulled down and she is caught in Joseph’s quarters, she refuses to second his story and dubs him “Good Mr. Hypocrite.” Thereafter, she withdraws from the “scandalous college” and turns over a new leaf. Finally, there is Charles, the reprobate himself. His regeneration is harder to believe than Lady Teazle’s, but Sheridan shrewdly keeps him offstage until halfway through the play, by which time he contrasts favorably with Joseph and the scandalmongers. Although dissolute and bankrupt, Charles has two important qualities that Joseph lacks: benevolence and honesty. Unlike the hypocritical Joseph Surface, Charles Surface is exactly what he appears to be. His loss of reputation has, in fact, freed him to be himself, and his experience has prepared him to see himself and others clearly. He is given the two main symbolic gestures in the play: pulling down the screen and selling off the family portraits. Symbolically, he attacks both the pretensions of his society and their hereditary basis. Charles’s auction of the family portraits now seems merely funny, but the mockery involved in “knocking down” one’s ancestors “with their own pedigree” was probably a shock to the eighteenth century system, even though Sheridan softened the revolutionary gesture by keeping it in the family. The Critic • In the tradition of The Rehearsal (pr. 1671) by George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, and Henry Fielding’s Tom Thumb: A Tragedy (pr. 1730), Sheridan’s The Critic is a burlesque, a type of comedy especially popular in eighteenth century England. The Critic provides an engaging and informative survey of the theatrical world in Sheridan’s time. Despite its many topical references, the play also has potential for revival in the contemporary age of self-conscious art, in which burlesque is a staple of television comedy. The topical references, in fact, would reverberate with a certain irony, since it appears from The Critic that things have not changed all that much in the theater. Act 1 opens on a breakfast scene, where the critic Mr. Dangle holds court, entertaining all sorts of solicitations. This day there appear Mr. Sneer, another critic; Sir Fretful Plagiary, a vain playwright (based on Richard Cumberland); Mr. Puff, an advertising writer who has authored a play; and Signor Pasticcio Ritornello and a chorus of Italian girls come for audition (the scene probably gives some insight into the Sheridan house-

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hold). Repartee, malice, and dissimulation fly around the table, in the manner of theatrical shoptalk, with Mrs. Dangle occasionally clearing the air in straightforward language. In the other two acts, Dangle and Sneer attend a rehearsal of Puff’s play, a wretched tragedy entitled The Spanish Armada. Again there is much opportunity for satire. Puff has given the actors permission “to cut out or omit whatever they found heavy or unnecessary to the plot”; thus, the play is very brief. Brief as it is, it is a smashing parody of the kind of tragedy written in Sheridan’s time, full of clumsy exposition, bombastic verse, stilted characters, and improbable, sensational events, ending with a triumphant sea battle and a procession of all the English rivers accompanied by George Frederick Handel’s water music and a chorus. The faked feelings of the actors in the play-within-the-play are reminders that theater is the essence of illusion, and the framing action of The Critic is a reminder of how theater people are often caught up in the illusion. To Mr. Dangle, the theater is more important than the real world: When he reads “the news,” it is the theatrical news rather than the news of the impending French invasion. He is such a stargazer because he considers himself a moving force in the theatrical world, as he tells Mrs. Dangle: “You will not easily persuade me that there is no credit or importance in being at the head of a band of critics, who take on them to decide for the whole town, whose opinion and patronage all writers solicit, and whose recommendation no manager dares refuse!” Representing a commonsense point of view, Mrs. Dangle is a counterweight to the vanity that is such an occupational hazard for theatrical (and literary) people. At regular intervals, she tells Mr. Dangle that he is ridiculous: “Why should you affect the character of a critic?” and “Both managers and authors of the least merit laugh at your pretensions. The Public is their Critic.” The real critic in the play is the play itself, as the double meaning in the title indicates. Taking a hard look at the eighteenth century theater, The Critic first notes the ideal: “the stage is ‘the mirror of Nature.’” The statement is a reminder of how theatrical illusion, and art in general, can paradoxically arrive at the truth. The theater (and art), however, can also go astray, as it did in Sheridan’s time. First there is comedy, which strayed into two sorts: “sentimental” comedy, which contains “nothing ridiculous in it from the beginning to the end,” and “moral” comedy, which treats “the greater vices and blacker crimes of humanity.” To her discredit, Mrs. Dangle prefers the former sort, and Mr. Sneer defends the latter: “The theatre, in proper hands, might certainly be made the school of morality; but now, I am sorry to say it, people seem to go there principally for their entertainment.” As for what was happening to tragedy, Mr. Puff’s The Spanish Armada is sufficient example. Choosing Mr. Puff to be the featured author was an inspired symbolic stroke: as a master of “puffing” (advertising) who commands the language of “panegyrical superlatives,” the ability to exaggerate or even invent reality (“to insinuate obsequious rivulets into visionary groves”), he truly represents the spirit of the age in the theater. Sheridan’s remaining plays little enhance his literary reputation, but they do reveal a great deal about his political and social attitudes. The plays are St. Patrick’s Day, a two-act comedy; A Trip to Scarborough, an adaptation of Sir John Vanbrugh’s comedy The Relapse (pr., pb. 1696); and Pizarro, an adaptation of August von Kotzebue’s tragedy Die Spanier in Peru (1794). Pizarro • Pizarro is an embarrassing reminder of the kind of tragedy which Sheridan parodied in The Critic. Treating the depredations of European invaders against the no-

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ble Incas, the play gives evidence of Sheridan’s antipathy to colonial oppression (it echoes his speeches in Parliament against British rule in India) and his ability to satisfy the growing popular taste for romantic melodrama. In its day, Pizarro was a tremendous box-office success. St. Patrick’s Day • Like Pizarro, St. Patrick’s Day was probably a vehicle for specific actors. The short farce also satisfied the requirements of an afterpiece, a slighter work presented after the main play. Full of scheming and disguising, it dramatizes Lieutenant O’Connor’s winning of Miss Lauretta Credulous over the opposition of her father, Justice Credulous, who hates Irishmen and soldiers. Aside from its lighthearted action, St. Patrick’s Day is notable for its Irish sentiments and its sympathy for the lot of poor soldiers (in Sheridan’s time, often Irishmen). A Trip to Scarborough • A Trip to Scarborough, a much more substantial work, was adapted from The Relapse, a favorite Restoration comedy. In his adaptation, Sheridan trimmed the plot and cleaned up the sexual innuendo of the original. The adaptation has many features similar to those of Sheridan’s other comedies of manners—in particular, an intrigue centering on assumed identity and rivalry between two brothers for a rich heiress. In the course of the intrigue, the penniless Tom Fashion triumphs over his older brother, Lord Foppington, “an ungrateful narrow-minded coxcomb.” Furthermore, Lord Foppington is roughly handled by the father-in-law, Sir Tunbelly Clumsy, a jovial Yorkshireman whose personality and household (Muddymoat Hall) are in a tradition stretching to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839). The humbling of a lord in A Trip to Scarborough is another example of the antiestablishment Sheridan, a side that the official pronouncements have preferred not to mention. Yet it is as much a part of Sheridan as his inspired ability to write entertaining comedy. A subversive element in eighteenth century Britain, Sheridan was constantly chipping away at the illusions and pretensions of the old order and interjecting stirrings of the egalitarianism that was sweeping away the old order elsewhere. His attack on primogeniture, at the heart of the old system, is typical: Lord Foppington: . . . Nature has made some difference ‘twixt me and you. Tom Fashion: Yes—she made you older. Something of a transitional figure in British drama, Sheridan looked back to Restoration comedy for his inspiration, but his social attitudes looked forward to George Bernard Shaw. During the long barren stretch of two hundred years between Restoration comedy and Shaw, Sheridan preserved the comic spirit in British drama largely through the force of his talent. Other major works poetry: “Clio’s Protest,” 1771; “The Ridotto of Bath,” 1771; A Familiar Epistle to the Author of the Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers, 1774; “Epilogue to The Rivals,” 1775; “Epilogue to Semiramis,” 1776; “Verses to the Memory of Garrick, Spoken as a Monody,” 1779; “Epilogue to The Fatal Falsehood,” 1779; “Prologue to Pizarro,” 1799; “Lines by a Lady of Fashion,” 1825. nonfiction: Speeches of the Late Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Several Corrected by Himself), 1816 (5 volumes); The Letters of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 1966 (3 volumes; C. J. L. Price, editor).

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miscellaneous: The Plays and Poems of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 1928, 1962 (3 volumes; R. Compton Rhodes, editor). Bibliography Ayling, Stanley. A Portrait of Sheridan. London: Constable, 1985. More than two hundred pages on Sheridan’s life and work. Ayling offers glimpses of Sheridan’s true nature, including the unflattering views on the theater expressed in his letters. The treatment of the early plays is rather brief. Includes some comments on the management of the Drury Lane in later chapters. Davision, Peter, ed. Sheridan: Comedies. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1986. A casebook for the two best-known plays, plus discussions of The Critic and A Trip to Scarborough. Contains an introductory section on Sheridan’s family, his orations, his life and letters; general commentary on Restoration comedy and Sheridan’s plays; and final sections on each of the four plays with commentaries by William Hazlitt, Max Beerbohm, George Bernard Shaw, Sir Laurence Olivier, and numerous others. Bibliography and index. Hare, Arnold. Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Windsor, England: Profile Books, 1981. Sketches the major details about Sheridan’s life and family. Pays brief attention to the theatrical milieu but analyzes the plays, including some relatively minor ones. Complemented by a select bibliography and a portrait from a pastel by John Russell. Kelly, Linda. Richard Brinsley Sheridan: A Life. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1997. The biography looks at Sheridan as both dramatist and legislator. Bibliography and index. Morwood, James. The Life and Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985. Morwood believes that Sheridan’s career as a writer and theatrical manager is inseparable from his private and political life. Makes a fresh effort to evaluate Sheridan’s political career and to create a balanced assessment of his thirty-two years as manager of the Drury Lane. Several illustrations, bibliography, index. Morwood, James, and David Crane, eds. Sheridan Studies. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. A collection of essays on Sheridan as a dramatist and member of Parliament. Includes a bibliography and index. O’Toole, Fintan. A Traitor’s Kiss: The Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 1751-1816. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. This biography covers Sheridan’s earlier years and his plays as well as his later life in Parliament. Also describes his romantic life. Bibliography and index. Worth, Katharine. Sheridan and Goldsmith. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Worth compares and contrasts the writings of Oliver Goldsmith and Sheridan. Bibliography and index. Harold Branam, updated by Howard L. Ford

Neil Simon Neil Simon

Born: Bronx, New York; July 4, 1927 Principal drama • Come Blow Your Horn, pr. 1960, pb. 1961; Little Me, pr. 1962, revised pr. 1982 (music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Carol Leigh; adaptation of Patrick Dennis’s novel); Barefoot in the Park, pr. 1963, pb. 1964; The Odd Couple, pr. 1965, pb. 1966; Sweet Charity, pr., pb. 1966 (music and lyrics by Coleman and Dorothy Fields; adaptation of Federico Fellini’s film Nights of Cabiria); The Star-Spangled Girl, pr. 1966, pb. 1967; Plaza Suite, pr. 1968, pb. 1969; Promises, Promises, pr. 1968, pb. 1969 (music and lyrics by Hal David and Burt Bacharach; adaptation of Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond’s film The Apartment); Last of the Red Hot Lovers, pr. 1969, pb. 1970; The Gingerbread Lady, pr. 1970, pb. 1971; The Comedy of Neil Simon, pb. 1971 (volume 1 in The Collected Plays of Neil Simon); The Prisoner of Second Avenue, pr., pb. 1971; The Sunshine Boys, pr. 1972, pb. 1973; The Good Doctor, pr. 1973, pb. 1974 (adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s short stories); God’s Favorite, pr. 1974, pb. 1975 (adaptation of the biblical story of Job); California Suite, pr. 1976, pb. 1977; Chapter Two, pr. 1977, pb. 1979; They’re Playing Our Song, pr. 1978, pb. 1980 (music by Marvin Hamlisch, lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager; adaptation of Patrick Dennis’s novel); The Collected Plays of Neil Simon, pb. 1979 (volume 2); I Ought to Be in Pictures, pr. 1980, pb. 1981; Fools, pr., pb. 1981; Brighton Beach Memoirs, pr. 1982, pb. 1984; Biloxi Blues, pr. 1984, pb. 1986; Broadway Bound, pr. 1986, pb. 1987; The Odd Couple, pr. 1985, pb. 1986 (female version); Rumors, pr. 1988, pb. 1990; Jake’s Women, pr. 1990, pb. 1991; Lost in Yonkers, pr., pb. 1991; The Collected Plays of Neil Simon, pb. 1991 (volume 3); Laughter on the 23rd Floor, pr. 1993, pb. 1995; London Suite, pr. 1994, pb. 1996; Three from the Stage, pb. 1995; Proposals, pr. 1997, pb. 1998; The Dinner Party, pr. 2000; 45 Seconds from Broadway, pr. 2001 Other literary forms • In addition to his plays, Neil Simon has written numerous scripts for motion pictures. Among these are After the Fox (1966, with Cesare Zavattini), The Out-of-Towners (1970), The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Murder by Death (1976), The Goodbye Girl (1977), The Cheap Detective (1978), Seems Like Old Times (1980), Max Dugan Returns (1983), The Lonely Guy (1984), and The Slugger’s Wife (1985). He has also adapted dozens of his plays to the screen, from Barefoot in the Park (1967) to I Ought to Be in Pictures (1982) and Biloxi Blues (1988). Along with his brother, Simon wrote during the 1940’s and 1950’s for a variety of television shows, including The Phil Silvers Show (1948), The Tallulah Bankhead Show (1951), The Sid Caesar Show (1956-1957), and The Garry Moore Show (1959-1960). His teleplays include Broadway Bound (1992), Jake’s Women (1996), and The Sunshine Boys (1997). Simon published Rewrites: A Memoir in 1996, adding a second autobiographical volume, The Play Goes On: A Memoir, in 1999. Achievements • Neil Simon has established himself as a leading American playwright of the late twentieth century. As a master of domestic comedy and one-line humor, his popular appeal was established early in his career. Though considered 873

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by some to be lighter or less serious because of his comedic talents, as his career progressed, Simon infused his comedy with greater amounts of social relevance, autobiographical inspiration, and dramatic depth. Many of his plays explore the thin line that separates comedy from pathos, provoking audiences to laugh through their tears. His plays focus on character and personal relationships in primarily middle-class, urban settings in the United States. Nevertheless, the stories he dramatizes are about basic human problems and aspirations, and his plays have proven to have universal appeal. Simon has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors. They include two Emmy Awards for his work in television in 1957 and 1959; a Tony Award for Best Author for The Odd Couple in 1965, and another for Biloxi Blues in 1985; a New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1983 for Brighton Beach Memoirs; a New York State Governor’s Award in 1986; and a Pulitzer Prize in Drama and a Tony Award for Best Play for Lost in Yonkers, both in 1991. In 1993 President Bill Clinton hosted Simon at the White House when Simon received Kennedy Center Honors. Biography • Marvin Neil Simon was born in the Bronx, New York, on July 4, 1927. His father, Irving, was a salesman in Manhattan’s garment district; his mother, Mamie, worked at Gimbel’s department store. The family moved to Washington Heights in northern Manhattan when Simon was young. The family’s life was not always tranquil. Irving was an errant husband who occasionally abandoned the family altogether, leaving Mamie, a frustrated and bitter woman, alone to deal with Neil and his older brother, Danny. Eventually, the parents were divorced, and Neil went to live with relatives in Queens. From an early age, he exhibited a quick wit and an active imagination. He earned the nickname “Doc”—which stayed with him into adult life—because of his penchant for imitating the family doctor. He loved films and sometimes was asked to leave the theater for laughing too loud. In high school, Simon was sometimes ostracized as a Jew, an experience that would later inform his work. That changed, however, when he joined the baseball team and became a star center fielder. Meanwhile, he and his brother began collaborating on comedy material that they sold to stand-up comics and radio announcers. Simon was graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in 1944 at the age of sixteen. He entered New York University under the U.S. Army Air Force Reserve program and was sent to basic training in Biloxi, Mississippi, and then to Lowry Field, Colorado. Throughout his military career, he continued to hone his writing skills, reading favorite authors such as Mark Twain and Robert Benchley and writing for military newspapers. Discharged in 1946, Simon took a job in the mail room at Warner Bros. in New York, where Danny worked in the publicity department. The brothers were soon hired to write for Goodman Ace of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), and over the next decade they provided material for such television comedians as Tallulah Bankhead, Jackie Gleason, Carl Reiner, and Red Skelton. During the summers of 1952 and 1953, they wrote sketches for the professional acting company at Camp Tamiment in Pennsylvania, some of which were featured on Broadway several years later. At Camp Tamiment, Simon fell in love with a young actress named Joan Baim, and the couple was married on September 30, 1953. Five years later, Joan gave birth to a daughter, Ellen; a second daughter, Nancy, was born in 1963. In 1956, Danny Simon moved to California to be a television director. Neil stayed in New York and wrote for Phil Silvers’s Sergeant Bilko, Sid Caesar’s Your Show of

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Shows, and The Garry Moore Show. He also adapted Broadway plays for television, including Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers’s musical Dearest Enemy (pr. 1925). By the later 1950’s, however, he wanted more independence than television writing could offer. He began writing a play of his own. For three years, he wrote and revised, as many as fifty times, his first full play. Come Blow Your Horn was optioned by twentyfive producers before it was finally staged in 1960 at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania. A greatly improved version opened on Broadway the following February. The play received positive notice, and, in 1962, Simon’s book for the musical Little Me reinforced his growing reputation. It was his third full script, however, Barefoot in the Park, that firmly established him on the American stage. It ran for four years, with a total of 1,532 performances. In 1965, Simon had a second smash hit with The Odd Couple, which ran for two years and earned for him his first Tony Award. Over the next decade, Simon’s work was characteristically prodigious, with a new play appearing every year or two. While the plays were not all unqualified successes, Simon’s popularity continued to rise. At the same time, he accrued a list of screenplay credits. Many were adaptations of his own plays; others were original screenplays or adaptations of other people’s works. These films helped spread his notoriety beyond primarily urban, middle-class theater audiences to a wider range of viewers. Despite his popular success, however, Simon was still regarded by serious critics as a lightweight scenarist writing for laughs. In 1972, Simon faced a harrowing personal tragedy. His wife, Joan, was diagnosed with cancer. Simon nursed her through fifteen agonizing months until she succumbed

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to the disease in 1973. After twenty years of happy marriage, the loss affected him deeply. Later that year, Simon met an actress named Marsha Mason. The two had a whirlwind romance and within weeks were husband and wife. While never rediscovering the deep passion he had known with Joan, Simon enjoyed a good marriage with Mason that lasted nine years. In 1974, Simon received a special Tony Award for his contributions to the American theater. His plays continued to appear regularly, and on the screen he scored with such films as The Goodbye Girl and The Cheap Detective. In 1983, he received a singular honor: The Nederlander Organization renamed a Broadway theater after him. In the mid-1980’s, the trilogy composed of Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and Broadway Bound showed a more serious, mature, and openly autobiographical Simon. The three plays garnered many awards, including a Tony Award for Biloxi Blues as best play of 1985. Lost in Yonkers received even more praise, winning the 1991 Pulitzer Prize in Drama and the Tony Award for best play. Most important, critics began to take Simon seriously as a respectable dramatist. His third marriage came in 1987, to Diane Lander, a former actress and model. Though divorced in 1988, the couple remarried in 1990, and Simon adopted Lander’s daughter Bryn. In 1998 Simon divorced Lander a second time. Marrying for a fifth time, he wedded actress Elaine Joyce shortly after divorcing Lander. By the 1990’s, through four decades of diligent writing, Simon had developed great skill and technique. He divided his time between homes in Manhattan and Bel Air, California, and wrote methodically for seven hours every day. Behind each play that reached fruition, Simon had another ten beginnings that had been put aside, and many more ideas not yet even committed to paper. Nevertheless, with the prodigious output already behind him, he has claimed his position in the history of American theater. Analysis • Neil Simon’s plays have so set the standard for American domestic comedy that they almost form a subgenre in themselves. His work is certainly marked by a distinct style and mastery of certain principles of comic writing. Though the mood, subject matter, and focus of his writing have developed over the years, the Neil Simon signature can still be read throughout. His plays tend to be domestic comedies focusing on family life and relationships. Almost all are set in New York City and, explicitly or not, depict the concerns and values of middle-class, Jewish family life, writers and show business people, and Americans in touch with the liberal movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s. As a keen observer of contemporary life, Simon fills his plays with recognizable topical references and details. Dealing with such themes as marriage, divorce, sexual liberation, and intergenerational conflict, his work effectively chronicles late twentieth century American lifestyles and values. Coming as Simon did from a training ground in stand-up comedy and television writing, he is technically expert at coining and structuring one-line jokes. One-liners are not restricted to token “comic” characters; rather, they are distributed among all the characters in his plays. Furthermore, Simon is skilled at connecting the jokes and embedding them in the texture of the conflict in a way that reinforces the integrity of a scene. The jokes serve rather than divert the flow of action; they inform characterization rather than reduce characters to mere mouthpieces for the author’s wit. Simon supports his quick humor with characters who are clearly delineated, defined not only by their backgrounds, tastes, idiosyncrasies, and language but also by their larger ob-

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jectives and outlooks on life. They are drawn with eccentricity and excess, but with sympathy and warmth as well. The tendency toward stereotypes and caricatures that Simon sometimes indulged early in his career gradually disappeared as he honed his craft. Creating rich characters, Simon serves them well by carefully structuring his plays to maximize the potential for both conflict and humor. Knowing that the line between tragedy and comedy is a thin one, he heightens the stakes of his characters’ desires. Indeed, many a Simon play, drained of its wit, could easily be transformed into serious high drama, with situations worthy of Henrik Ibsen or August Strindberg. The people of Simon’s plays are frustrated, sometimes nearly neurotic; they take their problems head-on and search earnestly for solutions. Like William Shakespeare, Simon lets the meaning of his plays inhabit the surface, so there is rarely a deep subtext to unearth. As his characters are generally intelligent and perceptive, they police one another against emotional subterfuge. Unlike Shakespeare, however, Simon does not utilize subplots but rather provides a single, clear conflict to propel the action. Through more than two dozen plays and nearly as many film scripts, Simon became the wealthiest dramatist in history and the most-produced playwright on the contemporary American stage behind Shakespeare. More important, in addition to his supremacy over the popular American theater, his devotion to craft, hard work, simplicity, honesty, and diligence as a playwright have secured him a primary position in its literary annals. Simon’s techniques are clearly evident in his first two major successes, Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple. Both plays are simply constructed, consisting of four scenes in three acts, taking place in a single locale within a span of several weeks, and built on the conflict between two distinctly defined characters. Barefoot in the Park • Barefoot in the Park is about newlyweds Paul and Corie Bratter. The young lawyer and his wife are moving into their first New York apartment, a living space too small, cold, dilapidated, expensive, and high up to induce peaceful living. In the first scene, they take inventory of their new home, amid visits from Corie’s well-intentioned mother from New Jersey and a flamboyant older gentleman from the upstairs apartment. Corie hatches a plan to make a match between Mother and the exotic Mr. Velasco. The second scene is the dinner gathering, pitting Mother’s tender stomach against Velasco’s gourmet hors d’oeuvres, Corie’s enthusiasm against Paul’s reluctance, and the foursome against a cold apartment and a catastrophic kitchen. In the third scene, the group returns from a dinner out, Mother leaves with Velasco, and Corie and Paul become embroiled in a fight that ends in a decision to divorce. In facing the challenges of the apartment and the evening, the newlyweds have come to believe that they have nothing in common. Paul considers his wife irrational and irresponsible; she thinks that he is a stuffed shirt incapable of enjoying life. In the final scene, Mother is unaccounted for, divorce plans proceed apace, and Corie and Paul are miserable. Ultimately, Mother appears, no worse for wear from a night at Velasco’s, and Paul and Corie discover the importance of surrender and compromise. She recognizes her need for order, he relaxes enough to take a walk “barefoot in the park,” and they both realize the depth of their love. From the start, Simon creates a situation rife with possibilities. The setting offers opportunities for visual jokes and offstage action: For example, there are ongoing references to the six-flight ascent to the apartment. As newlyweds adapting to a new home,

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job, and lifestyle, Corie and Paul are portrayed in the midst of major upheaval. The stolid Mother and the splendiferous Velasco are great foils for each other and for the younger couple as well. Furthermore, in Corie and Paul, Simon creates protagonists whose personalities, often in harmony, easily become diametrically opposed through their responses to difficult circumstances. The Odd Couple • Even more than in Barefoot in the Park, the conflict in Simon’s next play, The Odd Couple, is built squarely on the collision of opposites. Oscar Madison is a divorced sportswriter living alone, who hosts five friends for a weekly poker game, including his good friend Felix Ungar. (During his childhood, Simon’s mother used to run poker games in the family home for extra income.) In the first scene, Felix, usually quite punctual, arrives hours late in emotional distress, with the horrific news that his wife kicked him out. Oscar invites Felix to become his roommate, and the “odd couple” is formed. Simon established Felix’s sensitive and fastidious nature in the opening scene, so it is no surprise when, in the second scene, two weeks later, Felix is driving the slovenly Oscar crazy with his devotion to detail and cleanliness. Their relationship is implicitly a send-up of marriage in an age of rising divorce rates and precarious gender roles. The bachelor life is clearly threatened by Felix’s uxoriousness. To break the tension and salve their solitude, Oscar suggests a double date with their upstairs neighbors, the Pigeon sisters. Felix reluctantly agrees. In the third scene, Cecily and Gwendolyn Pigeon come downstairs for dinner, straight out of an Oscar Wilde drawing room. As in Barefoot in the Park, however, the menu is sabotaged by circumstance, and, instead of succumbing to the double seduction that Oscar envisions, the Pigeons both take sisterly pity on the heartbroken Felix. The failed date precipitates a climactic conflagration between the two men, and, as in Barefoot in the Park, the only solution seems to be separation. In the final scene, amid a cold war of silence and anger, Oscar and Felix vent their rage and passion, coming to understand that their conflict reflects an unhappy combination of personality types and the larger tragedies of failed marriages and solitary middle age. These themes reappear time and again in Simon’s work—the distance between people, the effects of time on relationships, and the different ways that men and women deal with emotion. In the end, Oscar and Felix reach a mutually respectful peace, forged of patience, humility, and a willingness to laugh. Other early plays • The formula established by these early comedies provides the basis for many of the plays that followed. In 1966, Simon wrote the book for Sweet Charity, a Bob Fosse musical based on the Federico Fellini film Nights of Cabiria (1957). In The Star-Spangled Girl, he pitted liberal journalists against an old-fashioned southern belle. Both of these pieces met mixed response. Years later, Simon called The StarSpangled Girl “simply a failure,” a play “where I did not have a clear visual image of the characters in my mind as I sat down at the typewriter.” Nevertheless, with the opening of The Star-Spangled Girl, Simon could claim the singular distinction of having four plays running simultaneously on Broadway. In 1968, Simon tried something new: a series of three one-act plays set in the same hotel room. The result, Plaza Suite, is vintage Simon with an added bittersweetness. The first piece focuses on a stale marriage and a revelation of infidelity; the second, on high school flames reuniting in midlife; and the third, on a bride’s wedding day jitters and what they bring out in her parents’ marriage. That same year, Simon wrote the

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book for Promises, Promises, a Burt Bacharach-Hal David musical version of the 1960 film The Apartment. Mid-career plays • A mid-career Simon focused on the romantic woes of a middleaged man in his next play, Last of the Red Hot Lovers. Then came The Gingerbread Lady, dealing with the subject of alcoholism; The Prisoner of Second Avenue, about the nervous breakdown of a man caught in the vertigo of urban life; and The Sunshine Boys, depicting the deteriorating relationship of a pair of old comedians. These plays signaled an attempt by Simon to move into issue-oriented material with a more serious tone. While still striking with characteristic wit and receiving popular acclaim, he sometimes overindulged in sentiment and high seriousness. Some critics lambasted the attempt and urged him to stay on familiar, lighter terrain. In 1972 and 1973, during the period of his wife’s illness and death, Simon’s writing reflected his personal tragedy. The Good Doctor was his adaptation of the tragicomic stories of Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov. More penetrating was God’s Favorite, a modern reworking of the biblical story of Job, in which a man challenges God and the universe to help him understand the extremity of his sufferings. It was Simon’s attempt to find solace and peace through his writing. California Suite • California Suite, a Pacific Coast retake of the Plaza Suite concept, appeared in 1976. Like its predecessor, and much of the intervening work, it takes a more sophisticated approach to relationships and social situations. It consists of four short plays set in a two-room suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The first and third have definite pathos beneath their comic gloss; the second and fourth are lighter and broader. The second of the four pieces is about Marvin and Millie, a husband and wife from Philadelphia who have come to Los Angeles for a nephew’s Bar Mitzvah. Marvin arrived a night early and returned to the suite to find a gift from his brother waiting for him: a prostitute. It is the next morning, and Millie arrives; the other woman, however, is still drunk and asleep in the bed, and for most of the play, Marvin scrambles to conceal her inert form. Eventually, he confesses his sin to Millie, and they face the crisis with equal guilt and stoicism. The play runs on frantic energy, physical comedy, and the audience’s discrepant awareness of the other woman’s presence. The fourth play is also built on physical comedy emerging from a situation that is out of control. Mort and Beth and Stu and Gert are two couples from Chicago who have taken a three-week vacation together. Best friends at the start, their rapport has steadily eroded. At last, an accidental injury on the tennis court unleashes torrents of accumulated hostility; the feuding then triggers a series of freak accidents, a veritable comedy of mishaps. The barroom brawl-like mayhem ends in unresolved pandemonium. Simon here displays his ability to bring together one-liners, character conflict, and physical comedy into an orchestrated whole. Set against these two lighter plays are the first and third pieces. In the first, a divorced couple negotiate where their daughter will live for her last year of high school. Billy and Hannah are both brashly intelligent and piercingly sarcastic. What begins as a brittle, venomous battle of words and wits subtly evolves into a deep struggle for pride and control. Knowing each other all too well, they ultimately bring their hopes, fears, and even some of their long-abandoned love into the open. While the characters use humor as a weapon throughout, their true feelings are always evident, and Simon allows and validates their enduring anger. Ultimately, a

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deal is struck, but the tone and outcome make it clear that there are no winners in this struggle. The same is true of the third piece, in which a British actress and her husband have come to Hollywood for the Academy Awards. Dividing the action into two scenes, Simon contrasts their hopeful harmony before the ceremony with their bitter and drunken divisiveness after it. Diana has not won the coveted Oscar but instead has made a fool of herself at the ensuing parties. At the heart of her recklessness is a deep dissatisfaction with her marriage. Her husband, Sidney, an unassuming antiques dealer, is a “bisexual homosexual,” and his flirtation with a young actor over dinner has brought dangerous issues to the surface. In the end, Sidney will hold, soothe, and probably make love to Diana, but it is evident that the connection is only temporary. That they can come together at all is a sign of hope, but Simon allows no illusions about the sacrifices they are making and the evanescence of their union. This mix of pieces and tones, all still focused on relationships, marriages, sex, and love, bespeaks an unapologetic honesty that cannot be found in Simon’s earlier work. Indeed, in 1979, Simon said that he believed the third play of California Suite was his best and most honest writing. Autobiographical works • While parts of his earlier plays are drawn loosely from personal experience, by the late 1970’s Simon was ready to take on autobiographical material more directly. Chapter Two was the first play in this direction. It tells the story of a recently widowed man who meets and falls in love with a woman, a story the playwright had known firsthand several years before. During this period, he also wrote a second version of The Odd Couple, this time with two women in the leading roles (produced and published a decade later); the book for a Marvin Hamlisch-Carole Bayer Sager musical called They’re Playing Our Song; a play called I Ought to Be in Pictures, about a screenwriter and his daughter; and Fools, a comic fable based on a Ukrainian folktale. This last was Simon’s only unequivocal flop. Brighton Beach Memoirs • The real breakthrough came with Brighton Beach Memoirs, which, with Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound, forms Simon’s acclaimed autobiographical trilogy. In these plays, the playwright’s own past is clear and unmistakable. The plays center on Eugene Morris Jerome, a teenage writer and baseball enthusiast growing up in Brighton Beach, New York, in the 1940’s. Eugene has an older brother, unhappily married parents, and great aspirations. These aspirations lead him to chronicle his family’s trials and tribulations, and his writings become a vehicle for narrating and commenting on the action directly to the audience. As Eugene is representative of the young Simon, his direct address offers an intimacy between playwright and audience that Simon had never before attempted or allowed. In the trilogy, Simon also effectively explores dramatic structure. “I really made a quantum leap in Brighton Beach as a playwright,” Simon said in 1985, “because it was the first full-bodied play I had ever written, in terms of dealing with a group of people as individuals and telling all their stories.” Before, he would focus on a central character or conflict; now, though Eugene was the connecting thread, Simon was portraying a more integrated and balanced world. In Brighton Beach Memoirs, Eugene’s adolescent fascination with his cousin Nora, his aunt Blanche’s quandary over reestablishing her independence, his older brother Stanley’s moral crisis at work, Nora’s dreams of a show business career, her sister Laurie’s fragile health, and Jack and Kate Jerome’s pre-

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carious marriage and difficult economic straits are all woven together into a delicate tapestry of events and emotions. The play, suffused with characteristic wit but a deeper sense of poignancy, won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the first truly critical recognition of Simon’s work. Biloxi Blues • The New York Times critic Frank Rich wrote that he would love to see a “chapter two” to Brighton Beach Memoirs, so Simon decided to continue Eugene’s story. Biloxi Blues takes place at an army training camp in Biloxi, Mississippi, no doubt the camp that Simon had attended four decades earlier. It is one of his few plays set outside New York City and one of the few that feature a group of strangers. Like its predecessor, it balances the stories of several characters. Simon introduces Arnold Epstein, a tender Jewish youth with a will of steel; Sergeant Toomey, a career military man facing his mortality and determined to make soldiers of the last group assigned to him; Wykowski and Selridge, the company bullies; and Carney and Hennesey, who bring other colors of adolescence to the complete picture. Outside the barracks, there are Rowena, the weekend prostitute who takes Eugene’s virginity, and Daisy, the lovely schoolgirl who wins his heart. The play gains steady momentum through a variety of means: the rigors of training, the competitive banter of the barracks, the young men’s unrelenting fears and hormones, the often blatant bigotry and anti-Semitism, the lurking suspicions of homosexuality, and the implicit challenges to pride and manhood. In the climactic scene, Simon distills all the play’s themes into a tense confrontation between the old soldier Toomey and the unwilling hero Epstein, in a way that seals the play’s uncanny, but human, logic. In Biloxi Blues, Eugene again takes the audience into his confidence, sharing his process of maturing as both man and writer. The one-liners are ever-present, but the world of the play is darkened by the shadow of World War II, establishing a type of meaningful historical context that is unseen in Simon’s work before the trilogy. The fourteen scenes, spanning months and moving through a variety of settings, are also unusual for Simon. Biloxi Blues is a rite-of-passage play, and Simon treats the inherent issues—adolescence, manhood, fear, sexuality, separation—with deep warmth, sensitivity, and subtlety. Broadway Bound • Broadway Bound completed the trilogy in 1986. Eugene is back in Brighton Beach, and the tapestry interweaves his fledgling career, writing comedy with his brother Stanley, with the quickly unraveling threads of his parents’ marriage. Past and family are inescapable even as the future looks bright, and, when their homegrown skit actually comes across the radio waves, Eugene and Stanley learn an important lesson about the dangers of mixing humor and autobiography. It is no doubt an issue that had crossed the playwright’s mind as well. In Broadway Bound, Eugene still narrates and comments, and audiences who followed him through the first two plays can appreciate his ripening maturity. The most powerful scene of the play is remarkably simple: Eugene dances with his mother, Kate, amid the disarray of the kitchen and her crumbling marriage, to her lyrical reminiscences of a girlhood infatuation with a dashing celebrity and a magical night when she danced with him. The intimacy of the story embarrasses even Eugene, a fact that he candidly confesses to the audience. The Oedipal implications of the scene magnify both the young man’s coming-of-age and his mother’s life of pain and frustration. By using details taken directly from his own youth, Simon frankly investigates his filial

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memories and feelings, and the result is powerful. The writing shows a level of dramatic achievement of which the author of Come Blow Your Horn could only have dreamed. The trilogy was followed by Rumors, Simon’s first attempt at all-out farce, and Jake’s Women, a whimsical play about a writer and the women who populate his mind. Jake’s Women endured many rewrites and an aborted out-of-town trial before finally coming to Broadway, a process that testified to Simon’s power and diligence as a playwright. Lost in Yonkers • In 1991, continuing in the spirit of the trilogy, Lost in Yonkers appeared on Broadway. Portraying the sojourn of two boys with their brusque grandmother and eccentric aunt and uncle, it earned Simon critical praise, his second Tony Award for best play, and a prestigious Pulitzer Prize in Drama. The play continues in the spirit of the Brighton Beach trilogy, but with less sense of nostalgia as Simon wrings comedy from the anguish of five deeply disturbed people. Critic David Richards noted that “Were it not for his [Simon’s] ready wit and appreciation of life’s incongruities, Lost in Yonkers could pass for a nightmare.” As in the trilogy, there are two young boys, clearly based on Simon and his older brother, but the other characters and the action are inventions. The place is the apartment over Kurnitz’s Kandy Store in Yonkers, where Grandma Kurnitz lives with her thirty-five-year-old, brain-damaged daughter Bella. Grandma Kurnitz’s experiences with anti-Semitism as a child in Germany convinced her that to succeed in this world you must be hard as steel. Ignoring her four surviving children’s emotional life, she rigidly disciplined them. The time is 1942, and son Eddie has come to beg his mother to take in his two boys while he travels as a salesman. Having borrowed from loan sharks to pay the medical bills of his recently deceased wife, he desperately needs to earn money. Grandma reluctantly agrees. Following his mother’s advice to be hard, a second son, Louie, became a small-time gangster and now comes home to hide from the associates he has cheated. An older daughter Gert also stops by; she suffers from a breathing problem whenever she visits her mother and cannot finish a sentence without gasping for breath. The emotional center of the play is the struggle of Bella to fashion a life of her own, against the opposition of her mother. Bella falls in love with a mentally retarded movie theater usher and is determined to marry him, despite the grim disapproval of her mother and the skepticism of her siblings, but the usher is too timid to leave the protection of his parents and the romance fails. At the play’s end Eddie returns to claim his sons, and Bella asserts herself. She tells her mother she is going to the movies with a new girlfriend who likes her. Further, the girlfriend has a brother, and Bella plans to invite them both for dinner later that week. Later plays • Simon continued to send new plays to Broadway, though none repeated the critical or monetary success of Lost in Yonkers. Laughter on the 23rd Floor, based on Simon’s years as a writer for Sid Caesar’s television shows, portrays activities in the writers’ room as eight conflicting personalities and egos struggle to put together a new comic script every week. London Suite echoes Plaza Suite and California Suite with four one-act dramas, this time taking place in an elegant London hotel. Proposals, set in the 1950’s at a summer cottage in a resort area of eastern Pennsylvania, revolves around the disagreements between a retired businessman, his former wife, his daugh-

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ter, and his daughter’s various boyfriends, one of whom is the son of a Mafia baron. The Dinner Party occurs in a private room at an expensive Parisian restaurant as six diners explore the various reasons their marriages have failed. 45 Seconds from Broadway takes its title from the time needed to walk from theaters to a coffee shop, familiarly known as the Polish Tea Room, that is a favorite hangout of theater folk. Ten actors exchange banter and good-natured insults with each other and the restaurant’s owners. Other major works screenplays: After the Fox, 1966 (with Cesare Zavattini); Barefoot in the Park, 1967; The Odd Couple, 1968; The Out-of-Towners, 1970; Plaza Suite, 1971; The Last of the Red Hot Lovers, 1972; The Heartbreak Kid, 1972; The Prisoner of Second Avenue, 1975; The Sunshine Boys, 1975; Murder by Death, 1976; The Goodbye Girl, 1977; California Suite, 1978; The Cheap Detective, 1978; Chapter Two, 1979; Seems Like Old Times, 1980; Only When I Laugh, 1981; I Ought to Be in Pictures, 1982; Max Dugan Returns, 1983; The Lonely Guy, 1984; The Slugger’s Wife, 1985; Brighton Beach Memoirs, 1987; Biloxi Blues, 1988; The Marrying Man, 1991; Lost in Yonkers, 1993; The Odd Couple II, 1998. teleplays: Broadway Bound, 1992; Jake’s Women, 1996; London Suite, 1996; The Sunshine Boys, 1997. nonfiction: Rewrites: A Memoir, 1996; The Play Goes On: A Memoir, 1999. Bibliography Henry, William A., III. “Reliving a Poignant Past.” Time, December 15, 1986, 72-78. Henry describes the success of the play Broadway Bound and its biographical sources, and includes in-depth material about Simon’s marriages, lifestyle, writing habits, and older brother Danny. Compares Simon’s life with its fictional parallels, especially in Broadway Bound. Johnson, Robert K. Neil Simon. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983. In this thoughtful and penetrating study, Johnson examines Simon’s career and output through 1982, providing thorough synopses, analysis, and criticism of both plays and screenplays. Includes a chronology, a select bibliography, notes, and an index. Konas, Gary, ed. Neil Simon: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1997. Seven scholarly articles examine the influence of Simon’s Jewish heritage and compare his work with that of other dramatists. Four essays discuss recurrent patterns in Simon’s plays. The volume closes with two Simon interviews. Koprince, Susan. Understanding Neil Simon. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. Offering a guide to Simon’s work, Koprince provides an overview of Simon’s career and an in-depth analysis of his major plays. Includes bibliography and index. McGovern, Edythe. Not-So-Simple Neil Simon: A Critical Study. Van Nuys, Calif.: Perivale Press, 1978. McGovern examines twelve of Simon’s earliest plays with an even, theoretical, scholarly tone, occasionally tending toward unqualified praise. The slim volume includes a preface by the playwright, a list of characters from the plays, twenty-two production photographs, and seven illustrations by renowned Broadway caricaturist Al Hirschfeld. Richards, David. “The Last of the Red Hot Playwrights.” Review of Lost in Yonkers, by Neil Simon. The New York Times Magazine, February 17, 1991, 30. Celebrating Simon’s success with Lost in Yonkers, this reviewer describes the play and production and profiles the playwright. The article brings together personal and professional

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material, using quotes from Simon, his family members, and actors associated with his plays. Personal and in-depth, with nine photographs. Simon, Neil. “The Art of Theater X.” Interview by James Lipton. The Paris Review 34 (Winter, 1992): 166-213. A chatty, revealing interview. The first half of the interview is largely given to discussion of how Simon became a playwright and the strong autobiographical elements in his work: “I think my greatest weakness is that I can’t write outside my own experience.” Other topics include the “almost invisible line” between comedy and tragedy and the gradually darkening vision of Simon’s plays, which he sees as a movement toward greater truthfulness. Simon’s ongoing enthusiasm for theater is clear; he concludes, “Every time I write a play it’s the beginning of a new life for me.” Barry Mann, updated by Milton Berman

Stephen Sondheim Stephen Sondheim

Born: New York, New York; March 22, 1930 Principal drama • West Side Story, pr. 1957, pb. 1958 (lyrics; music by Leonard Bernstein; book by Arthur Laurents); Gypsy, pr. 1959, pb. 1960 (lyrics; music by Jule Styne; book by Laurents); A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, pr., pb. 1962 (lyrics and music; book by Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove); Anyone Can Whistle, pr. 1964, pb. 1965 (lyrics and music; book by Laurents); Do I Hear a Waltz?, pr. 1965, pb. 1966 (lyrics; music by Richard Rodgers; book by Laurents); Candide, pr. 1974, pb. 1976 (lyrics with Richard Wilbur and John Latouche; music by Bernstein; book by Hugh Wheeler); Company, pr., pb. 1970 (lyrics and music; book by George Furth); Follies, pr., pb. 1971 (lyrics and music; book by James Goldman); The Frogs, pr. 1974, pb. 1975 (lyrics and music; book by Shevelove); A Little Night Music, pr., pb. 1973 (lyrics and music; book by Wheeler); Pacific Overtures, pr. 1976, pb. 1977 (lyrics and music; book by John Weidman); Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, pr., pb. 1979 (lyrics and music; book by Wheeler); Marry Me a Little, pr. 1980 (lyrics and music; book by Craig Lucas and Norman René); Merrily We Roll Along, pr. 1981, pb. 1982 (lyrics and music; book by Furth); Sunday in the Park with George, pr. 1983, pb. 1986 (lyrics and music; book by James Lapine); Into the Woods, pr. 1987, pb. 1988 (lyrics and music; book by Lapine); Assassins, pr. 1990, pb. 1991 (lyrics and music; book by Weidman); Passion, pr., pb. 1994 (lyrics and music; book by Lapine); Getting Away with Murder, pr. 1995, pb. 1997 (with Furth); Gold!, pr. 2002 (lyrics and music; book by Weidman; originally pr. 1999 as Wise Guys) Other literary forms • Stephen Sondheim wrote a film script, The Last of Sheila (1973), with Anthony Perkins. He has composed music for films as well. He wrote the scores for Stavisky (1974) and Reds (1981) and songs for Dick Tracy (1990) and The Birdcage (1996). However, Sondheim’s reputation is based primarily on his music and lyrics for Broadway-style musicals. Achievements • Stephen Sondheim was the most critically acclaimed figure in American musical theater during the last three decades of the twentieth century. Sondheim has won the Tony Award for Best Original Score five times, more than any other individual. These awards were for Follies (1972), A Little Night Music (1973), Sweeney Todd (1979), Into the Woods (1988), and Passion (1994). In 1971 only, separate Tonys were awarded for score and lyrics, and Sondheim won both for Company. Numerous plays on which Sondheim has collaborated have won Tony Awards and New York Drama Critics Circle Awards for Best Musical; these awards were not presented specifically to Sondheim. Sunday in the Park with George won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Sondheim turned down the National Medal of Arts in 1992 in protest because the National Endowment for the Arts, the granting agency, had canceled some of its more controversial grants. He accepted that award in 1997. Biography • Stephen Joshua Sondheim was born on March 22, 1930, in New York City, the only child of Herbert and Janet Fox Sondheim. His parents owned a clothing 885

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company and were both very involved in the business. The Sondheims separated when Stephen was ten, and he attended military school for two years and then attended the George School, a prep school. He was an exceptional student who had skipped two grades and who showed an early talent for music. In the early 1940’s, Sondheim and his mother became close friends with the family of Oscar Hammerstein II, one of the leading figures in musical theater at the time. Sondheim and the Hammersteins’ son were close in age, and Sondheim even spent a summer with the family at their home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Janet Sondheim bought a house near the Hammersteins’ home where her son lived during his adolescence. Stephen Sondheim asked Hammerstein to read a musical he wrote as a teenager at the George School; Hammerstein critiqued the piece, giving Sondheim valuable training in writing for musical theater. He also hired Sondheim to work on the set of one of his plays. Sondheim attended Williams College; initially, he majored in English but changed to music. During his college years, he pursued a training program devised by Hammerstein to learn musical theater; the plan involved writing four plays. The first step was to set a play he liked to music, the second was to fix the flaws in a play and set it to music, the third was to write a musical based upon a nondramatic source, and the fourth was to write an original work. After graduation, Sondheim studied music in New York City with Milton Babbitt, an avant-garde composer. As part of his studies, he performed in-depth analyses of classical works; his seriousness about music would be apparent in the complexity of his later compositions. Sondheim’s first big break was as a lyricist for West Side Story; he followed by writing lyrics for Gypsy. He finally got to write both music and lyrics for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which opened in 1962. Sondheim’s reputation and success continued to grow such that he became a central figure in musical theater. Sondheim’s most serious romantic involvement has been with Peter Jones, with whom he exchanged wedding rings in 1994. Analysis • The most critically acclaimed writer of music and lyrics for Broadwaystyle musicals in the late twentieth century, Stephen Sondheim has advanced the sophistication of the musical form through his experimentation with content and musical style. One of American musical theater’s contributions to drama is the integration of spoken words and music within a production. The majority of Sondheim’s lyrics make sense only when sung by the character for whom they are written. Much popular American music earlier in the century came from musical theater. With the exception of “Send in the Clowns” from A Little Night Music, Sondheim’s songs have not enjoyed popularity, in large part because their meaning is so specific to the dramatic context for which they were written. The sophistication of Sondheim’s compositions has also been an important element in elevating critical assessment of the musical theater genre, which has often been dismissed as pure entertainment rather than serious drama. Sondheim’s musical influences range from classical, as seen in the Gregorian chant motif in the score of Sweeney Todd, to Asian motifs in Pacific Overtures, to contemporary popular music from musical theater and film. Sondheim’s drama, as well, is notable for the range of its sources and themes. For example, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is a farce based on the works of the Roman playwright Plautus, Pacific Overtures is styled after Japanese Kabuki theater, and Sunday in the Park with George draws on the life and work of French Impres-

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sionist painter Georges Seurat. Although collaborative work and drawing on preexisting sources for materials is within the tradition of musical theater, Sondheim’s multiple references are also consistent with the practice of postmodernist writers of self-consciously borrowing from existing works. Musical theater, and Sondheim’s works in particular, epitomize the postmodernist tendency to reinterpret earlier forms for contemporary uses. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum • Based on plays written by the Roman playwright Plautus, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is a farce, with the plot centering on men lusting for beautiful prostitutes and plot twists deriving from coincidences and mistaken identities. The show’s bawdy content and farcical nature pushed the limits of musical theater. The drama is framed as a play-within-a-play, a theatrical device that allows a play to be self-conscious about itself and its intentions. Beginning with the chorus of Greek drama, a tradition has long existed in the theater of voices external to the drama offering commentary on the events. However, most twentieth century drama presents characters going about their business as if unaware of the audience. The framing of Sondheim’s drama both ties the play to its classical sources and invites the audience to adopt, despite the lighthearted subject matter, a critical attitude toward the work, as the play offers an explanation of itself as comedy with details about what that means. A Little Night Music • A Little Night Music is a romantic comedy that draws on the conventional comedic topic of mismatched lovers trying to find their true loves. The idea originally began with a desire by Sondheim and others to make a musical from Jean Anouilh’s play L’Invitation au château (pr. 1947; Ring Round the Moon, 1950). When Anouilh declined an adaptation of his play, Sondheim viewed films with similar plots including Jean Renoir’s 1939 Rules of the Game and Ingmar Bergman’s 1956 Smiles of a Summer Night. The themes and mood of the play draw from a long theatrical tradition, evoking, for example, William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (pr. c. 1595-1596), which also portrays mismatched lovers seeking their true loves on a magical evening. In proper comedic form, A Little Night Music ends with the lovers properly matched. Beyond the follies and maneuvering of the lovers, the theme of youth and age is important to both the play’s meaning and its structure. Most of the action takes place at the country house of an old woman who, with her young granddaughter, watches the action. The grandmother teaches her young charge that a summer night smiles three times: at the young who know nothing, the fools who know too little, and the old who know too much. The primary plot could occur without the older and younger characters, but they deepen the drama’s scope by showing the lovers’ plots as part of a stage of life between youth and age. The musical opens with a quintet of characters who are not part of the main story but who perform lyrics both at the beginning and later in the show that comment on the play’s main action. This use of choruslike characters serves to distance the audience from identification with the main characters because of the obvious artifice involved. This distancing evokes an intellectual or critical response from the audience. Sweeney Todd • Sweeney Todd blurs the boundaries between musical theater and opera and has, in fact, been performed by various opera companies. The play retells a

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story about a mass murderer originally written for the stage in the nineteenth century, rewritten by contemporary British playwright Christopher Bond, and finally set to music by Sondheim. The play presents the challenges of portraying murders onstage without disgusting the audience or resorting to slapstick. Further, although the nineteenth century sources were not notable for their psychological subtlety, Sondheim’s version seeks to offer insight into the mind of the deranged killer. Beyond the psychological intrigue, the musical explores the themes of revenge and justice. Despite these serious themes, the drama contains significant, albeit black, humor. Todd’s accomplice, Mrs. Lovett, bakes the meat from the corpses into pies that she sells in her shop. The play’s significant accomplishment is its ability to interweave tragedy and comedy as well as sophistication and base humor within a musical score that draws on sources ranging from Gregorian chant to contemporary, popular music. Sunday in the Park with George • Inspired by the life and work of Georges Seurat, especially the painting Un Dimanche Après-Midi à l’ile de la Grande Jatte (A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte), Sunday in the Park with George explores what it means to be an artist and the relationship between life and art. In the musical’s first act, the people in the painting go about their lives as George sketches them. For example, his pregnant girlfriend Dot decides to marry the baker Louis, and two young women pursue an attractive soldier. At the end of the act, as the characters argue among themselves, the painter stops them and arranges them into the poses and positions for his picture. The dual statement is that the piece of art hides the tensions of life, and at the same time, the artwork turns ordinary life into something beautiful. The second act continues to explore the meanings of art as Seurat’s daughter and her grandson George attend an opening for the grandson’s artwork. In contrast to his grandfather, who was focused solely on his artistic vision and never sold a painting, the younger George works the crowd of art patrons and critics, seeking funding for his work. As the play ends, he has decided to move on to new projects rather than repeating variations of his current work. His great-grandmother practiced writing in a book that has been passed down, and George reads from it some of his grandfather’s favorite words about art, including order, design, and tension. The grandfather is able, through this medium, to instruct his grandson on the importance of following his own artistic vision. Other major works screenplay: The Last of Sheila, 1973 (with Anthony Perkins) teleplay: Evening Primrose, 1966 (lyrics and music) Bibliography Banfield, Stephen. Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. A very thorough study of Sondheim’s work, this book is particularly useful in its discussions of his music. Although perhaps at times too technical for the typical reader, this book provides much valuable information on Sondheim’s life and his musicals. Sondheim himself reviewed the manuscript before publication. Block, Geoffrey. “Happily Ever After: West Side Story with Sondheim.” In Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from “Show Boat” to Sondheim. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. This chapter places Sondheim in the context of the musical theater, arguing that his work is the culmination of the form’s development since the late 1920’s. The earlier chapters provide a useful history of musical theater.

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Goodhart, Sandor, ed. Reading Stephen Sondheim: A Collection of Critical Essays. New York: Garland, 2000. The essays in this volume, written by literary critics, treat Sondheim with the seriousness afforded other twentieth century playwrights. The essays range from general treatments to explorations of specific features of the plays. Gordon, Joanne. Art Ain’t Easy: The Achievement of Stephen Sondheim. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. Gordon argues for the recognition of Sondheim and musical theater as art rather than merely as escapist entertainment. This study notes many connections between Sondheim’s works and works considered high art. Gordon’s analysis of the musical qualities of Sondheim’s numbers is thorough. Secrest, Meryle. Stephen Sondheim: A Life. New York: Delta, 1998. This full-length biography is based primarily on interviews with Sondheim’s friends and associates. It describes not only the events of Sondheim’s life but also the history of each of the musicals on which Sondheim worked, including the inspiration for the story, the process the collaborators went through to see the project to production, and the critical and audience response to the play. Zadan, Craig. Sondheim and Company. 2d ed. New York: Da Capo, 1994. This book provides analysis and history of each of Sondheim’s musicals. Its many photographs offer a good sense of the style of the productions as well as the process of their preparation. A useful appendix lists who worked on the various productions, provides Broadway performance histories, and lists nonmusical projects in which Sondheim participated. Joan Hope

Sophocles Sophocles

Born: Colonus, Greece; c. 496 b.c.e. Died: Athens, Greece; 406 b.c.e. Principal drama • Aias, early 440’s b.c.e. (Ajax, 1729); AntigonT, 441 b.c.e. (Antigone, 1729); Trachinai, 435-429 b.c.e. (The Women of Trachis, 1729); Oidipous Tyrannos, c. 429 b.c.e. (Oedipus Tyrannus, 1715); $lektra, 418-410 b.c.e. (Electra, 1649); Philokt4t4s, 409 b.c.e. (Philoctetes, 1729); Oidipous epi Kol fnfi, 401 b.c.e. (Oedipus at Colonus, 1729); Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments with Critical Notes, Commentary, and Translation in English Prose, pb. 1897 (7 volumes) Other literary forms • In addition to his plays, Sophocles also wrote paeans and elegies. Fragments exist of a paean to the god Asclepius, of an ode to the historian Herodotus, and of an elegy to the philosopher Archelaus. An apparently complete epigram addressed to the poet Euripides also survives. According to ancient tradition, Sophocles wrote a literary treatise in prose, On the Chorus. Unfortunately, this work, which may have discussed the tragedian’s increase in the size of the chorus, is lost. Achievements • Sophocles’ dramatic career, which intersects both Aeschylus’s and Euripides’ periods of production, was noted in antiquity for several important theatrical innovations, and his plays have experienced a remarkably constant popularity beginning in his own lifetime and continuing into the present. Perhaps no other playwright has had as great an influence on both ancient and modern concepts of the dramatic art. Like Aeschylus, Sophocles acted in his own plays. His performances as a ball-playing Nausicaa and as a lyre-playing Thamyras in lost plays were well known in the fifth century. Sophocles is said by ancient sources, however, to have been the first playwright to have abandoned the practice of acting in his own works. It is now impossible to determine whether this change, which became the norm among later Greek tragedians, was a true Sophoclean innovation, the result of, as the sources state, Sophocles’ own weakening voice, or was rather the result of a general trend toward increasing specialization in later fifth century b.c.e. tragedies. Sophocles is also said to have increased the size of the tragic chorus from twelve to fifteen members and to have added a third actor. If Aeschylus’s Oresteia, produced in 458 b.c.e., can be used as chronological evidence, the former innovation had not yet become the rule by 458, but the latter change had most certainly been introduced by that date. All the surviving plays of Sophocles make use of three actors, but the size of the chorus in a given play is rarely easy to document. The introduction of the third actor was the final evolutionary stage in the development of Greek tragedy, which probably had its origins in a choral song to which one, two, and, finally, three actors were added. With the use of three actors, Sophocles was able to concentrate dramatic attention on the actors and the spoken dialogues and agons or “debates” for which his plays are noted. Sophocles’ mastery of dialogue is especially evident in his prologues, which almost always begin not with the static, expository monologues of Euripides, but with 890

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dramatic, plot-advancing dialogues, such as the bitter exchange between Antigone and Ismene at the beginning of Antigone. In general, Sophocles accomplishes this development of the actor’s role in tragedy without neglecting the choral portions of the play. Sophocles’ interest in the chorus is suggested not only by the tradition that he wrote a prose treatise on the chorus and increased its size, but also by the extant plays themselves. While the choruses of Sophocles’ tragedies do not have the central importance of such Aeschylean choruses as those in Hiketides (463 b.c.e.?; The Suppliants, 1777) and Eumenides (English translation, 1777; one of three parts of Oresteia, 458 b.c.e.), nevertheless, several Sophoclean odes, such as the “Ode to Man” in Antigone and the Colonus ode in Oedipus at Colonus, are among the most beautiful in Greek tragedy. Sophocles also shows himself able to manipulate dramatic mood through the tone of his odes, as in Ajax, when he places a joyful song just before disaster. Only in Philoctetes, which has only one true choral ode, does a work of Sophocles exhibit the diminished choral role common in Greek tragedy of the last decades of the fifth century b.c.e. Two other innovations attributed in antiquity to Sophocles suggest that the playwright was interested in the visual as well as the verbal effects of drama. The ancient biography on the life of Sophocles states that he designed boots and staffs for both actors and the chorus, and in De poetica (c. 334-323 b.c.e.; Poetics, 1705), Aristotle says that Sophocles invented scene painting. In general, however, the extant plays show little of the spectacular stagecraft found in both Aeschylus and Euripides. The closest Sophocles comes to Aeschylus’s use of ghosts is the supernatural disappearance of Oedipus in Oedipus at Colonus, and he employs the favorite Euripidean technique of the deus ex machina only once, in Philoctetes. Modern scholars often state that Sophocles was responsible for the abandonment of connected tragic trilogies in favor of thematically independent plays, a conclusion based on the tenuous assumption that all mid-fifth century b.c.e. productions of three tragedies and one satyr play were connected in theme. Another possible interpretation of the scanty ancient evidence on trilogies is that connected trilogies were an Aeschylean experiment that few, if any, later tragedians repeated. Sophocles’ composition Telepheia, usually considered to be his only connected trilogy, may not have been a connected group at all. Not even the names of the plays that made up Telepheia are known, and there is no evidence that the -eia ending signifies a connected trilogy in fifth century b.c.e. terminology, despite the -eia ending in Oresteia. Although it is unlikely, then, that Sophocles was an innovator in the production of unconnected trilogies, several of his individual plays do possess another distinctive structural feature, diptych composition. Composed of two nearly independent parts or with two separate main characters, Ajax, Antigone, and The Women of Trachis all divide neatly into two parts, with the departures or deaths of Ajax, Antigone, and Deianira, respectively. Only Euripides’ Alk 4stis (438 b.c.e.; Alcestis, 1781) approaches the twopart structure of these Sophoclean plays, the “disunity” of which has been noted by both ancient and modern critics. Yet dipytch form appears to have been an intentional feature of these tragedies, perhaps even a Sophoclean experiment made in response to the Aeschylean connected trilogy. This Sophoclean form is based not on structural disunity but rather on structural flexibility and demonstrates a general deemphasis on the need for single central characters that is notable not only in Sophocles but also in extant Greek tragedy in general. Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, with its nearly exclusive attention to the fate of a single character, is rather the exception than the rule in this respect.

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The esteem in which Sophocles’ work was held in the fifth century b.c.e. is evident from such contemporary evidence as Aristophanes’ Batrachoi (405 b.c.e.; The Frogs, 1780), in which praise of the late Sophocles as “good-natured while alive and good-natured in Hades,” is clearly comic understatement, and Phrynichus’s Muses, produced in the same year, in which Sophocles is described as “a prosperous and clever man who wrote many good tragedies.” This fifth century b.c.e. respect for Sophocles was intensified in the fourth century b.c.e., under the influence of Aristotle, whose high praise of Sophoclean tragedy in The Poetics has shaped all subsequent critical approaches, not only to Sophocles but also to tragedy in general. Aris(Library of Congress) totle, for whom Sophoclean tragedy, and specifically Oedipus Tyrannus, was an ideal tragedy, particularly admired Sophocles’ dramatic development of character and quoted the playwright as saying that “he [Sophocles] made men as they ought to be; Euripides as they are.” Along with the works of Aeschylus and Euripides, Sophocles’ plays were widely adapted by Roman tragedians in the second and first centuries b.c.e., but Seneca’s Oedipus (c. 40-55 c.e.; English translation, 1581) is the only extant Roman imitation of Sophocles. Seneca follows closely the plot of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, but with a typically Roman overemphasis on Teiresias’s rites of prophecy and with a compressed version of Oedipus’s discovery of his true identity that pales beside its Sophoclean source. Seneca’s play also lacks the great mood of irony for which Sophocles is justly famous. The role of Sophoclean tragedy in the history of ideas would be incomplete without mention of Sophocles’ influence on the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in the nineteenth century and on the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud in the twentieth century. In his Ästhetik (1835; The Philosophy of Fine Art, 1920), Hegel praised Antigone for its ideal tragic form—that is, its dramatic reconciliation of conflicting positions, which conformed well with the Hegelian concept of dialectics, of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud cited Oedipus Tyrannus as an expression of a child’s love of one parent and hatred of the other, the psychic impulse that Freud came to call the “Oedipus complex.” Despite such influence outside the theater, it is on Sophocles’ tragic art, and in particular on his skilled use of character development, dialogue, and dramatic irony, that his reputation has justly rested for more than two thousand years. Biography • The main events of Sophocles’ life are known from several ancient sources, including inscriptions and especially an Alexandrian biography that survives

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in the manuscript tradition. Although it is difficult at times to distinguish fact from anecdote in these sources, even the fiction is a useful gauge of Sophocles’ image and reputation in antiquity. Sophocles’ lifetime coincides with the glorious rise of Athenian democracy and Athens’s naval empire and with the horrors of the Peloponnesian War. Born a generation later than Aeschylus and a generation earlier than Euripides, Sophocles won dramatic victories over both of these playwrights. He was born c. 496 b.c.e. to Sophilus, a wealthy industrialist and slave owner from the Athenian deme of Colonus. Although Sophocles generally avoids personal references in his plays, his love for his native Colonus is evident in his last work, Oedipus at Colonus, and especially in the famous Colonus ode of that play. Sophocles received a good education. According to ancient sources, as a youth he won competitions in wrestling and in music. His music teacher, Lamprus, was known for his epic and conservative compositions, for which he was ranked in his day with the great lyric poet Pindar. Sophocles himself is said to have been chosen to lead the victory song with lyre after the Athenian sea victory at Salamis in 480 b.c.e. The patriotism of Sophocles was well known in antiquity. In the ancient biography, he is called philathenaiotatos, “a very great lover of Athens,” and, unlike both Aeschylus and Euripides, he is said never to have left his native city for the court of a foreign king. Sophocles was also unlike his fellow dramatists in that he held public office several times: In 443/442 b.c.e., he was Hellenotamias, a financial overseer of the Delian League in Athens; in 441/440, he was general along with Pericles in the Samian Revolt. Sophocles may have been general again, around 427, this time with Nicias; and in 413, he was elected proboulos, a member of a special executive committee formed after the Sicilian disaster. No clear conclusions concerning the dramatist’s political sentiments can be derived from Sophocles’ political career, especially since fifth century Athenian democracy often survived on noncareer appointments from among its citizens. There are several hints in Sophocles’ biography, however, of links with the pro-Spartan and aristocratic circle of the Athenian statesman Cimon: Plutarch says that Sophocles won his first dramatic victory in 468 b.c.e., when, as requested, Cimon and his nine fellow generals took the place of judges chosen by lot for the tragic competition. Sophocles, as general in 441/440, is said to have visited the poet Ion of Chios, a close friend of Cimon. Sophocles wrote an elegy, of which fragments survive, to another member of Cimon’s circle, the philosopher Archelaus of Miletus. Finally, Sophocles is also connected with Polygnotus, the famous painter and friend of Cimon who is said to have made a wellknown portrait of Sophocles holding a lyre. On the other hand, Sophocles may have also been a friend of Pericles, the great Athenian statesman and Cimon’s political rival, with whom Sophocles was general in 441/440 b.c.e. It may be that Sophocles attempted to separate his probable friendship with Cimon from his civic duty and patriotic sentiments. At the least, this evidence shows that Sophocles was not politically detached, but rather, very much involved in the political and intellectual life of his day. The ancient biography mentions that Sophocles established a thiasos, or religious guild, in honor of the Muses. Other members of this intellectual group are unknown, but it may have included Sophocles’ good friend, the historian Herodotus, whom the dramatist occasionally used as a source and to whom he wrote an ode. Sophocles won his first dramatic victory in 468 b.c.e. by defeating Aeschylus, probably with a group that included a Triptolemus, now lost. Whether this was Sophocles’

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first dramatic competition is not known, but it is recorded that the playwright went on to win twenty-three more victories, to earn second place many times, and third place never. With four plays in each production, this means that ninety-two out of Sophocles’ approximately 124 dramas won for him first prizes. This great contemporary success contrasts strikingly with the career of Euripides, who won first place only five times. Sophocles did not compete in 467 b.c.e. but probably won second place against Aeschylus’s Danaid trilogy in 463 (?). Unfortunately, no plays from Sophocles’ earliest years survive. The earliest extant play is probably Ajax, from the early 440’s b.c.e. In his Ethika (after c. 100; Moralia, 1603), Plutarch distinguishes three periods of Sophoclean style: a “weighty” period with Aeschylean similarities; a “harsh and artificial stage”; and a final group “most suited to express character and best.” No extant plays, except perhaps Ajax, belong to the first two periods. Because the categories themselves, with their progression toward increasing worth, are obviously peripatetic in origin, it is doubtful that these periods can be accepted as reliable statements about Sophoclean drama. In 441 b.c.e., Sophocles probably produced Antigone, for which he may have won first prize, since the hypothesis, or ancient introduction, to this play states that the dramatist was elected general in 441/440, based on the merit of Antigone. The Athenian democracy of that period was perfectly capable of making political appointments on such an apolitical basis. Other ancient sources imply that Sophocles saw no military action as general in the Samian Revolt that year but that he did travel to Ionia with the Athenian fleet. Sophocles was certainly back in Athens in 438 b.c.e., when he won first prize with unknown plays against an Euripidean group which included Alcestis. The dating of The Women of Trachis is perhaps the most fiercely debated of all extant Sophoclean tragedies, but the stylistic and thematic similarities of this play to the firmly dated Alcestis make possible at least an approximate dating of The Women of Trachis to the period between 435 and 429. In 431, Sophocles, competing with an unknown group of plays, came in second to the dramatist Euphorion, Aeschylus’s son. Euripides came in third in that year with M4deia (431 b.c.e.; Medea, 1781). Sophocles made no production at the Greater Dionysia of 428. Electra is another play that is difficult to date accurately, but based on its links with Euripides’ $lektra (413 b.c.e.; Electra, 1782), Sophocles’ play can at least be dated to the decade beginning 420 b.c.e., except for the year 415, when it is known that Sophocles made no production. Only the last two extant plays are firmly dated: Philoctetes, which won for him first prize in 409 b.c.e., and Oedipus at Colonus, produced posthumously in 401 b.c.e. by Sophocles’ grandson of the same name, which also won for him first prize. In addition to his patriotism, Sophocles was also noted for his piety. Specifically, he is linked with the cult of the healing god Asclepius, whose cult the dramatist helped establish in Athens in 420 b.c.e. Sophocles’ paean to Asclepius was quite famous in antiquity and still survives in fragments. Sophocles was a priest of the hero Halon, who was ritually connected with Asclepius and under whose epithet, Dexion or “Receiver,” Sophocles was honored posthumously. Such associations with public cults, however, were distinct in fifth century b.c.e. Athens from intellectual belief, and the classical view of Sophocles as calm, pious, and moderate has come to be questioned by such modern scholars as C. H. Whitman, who notes that the extant tragedies exhibit little of that blind piety that tradition links with the dramatist. Sophocles’ true religious sentiments are lost behind the poetic veil of his tragedies.

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There are indications in ancient sources that Sophocles had a troubled family life in his old age. The playwright had two sons: Iophon by Nicostrata and Ariston by the Sicyonian woman Theoris. Iophon was a dramatist in his own right and even competed against his father at least once. Less is known about Ariston, except that his son, Sophocles, was so favored by the grandfather that Iophon brought a lawsuit to have the old man made a legal ward of his son on the grounds of senility. Sophocles, speaking in his own defense at the trial, is said to have stated: “If I am Sophocles, I am not insane; if I am insane, I am not Sophocles.” When Sophocles concluded by reciting lines from Oedipus at Colonus, his work in progress, the case was dismissed. In March of 406 b.c.e., at the proagon, or preview to the Greater Dionysia, Sophocles dressed a chorus in mourning for the recent death of Euripides. This appearance at the proagon is evidence for a Sophoclean production in that year, but Sophocles must have died shortly after the dramatic festival, because in Aristophanes’ The Frogs, produced in early 405, Sophocles is mentioned as already dead. Despite Sophocles’ advanced age, the ancient sources still sought to embellish his death with several spurious causes: that he choked on a grape (like Anacreon), that he became overexerted while reciting Antigone, or that he died for joy after a dramatic victory. More reliable is the report that Sophocles’ family was granted special permission from the Spartan general Lysander to bury the dramatist in his family plot on the road to Decelea, where the Spartans maintained a garrison. Death thus spared Sophocles from witnessing the complete collapse of the Athenian empire and the submission of Athens to Sparta in 405 to 404 b.c.e. Analysis • The textual transmission of Sophocles is remarkably similar to that of Aeschylus, with a first complete ancient edition by the Athenian orator Lycurgus in the late fourth century b.c.e. and a definitive Alexandrian edition by Aristophanes of Byzantium in the second century b.c.e. A school selection of the seven extant tragedies was made sometime after the second century c.e. and was reedited by the late fourth century rhetorician Salustius. The plays may have survived the medieval period in only one manuscript, although this has been debated. The present text was extensively revised in the fourteenth century by several Byzantine scholars, including Planudes, Thomas Magister, and Triclinius. The plays reached the West in the fifteenth century, and the first printed edition of Sophocles was the Aldine edition of Venice (1502). The Life of Sophocles devotes a lengthy paragraph to describing the playwright’s links with the epic poetry of Homer, and scholars of all periods have continued to note Sophoclean imitation of Homeric subject matter and language. Sophocles achieved his greatest success in the art of character development and especially in the depiction of the hero, for which he owes a major debt to Homer. Many Sophoclean characters, including nearly all the dramatis personae of Ajax and the Odysseus of Philoctetes, are derived from Homeric sources at least in part, but even where Sophocles treats a subject not directly handled by Homer, such as the stories of Oedipus and Antigone, the poetic techniques of Homer and Sophocles intersect in their methods of character development, in the types of characters depicted, and especially in their focus on the heroic qualities of particular individuals. Even Aristotle recognized the importance of character development to Sophoclean studies. In his Poetics, he frequently cited Sophocles’ Oedipus as the ideal tragic character and stated that “Sophocles is the same kind of imitator as Homer, for both imitate characters of a higher type.” Much modern scholarship, too, has been devoted to a

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study of Sophocles’ technique of character development and of the “Sophoclean hero.” In particular, the works of C. H. Whitman and of B. M. W. Knox have both helped to clarify the characteristics of the Sophoclean hero and to show his affinities with the Homeric hero. It is impossible to analyze a Sophoclean play without studying Sophocles’ character development and without taking into account the Aristotelian and later interpretations of the Sophoclean hero that have molded a modern understanding of this dramatist and his work. At the same time, such an analysis must not lose sight of Sophocles’ other dramatic skills, such as his mastery of dialogue and his use of the chorus, both of which complement the development of Sophocles’ main characters. The Theban plays • Sophocles’ so-called Theban plays have always been considered the center of his corpus. Although Antigone, Oedipus Tyrannus, and Oedipus at Colonus do not form a connected trilogy and, indeed, represent productions spanning a period of forty years, these plays project many consistencies of style and character development that suggest some continuity in Sophoclean dramatic art. The story of the unfortunate house of Laius was a popular theme of fifth century b.c.e. Greek tragedy, but except for Aeschylus’s Hepta epi Th4bas (467 b.c.e.; Seven Against Thebes, 1777) and Euripides’ Phoinissai (c. 410 b.c.e.; The Phoenician Women, 1781), which are extant, far too little is known about any of these lost plays to judge their relationship to the Sophoclean versions. The misfortunes of the house of Laius, including Oedipus’s destiny to kill his father and marry his mother as well as the mutual fratricide of his sons, were mentioned by Homer, and several epics on this Theban cycle are known to have survived past the fifth century b.c.e. Knowledge of these epics is scanty, but Sophoclean innovations in this mythic cycle may include the blinding of Oedipus, the dramatic use of a local Athenian legend concerning the death of Oedipus in Sophocles’ native deme of Colonus, and the development of the story of Antigone. Antigone • Antigone concerns the events after the deaths of her brothers Eteocles and Polyneices and her decision to bury Polyneices despite the decree of Creon, the new ruler of Thebes, that the body remain unburied as a lesson to traitors. Sophocles begins the play with a dramatic prologue in which Antigone announces her decision to her sister Ismene, asks for her help and is refused, and finally determines in anger to act alone. This scene between the sisters, which Sophocles later skillfully imitated in Electra, demonstrates Sophocles’ ability to employ action to develop his characters. Absent are the long, choral, narrative beginnings of Aeschylus’s Persai (472 b.c.e.; The Persians, 1777) and Agamemnon (Agamemnfn, 1777; one of three parts of Oresteia, 458 b.c.e.), and the expository prologues of Euripides. Within one hundred lines of dialogue, Sophocles not only has significantly advanced the action but also has vividly depicted Antigone’s character. Antigone’s stubbornness, isolation, and strong sense of self-righteous nobility are well developed in this scene and help to define not only her character but also that of the Sophoclean hero in general. Much like the Homeric hero, especially Achilles, the Sophoclean hero projects arete, an untranslatable Greek word implying a “pattern of virtue.” Arete sets the hero apart from other people and is inevitably self-destructive through its greatness. Thus, from the outset, Antigone is determined to face death for what she believes to be the noble course of action. By contrast to the gloom of the prologue, the parodos, or choral entrance song, is a jubilant victory song celebrating the end of the siege of Thebes by Polyneices and is a striking example of Sophoclean manipulation of mood through choral passages. The

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chorus in Sophocles is usually considered to be a mouthpiece for the playwright’s own views, but the interest in dramatic effect that Sophocles demonstrates in this chorus and others should be sufficient warning against reading such direct authorial intrusion into the dramatic text. Therefore, the chorus’s Aeschylean sentiments in the parodos, that an insolent—that is, hubristic—Polyneices has been justly punished by Zeus, cannot necessarily be applied to Antigone’s situation or to Sophocles’ belief. Rather, the Sophoclean chorus tends to speak in character and with little extradramatic insight. Antigone’s chorus of elders express their own views in the parodos, views that serve as an excellent dramatic transition from Antigone in the prologue to Creon in the next scene. In the first episode, Sophocles once again moves events along swiftly while developing character, this time that of Creon. Hardly has Creon finished his long and selfrevealing inaugural address as ruler of Thebes and announced his decree concerning Polyneices, than a messenger arrives to report that this decree has already been disobeyed. Hegel used Creon’s insistence in this scene on the primacy of the state and positive law over the individual to argue that the meaning of Antigone lay in the inevitable resolution or synthesis of Creon’s conflict with Antigone, who stands for the right of the individual and the family and for the superiority of divine law. This interpretation of Antigone, however, is Hegelian, not Sophoclean, for there is no real synthesis in Antigone. Rather, there is a constant affirmation of the righteousness of the heroine that is evident even in this first episode, in which the messenger’s suggestion that certain bizarre circumstances surrounding Polyneices’ burial may hint at divine complicity is roundly rejected by Creon. Divine sanction for Antigone’s action is inherent in the ancient Greek belief that all human corpses must be buried, a law to be challenged only under pain of punishment by the gods. The choral ode that follows, often called the “Ode to Man,” is probably the most famous ode of Sophocles, if not of all Greek tragedy. With its thematic links with Homer’s Odyssey (c. 725 b.c.e.; English translation, 1614) and Aeschylus’s Cho4phoroi (Libation Bearers, 1777; one of three parts of Oresteia, 458 b.c.e.), as well as its philosophical connections with Protagoras and other thinkers of that time, this ode is a poetic statement of the wonder of humankind, of the ability of the human intellect to surmount the limitations of nature, and of the dangers inherent in such a powerful intelligence. Application of this ode to the dramatic events of Antigone is ambiguous. Clearly, the chorus is thinking of the unknown lawbreaker who buried Polyneices and whose deeds are a good example of humankind’s dangerous intellect. As early as Homer, a hero’s greatness had led to self-destruction, and this is no less true of Antigone. On the other hand, later events in the play will prove the relevance of the chorus’s words as well to Creon, whose decree has dishonored the “sworn right of the gods.” The multiplicity of interpretations that can be applied to this ode enhances its dramatic value and emphasizes once again Sophocles’ skilled use of the chorus. The “Ode to Man” also illustrates the power of Sophocles’ so-called diptych structure and shows the futility of searching for a single main character in this or several other Sophoclean plays. Antigone and Creon complement each other. Antigone could not be Antigone without Creon, who, like Antigone, possesses some of the qualities of a Sophoclean hero, including stubbornness, isolation, and a self-righteous nobility. Creon’s encounter with his son Haemon in the third episode is particularly revealing of the king’s character. The scene is a brilliant combination of set speeches by both Creon and Haemon followed by rapid and emotional stichomythia, or line-by-line interchange, between father and son. This dialogue reveals Creon’s stubborn inability to

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yield to reason and a lack of understanding of and isolation from his son Haemon that lead inevitably to disaster. Haemon’s appearance in the play may have been another Sophoclean innovation in the myth. As Creon’s son and Antigone’s fiancé, Haemon serves an an excellent illuminator not only of Creon’s but also of Antigone’s character. Sophocles does not present Haemon’s relationship to Antigone in a romantic manner; the two are certainly not “lovers” in the modern sense because they never meet onstage. If the manuscript attribution of line 572 to Ismene is correct, Antigone never even speaks of her betrothed. Rather, Haemon’s loyalty for Antigone, even unto death, serves as another, and perhaps the most vivid, proof of the heroine’s isolation from all human contact in pursuit of her noble goal. Antigone ends as quickly as it began, with a decision to free Antigone forced on Creon by the seer Teiresias, but not before it is too late. In rapid succession, the suicides of Antigone, Haemon, and his mother, Eurydice, are announced, and Creon returns in the exodos, or last scene, as a broken man. It is Creon, not Antigone, who comes closest to fitting the requirements of an Aristotelian tragic hero, with a peripeteia, or “fall,” caused by hamartia, a “tragic flaw.” Like both Xerxes in The Persians and Agamemnon in the first play of Oresteia, Creon’s hamartia may be a form of faulty thinking that is punished by the gods. (Creon himself realizes this and uses the word “hamartemata.”) By contrast, Antigone has no true peripeteia; while she does die, she dies as a Sophoclean hero in the glory and isolation of her self-conscious nobility. An Aristotelian tragic hero can thus be found in this play, but only at Antigone’s expense. Oedipus Tyrannus • Oedipus Tyrannus concerns an earlier stage in the same myth, with the discovery by Oedipus, Antigone’s father, that he has fulfilled a Delphic oracle by unwittingly killing his father, Laius, and marrying his mother, Jocasta. The play is perhaps better known by its Latin title, Oedipus Rex or Oedipus the King, but the Greek title, while probably not Sophoclean (fifth century b.c.e. playwrights apparently did not title their plays, which were usually identified by their first lines), is more dramatically accurate. Technically, the Greek word tyrannos, means not a “harsh ruler” but an “unconstitutional” one. At the beginning of the play, Oedipus, having gained power by solving the Sphinx’s riddle, rules Thebes as a true tyrannos; yet, dramatic events prove that Oedipus is also Thebes’s true basileus or “king” because he is really the son of the late King Laius. This irony in Oedipus’s situation is the focus of the drama, which was so admired by Aristotle for its depiction of peripeteia caused directly by anagnorisis or “recognition.” Sophocles further developed this irony, if not by actually inventing the blinding of Oedipus (who does not blind himself in Homer), then by using the theme of sight and blindness to great dramatic effect in the famous scene with Teiresias, in which the blind prophet is forced by Oedipus to contrast his own true knowledge with the ruler’s ignorance; Teiresias tells Oedipus: “You have eyes but cannot see in what evil you are.” In an ironic sense, then, the action of the play is directed toward an Oedipus, who sees with his eyes but not with his mind, becoming like Teiresias, who sees with his mind but not with his eyes. Oedipus Tyrannus is a true tragedy of discovery. Many of the same dramatic skills found in Antigone can also be seen in Oedipus Tyrannus. In this play, too, Sophocles combines rapid action and dialogue with careful character development. One striking difference between Antigone and Oedipus Tyrannus, however, is structural: Oedipus Tyrannus lacks the diptych form and vacillation between two main characters that are found in Antigone. Rather, Oedipus

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Tyrannus is focused entirely on Oedipus and the development of his personality. This development is accomplished through a series of dialogues between Oedipus and most of the other dramatis personae, beginning in the prologue and not ending until Oedipus learns the fatal truth of his identity in the fourth episode. In these scenes, the qualities of a Sophoclean hero are again and again revealed in Oedipus: in his heroic intransigence, his determination to discover the murderer of Laius and his own identity, in his sense of nobility and self-worth, in his angry alienation from all who try to help. Oedipus’s own heroic nature—like that of Antigone—leads him on to selfdestruction. Aristotle’s admiration of Oedipus Tyrannus as the ideal tragedy has, in a sense, been a Trojan horse for this play, because it has directed too much scholarly attention to Aristotle’s interpretation of the play, an interpretation that is more Aristotle’s reaction to Plato’s prohibition of tragedy in Politeia (388-368 b.c.e.; Republic, 1701) than it is a close reading of Oedipus Tyrannus. Aristotle sought to counter Plato’s objections to tragedy by making Oedipus into a morally satisfying character, by seeing in Oedipus a man, neither outstandingly virtuous nor evil, who falls into misfortune through hamartia. By doing this, Aristotle has created several thorny questions for the play: Does Oedipus really have a tragic flaw? Could he have acted any differently and still have been himself? Finally, is Oedipus of only average virtue? The Sophoclean answer to all these questions could only have been negative. Oedipus is not an ordinary person. He is the solver of the Sphinx’s riddle and a man of superior intelligence. He is a man of outstanding virtue. In short, he is a Sophoclean hero. To have acted other than he did would have meant a denial of his heroic identity, a denial of himself. This heroic firmness is a remarkably constant theme in the Sophoclean corpus. It can be found in the suicide of Ajax, in the desperate love of Deianeira, in the civil disobedience of Antigone, in the inquest of Oedipus the tyrannus, in the hatred of Electra, in the suffering of Philoctetes, and in the mysterious death of Oedipus at Colonus. Sophocles’ primary contribution to the history of drama, then, is his masterful focus on character development, and, in particular, his portrayal of the unyielding hero. Bibliography Budelmann, Felix. The Language of Sophocles: Communality, Communication, and Involvement. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. A scholarly study of the language used in Sophocles’ works. Bibliography and indexes. Daniels, Charles B. What Really Goes on in Sophocles’ Theban Plays. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1996. Daniels examines Sophocles’ Theban plays with reference to Greek mythology. Bibliography and index. Kirkwood, Gordon MacDonald. A Study of Sophoclean Drama: With a New Preface and Enlarged Bibliographical Note. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994. A scholarly look at the tragedies of Sophocles. Bibliography and indexes. Pucci, Pietro. Oedipus and the Fabrication of the Father: “Oedipus Tyrannus” in Modern Criticism and Philosophy. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. A study of Sophocles’ works that focuses on the Oedipus character. Bibliography and index. Segal, Charles. Oedipus Tyrannus: Tragic Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. A close examination of the role of heroes in Sophocles’ tragedies, particularly Oedipus in Oedipus Tyrannus. Bibliography and index.

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_______. Sophocles’ Tragic World: Divinity, Nature, Society. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. The tragedies of Sophocles are analyzed in respect to religion, nature, and society. Bibliography and indexes. _______. Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. In this work, Segal examines Sophocles’ major plays as well as the role of Greek mythology and civilization in his works. Bibliography and indexes. Van Nortwick, Thomas. Oedipus: The Meaning of a Masculine Life. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. A scholarly study of the Oedipus character, particularly in Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonus. Bibliography and index. Thomas J. Sienkewicz

Wole Soyinka Wole Soyinka

Born: Ijebu Isara, near Abeokuta, Nigeria; July 13, 1934 Principal drama • The Swamp Dwellers, pr. 1958, pb. 1963; The Invention, pr. 1959 (one act); The Lion and the Jewel, pr. 1959, pb. 1963; Camwood on the Leaves, pr. 1960, pb. 1973 (radio play); A Dance of the Forests, pr. 1960, pb. 1963; The Trials of Brother Jero, pr. 1960, pb. 1963; The Strong Breed, pb. 1963, pr. 1964; Three Plays, pb. 1963; Five Plays, pb. 1964; Kongi’s Harvest, pr. 1964, pb. 1967; The Road, pr., pb. 1965; Madmen and Specialists, pr. 1970, revised pr., pb. 1971; The Bacchae, pr., pb. 1973 (adaptation of Euripides’ play); Jero’s Metamorphosis, pb. 1973, pr. 1975; Collected Plays, pb. 1973-1974 (2 volumes); Death and the King’s Horseman, pb. 1975, pr. 1976; Opera Wonyosi, pr. 1977, pb. 1980 (adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s play The Three-Penny Opera); Requiem for a Futurologist, pr. 1983, pb. 1985; A Play of Giants, pr., pb. 1984; Six Plays, pb. 1984; A Scourge of Hyacinths, pr. 1990, pb. 1992 (radio play); From Zia, with Love, pr., pb. 1992; The Beatification of Area Boy: A Lagosian Kaleidoscope, pb. 1995, pr. 1996; Plays: Two, pb. 1999 Other literary forms • Wole Soyinka is not only a dramatist but also a poet, novelist, and critic. His poetry has appeared in several collections, including Idanre and Other Poems (1967), Poems from Prison (1969), A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972), and Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems (1988). The long poem Ogun Abibiman, connecting Yoruba mythology with African liberation, was first published in 1976. Soyinka has also written a few short stories as well as The Interpreters (1965) and Season of Anomy (1973), two novels. He has also translated the Yoruba novel of D. O. Fagunwa, Forest of a Thousand Daemons: A Hunter’s Saga (1968). His most famous piece of criticism is Myth, Literature, and the African World (1976). In addition, Soyinka has produced two autobiographical works–“The Man Died”: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka (1972), a memoir of his prison experiences, and Aké: The Years of Childhood (1981), a dramatic and imaginative re-creation of his early life—and a memoir to his father, Ìsarà: A Voyage Around “Essay” (1989). Achievements • In spite of frequent criticism of his obscure and difficult style, Wole Soyinka is generally regarded as a major literary figure in the contemporary world; by some he is considered to be the most sophisticated writer to emerge in Anglophone Africa. He has achieved success in the three major forms—poetry, fiction, and drama— and in the drama, for which he is best known, his range extends from broad farce and satire to tragedy. If he seems obscure, it is usually because of the density of the text: the constant reliance on imagistic and rhythmic expression and on the ever-present mythic and metaphysical dimension. An ambitious and experimental writer, he invites close textual analysis. His success as a dramatist extends to the practical arts of acting and directing. He has been the prime mover in the establishment of theater companies and the encouragement of the theatrical arts in Nigeria. Behind all this literary activity lies Soyinka’s loyalty to traditional Yoruba culture. He has had the intellectual capacity to understand and adapt it to his own needs and to the needs of his country. This has, perhaps inevitably, led him into the political arena, since his primary concern for human freedom is based largely on the identity of Ogun, the dynamic god of Yoruba mythology. Ogun is not necessarily the god of all 901

902 Nigerian society. Soyinka is one of those rare writers of genius whose productions appeal both to the professional critic and to the general public. Soyinka’s social consciousness has given his works a moral force that has made him a leader among political activists in Africa. His plays are translated into French and have been produced in Africa’s Francophone countries. His influence on African theater has been tremendous, and the fear of Soyinka’s revolutionary themes has led at least one African country to ban his plays. Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986. Other prizes include the Jock Campbell Award for Fiction in 1968, the John Whiting Drama Prize in 1966, and his first prize at the Dakar Negro Arts Festival in 1960.

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(© The Nobel Foundation)

Biography • Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka was born July 13, 1934, at Abeokuta in Western Nigeria. His mother was a strong-willed businesswoman; his father, a school supervisor. Soyinka is a member of the Yoruba tribe whose culture is dominant in Western Nigeria. He has studied Yoruban mythology and theology as a scholar, and he has developed a theory of tragedy from Yoruban culture and has used it as the basis and inspiration of his fiction, poetry, and drama. His works are filled with its gods and spirits and its rituals and festivals. The traditional leader, the Oba, retains his spiritual and moral authority. The Yoruba language influences Soyinka’s rhythmic and imagistic English style. Soyinka’s formal education, however, has been basically Christian and European. Biblical and literary echoes pervade his work. Still, he considers himself African, writing for an African audience. He defends his eclecticism as the right of any artist and insists that even his representation of Yoruba culture is necessarily and justifiably personal. Soyinka’s primary and secondary education was in Nigeria. He attended St. Peter’s School in Aké, Abeokuta (1938-1943), Abeokuta Grammar School (1944-1945), and Government College in Ibadan (1946-1950). His undergraduate preparation began at University College, Ibadan (later the University of Ibadan), where he studied from 1952 to 1954 with such future notables as Chinua Achebe and Christopher Okigbo. He then went to the University of Leeds in England, where he received his bachelor of arts degree with honors in English in 1957. He was later to receive an honorary degree from Leeds in 1973. His academic career began four years after graduation. He received a Rockefeller Research Fellowship to the University of Ibadan (1961-1962) and became lecturer at the University of Ife (1962-1964). In 1969, he became drama director, and he soon established a drama department and an acting company at the University of Ibadan. He has held various university academic posts, including a visiting professor-

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ship at Yale University in 1981, and has also delivered papers at academic meetings and published critical reviews and articles. As early as his high school days, Soyinka was writing sketches for presentation and, soon after, clever comedies for the radio. At Leeds, he concentrated on the dramatic component in his course work. His career as a dramatist actually began when he became a play reader at the Royal Court Theatre in London, where some of his own early work was performed. Believing that special skills were necessary for the performance of his Nigerian plays, after his return to Lagos in 1960, he organized two theater companies: the Masks Company (1960) in Lagos and the Orison Theatre Group (1964) in Ibadan. Since then, he has argued that the best place for such companies, to ensure that they remain nonpolitical, is the university campus. This insistence on political nonalignment points to a final aspect of Soyinka’s life— his social commitment. He has continually spoken out on public issues and, as a result, has risked the constant displeasure of existing authorities and institutions; he was detained in prison during the Biafran War, from August, 1967, to October, 1969. Even his early work contains political themes, but the Biafran War and his prison experiences have made his subsequent work more explicitly committed to social justice. He lived in exile from Nigeria for five years (1970-1975). His plays of those years and afterward, produced both abroad and at home, exhibit a political pessimism and employ varying degrees of political rhetoric, from subtle, intricate, metaphysical exploration to overt, satirical attack in public forums and over the radio. The dominant theme in his drama, as well as in his poetry and fiction, is individual human freedom, with its capacity for creation and destruction. Soyinka’s own life is an example of that exertion of will, the responsibility of the individual to understand, reinterpret, and act on his or her cultural surroundings. Given the political climate of Nigeria since 1993, Soyinka frequently led the exile’s life, shuttling back and forth between the United States and Europe. Some reforms after 1998 have allowed him to return intermittently to his country. He continues his outspoken criticism of repressive regimes. Analysis • For Wole Soyinka, art and morality are inseparable. This does not mean simply that sensitivity to beauty is a good indicator of moral awareness, though that is strongly suggested in A Dance of the Forests. What is more to the point is that the primary obligation of art is to tell the truth: That obligation implies exposure and denunciation of falsehood. Even in Soyinka’s broad farces—for example, the two plays that feature the prophet Jero—the object is not entertainment for its own sake but satire against any religious, social, or political leader who makes a mockery of human freedom. Soyinka also insists—with an eye on the romantic notion of negritude—that human beings have a dual nature whether they be African or Western; that is, they have destructive as well as creative urges. Part of his purpose as an artist is to expose the self-serving idealization of primitive African virtue; the problems in contemporary Africa may exist in a context of Western colonial oppression, but moral responsibility lies within the individual person as much as in the cultural milieu. What is special about the moral content of Soyinka’s drama is its metaphysical dimension, based on his own personal rendering of Yoruba myth. It assumes a continuum between the worlds of the dead, the living, and the unborn. That continuum is made possible by a fourth realm, which, in Myth, Literature, and the African World, Soyinka calls “the fourth stage,” a realm that links the living with their ancestors and with the future. The myth of Ogun, the god who risked the dangers of the abyss and

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created a road from the spiritual to the human world, is the key to an understanding of all Soyinka’s work, including his drama. The worship of Ogun is a ritual repetition of the god’s feat. Yoruba drama, in a comparison that Soyinka himself makes, thus resembles Greek drama in its ritual essence and its origin. Ogun is the Yoruba counterpart of Dionysus. To emphasize its ritual nature, Soyinka incorporates in his drama elements of dance, music, mime, and masquerade. Characters are not merely actors playing a role—which in itself has ritual suggestions—but, in moments of high tension, are symbolically possessed by a god. The central actions are variations of rites of passage, with transformation or death-rebirth being the central archetypal pattern. Soyinka’s most frequently used term for the terrifying experience of the numinous fourth stage is “transition.” In some plays, the transition experience is artificial or incomplete, or it is parodied (the Jero plays); in others, it is the most pervasive theme. Soyinka has a remarkable ability to combine the dramatic and theatrical device of peripeteia with the metaphysical experience of transition. The peripeteia, or climactic event of the play, is at the same time as the moment of divine possession. Generally, the plays move from ordinary realism to ritual enactment, with the nonverbal elements of dance, song, and masquerade receiving increasing prominence as the climax approaches. Thus, for Soyinka, drama is a serious matter. He may say in a facetious moment that it must be primarily entertainment, but in fact he treats it not only as a social and moral force but also as an act of human freedom and a ritual reenactment of human beings’ relationship to divinity. Early plays • Among Soyinka’s early plays, A Dance of the Forests is the most ambitious; it is also the most complex treatment of the chthonic, or underworld, realm of gods and spirits of transition. Even in Soyinka’s earliest major play, The Swamp Dwellers, the sensitive protagonist, Igwezu, appears as an outcast from ordinary society, as one who has returned from a confrontation with the gods and is not yet able to deal with the compromising and capricious worlds of society and nature. His climactic decisions are those of a man dazed by his revolutionary experiences. The wise old Beggar (an incarnation of the god?) cannot persuade him to turn his knowledge to account. The Lion and the Jewel, a comic rendition of society, presents the archetype of transition in at least two ways: through a parody of transformation as the ridiculous country schoolteacher, Lakunle, imagines his passage from bachelor to husband, and through the real rite of passage experienced by the heroine, Sidi, from maiden to wife. A Dance of the Forests • A Dance of the Forests, as the title itself suggests, is in another world entirely. All the action is set in the forest, a universal symbol of the unknown, of the mysterious secrets of nature. It relies heavily on ritual, with its accompanying music, mime, dance, and masquerade. In the forest are representatives of the three other realms—the ancestors from the past, the living, and spiritual projections of posterity— as well as the gods and spirits who participate in and organize an extraordinary ritual to bridge the abyss between them. A Dance of the Forests was written for the Nigerian independence celebrations in 1960, represented in the play as the Gathering of the Tribes. The principal human figures, Adenebi, Rola, and Demoke, have left the public festivities and sought the solitude of the forest. They are all guilty of some crime, hence uneasy in public, though the degree of their awareness varies considerably. Adenebi remains a lost soul because he cannot admit his guilt, even to himself. Rola, a prostitute, and Demoke, an artist who has just murdered his rival, at first, like Adenebi, try to hide their shame, but eventu-

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ally they face the truth about themselves as human beings and achieve redemption. This is the essential plot of the play; it requires that these three characters—especially Demoke, as the central figure on whom the climax turns—pass from the ordinary world of the living to the world of the dead and the gods—that is, that they enter the “fourth stage.” The first people they meet are Dead Man and Dead Woman, who have come in answer to the summons of the tribes. These ancestors turn out to be not the glorious heroes of Africa’s imaginary past but fallen human beings who led unsatisfactory lives. They are accusers rather than celebrators of humankind. Part 1 ends with some of the townspeople trying, through divination, ritual proverbs, dance and song, and a smoking, air-polluting lorry, to chase them away. Early in part 1, the three human protagonists also meet the Supreme Deity, called in the play Forest Head and temporarily disguised as an ordinary man named Obaneji. He guides them to the appointed place for the ritual Welcome of the Dead, which he has decided to hold in the forest because human society has refused to acknowledge the two dead guests as true ancestors out of their past. Part 2 depicts a conflict between the forces of chance, retribution, and destruction, represented by the god Eshuoro, and the creative forces, represented by the god Ogun and his human agent, Demoke. It is a spiritual conflict that takes place in the realm of transition, symbolically rendered by the swamplike setting deep in the forest. The actual conflict between Eshuoro and Demoke is preceded by an elaborate Welcome of the Dead. Forest Head, in Prospero-like fashion, stages a drama that re-creates the crucial event in the lives of Dead Man and Dead Woman. Dead Man, a warrior in the court of Mata Kharibu three centuries earlier, had defied the order of his ruler and refused to fight a senseless war. His punishment was emasculation and slavery, which he had to endure in two subsequent incarnations. What he wants now is rest. Forest Head is sympathetic, but Eshuoro is not. Dead Woman was Dead Man’s pregnant wife, who, overcome by grief, committed suicide and hence doomed her unborn child to the fate of an abiku, an infant that dies repeatedly in childbirth. This scene, designed to arouse fear and pity for the suffering in human life, especially of those whose motives are pure, becomes in the hands of Eshuoro, an uninvited guest who appears in disguise as the Questioner of the Dead, further evidence of the weakness and sinfulness of human nature. The scene also includes two other figures, previous incarnations of Rola and Demoke as Madame Tortoise, the archetypal prostitute, and the Court Poet, who along with the Warrior resists her charms. What the scene also suggests, therefore, is the ever-recurring cycle of human history, and what follows is a dramatic and symbolic investigation of the question: Do human beings have the freedom and the will to change the pattern? Again it is Eshuoro who attempts to control the inquisition. Up to this point, the three human protagonists have remained in the background (partly through dramatic necessity, since Rola and Demoke are actors in the flashback), but now the magic of Forest Head concentrates on their redemption. He insists that he cannot change anything himself; he can only provoke self-awareness. Thus, he designs a spiritual projection of the future but remains a passive observer. Significantly, the three humans are masked and become possessed by the spirits who speak through them. Having lost their identities, they enter totally the abyss of transition. The spirit voices from the intangible void are purposely obscure in their dire warnings. Scattered among them are the cries of Half-Child, whom Forest Head has meanwhile taken from the womb of Dead Woman. Its voice, too, is a voice of the future; it wants a full existence with a living mother.

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With Eshuoro directing the action, the future of humankind appears desolate, but Eshuoro’s power is not absolute. The play’s climactic events, couched as they are in symbolic mime and dance, have elicited numerous interpretations. Eshuoro appears bent on separating Half-Child from its mother, as though a reunion would mean salvation. Demoke becomes a principal actor (once Forest Head has restored his consciousness), as he attempts to protect the child. With Ogun’s help, he succeeds in returning the child to the mother, but Eshuoro emits a shout of victory even at this, suggesting perhaps that Demoke’s act may save the child but place his own life in jeopardy, for he is taking on the responsibility of changing the pattern of history. A ritual scene follows in which Eshuoro forces Demoke, a “sacrificial basket” on his head, to climb the totem that Demoke had carved for the tribal festivities. Eshuoro then sets fire to the totem in order to kill both the artist and his creation, but his vengeance is foiled by Ogun, who catches the falling Demoke. These scenes, depicting the saving of the child and of Demoke himself, are symbolically taking place within the unconscious and are a resolution to Demoke’s particular problem and to the central issue raised by the play. As the tribe’s carver, Demoke occupies a vital position. Without his art, ritual contact with the gods is impossible, yet in the act of carving the totem he had through jealousy flung his assistant and rival to his death. The incident reflects Soyinka’s insistence on the creative and destructive tendencies in humankind. How can Demoke atone for his crime? The play dramatizes his inner acceptance of his human nature, his admission of guilt, and his redemption through the saving of Half-Child. Soyinka seems to suggest that all salvation is essentially personal and must follow the path of self-awareness, confession, and risk—a rite of passage across the abyss that separates human beings and the gods. The public celebration at the Gathering of the Tribes is pointless and meaningless, even hypocritical, because it denies the realities of the past and the destructive, darker side of human nature. The play thus offers both a tragic vision of life and hope for the future through the courageous acts of individual people. It also identifies the artist as the key provoker of self-awareness. Like Demoke, he is closest to the abyss; he possesses “fingers of the dead.” The Strong Breed and Kongi’s Harvest • Between A Dance of the Forests in 1960 and The Road in 1965, Soyinka devoted his energies to the writing of his first novel, The Interpreters, but he did complete two plays, The Strong Breed and Kongi’s Harvest, both of which present a young man taking the responsibilities of the community on his own shoulders. In The Strong Breed, Eman first tries to deny the very fact of ritual atonement, especially his own inherited role as the “carrier” of tribal guilt; eventually, however, he plays out this role in another tribe with such obsession that he pays for his rebellion with his life. Daodu, in Kongi’s Harvest, assumes the Hamlet-like role of avenger as he challenges the authority of the usurping President Kongi, forcing him in the climactic scene to face the horrors of death, of the abyss, which in his egotism he had ignored. In both plays, the myth of transition clearly remains the key to self-awareness. The Road • These two plays were followed by The Road, Soyinka’s first drama centered on the danger to human sanity posed by contact with the chthonic realm. The setting of The Road differs significantly from that of A Dance of the Forests. The latter takes place entirely within the realm of passage—symbolically the forest—and hence is essentially an inner experience; in contrast, The Road takes place in society—although a very specialized and symbolic segment of it—and is mainly concerned with

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the effects of death on social behavior. The vision of A Dance of the Forests is, broadly speaking, tragic, but with a comic ending: Demoke receives both atonement and a sobering projection of the future. The Road, on the other hand, maintains a comic atmosphere through most of its scenes but ends on a tragic note; it actually contains every conceivable dramatic mode, from satire and realism to Symbolism and the absurd. Like A Dance of the Forests, it is a complex, multifaceted, and ambiguous play. Structurally, The Road proceeds in a manner similar to A Dance of the Forests, from the ordinary to the ritualistic. Throughout, Soyinka maintains a tension between the practical world of survival and the spiritual world of essences, between the self and the other. Samson is a realist. He always retains contact with the ordinary world and fulfills the role of mirror or “narrator” even though he never steps out of his role as character. He is the reference point by which one measures the psychological states and obsessions of the other characters. In part 1, he remains onstage and controls the action until the final scene, when Professor, the epitome of obsession with death and the other major figure in the play, takes over the action. The same pattern emerges in part 2, in which Samson and Professor are usually onstage together and in which the balance gradually shifts in the direction of ritual. The setting for the play is a kind of rundown truck stop. Samson is a “tout” for the truck driver Kotonu, who has recently given up his job for psychological reasons that the play gradually makes clear. Professor, a former lay reader in the adjacent church, now runs the truckers’ rest stop, which doubles as a spare-parts shop and headquarters of his Quest for the meaning of Death. He holds his own communion every evening for his followers and hangers-on. Murano, his assistant and palm-wine tapster, symbol of the transition stage and Professor’s best hope for enlightenment, leaves every morning and returns in the evening with wine for the ritual service. The play deals with one day in the lives of these characters, a day made decisive by two recent occurrences that bring Professor’s Quest to its crisis. In part 1, the occurrences are merely suggested; part 2 contains their reenactment as past merges with present. Kotonu and Samson narrowly missed being killed in an accident on the road; a truck passed them and then fell through a rotted portion of a bridge. Though Samson viewed the near miss stoically, Kotonu was so disturbed by the thought of death that he has given up driving, much to the displeasure of Samson, whose main preoccupation throughout the play is to restore Kotonu to his common sense. To this end, Samson solicits the aid of Professor, who has hired Kotonu to manage the spare-parts store. Samson insists that Kotonu’s genius is in driving, not in scavenging parts off wrecked vehicles and selling them. Professor, however, is sympathetic with Kotonu’s sudden concern with death. The second incident is even more significant. Kotonu and Samson were involved in a hit-and-run accident in which they “killed” a man masquerading as Ogun (the “guardian of the road”) in a ritual ceremony; he was in the agemo phase, in transition from the human to the divine essence. They hid the body in the back of the truck and carried it to the truck stop, where Professor found it. This victim is the Murano of the play, in dumb suspension between life and death and, hence, supposedly in possession of secrets that Professor is after. The incident intensified Kotonu’s withdrawal, especially since he was required to don Murano’s bloody mask to escape capture by the other celebrants. Thus, Kotonu himself symbolically became the god Ogun in the rite of passage. The reenactment of these scenes, together with several others in which Samson mimics Professor or recalls past incidents, dramatizes the impact of death on the living and structurally prepares for the final ritual act.

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One other significant event has also recently occurred. Usually Professor leaves every morning for his tour of the road and, like Murano, does not return until evening. On this particular day, he has broken that pattern after coming upon a wreck and finding a road sign with the word “Bend” on it, which he takes to be symbolic. He returns to his headquarters more absentminded than usual and then departs in a daze. Part 1 ends at noon with a funeral service for the victims of the accident at the bridge, and with the return of Murano, confused by the organ music that usually calls him back in the evening. The day is clearly ominous. Murano is almost “killed” as a thief by one of the hangers-on. The communion service at the end of part 2 is the culmination of the various “performances” during the play that have become progressively more intense. The policeman, Particulars Joe, is at the truck stop in search of the hit-and-run victim, whom no one has as yet identified as Murano. The identification soon becomes clear as Murano discovers the Mask he had worn, puts it on, and begins the dance that is to continue until Professor’s closing speech. Everyone at the communion, already intoxicated by the wine, senses the power of the moment, the traditional reenactment of the rite of passage from human to divine. Murano is becoming possessed by the god Ogun. Professor hopes to use the moment to gain secret knowledge of death without dying himself. Salubi, to retain his sanity, wants to leave. Say Tokyo Kid, apparently the Eshuoro figure, symbolic of retribution and destruction, skeptical of such ritual behavior, challenges Murano and, during the struggle, stabs Professor with a knife passed to him by Salubi. Murano, completely possessed by the god, hurls Say Tokyo Kid to his death. Professor ends the play with a sermon to his followers, enjoining them to imitate the Road by lying in wait and treacherously destroying the unsuspecting traveler. The key figure in this play is Professor, but he is such a strange composite that the play remains an ambiguous statement. He is an archetypal character, or rather a composite of archetypes. He is Faust, Falstaff, Jesus, and Don Quixote mixed up in a bundle of conflicting motives. Like Falstaff, he insists on the survival instincts in human nature. Like Faust, he challenges the gods to achieve knowledge denied to the descendants of Adam. He has messianic fantasies, but he is maddened by his preoccupation with death as surely as Don Quixote’s romance with literature blinds him to ordinary reality. It is as though the mind of Professor has become a chaotic image of the chthonic realm that he so desperately searches out but that he as a human being cannot understand. He never learns that the road of his daily wanderings on which his drivers make their living is not a real substitute for the Road that Ogun traveled to make contact with the human. Whereas Demoke in A Dance of the Forests undergoes the transition experience but retains his human perspective, Professor becomes obsessed with the realm itself and intellectualizes himself out of human society. To a large extent he is a comic figure—the proverbial absentminded professor—but the ambivalent messianic-Machiavellian Quest gives him a certain magnificent dimension and elevates his flaw to the hubris of classical tragedy. The Trials of Brother Jero and Jero’s Metamorphosis • The chaotic misdirection of The Road—and, indeed, of much of Soyinka’s work in the 1960’s, with its motifs of political chicanery, moral inertia, and death in modern Nigeria—anticipated the horrors of the Biafran War at the end of the decade. The war and Soyinka’s two-year detention in prison did not, in fact, drastically change his philosophical approach to his craft, but they did intensify his concerns. The Trials of Brother Jero, for example, written

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before the war, is political and social satire, but Jero as the trickster is essentially a comic figure mixing farce and wit. The political caricature who undergoes a mock transformation in the final scene is more ridiculous than dangerous. In a companion piece, however, Jero’s Metamorphosis, written after the war, the ritual transformation of the beach prophets into an Apostolic Salvation Army is a thinly veiled attack on a military regime that has, as the play reiterates, made public execution a national spectacle. Jero, dressed in his general’s uniform, sitting underneath his own portrait as the curtain falls, is a sinister threat to moral sanity. Madmen and Specialists • The very subject of Madmen and Specialists, written soon after Soyinka’s release from prison, is the war’s devastating effect on every phase of human life. Its central character, Bero, is hubris itself in his absolute denial of the essence of Yoruba culture: the continuity of life, the gods, the ancestors, and humankind’s responsibility toward the future. He renders meaningless the realm that links human beings with the gods, and he violates the primary law of existence—return to nature as much as or more than is taken from it—and reduces people to organisms. The Bacchae • Soyinka’s willingness to undertake an adaptation of Euripides’ Bakchai (405 b.c.e.; The Bacchae, 1781) thus comes as no surprise: It, too, deals with a madman in defiance of the gods and of the basic rhythms of human society and human nature. Dionysian possession and retribution are the closest thing in Western culture to the worship of Ogun among the Yoruba: The Bacchae, like Madmen and Specialists, constitutes a warning to militaristic oppression. In all three of these postwar plays, the motif of death, the numinous realm of passage, has retained its central place within the philosophical and dramatic structure; it has simply taken on added significance and urgency because of the realities through which Soyinka has had to live. Death has become part of a greater political commitment and a deeper pessimism. Death and the King’s Horseman • The new commitment and tone are nowhere more evident than in Death and the King’s Horseman, a play that addresses the failure of the older generation to preserve intact the traditional Yoruba culture and that pessimistically depicts the attempt of their children to undertake the responsibility. According to Yoruba custom, when a king dies, his horseman must, at the end of the thirty days of mourning, commit suicide and join him in the passage to the underworld; otherwise, the king remains in the passage, subject to evil forces. Soyinka builds his play around the king’s horseman, Elesin Oba, whose weakness of will breaks the age-old formula and places the entire society in danger of extinction. As with the other plays, much of the action is ritual, and, as is common in Soyinka, the climactic scenes combine dramatic peripeteia with divine possession and entrance into the transition phase. The structure also reflects the clash of African and Western cultures, a theme common in African literature but rather rare in Soyinka; the scenes alternate between Nigerian and British settings. Soyinka insists in a prefatory note that the British presence is only accidental: Elesin’s failure is not imposed from without but is self-inflicted. Soyinka organizes the play with his usual economy. All the action takes place within the span of a few hours. Act 1 presents Elesin’s procession through the market just at closing time, on the way to his own death: He and his Praise Singer chant his fate. His love of the market as a symbol of earthly activity and life, however, suggests his ambivalence toward his role, and when he sees a beautiful young girl and arranges with Iyaloja, her future mother-in-law and leader of the market women, to marry and

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enjoy this maiden as his last earthly act, his eventual failure to carry out his appointed role is almost certain. Both Iyaloja and the audience, however, yield temporarily to Elesin’s sophistic arguments. He insists that this is not mere sexual indulgence but a mingling of the “seeds of passage” with the life of the unborn; he deceives himself and his audience with poetic fancies and beautiful language. Iyaloja grants him the gift of the girl but warns him of his responsibility. His poetic fancy will not become a reality unless he dies. In act 2, the scene changes to the home of the British District Officer, Simon Pilkings, and his wife, Jane; the accompanying music changes from sacred chant and rhythm to the tango. The egungun mask, used in Ogun worship to represent divine possession, has been turned into a costume for the masquerade later that evening. Here, Soyinka presents ritual suicide through the eyes of the supercilious Pilkings, who rejects Yoruba culture as barbaric; Jane is more sympathetic but still uncomprehending. Simon arranges for Amusa, a Nigerian sergeant in his employ, to arrest Elesin and prevent the completion of the ritual. Act 3 begins with a comic scene in which the market women and their daughters turn Sergeant Amusa’s duty into a mockery and send him packing back to his white superior. This moment of hilarious triumph gives way to what appears to be the climactic scene of the play, Elesin’s emergence from his wedding chamber and his hypnotic dance of possession as he symbolically enters the abyss of transition. This sacred event is replaced again by the artificiality of British custom, as act 4 begins with a mime at the masquerade ball, with the prince of Wales (having come to Nigeria as a gesture of courage and solidarity during World War II) and his entourage dressed in seventeenth century costume, dancing to a Viennese waltz and admiring Pilkings’s demonstration of the egungun dance movements and vocal accompaniments. When he learns that Amusa has failed in his mission, Pilkings departs for the market to halt the suicide. Meanwhile, Jane has a long discussion with Elesin’s son, Olunde, who has just returned from studying medicine in England to oversee his father’s ritual burial. Jane is shocked that Olunde still clings to barbaric customs in spite of his Western education; in turn, Olunde suggests the greater barbarism of world wars, and there is no meeting of minds. The act closes with the unexpected return of Pilkings with Elesin. Olunde, who had assumed with absolute confidence that his father had completed the ritual obligation, senses immediately the cosmic reversal of roles, represented onstage by the father on his knees begging forgiveness from his son and the son judging the father. Act 5 sees Elesin in chains imprisoned at the Residency. Iyaloja and the other market women bear the body of Olunde to his cell. She condemns Elesin for forcing his son to die in his place, thus reversing the cycle of nature. At the sight of his son, Elesin strangles himself with his chain and enters the abyss, though perhaps too late to satisfy the demands of the gods. What is especially significant about this scene is Elesin’s second attempt to conceal the truth from himself. In act 2, he had refused to face his excessive love of life, his inability to leave the world of pleasure to the young. Now, in his conversation with Iyaloja before his recognition of his son, Elesin is denying responsibility for his failure of will. He blames the tempting touch of young flesh and mentions Iyaloja’s own complicity in the temptation; he blames especially Pilkings for his abrupt intervention. His most significant statement, however, is his self-serving appeal to the cultural situation. The power and influence of British culture, he says, caused him to question the loyalty of his own gods, and he came to doubt the validity of the ritual itself. The play ends with a dirge over the deaths of Olunde and

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Elesin, but also, perhaps, over the death of a culture. Iyaloja and Olunde have completed the ritual as best they could, but she is not sure whether the son’s death will satisfy the gods. The question remains, whether the younger generation of Nigerians will be able to save the civilization that their parents, in self-indulgence, doubt, and cowardice, have abandoned. A Play of Giants and Requiem for a Futurologist • Two satirical plays of the 1980’s, A Play of Giants and Requiem for a Futurologist, insist that neither the political leaders nor the people have emerged from the chaos. In the first, set in New York City, Field-Marshal Kamini (a thinly disguised Idi Amin of Uganda) is a con artist who leads three other heads of state in a hostage-taking, blackmailing, terrorist challenge against the United Nations. It is an all-out, farcical attack on the worship of power by those who wield it and those who submit to it. In the second play, the con artist is an opportunistic servant, Alaba, who uses various disguises to “overthrow” his master, Dr. Godspeak, a well-known prophet or “futurologist,” by convincing the public and the doctor himself that he is dead. At Godspeak’s “death,” Alaba becomes the futurologist, a reincarnation of the famous French astrologer Nostradamus, who can use his supposed powers to exploit a gullible population. In Kamini and Alaba, Soyinka thus metamorphoses once again the Jero of the 1960 play. Nigeria—and the world—still plays the grotesque, exhausting, and futile game of the quack and the dupe. Plays of the 1990’s • Three plays written in the 1990’s, From Zia, with Love, A Scourge of Hyacinths, and The Beatification of Area Boy: A Lagosian Kaleidoscope, are Soyinka’s direct responses to the military dictators and irresponsible government of Nigeria. For his critical portrayals, Soyinka paid an additional four years (1993 to 1998) of self-imposed exile. During that period, he taught and traveled in the United States and England. Both From Zia, with Love and A Scourge of Hyacinths were originally written as radio plays. Each grew out of real situations. Whether parodying the dictatorship of General Sani Abachu by comparing life under him to living in a prison in From Zia, with Love or likening the destruction of civil liberties to an invasion of water hyacinths in A Scourge of Hyacinths, Soyinka used his position as a world-respected writer to protest and was charged with treason for his efforts. The Beatification of Area Boy • The Beatification of Area Boy shows the suffering of the average Nigerian at the hands of both the military and corrupt politicians. Soyinka’s protagonist is Sanda, a university dropout, who is the leader of a group of small-time vendors on Broad Street in Lagos, the capital. This one-act play, written in 1995, combines many of Soyinka’s writing strengths with his political determination. He uses the setting of the streets of modern Lagos to illustrate the huge disparities in the lives of Nigerians and to show that while at one time the country’s problems may have been imposed on it by outsiders, usually Western powers, current difficulties are primarily indigenous, rooted in the corruption and greed of the Nigerian military and political parties. The title is taken from the name given to the Area Boys, or young men who operate more or less like gang leaders in specific, assigned turf in Lagos, basically conning and blackmailing wealthy businesspeople and tourists. Their quasi-director and the play’s protagonist is Sanda. What becomes quickly apparent is that Sanda and all the other

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characters hustling on the street really have no other choice. The corruption and brutality in the country have made it all but impossible for them to have legitimate jobs and the chance at a better life. Soyinka’s sympathy for the ordinary Nigerian is obvious because the characters exude charm and warmth and care for each other in addition to exhibiting a realistic assessment of their situation and the powers that persecute them. On this busy street, working from their humble stalls, exists a community of people like Mama Put, who sells food; Judge, a vagrant; Barber; Cyclist; Boyko; Sanda; and Sanda’s former girlfriend Miseyi, although she is actually from a well-connected family. The police, military officers, and a military governor use their considerable positions and thugs against these people, who are merely trying to survive. A public wedding and the bride’s lastminute rejection of the groom force a showdown between the street people and the military and political powers. Despite a serious skirmish complete with gunshots and beatings, the street people escape to try another day, showing that Soyinka still harbors hope for his country. Soyinka’s considerable skill at presenting song and dance in his plays is evident in The Beatification of Area Boy. For example, upset because the Area Boys have overcome some of his soldiers, a screeching military officer belts out a tune entitled, “DON’T TOUCH MY UNIFORM!!!” Another song example is “Maroko,” which describes a “wretched shanty town.” Both are funny despite the pathetic and miserable situations being described. Other major works long fiction: The Interpreters, 1965; Season of Anomy, 1973. poetry: Idanre and Other Poems, 1967; Poems from Prison, 1969; A Shuttle in the Crypt, 1972; Ogun Abibiman, 1976; Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems, 1988; Early Poems, 1997. nonfiction: “The Man Died”: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka, 1972 (autobiography); Myth, Literature, and the African World, 1976; Aké: The Years of Childhood, 1981 (autobiography); Art, Dialogue, and Outrage, 1988; Ìsarà: A Voyage Around “Essay,” 1989; The Credo of Being and Nothingness, 1991; Wole Soyinka on “Identity,” 1992; Orisha Liberated the Mind: Wole Soyinka in Conversation with Ulli Beier on Yoruba Religion, 1992; “Death and the Kings’ Horseman”: A Conversation Between Wole Soyinka and Ulli Beier, 1993; Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years: A Memoir, 1946-1965, 1994; The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis, 1996; The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness, 1999; Seven Signposts of Existence: Knowledge, Humour, Justice, and Other Virtues, 1999; Conversations with Wole Soyinka, 2001 (Biodun Jeyifo, editor). translation: Forest of a Thousand Daemons: A Hunter’s Saga, 1968 (of D. O. Fagunwa’s novel Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale). Bibliography Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. In the House of Oshugbo: Critical Essays on Wole Soyinka. London: Oxford University Press, 2002. This large collection of essays includes analyses of specific plays, biographical information, comparative studies involving contemporary writers such as Bertolt Brecht and James Joyce, and discussions of literary theory, the art of writing, and Yoruba culture. Jeyifo, Biodun, ed. Conversations with Wole Soyinka. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. The first book to feature recorded interviews of Soyinka. Interviewers include Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Anthony Appiah, and Biodun Jeyifo. These interviews help clarify what are called the obscurities in Soyinka’s most difficult plays.

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_______. Perspectives on Wole Soyinka. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. This collection of critical essays covers three decades. Its major contribution is analyzing Soyinka’s work using many kinds of contemporary schools of critical theory from feminism to recuperated phenomenology. Also discussed are his postcolonial politics and aestheticism. Jones, Eldred Durosimi. The Writing of Wole Soyinka. 3d ed. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1988. This introductory survey of Soyinka’s works opens with a background essay on the author. Subsequent essays deal with individual texts under the general chapter headings “Autobiography,” “Plays,” “Poetry,” and “Fiction.” Essays on thirteen plays follow a summary-commentary format, approaching them as individual, literary texts, but with some cross-referencing, a few production and theatrical notes, and occasional attention to stylistic development. Includes a biographical outline and a brief bibliography. Lindfors, Bernth, and James Gibbs, eds. Research on Wole Soyinka. Lawrenceville, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1992. These essays represent a wide variety of critical methodologies applied to Soyinka’s works, including linguistics and structural, textual, and cultural interpretations. Maja-Pearce, Adewale, ed. Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1994. This book is a collection of essays primarily by African writers. Topics include Soyinka’s fiction, poetry, and drama, as well as the African culture from which he writes. His Noble lecture is the lead entry. An interview with Soyinka is also presented. Okome, Onookome. Ogun’s Children: The Literature and Politics of Wole Soyinka Since the Nobel Prize. Lawrenceville, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2002. An analysis of Soyinka that focuses on his work since receiving the Nobel Prize. Wright, Derek. Wole Soyinka Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1992. This introductory study of Soyinka includes critical studies of his works, biographical information, and a chronology of his life and works. Thomas Banks, updated by Judith Steininger

Tom Stoppard Tom Stoppard

Tomas Straussler Born: Zlin, Czechoslovakia; July 3, 1937 Principal drama • A Walk on the Water, pr. 1963 (televised; revised and televised as The Preservation of George Riley, 1964; revised and staged as Enter a Free Man, pr., pb. 1968); The Gamblers, pr. 1965; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, pr. 1966, pb. 1967; Tango, pr. 1966, pb. 1968 (adapted from the play by Slawomir Mroxek); Albert’s Bridge, pr. 1967 (radio play), pr. 1969 (staged), pb. 1969; The Real Inspector Hound, pr., pb. 1968 (one act); After Magritte, pr. 1970, pb. 1971 (one act); Dogg’s Our Pet, pr. 1971, pb. 1976 (one act); Jumpers, pr., pb. 1972; Travesties, pr. 1974, pb. 1975; Dirty Linen and NewFound-Land, pr., pb. 1976; The Fifteen-Minute Hamlet, pr. 1976, pb. 1978; Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, pr. 1977, pb. 1978 (music by André Previn); Night and Day, pr., pb. 1978; Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth, pr. 1979, pb. 1980; Undiscovered Country, pr. 1979, pb. 1980 (adapted from Arthur Schnitzler’s play Das weite Land); On the Razzle, pr., pb. 1981 (adaptation of Johann Nestroy’s play Einen Jux will er sich machen); The Real Thing, pr., pb. 1982; The Dog It Was That Died, and Other Plays, pb. 1983; The Love for Three Oranges, pr. 1983 (adaptation of Sergei Prokofiev’s opera); Rough Crossing, pr. 1984, pb. 1985 (adaptation of Ferenc Molnár’s play Play at the Castle); Dalliance, pr., pb. 1986 (adapted from Arthur Schnitzler’s play Liebelei ); Hapgood, pr., pb. 1988; The Boundary, pb. 1991 (with Clive Exton); Arcadia, pr., pb. 1993; The Real Inspector Hound and Other Entertainments, pb. 1993; Indian Ink, pr., pb. 1995; The Invention of Love, pr., pb. 1997; The Seagull, pr., pb. 1997 (adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s play); Plays: Four, pb. 1999; Plays: Five, pb. 1999 Other literary forms • In addition to composing plays and occasionally adapting the dramas of others, Tom Stoppard has written several short stories, radio plays, teleplays, screenplays, and the novel Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon (1966). He prides himself on his versatility, eschewing the notion of the dedicated author plowing a lonely furrow and sacrificing almost all other concerns on the altar of high art. Instead, as he told an interviewer in 1976: I’ve got a weakness . . . for rather shallow people who knock off a telly play and write a rather good novel and . . . interview Castro and write a good poem and a bad poem and . . . every five years do a really good piece of work as well. That sort of eclectic, trivial person who’s very gifted. Stoppard’s novel Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon is “rather good.” It is an exuberant farce that uses a collage of literary styles and allusions ranging from those of Joseph Conrad to Oscar Wilde, and from James Joyce to T. S. Eliot. Lord Malquist is a modernday earl who seeks to sustain the dandyish refinements of his eighteenth century ancestors. His hired diarist, Mr. Moon, is a pathetically ineffectual man obsessively nursing a homemade bomb. Where the imperious and selfish Malquist anticipates such later dramatic characters as Sir Archibald Jumper of Jumpers, the confused, Prufrockian Moon models for the rebuffs experienced by the same text’s George Moore. Malquist 914

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sums up what seems to be the novel’s thesis when he declares, “since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the chaos.” Achievements • Tom Stoppard’s dramaturgy has a uniquely wide appeal in the contemporary theater because he often manages to combine comedy with social concern, farce with moral philosophy, and sometimes absurdism with naturalism. He and Harold Pinter, beginning in the 1960’s, came to be considered the English-speaking world’s leading playwrights. Both owe a large debt to Samuel Beckett and exhibit a willingness to experiment with theatrical forms. Pinter’s sparse language, pauses, and silences, however, contrast sharply with Stoppard’s free-flowing fountains of verbal play and display. Moreover, Pinter’s carefully guarded characters and often baffling, static plots could not differ more from Stoppard’s accessible people and vividly detailed, fastpaced action sequences. His plays have won Tony and Olivier awards. The film of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival in 1990. In 1999 Shakespeare in Love, for which he wrote the screenplay, won seven Academy awards and three Golden Globes. In 1997 Stoppard became the first British playwright to be knighted since Terence Rattigan. Stoppard’s work is postmodernist in its self-conscious artfulness and intricate game playing. He loves to confound his audience with abrupt shifts of time and convention, unreliable narrations, and surprising twists of plot. His eclectic borrowings fuse high and low culture, invading the texts of William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Wilde, Joyce, Eliot, and many more to combine them with “whodunit” thrillers, journalistic techniques, music-hall comedies, and popular love songs. The leading debate among Stoppard’s critics is whether his works are too frivolous and waggish to be taken seriously and whether, despite his eye for striking situations and ear for witty talk, he is no more than an ingenious but juvenile sprinter, too shortwinded to complete the potential of his promising situations. His supporters insist that Stoppard is able to fuse his fertile comic sense with intellectual substance. They find his vision of life mature and profound as he dramatizes such concerns as free will versus fate (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead), moral philosophy (Jumpers), art versus politics (Travesties), totalitarianism (Every Good Boy Deserves Favour), the press’s freedoms and responsibilities (Night and Day), and married love (The Real Thing). They assert that Stoppard’s career has shown an increasing commitment to ethical humanism and freedom of conscience while his dramatic craft has forged a rare compact between high comedy and the drama of ideas. Biography • Tomas Straussler was born on July 3, 1937, in the town of Zlin, Czechoslovakia, since renamed Gottwaldov. He was the youngest of two sons of a physician, Eugene Straussler, and his wife, Martha. Stoppard’s parents were Jewish, although Stoppard did not know this until much later in life. Their religious background caused the family to move to Singapore in early 1939, on the eve of the German invasion of their homeland. In 1942, all but the father moved again, to India, just before the Japanese invasion, in which Dr. Straussler was killed. In 1946, Martha Straussler married Kenneth Stoppard, a major in the British army who was stationed in India. Both children took their stepfather’s name when the family moved to England later that year. Demobilized, Kenneth Stoppard prospered as a machine-tool salesperson. Despite this globe-trotting background—in one interview he called himself “a bounced Czech”—Stoppard has spoken and written in English since the age of five. His first school in Darjeeling, India, was an English-language, American-run institu-

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tion. He attended preparatory schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, leaving at the age of seventeen after having completed his “A” levels. In 1954, he began working as a local journalist in Bristol, rejoicing in the life of a newspaper reporter for the next six years. He did not consider becoming a playwright until the late 1950’s, when a new breed of English dramatists, led by John Osborne and Arnold Wesker, asserted themselves on the London stage. Simultaneously, a new breed of actors emerged, prominent among them Peter O’Toole, whose blazing performances for the Bristol Old Vic repertory company definitively turned Stoppard to the theater. In July, 1960, Stoppard wrote The Gamblers—a one-act clumsily derived from Beckett’s En attendant Godot (pb. 1952, pr. 1953; Waiting for Godot, 1954)—which was unsuccessfully staged in Bristol in 1965. Later in 1960, he composed his first full-length play, A Walk on the Water. Considerably rewritten and retitled Enter a Free Man, it was staged in London in 1968 after Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead had established Stoppard as a major playwright. In 1962, Stoppard moved to a London suburb and became the drama critic of a new magazine, Scene, which folded after eight months. Fortunately, he had begun by then a steady career as a writer of radio plays for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). With the aid of a Ford Foundation grant, he wrote, in 1964, a one-act version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which he rewrote and expanded for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1965, then for the Oxford Theatre Group in 1966, which performed it at that year’s Edinburgh Festival. An enthusiastic review in The Observer caused Laurence Olivier to buy the play for his National Theatre, which staged it in 1967. Critical acclaim showered on this production, which continued in the National Theatre’s repertoire for an unprecedented three and a half years. In 1965, Stoppard married Jose Ingle; they became the parents of two sons, Oliver and Barnaby. They were divorced in 1972, and the same year, Stoppard married Dr. Miriam Moore-Robinson, a physician and television personality, with whom he had two sons, William and Edmond. After the worldwide success of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard not only has produced a number of one-act and full-length dramas but also has adapted the plays of several European writers. He has written film scripts as well as radio and television plays. He has directed several stage plays, usually but not always his own, and has supervised the filming of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. In 1983, he adapted Sergei Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges for the Glyndebourne Opera. Although he had known that one or two of his grandparents were Jewish, Stoppard learned in 1994 that, in fact, all of his grandparents were Jewish and all were killed by the Nazis. His adopted father’s anti-Semitism became public when he asked Stoppard in 1996 to stop using the name Stoppard because the playwright had been working for the cause of Russian Jews. In 1999 he wrote an article entitled “On Turning Out to Be Jewish” in which he discusses how these discoveries fundamentally altered his sense of self. Analysis • Tom Stoppard’s dramaturgy reveals a cyclical pattern of activity. He tends to explore certain subjects or techniques in several minor works, then creates a major play that integrates the fruits of his earlier trial runs. Thus Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead explores the dialectic of individual freedom opposed to entrapment, which such earlier plays as A Walk on the Water had rehearsed. Stoppard’s major theatrical work in the late twentieth century, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink, and The Invention of Love show a depth to his characters and ideas that did not exist in his earlier work. Unlike his early plays, which were often described by critics as

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being too academic, his later work demonstrates Stoppard’s discovery of lyricism. Although just as complex intellectually, these later plays are equally about ideas and emotions and present fully realized characters, rather than the witty, though ultimately shallow ones that populate his work before The Real Thing. Despite greater emphasis on developed characters, these late plays still manage to tackle concepts as diverse and complex as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (in Hapgood), chaos theory (in Arcadia), colonialism (in Indian Ink), and classicism (in The Invention of Love). Stoppard has already earned an honored place in the ranks of England’s playwrights. Like Wilde, his ferocious wit and intellectual acuity dazzle audiences; like Shaw, he stylishly explores intellectual and emotional dilemmas; and like Beckett, his comedy is sometimes bathed in pain and sadness. Altogether, Stoppard is an immensely talented, uniquely unclassifiable writer who invites his public to discover the humaneness of plays and the glory of the English language’s density and richness. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead • In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard assumes the audience’s close knowledge of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (pr. c. 1600-1601, pb. 1603). In the Elizabethan tragedy, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are two former schoolmates of Hamlet who have been summoned to Elsinore by King Claudius to probe the puzzling behavior of the prince. Hamlet soon intuits that they have become Claudius’s spies. When Claudius has them accompany Hamlet on the ship to England, Hamlet discovers the King’s letter ordering his execution. He coolly substitutes his escorts’ names for his in the letter and shrugs off their consequent deaths as resulting from their dangerous trade of espionage. From a total of nine scenes in Hamlet, Prince of Denmark involving Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Stoppard incorporates six, omits two, and distributes the other in scenes wholly devised by him. Stoppard’s Ros and Guil know that they have been summoned to Elsinore but can remember nothing more of their past. They are two bewildered young men playing pointless games (such as coin flipping) in a theatrical void, while the real action unfolds off stage. They are adrift in a predetermined plot, bumbling Shakespeare’s lines on the occasions when the palace intrigue sweeps their way. Just as Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon engage in mock-philosophizing disputations and vain recollections as they await Godot, so Ros and Guil pursue frequent speculations about their past, their identity, and the baffling world around them. Stoppard has here constructed an absurdist drama that owes its largest debts to Franz Kafka and Beckett. His Ros and Guil are unaccountably summoned to a mysterious castle where, between long periods of waiting, they receive cryptic instructions that eventually lead to their deaths. They remain uncertain whether they are the victims of chance or fate, mystified by events that are within the boundaries of their awareness but outside the circumference of their understanding. Like Beckett’s Vladimir, Ros is the one who worries and protects; like Beckett’s Estragon, Guil is the one who feels and follows. Beckett’s world is, however, considerably bleaker than Stoppard’s. He offers no comforting irony behind his characters’ somber metaphysical flights, while Stoppard’s buffoonery is humane. He presents his coprotagonists as likable though confused and frightened strangers in a world somebody else seems to have organized. Stoppard’s literary borrowings include a generous slice of Eliot’s poetry, as Ros and Guil imitate Prufock in their roles as attendants and easy tools, playing insignificant parts in a ferociously patterned plot featuring mightier powers. This sympathy for the ineffectual underdog is a constant in Stoppard’s dramatic world, as he demonstrates,

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over and over, his compassionate concern for decent people shouldered aside and manipulated by more brutal peers. Is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead an immensely entertaining but ultimately shallow exercise, or is it a brilliant transposition of Shakespeare’s universe to Beckett’s absurdist world? Most critics and large audiences have cast their votes in favor of this erudite, witty, crackling clever drama. Jumpers • A second group of Stoppard’s plays dramatizes the conflict between a protagonist’s wish to know and the many difficulties that frustrate this desire, such as the limitations of human perceptions, the frequent deceptiveness of one’s senses, and the complexity of ethical choices in a world in which guidance is either uncertain or unavailable. Plays belonging to this category include such one-acts as After Magritte and the radio play Artist Descending a Staircase (1972), as well as Stoppard’s two most ambitious, full-length dramas, Jumpers and Travesties. Jumpers is a kaleidoscopic work, part bedroom farce, part murder mystery, part political satire, part metaphysical inquiry, and part cosmic tragedy, creating new configurations of ideas and themes from each angle of vision. Stoppard’s hero is George Moore, a work-obsessed, seedy, middle-aged professor of moral philosophy, whose name is identical with that of the great English thinker who wrote Principia Ethica (1903). George’s career has ground to a halt because his adherence to absolute values—beauty, goodness, God—makes him odd man out in a university dominated by logical positivists who hold that value judgments cannot be empirically verified and are therefore relative and meaningless. George’s main adversary is Sir Archibald Jumper, vice chancellor of the university, who is authoritative in a staggering number of roles: He holds degrees in medicine, philosophy, literature, and law, and diplomas in psychiatry and gymnastics. He is organizer of the Jumpers—a combination of philosophical gymnasts and gymnastic philosophers—all members of the Radical Liberal Party that Archie also heads. The Radical Liberals embody Stoppard’s satiric vision of socialism in action. Having just won an election—which they may have rigged—they have taken over the broadcasting services, arrested all newspaper owners, and appointed a veterinary surgeon Archbishop of Canterbury. The female principal in the George-Archie struggle is represented by George’s beautiful but aptly named wife, Dotty. She is a neurotic musical-comedy star, many years younger than her husband, who retired from the stage after having suffered a nervous breakdown because she believed that the landing of a human being on the Moon had eliminated that planet as a source of romance and thousands of songs. In an ironic reversal of the selflessly heroic British Antarctic Expedition of 1912, Dotty sees, on her bedroom television set, a fight for survival between the damaged space capsule’s commander, Captain Scott, and his subordinate officer, Oates. To reduce the weight load, Scott kicks Oates off the capsule’s ladder, thereby condemning him to death. Pragmatism has sacrificed moral values—an indictment of logical positivism’s slippery ethics. George and Archie are not only philosophic but also erotic rivals. While Dotty has barred her husband from her body—and he makes little effort to overcome her resistance—she is available at all hours to Archie, who visits her in the mornings in her bedroom and is her doctor and psychiatrist and presumably her lover, leaving her room “looking more than a little complacent.” In the first scene, as the Jumpers tumble in the Moores’ apartment to celebrate the Rad-Lib victory, a bullet suddenly kills one of them. He turns out to be Duncan McFee, a logical positivist who was scheduled to debate with George at a symposium

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the next day. Dotty is left whimpering with the corpse, while George, concentrating on composing his lecture, knows nothing of the killing, so that he and his wife talk at cross-purposes while the body hangs behind her bedroom door, always unseen by him. Stoppard parodies the whodunit formula by having Inspector Bones bumble the murder investigation. The resourceful Archie persuades Bones to drop the case by having Dotty trap him in an apparently compromising position. At the close of act 2, McFee is revealed as probably the victim of George’s vengeful secretary, who had been McFee’s mistress and had learned that he was married and planned to enter a monastery. Holding together the frequently delirious action is the shabby but lovable person of George, shuffling distractedly between his study and Dotty’s bedroom, preparing his case against Archie’s cynical materialism, which insists that observability has to be a predicate of all genuine knowledge. He does his best—and clearly advocates Stoppard’s position—to defend a God in whom he cannot wholly bring himself to believe, so as to support his adherence to moral and aesthetic standards, which he considers a necessary basis for civilization. The condescending Archie dismisses George as no more than the local eccentric: “[He] is our tame believer, pointed out to visitors in much the same spirit as we point out the magnificent stained glass in what is now the gymnasium.” George is less mocked by Stoppard as bumbler and clown than he is admired as a fragmented culture’s last humanist, clinging with mad gallantry to lasting values. In Jumpers, Stoppard has written his best play. It is not only a swiftly paced farce and mystery but also a brilliantly humane comedy about the only animal in the cosmos trapped in the toils of an overdeveloped consciousness: the human being. The ultimate mystery, Jumpers suggests, is the meaning of life. The work constitutes Stoppard’s richest and most brilliant exploration of ethical concerns. Artist Descending a Staircase • In Artist Descending a Staircase, a radio play, Stoppard undertook what he has called “a dry run” of Travesties. Artist Descending a Staircase uses a continuous loop of recording tape to involve the audience with three artists engaged in an inquiry into the meaning of art. A more striking bond, between Jumpers and Travesties, has been summarized by Stoppard in an interview: Jumpers and Travesties are very similar plays. . . . You start with a prologue which is slightly strange. Then you have an interminable monologue which is rather funny. Then you have scenes. Then you end up with another monologue. And you have unexpected bits of music and dance, and at the same time people are playing pingpong with various intellectual arguments. Travesties • Travesties is aptly named. In one of those travesties of probability, the writer James Joyce, the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, and the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (who assumed the name of Lenin) were all living in Zurich in 1917: the Irishman working on Ulysses, the Romanian helping to set off the Dadaist explosion, and the Russian planning the Armageddon of the Bolshevik Revolution. Stoppard uses his literary license to have the trio interact, and adds, as his protagonist, a British consular official, Henry Carr, historically a minor clerk but promoted by the author to head the British consulate, while the name of the real consul in Zurich— Bennett—is assigned to Carr’s butler. Old Carr, like Beckett’s Krapp, replays the spool that contains his past.

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The play’s plot is both a pastiche and a travesty of Oscar Wilde’s great comedy The Importance of Being Earnest (pr. 1895, pb. 1899). Stoppard discovered that Joyce had been the business manager of an amateur theatrical company that had staged Wilde’s work in Zurich in 1918 and had cast Carr in one of the leading roles as Algernon Moncrieff. This prompted Stoppard not only to have his Carr also echo Algernon but also to double Tzara as Wilde’s Jack Worthing, Bennett as Wilde’s manservant Lane, and to name his romantic interests Gwendolen and Cecily to mirror Wilde’s Gwendolen and Cecily. Rather surprisingly, Joyce intermittently becomes Lady Bracknell; after all, his middle name, Augusta, corresponds to Bracknell’s first. Travesties is a tour de force of spirited language and convoluted situations that fuses Wilde’s high comedy of manners with Shavian dialectic, Joycean fiction, Epic theater, Dadaist spontaneity, music-hall sketches, and limerick word-games. Underneath the bouncy mattress of witty farce is a hard board: Stoppard’s lust for ideas. He takes a piercingly cross-eyed look at those movers and shakers of everything that is not nailed down: artists and revolutionaries. The drama revolves four views on art through its ironic prism: Tzara represents Dadaist antiart; Joyce advocates the formalist tradition of art that emphasizes its long-meditated artifice; Lenin subordinates art to an instrument of state policy; and Carr holds a Philistine suspicion of the artist as an ungrateful drone. In an interview, Stoppard declared himself particularly pleased with a scene, late in act 1, in which Tzara and Joyce confront each other on several levels: Joyce quizzes Tzara along the lines of the catechism chapter involving Bloom and Dedalus in Ulysses; Lady Bracknell quizzes Jack about his eligibility for her niece’s hand; Tzara informs the audience about the nature of Dadaism; and Joyce affirms the mission of art to shape the ephemeral fragmentation of life into quasi-eternal objects. Tzara may be the play’s most attractive personality. He is not only a Romanian eccentric but also a sardonic social critic and an irreverent deconstructionist of platitudinous slogans. Stoppard has Tzara demand the right both to create a poem out of words jumbled in his hat and to urinate in different colors. Stoppard’s Joyce is eloquent in his devout allegiance to the religion of art but less convincing as a shamrock-jacketed spouter of limericks and scrounger of money. The characterization of Lenin, encountered in the public library but never in Carr’s drawing room, proves most problematic. While the artists and bourgeoisie play, he acts, preparing to depart for Russia. His admirer, the librarian Cecily, opens the second act with an earnest lecture on Marxism, interrupted only by Carr’s wooing of her. Lenin does not participate in any parallel pairing with Wilde’s play—his political weight negates travesty except, perhaps, that his role as Cecily’s instructor faintly resembles Miss Prism’s. Theatrically, Stoppard’s shift from the high-spirited merriment of act 1 to the solemn opening of act 2 is audacious and controversial; some critics have demurred at the drastic undercutting of comic momentum, since it upsets the audience’s assumption that the play is made up of the blurred and unreliable recollections of a senile Henry Carr. Carr is shocked by Tzara’s and Lenin’s demands that society should be transformed. He tells Tzara, who has expressed sympathy for Lenin’s ideas, “You’re an amiable bourgeois . . . and if the revolution came you wouldn’t know what hit you. . . . Multicoloured micturition is no trick to these boys, they’ll have you pissing blood.” Yet Carr, while inveighing against artists as self-centered and hostile, also insists that an individual artist’s freedom is the most reliable test of a society’s freedom. In the play’s coda, old Carr concludes that he learned these lessons from his Zurich experiences: One should be a revolutionary; if not, one should be an artist; and then

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there is a third lesson—which he cannot recall. Carr may well be a travesty of the sentiments of the public at large, trying to make sense of the meaning of history and the nature of art—and usually failing to do so. In Travesties, Stoppard has composed a witty test whose laughs may outweigh the moral force of its ideas. “In the future,” he told Ronald Hayman in June, 1974, “I must stop compromising my plays with this whiff of social application. . . . I should have the courage of my lack of convictions.” Yet most of Stoppard’s plays after Travesties show a marked increase in his political concerns and the deepening of his social conscience. Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land • In Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land, Stoppard for the first time takes an unequivocal political stance, opposing any absolute right of the press to wash any and all linen in the glare of trash journalism’s exposures. Even politicians, the play contends, are entitled to their confidential lives, as long as their private conduct does not handicap their public performance. Starting in 1975 with his participation in a protest march against the mistreatment of Soviet dissidents, Stoppard has consistently voiced, both on and off the stage, his outrage at totalitarian violations of human rights. He has particularly befriended and championed the Czech playwright and later statesman Václav Havel, who is in significant ways his mirror image: Havel was born nine months before Stoppard, shares Stoppard’s perspectives of absurdism and penchant for wordplay as well as Czech nativity, but he has consistently committed his work as well as his person to social causes, while Stoppard’s recognition of social responsibilities has been intermittent. Both playwrights value as their highest goods freedom of expression and individualism. Every Good Boy Deserves Favour • In Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Stoppard created what he termed “a piece for actors and orchestra.” With music by André Previn and a setting in a psychiatric prison in the Soviet Union, the work uses for its title a mnemonic phrase familiar to students of music because the initial letters, EGBDF, represent in ascending order the notes signified by the black lines of the treble clef. This play-oratorio is a sharply ironic, point-blank attack on the ways in which Soviet law is perverted to stifle dissent. The work is unfortunately flawed by Stoppard’s and Previn’s self-contradictory uses of the orchestra: On one hand, it evokes a totalitarian society based on a rigid notion of harmonious order in which improvisation and nonconformity are forbidden; on the other hand, the orchestra seeks to offer a lyrical and humane commentary on the action. The text fails to resolve these opposing purposes. A far more accomplished attack on the suppression of individual freedom is Stoppard’s teleplay Professional Foul (1977), dedicated to Havel. The text explores the same ethical problems posed in Jumpers and is one of Stoppard’s most impressive works. Night and Day • Although Every Good Boy Deserves Favour and Professional Foul represent ambitious advances in Stoppard’s dramaturgy, Night and Day is a disappointing sidestep into a naturalism that none of Stoppard’s previous plays has embraced. He does continue his new role as a didact, opposing any force that might inhibit the untrammeled passage of information, whether it be a union-closed shop or venal media tycoons or a totalitarian state. The drama takes place in a convulsed African country, possibly Uganda, which is agitated by a rebellion against a despotic government led by equally despotic officers. The play’s serious concerns, however, are often obscured by

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stylish posturing and excessive verbal sparks that subvert the serious circumstances of the action. As a result, the text toys with difficult subjects, trivializing them in a manner reminiscent of Noël Coward’s flip cleverness. The Real Thing • In The Real Thing, Stoppard again harks back to Coward (as well as Wilde) for an exercise in love among the leisured classes, in which aristocrats of style spend their time polishing epigrams and tiptoeing into one another’s penthouse souls. This play, however, also has a heart, throbbing with the domestic passion to which even an intellectual playwright, the protagonist Henry, can succumb. Henry has an affair with his good friend’s wife, Annie; they fall in love, divorce their spouses, and marry. They are happy for two years, but Annie takes Henry’s complaisance for complacence and has trysts with other men. Henry discovers howling-wolf pain in his cuckoldry before he and Annie realize that their marriage is, for better and worse, the real thing. As so often in his dramatic practice, Stoppard mines his play with parallel phrases and repeated allusions. Yet this time his characters do more than skate on brittle surfaces. They suffer recognizable pain in the throes of romance, sharp darts of regret and ardor, frustration and anguish as they find themselves betrayed and rejected by those they love. This time, Stoppard has created recognizable people as well as flashed the laser beams of his intellect. Hapgood • More than five years after The Real Thing, and after a series of adaptations, Stoppard wrote Hapgood, first performed in London in 1988 and subsequently revised for its American tour. Stoppard was inspired by quantum mechanics and the discovery that light consists of particles and waves. He took his fascination with physics’ duality and applied it to Hapgood, in the form of dual human nature, that is, double agents and double dealings—or, more specifically, espionage. The principal character, Hapgood (also code-named Mother), is a female spy who has been ordered by the Central Intelligence Agency to get rid of a double agent who has been serving the Soviet government. The kind but at the same time merciless Hapgood carries out her mission amid thrilling scenes of kidnappings that are not exactly what they seem to be, double agents who may actually be triple or even quadruple agents, and sexual delusions, in a cerebral drama unequivocally demonstrating its author’s love of paradox. Indian Ink • Between screenplays, adaptations, and original dramas, Stoppard wrote perhaps one of his best works, the 1991 radio play In the Native State, which he later adapted for the stage as Indian Ink. Like other writers fascinated with British imperialism and India, such as E. M. Forster, Stoppard deals here with the ambiguous theme of India’s gaining of independence or, as it can also be seen, India’s losing its status as a territory of the British Empire. In the Native State is also about the Anglo-Indian taboo of sexual relations between British women and Indian men. While on a visit to India, the young poet Flora Crewe has her portrait painted by Nirad Das, an Indian artist. Das, however, has painted two portraits of Crewe: a “proper” one and a nude, the latter remaining in the possession of his son. The nude represents the “more Indian” side of Nirad Das, which is exactly how Crewe wants him to be, for if he anglicized himself she would despise him, since he would be attempting to bring the bloodlines closer together and eventually erase the distinction between ruler and ruled.

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Arcadia • Although after The Real Thing Stoppard began devoting most of his time to screenplays and to adapting other writers’ dramas, his 1993 play Arcadia, which was produced after a break of five years, was greeted with enthusiasm among theater critics, who saw the play returning Stoppard to the stage world. In Arcadia, Stoppard again manages to throw his audience into confusion with sudden shifts from one time period to another; he also continues his experiment of borrowing authentic literary figures, such as Lord Byron, whom spectators find here involved in a murder mystery, one requiring a certain level of intellectual gymnastics on their part. Arcadia is set in 1809 in the garden room of a beautiful country house in Derbyshire, England. The play’s two principal characters, Thomasina Coverly, a thirteen-year-old pupil of Lord Byron’s contemporary Septimus Hodge, and Bernard Nightingale, a detective/academic, are separated in time by 180 years. Nightingale, who visits the Coverly house in the 1990’s, has as a motive a desire to expose a scandal that occurred in the country house and that involved Lord Byron. According to Nightingale, the fictional poet Ezra Chater, whom Byron criticized in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, is shot following an erotic meeting in the country house. The supposed shooting of Chater, his fictitiousness (as viewers discover that he is Nightingale’s invention), and the insinuated quarrel between him and Lord Byron are only some of the mysteries that engage spectators into becoming detectives. The Invention of Love • Stoppard’s last play written in the twentieth century, The Invention of Love, is also one of his most ambitious. The play is a memory play again based on a real-life writer: A. E. Housman, poet and classics scholar of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It begins with Housman’s arrival in Hades upon his death in 1936. As he travels down the river Styx with Charon, the ferryman, he remembers/encounters/relives important moments in his life, particularly those that involve Moses Jackson, the man Housman loved unrequitedly throughout his entire life. Here again Stoppard plays with the audiences’ perception of time, showing both the young Housman and the old, even allowing them to interact at the ends of both acts. Stoppard parallels the life of Housman with the life of Oscar Wilde, his contemporary. Where Wilde acted on his homosexual tendencies, ultimately leading to his imprisonment, Housman repressed his own leanings. Rather than simply being a play about denial of love, Stoppard uses Housman to question the nature of many types of love, including brotherly, scholarly and physical. When Housman encounters Wilde in Hades the two discuss the differences between artist and scholar, as well as the two types of love that can be created by these two types of men. The Invention of Love is Stoppard’s most complex musings on the nature of love, time, life, and death. It is arguably his densest, and most rewarding, work at the time of its first performances. Other major works long fiction: Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon, 1966. screenplays: The Engagement, 1970; The Romantic Englishwoman, 1975 (with Thomas Wiseman); Despair, 1978 (adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel); The Human Factor, 1979 (adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel); Brazil, 1986; Empire of the Sun, 1987 (adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s novel); The Russia House, 1990 (adaptation of John Le Carré’s novel); Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 1990; Billy Bathgate, 1991 (adaptation of E. L. Doctorow’s novel); Medicine Man, 1992; Vatel, 1997 (translation and adaptation of Jeanne LaBrune’s screenplay); Shakespeare in Love, 1998; Enigma, 1999.

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teleplays: A Separate Peace, 1966; Teeth, 1967; Another Moon Called Earth, 1967; Neutral Ground, 1968; The Engagement, 1970; One Pair of Eyes, 1972 (documentary); Boundaries, 1975 (with Clive Exton); Three Men in a Boat, 1975 (adaptation of Jerome K. Jerome’s novel); Professional Foul, 1977; Squaring the Circle, 1984; The Television Plays, 1965-1984, 1993; Poodle Springs, 1998. radio plays: The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, 1964; M Is for Moon Among Other Things, 1964; If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank, 1965; Where Are They Now?, 1970; Artist Descending a Staircase, 1972; In the Native State, 1991; Stoppard: The Plays for Radio, 1964-1991, 1994. nonfiction: Conversations with Stoppard, 1995. translation: Largo Desolato, 1986 (of Václav Havel’s play). Bibliography Billington, Michael. Stoppard the Playwright. London: Methuen, 1987. Long the drama critic of The Guardian, Billington, who writes from a leftist perspective, admires Stoppard’s eloquence but mistrusts his conservative ideas. Still, Billington praises The Real Thing and expresses his hopes that Stoppard will increase his passion for both people and causes. Brassell, Tim. Tom Stoppard: An Assessment. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. Brassell’s study is detailed, elegantly written, and learned. He applies a considerable knowledge of modern drama as well as philosophy. Gusso, Mel. Conversations with Stoppard. New York: Limelight Editions, 1995. A collection of interviews between New York Times drama critic Gusso and the playwright that covers the time from 1972 to 1995 when the playwright’s Indian Ink was about to open in London. Presents Stoppard’s own erudite thoughts on his work. Hayman, Ronald. Tom Stoppard. London: Heinemann, 1977. Hayman’s compact text is chiefly valuable for two highly revealing interviews conducted in 1974 and 1976. Kelly, Katherine E., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Provides essays on all things Stoppard, including an in-depth biography, as well as scholarly criticism on his plays, radio plays, and screenplays. Also contains a very extensive bibliography. Rusinko, Susan. Tom Stoppard. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Mainly summarizes the views of other critics and reviewers. Its chief service is an extended bibliography of secondary as well as primary sources. Whitaker, Thomas. Tom Stoppard. New York: Grove Press, 1983. Whitaker’s text is succinct, perceptive, and smoothly worded. He stresses the performance aspects of Stoppard’s plays, often commenting on particular productions that he has seen. Gerhard Brand, updated by Matthew J. Kopans

August Strindberg August Strindberg

Born: Stockholm, Sweden; January 22, 1849 Died: Stockholm, Sweden; May 14, 1912 Principal drama • Fritänkaren, pb. 1870; I Rom, pr., pb. 1870; Den fredlöse, pr. 1871, pb. 1876 (The Outlaw, 1912); Hermione, pb. 1871; Anno fyrtioåtta, wr. 1876, pb. 1881; Mäster Olof, pb. 1878, pr. 1890 (Master Olof, 1915); Gillets hemlighet, pr., pb. 1880; Herr Bengts hustru, pr., pb. 1882; Lycko-Pers resa, pr., pb. 1883 (Lucky Peter’s Travels, 1912); Fadren, pr., pb. 1887 (The Father, 1899); Marodörer, pr. 1887; Fröken Julie, pb. 1888, pr. 1889 (Miss Julie, 1912); Kamraterna, pb. 1888, pr. 1905 (with Axel Lundegård; Comrades, 1912); Fordringsägare, pb. in Danish 1888, pr. 1889, pb. 1890 (Creditors, 1910); Hemsöborna, pr. 1889, pb. 1905 (adaptation of his novel); Paria, pr. 1889, pb. 1890 (Pariah, 1913); Den starkare, pr. 1889, pb. 1890 (The Stronger, 1912); Samum, pr., pb. 1890 (Simoom, 1906); Himmelrikets nycklar, eller Sankte Per vandrar på jorden, pb. 1892, pr. 1929 (The Keys of Heaven, 1965); Moderskärlek, pb. 1893, pr. 1894 (Mother Love, 1910); Bandet, pb. in German 1893, pb. 1897, pr. 1902 (The Bond, 1960); Debet och kredit, pb. 1893, pr. 1900 (Debit and Credit, 1906); Första varningen, pr., pb. 1893 (The First Warning, 1915); Inför döden, pr., pb. 1893 (In the Face of Death, 1916); Leka med elden, pb. 1893, pr. in German 1893, pr. 1897 (Playing with Fire, 1930); Till Damaskus, forsta delen, pb. 1898, pr. 1900 (To Damascus I, 1913); Till Damaskus, andra delen, pb. 1898, pr. 1916 (To Damascus II, 1913); Advent, ett mysterium, pb. 1899, pr. 1915 (Advent, 1912); Brott och Brott, pb. 1899, pr. 1900 (Crime and Crime, 1913; also known as There Are Crimes and Crimes); Erik XIV, pr., pb. 1899 (English translation, 1931); Folkungasagan, pb. 1899, pr. 1901 (The Saga of the Folkungs, 1931); Gustav Vasa, pr., pb. 1899 (English translation, 1916); Gustav Adolf, pb. 1900, pr. 1903 (English translation, 1957); Carl XII, pb. 1901, pr. 1902 (Charles XII, 1955); Dödsdansen, första delen, pb. 1901, pr. 1905 (The Dance of Death I, 1912); Dödsdansen, andra delen, pb. 1901, pr. 1905 (The Dance of Death II, 1912); Engelbrekt, pr., pb. 1901 (English translation, 1949); Kaspers fet-tisdag, pr. 1901, pb. 1915; Kristina, pb. 1901, pr. 1908 (Queen Christina, 1955); Midsommar, pr., pb. 1901 (Midsummertide, 1912); Påsk, pr., pb. 1901 (Easter, 1912); Ett drömspel, pb. 1902, pr. 1907 (A Dream Play, 1912); Halländarn, wr. 1902, pb. 1918, pr. 1923; Kronbruden, pb. 1902, pr. 1906 (The Bridal Crown, 1916); Svanevit, pb. 1902, pr. 1908 (Swanwhite, 1914); Genom öknar till arvland, eller Moses, wr. 1903, pb. 1918, pr. 1922 (Through Deserts to Ancestral Lands, 1970); Gustav III, pb. 1903, pr. 1916 (English translation, 1955); Lammet och vilddjuret: Eller, Kristus, wr. 1903, pb. 1918, pr. 1922 (The Lamb and the Beast, 1970); Näktergalen i Wittenberg, pb. 1904, pr. 1914 (The Nightingale of Whittenberg, 1970); Till Damaskus, tredje delen, pb. 1904, pr. 1916 (To Damascus III, 1913); Brända tomten, pr., pb. 1907 (After the Fire, 1913); Oväder, pr., pb. 1907 (Storm, 1913); Pelikanen, pr., pb. 1907 (The Pelican, 1962); Spöksonaten, pb. 1907, pr. 1908 (The Ghost Sonata, 1916); Abu Casems tofflor, pr., pb. 1908; Bjälbo-Jarlen, pr., pb. 1909 (Earl Birger of Bjälbo, 1956); Riksföreståndaren, pb. 1909, pr. 1911 (The Regent, 1956); Siste riddaren, pr., pb. 1909 (The Last of the Knights, 1956); Stora landsvägen, pb. 1909, pr. 1910 (The Great Highway, 1954); Svarta handsken, pb. 1909, pr. 1911 (The Black Glove, 1916); Hellas: Eller, Sokrates, pb. 1918, pr. 1922 (Hellas, 1970); Toten-Insel: Eller, Hades, pb. 1918 (Isle of the Dead, 1962); Six Plays, pb. 1955; Eight Expressionist Plays, pb. 1965 925

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Other literary forms • August Strindberg wrote nearly two dozen novels, many of which are autobiographical; several volumes of short stories and poems; and more than twenty book-length essays, including writings about the history of Sweden, philosophy, religion, language, and dramatic theory. In addition to the individual Swedish- and English-language editions of Strindberg’s work, translated selections appear in The Strindberg Reader (1968), edited by Arvid Paulson, and Inferno, Alone and Other Writings (1968), edited by Evert Sprinchorn. Achievements • Tremendously influential in both Europe and the United States, August Strindberg was begrudgingly praised by Henrik Ibsen as one who would be greater than he, and more generously lauded half a century later by Eugene O’Neill as the writer to whom the American playwright owed his greatest debt. Although Strindberg wrote some seventy dramatic pieces, he is best known outside his native Sweden for a small number of plays that represent the range of his achievement. Of these, The Father, Miss Julie, A Dream Play, and The Ghost Sonata have earned for Strindberg his stature alongside Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, and George Bernard Shaw as a seminal figure in the first stage (1880-1920) of modern drama. Strindberg’s intensity and versatility are generally considered as much a product of his own neuroses as of his literary genius. The turbulent male-female relationships that his plays portray are commonly accepted as the playwright’s expression of his own ambivalent feelings toward women, just as his treatment of the class conflict would seem to have its impulse in his domestic position as “the son of a servant.” His late, expressionistic plays, written after a period of intense despair and nonproductivity, reflect the emphasis on atonement that characterizes Strindberg’s later writing. Aside from the provocative autobiographical content of his work, however, Strindberg’s achievement rests on his perfection of the naturalistic form, his extension of that form into an imaginative forum for modern psychology, and his movement from dramatic realism to expressionism. Most of Strindberg’s plays that were translated into English and published early in the century are no longer in print. There are, however, a number of more recent translations that have appeared in collections, including, among others, Elizabeth Sprigge’s Six Plays (1955), Arvid Paulson’s Eight Expressionist Plays (1965), and the translations of Strindberg’s drama by Walter Johnson. Biography • Born in Stockholm on January 22, 1849, Johan August Strindberg was the fourth child of twelve born to Ulrika Eleonora Norling, formerly a waitress, and Carl Oscar Strindberg, a shipping agent. Strindberg’s early life was spent in poverty, in the aftermath of his father’s bankruptcy. When he was thirteen, his mother died, and his father married a housemaid. In 1867, Strindberg entered the University of Uppsala, where he studied, intermittently, until 1872, only to leave the university without a degree. In 1869, during one of his respites from university life, he tried acting at the Royal Theater and completed an acting course at the Dramatic Academy, though with little promise of success on the stage. By the following year, Strindberg had turned to playwriting, returned to the university, and had a modest theatrical success with the production of I Rom by Runa, a local literary club. The play had been preceded by several other dramatic efforts, and its production encouraged Strindberg to begin work on Master Olof, a play about the Swedish religious reformer Olaus Petri, on which Strindberg was to work for nearly a decade. When he left the university, Strindberg worked as a journalist in Stockholm. In 1874, following a second unsuc-

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cessful attempt at acting, he took a position at the Royal Library in Stockholm, which he retained for eight years as he continued writing plays. In 1875, Strindberg met the first of his three wives, Siri von Essen, who was married at the time to Baron Carl Gustaf Wrangel. The actress divorced her husband following an attempted suicide by Strindberg and, late in 1877, married the man who had been a frequent guest in their home. The marriage lasted until 1891, producing three children (a fourth, born two months after the wedding, did not live). During this period, Strindberg wrote a number of naturalistic plays that reflected the class and gender struggles that were to characterize his best-known work. (Courtesy of the D. C. Public Library) Though reasonably secure in his reputation among Swedish writers, Strindberg became disillusioned with the theater when Herr Bengts hustru (Sir Bengt’s wife), a play he wrote in response to Ibsen’s Et dukkehjem (pr., pb. 1879; A Doll’s House, 1880), with his wife in the lead role, failed in production, and he and Siri entered the period of their lives that critics have called “the wander years.” From 1883 through 1891, the pair traveled extensively, settling at various times in France, Switzerland, Bavaria, and, in 1889, again in Sweden. Following their divorce, Strindberg continued his nomadic life, moving to Berlin, Paris, London, Lund, and, finally, back to Stockholm. Strindberg was particularly creative during the wander years, publishing a short story collection in two volumes, entitled Giftas I and Giftas II (1884, 1886; Married, 1913), a historical novel, two autobiographical works, and three naturalistic dramas, two of which, The Father and Miss Julie, are among the most successful of his plays. Immediately after the divorce, Strindberg entered a six-year period during which his literary achievements were nearly nonexistent. Distraught over a blasphemy trial centering on statements made in his short-story collection and deeply disturbed by his suspicions concerning Siri’s infidelity, Strindberg married Frida Uhl, an Austrian journalist whom he met in Berlin. A year and a half later, in 1894, the couple were divorced, with Frida taking custody of their infant daughter. For the next three years, Strindberg endured poverty and humiliation and suffered fantastic visions and unfounded fears. Displaying the classic symptoms of paranoia, he entered the torment about which he was to write in Inferno (1897; English translation, 1912). It was a time during which he experimented with alchemy, hypnotism, and black magic. He surfaced from his Inferno a self-styled religious man, practicing a hybrid of Roman Catholicism and Swedenborgianism and working on the first play in the allegorical Damascus trilogy.

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In Stockholm, Strindberg met a young actress, Harriet Bosse, and, despite nearly thirty years difference in their ages, married her. During a separation from Harriet, Strindberg began writing his expressionistic A Dream Play, with intentions of having his wife play the Daughter of Indra. In 1903, however, after only two years of marriage, Harriet left with their infant daughter, apparently unable to accommodate Strindberg’s excessive jealousy. In 1907, Strindberg became codirector, with August Falck, of the Intimate Theater, founded especially for the production of Strindberg’s “chamber plays.” The theater closed three years later, and in 1912 Strindberg died of stomach cancer. Though the Swedish writer did not have the honor of receiving the prestigious Nobel Prize, he was awarded the Anti-Nobel Prize—fifty thousand crowns through public subscription— two months before his death. Analysis • Because August Strindberg’s drama falls into two distinct periods, separated by the years of his personal Inferno, it is easy to generalize about his work. The pre-Inferno plays are naturalistic in form and are insistently concerned with sexual and class struggles bringing to the philosophy of naturalism a psychological realism that validates his characters as among the most excitingly credible in modern drama. The post-Inferno plays reflect Strindberg’s experience with mysticism and a variety of religions, along with his preoccupation in later life with guilt, expiation, and reconciliation. These plays are important especially for the ways in which they extend the boundaries of dramatic form, introducing expressionism and Symbolism into the mainstream of world drama. Strindberg’s early plays reflect the literary preoccupation of the time with the philosophy of naturalism, which holds forces beyond the control of the individual will responsible for human behavior yet also poses the question of individual choice. The resulting complexity of character allowed Strindberg to approach with renewed intensity the two conflicts that for him both personally and artistically were never resolved. Though Strindberg’s work was published as early as 1869, The Father, produced and published in 1887, is considered the first of his great naturalistic plays. In that play, as in a number of others that followed, Strindberg dramatizes a major concern of his life and work: the eternal power struggle between men and women. Laura stands as a prototypical Strindbergian woman: immensely powerful and in control yet perhaps not so by design. The play does not clarify whether Laura’s triumph over her husband is the consequence of malevolent cunning or of an innocent but nevertheless destructive wielding of a natural female power. That same power is evident in the relationship between Miss Julie and Jean in Miss Julie, in which the sexual encounter between mistress and servant is initiated through Julie’s aggression, though here the male ultimately achieves superiority as Julie endures postcoital humiliation and finally commits suicide. A concurrent struggle in Miss Julie, which is a second preoccupation of Strindberg, is that between the classes. Julie may be seduced to her death by Jean, but she reestablishes class honor, whereas the intimidated servant reverts to subservience. Strindberg’s personal conflicts were to expand during the Inferno period and were reflected in the religious and historical plays produced between 1897 and 1901. In those years, the playwright turned to mysticism and allegory, as in the Damascus trilogy. During this period, he also devoted considerable attention to Swedish history, dramatizing the lives of its people and several of its kings in such plays as The Saga of the

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Folkungs, Gustav Vasa, Gustav Adolf, and Carl XII. In The Dance of Death I and The Dance of Death II, he confirmed that his obsession with the battle of the sexes was still alive. Strindberg’s most interesting work, however, comes with his later plays, which attempt to capture the dream form in drama. In both A Dream Play and The Ghost Sonata, his two most successful efforts, the playwright violates the laws of causality and logic, creating a fluid and subjective sequence of events that is dominated by the vision of an implied dreamer. In A Dream Play, the Daughter of Indra visits Earth and both observes and participates in the activities of those she encounters. In The Ghost Sonata, a young student passes through several rooms in a symbolic house en route to an encounter with a symbolic hyacinth girl. In the earlier play, the recurrent lament of the Daughter of Indra is, “Humankind is to be pitied,” reflecting the deep sadness of the playwright, who had been through several religious conversions and had himself seen the condition of humankind. In The Ghost Sonata, a similar pessimism prevails but is redeemed in that play by a final tone of reconciliation. A statue of Buddha in the inner room suggests the religious preoccupation and the need to reconcile good and evil that characterizes Strindberg’s post-Inferno plays. The Father • Strindberg once remarked that he did not know whether The Father was an invention or a reflection of his own life. The play, in which a man is driven mad by doubts concerning his parenthood, was written at a time when Strindberg’s marriage to Siri von Essen was near collapse. Like the Captain in The Father, Strindberg was haunted by the knowledge that a man can never know with certainty that he is his child’s father, as his suspicions of Siri developed into an obsession with whether he had fathered their first child, born two months after the wedding. The sexual power struggle that takes place between husband and wife when the two disagree on the future of their daughter, Bertha, forms the dramatic center of the play. Determined to have her way, Laura, the Captain’s wife, devises ways of undermining her husband’s credibility and confidence. Her goal is to have the Captain certified insane so that he loses his legal claim to their daughter. Her method is psychological torment: Only she, not he, can know whether Bertha is his natural child. Made suspicious by her suggestion, the Captain becomes obsessed with the need to know, devising biological, experiential, and literary tests to affirm his paternity, only to be driven to madness by the impossibility of knowing. In the final tableau, the straitjacketed Captain, surrounded by the women in the household, lies helpless at the nurse’s breast, repudiating his child, then falling in a fatal stroke; his wife, embracing Bertha, cries, “My child! My own child!” Laura’s manipulations are not less effective than those of an Iago, and she emerges as uncontested champion in this domestic duel of wills. Yet the play—and she herself—question how conscious her manipulations have been. Moments before the Captain’s defeat, Laura claims that she never meant for any of this to happen, that she never thought through her behavior to its consequence. Allusions throughout the play to Omphale and to other women in classical literature suggest that for Strindberg, Laura represents a prototypical evil, a curiously innocent power that is uniquely and naturally feminine. Laura achieves control less by design than by instinct. In a letter to Friedrich Nietzsche, Strindberg reported the reaction to the production of his play: One woman died, another miscarried, and most of the audience ran from the theater, bellowing. Strindberg’s hyperbole, though obviously intended to be frivolous, nevertheless reflects the excitement generated by this highly personal but powerful portrayal of women and of marriage.

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Miss Julie • The best known of Strindberg’s plays, Miss Julie takes place on a midsummer eve in Sweden. In the absence of her father, a nobleman, the twenty-five-year-old Julie, a member of Strindberg’s degenerate, emancipated “third sex,” initiates a psychological battle with Jean, the valet, that culminates in his sexual triumph. The battle, however, is a social conflict as well, and, in a dramatic suicide-seduction scene, Julie regains her social honor, leaving Jean to tremble at the return of her father, the count. Throughout their encounter, the sexual and social lines separating the two shift, as each lives out the respective dreams of rising and falling that unify the work’s images and give dramatic design to the play. Jean’s dream is one of aspiration: He is lying under a tree in a thick and darkened wood; he wants to climb to the top of the tree to look out over the brightly lit landscape and rob a bird’s nest of its golden eggs. Despite persistent climbing, however, he never arrives at the first branch, much less the top. When Jean was younger, he once found himself in a compromising position. A servant who had no business being in the gentry’s outhouse (the Turkish pavilion), Jean avoided discovery by leaving through the sewer, only to surface to spy Julie, in pink dress and white stockings, standing in the fields. Since that time, he has been symbolically cleansing himself of the dirt and excrement that characterize his servile status, hoping to become proprietor of a Swiss hotel and, eventually, a Rumanian count. Julie’s dream is one of degradation and fall. She is on top of a pillar, longing to descend to the ground, but she does not have the courage to jump. The daughter of an aristocratic father and a common but feminist mother, Julie has developed a hostility toward men (she forces her fiancé to jump over her slashing whip) and an attraction to the servant class. At the Midsummer Eve’s festivity, both she and Jean find occasion to act out their perversities and temporarily realize their dreams. Jean’s aspiration and Julie’s desire to fall meet in an offstage sexual consummation, signaled onstage by the crescendo of the sounds of the reveling peasants. When the couple emerge from Jean’s bedroom, it is clear that Jean is in control. Just as Julie had flaunted her superiority before the sexual act, Jean flaunts his now, ruthlessly abusing the younger woman by refusing to be tender and by calling her a whore. Yet any sense of triumph or defeat is neutralized by the couple’s awareness of the consequences of their act; the two plan their departure for Switzerland, Jean to start his hotel, Julie to escape her shame. Julie reappears in traveling clothes, a smudge of dirt on her face, her pet bird in hand. Asserting his masculine strength, Jean refuses to let Julie take the bird along, decapitating it as Julie expresses a brutal death wish for the entire male sex. Recovering from the fantasy that allowed her hope, she urges Jean to seduce her into killing herself. Jean’s dream of self-advancement dissipates as Julie, in her willingness to die to atone for the sacrifice of her honor, endorses an aristocratic principle of reputation and personal integrity that the servant cannot understand. Julie’s social victory is affirmed when Jean flinches at the sound of the bell announcing the count’s return. In his preface to the play, Strindberg identifies the factors that were responsible for Julie’s tragic fate, including her parents’ and her fiancé’s characters, the mood of the Midsummer Eve, the urgency of the sexually aroused Jean, Julie’s “monthly indisposition,” chance, and other biological and environmental conditions. Strindberg’s analysis of Julie’s behavior reflects the extent to which the playwright incorporated into the play the naturalistic philosophy first given literary expression by novelist Émile Zola. As Strindberg himself notes in the preface, however, Miss Julie also includes a psychological dimension that implies Julie’s complicity in her fate.

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Because it articulates the philosophy of naturalistic drama and suggests both the psychological and the expressionistic, Strindberg’s preface has become one of the most widely reprinted statements of modern dramatic theory. Similarly, Miss Julie, as the dramatic representation of that theory, and as an emotionally and intellectually engaging play as well, has become an acknowledged masterpiece of world drama. A Dream Play • An example of Strindberg’s post-Inferno work, A Dream Play replaces the causal structure of the early naturalistic plays with a loosely constructed series of events that approximate the form of a dream. Though seemingly random, spontaneous, and formless, the action of the play is carefully contrived to re-create the unconscious and reveal inner truth. A Dream Play is an astonishing foray into expressionistic drama that testifies to Strindberg’s quest for a form to accommodate the polyphonic thinking that characterizes his later work. A Dream Play has a cast of thirty-nine, as well as a sizable number of walk-on performers. Its central character is the supernatural Daughter of Indra, who visits Earth both as an observer and as a participant. As emissary of her father, she is to report back to him on whether human complaint is justified; as a result of her sojourn, she concludes that humankind is to be pitied. The Daughter of Indra’s earthly enterprise first brings her in contact with an imprisoned officer, whom she frees from punishing labor, and then with the officer’s family, whom she observes as the mother, preparing for death, saddens her husband by offering a servant the shawl that he once gave her. The Daughter of Indra’s preliminary judgment is that humankind is to be pitied, but that love conquers all. In an alley leading to the opera house, the Daughter of Indra witnesses the disappointments of auditioning opera singers, who tell their troubles to the doorkeeper, who wears the mother’s shawl. Roses in hand, the officer awaits Miss Victoria, who never appears. In the alley, there is a locked door with a cloverleaf cutout that presumably shields the mysteries of life, but a court order is needed to open it. In a lawyer’s office, a white-faced divorce attorney, sitting in the stench of crime, prompts the Daughter of Indra’s judgment. The office is transformed into a church, where a commencement ceremony, presided over by four deans of the faculties, is in progress. When the lawyer steps forward to receive his laurels, he receives only a crown of thorns. Unable to understand the cries for mercy that surround the lawyer or the tears dropping to the pavement, the Daughter of Indra offers to marry the lawyer to test the redemptive power of love, marriage, and home. Yet in the next scene, she is a poor, tired housewife, cooking over a hot stove while the baby screams. Announcing that he now has his degree, the lawyer offers to take his wife to Fairhaven, where the world is more pleasant. By mistake, however, they wind up in Foulstrand, a contemporary inferno, to be greeted by the Quarantine Master and an assortment of miserable people. A dragon boat arrives with newlyweds at the helm, but the blissful couple kill themselves. At Fairhaven, strains of a Johann Sebastian Bach toccata and a waltz conflict to ruin the dance, while at a Mediterranean resort, two men shovel coal in the heat, complaining of their misfortune. Finally, at Fingal’s Cave, or Indra’s Ear, the Daughter of Indra again encounters the poet whom she first met at Foulstrand, and here she invokes the Kingdom of Heaven and speaks of what she has learned, asking, with the poet, why humankind must be so miserable. Though much time has passed since her descent to Earth, a telescoping now takes place that transports the Daughter of Indra back to the opera house and the

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cloverleaf stage door. She listens as the deans of the faculties quarrel over whether it should be opened, then watches as it swings ajar to reveal nothing. The Daughter of Indra returns to the Growing Castle that had appeared on her descent and prepares to return to the ethereal world. As she offers her assessment of the divided nature of humankind, promising to carry the world’s lamentations to her father’s throne, the Castle bursts into flame, revealing a wall of human faces in despair, and, finally, a chrysanthemum. The Daughter of Indra departs, leaving behind the poet, the one visionary capable of articulating the coexistence of misery and joy that is the story of humankind. Influenced by Indian religion and Oriental philosophy, Strindberg envisions the world in this play as a mirage, caught in the eternal conflict between spirit and form. In a diary entry made two days before he completed the play, Strindberg equated love with sin, remarking on the paradox that the world (if it exists at all) exists through sin, making life an endless vacillation between “the pleasures of love and the agony of penance.” A Dream Play remained unproduced for five years after it was published in 1902, finally seeing production during the same year in which The Ghost Sonata was published. The Ghost Sonata • The Ghost Sonata is one of Strindberg’s chamber plays, so named for their intimacy, their lyricism, and their simplicity of theme. Like chamber music, the chamber plays were designed for small audiences, particularly those at Strindberg’s Intimate Theater. Like A Dream Play, The Ghost Sonata is abstract in form, presenting a series of images suggestive of a dream. The dominant consciousness in the play is a student named Arkenholz, who progresses through the symbolic episodes of the dream until he acquires understanding, at which point the dream ends through his awakening. While he is in the dream, Arkenholz is poet-seeker, possessing exceptional acuity of perception. He is limited, however, by an equally powerful, ambivalently evil old man named Hummel, who guides Arkenholz into a house in which strange and symbolic characters reside. In the deepest room of the house is the Hyacinth Girl, the vision of beauty and love that the student cannot resist. Arkenholz’s mythic quest begins at the facade of the building, where he encounters a milkmaid and Hummel, an old man in a wheelchair who tells him that by sitting through a Richard Wagner opera he will gain entrance to the house. Excited by Arkenholz’s fondness for the house, Hummel identifies its inhabitants: the colonel who beats his wife; the marble statue of the colonel’s wife, who is now a mummy; the Lady in Black; the dead consul; the decrepit fiancé, who is mad; the caretaker’s wife; and, in the Hyacinth Room, the Girl. Once inside, the student observes the unnatural coterie in the Round Room, where he witnesses Hummel’s inhumane treatment of the colonel and hears of a network of sexual relationships as the residents of the house gather for their ritual supper. The student pauses for introductions to the mummy, who comes out of her closet squawking like a parrot, and to the marble statue of her youthful form, while Hummel, who has fathered the woman’s child, hangs himself in the closet. Without his guide, Arkenholz continues his journey into the timeless world of the Hyacinth Room, in which the clock that stood prominently on the mantle in the Round Room and strikes to signal the last minutes of the old man’s life is replaced by a statue of the Buddha. The Hyacinth Girl turns out to be an emaciated woman, drained of her strength by a vampire cook who boils the nourishment out of the meat, but the student is awed by

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her beauty. When she hears that Arkenholz wants to marry her, the Hyacinth Girl reveals the secrets of the house, transforming his vision of innocence and beauty into a lamentation, then a plea for redemption. As the student begins to awaken from his dream, he speaks of what he has learned, reconciling the woe that he has discovered and the innocence in which he had believed. A “world of intimations,” suggestively inviting its readers into its seemingly strange but curiously familiar landscape, The Ghost Sonata is a richly evocative vision of guilt and expiation, of innocence and evil, that extends to all humankind. Strindberg claimed that writing the play was a painful experience, that he hardly knew himself what he had written, but that he felt in it the sublime. Other major works long fiction: Från Fjärdingen och Svartbäcken, 1877; Röda rummet, 1879 (The Red Room, 1913); Jäsningstiden, 1886 (The Growth of the Soul, 1914); Hemsöborna, 1887 (The Natives of Hemsö, 1959); Tschandala, in Danish 1889, in Swedish 1897; I havsbandet, 1890 (By the Open Sea, 1913); Le Plaidoyer d’un fou, 1893 in German, 1895 in Swedish (A Madman’s Defense, 1912, also known as The Confession of a Fool ); Inferno, 1897 (English translation, 1912); Ensam, 1903 (Alone, 1968); Götiska rummen, 1904; Svarta fanor, 1907; Taklagsöl, 1907; Syndabocken, 1907 (The Scapegoat, 1967); Författaren, 1909. short fiction: Giftas I, 1884; Svenska öden och äventyr, 1882-1892; Giftas II, 1886 (Married, 1913; also known as Getting Married, 1973; includes Giftas I and Giftas II); Utopier i verkligheten, 1885; Skärkarlsliv, 1888; Legender, 1898 (Legends, 1912); Fagervik och Skamsund, 1902 (Fair Haven and Foul Strand, 1913); Sagor, 1903 (Tales, 1930); Historiska miniatyrer, 1905 (Historical Miniatures, 1913). poetry: Dikter och verkligheter, 1881; Dikter på vers och prosa, 1883; Sömngångarnätter på vakna dagar, 1884. nonfiction: Gamla Stockholm, 1880; Det nya riket, 1882; Svenska folket i helg och söcken, krig och fred, hemma och ute eller Ett tusen år av svenska bildningens och sedernas historia, 1882; Tjänstekvinnans son: En s äls utvecklingshistoria, 1886 (4 volumes; The Son of a Servant: The Story of the Evolution of a Human Being, 1966, volume 1 only); Vivisektioner, 1887; Blomstermalningar och djurstycken, 1888; Bland franska bönder, 1889; Antibarbarus, 1896; Jardin des plantes, 1896; Svensk natur, 1897; Världshistoriens mystik, 1903; Modersmålets anor, 1910; Religiös renässans, 1910; Folkstaten, 1910-1911; Tal till svenska nationen, 1910-1911; Världsspråkens rötter, 1910; Oppna brev till Intima Teatern, 1911-1912 (Open Letters to the Intimate Theater, 1959); Zones of the Spirit: A Book of Thoughts, 1913. Bibliography Carlson, Harry Gilbert. Out of “Inferno”: Strindberg’s Reawakening as an Artist. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996. A study of the change in Strindberg’s literary works after his publication of Inferno. Bibliography and index. Ekman, Hans-Göran. Strindberg and the Five Senses: Studies in Strindberg’s Chamber Plays. Somerset, N.J.: Transaction, 2000. A critical analysis of Strindberg’s chamber plays, with particular emphasis on the five senses. Bibliography and index. Marker, Frederick J., and Christopher Innes, eds. Modernism in European Drama: Ibsen, Strindberg, Pirandello, Beckett: Essays from Modern Drama. Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press, 1998. A collection of essays from Modern Drama published between 1963 and 1994 on modernism in the dramatic works of Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen, Luigi Pirandello, and Samuel Beckett. Bibliography and index.

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Martinus, Eivor. Strindberg and Love. Charlbury, Oxford, England: Amber Lane Press, 2001. A study of Strindberg’s relations with women, including how it manifested in his literary works. Bibliography and index. Robinson, Michael. Studies in Strindberg. Norwich: Norvik Press, 1998. A critical analysis and interpretation of the literary works of Strindberg. Bibliography and index. Robinson, Michael, and Sven Hakon Rossel, eds. Expressionism and Modernism: New Approaches to August Strindberg. Vienna: Edition Praesens, 1999. A collection of papers from the Thirteenth International Strindberg Conference, Linz Austria, October, 1997, and one essay from the Internationale Strindberg-Tage, Vienna, October, 1997, that examine the literary works of Strindberg. Bibliography and index. Törnqvist, Egil. Strindberg’s “The Ghost Sonata” from Text to Performance. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000. An in-depth analysis of Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata. Bibliography and index. June Schlueter

John Millington Synge John Millington Synge

Born: Rathfarnham, Ireland; April 16, 1871 Died: Dublin, Ireland; March 24, 1909 Principal drama • When the Moon Has Set, wr. 1900-1901, pb. 1968; Luasnad, Capa, and Laine, wr. 1902, pb. 1968; A Vernal Play, wr. 1902, pb. 1968; The Tinker’s Wedding, wr. 1903, pb. 1908, pr. 1909; In the Shadow of the Glen, pr. 1903, pb. 1904 (one act); Riders to the Sea, pb. 1903, pr. 1904 (one act); The Well of the Saints, pr., pb. 1905; The Playboy of the Western World, pr., pb. 1907; Deirdre of the Sorrows, pr., pb. 1910; The Complete Plays, pb. 1981 Other literary forms • John Millington Synge’s nondramatic works—autobiographical sketches, essays, reviews, and diaries—document the proposition that his dramatic career began with his response to William Butler Yeats’s advice to abandon Paris for Ireland’s remote regions. Synge’s observations of the lives of the country people of Aran, Connemara, Kerry, and Wicklow indicate that until he lived in these repositories of folk tradition, he had not found either theme or style. The diaries and essays from these visits report Synge’s compilation of dramatic incidents, details of local color, images, and turns of speech, and show an understanding of that way of life that encompassed its dialect, character, and fatalism. Although these accounts show an acute eye for the dramatic, they have less-than-scientific reliability, permeated as they are with Synge’s nature mysticism, his brooding remove from social engagement, and his lack of sympathy with the religious traditions of the people. Synge’s direct, precise prose is chiefly valuable as a record of the sources for his plays and of his developing creative consciousness. With a few exceptions—“In Kerry,” “Queens,” and “Danny”—Synge’s poetry merits the same judgment. Ironic, romantic, and morbid, it is rich with Celtic and folk reference. It also shows, however, the influence of various European poets—François Villon, Giacomo Leopardi, Petrarch—whose works Synge translated. There is some evidence that Synge’s direct idiom contributed to Yeats’s abandonment of romantic idealism after 1902. Synge’s photographs (My Wallet of Photographs, 1971) are valuable documents of turn-of-the-century life on the Irish seaboard. His Letters to Molly (1971) and Some Letters of John M. Synge to Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats (1971) are equally valuable in coming to an appreciation of Synge’s personal and business struggles in his final and more creative years. Achievements • The Irish Literary Renaissance was the result of the collective efforts of diverse talents in the fields of translation, folklore, fiction, poetry, and drama. Under the leadership of the Olympian William Butler Yeats, the movement counted the folklorist Douglas Hyde, the novelists James Joyce and George Moore, the translator and dramatist Lady Augusta Gregory, and the poet and editor George Russell (whose pseudonym was Æ) among its contributors. These writers shared the desire for the establishment of a national literature that would express what they considered distinctive about the Irish imagination. Each contributed to the dramatic literature pre935

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sented on the stage of the Abbey Theatre, but John Millington Synge is the only one of this group whose contribution lies mainly in the drama. Indeed, Synge is generally regarded as the most distinguished dramatist of the Irish Literary Renaissance. This reputation rests on the output of his final seven years: six plays, two of which, Riders to the Sea and The Playboy of the Western World, are masterpieces. These plays in particular exhibit the characteristic qualities of intense lyric speech drawn from the native language and dialects of Ireland, romantic characterization in primitive settings, and dramatic construction after the classics of European drama. Three central theses dominate Synge’s work: the enmity between romantic dreams and life’s hard necessities, the relationship between human beings and the natural world, and the mutability of all things. These plays are the expressions of a complex personality, formed by Synge’s early musical training, his alienation from his own Anglo-Irish roots, his love for the landscapes and country people of Ireland, the tension between romantic impulse and realistic imperatives, and his persistent morbidity and personal loneliness. Synge has had considerable influence in shaping the style and themes of subsequent Irish dramatists, such as George Fitzmaurice and M. J. Malloy, and some influence outside Ireland, most notably in the work of Federico García Lorca and Eugene O’Neill. Biography • Edmund John Millington Synge was born April 16, 1871, in Rathfarnham, County Dublin, the youngest of the five children of a comfortable Anglo-Irish Protestant family. His schooling was mostly private until, at the age of seventeen, he entered Trinity College, Dublin, where he won prizes in Irish and Hebrew even though he put most of his energy into the study of the piano, violin, and flute. During his youth, he developed a strong reaction to his mother’s religiosity and an enthusiasm for the antiquities and natural beauty of the Irish countryside. He went to Germany in 1893 to study music but the following year abandoned his plans to move to Paris and attend lectures in European language and literature at the Sorbonne. Instead, he traveled through Germany, Italy, and France between 1894 and 1896. He wrote some poetry and dramatic fragments, gave lessons in English, and studied French and Italian, returning during the summers to Dublin, where he furthered his interests in the Irish language and Irish antiquities. In December, 1896, Yeats encountered Synge in Paris and discerned a literary talent in search of a subject. He advised Synge to go to the Aran Islands off the Atlantic coast of Ireland, where the people spoke Irish (Library of Congress) and still led lives free of modern

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convention. Synge complied, and for a portion of each summer from 1898 to 1902, he lived among the fisherfolk and recorded his observations with notebook and camera. Yeats continued to write dramatic sketches and literary reviews and edited his notes under the title The Aran Islands (1907). His first plays, When the Moon Has Set, written in prose, and A Vernal Play and Luasnad, Capa, and Laine, written in verse—although apprenticeship works—exhibit fragmentary characteristics of his mature work. This maturity came rapidly, for during the summer of 1902, he wrote Riders to the Sea and In the Shadow of the Glen and began The Tinker’s Wedding. Riders to the Sea was the first of Synge’s plays to be published (October, 1903), but In the Shadow of the Glen was the first to be produced on the stage—by the Irish National Theatre Society (October, 1903). An acrimonious public debate over the play’s depiction of Irish life followed this production, a debate to which its author contributed little. When Riders to the Sea was produced, Synge’s reputation improved, especially following the London presentation of the two plays in March, 1904. When the Abbey Theatre opened in December of 1904, Synge was appointed literary adviser and later director, along with Lady Augusta Gregory and W. B. Yeats. The following February, The Well of the Saints was produced there, though it was poorly received. Meanwhile, Synge was visiting Counties Kerry, Galway, and Mayo and was working on his masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World. As he drafted and revised this play throughout 1906, a romantic relationship was growing with Molly Allgood (known on stage as Máire O’Neill), the Abbey actress who played the role of Pegeen Mike in the first production, on January 26, 1907. The play offended Irish sensibilities, provoking a week of riots and a bitter public debate over the play and freedom of expression on the stage. Again, Synge took little part in the argument, leaving the burden of defending his work to Yeats. Synge commenced his last play, Deirdre of the Sorrows, which is based on a story of the Sons of Usnach from the Ulster cycle of Celtic tales, during 1907. During this same year, the symptoms of Hodgkin’s disease, which had first manifested themselves in 1897, reappeared. The resultant operations interfered with Synge’s revisions of the play, caused the postponement of his wedding, and failed to arrest the disease. He died on March 24, 1909. In January, 1910, Deirdre of the Sorrows was first performed, with Molly Allgood in the title role. Analysis • When, in 1893, John Millington Synge was choosing between musical and literary careers, two seminal documents were published that would profoundly affect his decision and form the character of his subsequent work. These were Stopford Brooke’s lecture “The Need of Use of Getting Irish Literature into the English Tongue,” and Douglas Hyde’s Love Songs of Connaucht (1893). Brooke’s lecture identified four tasks essential to the development of an Irish national literature: the translation of ancient Irish texts, the molding of the various mythological and historical cycles into an imaginative unity, the treatment in verse of selected episodes from these materials, and the collection of folk stories surviving in the Irish countryside. Some of these tasks had already been undertaken, but none had an impact on the developing revival to equal that of Hyde’s slim volume of the same year. He showed that the living song tradition in the Irish Gaelic-speaking areas was rich, complex, and sensitive; that a strong link with an ancient cultural tradition still persisted; and that a translation of these songs into Hiberno-English opened new avenues of expression to the literary artist. By the early 1890’s, Yeats was already committed to some of the tasks outlined by Brooke, and he also greeted Hyde’s work enthusiastically. Yeats wrote in an 1893 issue

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of The Bookman: “These poor peasants lived in a beautiful if somewhat inhospitable world, where little has changed since Adam delved and Eve span. Everything was so old that it was steeped in the heart, and every powerful emotion found at once noble types and symbols for its expression.” When Yeats encountered Synge in Paris three years later, it was with these principles and sentiments that he persuaded him to abandon the French capital for the Aran Islands. The plays that resulted do indeed constitute a distinguished translation of folk and heroic materials to the modern stage. Synge set himself not only against the mystical excesses of the Irish writers of his time but also against the intellectual drama of Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw and produced works of narrow but intense passion. Synge’s plays realize, more successfully than those of any of his contemporaries, Yeats’s dictum that Irish writers should seek their form among the classical writers, but their language at home. Riders to the Sea • Riders to the Sea was the first play Synge wrote, and it draws most heavily and directly on his experience of life on the Aran Islands; many of the details, along with the main incident on which the play is based, can be found in the journals Synge kept during his visits there. It was Synge’s first successful use of Hiberno-English to serve his own dramatic and poetic purposes, and it is regarded by most commentators as one of the finest short plays in that literature. The action of the play is simple and highly compressed. An old woman of the Aran Islands, Maurya, has lost her husband, father-in-law, and four sons to the sea. She now awaits news of the fate of Michael, another son, as her last and youngest son, Bartley, prepares to make the crossing to Galway with two horses. Maurya’s two daughters have just received a bundle of clothes which they identify as those of Michael. As the young women attempt to keep the news from her, she attempts to dissuade Bartley from the hazardous journey—in vain, for just as Bartley must play the provider’s part, Maurya’s timeworn experience has taught her to anticipate the truth. While her daughters find confirmation of Michael’s death in the bundle of clothes, Maurya sees a vision of what is about to happen: Bartley’s drowning. As the daughters tell Maurya of Michael’s death, the neighbors carry in Bartley’s body. The play climaxes with Maurya’s lament for these and all her menfolk, ending with a prayer for all the living and the dead. Although it requires less than thirty minutes to perform, the play encompasses a succession of moods and a universe of action. By contrasting the young women’s particular, objective attitudes (their preoccupation with the physical evidence of Michael’s death) with Maurya’s subjective, universal, even mystical, consciousness (her forgetting the blessing and the nails, and her visionary experience), Synge establishes a pattern of dramatic ironies. Maurya’s feelings in regard to the external action of the play, moreover, are seen to evolve from a subdued disquiet, to a higher anxiety, to a visionary sympathy with her last two sons, and finally to a threnody of disinterested compassion for the mothers and sons of all humankind. Maurya is, therefore, not only a credible individual character but also an archetypal figure: She is cast among domestic details yet is inattentive to them because her awareness of commonality and community eventually obscures particular concerns. Only her indomitable attitude in those eloquent, passionate speeches offers a nearly adequate human response to the implacable antagonist, the sea. The sea that surrounds the bare islands is both the islanders’ source of sustenance and their principal natural enemy; in the play, it insistently reminds the characters that, contend with it or not, they are doomed. Synge has carefully selected the domes-

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tic details to develop his themes—the bread, the nets, boards, knife, rope, and knot— details which establish a practical and symbolic relationship between the smaller and larger worlds of action, onstage and offstage, practical and moral. Other elements in the play act as religious or mystical allusions: the apocalyptic horses, the fateful dropped stitches, the ineffectual young priest, the omens in the sky and in the holy well. Many aspects of the setting—the door, the colors, the blessing—repeat and reverse themselves as images of the life-and-death ritual that sets Maurya and the sea against each other again and again. Maurya’s maternal mysticism is solemnly expressed by her prayers, blessings, gestures, litanies, and pitiful elegy for the cavalcade of death. Although Maurya’s speeches are interlaced with Christian invocation, her response to the catastrophe does not, at its most profound depths, derive from conventional Christian feelings. Maurya confronts a system of natural elements that confounds all human aspirations, and her response is in the tradition of characters from grand tragedy. Thus Synge has written a play that combines elements from Greek tragedy (it reminded Yeats of the plays of Aeschylus), the attitudes of primitive Gaelic society (its fatalism and impersonality), and the modern world, with its nihilism and cultivation of a sense of the absurd. There has been considerable argument over the compatibility of these ethics with one another, but there is no disagreement over the intensity and complexity of the emotions engendered by the play, whether read or staged. In the Shadow of the Glen • Synge’s second produced play, In the Shadow of the Glen (written under the title The Shadow of the Glen) is set in the Wicklow Mountains south of Dublin, a remote area familiar to Synge, in which he had a cottage and about which he had written several essays gathered under the title In Wicklow (1910). The play shows the influence of Ibsen’s Et dukkehjem (pr., pb. 1879; A Doll’s House, 1880), but its direct source is “An Old Man’s Story,” which Synge had heard from the Aran Island storyteller Pat Dirane; it is found in Synge’s prose work The Aran Islands. The question of the play’s origin is significant because it was immediately attacked for its depiction of an unfaithful wife and its unfair portrayal of Irishwomen. Synge unquestionably took considerable liberty with his raw materials—drawing, for example, on an episode from Petronius’s Satyricon (c. 60 c.e.; The Satyricon, 1694), “The Widow of Ephesus”—and the result was an original, concise, complex comedy. A “Tramp” is admitted to a lonely cottage by one Nora Burke, whose husband is laid out as if for a wake. Conversation between the two reveals that Nora has been living unhappily with her relatively well-off but aged husband, a situation that has led to a number of dalliances with other men, including the now deceased Patch Darcy. Nora then exits to rendezvous with another young man, Michael Dara, leaving the Tramp to maintain the wake. The Tramp, however, is soon shocked to find that Nora’s husband, Dan Burke, is feigning death in order to trap his wife and either bring her to heel or eject her from his house. No sooner has the Tramp agreed to cooperate with Dan’s scheme than Nora returns with Michael Dara. The pair discuss their prospects of marriage now that Nora is apparently free. Suddenly Dan springs from the bed to confront the pair. Michael Dara backs off immediately, and Nora is left to face her husband alone; at this point, the Tramp reintroduces himself with renewed eloquence, offering Nora a romantic life with him outside material security. This appeal finally releases Nora’s imaginative energies, and she departs with him, leaving Dan Burke and Michael Dara to share a bottle of whiskey.

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In the Shadow of the Glen offered the first explicit treatment of sexual frustration on the modern Irish stage; at the same time, the play’s symbolic setting and the rich imagery of its language enlarge its reference to register a protest against the constraints of time and space (represented by the mists moving up and down the Wicklow glen). Synge sympathizes with Nora and identifies with the Tramp, the two developing characters in the play, in opposition to their static counterparts, Dan Burke and Michael Dara. The Tramp’s sympathetic nature and colorful talk awaken hitherto untapped imaginative reserves in Nora, so that the surroundings of mountain mist and road become reinvested with their primary magic. The play thus dramatizes Synge’s central preoccupations: the conflict between actuality and human aspirations, the awareness of human mutability, and human beings’ intimate relation with the natural world. In the Shadow of the Glen dramatizes life-and-death issues in many ways, both literally and metaphorically, and on different levels of seriousness and comedy: Daniel Burke appears dead but rises twice. His ploy is to test the convention of life (his wife’s fidelity) with the perspective of death, and he succeeds in exposing it as illusory. The audience begins with a conventional view of death; proceeds, after Dan’s first resurrection (through the sharing of his vantage point, but not his point of view), to a seriocomic view of life; and ends, after his second resurrection, with a romantic sharing of the Tramp’s vantage point and point of view on both life and death. As its sympathies shift, the audience proceeds from an ironic view of Nora’s infidelity to an ironic view of Dan’s righteousness. The first revelation is that the conventional phenomena of death are deceptive; the final revelation is that the conventional phenomena of life are equally deceptive. The playgoer begins by believing Dan to be dead in body and ends by believing him dead in soul. These ambiguities and shifts in the plot are reflected in the language and imagery of the play, which propose states of animality, madness, and age as relative conditions between life and death. It is clear, for example, that Nora’s memories of Patch Darcy condition her response to the Tramp, and as the play progresses, the connections between these two male figures multiply, as do the associations of the Tramp with death. Thus, as the image of Patch Darcy (his life-in-death counterpart), the Tramp is at once the antagonist of Dan and Michael, death-in-life counterparts. The Tramp is, in an important sense, the ghost of Patch Darcy, for he is the counterpart, in Nora’s consciousness, of her dead lover. She seems to recognize the affinity, at first dimly but with sufficient clarity at the end to follow her Patch into the mists on the mountainside to romance, and probably to madness and death. Thus, the Tramp, as Patch Darcy revenant, is Nora’s shadow of the Wicklow glen. By a combination of poetic language, naturalistic action, and farce, the play transforms its source into a small triumph, preparing the way for Synge’s greatest achievement, The Playboy of the Western World. The Playboy of the Western World • The Playboy of the Western World originated in a story, recorded in 1898, about a man named Lynchenaun “who killed his father with the blow of a spade when he was in a passion” and, with the aid of the people of Inishmaan, evaded the police to escape eventually to the United States. When later (1903-1905) Synge visited Counties Kerry and Mayo, he gathered further materials for this work: observations of the lonely landscapes of the western seaboard, the moodiness and rebellious temperament of the people, and their religiosity, alcoholism, and fanciful language. For the next two years, he worked steadily on the play under five successive titles, almost twenty scenarios, and a dozen complete drafts, before it was finally produced on January 26, 1907.

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The play develops the Lynchenaun story into that of Christy Mahon, a timorous Kerry farmboy who has fled north from the scene of his parricide to a lonely stretch of the coastline of Mayo. There he happens on a remote public house where he tells his story. The villagers give him refuge, and as he is called on to retell his story to a succession of curious neighbors, his embellishments become more colorful, and his selfconfidence grows in proportion to the hyperbole. The villagers respond to these accounts with increasing admiration, so that Christy is soon regarded as a hero for his passionate deed. He strikes fear in the men and desire in the women, especially in the daughter of the house, Pegeen Mike. She rejects her fiancé, the pious Shawn Keogh, for Christy’s attentions, which she seeks to retain against the competition of the village women, especially the Widow Quin. All this attention drives Christy to further heights of eloquence—especially in the love scene with Pegeen—and to feats of athletic skill at the village sports. These triumphs, however, are rudely deflated by the appearance of another, older Kerryman, with a bandaged head: Christy’s father, very much alive. He exposes Christy as a coward and a liar, and the crowd, Pegeen included, immediately rejects their erstwhile champion. Christy has been changed, however, and to prove his father wrong and regain his reputation and Pegeen’s affections, he attacks his father again, this time laying him low “in the sight of all.” Christy, however, has misjudged the effect of such an action on the villagers, who distinguish between the admirable “gallous story” and the shocking “dirty deed,” and they capture Christy to bring him to justice. He is disillusioned with all of them and threatens indiscriminate vengeance, whereupon his father again revives, recognizes Christy’s newfound character, and invites him back to Kerry as master of the house. Christy agrees, and they depart, casting aspersions on the “villainy of Mayo and the fools in here.” Too late, Pegeen realizes that she has lost a true champion. The play provoked immediate outrage among the Dublin audiences: They considered it an insult to national pride, to Roman Catholicism, and to common decency. Among a people hoping for a fair, if not positive, treatment in support of their longstanding grievance against British rule, the play was a cruel disappointment. For his part, Synge refused to tone down the play’s oaths and irreverent allusions, even when appealed to privately by the actors and by his fellow Protestants Yeats and Lady Gregory. The protests, in fact, turned into a full-scale riot with Christy’s reference to “a drift of chosen females standing in their shifts,” which was considered an intolerable obscenity. In the week that followed, the police protected the stage and players from nightly attack, Yeats defended the freedom of the stage in public debate, Synge himself granted an unfortunate interview to the press, and the newspapers were full of acrimonious argument. In retrospect, it is not difficult to understand why a Dublin audience, sensitive to signs of religious and ethnic derogation, should react so vehemently to the work of a son of the landed class produced at the “national” theater and composed of such an original blend of Rabelaisian humor, lyricism, romance, and exaggeration. In his preface to the play, Synge anticipates a hostile reaction by praising the “popular imagination that is fiery and magnificent, and tender” that he found among the people of the remote regions. He proposes that the language and images are authentic, “that the wildest sayings and ideas in this play are tame indeed compared with the fancies one may hear in any little hillside cabin.” Although it is true that Synge’s sources— in plot, language, and characterization—are sound, the combination here, more than in his other works, is uniquely his own. Just as the action and characterization lack normal constraints, so, too, is the language compressed and heightened.

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The distinctive language of The Playboy of the Western World derives from several sources: the Hiberno-English dialects of the West of Ireland, vestiges of Tudor English still found in Ireland, popular sermons, and Synge’s own penchant for musical, rhythmic prose. Chief among these is the influence of Irish Gaelic syntax, vocabulary, and idiom, with its rich lode of religious and natural imagery. This convention is particularly effective at the romantic climax in act 3, although it can sound parodic in scenes of less excitement. Even so, Synge’s particular artistic use of local dialect is considerably more flexible and expressive than the comparable experiments of Lady Gregory or Yeats. In this dialect, Synge found an ideal vehicle for his own passionate vision of the lonely outsider. Christy is the poet whose creative gifts are only superficially appreciated by a convention-bound society; Christy not only invests the language with new zest and daring but also unknowingly transforms himself, by the same process of imaginative energy, from a cowering lout into a master of his destiny. His transformation begins as the people of Mayo trust his story and continues as he realizes his own narrative skills; it is completed when, with full moral awareness, he strikes his father down a second time. His father is the first to recognize the new Christy; Pegeen Mike does so, too, but for her it is too late; for the rest, the episode is no more than a subject for gossip. Christy’s path to his apotheosis comes only after an erratic journey of surges and reversals; The Playboy of the Western World is exuberant comedy in its action as well as in its language and characterization. It contains moments of farce, satire, tragicomedy, and the mock heroic. As Ann Saddlemyer’s standard edition shows, Synge’s revisions were vigorous and meticulous, act 3 giving him the most difficulties; some of these difficulties—Pegeen’s motivations and the resolution of the Widow Quin’s role—arguably remain unresolved. For all of its difficulties, however, this act achieves brilliant closure and includes perhaps the finest dramatic writing to come from the Irish theater. The power of The Playboy of the Western World rests on more than its verbal pyrotechnics and comic structure; as many critics have argued, it exhibits features of the scapegoat archetype, the Oedipus myth, and the Messiah theme. It has relationships with Irish folk legend, with the early Irish Ulster cycle of heroic tales, and with Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1867). Whatever the relevance of these sources or analogues to an appreciation of this great play, the play’s qualities derive from the happy collaboration of Synge’s instinctive sense of the dramatic and the quality of his material. He describes it thus to an admirer: “The wildness and, if you will, the vices of the Irish peasantry are due, like their extraordinary good points of all kinds, to the richness of their nature—a thing that is priceless beyond words.” Deirdre of the Sorrows • In his unfinished last play, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Synge was in the process of making a new departure. He found that the challenge of writing on a heroic theme from the Ulster cycle presented fresh difficulties, which he took satisfaction in solving. It is generally conceded that his version humanizes the legend: It is more realistic than the versions by Æ and Yeats, with which it is often compared. Other major works nonfiction: The Aran Islands, 1907; In Wicklow, 1910; The Autobiography of J. M. Synge, 1965; Letters to Molly: John Millington Synge to Máire O’Neill, 1906-1909, 1971 (Ann Saddlemyer, editor); My Wallet of Photographs, 1971 (Lilo Stephens, introducer and arranger); Some Letters of John M. Synge to Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats, 1971 (Saddlemyer,

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editor); The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, 1983-1984 (2 volumes; Saddlemyer, editor). miscellaneous: Plays, Poems, and Prose, 1941; Collected Works, 1962-1968 (Ann Saddlemyer and Robin Skelton, editors). Bibliography Casey, Daniel J. Critical Essays on John Millington Synge. New York: G. K. Hall, 1994. These essays by Synge scholars cover topics such as Synge’s use of language, his poems, and most of his plays, including The Well of the Saints and The Tinker’s Wedding as well as the more famous The Playboy of the Western World. Bibliography and index. Gerstenberger, Donna Lorine. John Millington Synge. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1990. A basic biography and critical evaluation of Synge’s works. Bibliography. Kiely, David M. John Millington Synge: A Biography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Kiely covers the life of this complex and difficult dramatist. Bibliography and index. Krause, Joseph. The Regeneration of Ireland: Essays. Bethesda, Md.: Academica Press, 2001. This scholarly work focuses on the intellectual life of Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on Synge’s life and works. Bibliography and index. McCormack, W. J. Fool of the Family: A Life of J. M. Synge. New York: New York University Press, 2000. McCormack draws on previously unpublished material in his depiction of Synge, which places the dramatist in the context of the cultural changes taking place around him. McDonald, Ronan. Tragedy and Irish Writing: Synge, O’Casey, Beckett. New York: Palgrave, 2001. McDonald examines the treatment of tragedy in Irish literature, focusing on the works of Synge, Sean O’Casey, and Samuel Beckett. Bibliography and index. Watson, George J. Irish Identity and the Literary Revival: Synge, Yeats, Joyce, and O’Casey. 2d ed. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1994. Watson looks at the historical and sociological developments taking place in Ireland while Synge, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Sean O’Casey were writing and the influence these events had on their works. Bibliography and index. Cóilín D. Owens, updated by Peter C. Holloran

Terence Terence

Publius Terentius Afer Born: Carthage; c. 190 b.c.e. Died: En route from Greece; 159 b.c.e. Principal drama • Andria, 166 b.c.e. (English translation, 1598); Hecyra, 165 b.c.e. (The Mother-in-Law, 1598); Heautontimorumenos, 163 b.c.e. (The Self-Tormentor, 1598); Eunuchus, 161 b.c.e. (The Eunuch, 1598); Phormio, 161 b.c.e. (English translation, 1598); Adelphoe, 160 b.c.e. (The Brothers, 1598) Other literary forms • Terence is remembered only for his plays. Achievements • Latin literature took an important step in its development when Terence arrived on the scene. Although Plautus had done much to improve the Latin tongue and to refine the stage, he was hindered in his efforts by an audience lacking in culture. It was otherwise with Terence. In the interval that separated Plautus and Terence, a society of literary men had grown up at Rome, and their tastes were dominated by admiration of Greek literature and culture. It was in this circle that Terence moved and formed his literary aspirations and ideals. As a result, his main purpose differed from that of Plautus, who aimed at securing the applause of the people. Instead, Terence directed his efforts especially toward the attainment of elegance and correctness of expression and toward symmetry in the elaboration of his plots. Terence believed that the best way to obtain these results and the surest method for building up a national literature was a faithful reproduction of Greek works. Accordingly, he set himself the task of Hellenizing Roman comedy more completely, and by a close imitation of his Greek models, he succeeded in combining with the refined Latin of the cultivated class much of the flexibility, delicacy, and smoothness of the Attic idiom. Biography • Publius Terentius Afer (Terence) is said to have been a native of Carthage and to have been brought in his childhood to Rome as a slave. There he was educated as a free man, by Terentius Lucanus, the senator, by whom he was afterward set free. Although originally a slave, Terence cannot have been a prisoner of war because there was no war between Rome and Carthage during his lifetime. He may, however, have fallen into the hands of a slave-dealer at Carthage because many of the native African tribes were subject to the Carthaginians. In Carthage, there must have been enslaved Afri whose children were in bondage with their parents. The children of such parents were often sold into foreign lands, and it is easy to conceive how Terence, if born at Carthage under these or similar circumstances, may have been sold by a slave-dealer to Lucanus at Rome. Such an explanation of his origin and deportation to Rome is justified in part by his cognomen Afer, which points to his being of other than Phoenician blood. Had Terence been of Phoenician origin, the last of his three names would more naturally have been Poenulus, since the Carthaginians were commonly distinguished from the Africans and it was customary to give names to slaves to indicate 944

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the nation to which they belonged. On receiving his freedom, Terence would have added to his praenomen, Publius, the Gentile name of his master (Terentius), which then would become his nomen, while as cognomen he might retain the title of “the African” (Afer) as a mark of particular distinction. Terence’s personal attractions and intellectual gifts, which had helped him to obtain his freedom, were the cause also of his permanent reception within the aristocratic circle of younger literary men at Rome. Terence probably became known to these men while he was still a member of his master’s household. This circle included many of the nobility who were mainly responsible for introducing into Roman life Greek culture and refinement. Among the noble young men who were friends of Terence and members of the same literary circle was Scipio Africanus the Younger; it was he who gave his name to what has since been known as the Scipionic circle of literati, a small group of people who made Greek literature their special study and Greek refinement and education their standard. It was the men of this class and character whom Terence especially endeavored to please with his comedies. He seems to have been indifferent to the general public. Reportedly, when Terence submitted his first play to the aediles for production, he was told to obtain the opinion of Caecilius, who was then an established author. Going to Caecilius’s house, where a dinner was in progress, Terence sat at the side of the room and began reading his play aloud. Soon he was invited to join the guests on the couches, where he finished reading it to great applause. Having gained the support of Caecilius and Scipio and other members of the literary and aristocratic class at Rome, he was able to repel the attacks of his enemies, who, moved by jealousy, brought against Terence the unfounded charge of plagiarism— or more exactly, hypocrisy—in representing as his own compositions dramas that were written at least in part by his noble friends. The truth appears to be that Terence read his compositions aloud to his literary friends and employed, independently and according to his choice, their criticisms and suggestions. After producing six comedies between 166 and 160 b.c.e., Terence went to Greece, probably for the purpose of studying Greek life and institutions, which, according to his habit, he portrayed in his comedies. In 159 b.c.e., he died, just as he was about to return to Rome with translations, which he had made in Greece, of a number of Menander’s plays. Accounts vary as to the place and manner of his death. One story relates that he was lost at sea off the island of Leucas while on his way to (Library of Congress) Italy and that his translations per-

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ished with him. Another account reports that he died at Stymphalus in Arcadia, after having lost his baggage and manuscripts in a shipwreck. Analysis • Terence’s literary activity displayed itself wholly in the production of palliatae, plays that are fundamentally Greek and are representations of Greek habits, morals, and customs. The name palliatae comes from the pallium, a Greek cloak worn by the actor. It is clear that Terence deliberately tried not to break the Greek illusion. The characters must have seemed distinctly foreign to the Roman audience to such an extent that sometimes it appears that the only truly Latin element in his plays is the language. He based all of his plays on the Greek New Comedy; his favorite model was Menander, on whose plays four of Terence’s are based (Andria, The Self-Tormentor, The Eunuch, and The Brothers). The remaining two (Phormio and The Mother-in-Law) are based on originals by the later writer Apollodorus. Terence’s use of the Greek plays led to an accusation of contamnatio (contamination). Normally, the use of a Greek original meant the closest possible adherence to it. Terence, contrary to the artistic usage of the time, used parts and materials drawn from more than one Greek model in the construction of a play. Terence countered the charge in the prologues of several plays, most notably in Andria. It is now generally accepted that the charge was malicious and inspired by the jealousy of his enemies. All six of Terence’s plays tend to be conservative and more staid than those of Plautus. The scene is always “a street in Athens”; the characters are the standard old man, young man, courtesan, and slave; the chief variation is the more frequent introduction of the elderly married lady, and of the young couple already married when the play begins. The parasite, when he appears in Phormio and The Eunuch, has been elevated from the status of buffoon to that of an intelligent man-about-town; similarly the pimp, when he appears in Phormio and The Brothers, is much more the businessman than the scoundrel. Terence’s plays show almost no clowning and no slapstick. Nearest to rowdy foolishness are the scenes in The Eunuch in which a braggart soldier, in the company of his parasite and an “army” consisting of two or three ragged numbskulls, lays siege to the house of a prostitute. The plays are nearly perfect in form; every scene is functional and serves to forward the action of the plot or to provide necessary elaboration on some character trait. There are no wasted scenes, introduced merely for comic diversion; indeed, there is hardly a wasted word. There are no immoral scenes, no drunken revels, few remarks that even smack of impropriety, let alone of obscenity, and no violence at all. Action on stage is quiet and rarely undignified. That the plays move smoothly, gracefully, and rapidly is a tribute to the skill with which they were put together; for all their quietness, they never lose the fast action that is the essence of Terence’s comedy. Terence’s plays move on a higher moral level than Plautus’s. In every one of the six, there is a “recognition” of one sort or another; in every one, except for The Mother-inLaw in which the characters are already married when the story begins, the hero and heroine properly end by becoming husband and wife. In Andria, The Self-Tormentor, and Phormio, a long-lost daughter is found and recognized. In The Eunuch, the girl turns out to be the sister of a proper Athenian citizen. In The Mother-in-Law and The Brothers, the girls had been foolish enough to go out on the streets at night in the course of a wildly sexual festival and had been raped by unknown young men. In The Mother-inLaw, the young man in question has subsequently married the girl he raped, without realizing who she was. His self-righteous anxiety on discovering that she was already

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pregnant, presumably by some man other than himself, causes the complications that Terence sets out to solve. In The Brothers, the young man has acknowledged his act and has promised to marry the girl, even though she is poor and of a lower class. The suspicion on the part of the girl’s mother that the young man is about to renege on his promise forms one of the problems that this intricate play tries to solve. In all of his plays, Terence is a thoroughly gentle and tactful poet, never overly forceful or blatant. Still, through all of his plays runs a persistent note of social criticism, directed particularly at the position of slaves and of women in Greek and Roman society. There is not a single slave or female character who is not decent, honorable, resourceful, and intelligent. This is certainly not the result of inadvertence, nor can it be brushed aside as simple sentimentality. It is rather Terence’s way of arraigning ancient society for the heartless indifference that it commonly demonstrated toward its slave population and for the hypocritical and specious reasoning with which it handled prostitutes. Terence, perhaps because he himself had been a slave, shows sympathy toward them, and this gains for him respect for his understanding and courage. Terence’s plays, as documents of human nature, are not much better than Plautus’s, but where Plautus saw in other people chiefly an opportunity for creating an amusing situation, Terence viewed humanity with affection and regard. The Brothers • The critical consensus has been that The Brothers is Terence’s masterpiece. First, it is a serious comedy because it deals with the theme of education and works out the consequences of opposing theories in ways that are simultaneously logical and amusing. Second, it is a tour de force of double plotting hardly equaled in drama: There are two systems of upbringing; two young products thereof, with their two love affairs, as well as the two brothers of the older generation who are the cause of it all. Last, in spite of the play’s clever plot, its characters remain complex. Although the plot elements of all the plays are conventional and repetitive, they form no more than a base on which Terence erects a remarkably varied set of stories, which hold the attention of the audience not only by unfolding a tale but even more by the sympathetic presentation of an interesting set of human problems and by a remarkable, gentle, unobtrusive, yet persistent note of social criticism. The Eunuch • A good example of a conventional play of New Comedy is The Eunuch. The play presents two stories. In the primary plot, the young man has lost his position as lover of a courtesan to a braggart soldier. The courtesan hopes to regain possession of a young Athenian girl who had been like a sister to her and who has been lost to her for many years. By coincidence, the young girl has turned up in the soldier’s possession. Once the problem of getting the young girl back has been solved, the courtesan is presumably ready to take the young man back as her lover. The chief interest of the play centers on its subplot, in which the Athenian girl herself is the central figure, even though she appears on the stage briefly and speaks no lines. The young man’s brother falls in love with her and substitutes himself for a eunuch who was given to the courtesan by the young man. The “eunuch” and the Athenian girl make love, and the other slaves wonder wide-eyed how a eunuch managed it. In the meantime, the Athenian girl is recognized as the sister of an Athenian citizen, and after disentangling the identity of the brother from that of the eunuch, he (the brother) is engaged to the girl. The play comes very near to being foolish; it is certainly the least interesting of all of them, yet it is said to have been the most popular and Terence’s greatest success in his lifetime. One reason may be that it is the most lively

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and vivid of Terence’s plays; although it is noted for its bawdy scenes, its vulgarity is greatly minimized by Terence’s tasteful treatment. Phormio • Phormio has a double plot somewhat better balanced than that of The Eunuch. There are two love affairs, one concerned with the love of the young man Antipho for an orphan girl, Phanium, who never appears on the stage, and the other with the passion of Phaedria, the second young man, for the usual courtesan. By a series of clever tricks, the parasite Phormio succeeds in getting Antipho married to Phanium and obtaining the money that Phaedria needs to purchase his ladylove. At the end of the play, Phanium turns out to be an Athenian citizen, in fact, the daughter of Phaedria’s father Chremes, who is cajoled into letting Phaedria keep his courtesan. Aside from The Brothers, Phormio has earned more praise than any other Terentian comedy. It is more comical than the others; the handling of the improbable plot is masterly; the characters, as is usual with Terence, are complex and sympathetic; and in a variation on a theme, it is interesting to see the parasite rather than the slave carry the burden of intrigue. Andria • Andria is the closest of all Terence’s plays to a tender love story and probably the best known of all of his plays. The play centers on the usual love-of-youngman-for-long-lost-daughter theme. The conflict is occasioned by the young man, Pamphilus, and his determination to keep the girl whom he has married without his father’s consent and without adequate proof of her citizenship. Pamphilus has to withstand the equally strong determination of his father, Simo, to separate the couple, not so much because he disapproves of the girl, Glycerium, as because of Simo’s hurt that a son of his flouted both Athenian law and custom by, apparently, marrying a noncitizen. In the end, Glycerium turns out to be a citizen, in fact, the daughter of Simo’s old friend, Chremes. The story might be quite commonplace except for the curious way in which the character of a dead woman, Chrysis, pervades it. She is the true “woman from Andros.” She came to Athens a penniless orphan, tried with courage and persistence to earn an honest living, but, finding this too difficult, dropped into the less happy but more prosperous trade of the prostitute, and died just before the story of the play opens. Her courage, kindness, generosity, and devotion to Glycerium makes the whole play shine and gives it a human warmth and sympathy that would not be possible otherwise. Interest inevitably centers on the slave Davus, who considerably outdoes his master in matters of intelligence and sheer manliness. Davus is clever, quick, and resourceful. He has a buoyant spirit that even the abuse of slavery cannot break. More than that, he never loses his human dignity; he may be a slave, but he is nevertheless a man. The Self-Tormentor • Terence apparently believed that there is no one right way to rear sons, and this is confirmed in The Self-Tormentor. The bewildered and self-pitying father in this play, with his foolish attempts to punish himself for what he perceives as a mistake in bringing up his son, represents Terence’s opinion of fathers. The play once again involves two fathers. One is Menedemus, whose son Cinia has joined the Persian army because his love for a poor woman, Antiphila, has shamed his father. The other is Chremes whose son Clitipho has as a mistress a prostitute, Bacchis. The plot centers on the attempts of the young men to obtain their respective ladyloves. The Self-Tormentor is usually considered a less successful The Brothers. Its theme is similar and its character-

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ization almost as good. Terence is thought to have started weaving more threads here than he could effectively manage; the general pattern, even when completed, is hard to follow. There is one unique feature in the plot: In this play, the recognition scene adds to the complication rather than leading to the denouement. The Mother-in-Law • The remaining play, The Mother-in-Law, had a curious history. On the first two occasions when it was presented, the audience walked out before the play was over to go and see, on one occasion, a tightrope walker, and on the other, a gladiatorial exhibition. Only on the third attempt did the play succeed in holding the audience until the final curtain. This original bad luck has been at least in part responsible for the generally low rating that the play still enjoys. Actually, it tells an unusual story and tells it remarkably well. The plot concerns a young man who has raped a girl during a religious festival and later has married her without knowing that she was this same person, only to be greatly distressed on discovering that she was pregnant, apparently by some other man. The resolution of this tangle comes about through a variation of the recognition device: A ring, pulled from the girl’s finger by the young man in the act of raping her and later presented by him to his mistress, a prostitute, is produced by the prostitute at the critical moment and establishes the identity of the young man’s wife. The role of the prostitute immediately attracts the attention of the audience; generous and sympathetic courtesans are not unknown in the comedy of Terence, but this one is the only one who deliberately, and out of sheer kindness and generosity, engages in an act that must inevitably and permanently sever her from her former lover. The young man, too, presents an interesting variant, for unlike other young men in Roman comedy who seem to have had mothers only through biological necessity, this one is devoted to his mother—so much so, in fact, that he considers her happiness more important than his wife’s. Bibliography Forehand, Walter. Terence. Boston: Twayne, 1985. A basic biography of Terence with literary criticism of his works. Includes some general discussion of Latin drama. Bibliography and index. Goldberg, Sander M. Understanding Terence. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986. Goldberg provides a brief biography of Terence along with analysis of his works and of Latin drama in general. Snowden, Frank M., Jr. Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1970. The author examines the role of blacks in the Greek and Roman worlds. Sutton, Dana Ferrin. Ancient Comedy: The War of the Generations. New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1993. This study of ancient comedy looks at Terence, Menander, and Plautus. Bibliography and index. Shelley P. Haley

Michel Tremblay Michel Tremblay

Born: Montreal, Canada; June 25, 1942 Principal drama • Le Train, pr. 1964 (televised), pb. 1990; Cinq, pr. 1966, pb. 1971 (English translation, 1976; includes Berthe, Johnny Mangano and His Astonishing Dogs, and Gloria Star); Les Belles-sœurs, pr., pb. 1968 (English translation, 1973; also as The Guid Sisters, 1988); En pièces détachées, pr. 1969, pb. 1970 (revision of Cinq; Like Death Warmed Over, 1973; also as Broken Pieces and Montreal Smoked Meat); La Duchesse de Langeais, pr. 1969, pb. 1970 (English translation, 1976); Demain matin, Montréal m’attend, pr. 1970, pb. 1972 (musical); À toi, pour toujours, ta Marie-Lòu, pr., pb. 1971 (Forever Yours, MarieLou, 1972); Les Paons, pr. 1971; Hosanna, pr., pb. 1973 (English translation, 1974); Bonjour, là, bonjour, pr., pb. 1974 (English translation, 1975); Surprise! Surprise!, pr. 1975, pb. 1977 (English translation, 1976); La Duchesse de Langeais, and Other Plays, pb. 1976 (includes La Duchesse de Langeais, Berthe, Johnny Mangano and His Astonishing Dogs, Gloria Star, and Surprise! Surprise! ); Les Héros de mon enfance, pr., pb. 1976 (musical; music by Sylvain Lelièvre); Sainte-Carmen de la Main, pr., pb. 1976 (Saint Carmen of the Main, 1978); Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra, pr., pb. 1977 (English translation, 1979); Les Socles, pb. 1979 (The Pedestals, 1979); L’Impromptu d’Outrement, pr., pb. 1980 (The Impromptu of Outrement, 1981); Les Anciennes Odeurs, pr., pb. 1981 (Remember Me, 1984); Albertine en cinq temps, pr. 1985, pb. 1986 (Albertine in Five Times, 1986); Le Vrai Monde?, pr., pb. 1987 (The Real World?, 1988); La Maison suspendue, pr., pb. 1990; Nelligan, pr., pb. 1990 (libretto; music by Andre Gagnon); Théâtre: Volume 1, pb. 1991; Marcel poursuivi par les chiens, pr., pb. 1992 (Marcel Pursued by the Hounds, 1992); En circuit fermé, pb. 1994; Messe solenelle pour une pleine lune d’été, pr., pb. 1996 (Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer, 2000); Encore une fois, si vous le permettez, pr., pb. 1998 (For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, 1998); L’État des lieux, pr., pb. 2002 Other literary forms • Although Michel Tremblay is best known for his drama, he is also the author of a number of short stories, film scripts, and television plays; in addition, he translated into French Aristophanes’ Lysistrat 4 (411 b.c.e.; Lysistrat4, 1837), Paul Zindel’s And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little (pr. 1967, pb. 1972) and The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (pr. 1965, pb. 1971), four short plays by Tennessee Williams, and Dario Fo’s Mistero buffo: Giullarata popolare (pr. 1969, pb. 1970; Mistero Buffo: Comic Mysteries, 1983). He has also published a number of novels, including La Grosse Femme d’à côté est enceinte (1978; The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant, 1981); Thérèse et Pierrette à l’École des saintes-anges (1980; Thérèse and Pierrette and the Little Hanging Angel, 1984); Le Cœur découvert (1986; The Heart Laid Bare, 1989; also as Making Room, 1990), and Hotel Bristol: New York, NY (1999). In 1990, Tremblay wrote and published the libretto for an opera, Nelligan, which was produced the same year. Achievements • Michel Tremblay is part of a new generation of playwrights that emerged in Quebec during the 1960’s and 1970’s, a time of profound political and cultural change for this province. Led by Tremblay, these writers saw as their primary task the liberation of Quebec culture from the shackles of foreign domination. With very few exceptions, the theater of Quebec to the mid-twentieth century had never treated 950

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issues genuinely French-Canadian; it was a theater enslaved to the thematic, stylistic, and linguistic control of “mother” France. With the opening of Tremblay’s Les Bellessœurs, at the Théâtre du Rideau Vert in Montreal on August 28, 1968, a new and autonomous Québécois theater was born. Significant partly for its thematic focus on the realities of the working class of Quebec, Les Belles-sœurs is the first play to be written in the distinctive French of Tremblay’s people–joual. A peculiar mixture of Anglicanisms, Old French, neologisms, and standard French, joual (from the Québécois pronunciation of the French word cheval) is the popular idiom of Quebec and especially of Montreal’s working class. To the French and to Quebec’s cultural elite, joual was a bastard tongue, emphasizing the pitiful nature of Quebec culture. To Tremblay, however, joual was a symbol of identity, a language not to be silenced but to be celebrated for its richness and for its distinctive flavor. To discuss Tremblay’s greatest achievements is thus not simply to focus on the fact that he has become Canada’s leading playwright, that his enormous creative output in the areas of theater, literature, film, and television has won for him international fame, that he has influenced the development of Canadian drama, and that he has won countless awards for his work. Though all of this is true, it is also important to recognize him as a cultural leader with a commitment to articulate and grapple with the problems of an oppressed community. Tremblay has accumulated a long list of literary prizes and distinctions. Among the most important are his being named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de France; his Albertine in Five Times brought him the Chalmers Prize in 1986; in 1988, Tremblay received the Prix Athanase-David for his work as a whole; in 1989, he received the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal for Le Premier Quartier de la lune (The First Quarter of the Moon, 1994), a prose work. Tremblay was named Chevalier de l’Ordre national du Québec in 1991. In 1994, he was given the Molson Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts. In 1999, Tremblay received a Governor-General’s Award. A controversy developed when some Quebec nationalists expected him to refuse the award. However, Tremblay accepted it—announcing for the first time, however, that he had refused the Order of Canada award in 1990. Tremblay won two prizes, the Chalmers Award and a Dora Mavor Moore Award, for For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again. Biography • Michel Tremblay was born in east-end Montreal on June 25, 1942, the youngest child of a working-class family. His family lived in a small seven-room house with two other families, and Tremblay remembers distinctly the first voices of his life: women who would speak candidly to one another about their lives and who would censor nothing in front of the young child. Indeed, these are the voices sounded in many of his plays, especially Les Belles-sœurs. In 1955, he won a scholarship to a school for gifted children; his innate distaste for the cultural elite soon caused him to return to the public schools. Tremblay speaks of his adolescence as a time of personal anguish, a time when writing became his primary channel of expression. Moreover, as a young man he became obsessed with television: “It was the only theatre I knew.” In 1959, he took a job as a linotype operator and during this period wrote his first television play, Le Train, for which he eventually won first prize in the 1964 Radio-Canada Contest for Young Authors. It is also in 1964 that he met André Brassard, who became one of his closest friends, his principal collaborator, and the director of many of the premier performances of his plays. His publishing career began in 1966 with a book of short stories,

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Contes pour buveurs attardés (Stories for Late Night Drinkers, 1978). In the same year, he submitted his first full-length play, Les Belles-sœurs (written in 1965), to the Dominion Drama Festival, but the revolutionary piece was rejected. Two years later, however, it was produced, with great success, at the Théâtre du Rideau Vert in Montreal and later in Paris. The years following 1968 marked a creative and prolific period for Tremblay. For English-speaking Canadians, however, Tremblay was not so widely publicized, partly because of the playwright’s desire to restrict his work to his French compatriots. It was only after 1976, the year the Separatists’ Parti Québécois under René Lévesque took power in the provincial House, that Tremblay opened his work to the English-speaking world. After 1976, translations of his plays appeared, productions abounded, and Tremblay emerged as Canada’s leading playwright, recognized as such in both North America and Europe. That he has achieved international acclaim testifies to the fact that his work is as universal in meaning as it is specific to contemporary Quebec life. In the late 1980’s, Tremblay’s work became increasingly autobiographical with such plays as The Real World? and For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again and the series of autobiographical novels, Chroniques du Plateau-Mont-Royal. In 1989 he added Le Premier Quartier de la lune to the series, and Un Objet de beauté (A Thing of Beauty, 1998) was published in 1997. He has also written the memoirs Les Vues animées (1995; Bambi and Me, 1998) and Douze coups de théâtre (1992; Twelve Opening Acts, 2002). In general, Tremblay is so productive in so many artistic genres—musical theater, opera, fiction, painting, and film among them—that an observer may find it difficult to keep track of what Tremblay has done and is doing. His career is certainly one of the richest in literary history. Analysis • Antecedents in the history of dramatic literature help to characterize the plays of Michel Tremblay. The playwright himself cites as most influential the ancient Greek tragedians on one hand and Samuel Beckett on the other. The influence of the ancient playwrights shows itself most notably in Tremblay’s repeated use of choruses and in the rhythmic precision of his work. Indeed, much of his theatrical power stems from a native musical sensibility that informs the structure of his plays. Like the Greeks, Tremblay writes dramatic pieces that operate, at least in part, as rhythmic scores for performance; his plays abound with overlapping voices and interwoven monologues, and possess a rhythm so peculiar to the language and intonations of the Québécois that there is often as much power in how his characters speak as there is in what they say. Beckett’s influence on Tremblay manifests itself in the specific context in which Tremblay places his characters and in the way those characters grapple with the struggles of life. Tremblay celebrates the notion that, despite the seeming despair of Beckett’s figures, there is a beauty in their struggle to face and accept their lives: “I never read or see a Beckett play without experiencing a lift.” His appreciation of Beckett is significant; although Tremblay’s characters seem trapped in the underbelly of culture, in seedy nightclubs, confined apartments, in a world of whores, pimps, and transvestites, or trapped even in their own social roles and family relationships, still there is a sense of uplift in their struggles and in the courage they find in themselves. Les Belles-sœurs • Stylistically, Tremblay’s dramas are eclectic, not only when looked at as a body of work, but also within single plays. In Les Belles-sœurs, for example, he creates a realistic setting, utilizes realistic dialogue, and then counters that realism with stylized elements reminiscent of the Theater of the Absurd. The premise of

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the play is simple: Fifteen women of the neighborhood gather to help Germaine Lauzon paste a million Blue Chip stamps in booklets for a contest she has won. The women of the title (“the sisters-in-law” or “the beautiful sisters,” an ambiguity in French that accounts for the original title maintained in translation) gossip as they paste. When Germaine is not looking, however, the women secretly steal the stamps. This ostensible, realistic line of the story unfolds in a dynamic relationship with stylized, isolated monologues spoken by the women to express the more honest, individual problems of their miserable, trapped lives: Marriage, family, and sex—the basis of their worlds—have achieved a level of banality that seems to reduce all of life to sheer endurance. Perhaps the clearest example of the juxtaposition of styles comes at the end of the play. Germaine discovers the thieves, throws them out of her home, and feels a profound sense of loneliness and isolation. She falls to her knees to pick up the stamps that scattered on the floor during the chaos of discovering the theft. At that moment, Tremblay breaks out of the realistic structure once again. From off stage the women begin to sing a chorus of “O Canada,” while simultaneously a rain of stamps falls from the ceiling. The stylized “shower” of prosperity is parallel to Germaine’s windfall of stamps at the beginning of the play. Yet the playwright creates his final image as a selfconsciously artificial construct, an image that contrasts with the conventionally realistic form used at the outset. Like a Euripidean deus ex machina, Tremblay’s rain of stamps is a theatrical joke; humanity is in turmoil and has reached an impasse within the realistic conventions of the play. The playwright’s ending undercuts that impasse, however, and, with a broad satirical gesture, he clarifies the source of the problem itself; the values of the Canadian middle class have their price. The family cycle • The body of Tremblay’s dramatic work possesses a remarkable consistency both in theme and in focus. His dramatis personae are the underprivileged, the people on the fringe of society, people who live in disguise. His plays also have a striking similarity of context; indeed, in the bulk of his work, he examines two specific worlds. On one hand, he looks at the family, at the home, and at the nature of the individual within the family construct. On the other hand, he looks to a horrifying world external to the family: the world of the Main in Montreal, with its host of transvestites, whores, and pimps, all set against a backdrop of “gambling joints, cabarets, lights and noise.” In the words of André Brassard, “The Main is the Kingdom of the marginals . . . the underprivileged and forgotten part of the proletariat . . . the underlayer of society.” The Tremblay opus can thus be examined to a large degree in two major cycles: the family cycle and the Main cycle. The two worlds do intersect at points, creating a potent juxtaposition. Indeed, when considered as a whole, Tremblay’s work is interesting not only because of his investigation into these two separate worlds but also because of his ability to show how those worlds mirror each other. In effect, the two cycles intersect to illuminate the “family” of the Main and the “underbelly” of the home. Like Death Warmed Over • Like Death Warmed Over, the first play of the family cycle, was actually written, in its original version, before Les Belles-sœurs but published and performed at a later date. It unfolds in four loosely connected episodes. The play begins in the inner courtyard of an east-end Montreal tenement on a sweltering summer afternoon. For the chorus of neighbors, the single point of interest is the window across the way—the home of Robertine, her daughter Hélène, Hélène’s husband, Henri, and their daughter Francine. The neighbors are fascinated with the peculiar

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and unsavory domestic battles in Robertine’s home. They offer a detailed description of the troubled family and its history as they wait for Hélène to come home, for the “show” of the evening to begin. The middle two episodes tell the story of Hélène, how she spends her time slinging smoked meat in a cheap restaurant on Papineau Street after having lost her job in a bar on the Main. She gets drunk, returns to the bar, only to have the frustrations of her life become that much more glaring as she confronts the figures of her past. The final episode takes place back in Robertine’s living room. Hélène comes home, verbally abuses Henri (who spends all of his time watching cartoons on television) and Robertine, and gives the neighbors the “show” for which they have waited. Toward the end, Claude, the retarded brother, returns home for a visit after escaping from his sanatorium. He wears “sunglasses and speaks English” and believes that doing so gives him ultimate power: It makes him invisible. In Tremblay’s world, the madman overturns his alienation to make it an illusory source of strength. Claude’s presence thus provides a sharp contrast to the feeling of humiliation and powerlessness among the other members of the family. Typically, the play ends in a series of stylized monologues in which the family members express their despair. They repeat a refrain in unison during this final section, a refrain that sums up their despondency and languor: “There’s not a goddamn thing I can do.” Forever Yours, Marie-Lou • Although Like Death Warmed Over is a play about failure and ultimate despair in family relationships, Tremblay’s next play in the family cycle, Forever Yours, Marie-Lou, presents the attempt of two sisters, Carmen and Manon, to find refuge from the traumas of family life. In this play, two conversations transpire simultaneously, one between Marie-Louise and her husband, Leopold, and the other between their daughters Carmen and Manon. The two conversations take place in the family home, but ten years apart. Carmen and Manon (in the 1970’s) recall the past, ten years earlier, when their parents and younger brother Roger died in a car accident. Manon, a religious zealot, believes her father Leopold was responsible for the accident, an act of suicide and filial murder. Carmen denies this account, although her rejection is undermined when Leopold (in the action of the 1960’s) threatens MarieLouise with that very scenario. Structurally, the play is a quartet of interweaving voices as each level of action comments on the other through a powerful theatrical juxtaposition. Each character has complaints about the others, each feels abused, each feels as if life has dealt him or her an unfair blow. In the turbulence of the marriage, Marie-Louise turns to religion and Leopold to his drinking and television. The daughters, too, have their share of trouble, not only as products of their repressive and abusive home but also as individuals who must cope with the tragic past. Carmen has turned to the Main and to singing in cabarets. Manon has, on the other hand, withdrawn entirely into a lonely life of religious fanaticism. The two women have clearly gone in opposite directions, but it is evident that they are both striving to find shelter from the traumas of the family. While Marie-Louise and Manon hide in an existence of religious repression, and Leopold in an escape into alcohol and boredom that finally erupts in the violence of murder and suicide, Carmen achieves a degree of liberation from her repressive past. This is evident only when one realizes that the core of Tremblay’s play is the collision of real human needs with the religious and social constructs that make the fulfillment of those needs impossible. That Carmen turns to the Main is perhaps only a limited alternative, another subculture with its own restrictions. Yet, within the context of the

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play, Carmen’s choice is the most fruitful; she has at least discovered a part of herself that opens the way toward personal creativity. This notion is the center of the play in which she next appears: Saint Carmen of the Main, a play in which issues of the family and the Main intersect in a subtle but provocative way. Saint Carmen of the Main • In this later play, Carmen is returning from a stay in Nashville, where she has been sent to improve her yodeling technique; the play opens with the chorus (the people of the Main) celebrating her return. Indeed, her education away from the Main was more than simply a time to improve technique: Carmen comes back as a leader of the people, as their voice; it is a voice expressed through her new lyrics and songs that relate directly to the concerns of the community. Carmen’s journey from repression to release is a model of realized human potential and gives her strength to speak for others. Despite the ecstasy of the people over their newfound leader, however, Carmen must face her antagonists: the cabaret owner Maurice, who wants her to sing the “old songs,” and Carmen’s rival, Gloria, who fights for her “rightful place.” When he challenges Carmen, Maurice articulates the political question of the play, a question that perhaps haunts the playwright himself: “All right. Let’s say they take our advice. Let’s say they smarten up, they wake up and they get mad. Then what? It’s fine to wake people up, but once they’re awake, what do you do with them?” Shortly after her performance at the cabaret, Carmen is brutally murdered; she is denounced as a lesbian so that the crime may be pinned on her innocent dresser, Harelip. “The lights go out completely on the Choruses”; the sun is down, the fire of awakening quelled. This is a play about the possibility of awakening, of fighting repression, of the change that can come about when human beings are acknowledged for their strengths. Carmen has found that strength within herself and is a beacon for the people. Yet the figures of the status quo—threatened for reasons both political and financial—end the triumph of humanity that lit the world for an instant. Bonjour, là, bonjour • If in the story of Carmen, Tremblay suggests that personal strength can come only from a freedom discovered outside the repressive home, then in Bonjour, là, bonjour, he explores the act of personal acceptance within the family itself. Again, this play is inspired by musical principles; there are thirty-one sections entitled “solo,” “duo,” “trio,” and so forth, up to “octuor,” depending on the number of voices involved in a given episode. The central figure in Bonjour, là, bonjour, Serge, is a young man who has just returned from a three-month stay in Paris, where he has tried to deal with his love for his sister Nicole. Though the odds are against him, Serge breaks through the oppressive structures of his family life to assert his integrity and express his love both to Nicole and to his aging and deaf father, Gabriel. Serge must defend himself against the invasion of his relatives (two spinster aunts and three sisters other than Nicole), who try to use his vitality to serve their needs. Once he sees past moral taboo to admit fully his incestuous love, he is able to triumph and communicate with his father. Like Carmen, in her relationship to the people of the Main, Serge becomes a figure who releases his father from a suffocating life. He invites his father to live with him and Nicole and, in the end, finds the strength to shout the words “I love you” into Gabriel’s deaf ears. The Main cycle • The plays of the family cycle are clearly parables of the political and cultural repression Tremblay sees within Quebec culture. Like Tremblay’s characters, the Québécois must begin a long journey to self-acceptance. Still, there is another

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“family” Tremblay explores: the family of the Main. In the Main cycle, he focuses on the individual desperately trying to find himself in a chaotic and frightening world, a world in which the search for identity is no less difficult, nor alienation less painful, than it is within the home. Perhaps most indicative of his concern is the recurring transvestite figure, whose multiple personas epitomize the alienation of the individual in the Main. Tremblay began his investigation of the Main in three short plays written early in his career: Berthe, Johnny Mangano and His Astonishing Dogs, and Gloria Star. The three plays function as a trilogy and were originally part of the collection entitled Cinq, written in 1966. The trilogy examines the individual’s alienation from the self by focusing on the collision of one’s dreams and fantasies of fame and glory with the stark realities of a boring and desperate life. Tremblay once again works toward a stylized ending to the trilogy in which he communicates how dreams of success and perfection are the offspring of artifice; the playwright makes this abundantly clear in a surrealistic conclusion of theatrical make-believe. La Duchesse de Langeais • La Duchesse de Langeais, a piece in which the past of an aging transvestite unravels in monologue, is the next play of the Main cycle and represents Tremblay’s first treatment of this sexually complex figure. The Duchesse is a human being who is desperately alone. She speaks of how she became the Duchesse, “the biggest faggot ever,” how she envisions herself as a “woman of the world,” how she spent her life whoring for hundreds of men, how she was sexually abused as a child by her cousin Leopold (later to appear in Forever Yours, Marie-Lou), and how she entered a life of obsessive sexual activity from the age of six. The theme of alienation operates on many levels in La Duchesse de Langeais. She is a transvestite locked in a sexually ambiguous role. She is aware of her age and feels a frightening sense of attenuation in her life. She has a history of being a female impersonator, trapped in a Pirandellian disparity between the roles performed and the actress/actor underneath. Yet the monologue itself attests her alienation in a more immediate way. Is there any possibility of verifying the past she describes? Is she merely creating a fiction for the audience? Is she creating the fiction for herself? Indeed, reality and illusion are so disconnected in this play that it is impossible to verify much. Tremblay (the primary illusion-maker) communicates through this onslaught of unverifiable information the pain and suffering that accompanies the life of one lost in a labyrinth of insubstantiality and artifice. Hosanna • Hosanna, on the other hand, probes deeper into the tensions of the multiple roles of the transvestite and female impersonator. The play takes place in the early hours of the morning in the confined and oppressive apartment of Hosanna, a transvestite whose original name is Claude, and “her” lover Cuirette (“Leatherette” in French, but also suggesting the English “Queerette”), whose original name is Raymond. Hosanna has returned from a night of humiliation and ridicule, a night that will ultimately lead her to a painful acceptance of self. Hosanna and Cuirette represent two extremes. The former is a highly effeminate drag queen whose excessive perfume, makeup, jewels, and clothing constitute her mask. The latter is a “leather-man,” who has grown too fat for the clothes that once expressed his exaggerated machismo image; nevertheless, his leather jacket, motorcycle, and tough persona are all the accoutrements through which he defines himself. The first act deals with the tensions and collisions of the relationship, the inability of the

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two individuals to recognize each other’s needs and, more important, to recognize and accept themselves for who they are. When the second act begins, Hosanna is alone; she tells the story of how the people of the cabaret (including the Duchesse) played a practical joke on her, how they faked plans for a costume party for which they were all to dress as famous women in history. For weeks, Hosanna prepares her role as Elizabeth Taylor playing Cleopatra; when she arrives, however, everyone at the club is dressed in a Cleopatra costume—“Everyone made up better than me!” She tries to keep her composure, even through the taunting repetition of the chant that haunts the audience as much as Hosanna herself: “Hosanna, Hosanna, Hosanna, Ho!” The event is enough to shock Hosanna into a state of self-reflection and to force her to confront the mask she wears. Cuirette, who is absent for most of the second act in a frustrated sexual escapade, and who had been privy to the joke played on Hosanna, returns home to shed his own mask and to be with the one he loves. It is, thus, Raymond and Claude present at the last moment of the play, not Cuirette and Hosanna. In the end, Tremblay shows two human beings who have begun the difficult journey involved with the abandonment of self-hatred. Raymond and Claude must accept who they are, together and as individuals. Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra • The theme of reconciliation with the self dominant in the Main cycle is also at the core of Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra. (The literal English translation would be “doomed Manon, holy Sandra,” but is finally inadequate because of the ambiguous implication of sacrée in French, a word with meanings both sacred and profane. Indeed, this ambiguity is precisely what this conceptually complex piece is about.) Manon, the religious sister from Forever Yours, Marie-Lou, and Sandra, the transvestite cabaret owner from Hosanna, are the characters of the drama. Tremblay again creates a double action by juxtaposing two monologues. The double action eventually moves to a single point that articulates the place in which the sacred and profane meet. Moreover, the play ends with the kind of theatrical self-consciousness that informs much of the playwright’s work: Both characters realize that they are the invention of the same author. As Manon comes to recognize the erotic nature of her religious devotion and Sandra the obsessive religiosity of her sexual escapades, the playwright himself seems to imply a reconciliation of seeming opposites within himself. He is the creator of both characters; indeed, as an individual, he, too, embodies both the sacred and profane. The Impromptu of Outrement • Tremblay wrote three major plays after 1979: The Impromptu of Outrement, Remember Me, and Albertine in Five Times. In these plays, he plucks his characters out of the Main and places them back in a domestic context. In The Impromptu of Outrement, Tremblay presents four sisters who were brought up in a middle-class Montreal suburb, Outrement, and who are meeting for the occasion of Yvette’s birthday. The party has become an annual custom, a time for a little “impromptu.” The real purpose of their meeting, however, is to have a chance to lash out against one another, to complain about one another’s lives, to scream about one another’s failures and life choices. Ultimately, however, it is an occasion when they feel disgust with who they are; the sisters mirror to one another what they deem ugliest in themselves. The play is Tremblay’s version of Anton Chekhov’s Tri sestry (pr., pb. 1901, revised pb. 1904; The Three Sisters, 1920), a work that explores the torture of languishing potentiality, of the trap of the middle class, of unrealized dreams and bourgeois isolation.

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Remember Me • Remember Me examines two men who are meeting long after the end of their relationship of seven years. Each man has continued with his career and with other relationships; each, however, feels the burden of his own mediocrity and a profound discontent with life. Like The Impromptu of Outrement, therefore, Remember Me centers on the individual who feels disenfranchised from his own potential; both plays demonstrate how middle-class promise quickly turns to mundane routine. In addition, by focusing on four women in one play, and two homosexual men in the other, Tremblay makes a clear statement about the frustrations minorities feel with the false promises of acceptance in bourgeois society. Albertine in Five Times • Albertine in Five Times is a play about the life of one woman at five different points in her life. Tremblay presents the fragmented individual in many of his dramas, but this time he exploits his art to realize all pieces simultaneously. In this play, Tremblay pursues his preoccupation with self-alienation by grappling with the problem of the ever-changing self in time; as in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (pr., pb. 1958), Albertine in Five Times creates a picture of the individual estranged from the past and from the self that has emerged over time. Nevertheless, the play provides a moving portrait of the stages of one woman’s struggle. Like so many of Tremblay’s characters, Albertine, though desperate, does struggle; the search for identity is the most challenging task for any individual. Tremblay celebrates the courage of his characters, and of the Québécois themselves; he celebrates their strength to look at themselves and begin the long journey to freedom. The Real World? • Almost all Tremblay’s plays since the mid-1980’s have to do, in one way or another, with the family—in particular, how troubled characters fit into their families and how members of those families respond to threat from within or without. Another important theme in the plays of this period is artistic creation—its sources and its problems. The Real World? focuses on both of these concerns. This piece deals with a young playwright whose first drama features characters named after his father, mother, and sister—the sources of his inspiration. As the play’s characters look more and more like their models, Claude, the writer, is troubled by what he is doing. He wonders if he has the right to plunder his private life and to invade the lives of his family members in order to create. And, as the title suggests, where does a writer draw the line between what is fact and what is imagined? Clearly, this subject is of importance to Tremblay, and he has said that he and Claude have shared the same concerns. La Maison suspendue • La Maison suspendue presents a couple, Jean-Marc and Mathieu, who come to spend a summer vacation with Mathieu’s son, Sébastien, in a log cabin in the Laurentian Mountains. The cabin has been in Jean-Marc’s family for three generations, and when he opens the front door, he takes off on a discovery of his roots. The couple finds that the cabin contains vibrations of fiddler-tale teller Josaphat-leviolon who had a son by his sister, Victoire. In 1950, the home witnesses the trials of Edouard, who fantasizes his ambiguous sexuality while living with his sister, Albertine, who rejects such fantasies. Jean-Marc, who has had to deal with his own sexual identity, reconciles his identity and his new family with the figures from the past. Marcel Pursued by the Hounds • In Marcel Pursued by the Hounds, the protagonist is fifteen-year-old Marcel—who is subject to hallucinations that suspend him between

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dream and reality. He hopes to makes things better by living with his sister, Thérèse, but it may be too late: He seems hopelessly trapped by imagination, even madness. The play is a form of dialogue between Marcel and Thérèse, in which other characters constitute a kind of Greek-tragedy chorus. The ultimate point is the extent to which people’s childhood games and fantasies come back to haunt them in their adult lives— which are full of the dangers and cruel realities that people did not recognize when they were children. Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer • The form of Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer resembles that of Marcel Pursued by the Hounds. The title of this play is an accurate one: Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer is an incantatory rite, in which the voices of the characters—Isabelle, Yannick, Jeannine, Louise, Rose, Mathieu, Gaston, Mireille, Yvon, Gérard, and the Widow—mingle in a liturgical drama. All the characters complain about their lives, yet they try hard to not succumb to bitterness. Instead, they long for some kind of self-liberation—and when the summer moon appears, a solution, hope, and consolation seem possible. For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again • For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again is a short play but one of Tremblay’s most moving works. It is an extended conversation between the Narrator (a stand-in for Tremblay himself) and Nana (who represents the playwright’s late mother). The play contains wonderfully funny reminiscences by both the Narrator and his mother—about growing up in Montreal and Saskatchewan, about oddball family members, about Tremblay’s choice of career and his mother’s ambivalent attitude toward the latter. However, the tone takes a deeply somber turn near the play’s end, when Nana tells about the cancer that she carried for a time, the pain, and her death. The finale features an angel descending to take Nana to Heaven. L’État des lieux • L’État des lieux is, on one hand, a riotous comedy and on the other, an investigation into such subjects as aging, failure, and artistic energy. It all begins when soprano Patricia Pasquetti has a crisis during the final scene of Richard Strauss’s Salome. Before a packed house, Patricia hits a grotesquely false note. It is not surprising that Patricia’s life starts to fall apart. Through the sympathetic eyes of her longtime accompanist, the audience sees Patricia struggle for a while in Paris before returning home to Quebec’s L’Ile des Soeurs. Once she gets home, Patricia takes out her disappointment on her daughter, who is an actress. Mother accuses daughter of lacking creative élan. However, Patricia’s own mother—another actress—intervenes. She knows firsthand how artists decline with age—but she also knows the immense power of artistic freedom that transcends aging. Other major works long fiction: La Cité dans l’œuf, 1969 (The City in the Egg, 1999); C’t’à ton tour, Laura Cadieux, 1973; Le Cœur découvert, 1986 (The Heart Laid Bare, 1989; also as Making Room, 1990); Le Cœur éclaté, 1993; La Nuit des princes charmants, 1995; Quarante-quatre minutes, quarante-quatre secondes, 1997; Hotel Bristol: New York, NY, 1999; Chroniques du PlateauMont-Royal, 2000 (series of six novels including: La Grosse Femme d’à côté est enceinte, 1978 [The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant, 1981]; Thérèse et Pierrette à l’École des saintesanges, 1980 [Thérèse and Pierrette and the Little Hanging Angel, 1984]; La Duchesse et le roturier 1982 [The Duchess and the Commoner, 1999]; Le Premier Quartier de la lune, 1989 [The First Quarter of the Moon, 1994]; Des nouveles d’Édouard, 1984 [News from Edouard,

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2000]; and Un Objet de beauté, 1997 [A Thing of Beauty, 1998]); L’Homme qui entendait siffler une bouilloire, 2001. short fiction: Contes pour buveurs attardés, 1966 (Stories for Late Night Drinkers, 1978); Manoua, 1966. screenplays: Françoise Durocher, Waitress, 1971; Backyard Theatre, 1972; Il était une fois dans l’est, 1974; Parlez-nous d’amour, 1974. teleplays: Trois Petits Tours, 1969; En pièces détachées, 1971; Le Soleil se lève en retard, 1975; Bonheur d’occasion, 1977; Les Belles-sœurs, 1978. nonfiction: Douze coups de théâtre, 1992 (memoir; Twelve Opening Acts, 2002); Un Ange cornu avec des ailes de tôle, 1994 (memoir); Les Vues animées, 1995 (memoir; Bambi and Me, 1998); Pièces à conviction: Entretiens avec Michel Tremblay, 2001 (interviews). translations: Lysistrata, 1964 (of Aristophanes’ play); L’Effet des rayons gamma sur les vieux garçons, 1970 (of Paul Zindel’s play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds); Et Madame Roberge boit un peu, 1971 (of Paul Zindel’s play And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little); Mistero buffo, 1973 (of Dario Fo’s play); Mademoiselle Marguerite, 1975 (of Roberto Athayde’s play Apareceu a Margarida); Oncle Vania, 1983 (with Kim Yaroshevskaya; of Anton Chekhov’s play); Le Gars de Quebec, 1985 (of Nikolai Gogol’s play Revizor). Bibliography Anthony, G., ed. Stage Voices: Twelve Canadian Playwrights Talk About Their Lives and Work. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978. Canadian playwrights, including Tremblay, discuss their plays and their lives. Index. David, Gilbert, and Pierre Lavoie, eds. Le Monde de Michel Tremblay. Montreal: Cahiers de Théâtre Jeu, 1993. Presents a series of studies relevant to Tremblay’s entire body of work from Les Belles-sœurs to Marcel Pursued by the Hounds. In French. Godin, Jean-Cléo, and Laurent Mailhot, eds. Théâtre Québecois II. Montreal: Bibliothèque Québecoise, 1988. A collection of essays on theater in Quebec. In French. Massey, Irving. Identity and Community: Reflections on English, Yiddish, and French Literature in Canada. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1994. Provides a section containing criticism and interpretation of Tremblay’s works. Bibliography and index. Usmiani, Renate. Michel Tremblay. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1982. An analysis of Tremblay’s works and discussion of his life. Bibliography. _______. The Theatre of Frustration: Super Realism in the Dramatic Work of F. X. Kroetz and Michel Tremblay. New York: Garland, 1990. A comparative study of the realism in the works of Tremblay and Franz Xaver Kroetz. Bibliography and index. Lorne M. Buchman, updated by Gordon Walters

Luis Miguel Valdez Luis Miguel Valdez

Born: Delano, California; June 26, 1940 Principal drama • The Theft, pr. 1961; The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, pr. 1965, pb. 1967; Las dos caras del patroncito, pr. 1965, pb. 1971; La quinta temporada, pr. 1966, pb. 1971; Los vendidos, pr. 1967, pb. 1971; Dark Root of a Scream, pr. 1967, pb. 1973; La conquista de México, pr. 1968, pb. 1971 (puppet play); No saco nada de la escuela, pr. 1969, pb. 1971; The Militants, pr. 1969, pb. 1971; Vietnam campesino, pr. 1970, pb. 1971; Huelguistas, pr. 1970, pb. 1971; Bernabé, pr. 1970, pb. 1976; Soldado razo, pr., pb. 1971; Actos, pb. 1971 (includes Las dos caras del patroncito, La quinta temporada, Los vendidos, La conquista de México, No saco nada de la escuela, The Militants, Vietnam campesino, Huelguistas, and Soldado razo); Las pastorelas, pr. 1971 (adaptation of a sixteenth century Mexican shepherd’s play); La Virgen del Tepeyac, pr. 1971 (adaptation of Las cuatro apariciones de la Virgen de Guadalupe); Los endrogados, pr. 1972; Los olivos pits, pr. 1972; La gran carpa de los rasquachis, pr. 1973; Mundo, pr. 1973; El baille de los gigantes, pr. 1973; El fin del mundo, pr. 1975; Zoot Suit, pr. 1978, pb. 1992; Bandido!, pr. 1981, pb. 1992, revised pr. 1994; Corridos, pr. 1983; “I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges!,” pr., pb. 1986; Luis Valdez—Early Works: Actos, Bernabé, and Pensamiento Serpentino, pb. 1990; Zoot Suit and Other Plays, pb. 1992; Mummified Deer, pr. 2000 Other literary forms • Although Luis Miguel Valdez is known primarily for his plays, his writing on Chicano culture has had a significant impact. In a number of essays initially in the 1960’s and 1970’s (“Theatre: El Teatro Campesino,” “Notes on Chicano Theatre,” and several others), he elaborated an aesthetic based on what he believed to be the special features of Chicano reality: bilingualism, mestizaje (mixed race), and cultural disinheritance. Valdez’s commitment to Chicano nationalism is reflected in two important works of nontheatrical writing—Aztlan: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature (1972; coedited with Stan Steiner), whose lengthy introduction recounts the history of the Chicano people as the original inhabitants of “Aztlan” (the contemporary American Southwest), and Pensamiento Serpentino: A Chicano Approach to the Theatre of Reality (1973), which explores the influence of Aztec and Mayan spirituality on Chicano art and thought. It is in this latter book that all of Valdez’s published poetry can be found. Achievements • Without Luis Miguel Valdez, the Chicano theater would not exist in its present vibrant form. At the age of twenty-five, in the fields of rural California, without financial backing and using farm laborers as actors, Valdez single-handedly created a movement that has since become international in scope, leading to the founding of Chicano theater troupes from Los Angeles, California, to Gary, Indiana. Although not usually mentioned in the company of revered American playwrights of his generation, such as Sam Shepard, David Mamet, and Richard Foreman, he is in many ways as distinguished and as well known internationally, both in Europe and in Latin America. In one respect especially, Valdez has accomplished what no other American playwright has: the creation of a genuine workers’ theater, completely indigenous and the work of neither university intellectuals nor producers of a commercialized “mass cul961

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ture.” He has made “serious” drama popular, political drama entertaining, and ethnic drama universal. Valdez has won acclaim in two parallel but distinct artistic communities. If his early career fits neatly within the contours of the cultural nationalism of the Civil Rights movement (whose Chicano forms in the American Southwest are perhaps less well known than the African American forms of the South), he found a hearing also in more established circles. One of the original organizers for the United Farm Workers Union, a tireless propagandist for Chicano identity, and a founder of an annual cultural festival in Fresno, California, he has also been a founding member of the California Arts Council. In addition to this, he served on a congressional subcommittee of the National Endowment for the Arts and on the board of directors of the Theatre Communications Group, and he acted in teleplays and films based on his own work. Winning an honorary Obie Award in 1968 for his work on the West Coast, he appropriately was the first, ten years later, to produce a Chicano play on Broadway, the highly acclaimed Zoot Suit. He cannot, however, be seen simply as a major playwright. His fortunate position as a public figure at the first serious outbreak of Chicano nationalism, in the mid1960’s—which he helped articulate and which helped articulate him—makes him also an emblematic representative of American cultural politics, especially as it regards the important (and often forgotten) Latino community. Crucial in this respect is his groundbreaking book, Aztlan, which brings together writings from the pre-Columbian period to the late twentieth century, sketching a picture of Chicanos as a distinct people with a long tradition and an active history. Valdez’s passionate commitment to Chicano nationalism must be seen as a driving force of his art. If Aztlan defiantly underlines the uniqueness of the Chicano in an alienating landscape of oppressive Anglo institutions, his next book, Pensamiento Serpentino, emphasizes the evils of artificially separating peoples on the basis of race and culture; it argues for a common North American experience in a spirit of forgiveness and mutual cooperation and derives its moral approach to contemporary social problems from Aztec and Mayan teachings. The rarity of someone from Valdez’s background and interests finding so distinctive a public voice cannot be underestimated. Nevertheless, his greatest work is probably the legacy he leaves to Chicano culture itself. The Centro Campesino Cultural, a nonprofit corporation he founded in Del Rey, California, in 1967, became a clearinghouse for Chicano artists around the country and operated film, publishing, and musical recording facilities for their use. Inspired by the success of El Teatro Campesino, many other groups have come into being. Some of the most important are Teatro Urbano, Teatro de la Esperanza, El Teatro de la Gente, and El Teatro Desengañó del Pueblo. It is the pioneering work of Valdez that has allowed these vital regional theaters to operate in a coordinated and organized fashion under a national network known as TENAZ (Teatro Nacional de Aztlan), a direct offshoot of the Centro Campesino Cultural. Biography • Luis Miguel Valdez was born on June 26, 1940, in Delano, California, the second of ten brothers and sisters. His father and mother were migrant farmworkers. Already working in the fields by the age of six, Valdez spent his childhood traveling to the harvests in the agricultural centers of the San Joaquin Valley. Despite having little uninterrupted early schooling, he managed to win a scholarship to San Jose State College in 1960.

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Soon after his arrival at college, he won a regional playwriting contest for his first one-act play, The Theft. Encouraged by his teachers to write a full-length work, Valdez complied with The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, which was promptly produced by the San Jose State drama department. Graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1964, Valdez spent the next several months traveling in Cuba; on his return, he joined the San Francisco Mime Troupe under Ron Davis, where he worked for one year, learning from the troupe’s commedia dell’arte techniques, which he was later to adapt in new ways. Partly as a result of the sense of solidarity that he gained from his experiences while in Cuba, Valdez returned home to Delano, where the United Farm Workers Union was then being formed under the leadership of César Chávez. Amid a strike for union recognition, the union officials responded enthusiastically to Valdez’s offer to create an educational theater group. Using volunteer actors from among the strikers, he formed El Teatro Campesino in 1965. Traveling on a flatbed truck from field to field, the troupe produced a series of one-act political skits dubbed actos (actions, or gestures), performing them in churches, storefronts, and on the edges of the fields themselves. Enormously successful, the plays soon won outside attention and led to a United States tour in the summer of 1967. Later that year, Valdez left the fields to found the Centro Campesino Cultural in Del Rey, California. Similar recognition followed, with an Obie Award in New York in 1969 for “creating a workers’ theater to demonstrate the politics of survival” and an invitation to perform at the Theatre des Nations festival in Nancy, France—one of four tours to Europe between 1969 and 1980. Later in 1969, Valdez and the troupe moved to Fresno, California, where they founded an annual Chicano theater festival, and Valdez began teaching drama at Fresno State College. The Centro Campesino Cultural relocated once again in 1971 to San Juan Bautista, a small rural California town, where it would stay for the next several years, rooting itself in the community and transforming its dramaturgy to reflect local concerns— particularly through its adaptations of earlier devotional drama dating from the Spanish occupation. El Teatro Campesino there underwent a fundamental transformation. Living more or less in a commune, the group began increasingly to emphasize the spiritual side of their work, as derived not only from the prevalent Christianity of the typical Chicano community but also from their own newfound Aztec and Mayan roots. This shift from the agitational actos to a search for spiritual solutions was met with anger by formerly admiring audiences at the Quinto Festival de los Teatros Chicanos in Mexico City in 1974. From its base in San Juan Bautista, the Centro Campesino Cultural continued to flourish, touring campuses and communities on a yearly basis; giving financial support, training, and advice to other theater troupes; and hosting visitors such as English director Peter Brook, who brought his actors from the International Centre of Theatre Research in 1973. After a career of refusing to participate in the commercial theater, Valdez determined finally, in 1978, to try reaching a middle-class audience. The result was Zoot Suit, a polished, full-length dance-musical based on the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial of 1943. It premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 1978 and ran for eleven months. The play opened at the Wintergarden Theatre on Broadway in 1979 but was forced to close after a month because of bad reviews. A film version of the play was made in 1981. In 1985, Soldado razo and Dark Root of a Scream were performed for the first time in New York at the Public Theatre as part of a Latino theater festival. Valdez brought Tony Curiel into El Teatro Campesino in 1985 to help run the company. Valdez’s play “I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges!” (a famous line from

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the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre) was coproduced with the Los Angeles Theatre Center in 1986. The film La Bamba (1987), written and directed by Valdez, was the first major release to celebrate the urban Hispanic youth lifestyle. In 1991, a trio of actos from earlier El Teatro Campesino projects were presented in Dallas at the South Dallas Cultural Center; reviewers noted that they remained “remarkably fresh and quick-witted.” Soldado razo, a 1970’s play of protest about Chicano involvement in the Vietnam War, was revived in San Jose, California, in 1991. El Teatro Campesino began the process of restructuring in 1988, learning to work more independently of Valdez, although his commitment to it remained substantial. On July 29, 1990, in a retrospective in the Los Angeles Times in celebration of Valdez’s fiftieth birthday (“Luis Valdez at Fifty: The Rage Has Cooled”), the playwright, firmly established in Hollywood, admitted: “I couldn’t turn around and kiss the teatro goodbye . . . without ruining my chances in Hollywood . . . my roots would dry up. I need to be true to what I set out to do.” In 2001, in a keynote address for the American Society for Theatre Research, with a new play in production and a forthcoming anthology, Valdez reaffirmed his commitment to El Teatro Campesino, Chicano Theatre, politicization and his work. Analysis • Luis Miguel Valdez’s genius was to reach an audience both Chicano and working-class, not only with political farces about strikers, “scabs,” and bosses in a familiar street-theater concept but also by incorporating the popular theatrical forms of Latin America itself: the carpas (traveling theater shows), variedades (Mexican vaudeville), corridos (traditional Mexican folk ballads), and others. It is a unique combination to which Valdez added his own distinctive forms. Appraising Valdez’s work is, however, different from appraising that of most other playwrights of his stature. By political conviction and by necessity, much of his dramatic work is a collective product. Although he has always been El Teatro Campesino’s major creative inspiration and although entire passages from the collective plays were written by him alone, Valdez’s drama is largely a joint project under his guidance—a collective political and religious celebration. The starting point for all of Valdez’s work is his evocation of what he calls la plebe, el vulgo, or simply La Raza, that is, the Chicano people. It is from this outlook that the first actos were created—a genre very close to the Brechtian Lehrstück (teaching piece), with its episodic structure, its use of broad social types, its indifference to all but the most minimal of props and scenery, and its direct involvement of the audience in the solving of its dramatized social problems. In Valdez’s words, the actos “must be popular, subject to no other critics except the pueblo itself, but it must also educate the pueblo toward an appreciation of social change, on and off the stage.” According to various accounts, the form was first developed in a Delano storefront, where Valdez had assembled his would-be performers from among the strikers. He hung signs around their necks that read: huelguista (striker), esquirol (scab), and patroncito (little boss) and then simply asked them to show what had happened that day on the picket line. After some hesitation, the actors performed an impromptu political play, alive with their own jargon and bawdy jokes and inspired by the passions of the labor dispute within which they found themselves. Valdez’s theatrical vision is inseparable from the conditions under which he founded El Teatro Campesino in the farmworkers’ strike of 1965. Born in struggle, his early plays all have a vitality, directness, and urgency that cannot be divorced from their lasting appeal. His achievement blossoms finally with his successful incorpora-

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tion of the deep cultural roots of the Chicano nation, which are found in the religious imagery of the indio past. Both facets of his career have been widely copied by other Chicano directors and playwrights and admired widely outside the Chicano community as well. Las dos caras del patroncito • One exemplary early acto is Las dos caras del patroncito (the two faces of the boss), in which a typical undocumented worker, recruited fresh from Mexico by a California landowner in order to scab on the strike, exchanges roles with his patroncito. Dressed in a pig mask and speaking in an absurd Texas drawl, the patroncito playfully suggests that he temporarily trade his own whip for the esquirol’s pruning shears. The two quickly assume the inner reality of these symbolic outward forms. The climactic moment occurs when the owner removes his mask, at which point the esquirol has the revelation that worker and boss look (and therefore are) the same. Calling now for help, the boss is mistaken by the police for a troublemaker and is hauled off-stage, shouting for César Chávez and declaring his support for La huelga (the strike). The social tensions and contradictions of this role-reversal are central to all the actos. If the boss is brought down to a vulnerable stature and the worker is shown to be capable of leadership, there is no simplistic identification of one or the other as totally good or evil. Bernabé • In the next stage of his career, Valdez explored the legends and myths of the Chicano’s indio past. Bernabé is perhaps Valdez’s most fully realized mito (mythplay). The hero is a thirty-one-year-old village idiot who has never had sexual relations with a woman. At the same time, he is a symbolic embodiment of the Chicano who possesses what Valdez calls “divinity in madness.” After a series of taunts by the village toughs and an embarrassing encounter with Consuela, the local prostitute, Bernabé flees to a favorite hiding place in the countryside, where he has dug a gravelike hole in which he frequently masturbates in a kind of ritual copulation with La Tierra (the earth). The climactic scene occurs when the elemental surroundings take on the forms of an Aztec allegory. La Luna (the moon) appears dressed as a pachuco (an urban Chicano zoot-suiter), smoking marijuana and acting as a go-between for his sister La Tierra, who then enters in the costume of a Mexican revolutionary camp follower (the proverbial “Adelita”). In the interchange, La Tierra questions the extent of Bernabé’s love for her—whether he is “Chicano” enough to kill and to die for her. It is precisely his status as loco (crazy) that gives him the courage finally to say yes, and El Sol (the sun), as father, is pleased. As if mimicking the sacrifices to the Aztec sun god, Huitzilopochtli, Bernabé offers his physical heart to La Tierra and immediately ceases being the village idiot he was before, buried now within the earth but living on as a lesson to his people. Valdez was to refine further this allegorical (and less immediately political) approach to Chicano identity in his plays throughout the 1970’s, particularly in La gran carpa de los rasquachis (the great tent of the underdogs) and El fin del mundo (the end of the world), which further developed the use of the Mexican corrido (musical ballad), the split-level staging designed to evoke a mythical and suprahistorical realm of action, and the traditional images from Latino religious drama—particularly the calavera (skeleton) costume. In El fin del mundo, his play had become a full-scale allegorical ballet— a great dance of death.

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Zoot Suit • With his first deliberate turn to the commercial theater in 1978, Valdez incorporated the mito, acto, and corrido in the unlikely framework of a play about the urban Chicano of the 1940’s. Zoot Suit—filled with stylized scenes from the Los Angeles barrio—was a drama about a celebrated murder trial and the racist hysteria surrounding it. A panorama of American life of the time, the play deliberately adopted many of the outward features of the “professional” theater, while transforming them for its purposes. It displayed immense photographic projections of newspaper headlines, slickly choreographed dances and songs, and the overpowering central image of the narrator himself, dressed in a zoot suit—the mythical pachuco. To an extent greater than in any other of his plays, the work addressed Americans as a whole, reviving for them a historical moment of which they had never been aware and bringing them face-to-face with their latent prejudices. “I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges!” • Valdez’s most celebrated play concerns a middle-class Chicano family’s attempts to blend into the American cultural mainstream. The family’s parents, Buddy and Connie Villa, are middle-aged bit-part actors who play stereotyped Latino roles in television and films; their son, Sonny, is a law student who disapproves of his parents’ work, which he finds demeaning. The play’s mixture of the themes of generational and cultural conflict drew wide praise, and the work confirmed Valdez’s standing as an important contemporary dramatist. Mummified Deer • Mummified Deer is Valdez’s first play after a gap in playwriting of almost fifteen years. It reaffirms his status as the “father of Chicano drama” and continues his exploration of his heritage through the juxtaposition of ritual and realism. The play takes its inspiration from a newspaper article Valdez read concerning the discovery of a sixty-year-old fetus in the body of an eighty-four-year old woman. According to scholar Jorge Huerta, in his unpublished paper, “For Valdez the mummified fetus became a metaphor for the Chicanos’ Indio heritage, seen through the lens of his own Yaqui blood.” A Yaqui deer dancer serves as the alter-ego to the old woman, Mama Chu, and is visible only to her. A present-day narrative is established, and the gathering of Mamu Chu’s relatives around the old woman provides the play’s central image. The play’s major dramatic action, however, operates in the historical/fictional past. Through the representation of Cajeme, the deer dancer, Valdez deftly divides his characters’ philosophies into two distinct camps—revolutionaries and colonizers. The deer dancer “is, to Mama Chu, above all, a son, a man, a symbol of freedom, purity and preconquest liberation,” according to actress Alma Martinez, who originated the role of Mama Chu. When Mama Chu dies, “Cajame dances to a climax at the foot of the bed. With his deer head up in triumph, he collapses, lifeless,” thus commenting on the past versus the present, cultural heritage versus assimilation. Other major works screenplays: Zoot Suit, 1982; La Bamba, 1987. teleplays: Fort Figueroa, 1988; La Pastorela, 1991; The Cisco Kid, 1994. edited text: Aztlan: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature, 1972 (with Stan Steiner). miscellaneous: Pensamiento Serpentino: A Chicano Approach to the Theatre of Reality, 1973.

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Bibliography Broyles-Gonzales, Yolanda. El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. This study uses previously unexamined materials such as production notes and interviews with former ensemble members to demystify the roles Valdez and El Teatro Campesino played in the development of a Chicano theatre aesthetic. Broyles-Gonzales employs a cultural studies methodology and reexamines the company in terms of class, race, and gender. Provides an “alternative reading” to the accepted El Teatro Campesino narrative. Elam, Harry J., Jr. Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theatre of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Noted African American Theatre scholar Harry Elam explores the political, cultural, and performative similarities between El Teatro Campesino and Baraka’s Black Revolutionary Theater. An intriguing examination of the political theater of these two marginalized groups, Chicanos and African Americans, and their shared aesthetic. Flores, Arturo C. El Teatro Campesino de Luis Valdez. Madrid: Editorial Pliegos, 1990. This five-chapter study examines the importance, gradual development, theoretical considerations, touring, and “return to identity,” and the “steps to commercialization (1975-1980)” represented by Zoot Suit. A strong study with a bibliography. In Spanish. Huerta, Jorge A. Chicano Theatre: Themes and Forms. Ypsilanti, Mich.: Bilingual Press, 1982. This well-written and well-illustrated study begins with Valdez’s experiences in Delano in 1965. It contains an excellent immediate description with dialogue of these first energies and is written in the present tense for immediacy and energy. Provides some discussion of the beginnings of the San Francisco mime troupe and strong description of the actos and their literary history in Europe. Highly descriptive and lively. Valuable bibliography and index. _______. “Labor Theatre, Street Theatre, and Community Theatre in the Barrio, 19651983.” In Hispanic Theatre in the United States, edited by Nicolas Kanellos. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1984. Placed at the end of a longer study of Hispanic theater history, this essay takes on more importance by indicating that Valdez’s contribution belongs in a continuum of history. Under the wing of César Chávez’s farm labor union, the playwright used the workers in a manner reminiscent of Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty (pr., pb. 1935). Good on contemporaries of El Teatro Campesino; strong bibliography. Kanellos, Nicolas. Mexican American Theater: Legacy and Reality. Pittsburgh: Latin American Literary Review Press, 1987. Begins with an examination of Valdez’s transformation from director of El Teatro Campesino, in league with the rural farm worker, to the urban commercial playwright of Zoot Suit in 1978, “an attempt at addressing a mass audience on a commercial basis.” Cites Valdez’s contribution to the “discernible period of proliferation and flourishing in Chicano theatres” from 1965 to 1976, then moves on to examine other offshoots of the impulse. Morales, Ed. “Shadowing Valdez.” American Theatre 9 (November, 1992): 14-19. An excellent essay on Valdez, his followers, his film plans, his shelved Frida Kahlo project (he was criticized for casting an Italian American in the role of Kahlo), and later productions in and around Los Angeles, with production stills. Includes an essay entitled “Statement on Artistic Freedom” by Valdez, in which he defends his nontraditional casting: “My first objective is to create mutual understanding between Americans and Mexicans, not to provoke more mistrust and suspicion.”

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Orona-Cordova, Roberta. “Zoot Suit and the Pachuco Phenomenon: An Interview with Luis Valdez.” In Mexican American Theatre: Then and Now, edited by Nicolas Kanellos. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1983. The opening of the film version of Zoot Suit in 1982 prompted this interview, in which Valdez reveals much about his motives for working, his view of Chicano literature and art, and his solutions to “the entrenched attitude” that will not allow Chicano participation in these industries. Much on Pachuquismo from an insider’s point of view. Pottlitzer, Joanne. Hispanic Theater in the United States and Puerto Rico: A Report to the Ford Foundation. New York: Ford Foundation, 1988. This volume provides a brief history to 1965 and discusses the Hispanic theater during the upheaval of the Vietnam War. Also examines the theater’s activities and budget and pays homage to the inspiration of El Teatro Campesino and Valdez. Supplemented by an appendix and survey data. Timothy Brennan, updated by Thomas J. Taylor, Robert McClenaghan, and Anne Fletcher

Lope de Vega Carpio Lope de Vega Carpio

Born: Madrid, Spain; November 25, 1562 Died: Madrid, Spain; August 27, 1635 Principal drama • Los comendadores de Córdoba, wr. 1596-1598, pb. 1609; El nuevo mundo descubierto por Cristóbal Colón, wr. 1596-1603, pb. 1614 (The Discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus, 1950); El mayordomo de la duquesa de Amalfi, wr. 15991606, pb. 1618 (The Majordomo of the Duchess of Amalfi, 1951); El anzuelo de Fenisa, wr. 1602-1608, pb. 1617; La corona merecida, wr. 1603, pb. 1620; La noche toledana, wr. 1605, pb. 1612; Los melindres de Belisa, wr. 1606-1608, pb. 1617; El acero de Madrid, wr. 16061612, pb. 1618 (Madrid Steel, 1935); Castelvines y Monteses, wr. 1606-1612, pb. 1647 (English translation, 1869); La niña de plata, wr. 1607-1612, pb. 1617; Peribáñez y el comendador de Ocaña, wr. 1609-1612, pb. 1614 (Peribáñez, 1936); La buena guarda, wr. 1610, pb. 1621; Las flores de don Juan, y rico y pobre trocados, wr. 1610-1615, pb. 1619; El villano en su rincón, wr. 1611, pb. 1617 (The King and the Farmer, 1940); Fuenteovejuna, wr. 1611-1618, pb. 1619 (The Sheep Well, 1936); Lo cierto por lo dudoso, wr. 1612-1624, pb. 1625 (A Certainty for a Doubt, 1936); El perro del hortelano, wr. 1613-1615, pb. 1618 (The Gardener’s Dog, 1903); El caballero de Olmedo, wr. 1615-1626, pb. 1641 (The Knight from Olmedo, 1961); La dama boba, pb. 1617 (The Lady Nit-Wit, 1958); Amar sin saber a quién, wr. 1620-1622, pb. 1630; El mejor alcalde, el rey, wr. 1620-1623, pb. 1635 (The King, the Greatest Alcalde, 1918); Los Tellos de Meneses I, wr. 1620-1628, pb. 1635; El premio del bien hablar, wr. 1624-1625, pb. 1636; La moza de cántaro, wr. 1625-1626, pb. 1646?; El guante de doña Blanca, wr. 1627-1635, pb. 1637; El castigo sin venganza, pb. 1635 (based on Matteo Bandello’s novella; Justice Without Revenge, 1936); Las bizarrías de Belisa, pb. 1637; Four Plays, pb. 1936; Five Plays, pb. 1961 Other literary forms • Lope de Vega Carpio was an incredibly prolific writer. In addition to his plays, which number in the hundreds, he wrote poems, such as La Dragontea (1598; Drake the pirate), El Isidro (1599), La hermosura de Angélica (1602; Angélica’s beauty), Jerusalén conquistada (1609; Jerusalem regained), and La gatomaquia (1634; Gatomachia, 1843). He also wrote several prose works, including La Arcadia (1598), El peregrino en su patria (1604; The Pilgrim: Or, The Stranger in His Own Country, 1621), Los pastores de Belén (1612; the shepherds of Bethlehem), Novelas a Marcia Leonarda (1621; stories for Marcia Leonarda), and La Dorotea (1632). His Égloga a Claudio (1637; eclogue to Claudio), published after his death, contains autobiographical and critical material on his life and work. Achievements • Lope de Vega Carpio, “the father of Spanish theater,” is generally credited with establishing the norms for the drama of Spain’s Golden Age and is recognized as one of its most accomplished dramatists as well as its most prolific. His El arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo (1609; The New Art of Writing Plays, 1914), presented to a Madrid literary society, sets out the norms that Lope de Vega followed in writing his dramas. These norms are not entirely original with him but represent instead his synthesis of a long process of development in which many dramatists participated. It is significant, however, that once this style of theater received Lope de Vega’s endorse969

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ment, it became fixed in the Spanish canon. Thus, The New Art of Writing Plays provides a fairly accurate description of most Spanish drama from that time until the death of the last great Golden Age dramatist, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, in 1681. The full extent of Lope de Vega’s dramatic production remains unknown and is the subject of scholarly debate. He is the undisputed author of 316 surviving full-length plays and the probable or reputed author of many more. In 1609, in The New Art of Writing Plays, he claimed to have authored 483 dramas, and, toward the end of his life, he elevated that number to 1,500. His first biographer, Juan Pérez de Montalbán, who was also a close friend, credited him with more than 1,800 dramatic works. Both sources, how(Library of Congress) ever, are suspect. Lope de Vega is certainly not noted for his modesty, and there is some evidence indicating that he never intended the figures he cited to be taken literally; Pérez de Montalbán’s biography is an exaggerated encomium that deliberately suppresses the various scandalous incidents in Lope de Vega’s life that would have damaged his reputation. Therefore, more cautious critics have suggested that Lope de Vega’s total dramatic production probably did not exceed 800 full-length plays. Lope de Vega also produced a number (estimates run as high as 400, a tenth of which remain) of autos sacramentales—short, allegorical, religious dramas that were used in the Corpus Christi celebrations. His contribution to this genre, however, has been overshadowed by that of Calderón. Biography • Lope Félix de Vega Carpio was born in Madrid on November 25, 1562, to Félix de Vega Carpio and Francisca Fernández Flores, humble Asturian (northern Spanish) parents, who had moved to Madrid less than a year earlier. Very little is known about his childhood and early youth. His biased biographer, Pérez de Montalbán, claims that Lope de Vega studied at the prestigious Jesuit school the Colegio Imperial de San Pedro y San Pablo, but court records indicate that he studied at the smaller Colegio de los Teatinos. He attended the University of Alcalá de Henares (as did Miguel de Cervantes, Calderón, and Tirso de Molina), and he may have studied at the University of Salamanca as well. He enlisted in the armed forces in 1583 and fought in the Azores. On returning to Madrid, Lope de Vega engaged in a love affair with Elena Osorio, the married daughter of a theater manager for whom he wrote plays. This affair lasted until 1587, when Elena (apparently at her parents’ instigation) rejected him in order to establish a liaison with a wealthier man. Lope de Vega reacted violently, circulating

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anonymous poetry in which he insulted Elena and her family. He was consequently accused and convicted of criminal libel and was sentenced to eight years of exile from Madrid. It was apparently at this time that he recorded in La Dorotea his impressions of this, the first of many amorous affairs that were subsequently reflected in his writing; this novel, however, was not published until 1632. During his exile, which he apparently violated on several occasions, Lope de Vega lived first in Valencia and then in Toledo, where he was in the service of the duke of Alba. In 1588, he was married by proxy to Isabel de Urbina (the Belisa of his poetry), by whom he had a daughter, Antonia, and who died giving birth to another, Teodora, in 1594. Neither daughter lived to maturity. In the same year as his marriage, Lope de Vega may also have participated in the ill-fated expedition of the Spanish Armada against England. Lope de Vega returned to Madrid in 1596 and was indicted the same year for concubinage with Antonia Trillo de Armenta, a wealthy widow in her early thirties who was noted for her easy virtue. Shortly afterward, he began a more lasting (until 1608) affair with Micaela de Luján, an actor’s wife, whom he referred to in his writings as Lucinda or Camila Lucinda. In 1598, apparently motivated by the promise of a huge dowry (which he never received), he married Juana de Guardo, the daughter of a wealthy fish and meat merchant. Through his writings, he managed to maintain two households, moving both wife and mistress with him to Seville and Toledo before finally returning to Madrid. Both Juana and Micaela bore him children. Those born to Micaela were baptized in the name of her husband until his death in 1603; those born afterward were listed in the baptismal registry as being of unknown parents. Only two of his children by Micaela lived to maturity: One, a son named Lope Félix, joined the armed forces and died in a pearl-hunting expedition toward the end of his father’s life; the other, a daughter, Marcela, became a nun at the age of sixteen. Lope’s wife, Juana, bore him three daughters and a son before her death in 1613; of these children only one, a daughter, Feliciana, reached maturity. On a visit to Madrid in 1605, Lope de Vega met Luis Fernández de Córdoba, the twenty-three-year-old duke of Sessa, and established with him a friendship that was as remarkable as it was enduring. The duke used Lope de Vega to write letters to his paramours and prevailed on him to give him letters that he had written to his own mistresses—at least one of whom the duke may have shared. Because of the duke’s fondness for Lope de Vega and his penchant for collecting anything that the writer’s pen had produced, a substantial amount of Lope de Vega’s correspondence as well as the manuscripts of a number of his plays have survived to the present. In 1614, a year after his second wife’s death, Lope de Vega decided to enter the priesthood. His religious vocation, however, did not involve a conversion to chastity. He had already replaced Micaela with another mistress, a friend of hers and, like her, married and an actress, Jerónima de Burgos. Jerónima—whom he called la señora Gerarda (“Mrs. Gerarda”) in his letters to the duke of Sessa—was with Lope de Vega when he was ordained in Toledo, and she continued to live with him until he rejected her because of her increasing obesity and her chronic alcoholism. He then engaged in a brief but passionate fling with Lucía de Salcedo, whom he refers to as la loca (“the crazy girl”). The last great love of Lope de Vega’s life was Marta de Nevares (Amarilis in his writing), the wife of the highly unattractive (if Lope de Vega’s description of him can be trusted) Roque Hernández de Ayala, the scribe who copied Lope de Vega’s plays for the duke of Sessa. A daughter, Antonia Clara, was born to Marta in 1617 and was

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baptized as the daughter of Hernández, though it was common knowledge that Lope de Vega was her father. After a number of difficulties—including an attempt by Hernández to have Lope de Vega killed—Marta obtained a separation decree from her husband. He appealed but died suddenly, leaving both Marta and Lope de Vega ecstatic. A few years later, when Marta began to lose her sight, Lope de Vega was seized by the fear that her misfortune was divine retribution for their sin. As he grew increasingly repentant, scourging himself every Friday, new calamities arrived. Marta lost her sight completely and suffered periodic bouts of insanity, from which she recovered only briefly before her death in 1632; Lope Félix drowned during a pearl-hunting expedition; and Antonia Clara was abducted by a Madrid nobleman. Lope de Vega continued to write in spite of these misfortunes and produced some of his most admirable works in the final years of his life. He died on August 27, 1635, and was buried in the Church of Saint Sebastian in Madrid after an elaborate nine-day funeral arranged by the duke of Sessa. Analysis • The theater of Lope de Vega Carpio is so varied that it eludes generalizations. Indeed, its rich variety is probably its most defining trait, and it would seem that Lope de Vega intended this to be so. Commenting in The New Art of Writing Plays on his decision to mix comic and tragic elements in the same drama, he noted that this choice is based on his imitation of nature, which is beautiful because of its variety. Their diverseness explains why virtually all of Lope de Vega’s plays are referred to as comedias, or “comedies.” This designation does not mean that his plays are not often serious. Indeed, they frequently concern subjects (such as rape, murder, and political intrigue) that can scarcely be treated humorously. The designation “comedy” implies only that the plays are not tragedies; they usually end with a restoration of order rather than a catastrophe, and their principal characters are generally common people rather than the nobility whom classical norms deemed appropriate for tragedy. Moreover, humor is an important element in all of Lope de Vega’s plays, no matter how serious they are. Even those few that are designated tragedies include a buffoonlike character known as a gracioso (“funny one”), usually a servant, whose lack of dignity provides occasion for laughter in spite of the generally serious tone of these works. By mixing comic and tragic elements in the same work, Lope de Vega was intentionally ignoring the classical dramatic precepts established by Aristotle and Horace. He also deliberately disregarded the classical unities, which sought to limit a play’s setting to a single place and decreed that its action should occur in a single day. For all these reasons, Lope de Vega’s drama (and Spanish Golden Age drama in general) bears a closer resemblance to the theater of Elizabethan England than to the more classically oriented theater of seventeenth century France. His theater differs from its English counterparts in other ways, however, such as following a three-act rather than a five-act format and employing polymetric verse. In The New Art of Writing Plays, Lope de Vega recommended accommodating the verse form used in each passage to the material being treated—a principle based on Spanish poetic tradition. Therefore, Lope de Vega recommended that exposition be written in one of the two standard verse forms used for narrative poetry: Normal exposition may be handled in the popular romance or ballad form, but special cases should be rendered in the more elegant Italianate octava real, used for the polished epic poetry of the day. Lope de Vega also recommended accommodating each character’s

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speech to his station and to the material being treated, using figurative language in key discussions, for example, while rendering everyday conversations in more prosaic speech. In spite of its varied nature, Lope de Vega’s theater is characterized by a few constants. Among these are an interest in nature, an affection for the common people, an ability to discover poetic beauty in the everyday life of sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain, a penchant for reflecting his own experiences in his drama, and—above all—an abiding interest in the theme of honor or reputation. Lope de Vega recommended this theme in The New Art of Writing Plays because of its ability to elicit a strong emotional response from the audience, and he followed his own recommendation by including this theme in the overwhelming majority of his plays, where his treatment of it ranges from the humorous to the tragic. Peribáñez • Probably no play illustrates all that is typical of Lope de Vega better than does Peribáñez, a drama about a common Spanish farmer who kills the noble commander of the town’s military forces in order to defend his wife (and his own honor) against the commander’s unwelcome advances—and who is pardoned by King Enrique III for this offense. Much of the play’s appeal is its poetic treatment of life in the town of Ocaña, where Peribáñez and his wife live. The play’s opening scene shows a simple and joyful wedding celebration in Peribáñez’s house following his marriage to Casilda, and other scenes concern the town’s celebration of its patron saint’s day and farm laborers who sing in the fields as they work. Not only do these scenes paint an appealing picture of rural Spanish life, but also they advance the play’s action. The town’s commander passes by the wedding celebration and—appropriately, for a man who cannot control his passions—is thrown from his horse, so that he must be taken to recuperate in Peribáñez’s house, where he sees Casilda. The scenes centering on the celebration of the patron saint’s day and the singing farm laborers similarly contribute to the play’s development. It is because of his involvement in the preparations for the festival of San Roque that Peribáñez is obliged to visit Toledo and accidentally sees there a portrait of Casilda, which the commander has ordered painted surreptitiously. He learns of the commander’s attempt to seduce Casilda and of her refusal when, on returning from Toledo, he overhears a song that the farm laborers have composed celebrating the incident. Probably the most discussed passage in the play is a statement by a minor character, Belardo—a name that Lope de Vega frequently used as a pseudonym for himself—that he has taken refuge in the Church. Because Peribáñez was first published in 1614, the same year that Lope de Vega became a priest, some critics have believed that this passage is a reflection of that event. The current consensus, however, is that the play was written four years earlier and that this passage actually reflects Lope de Vega’s joining the Congregation of the Calle del Olivar in 1610. A far more interesting reflection of Lope de Vega’s life can be found in the play’s evocation of the biblical story of David and Bathsheba when the commander has Peribáñez sent to war (just as David did Uriah) so that he may satisfy his lust for his subject’s wife. Lope de Vega evoked the story of David in many of his works, and it is likely that he felt a special affinity for this biblical king whose great sin was lust and who enjoyed divine forgiveness for that sin. In this light, it is interesting to note that Lope de Vega has the commander, who is stabbed by Peribáñez, live long enough to receive absolution, but that the commander’s servant and Casilda’s treacherous friend Inés—both of whom are motivated by greed—are not so fortunate.

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The most noteworthy aspect of the play is its treatment of the theme of honor. In the commander’s opinion, honor is the prerogative of the nobility. This view was probably a commonly held one at the time of the play’s composition. Therefore, Peribáñez is obliged to defend his slaying of the commander on the grounds that, when the commander ordered him to fight the Moors, he also made him a knight—thereby endowing him with honor and the obligation to defend it. It is clear, however, that in the author’s view, the common man possesses honor and dignity as an inalienable birthright, and it is significant that the play closes with the king’s pronouncement that his pardoning of Peribáñez is not an act of grace but of justice. The Sheep Well • The right of the common man to defend his honor was a popular theme that reappeared in the work of Lope de Vega’s followers as well as in several other plays by Lope de Vega himself. Probably the most notable of these is his most frequently anthologized work, The Sheep Well, which is based on a rebellion that occurred in 1476 in the Spanish town of Fuente Ovejuna (“Sheep Well”). Like Peribáñez, this play dramatizes the murder of a town’s military commander. In the case of The Sheep Well, however, the commander’s offense is against the entire town. The commander believes that all of the town’s women are obligated to satisfy his sexual appetite, and it is thus appropriate that his death occurs because of the united action of the entire populace rather than at the hands of a single individual. Initially, The Sheep Well may impress a modern reader as a rather disjointed work in which several independent episodes—the town’s vindication of its honor, the love and marriage of two of the town’s young people, and the war between Queen Isabel and her half sister Juana—are not satisfactorily united into an aesthetically pleasing whole. Closer inspection, however, reveals that Lope de Vega has established a thematic unity based on a proper understanding of love and of the relationship between love and harmony. He thus carefully develops in the play a connection between the broken political order in Spain and in Fuente Ovejuna and a perverted understanding of love as appetite, and he shows that the restoration of this broken harmony depends on a selfsacrificing love evident in the willingness of the citizens to risk their individual security because of their love for their neighbors. As with Peribáñez, much of the charm of The Sheep Well comes from its poetic portrayal of the simple townspeople and of their customs and festivals. By including music and dancing in these and by having this music interrupted by the commander, Lope de Vega emphasizes even in these scenes the central theme of the relationship between love and harmony. This theme is based largely on the Neoplatonic view of love that had become popular in Spain during the sixteenth century. The King, the Greatest Alcalde • A third important play revolving around the common man’s right to honor and a nobleman’s abuse of that right is The King, the Greatest Alcalde, which dramatizes the abduction, during her wedding, of an attractive peasant girl, Elvira, by a nobleman, Don Tello. In this case, Elvira’s intended husband, Sancho, does not avenge his honor himself but relies instead on King Alfonso VII, whom he implores to send a mayor. Rather than do this, the king comes himself. On learning that Don Tello has already raped Elvira, the king commands him to marry her and endow her with half his estate and then has Tello put to death for his offense. Elvira, with her lost honor thus restored by her marriage to the man who raped her, is then able to marry Sancho and to bring to her marriage a large dowry. This ending inevitably seems unconvincing to modern readers, and it is unlikely that any amount of

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discussion could change this impression. However, seventeenth century Spanish audiences apparently found it quite satisfactory, and various other plays of this period end in a similar manner. The King and the Farmer • It is clear that in Lope de Vega’s view, society functions best if it is a harmonious whole in which each member assumes a place appropriate to his station. Plays such as Peribáñez, The Sheep Well, and The King, the Greatest Alcalde, show how the social balance is broken when aristocrats abuse their position of authority. The King and the Farmer gives a contrasting and complementary view by illustrating the presumption of a peasant, Juan Labrador (“John Worker”), who fails to recognize his dependence on the aristocracy. Living in a comfortable rural world in which nature’s bounty seems to respond generously to all human needs, Juan is proud of his isolation from the court and presumes to build, before his death, his tomb, which he inscribes with the boast that he lived and died without having seen the king. The folly of this boast becomes evident when the king visits Juan’s town on a hunting trip, sees the tomb, and visits Juan without revealing his identity. Juan receives him hospitably but in a series of comic scenes issues to him a series of arrogant commands, which the king obligingly obeys before eventually revealing his identity. Although this play is one of Lope de Vega’s most curious works, its main point seems evident enough: In spite of their apparent isolation from each other, the world of the court and the world of the peasant (the worlds of government and of the people) are mutually dependent. The marriage at the end of the play between Juan’s daughter Lisarda and Otón, the king’s marshal, is an expression of this complementary relationship. Los melindres de Belisa • The theme of honor, which is treated seriously in Peribáñez, The Sheep Well, and The King, the Greatest Alcalde, is handled in a humorous manner in Los melindres de Belisa (the caprices of Belisa). This work is typical of a genre referred to as comedias de capa y espada or cape and sword plays, a name derived from the costume worn by the actors playing the leading male roles. These plays have complicated plots revolving around the courtship of one or more sets of middle-class youths who devise ingenious measures to overcome the obstacles to their love. The young people frequently resort to deceptions or disguises that lead to a confusion of identities and threaten to cause a loss of honor, but cape and sword plays inevitably have happy endings each involving at least one wedding. Though duels are frequently an ingredient of these plays, they are never serious, merely contributing an additional element to the prevailing atmosphere of confusion and misunderstanding. Thus, in Los melindres de Belisa, it is Felisardo’s and his sweetheart Celia’s mistaken belief that Felisardo has killed a man in a duel, which causes them to hide in their friend Elisio’s house and to disguise themselves as slaves. As is usual in cape and sword plays, their seemingly logical deception backfires, and they are seized by the authorities as payment of a debt that Elisio owes the mother of the flighty and finical Belisa, who has rejected many suitors because she can find none refined enough for her. Ironically, this finical girl and her widowed mother both fall in love with Felisardo, whom they believe to be a slave, and Belisa’s brother Don Juan falls in love with Celia. In a treatment that pokes fun at the hypocrisy underlying the Spanish concept of honor, Lope de Vega has each family member express outrage when he or she suspects that one of the others may damage the family’s reputation by loving a social inferior.

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The Lady Nit-Wit • The Lady Nit-Wit is a relatively simple cape and sword play that lacks the disguises and the intricate complications of Los melindres de Belisa. Nevertheless, it has most of the standard ingredients of the genre, including a humorous duel that ends harmlessly when the two contenders realize that each of them prefers the girl whom the other is supposed to be courting. This ironic treatment of dueling is typical of the tone of the entire play, which dramatizes a scheme by which the supposedly stupid Finea outsmarts her brilliant sister Nise in order to win Nise’s suitor for herself. The play also shows how Finea—so naïve and illiterate in the beginning that she requests help from her father in deciphering a love letter that her sister’s suitor has smuggled to her—is transformed by love into an intelligent and discreet person. The theme that love could change people for the better is part of the same Neoplatonic tradition, which, as has been noted, provided the background for understanding The Sheep Well. Las bizarrías de Belisa • Lope de Vega cultivated the cape and sword drama all his life. Written the year before he died, Las bizarrías de Belisa continues to be typical of the genre. The plot concerns Belisa’s contest—involving various misunderstandings— with her rival Lucinda for the affection of Don Juan de Cardona (who is involved twice in dueling in the course of the play). The work closes with a passage in which Lope de Vega addresses the public through Belisa, informing them that the author’s desire to serve them caused him to leave retirement to write this play. Because of this statement, critics believed until recently that this was the last play he wrote. Though that conclusion has been questioned, it is probable that Lope de Vega himself expected that this would be the case. Therefore, throughout the play, he mixes references to the phoenix (evoking his own nickname “the Phoenix of Spain”) and the swan (who, according to tradition, sings before his death). The Gardener’s Dog • Because one of its principal characters, the Countess Diana, belongs to the nobility rather than the middle class, The Gardener’s Dog is not a capeand-sword play in the strictest sense. It is generally linked with this genre, however, because it treats humorously an ingenious scheme that allows two lovers—the countess and her secretary Teodoro—to overcome the obstacle to their love caused by their differing social stations. This obstacle is a serious one, and the countess struggles with it through most of the play, refusing to recognize openly her love for Teodoro but refusing also to allow him to marry one of her servants. Her behavior is thus like that of the proverbial dog in the manger, who neither eats nor allows others to eat. The solution to Teodoro’s and Diana’s dilemma is provided by Teodoro’s servant, the gracioso Tristán, who devises a scheme that convinces everyone that Teodoro is the lost son of a wealthy nobleman, Ludovico—and who begs the audience in the last lines of the play not to reveal Teodoro’s secret. This request emphasizes the artificiality of the play, and it is possible that this is Lope de Vega’s way of underscoring the artificiality of the restricting social conventions of his day. It is also possible that the audience might have felt threatened by the play’s violation of its social conventions had it not been reminded that this was only fiction after all. The Knight from Olmedo • Though he wrote very few tragedies, two of Lope de Vega’s finest works belong to this genre. The first of these, The Knight from Olmedo, dramatizes the murder of the protagonist, Alonso, a handsome and courageous knight, by Rodrigo, a man whose life Alonso saves but who is his rival for the love of Inés. The

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play establishes tragic expectations from the beginning by evoking in its title a wellknown song (sung in the last act) about the murder of a knight described as “the flower of Olmedo” (Alonso’s birthplace) and “the glory of Medina” (the town in which Alonso courted Inés), and these expectations are reinforced by parallels between the play’s action and passages in the song describing the knight from Olmedo as being warned by ghosts of the danger that awaits him. In spite of this, much of the first part of the play strikes the modern reader, who is unfamiliar with the song evoked by the title, as being inappropriately light for tragedy—evidence that Lope de Vega is following his customary practice of mixing tragic and humorous elements in the same work. Alonso’s employment of the witch Fabia’s services in order to win Inés led a number of critics to interpret this play moralistically and to view the protagonist’s death as a form of divine punishment. This reading has been corrected, however, and the current view of the play recognizes it as a poetic evocation of the thanatos-eros theme—of the inherent connection between love and death. Justice Without Revenge • Another tragedy, Justice Without Revenge, is more consistent in its tone than The Knight from Olmedo and is generally acknowledged as the equal of the great tragic dramas of the ancient Greeks and of William Shakespeare. Because of its tragic tone, it is probably the least typical of all of Lope de Vega’s plays, but one still finds among its characters the customary gracioso (whose jokes are in this case often related to the play’s serious theme). Lope de Vega’s abiding interest in nature is also evident in a number of passages that extol—perhaps ironically—the virtues of rural life. The play’s plot, taken from a novella by Matteo Bandello, concerns a scheme by which the Italian duke of Ferrara tricks his illegitimate son Federico into unwittingly murdering Casandra, the duke’s young bride, with whom Federico has had an adulterous affair. The duke then has Federico put to death for killing his stepmother. Because of its bloody and startling denouement, this play is typical of the Senecan tragic style that was popular in Spain and sought to dazzle or amaze the audience with the spectacular. It is also typical of a peculiarly Spanish genre referred to informally as the “wifemurder play,” because it dramatizes a husband’s need to defend his honor by murdering his wife. Calderón is a more noted writer of this type of drama, but Lope de Vega had experimented with it as early as 1596-1598, when he wrote Los comendadores de Córdoba (the commanders of Cordoba). However, until the composition of Justice Without Revenge in the final years of his life, he did not produce a masterpiece in the genre, and it is probable that the work’s tragic tone reflects the author’s own circumstances at the time he wrote it. The most striking feature of Justice Without Revenge is its ambiguity, which is not limited to the dialogue but also extends to the characters and the theme. For this reason, the play has been the subject of many conflicting interpretations, in which scholars have tried to assign the blame for the final catastrophe to one or another of the characters. As with The Knight from Olmedo, however, it is probably best to avoid moralistic interpretations of this work. Rather, the play’s ambiguity seems designed to evoke the ultimate ambiguity of life, and all three of the main characters seem caught in a dilemma for which they are not entirely responsible. The work’s basically pessimistic tone is attentuated, however, by a complex series of images in which Lope de Vega—apparently now taking his religious vocation seriously—evokes the Christian doctrine of the Atonement. Thus, even in his final, despairing years, he was unable to view life without hope.

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Other major works long fiction: La Arcadia, 1598; El peregrino en su patria, 1604 (The Pilgrim: Or, The Stranger in His Own Country, 1621); Los pastores de Belén, 1612; Novelas a Marcia Leonarda, 1621; La Dorotea, 1632. poetry: La Dragontea, 1598; El Isidro, 1599; La hermosura de Angélica, 1602; Rimas, 1602; El arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo, 1609 (The New Art of Writing Plays, 1914); Jerusalén conquistada, 1609; Rimas sacras, 1614; La Circe, 1621; La filomena, 1621; Triunfos divinos, 1625; La corona trágica, 1627; Laurel de Apolo, 1630; Amarilis, 1633; La gatomaquia, 1634 (Gatomachia, 1843); Rimas humanas y divinas del licenciado Tomé de Burguillos, 1634; Filis, 1635; La Vega del Parnaso, 1637. nonfiction: Égloga a Claudio, 1637. Bibliography Fox, Diane. Refiguring the Hero: From Peasant to Noble in Lope de Vega and Calderón. Penn State Studies in Romance Literature series. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. Fox examines the image of the hero and class status in the works of Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Bibliography and index. McKendrick, Melveena. Playing the King: Lope de Vega and the Limits of Conformity. Rochester, N.Y.: Tamesis, 2000. An examination of Lope de Vega’s portrayal of the monarchy in his works. Bibliography and index. Morrison, Robert R. Lope de Vega and the Comedia de Santos. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. This study examines the religious drama of Lope de Vega. Bibliography and index. Ostlund, DeLys. The Re-creation of History in the Fernando and Isabel Plays of Lope de Vega. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. Oslund examines the historical aspects of the dramas of Lope de Vega. Bibliography and index. Smith, Marlene K. The Beautiful Woman in the Theater of Lope de Vega: Ideology and Mythology of Female Beauty in Seventeenth Century Spain. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. A discussion of the feminine beauty as portrayed in the works of Lope de Vega. Bibliography and index. Wright, Elizabeth R. Pilgrimage to Patronage: Lope de Vega and the Court of Philip III, 15981621. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2001. This study focuses on the patronage system and the interactions between politics and the life and work of Lope de Vega. Bibliography and index. Currie K. Thompson

Voltaire Voltaire

François-Marie Arouet Born: Paris, France; November 21, 1694 Died: Paris, France; May 30, 1778 Principal drama • Œdipe, pr. 1718, pb. 1719 (Oedipus, 1761); Artémire, pr. 1720; Mariamne, pr. 1724, pb. 1725 (English translation, 1761); L’Indiscret, pr., pb. 1725 (verse play); Brutus, pr. 1730, pb. 1731 (English translation, 1761); Ériphyle, pr. 1732, pb. 1779; Zaïre, pr. 1732, pb. 1733 (English translation, 1736); La Mort de César, pr. 1733, pb. 1735; Adélaïde du Guesclin, pr. 1734; L’Échange, pr. 1734, pb. 1761; Alzire, pr., pb. 1736 (English translation, 1763); L’Enfant prodigue, pr. 1736, pb. 1738 (verse; prose translation, The Prodigal, 1750?); La Prude: Ou, La Grandeuse de Cassette, wr. 1740, pr., pb. 1747 (verse; based on William Wycherley’s play The Plain-Dealer); Zulime, pr. 1740, pb. 1761; Mahomet, pr., pb. 1742 (Mahomet the Prophet, 1744); Mérope, pr. 1743, pb. 1744 (English translation, 1744, 1749); La Princesse de Navarre, pr., pb. 1745 (verse play; music by Jean-Philippe Rameau); Sémiramis, pr. 1748, pb. 1749 (Semiramis, 1760); Nanine, pr., pb. 1749 (English translation, 1927); Oreste, pr., pb. 1750; Rome sauvée, pr., pb. 1752; L’Orphelin de la Chine, pr., pb. 1755 (The Orphan of China, 1756); Socrate, pb. 1759 (Socrates, 1760); L’Écossaise, pr., pb. 1760 (The Highland Girl, 1760); Tancrède, pr. 1760, pb. 1761; Don Pèdre, wr. 1761, pb. 1775; Olympie, pb. 1763, pr. 1764; Le Triumvirat, pr. 1764, pb. 1767; Les Scythes, pr., pb. 1767; Les Guèbres: Ou, La Tolérance, pb. 1769; Sophonisbe, pb. 1770, pr. 1774 (revision of Jean Mairet’s play); Les Pélopides: Ou, Atrée et Thyeste, pb. 1772; Les Lois de Minos, pb. 1773; Irène, pr. 1778, pb. 1779; Agathocle, pr. 1779 Other literary forms • In addition to his plays, Voltaire wrote many poems, especially odes. Some of his most important longer poems are Poème sur la religion naturelle (1722); La Henriade (1728), an epic poem initially entitled La Ligue (Henriade, 1732); Le Temple du goût (1733; The Temple of Taste, 1734), on literary criticism; Discours en vers sur l’homme (1738-1752; Discourses in Verse on Man, 1764); Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne (1756; Poem on the Lisbon Earthquake, 1764); and La Pucelle d’Orléans (1755, 1762; The Maid of Orleans, 1758, also as La Pucelle, 1785-1786). Voltaire’s main historical works are Histoire de Charles XII (1731; The History of Charles XII, 1732); Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV, 1752); and Essai sur les mœurs (1756, 1763; The General History and State of Europe, 1754, 1759). Voltaire’s current reputation is based on his contes philosophiques (philosophical tales), of which three of the principal ones are: Zadig: Ou, La Destinée, Histoire orientale (1748; originally as Memnon: Histoire orientale, 1747; Zadig: Or, The Book of Fate, 1749), Candide: Ou, L’Optimisme (1759; Candide: Or, All for the Best, 1759), and La Princesse de Babylone (1768; The Princess of Babylon, 1769). Voltaire wrote numerous philosophical treatises, essays, polemics, and brochures, and he left behind a voluminous correspondence, compiled in The Complete Works of Voltaire (1968-1977; 135 volumes, in French).

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Achievements • Voltaire dominated the eighteenth century theater by the number of his plays alone. He wrote fifty-two in all, of which twenty-seven are tragedies. He was the most popular dramatist of his time and the principal author for the ComédieFrançaise, which now only occasionally performs his plays. In his own time, Voltaire was regarded as one of the masters of French drama. More of his plays were performed than those of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine together. Today, he is best known for his philosophical works, especially his tales, but during his lifetime he believed his immortality would rest on his dramatic accomplishments. Although he wrote most of his plays rapidly, he constantly reworked them and revised the failures, often bringing them to success, as with Mariamne. Voltaire was the literary and philosophical bridge between the classical theater of the seventeenth century and the Romantic theater of the nineteenth century. It was he who kept the classical theater alive, both in subject matter (one-third of his tragedies are based on classical themes) and in form. He insisted on adherence to the Aristotelian unities of action, time, and place, and on verse, propriety, and verisimilitude. His style, though sometimes declamatory, is in accurate French alexandrins, elegant and frequently excellent poetry in the style of Corneille. Yet, as dedicated as he was to the values of French classicism in the drama, Voltaire was intrigued, if torn, by contemporary literary theories and foreign dramatic works, and at times he violated his own precepts in introducing into his plays—and into France—dramatic elements of the coming age. Thus, while Voltaire kept French classical theater alive, he distinctly widened its frontiers. Voltaire’s trip to England from 1726 to 1729 brought him into contact with the English theater, and especially with the plays of William Shakespeare. Critic Admad Gunny maintains that Voltaire also came to know and was influenced by the works of John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, John Milton, Laurence Sterne, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding. The influence of the earlier playwrights can be seen in many plays, among them Brutus and La Mort de César, based on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (pr. c. 1599-1600); Ériphyle, Semiramis, Oreste, and Tancrède, all inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (pr. c. 1600-1601); Zaïre, inspired by Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor of Venice (pr. 1604); and Alzire, inspired by Dryden’s The Indian Emperor: Or, The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards (pr. 1665, pb. 1667). Although Voltaire was most influenced by Shakespeare, and his numerous literary essays on the English dramatist helped to make Shakespeare known on the Continent, Voltaire did not unreservedly accept Shakespearean drama, as is especially evident in his “Lettre à l’Académie Française” (1776). Yet his contributions in incorporating English dramatic theory into the French theater are the most significant of the eighteenth century and prepared the way for the Romantic drama of the nineteenth century as described in Victor Hugo’s preface to Cromwell (1827), particularly in the emphasis on action rather than introspection. Voltaire did not limit his subjects to classical sources, but widened the geographical boundaries of the tragedy. Zaïre is situated in Jerusalem, Alzire in Peru, Zulime in Africa, Mahomet the Prophet in Mecca, The Orphan of China in China, Les Scythes in Scythia, and Les Guèbres in Syria. There is, however, very little local color in these plays other than the settings and the names. Heralding Romanticism years before it would flourish, Voltaire used French national themes and names for his inspiration. Zaïre recalls the illustrious family of Lusignan; Adélaïde du Guesclin is based on fourteenth century Breton history; and Tancrède, in the style of historical romance, returns to the courtly love theme. The critic Thurston Wheeler Russel maintains that one of Voltaire’s greatest literary innovations was his development of the heroic romance in the manner of

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Dryden; Voltaire’s plays in this genre, especially Zaïre, Alzire, Tancrède, and Mérope, almost operatic in nature, remain among his most popular. Less successful in comedy than in tragedy, Voltaire, who greatly admired Molière, declared that comedy exists mainly to provoke laughter among the spectators. He did, however, allow tearful situations in his comedies, and his best comedies are sentimental in the vein of the comédie larmoyante (“weeping comedy”), as in, for example, The Prodigal and The Highland Girl. Voltaire intended comedy to be a faithful portrayal of manners and to rest on mistaken identity, historically two of the most important comic devices. His own plays illustrate these techniques and thus were rather successful in continuing the tradition of Molière and the classical comedy of Plautus and Terence. Critic Raymond Navès sees caricature as Voltaire’s main accomplishment in comedy, and the use of prose in The Highland Girl as more effective than his ten-syllable verses in The Prodigal and Nanine. Biography • François-Marie Arouet, known to his contemporaries and to posterity as Voltaire, was born on November 21, 1694, very likely in Paris, though there is some evidence for Châtenay. His father, a former notary, was a well-to-do bourgeois. Like JeanJacques Rousseau, Voltaire grew up without a mother, whom he lost when he was seven years old. From 1704 to 1711, he attended the aristocratic Collège Louis-le-Grand, where he received an excellent classical formation from the Jesuits. Despite his later anticlericalism, Voltaire maintained several attachments to his Jesuit teachers, among them Father Thoulié, who received him into the Académie Française in 1746. Voltaire also formed lasting bonds with his companions, especially Charles Augustin Feriol, comte d’Argental, his lifelong friend. Voltaire’s father envisioned a career in law for his son, who felt no attraction to it, and preferred writing. He frequented the frivolous Society of the Temple, and in 1713 was exiled to Holland by his father, beginning a series of travels and romantic liaisons that were to characterize his life. At the same time, he began his literary career with an ode to commemorate the construction of Notre-Dame, soon to be followed by a play that was declared insulting to the Regent Philippe of Orléans, for which he was imprisoned in the Bastille in 1718. An expert in the art of flattery, he soon learned to court royal favor, and was well received until an argument with Gui Auguste de Rohan-Chabot, who had him beaten, necessitated exile in England. Thedore Besterman is of the opinion that this upsetting experience fueled Voltaire’s lifelong pas(Library of Congress) sion for social justice.

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Voltaire’s three years in England, from 1726 to 1729, were important in his intellectual development. He became acquainted with new ideas on political economy and literary theory through association with Lord Henry St. John Bolingbroke, already his friend in France, Lord Charles Mordaunt Peterborough, Swift, Pope, John Gay, Edward Young, George Berkeley, and Samuel Clarke. He was later to popularize the new trend in thought in his Lettres philosophiques (1734; originally published as Letters Concerning the English Nation, 1733, also as Philosophical Letters; 1961). On his return he became acquainted with Mme Émilie du Châtelet, with whom he maintained an erratic liaison until her death in 1749. He lived most of the time at her château of Cirey, and there, under her influence, became interested in experimental science and Isaac Newton’s physics. After her death, he spent two years, from 1750 to 1752, at the court of Frederick II of Prussia. Frederick had previously received Voltaire warmly, but gradually their relationship cooled, and it ceased in 1757. From 1743 until his death, Voltaire’s companion and mistress was his niece Mme Denis, with whom he settled at the estate of Les Délices, and at Ferney, near Geneva, from 1755 to 1778. The Calvinist pastors were not anxious to receive him among them, particularly since his anticlericalism was strongest at this time. He won his battles with them and with Rousseau on the theater, and in 1765 successfully rehabilitated the name of Jean Calas, who had been wrongly executed, and later the family Sirven and the Chevalier de la Barre (who was also killed), all victims of religious fanaticism. Voltaire created a model village at Ferney and became its provident patriarch. In 1778, he returned in triumph to Paris for the performance of his last tragedy, Irène. He died there on May 30, 1778, after having received the Sacraments of the Church. His nephew Father Mignot gave him secret Christian burial near Troyes. In 1791, the revolutionaries carried his remains in triumph to Paris, where they were placed in the Pantheon. Analysis • Voltaire’s theater is characterized both by innovation and by certain recurring themes. He draws primarily on the French classical theater, and uses techniques popularized by his contemporaries, such as Denis Diderot’s bourgeois drama and heroic romance, and his rival Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon’s recognition scenes. Voltaire’s sources of inspiration include exotic settings such as China in The Orphan of China, America in Alzire, and French national history, as in Adélaïde du Guesclin. At the same time, he uses Greek sources in five plays: Oedipus, Ériphyle, Mérope, Semiramis, and Oreste. In these plays, the ancient theme of the avenging deity is uppermost, yet as early as Oedipus (1718), Voltaire displays his humanism in showing the hero as an innocent victim who protests his independence. Voltaire wrote four plays of Roman inspiration: Brutus, La Mort de César, Rome sauvée, and Le Triumvirat. Less successful than his Greekinspired plays, they extol a patriotic and republican theme, to which Voltaire himself was not very committed. In the classical tradition, Voltaire kept alive the three unities as well as vraisemblance (verisimilitude), and bienséance (propriety). Yet his innovative emphasis on action, the influence of Shakespeare, and his use of recognition scenes evidence his inexact observance of the classical rules of theater. Many plays fail in unity of action, as in, for example, his first play, Oedipus: The addition of yet one more character to the action, Jocasta’s former lover Philoctetes, overdoes an already complex plot. The classical unity that Voltaire most frequently violates is that of place, as in Mahomet the Prophet, Mérope, and Alzire. In these plays, to give an appearance of exactness, Voltaire brings unlikely characters together in one location. Influenced by the English theater, at

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times Voltaire disregards the classical and contemporary French taboo against violence onstage, as in the murder scene in Mahomet the Prophet. (Such a case is an exception, however, since Voltaire generally preserves the French sense of delicacy with the classical device of a messenger who reports an act of violence.) Voltaire often fails in verisimilitude: The sudden change in Genghis Khan (in The Orphan of China) from a barbarous destroyer to a benevolent protector is unlikely; Semiramis’s failure to recognize Assur as her husband’s murderer is equally unbelievable; Mérope’s blindness to her son’s presence is improbable. This lack of strict adherence to classical rules reflects Voltaire’s changing dramatic theories. Although in many ways he resembles Racine, unlike that pillar of French classicism Voltaire subordinates psychological analysis to action, which in turn gives rise to an emphasis on staging and decoration—all highly untraditional at that time. Voltaire’s later plays often resemble operatic performances. With Tancrède, Voltaire succeeded in eliminating spectators from the stage, where they had been accustomed to sit and witness characters discuss action that had taken place previously or offstage. The action in Voltaire’s plays depends mainly on the coup de théâtre (an abrupt turn of events), surprise, and unexpected recognition scenes. Most frequently a child lost in early years is reunited with his or her parents. For example, in Mahomet the Prophet, Séïde and Palmire, who plan on marrying, learn that they are brother and sister, the children of Mahomet’s rival, Zopire. In Mérope, a suspected murderer is discovered to be Egisthe, Mérope’s lost child, and Zaïre, about to renounce her religion for her lover, discovers that she is Lusignan’s daughter. Even Voltaire’s comedies use this device; the impoverished Miss Lindon in The Highland Girl is really Montross’s daughter, who was taken from him at age five. Although Voltaire made action primary in his plays, and used a variety of sources for his inspiration, he actually rewrote the same play again and again and shows a pattern in his themes. Some are hardly distinguishable: Ériphyle and Semiramis; Zaïre, Alzire, and Mahomet the Prophet; Mérope and Mahomet the Prophet. Because of Voltaire’s belief in the theater as a moralizing device, he intended his plays to instruct spectators. In the theater, as elsewhere, Voltaire directed all his efforts against intolerance in religion and injustice in government. As early as Oedipus, Voltaire cited the danger in the power of priests. Alzire and Zaïre show the superiority of natural religion. In Alzire, the uninstructed Zamore is more compassionate than the inflexible Gusman, who compels the Indians to accept Christianity. Mahomet the Prophet is itself a fanatic apology for tolerance, falsifying history to present Muwammad as a merciless murderer and adulterer. Although Voltaire dedicated his play to Pope Benedict XIV, its anticlerical intent was not lost on the critics, among them Voltaire’s rival Crébillon, at that time a censor, who outlawed the play. Voltaire’s character analysis is for the most part rather superficial; his characters develop through action rather than through expression of their thoughts or through conversation. They resemble one another from play to play, usually revealing only one side, so that each character represents a human quality: Mérope and Idamé are maternal love; Alzire and Zaïre, romantic love; Zamti, patriotism; Mahomet and Polyphonte, tyranny. Yet owing to Voltaire’s genius, his characters manage to be human and touching. They are usually victims of love, be it maternal or romantic, and are often on the verge of committing incest before the recognition scene. In many cases, Voltaire the humanist prevents his tragedy from becoming tragic (in the classical sense), for he spares the innocent victim, as in The Orphan of China. René Pomeau sees Oedipus as marking the end of traditional French tragedy, as the victim accuses the gods. In

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fact, it is for this humanizing dimension that Voltaire’s plays are best appreciated, for he brought into a theater dominated by classical reason the Romantic trait of feeling, sensibilité, that was to characterize it in future years. Oedipus • Oedipus, says Pomeau, is important because it is Voltaire’s first tragedy, and among his best. In it, Voltaire announced the themes that he would spend his life proclaiming: justice and tolerance. Voltaire had begun the play before his imprisonment in the Bastille in 1718 and finished it there. It enjoyed a run of forty-five performances and featured two of the best-known actors of the time in the leading roles: Dufresne as Oedipus and Mlle Demarès as Jocasta. The play is obviously based on Sophocles’ Oidipous Tyrannos (c. 429 b.c.e.; Oedipus Tyrannus, 1715), though at the actors’ insistence Voltaire added the love scenes. The play was an enormous success, yet was attacked by critics as a plagiarism of Corneille, to which it does have strong resemblances. Voltaire responded to critics with several Lettres philosophiques, which form an excellent documentation of his literary views at the time. Although Voltaire uses the story of Oedipus’s search for the truth as narrated by Sophocles, like Corneille (whom he imitated), he complicates the plot with extraneous events. Such is the introduction of Philoctetes into the action of the story. Jocasta’s former lover is accused of killing Laius but denies the charge. Although he still loves Jocasta, he is not jealous of Oedipus, who is noble and has saved the city. Oedipus in turn respects Philoctetes and even wishes to have him as his successor. Oedipus learns his identity from Phorbas, originally Laius’s companion, and from Icarus, his former guardian. As in Sophocles’ play, Oedipus blinds himself and Jocasta commits suicide. Voltaire shows his anticlerical tendencies in act 2, scene 5, in which he points out the dangerous effects of priestly power. Voltaire also shows his humanism, differing from Sophocles in presenting an Oedipus who is not submissive to fate but assertive in protesting his innocence. Jocasta, too, defends Oedipus in act 4, scene 3; her suicide at the end is less convincing than her belief in justice. According to Pomeau, Voltaire’s Oedipus is a new dimension in the theater, actually bringing to an end the traditional concept of tragedy. Zaïre • Zaïre has always been one of the most popular of Voltaire’s plays, with thirtyone performances in its first season alone and a long time in the repertory of the Comédie-Française. Voltaire’s aim was that there should be “nothing so Turkish, nothing so Christian, so full of love, so tender, so furious,” as Zaïre. He added the love element lacking in the unsuccessful Ériphyle; in fact, as Jean-Baptiste Rousseau commented, passion seems to triumph over grace. Set in Jerusalem, it shows the widening geographical frontiers of Voltaire’s drama. Zaïre is a captive of the sultan Orosmane, who loves her and wishes to marry her. She has abandoned her Christian faith for him and has forgotten Nerestan, who returns with her ransom. Orosmane, however, refuses to part with her or with the aged Lusignan. Lusignan, about to die, recognizes Nerestan and Zaïre as his lost children and as his last request wants to see Zaïre convert to Christianity. She accepts, though she does not wish to abandon Orosmane. He intercepts a letter that seems to indicate that Zaïre has betrayed him for Nerestan, and following a secret rendezvous, unknowingly stabs Zaïre. When he discovers his error, Orosmane frees Nerestan and then kills himself. Zaïre‘s Deistic overtones were immediately perceived by the critics. Orosmane is as virtuous as Nerestan because Voltaire wished to show the equality of all beliefs. Zaïre

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herself states the relativity of religion: Had she been brought up along the Ganges, she would have been a “heathen”; in Paris, a Christian; she is a Muslim in Jerusalem. The play, however, is touching and very human; hence, Voltaire’s daring ideas did not prevent its success. Alzire • Alzire also treats the question of true religion, and has always been among the most popular of Voltaire’s plays. In Alzire, for the first time in the French theater, the scene was set in America—in Peru—and according to critic Theodore Besterman it remains one of the most modern of Voltaire’s plays because it deals with the problem of colonization and of “the relations between an occupying power and a subject people.” Besterman believes that Voltaire does not solve this problem, but rather shows the triumph of force. This may be the de facto answer, but it is not necessarily the ideal proposed by Voltaire. The play is preceded by a lengthy preface, in which Voltaire declares his purpose: “to discover to what extent the true spirit of religion is superior to the natural virtues.” For Voltaire, to harbor this true spirit is not to practice useless rituals, but rather “to consider all men as brothers, to do good and to forgive evil.” The brutal Spanish conqueror Gusman receives the governorship of Peru from his gentle father, Alvarez. Gusman is in love with Alzire, the Aztec king Montezuma’s daughter, who refuses the man responsible for the death of her lover Zamore. Zamore, however, is not dead; in fact, he has saved Gusman’s father, Alvarez, and returns to avenge the wrong done by Gusman. When Zamore arrives, Alzire has just been married to Gusman to appease the Spaniards. Alzire, though faithful to Gusman, pleads for mercy for Zamore, who in turn attacks Gusman. Both Alzire and Zamore are condemned, but are saved by Gusman’s pardon of Zamore. Zamore, inspired by Gusman’s gesture of forgiveness, accepts the Christian religion and will live to marry Alzire. Although Voltaire extolled the virtue of forgiveness, he did not make a convincing case for Gusman’s superiority. In fact, Zamore is equally virtuous, and Gusman’s sudden change of heart is highly improbable. D’Argental, Voltaire’s constant friend, found fault with the unconvincing ending, as do more modern critics, among them Pomeau and Besterman. Once again, however, Voltaire’s play has charm because of the touching love story it recounts and the deeply human character of Alzire. Mérope • The popular subject of Mérope is based on a nonextant tragedy of Euripides. Voltaire used the play by Francesco Scipione Maffei (Mérope, 1713), performed in Paris in 1717, as his main source. First planning a translation, Voltaire worked on the tragedy from 1736 to 1743, and dedicated it to Maffei. It was the best received of all Voltaire’s plays, and broke all records in its proceeds. This was surprising, as the play has no love element other than maternal affection directly inspired by Racine’s Andromaque (pr. 1667; Andromache, 1674). Mérope also repeats the theme of Mahomet the Prophet in Polyphonte, tyrant of Messène, who insists on blind obedience and fear in his followers. Besterman notes a Rousseauian element in Egisthe, “the virtuous man brought up far from cities and courts in an atmosphere of rustic simplicity.” Polyphonte, tyrant of Messène, wishes to marry Mérope, widow of the slain Cresphonte. She, however, detests Polyphonte and yearns only for the return of her lost son Egisthe. Egisthe has in fact returned, but his identity is unknown both to him and to Mérope, and he is accused of being the murderer of Mérope’s lost son. Although Mérope wishes to punish Egisthe, the alleged murderer, at the same time she feels tenderness for him. The mystery of his identity is solved by Narbas, Egisthe’s guardian; Polyphonte insists on punishing the young stranger, but on learning the

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truth, Polyphonte agrees to spare Egisthe on the condition that Mérope marry him and Egisthe swear homage to him. Egisthe kills the tyrant and becomes king in his place. The critic Fernand Vial ascribes the popularity of this tragedy to its simplicity. Voltaire’s contemporaries also hailed it as a model of true classical drama, although in fact it is not tragic, since the innocent triumph over the guilty. It is free from Voltaire’s usual complications, however, though it does violate unity of place and has several improbable situations, such as the delays in recognition. Nevertheless, it is human and touching, and shows Voltaire’s greatest merit as a dramatist: a sense of warmth and feeling, sensibilité. Other major works long fiction: Zadig: Ou, La Destinée, Histoire orientale, 1748 (originally as Memnon: Histoire orientale, 1747; Zadig: Or, The Book of Fate, 1749); Le Micromégas, 1752 (Micromegas, 1753); Histoire des voyages de Scarmentado, 1756 (The History of the Voyages of Scarmentado, 1757; also as History of Scarmentado’s Travels, 1961); Candide: Ou, L’Optimisme, 1759 (Candide: Or, All for the Best, 1759; also as Candide: Or, The Optimist, 1762; also as Candide: Or, Optimism, 1947); L’Ingénu, 1767 (The Pupil of Nature, 1771; also as Ingenuous, 1961); L’Homme aux quarante écus, 1768 (The Man of Forty Crowns, 1768); La Princesse de Babylone, 1768 (The Princess of Babylon, 1769). short fiction: Le Monde comme il va, 1748 (revised as Babouc: Ou, Le Monde comme il va, 1749; Babouc: Or, The World as It Goes, 1754; also as The World as It Is: Or, Babouc’s Vision, 1929); Memnon: Ou, La Sagesse humaine, 1749 (Memnon: Or, Human Wisdom, 1961); La Lettre d’un Turc, 1750; Le Blanc et le noir, 1764 (The Two Genies, 1895); Jeannot et Colin, 1764 (Jeannot and Colin, 1929); L’Histoire de Jenni, 1775; Les Oreilles du Comte de Chesterfield, 1775 (The Ears of Lord Chesterfield and Parson Goodman, 1826). nonfiction: An Essay upon the Civil Wars of France . . . and Also upon the Epick Poetry of the European Nations from Homer Down to Milton, 1727; La Henriade, 1728 (Henriade, 1732); Histoire de Charles XII, 1731 (The History of Charles XII, 1732); Le Temple du goût, 1733 (The Temple of Taste, 1734); Letters Concerning the English Nation, 1733; Lettres philosophiques, 1734 (originally published in English as Letters Concerning the English Nation, 1733; also as Philosophical Letters, 1961); Discours de métaphysique, 1736; Éléments de la philosophie de Newton, 1738 (The Elements of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy, 1738); Discours en vers sur l’homme 1738-1752 (Discourses in Verse on Man, 1764); Vie de Molière, 1739; Le Siècle de Louis XIV, 1751 (The Age of Louis XIV, 1752); Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations, 1756, 1763 (The General History and State of Europe, 1754, 1759); Traité sur la tolérance, 1763 (A Treatise on Religious Toleration, 1764); Dictionnaire philosophique portatif, 1764, enlarged 1769 (as La Raison par alphabet, also known as Dictionnaire philosophique; A Philosophical Dictionary for the Pocket, 1765; also as Philosophical Dictionary, 1945, enlarged 1962); Commentaires sur le théâtre de Pierre Corneille, 1764; Avis au public sur les parracides imputés aux calas et aux Sirven, 1775; Correspondence, 1953-1965 (102 volumes). miscellaneous: The Works of M. de Voltaire, 1761-1765 (35 volumes), 1761-1781 (38 volumes); Candide and Other Writings, 1945; The Portable Voltaire, 1949; Candide, Zadig, and Selected Stories, 1961; The Complete Works of Voltaire, 1968-1977 (135 volumes; in French). Bibliography Besterman, Theodore. Voltaire. 3d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. This biography by a Voltaire scholar provides coverage of the writer’s life and works. Bibliography and index.

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Bird, Stephen. Reinventing Voltaire: The Politics of Commemoration in Nineteenth Century France. Oxford, England: Voltaire Foundation, 2000. An examination of the critical response to Voltaire, particularly in the nineteenth century. Bibliography and indexes. Carlson, Marvin A. Voltaire and the Theatre of the Eighteenth Century. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. An examination of the French theater in the eighteenth century and Voltaire’s role. Bibliography and index. Gray, John. Voltaire. Great Philosophers 19. New York: Routledge, 1999. A biography of Voltaire that covers his life and works, while concentrating on his philosophy. Bibliography. Knapp, Bettina Liebowitz. Voltaire Revisited. New York: Twayne, 2000. A basic biography of Voltaire that describes his life and works. Bibliography and index. Mason, Haydn, ed. Studies for the Tercentenary of Voltaire’s Birth, 1694-1994. Oxford, England: Voltaire Foundation, 1994. Contains essays on Voltaire’s works and life, including one on the French theater in the 1690’s. Bibliography. Irma M. Kashuba

Wendy Wasserstein Wendy Wasserstein

Born: Brooklyn, New York; October 18, 1950 Principal drama • Any Woman Can’t, pr. 1973; Happy Birthday, Montpelier Pizz-zazz, pr. 1974; When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth, pr. 1975 (with Christopher Durang); Uncommon Women and Others, pr. 1975 (one act), pr. 1977 (two acts), pb. 1978; Isn’t It Romantic, pr. 1981, revised pr. 1983, pb. 1984; Tender Offer, pr. 1983, pb. 2000 (one act); The Man in a Case, pr., pb. 1986 (one act; adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s short story); Miami, pr. 1986 (musical); The Heidi Chronicles, pr., pb. 1988; The Heidi Chronicles and Other Plays, pb. 1990; The Sisters Rosensweig, pr. 1992, pb. 1993; An American Daughter, pr. 1997, pb. 1998; Waiting for Philip Glass, pr., pb. 1998 (inspired by William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94); The Festival of Regrets, pr. 1999 (libretto); Old Money, pr. 2000, pb. 2002; Seven OneAct Plays, pb. 2000 Other literary forms • Wendy Wasserstein, though best known for her plays, is the author of several teleplays, including The Sorrows of Gin (1979), an adaptation of John Cheever’s short story, and An American Daughter (2000), an adaptation of her play. She also has written several unproduced film scripts. Her essays, which have appeared in numerous periodicals, including Esquire and New York Woman, have been published in two collections, Bachelor Girls (1990) and Shiksa Goddess (2001). Achievements • Wendy Wasserstein has been hailed as the foremost theatrical chronicler of the lives of women of her generation. Her plays, steeped in her unique brand of humor, are moving, sometimes wrenching explorations of women’s struggle for identity and fulfillment in a world of rapidly shifting social, sexual, and political mores. Most often against the backdrop of the burgeoning feminist movement, her characters navigate through obstacle courses of expectations—those of their parents, their lovers, their siblings, their friends, and, ultimately, themselves. They seek answers to fundamental questions: how to find meaning in life and how to strike a balance between the need to connect and the need to be true to oneself. Wasserstein’s works, which deftly pair wit and pathos, satire and sensitivity, have garnered numerous honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony (Antoinette Perry) Award, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Biography • Wendy Wasserstein was born on October 18, 1950, in Brooklyn, New York. She was the fourth and youngest child of Morris W. Wasserstein, a successful textile manufacturer, and Lola (Schleifer) Wasserstein, a housewife and nonprofessional dancer, both Jewish émigrés from central Europe. When she was thirteen, Wasserstein’s family moved to Manhattan, where she attended the Calhoun School, an all-girl academy at which she discovered that she could get excused from gym class by writing the annual mother-daughter fashion show. Some years later, at Mount Holyoke, an elite Massachusetts women’s college, a friend persuaded Wasserstein, a history major, to take a playwriting course at nearby Smith College. Encouraged by her instructor, she devoted much of her junior year, which she spent at Amherst College, performing in campus musicals before returning to complete her B.A. degree at Mount Holyoke in 1971. 988

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Upon graduating, Wasserstein moved back to New York City, where she studied playwriting with Israel Horovitz and Joseph Heller at City College (where she later earned an M.A.) and held a variety of odd jobs to pay her rent. In 1973, her play Any Woman Can’t was produced Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons, prompting her to accept admission to the Yale School of Drama and to turn down the Columbia Business School, which had simultaneously offered her admission. It was at Yale University, where she earned her M.F.A. degree in 1976, that Wasserstein’s first hit play, Uncommon Women and Others, was conceived as a one-act. Ultimately expanded, it was given a workshop production at the prestigious National Playwrights Conference at the O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut, a well-known launching pad for many successful playwrights. Indeed, in 1977, the Phoenix Theater’s production of Uncommon Women and Others opened Off-Broadway at the Marymount Manhattan Theater. Although some critics objected to the play’s lack of traditional plot, most praised Wasserstein’s gifts as a humorist and a social observer. By 1980, Wasserstein, established as one of the United States’ most promising young playwrights, was commissioned by the Phoenix Theater to write Isn’t It Romantic for its 1980-1981 season. The play’s mixed reviews prompted Wasserstein to rework it under the guidance of director Gerald Gutierrez and André Bishop, artistic director of Playwrights Horizons. There, with a stronger narrative line and more in-depth character development, it opened in 1983 to widespread praise. In the meantime, Wasserstein had been at work on several new pieces—among them a one-act play, Tender Offer, which was produced at Ensemble Studio Theater, and, collaborating with Jack Feldman and Bruce Sussman, a musical, Miami, which was presented as a work-in-progress at Playwrights Horizons in 1986. In 1988, one of Wasserstein’s most ambitious works, The Heidi Chronicles, which had been previously performed in workshop at the Seattle Repertory Theatre, had its New York premiere at Playwrights Horizons. It moved quickly to the larger Plymouth Theater on Broadway, where it opened to mostly positive critical response. The play earned for Wasserstein the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award, and virtually every New York theater award. Wasserstein’s eagerly awaited The Sisters Rosensweig opened at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in the fall of 1992. Receiving widespread critical acclaim, the piece augmented her already prominent presence on the American dramatic scene. Wasserstein has branched out from her typical output to participate in several innovative theater events. In 1998 she was one of seven playwrights contributing one-act plays based on Shakespearean sonnets to the production of Love’s Fire. In 1999, she was one of three playwrights creating librettos for Central Park, a New York City Opera production presented at Glimmerglass Opera and Lincoln Center. Her libretto, “The Festival of Regrets,” was scored by Deborah Drattell, composer-in-residence for New York City Opera and Glimmerglass Opera. At the age of forty-eight, Wasserstein became a single mother after treatment with fertility drugs. Her daughter, Lucy Jane, weighed only one pound, twelve ounces at birth. Wasserstein’s essay about her struggle to conceive and her daughter’s birth is one of the most moving pieces in Shiksa Goddess. Analysis • Wendy Wasserstein’s plays are, for the most part, extremely consistent in their emphasis on character, their lack of classical structure, and their use of humor to explore or accompany serious, often poignant themes. Throughout her career, Wasserstein’s central concern has been the role of women—particularly white, upper-middleclass, educated women—in contemporary society. Though her plays are suffused with

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uproarious humor, her typical characters are individuals engaged in a struggle to carve out an identity and a place for themselves in a society that has left them feeling, at worst, stranded and desolate and, at best, disillusioned. This is not to say that Wasserstein’s worldview is bleak. Rather, the note of slightly skewed optimism with which she characteristically ends her works, along with her prevailing wit, lends them an air of levity and exuberance that often transcends her sober themes. These themes—loneliness, isolation, and a profound desire for meaning in life—are examined by Wasserstein chiefly through character. One of the playwright’s great strengths is her ability to poke fun at her characters without subjecting them to ridicule or scorn. Her women and men, with all their faults and foibles, are warmly and affectionately rendered. They engage their audience’s empathy as they make their way through the mazes of their lives, trying to connect and to be of consequence in the world. Wasserstein is a unique and important voice in contemporary American theater. As a woman writing plays about women, she has been a groundbreaker, though never self-consciously so. Despite her often thin plot lines, she finds and captures the drama inherent in the day-to-day choices confronting the women of her generation. As a humorist, too, Wasserstein is unquestionably a virtuoso. Her ability to see the absurdity of even her own most deeply held convictions, and to hold them deeply nevertheless, is perhaps the most engaging and distinctive of her writing’s many strengths. Wasserstein is best known for her four full-length, professional plays, Uncommon Women and Others, Isn’t It Romantic, The Heidi Chronicles, and The Sisters Rosensweig. The first three plays have in common their episodic structure and non-plot-driven narrative. In each of the three, scenes unfold to reveal aspects of character. Uncommon Women and Others • Uncommon Women and Others begins with five former college friends assessing their lives as they reunite six years after graduation. The body of the play is a flashback to their earlier life together at a small women’s college under the often conflicting influences of the school’s traditional “feminine” rituals and etiquette and the iconoclasm of the blossoming women’s movement. In each of the two time frames, events are largely contexts for discussions in which Wasserstein’s women use one another as sounding boards, each one testing and weighing her hopes, fears, expectations, and achievements against those of her friends. Isn’t It Romantic • Similarly, in Isn’t It Romantic, two former college friends, Janie Blumberg, a freelance writer, and Harriet Cornwall, a corporate M.B.A., move through their postcollege lives, weighing marriage and children against independence and the life choices of their mothers against their own. The play climaxes at the point where the two women diverge: Harriet, who has formerly decried marriage, accepts a suitor’s proposal out of fear of being alone, and Janie chooses to remain unattached and to seek happiness within herself. The Heidi Chronicles • The Heidi Chronicles, though more far-reaching in scope, is also a character-driven play. Here, Wasserstein narrows her focus to one woman, Heidi Holland, but through her reflects the changing social and political mores of more than two decades. From the mid-1960’s to the late 1980’s, Heidi, like Wasserstein’s earlier characters, struggles to find her identity. Moving through settings ranging from women’s consciousness-raising meetings and protests to power lunches in trendy restaurants and Yuppie baby showers, Wasserstein’s Heidi functions as, in her words, a “highly-informed spectator” who never quite seems to be in step with the pre-

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scribed order of the day. In a pivotal scene, Heidi, now an art-history professor, delivers a luncheon lecture entitled “Women, Where Are We Going?” Her speech, which disintegrates into a seeming nervous breakdown, ends with Heidi confessing that she feels “stranded”: “And I thought the whole point was that we wouldn’t feel stranded,” she concludes, “I thought the whole point was that we were in this together.” Isolation and loneliness and, contrastingly, friendship and family are themes that run throughout these three earlier plays. Heidi’s wish, expressed in that luncheon speech, is for the kind of solidarity that exists among the women in Uncommon Women and Others, who, while constantly comparing their lives, are not competitive in the sense of putting one another down. On the contrary, they are fervent in their praise and support of one another, a family unto themselves. Janie and Harriet, in Isn’t It Romantic, share a relationship that is much the same until something comes between them, Harriet’s decision to marry a man she hardly knows because he makes her feel “like [she has] a family.” Heidi, on the other hand, at the point when she makes her speech, has no close women friends. Presumably, they are all off having babies or careers. Her decision, at the play’s end, to adopt a Panamanian baby girl, thereby creating a family of her own, is much akin to Janie Blumberg’s decision finally to unpack her crates in her empty apartment at the end of Isn’t It Romantic and make a home for herself. This desire on the part of Wasserstein’s characters for a family and a place to belong has at its root the desire for self-affirmation. It is evident in the refrain that echoes throughout Uncommon Women and Others, “When we’re twenty-five [thirty, forty, fortyfive], we’re going to be incredible,” as well as in Janie Blumberg’s invocation, “I am,” borrowed from her mother, Tasha. Though failures by the standards of some, Janie, Heidi, and the others can be seen as heroic in their resilience and in the tenacity with which they cling to their ideals—however divergent from the reality at hand. Wasserstein’s tendency to create characters who resist change can exasperate audiences, as her critics have noted. The women, in particular, who people her plays are often, like Janie with her unpacked crates of furniture, in a state of suspension, waiting for life to begin. In Uncommon Women and Others, there is a constant look toward the future for self-substantiation, as there is, to some extent, in Heidi’s persistent state of unhappiness. Still, Heidi does ultimately make a choice—to adopt a baby, a step toward the process of growing up, another of Wasserstein’s recurrent themes. One of Wasserstein’s greatest gifts is her ability to find and depict the ironies of life. This is evident in each of the three plays’ bittersweet final images: the “uncommon women,” their arms wrapped around one another, repeating their by now slightly sardonic refrain; Janie, tap-dancing alone in her empty apartment; and Heidi, singing to her new daughter “You Send Me,” the song to which she had previously danced with her old flame, Scoop, at his wedding reception. These images are pure Wasserstein. In the face of disappointment, even the disillusionment, of life, her characters manifest a triumph of the spirit and a strength from within that ultimately prevails. The Sisters Rosensweig • Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig is a departure from her earlier plays in a number of ways. Most overt among these differences are the play’s international setting (the action takes place in Queen Anne’s Gate, London) and its concern with global issues and events. Also of note is the playwright’s uncharacteristic use, here, of classical, nonepisodic structure, maintaining unity of time and place: in this case, several days’ events in the sitting room of Sara Goode, the play’s main character and the eldest of the three sisters for whom the play is named.

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Sara shares many of the characteristics of Wasserstein’s earlier protagonists—that is, her gender (female), ethnic group ( Jewish), social class (upper-middle to upper class), and intelligence quotient (uncommonly high). She is, however, considerably older than her forerunners. The Sisters Rosensweig centers on the celebration of Sara’s fifty-fourth birthday. This is significant in that Sara, a hugely successful international banker who has been married and divorced several times, does not share the struggle for self-identity carried out by such Wasserstein heroines as Heidi Holland and Janie Blumberg. With a lucrative, challenging career (noteworthily, in a male-dominated field) and a daughter she loves, Sara has achieved, to some degree, the “meaning” in her life that those earlier characters found lacking and sought. As the play progresses, however, it is revealed that Sara, despite her self-confidence and seeming self-sufficiency, shares with Heidi, Janie, and the others a deep need to connect—to find, create, or reclaim a family. As she fends off and at last gives in to a persistent suitor, Merv Kant, a fake-fur dealer, and plays hostess to her two sisters (Pfeni Rosensweig, a sociopolitical journalist turned travel writer, and “Dr.” Gorgeous Teitelbaum, who hosts a radio call-in show), Sara manages, at last, to peel back the layers of defense and reserve that have seen her through two divorces and the rigors of her profession and to rediscover the joys of sisterhood and the revitalizing power of romantic love. It is not Sara alone who serves Wasserstein in her exploration of her characteristic themes of loneliness, isolation, and the search for true happiness. Pfeni, forty years old, the play’s most seemingly autobiographical character, a writer who has been temporarily diverted from her true calling, has been likewise diverted from pursuing “what any normal woman wants” by remaining in a relationship with Geoffrey, a former homosexual. Jilted and distraught over the havoc that acquired immunedeficiency syndrome (AIDS) has played with the lives of his friends, Geoffrey has wooed and won Pfeni, only to leave her in the end to follow his own true nature. Pfeni’s ceaseless “wandering” as well as her self-confessed need to write about the hardships of others to fill the emptiness in her own life is much akin to Heidi Holland’s position as a “highly informed spectator,” waiting for her own life to begin. The Sisters Rosensweig harks back to Wasserstein’s Isn’t It Romantic in its concerns with the profound role that both mothers and Judaism play in shaping women’s lives. Here, Sara rejects, and attempts to cast off, the influences of both. An atheist expatriate in London, she has reinvented her life, purging all memories of her Jewish New York upbringing and her deceased mother’s expectations as firmly as she has embraced the habits and speech patterns of her adopted home. Sara’s eventual acquiescence to Merv, a New York Jew, along with the rekindling of her emotional attachment to her sisters, represents, at the play’s end, an acceptance and embracing of the past that she has worked so hard to put behind her. Like all Wasserstein’s works, The Sisters Rosensweig presents characters whose spirit triumphs over their daily heartaches and heartbreaks. While they long to escape the tangled webs of their lives (“If I could only get to Moscow!” Pfeni laments, in one of the play’s several nods to Anton Chekhov’s Tri sestry, pr., pb. 1901, rev. pb. 1904; Three Sisters, 1920), they manage to find within themselves and in one another sufficient strength not only to endure but also to prevail. As in Uncommon Women and Others, Isn’t It Romantic, and The Heidi Chronicles, there is a scene in The Sisters Rosensweig in which women join together to share a toast, affirming and celebrating their sisterhood and themselves. Be they biological sisters, sorority sisters, or sisters of the world, Wasserstein has made sisters her province. With The Sis-

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ters Rosensweig, she adds three more portraits to her ever-growing gallery of uncommon women, painted, as always, with insight, wit, and compassion. Other major works nonfiction: Bachelor Girls, 1990; Shiksa Goddess: Or, How I Spent My Forties, 2001. screenplay: The Object of My Affection, 1998 (adaptation of Stephen McCauley’s novel). teleplays: The Sorrows of Gin, 1979 (from the story by John Cheever); “Drive,” She Said, 1984; The Heidi Chronicles, 1995 (adaptation of her play); An American Daughter, 2000 (adaptation of her play). children’s literature: Pamela’s First Musical, 1996. Bibliography Bennetts, Leslie. “An Uncommon Dramatist Prepares Her New Work.” The New York Times, May 24, 1981, p. C1. Written as Isn’t It Romantic was being previewed, this piece provides a look at Wasserstein’s entry into writing and theater during her high school and college years. Wasserstein discusses feminism and women’s difficulty in making choices in life. Contains photographs of Wasserstein and Steven Robman, the director of Isn’t It Romantic. Berman, Janice. “The Heidi Paradox.” Newsday, December 22, 1988. This article, in which Wasserstein defines herself as a “feminist,” discusses the male and female characters in The Heidi Chronicles and refers to Wasserstein’s earlier plays. Contains photographs of the playwright, of Joan Allen in The Heidi Chronicles, and of Christine Rose and Barbara Barrie in Isn’t It Romantic. Nightingale, Benedict. “There Really Is a World Beyond ‘Diaper Drama.’” The New York Times, January 1, 1984, p. C2. This two-page piece discusses Isn’t It Romantic in the context of plays that focus on adult children struggling to sever ties with their parents. It compares Wasserstein’s play with those of Tina Howe and Christopher Durang. Includes a photograph of the “mothers” in Isn’t It Romantic. Rose, Phyllis Jane. “Dear Heidi—An Open Letter to Dr. Holland.” American Theatre 6 (October, 1989): 26. Written in letter form, this essay is a provocative, in-depth feminist critique of the images of women as presented in The Heidi Chronicles. Rose emphasizes Heidi’s complicity in surrendering her independence to men, referring to Aeschylus’s Oresteia (458 b.c.e.; English translation, 1777) as a means of furthering her point. Contains numerous photographs of scenes from The Heidi Chronicles. Shapiro, Walter. “Chronicler of Frayed Feminism.” Time, March 27, 1989, 90-92. Written shortly after The Heidi Chronicles moved to Broadway, this article provides insight into Wasserstein’s impetus for writing the play. Shapiro offers a brief look at the feminist subtext throughout Wasserstein’s work, as well as a more lengthy examination of her New York roots and family. Contains a full-page photograph of Wasserstein. Wallace, Carol. “A Kvetch for Our Time,” Sunday News Magazine, August 19, 1984, 10. Wallace focuses on Isn’t It Romantic as a chronicle of the women of Wasserstein’s generation. She also discusses Wasserstein’s overachieving siblings, her New York youth, and her years at Mount Holyoke College. Includes a photograph of the playwright. Anne Newgarden, updated by Irene Struthers Rush

Oscar Wilde Oscar Wilde

Born: Dublin, Ireland; October 16, 1854 Died: Paris, France; November 30, 1900 Principal drama • Vera: Or, The Nihilists, pb. 1880, pr. 1883; The Duchess of Padua, pb. 1883, pr. 1891; Lady Windermere’s Fan, pr. 1892, pb. 1893; Salomé, pb. 1893 (in French), pb. 1894 (in English), pr. 1896 (in French), pr. 1905 (in English); A Woman of No Importance, pr. 1893, pb. 1894; An Ideal Husband, pr. 1895, pb. 1899; The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People, pr. 1895, pb. 1899; A Florentine Tragedy, pr. 1906, pb. 1908 (one act, completed by T. Sturge More); La Sainte Courtisane, pb. 1908 Other literary forms • Oscar Wilde’s character and conversation were in themselves striking enough to gain for him the attention of the reading public, but in addition to playwriting, he practiced all the other literary forms. He began writing poetry at an early age, commemorating the death of his sister Isola with “Requiescat” in 1867 and winning the Newdigate Prize for Poetry at Oxford with Ravenna in 1878. Wilde’s Poems appeared in 1881; The Sphinx in 1894; and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, his last literary work, in 1898. His efforts in fiction include “The Canterville Ghost” (1887), which was made into a movie in 1943; The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888); Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories (1891); A House of Pomegranates (1891); and his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (serialized in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890, published in book form in 1891). Oscar Wilde’s best-known essays and literary criticism appear in Intentions (1891). De Profundis, the long letter the imprisoned Wilde wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas, was published in 1905; his collected letters, edited by Rupert Hart-Davies, appeared in 1962. Achievements • To accuse Oscar Wilde of anything so active-sounding as “achievement” would be an impertinence that the strenuously indolent author would most likely deplore. Yet it must be admitted that Wilde’s presence, poses, ideas, and epigrams made him a potent influence, if not on the English literary tradition, at least on the artistic community of his own day. More visibly than any British contemporary, Oscar Wilde personified the doctrines of turn-of-the-century aestheticism—that art existed for its own sake and that one should live so as to make from the raw materials of one’s own existence an elegantly finished artifice. Wilde’s aestheticism, caricatured by W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan in their operetta Patience: Or, Bunthorne’s Bride (1881) and in Robert Smythe Hichens’s novel The Green Carnation (1894), mingled ideas from his two very different Oxford mentors, John Ruskin and Walter Pater, with the influence of the French Symbolists and, for a time, certain theories of the American painter James McNeill Whistler. However, Wilde’s Irish wit and eloquence made the articulation of this intellectual pastiche something distinctively his own. Wilde’s literary works are polished achievements in established modes rather than experiments in thought or form. His poems and plays tend to look across the English Channel to the examples of the Symbolists and the masters of the pièce bien faite, though his Salomé, a biblical play written in French after the style of the then acclaimed dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck, was to engender a yet more significant work of art, 994

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Richard Strauss’s opera of the same title. If they are not intellectually or technically adventurous, however, Wilde’s works are incomparable for their talk—talk that tends to be Wilde’s own put into the mouths of his characters. The outrageous, elegant, paradoxical conversation volleyed by Wilde’s languid verbal athletes have given English literature more quotable tags than have the speeches of any other dramatist save William Shakespeare. Biography • Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on October 16, 1854, in Dublin, Ireland, to parents who were among the most colorful members of the Irish gentry. His father, Sir William Wilde, one of the foremost Victorian oculists and surgeons, numbered crowned heads of Europe among his patients. He was equally famed for his archaeological research and his amorous adventures. Oscar Wilde’s mother was no less remarkable. Born Jane Francesca Elgee, she gained public notice for the patriotic pieces she published under the pseudonym Speranza. When one of Speranza’s essays brought Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, leader of the Young Ireland party, to trial for high treason and sedition, the tall and dramatic authoress rose in court, proclaimed “I alone am the culprit,” and on the spot became one of the heroines of Ireland. This colorful background and his mother’s doting attention must have fostered young Wilde’s imagination. His mind received more discipline and direction when, through good fortune, he was brought into contact with a series of fine teachers. At Trinity College in Dublin, Wilde’s Greek tutor, the Reverend John Pentland Mahaffy, inspired him with a love of Hellenic culture and, by his own witty example, honed and polished the younger man’s conversational talents. Next, having won a demyship to Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1874, Wilde encountered Ruskin (then Slade Professor of Art), whose social conscience, love of medieval architecture, and belief in the necessary connection between art and life were to become part of Wilde’s own creed. Even more important to Wilde’s development was Pater, the skeptical latter-day Epicurean famed for his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). In the light of Pater’s intellectual advice to the youth of the day, most memorably distilled in his observation that “to burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ectasy, is success in life,” the Oxonian Wilde’s famous ambition, “Oh, would that I could live up to my blue china!” seems a less frivolous objective. In 1879, Wilde went to London, where, sharing rooms with the artist Frank Miles, he became one of the central figures of the aesthetic movement and made the acquaintance of many of the celebrities of the day, particularly the lovely Lily Langtry, whose career as a professional beauty had been launched by Miles’s drawings. The tall, heavy, epigrammatic young Wilde was soon known in society for his eccentric dress and his paradoxical wit. Caricatured as Reginald Bunthorne in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience, he became the epitome of aestheticism for the wider public as well. The shrewd producers of the comic opera, which was to go on an American tour, realized that the presence of Bunthorne’s prototype would fan the flames of interest, so with their sponsorship, Wilde embarked on an extended tour of the United States that permitted him to see the notable places, to meet the notable people, and having done so, to conclude, “When good Americans die they go to Paris. When bad Americans die they stay in America.” On his return to England after a short stay in Paris, Wilde launched himself on what was to be his period of eminence. He made friends with the painter Whistler and became engaged to the pretty but conventional daughter of an Irish barrister, Constance Lloyd, whom he married in 1883. They had two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan. In need of

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funds to finance his luxurious mode of life, he cultivated his literary career, if not in earnest, then at least with more enterprise than he would have wished to acknowledge. He lectured, reviewed books, and for a time edited The Woman’s World. His prose works appeared in rapid succession: short stories (Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories, The Happy Prince and Other Tales, A House of Pomegranates), a novel (The Picture of Dorian Gray), and a collection of critical essays (Intentions). With his fiction, Wilde solidly established his reputation in the world of letters, but his great period of financial success began only when he turned to writing for the popular theater. Although he found the enforced discipline of playwriting difficult and never regarded his social comedies as anything more than (Library of Congress) well-crafted potboilers, Wilde managed in a span of three years to write four plays that paid him exceedingly well and made him even more famous. Lady Windermere’s Fan (premiering in February, 1892) was followed by A Woman of No Importance (April, 1893), An Ideal Husband ( January, 1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (February, 1895). After completing Lady Windermere’s Fan, Wilde went to France, where he wrote Salomé, a poetic drama intended to make his artistic reputation on the Continent and at home. Wilde offered the title role in that play to Sarah Bernhardt, who accepted and began rehearsals for a London production that was never staged: The Lord Chamberlain banned it for violating the old law forbidding the theatrical representation of biblical characters. Having reached its zenith, Wilde’s star rapidly sank to oblivion in the spring of 1895. Since 1891, Wilde had been friends, and more than friends, with the handsome, talented, spoiled, unstable Lord Alfred Douglas, a younger son of the eighth marquess of Queensbury. The relationship was not discreet. Lord Alfred took pleasure in flaunting himself in the role of minion to the celebrated Wilde and in flouting the authority of his father. As his letters reveal, Wilde in his turn expressed his feelings for the elegant youth whose “slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry” with his customary extravagance. Finally, in what was to be one of the most perverse and distasteful interludes in the history of English jurisprudence, Wilde was provoked to sue the ferocious marquess for criminal libel when that rash peer had culminated a campaign of harassment by leaving at Wilde’s club a card bearing the words “to Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite [sic].” For his defense, Queensbury collected a small parade of blackmailers and male prostitutes to testify to the accuracy of his epithet. Unwisely persisting in his suit, Wilde failed, on Queensbury’s acquittal, to seize his chance to flee the country. Having lost

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his battle with the marquess, Wilde in turn was arrested, tried, and ultimately convicted for practicing “the love that dares not tell its name.” He was sentenced to two years at hard labor. Wilde’s twenty-four months of imprisonment were a continuous mortification of body, mind, and spirit. He had lost his honor, his position, his fortune, and his family. Although he was to write one more fine work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, his life was behind him. Released from prison on May 19, 1897, he left England behind as well. Under the name Sebastian Melmoth, Wilde resided abroad, principally in France and Italy, until his death in Paris in 1900. Analysis • Oscar Wilde completed seven plays during his life, and for the purpose of discussion, these works can be divided into two groups: comedies and serious works. The four social comedies Wilde wrote for the commercial theater of his day, Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest, brought him money and prestige but not artistic satisfaction. There were three plays intended as serious works of art: Vera, The Duchess of Padua, and Salomé. None of these three plays gained popular regard, critical acclaim, or theatrical success in Wilde’s lifetime. One can disregard the first two serious plays and lose little by the omission. Vera, published when Wilde was only twenty-five, is an apprentice piece that unsuccessfully mingles revolutionary Russian politics (particularly ill-timed, for Czar Alexander II had recently been assassinated, and the consort of his successor was sister to Alexandra, wife of the prince of Wales), improbable psychology, creaky melodrama, and what was already Wilde’s dramatic forte: witty, ironic speech. The Duchess of Padua is a derivative verse drama in the intricate, full-blown style that worked so well in the hands of the Jacobeans and has failed so dismally for their many and often talented imitators. When read, the play has its fine moments, but even at its best, it is nothing more than a good piece of imitation. In Salomé, however, Wilde offered the world a serious drama of unquestionable distinction, a work that further enriched Western culture by providing a libretto for Richard Strauss’s fine opera of the same title. Salomé • The English-speaking public, to whom Wilde’s four comedies are familiar enough, is less likely to have read or seen performed his Salomé, yet this biblical extrapolation, with its pervasive air of overripe sensuality, is of all of his plays the one most characteristic of its age and most important to the European cultural tradition. Wilde wrote his poetic drama in France, and in French, during the autumn of 1891. Wilde’s command of the French language was not idiomatic but fluent in the schoolroom style. This very limitation became an asset when he chose to cast his play in the stylized, ritualistic mold set by the Belgian playwright Maeterlinck, whose works relied heavily on repetition, parallelism, and chiming effect—verbal traits equally characteristic of a writer who thinks in English but translates into French. Like the language, the biblical source of the story is bent to Wilde’s purposes. In the New Testament accounts of the death of John the Baptist (or Jokanaan, as he is called in the play), Salomé, the eighteen-year-old princess of Judea, is not held responsible for John’s death; rather, blame for the prophet’s death is laid on Salomé’s mother, Herodias. Furthermore, as Wilde’s literary executor, Robert Ross, and a number of other critics have observed, Wilde’s Herod is a synthesis of a handful of biblical Herods and tetrarchs. Although Wilde’s license with the language and sources of his play is sometimes deprecated, it should not

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be faulted. As a poetic dramatist, a verbal contriver of a symbolic ritual, his intention was not to transcribe but to transfigure. The action of Wilde’s Salomé takes place by moonlight on a great terrace above King Herod’s banquet hall. The simple setting is deftly conceived to heighten dramatic effects. On this spare stage, all entrances—whether Salomé’s, and later Herod’s and Herodias’s by the great staircase of Jokanaan’s from the cistern where he has been imprisoned—are striking. In addition, the play’s ruling motifs, moonlight and the recurrent contrasts of white, black, and—with increasing frequency as the play moves toward its grisly climax—red, emerge clearly. As the play begins, a cosmopolitan group of soldiers and pages attendant on the Judean royal house occupy the terrace. Their conversation on the beauty of the Princess Salomé, the strangeness of the moon, and the rich tableau of the Tetrarch and his party feasting within sets a weird tone that is enhanced by the sound of Jokanaan’s prophesies rising from his cistern prison. Salomé, like “a dove that has strayed . . . a narcissus trembling in the wind . . . a silver flower,” glides onto the terrace. The prophet’s strange voice and words stir the princess as deeply as her beauty troubles the young Syrian captain of the guard, a conquered prince now a slave in Herod’s palace. At her command, the Syrian brings forth Jokanaan from his prison. The prophet’s uncanny beauty—he seems as chaste and ascetic as she has just pronounced the moon to be—works a double charm of attraction and repulsion on Salomé. His body like a thin white statue, his black hair, his mouth “like a pomegranate cut with a knife of ivory” all kindle the princess’s desire. His disgusted rejection of her love only fans the flames of lust. She must have him: “I will kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan,” she chants, as the Syrian who adores her kills himself at her feet and the prophet who despises her descends once more to his cistern. At this point, Herod and Herodias, attended by their court, enter. Their comments on the moon (to Herod, “She is like a mad woman, a mad woman who is looking everywhere for lovers”; to Herodias, “the moon is like the moon, that is all”) introduce the significant differences in their equally evil natures. Herod is superstitious, cowardly, obliquely cruel, a tyrannical yet vacillating ruler; Herodias is brutal with the callous directness of an utterly debased woman. Salomé’s strange beauty tempts Herod just as Jokanaan’s tempts Salomé. Despite Herodias’s disapproval and Salomé’s reluctance, Herod presses the princess to dance. He offers her whatever reward she may request, even to the half of his kingdom. Having exacted this rash promise of the infatuated despot, Salomé performs her famous dance of seven veils and for her reward requires the head of Jokanaan on a silver charger. As horrified by this demand as his ghoulish consort is delighted, the superstitious Herod offers Salomé a long and intricate catalog of alternative payments—the rich, rare, curious, and vulgar contents of an Oriental or fin de siècle treasure chest. With the sure instincts of the true collector, Salomé persists in her original demand. Unable to break his vow, the horrified king dispatches the Nubian executioner into the cistern. Presently, in a striking culmination of the play’s color imagery, the Nubian’s arm rises from the cistern. This ebony stem bears a strange flower: a silver shield surmounted by the prophet’s bloody head. Delirious with ecstasy, Salomé addresses her passion to the disembodied lover-prophet she has asked for, silenced, and gained. “I have kissed thy mouth, Jokanaan,” she concludes as a moonbeam falls on her. At Herod’s cry, “Kill that woman!” the soldiers rush forward, crushing her beneath their shields. Even so brief an account as that above demonstrates that the play has potential in sheer dramatic terms, as the great Sarah Bernhardt realized when, though much too

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old for the title role, she agreed to play the role of Salomé in a proposed London production that was not to be. Salomé is a richly fashioned tapestry. The play’s prevailing mode, presentation of typically talkative Wildean characters articulating rather than acting on their emotions, gives way at three powerful moments—when Salomé dances, when the arm bearing Jokanaan’s head rises from the cistern, and when the silver shields crush the dancer and her reward—to pure act, unsullied by words. The play’s psychological and symbolic suggestiveness are equally rich. One of Wilde’s great contributions to the Salomé story was to provide psychological underpinnings for the sequence of events. To Wilde’s invention are owed Salomé’s spurned love for the prophet and the mutual hostility that counterbalances the sensual bond between Herod and Herodias. As an expression of love’s ambivalence, Salomé is “the incarnate spirit of the aesthetic woman,” a collector who (much in the spirit of Robert Browning’s duke of Ferrara, it would seem) does not desire a living being but a “love object” handsomely mounted. Richard Ellmann finds something more personally symbolic in the tragedy. Jokanaan, says Ellmann, presents the spirit-affirming, bodynegating moral earnestness of Wilde’s “Ruskinism”; Salomé, who collects beauty, sensations, and strange experiences, who consummates her love for the prophet in “a relation at once totally sensual and totally ‘mystical,’” stands for the rival claims of Pater. Herod, like his creator, vainly struggles to master these opposing impulses both within and outside himself. Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, and An Ideal Husband • Wilde’s first three comedies, although each has its particular charms and defects, are sufficiently similar to one another, and sufficiently inferior to his fourth, The Importance of Being Earnest, to be discussed as a group rather than individually. Always lazy about writing (which was an arduous process for a verbal artist with his high standards) but perpetually in need of money to pay for the great and small luxuries that were his necessities of life, Wilde agreed in 1891 to write a play for George Alexander, the actormanager of St. James’s Theater. The result was Lady Windermere’s Fan, a modern drawing-room comedy set in high society and frankly aimed to engage the interest of the London playgoing public. The financial results were gratifying enough to encourage Wilde to write three more plays in the same vein, though he never much respected the form or the products. Only in The Importance of Being Earnest was he to overcome the inherent weaknesses of the well-made society play, but each of the other three pieces is fine enough to win for him the title of best writer of British comedies between Richard Brinsley Sheridan and George Bernard Shaw. Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, and An Ideal Husband all center, as their titles suggest, on relationships between men and women, or more precisely between gentlemen and ladies. The plays were up-to-the-minute in providing fashionable furnishings and costumes to charm both segments of their intended audience. Late Victorian society people enjoyed seeing themselves reflected as creatures of such style and wit, while the middle classes delighted at being given a glimpse into the secret rites of the world of fashion. In fact, one might suspect that Wilde’s stated concern for the Aristotelian unity of time in these plays springs less from belief in that classical standard than from the opportunity (or even necessity) that placing three acts of high life in a twenty-four-hour period provides for striking changes of costume and set. In each of these elaborate “modern drawing-room comedies with pink lamp shades,” as Wilde termed them, one finds recurrent character types: puritanical figures

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of virtue (wives in Lady Windermere’s Fan and An Ideal Husband, an heiress soon to be a fiancé in A Woman of No Importance), mundanely fashionable hypocrites, and exceptional humanitarians of two types—the dandified lord (Darlington, Illingworth, and Goring) and the poised and prosperous “fallen woman,” two of whom (Mrs. Erlynne in Lady Windermere’s Fan and Mrs. Chevely in An Ideal Husband) go in for wit and the other of whom (Mrs. Arbuthnot of A Woman of No Importance), though equally unrepentant, specializes in good works. Clever, epigrammatic conversation is what these characters do best; guilty secrets and the situational intricacies they weave are the strings for Wilde’s verbal pearls. In Lady Windermere’s Fan, the initial secret is that Mrs. Erlynne, the runaway mother of whose continued existence Lady Windermere is utterly ignorant, has returned to London to regain a place in society and is blackmailing Lord Windermere, who seeks to protect his wife from knowledge of the blot on her pedigree. Misinterpreting her husband’s patronage of a mysterious lady with a hint of a past, Lady Windermere is led to the brink of unconsciously repeating her mother’s error by eloping with another man, thereby prompting Mrs. Erlynne to the one maternal gesture of her life: The older and wiser woman sacrifices her own reputation (temporarily, it turns out) to save that of her daughter. In A Woman of No Importance, Gerald Arbuthnot, a youth reared in rural seclusion and apparent respectability by his mother, happens to encounter the man who is his father: worldly Lord Illingworth, who when young and untitled had seduced Gerald’s mother and, on learning of her pregnancy, refused to marry her. This complex situation allows Wilde to expose several human inconsistencies. Previously uninterested in the child he had begotten and also unwilling to marry the beautiful young mother, Lord Illingworth is now so full of paternal feeling that he offers to marry the middleaged woman to retain the son. Gerald, who has just vowed to kill Lord Illingworth for attempting to kiss a prudish American girl, on hearing of Illingworth’s past treachery to his mother wants her to let the offender “make an honest woman” of her. Mrs. Arbuthnot professes selfless devotion to her son but begs Gerald to forgo the brilliant prospects Illingworth can offer and remain with her in their provincial backwater. In An Ideal Husband, the plot-initiating secret is a man’s property rather than a woman’s, and political intrigue rather than romantic. Sir Robert Chiltern, a highprincipled politician with a rigidly idealistic young wife, encounters the adventuress Mrs. Chevely, who has evidence that Chiltern’s career and fortune were founded on one unethical act—the selling of a political secret to a foreigner—and who attempts to use her knowledge to compel him to lend political support to a fraudulent scheme that will make her fortune. Acting against this resourceful woman is Chiltern’s friend Lord Goring, an apparently effete but impressively capable man who can beat her at her own game. In brief, then, all three of these plays are formed of the highly theatrical matter that, in lesser hands, would form the stuff of melodrama. Wilde’s “pink lamp shade” comedies are difficult to stage because of the stylish luxury demanded of the actors, costumes, and sets, but the plays are not weaker for being so ornate: They accurately mirror a certain facet of late Victorian society. Similarly, the pervasive wit never becomes tiresome. The contrived reversals, artful coincidences, predictably surprising discoveries, and “strong curtains” may seem trite—but they work onstage. The defect that Wilde’s first three comedies share is the problem of unreconciled opposites, implicit in Salomé. In Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, and An Ideal Husband, part of Wilde is drawn to admire wit, style, vitality, and courage regardless of where they may be found, and part of him has a serious so-

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cial or moral point to make. Even with this divided aim, Wilde wrote good comedies. When he solved the problem, he wrote a masterpiece: The Importance of Being Earnest. The Importance of Being Earnest • What makes The Importance of Being Earnest, unlike the three Wilde comedies that preceded it, a masterpiece of the theater rather than merely an eminently stageable play? Perhaps a good clue to the answer can be found in the play’s subtitle, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People. This typically Wildean paradox has been variously interpreted. Whatever the author may have intended by it, one thing the phrase suggests to readers is that The Importance of Being Earnest is worth the attention of “serious people” because it, unlike Wilde’s other three comedies, succeeds in being utterly trivial and thereby attains pure comic excellence. Eric Bentley has remarked of the play that “what begins as a prank ends as a criticism of life.” Here at last Wilde offers witty wordplay and exuberant high spirits in an undiluted form. There are no melodramatic ambiguities or dark, complex emotions in The Importance of Being Earnest, where the chief events are flirtations that lead to engagements and prodigious consumption of tea and cucumber sandwiches. Whereas Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, and An Ideal Husband take place in the stylized but recognizably real world of contemporary London society, this play unfolds in a world apart, one that, despite its containing a Mayfair flat and a Herefordshire manor, is as perfectly artificial yet completely valid as are Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden in As You Like It (pr. c. 1599-1600) and Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (pr. c. 1595-1596). The Importance of Being Earnest contains some of the stock theatrical devices Wilde relied on to galvanize his previous three comedies. There is mysterious parentage: Jack Worthing confesses to having been found in a handbag in Victoria Station. Characters run away from responsibility: Jack, in order to escape the country and get to town, has invented a wicked younger brother, Ernest, who lodges at the Albany; and Algernon Moncrieff, to escape from London to the country, has concocted an imaginary rural friend, the perennial invalid Bunbury. The comedy contains false identities: Both Jack and Algernon propose to and are accepted by their respective loves, the Honorable Gwendolyn Fairfax and Cecily Cardew, under the name “Ernest Worthing.” There are misplaced possessions as significant as Lady Windermere’s fan: Finding a cigarette case inscribed “From little Cecily, with her fondest love to her dear Uncle Jack,” enables Algernon to discover his friend’s double identity. The governess Miss Prism’s unexpected, happy, eloquent reunion with the handbag she had mislaid twenty-eight years before brings the climactic revelation of the play: Through this recovery of the long-lost handbag, Jack, a comic Oedipus, discovers his true parentage. In all these cases, the dramatic machines of potential tragedy or melodrama are operated in the spirit of burlesque. There are no lapses or incongruities to drag down the lighthearted mood. Similarly, the emotional developments, reversals, intrigues, and deceptions that were threatening in Wilde’s other comedies are harmless in The Importance of Being Earnest, chiefly because the play is not about established relationships. It does not present married people with domestic differences; former lovers who should have married but failed to do so; present lovers already yoked to other people; parents, who through love, guilt, selfishness, or honor, influence the behavior of their children; or children who similarly manipulate their parents. The play’s four principal characters—Jack Worthing, Gwendolyn Fairfax, Algernon Moncrieff, and Cecily Cardew—are all young, single, and, with the exception of

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Gwendolyn, parentless. The Reverend Dr. Chasuble and Miss Prism are, to use their own words, “ripe” but “celibate.” Early in the play, Lane, Algernon’s manservant, admits that, with regard to marriage, he has had “very little experience of it myself up to the present.” Of all the characters, only the marvelous Lady Bracknell is mature, married, and encumbered with children. Even so, Lord Bracknell is completely under her control; that pitiful peer, who dines upstairs at her command, does and knows only what she prescribes. Her daughter Gwendolyn, on the other hand, is completely free from her domination; the poised young lady listens politely to her dogmatic mother and then acts precisely as she chooses. As a consequence, Lady Bracknell’s personal essence and the behavior it determines are modified by neither spouse nor child. With this array of singularly unfettered characters, The Importance of Being Earnest is not about domestic complications but about the act of committing oneself to domesticity. The social comedy of the play parallels the movement of a Jane Austen novel: Characters who exist as pure potential define and place themselves by choosing to marry and by selecting their particular mates. The choreography of this matrimonial ballet is exceptionally elegant, particularly in the commonly known three-act version. (The original four-act version, first staged by the New Vic in 1980, contains material that is not essential, though not uninteresting.) The dialogue is so uniformly delightful that it is impossible to single out a high point or two for quoting. For the first time, Wilde’s comedy is a brilliant whole rather than a series of sparkling effects. Indeed, the play’s final interchange between Lady Bracknell and her newfound nephew (soon-tobe son-in-law) Jack could be the dramatist talking to himself, for by taking comedy seriously enough to stay within its bounds, Wilde the dramatist finally achieved his goal of creating a play not merely well-made but perfect of its kind: Lady Bracknell: My nephew, you seem to be displaying signs of triviality. Jack: On the contrary, Aunt Augusta, I’ve now realized for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest. Other major works long fiction: The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890 (serial), 1891 (expanded). short fiction: “The Canterville Ghost,” 1887; The Happy Prince and Other Tales, 1888; Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories, 1891; A House of Pomegranates, 1891. poetry: Ravenna, 1878; Poems, 1881; Poems in Prose, 1894; The Sphinx, 1894; The Ballad of Reading Gaol, 1898. nonfiction: Intentions, 1891; De Profundis, 1905; Letters, 1962 (Rupert Hart-Davies, editor). miscellaneous: Works, 1908; Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 1948 (Vyvyan Holland, editor); Plays, Prose Writings, and Poems, 1960. Bibliography Belford, Barbara. Oscar Wilde: A Certain Genius. New York: Random House, 2000. An examination of Wilde’s life with a somewhat revisionist view of Wilde’s post-prison years. Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987. A richly detailed, sympathetic account of Wilde’s life and art, with balanced views of his accomplishments and significance for modern culture. Ellmann presents a forceful analysis of the events that caused Wilde’s trial, imprisonment, and eventual early death. Con-

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tains many illustrations, notes, a select bibliography, two appendices of books by Wilde’s parents, and an index. McCormack, Jerusha Hull. The Man Who Was Dorian Gray. New York: Palgrave, 2000. A scholarly scraping together of the life of Wilde’s model. McGhee, Richard D. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Oscar Wilde.” In Marriage, Duty, and Desire in Victorian Poetry and Drama. Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1980. Comparing the art of Wilde and Browning, this study focuses on their contrasting emphases on duty and desire, with some similarity in their motives for attempting to reconcile the opposition between such values. Wilde’s dramas are closely examined along with his lyric poems and critical essays. Notes and index. Small, Ian. Oscar Wilde: A Recent Research, A Supplement to “Oscar Wilde Revalued.” Greensboro, N.C.: ELT Press, 2000. A follow-up to Small’s earlier work on Wilde that surveys new biographical and critical materials. Bibliography. Peter W. Graham, updated by Richard D. McGhee

Thornton Wilder Thornton Wilder

Born: Madison, Wisconsin; April 17, 1897 Died: Hamden, Connecticut; December 7, 1975 Principal drama • The Trumpet Shall Sound, pb. 1920, pr. 1927; The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays, pb. 1928 (includes 16 plays); The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, pr., pb. 1931 (one act); The Long Christmas Dinner, pr., pb. 1931 (one act; as libretto in German, 1961; translation and music by Paul Hindemith); The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act, pb. 1931 (includes Queens of France, Pullman Car Hiawatha, Love and How to Cure It, Such Things Only Happen in Books, and The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden); Lucrece, pr. 1932, pb. 1933 (adaptation of André Obey’s Le Viol de Lucrèce); A Doll’s House, pr. 1937 (adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play); The Merchant of Yonkers, pr. 1938, pb. 1939 (adaptation of Johann Nestroy’s Einen Jux will er sich machen); Our Town, pr., pb. 1938; The Skin of Our Teeth, pr., pb. 1942; The Matchmaker, pr. 1954, pb. 1956 (revision of The Merchant of Yonkers); A Life in the Sun, pr. 1955, pb. 1960 (in German), pb. 1977 (in English; commonly known as The Alcestiad; act four pb. 1952, pr. 1957 as The Drunken Sisters); Plays for Bleecker Street, pr. 1962 (3 one-acts: Someone from Assisi; Infancy, pb. 1961; and Childhood, pb. 1960); The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, pb. 1997-1998 (2 volumes) Other literary forms • Thornton Wilder came to national prominence in 1927 with what has remained his best-known novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which won for him the first of his three Pulitzer Prizes. The year before, his first published fiction, The Cabala (1926), had appeared, and in 1930 came his third novel, The Woman of Andros. These works were followed in 1934 by Heaven’s My Destination—his first fictional work about the American experience—and, at lengthy intervals, by three additional novels. The Ides of March, the story of Caesar told from fictional diaries, letters, and records, and quite probably Wilder’s most significant novel, appeared in 1948; The Eighth Day, winner of the National Book Award, was published in 1967; and his last novel, the semiautobiographical Theophilus North, was published in 1973. In 1942, Wilder cowrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s motion picture Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Over the years, Wilder wrote a number of essays, including several that develop his theory of drama; some that introduce works by other writers as varied as Sophocles, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Emily Dickinson; and a few scholarly articles on the Spanish playwright Lope de Vega Carpio. These works have been collected posthumously in American Characteristics and Other Essays (1979). Achievements • Thornton Wilder was a true man of letters, equally accomplished and highly regarded at various points in his career as both a novelist and a dramatist. None of his works of fiction, however, seems likely to endure as a classic in the way that two of his plays, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, most assuredly will. Wilder admittedly has always been, as the foreword to The Angel That Troubled the Waters insists, a decidedly and deliberately religious playwright, not in any parochial sense of espousing a specific body of theological doctrine but in the larger sense of consistently posing moral and metaphysical questions. As he makes clear in that preface, however, if the religious 1004

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artist today is to reach a sizable and responsive audience, that artist generally must couch his or her views “in that dilute fashion that is a believer’s concession to a contemporary standard of good manners.” By birth, Wilder was a Christian; by education and training, he was a humanist. By his own reading and intellectual inquiry later in life, he became an existentialist. Several of the playlets in his first volume reveal the intersection of pagan and Christian myth, showing how the former is implicit in and fulfilled by the latter. Continually, Wilder emphasizes the “presentness” of the past and how the best that has been thought and said throughout the ages continues to be of value. Always he asserts the importance of reason even in ages of faith. Wilder was one of the most learned and erudite of all American dramatists. Throughout his life, he was a teacher as well as a writer, and his plays teach effortlessly, engagingly, and entertainingly. Much of American drama centers on the family, and Wilder’s plays are no exception. His family, though, is the Family of Man, the human community throughout history. Because of the allegorical and parabolic nature of his plays, Wilder’s works might appear at first to be lacking in subtlety and complexity, yet, through the simple means he employs, they touch on the most vital of ideas. The timeless rituals in which his families participate are the universal ones of birth and growth, love and marriage, sickness and death. If Wilder perhaps reflects Henri Bergson and Marcel Proust in his own philosophy of time as duration and memory as a simultaneous coexistence of all past experiences, he is a child of Ralph Waldo Emer-

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son and Walt Whitman in his vague transcendentalism and almost religious belief in the value of democracy. Wilder insists that life has a purpose and a dignity, so it must be lived and cherished and nurtured. If this purpose and worth have become increasingly clouded, that simply makes artists all the more vital, for on them rests the task of revealing the divinity within human beings yet of showing them that they can become divine only by first being fully human. He received numerous awards during his lifetime, beginning with the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1928 for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 1938 for Our Town and in 1943 for The Skin of Our Teeth. He received the National Book Award for The Eighth Day in 1968. Among the many honors that came to Wilder late in life were the Gold Medal for Fiction of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the National Medal for Literature. Biography • Thornton Niven Wilder was born on April 17, 1897, in Madison, Wisconsin, into a family with a strong New England Protestant background: Congregationalist on his father Amos’s side, Presbyterian on his mother Isabella’s. An older brother, Amos, became a professor of theology and commentator on religious poetry, and among Wilder’s three younger sisters was Isabel, with whom he would later make his home and share the closest emotional attachment of his life. When their father was appointed consul general to Hong Kong and later to Shanghai in the first decade of the new century, the family lived with him for brief periods in each city, though the young Wilder was educated mostly in California. After he was graduated from Berkeley High School in 1915, Wilder went to Oberlin College in Ohio, later transferring to Yale, from which he received his bachelor of arts degree in 1920. While in college, he wrote numerous “three-minute plays,” some of which would be included among the sixteen somewhat precious and pretentious closet dramas that reached print as The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays, as well as his first full-length effort, The Trumpet Shall Sound. Somewhat similar to Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (pr. 1610) in its incidents and thematic emphasis on justice, this early play was finally produced by the American Laboratory Theatre in New York in 1927. While studying archaeology at the American Academy in Rome after college, Wilder began writing fiction. After returning to the United States, he taught French at the Lawrenceville School for Boys in New Jersey for much of the 1920’s, staying there—with time out to attend Princeton for a master of arts degree and for a stint writing at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire—until after the critical acclaim of his second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1928. In 1930, Wilder began lecturing for part of each academic year in comparative literature at the University of Chicago, where he made the acquaintance of Gertrude Stein, whose theories of time and language exercised a powerful influence on all of Wilder’s subsequent writing for the theater. During the 1930’s, Wilder published six additional one-act plays in his volume entitled The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act. In 1961, the title play became the libretto for an opera with music by Paul Hindemith. In addition, Wilder adapted both André Obey’s Le Viol de Lucrèce (1931) and Henrik Ibsen’s Et dukkehjem (pr., pb. 1879; A Doll’s House, 1880) for Broadway before writing his most famous work, Our Town, which won for him the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 1938. The same year saw the unsuccessful production, under the direction of Max Reinhardt, of The Merchant of Yonkers, later revised as The Matchmaker for performance at the Edinburgh Festival in Scot-

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land in 1954 and in New York in 1955; in a still later transformation (1964), dressed up with a musical score by Jerry Herman, The Matchmaker became Hello, Dolly!, one of the greatest successes in the history of American musical comedy. In 1943 while serving in the United States Army Air Corps during World War II, Wilder won his second Pulitzer Prize for The Skin of Our Teeth, perhaps one of the most original and inventive of all American comedies. At the beginning of the 1950’s, Wilder was Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard, lecturing on the American characteristics in classic American literature. In 1955, his last full-length drama, A Life in the Sun, was performed at the Edinburgh Festival. In 1962, it, too, became the libretto for an acclaimed German opera, Die Alkestiade, with music by Louise Talma. At the time of his death on December 7, 1975, he left incomplete two cycles of plays on which he had been working for more than a decade, “The Seven Deadly Sins” and “The Seven Ages of Man,” whose titles suggest the allegorical and mythic nature of Wilder’s best work for the theater. Perhaps the cumulative effect of the complete cycles would have been greater than the sampling of their parts that reached Off-Broadway production in 1962 under the collective title Plays for Bleecker Street. The three one-act plays, Someone from Assisi, Infancy, and Childhood, were Wilder’s last original works produced for New York audiences. Analysis • Thornton Wilder’s contributions in style and technique to American drama are akin to the innovations that Alfred Jarry in France, Luigi Pirandello in Italy, and Bertolt Brecht in Germany made to world drama in the twentieth century. Basically, Wilder was an antirealistic playwright, reacting against the tenets and presuppositions underlying the type of drama that held sway during the nineteenth century and continues to be a potent force even today. During a play that, as part of its attempt to create the absolute illusion of reality, employs a box set so that the audience sees the action through an imaginary fourth wall, there is a complete separation between actors and audience, stage space and auditorium. The audience, even though it implicitly knows it is in a theater watching a play, pretends for the duration that it is seeing reality on the stage; in short, the audience makes believe that it is not making believe. On the other hand, in theater that makes no attempt at achieving such an absolute illusion of reality, the audience readily accepts that what it is seeing is make-believe or pretense. In his important essay “Some Thoughts on Playwriting” (1941), Wilder argues that the theater in its greatest ages—Periclean Athens and Elizabethan England, for example—has always depended heavily on conventions, what he calls “agreed-upon falsehoods” or “permitted lies.” Such accepted conventions help to break down the artificial boundary between play and audience by inviting a fuller imaginative participation in the action; by increasing the audience’s awareness of itself as audience; and by emphasizing the communal and ritualistic nature of the theatrical experience. In Wilder’s view, the traditional box set, because it localizes the action to a particular place and restricts it to a definite time, renders the action less universal and hinders its ascent into the desirable realms of parable, allegory, and myth. In contrast, Wilder sought a theater in which the large, recurrent outlines of the human story could be told through particular examples less important in themselves than the universal truths they stand for and embody. The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden • Wilder’s brand of minimalist theater can be illustrated by looking at The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, which the dramatist himself regarded as the best of his one-act plays. The action is simple: The

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Kirby family (father, mother, son, and daughter) takes a brief automobile trip to visit a married daughter/sister, whose baby died shortly after birth. Because the literal journey is less important than the metaphoric one, it is appropriate that the bare brick walls of the backstage remain visible; that the automobile is merely suggested by four chairs and a platform, with Dad Kirby working an imaginary gearshift and steering wheel in pantomime; that the towns through which the family travels (including Lawrenceville, where Wilder once taught) are simply mentioned in the dialogue; and that a Stage Manager is available to serve as property man, to read the parts of all the minor characters, and to act the role of service station attendant. When the car must stop for an imaginary funeral procession to pass, it allows the family an opportunity to recall their son and brother Harold, who died in the war, and to remember that every human being must be ready for death. As is typical in Wilder, the central female figure carries the weight of the play’s meaning and expresses the dramatist’s simple faith. Ma Kirby is the Eternal Mother, preserver of the family, who is close to God and to the nature that shadows forth the divine. She understands the process-oriented quality of existence: All things are born and they die; some, in fact, are born only to die. Further, she maintains her confidence in a providential order at work in the universe. Although human beings cannot know the ways of God, they must continue in faith that all things in life are for the best. What tempers Wilder’s optimism and often prevents it from becoming sentimental is that he always keeps before his audience the dark side of human nature—human beings’ myopic vision that limits them from being all that they might become—and the dark side of human existence—the fact of death, especially of dying without ever having really lived. Our Town • When the Stage Manager steps out onto the stage at the beginning of Our Town and locates the mythical and microcosmic New England village of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, firmly in time and space, he creates a place so palpably present to the American imagination that most people in the audience might expect to be able to find it on a map. This is, truly, anyone’s and everyone’s town, and the people who are born and grow up and live and marry and suffer and die there are clearly Everyman and Everywoman. Wilder’s opening stage directions specify “No curtain. No scenery.” The absence of a curtain conveys the timeless quality of elemental experiences; the action has no specific beginning, because these daily events have been occurring since time immemorial and will continue to go on, despite an ever-changing cast on the world’s stage. The almost complete lack of scenery, with only “two arched trellises” permitted as a concession to the unimaginative and literal-minded in the audience, indicates that the action is unlocalized and not tied to only one place at one time, but could, and does, happen everywhere. The pantomimed actions—perhaps influenced by the style of the Chinese theater, with which Wilder was well acquainted—achieve the same effect. The audience has no difficulty recognizing them, precisely because they are common actions (such as getting meals) that everyone performs. The play’s action is as basic, and yet as universal, as the setting: neither more nor less than the archetypal journey of man and woman through life to death and beyond. In this respect, the title play from The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act serves as a precursor to Our Town. In that short work, Wilder presented ninety years in the life of the Bayard family. Characters enter through a portal on one side of the stage, which symbolizes birth; partake of a Christmas dinner over the years that symbolizes

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the feast of life; and then exit through a portal, on the opposite side of the stage, that symbolizes death. One generation replaces another, even uttering many of the same lines of dialogue. Act 1 of Our Town, called “Daily Life,” focuses on the ordinary, day-to-day existence of two neighboring families: Editor Webb, his wife, older daughter, and younger son; and Doc Gibbs, his wife, older son, and younger daughter. In act 2, called “Love and Marriage,” the playwright shows the courtship and wedding of George Gibbs and Emily Webb; the audience becomes an extension of the church congregation as the young couple enter and leave the ceremony via the theater aisles. Act 3, which is left untitled, is set in a cemetery with chairs for graves and an umbrella-protected group of mourners; it is the funeral of Emily, who died in childbirth and has been united in eternity with something like an Oversoul. Although the action literally begins in May, 1901 (the hopeful springtime of a new century), Our Town is, unlike a play such as Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! (pr. 1933), more than simply a nostalgic recollection of a bygone era of American democratic egalitarianism. Nor is the picture of life from the dawn of the twentieth century to the outbreak of World War I as sentimentally one-sided and limited in its awareness of evil and the darker forces of existence as has sometimes been charged. Along with Simon Stimson, the town drunk and eventual suicide, Wilder portrays petty gossip and backbiting, even among the church choir ladies; lack of communication between husband and wife and parent and child; the pain of separation and loss through death; and war (looking forward, since the action per se ends in 1913). The continuing importance of Our Town, however, should not be looked for on so basic a level as that of its story. Rather, it is a philosophical examination of time and the proper way of seeing, stressing the necessity for escaping from the narrow, myopic view of existence that human beings ordinarily take and embracing, with the poet’s help, a God’s-eye view of human history. Wilder’s attitude toward time as a continuum is made concrete in the way he conveys events that occurred before or will happen after the twelve-year scope of the action. Not only does the local expert, a college professor, Willard, provide a lengthy report about the geological formation of the region and the anthropological data of the area, but also the Stage Manager, in his casual shifting of verb tenses from present to future or future to past, points to a perspective that is both inside secular time and outside time, transcending it. Wilder’s laconic Stage Manager, with his understated and homespun New England manner, performs several functions: He is narrator, bridging shifts in time and place, setting the scene for the audience; he is actor of minor roles, including drugstore owner and preacher at George and Emily’s wedding; he is property man, constructing the soda fountain from a few boards; he is chorus, philosophizing for the audience; and he is destroyer of the theatrical illusion, reminding the audience that they are in a theater watching a play. Distanced from the action that is filtered through his eyes, the audience begins to see with his sometimes ironic perspective. He possesses a Godlike omniscience, overseeing the progression of human history as God would. It is this kind of sight and insight that the audience, too, must develop. In a seemingly inconsequential exchange of dialogue (perhaps influenced by a similar passage in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916), Wilder hints at the idea on which the entire work pivots. George Gibbs’s sister Rebecca tells about a letter that a minister sent to a sick friend; included as the final words of the address on the envelope was the location, “the Mind of God.” Wilder, who himself acted the role

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of the Stage Manager in the Broadway production, tells his audience that if it could only plumb the mind of God, where everything—from least to most, from smallest to largest, past, present, and to come—exists simultaneously as part of a purposive, providential order, then they would live life wholly and even be able to cope with death. The tension and tragedy of the human condition, however, arise because, paradoxically, it is possible to gain the perspective necessary for seeing life steadily and seeing it whole only after death. Emily dies giving birth, a poignant image not only of mutability but also of the way in which life and death are inextricably bound in nature’s cycle. Only after she dies and is given the opportunity to relive the most “unimportant day” in her life does she see that even the most ordinary and banal of life’s experiences is full of wonder and learn to treasure more what she has lost. Sadly, only the “saints and poets” seem to recognize this wonder and beauty while they are still alive. The end of a human life, union with some larger spirit, is in its beginning hinted at even in the most common events of daily living—if only that person, like the poet, could see. The Skin of Our Teeth • While Our Town displays some affinities with medieval morality plays, The Skin of Our Teeth is influenced by the medieval mystery cycles in its structure: In capsule form (and stylistically akin somewhat to a comic strip), it recounts human history from the beginning of time to the present and on into the future. The Antrobuses, Wilder’s Family of Man in this play, begin each of the three acts on the upswing, feeling positive about themselves and the human race; see their fortunes descend to a nadir, through either a natural disaster or human culpability; yet finally finish each act—and the play as a whole—having narrowly muddled through “by the skin of their teeth.” In each instance, temptation is overcome, sinful action somehow compensated for. In act 1, with its echoes of the Garden of Eden story from Genesis, son Henry’s killing of the neighbor boy (he earlier killed his brother, for which he received the mark of Cain) prompts Mr. Antrobus to despair, but daughter Gladys’ ability to recite in school a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow restores his faith. In act 2, with its underpinning of the Noah tale, the father’s lack of faithfulness to Mrs. Antrobus sends shock waves through the family, as Gladys dons red stockings and Henry attacks a black person with a slingshot. Yet Mr. Antrobus, unlike the other conventioneers at Atlantic City who writhe in a snakelike dance, is among the remnant of faithful ones saved from the Deluge. Act 3 finds the family returning to normalcy after the war (any war), but the anarchic Henry threatens the stability of the family unit just as the forces of totalitarianism almost destroyed the world, until he is finally reconciled with his father, who puts his confidence in the best ideas from the past to sustain the human race. The overall structure, therefore, embodies Wilder’s concept of cyclic time, with one result being that time can be handled anachronistically. The play, which began with a slide of the sun rising, ends with the equivalent lines from Genesis: “And the Lord said let there be light and there was light.” In its techniques, which extend the nonillusionistic style adopted in Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth reflects the influence of Surrealism and even points forward to the multimedia effects of the 1960’s and 1970’s. The scenery, with its angles askew, the dozen lantern slides projected onto the set, the talking dinosaur and mammoth, the cardboard cutouts and flats, the lighting and noises—all contribute to a carnival atmosphere, anticipating the playful techniques of some Absurdist drama while also suggesting a dream happening without conscious control. Mr. Fitzpatrick, Wilder’s director/stage manager here, not only stops the play so

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that he can rehearse volunteers taking over the parts of sick actors, but also is mildly satirized for his literal-mindedness and prosaicism; even Ivy, the costumer, understands the meaning of the play better than he does. Significantly, the substitute actors are needed to play the hours of the night who cross the stage; that they recite passages from Benedict de Spinoza, Plato, Aristotle, and the Bible (as similar characters also had in Pullman Car Hiawatha) demonstrates that the enduring ideas of the past are not out of reach of the common man. The illusion of reality is further destroyed when Lily Sabina Fairweather, a compound of temptress, mistress, camp follower, and maid, steps out of character and, as the actress Miss Somerset, speaks directly to the audience, requesting that they send up their chairs for firewood during the Ice Age of act 1 and, at the end of the play, sending them home to do their part in completing the history of the human race on earth. Within the framework of his comic allegory of humankind’s journey, Wilder’s characters assume an archetypal dimension; each member of the Antrobus family, whom Wilder calls “our selves,” seems to stand for an aspect of the archetypal man or woman’s personality. Mr. Antrobus—the former gardener (Adam), self-made man, inventor of the wheel, the lever, gunpowder, the singing telegram, the brewing of beer and of grass soup—represents the power of the intellect, which can be a force for both creation and destruction. Appreciating the importance of the wisdom of past ages, he will not tolerate the burning of William Shakespeare’s works even to provide lifesustaining warmth. Mrs. Antrobus, inventor in her own right of the apron, the hem, the gore and the gusset, and frying in oil, is humankind’s affective side; her watchword is the family and the promise of love between husband and wife that helps them endure and makes even suffering worthwhile. As one who insists that women are not the subservient creatures the media make them out to be, she stresses woman’s role as transmitter of the Life Force. Lily Sabina (Lilith), with her philosophy of enjoying the present moment, embodies the hedonistic pleasure principle. The Antrobuses’ daughter Gladys, who appears after the war with a baby, symbolically conveys hope for the future. Their son Henry is a representation of the strong, unreconciled evil that is always with humankind; though he is the enemy during the war and in general refuses to accept responsibility, he is still taken along on the ark at the end of act 2. In act 3, the actors playing Mr. Antrobus and Henry break out of their roles, moving from stereotypes to more rounded human beings as they reveal the tension between themselves as men rather than as characters. Something in the attitude of the actor playing Antrobus reminds the one portraying Henry of how authority figures have always blocked and hindered him, and so they clash personally. Through this tension, the actor playing Antrobus recognizes that there must indeed exist some lack within himself that triggered this negative response in the other, and so he promises to change. He ends confident that humanity, always on the edge of chaos and disaster, will ultimately endure and prevail, if only people accept the chance to do the hard work that Providence demands of them. Wilder, like George Bernard Shaw, has often been criticized for his romantic optimism, which seems out of keeping with the darker facts of human history—The Skin of Our Teeth opened, after all, only a year after Pearl Harbor and found its greatest success in post World War II Germany. Whether Wilder’s optimistic belief in humanity’s “spiral progression through trial and error” is found congenial or not, The Skin of Our Teeth remains a richly imaginative work and the seminal text of deliberately self-conscious art in the American theater.

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The Matchmaker • Wilder’s The Matchmaker—a revision of his The Merchant of Yonkers, an adaptation of Johann Nestroy’s 1842 Viennese comedy Einen Jux will er sich machen (pr. 1842, pb. 1844; The Matchmaker, 1957; which, in turn, was based loosely on John Oxenford’s 1835 English comedy A Day Well Spent)—belongs to that most venerable of dramatic traditions, the genre of romantic comedy. As such, it is characterized by a repressive authority figure who tries to thwart young love; mistaken identities and confusion between the sexes, including boys disguised as girls; and a ritualized dance to foreshadow the multiple marriages that resolve the plot. Along with these appear elements of good-natured, boisterous farce, including inopportune entrances and exits; hiding behind a screen, in closets, and under tables; and exploding cans of tomatoes shooting up through a trapdoor in the floor. What marks all of this traditional, even stereotypical material with Wilder’s own signature are the themes and the manner in which he breaks down the illusion of stage reality. A further alteration from the norm in romantic comedy is that in this play, the older couple, rather than the young ones, are the hero and heroine. Horace Vandergelder, the sly, miserly merchant from Yonkers (he seems a direct descendant of Ben Jonson’s Volpone, the fox) forbids his sentimental young niece and ward Ermengarde to marry the penniless artist Ambrose Kemper. They ultimately circumvent his authority through the agency of two older women: Miss Flora Van Huysen, the spinster fairy godmother in the play, and Mrs. Dolly Gallager Levi, the inimitable matchmaker herself. Miss Van Huysen refuses to permit her own loneliness to be extended to others through the destruction of young love, and so she acts as the presiding deity over the three marriages: Ermengarde’s to Ambrose; Cornelius Hackl’s to Irene Molloy, the Irish widow and milliner; and Barnaby Tucker’s to Minnie, Mrs. Molloy’s assistant. Dolly, who all along has her eyes on Horace for herself, is the only character among a cast of types permitted enough depth to probe into herself and her motives. In the manner in which she arranges the relationships of others and herself, there is something of the artist in Dolly Levi; her vocation is to make life interesting, to make people less selfish, to spread enjoyment, to see that the community renews and fructifies itself. She must, first of all, tutor Horace in adopting a proper attitude toward money; for her, money must “circulate like rain water” among the people and be “spread around like manure” if it is to encourage life and growth. She must also, however, tutor herself into giving up her widow’s weeds, so to speak, and completely rejoining the human community. Ever since the death of her first husband, Ephraim, she has allowed herself to become like a dying leaf and now must cure her underactive heart through marriage to Horace. For both Dolly and Horace, lonely old age is only narrowly averted. This emphasis on full participation in life and life’s processes, of seeing that to everything there is a season and of not rushing before one’s time toward death and decay, is peculiarly Wilder’s. Also distinctively Wilder’s is the emphasis on the need for “adventure” and “wonder,” which are two of the key words spoken by nearly every one of the play’s characters and are direct echoes of the attitudes espoused in Our Town. The settings for the four acts of The Matchmaker are the most elaborately realistic box sets prescribed for any Wilder play. Precisely because they do form such a realistic background, replete with “obtrusive bric-a-brac,” they make the several instances of direct address to the audience by the major characters all the more startling. The disjunction between the realistic sets and the very nonrealistic goings-on calls the audience’s attention to the fact that it is watching a play and turns stage realism on its ear.

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The Matchmaker becomes, indeed, a playful and affectionate parody of the way that stage realism stifles life. To be doubly sure that the audience does not miss this point, Miss Van Huysen even repeats several times some variation of the line “Everything’s imagination,” which is another way of saying that all is make-believe and pretense: exactly what Wilder strives to provide for his theater audiences. A Life in the Sun • Wilder’s A Life in the Sun is, both in form and content, linked closely to the Greek drama of the fifth century b.c.e. Its form, a play in three acts (each of which could almost stand alone as a self-contained episode) and a satyr play, replicates that of the Greek trilogies, which were followed with a comic parody of the tragic action. Here, the satyr play (entitled The Drunken Sisters, which tells how Apollo tricked the vain Fates into allowing Admetus to live) is added by Wilder to make the point that the tragic and comic experiences are incomplete in and of themselves; in life, the two kinds of perceptions must coexist. The content of Wilder’s powerful retelling of the Alcestis story for modern man is religious and mythological in nature, with his act 2 corresponding closely to the material found in Euripides’ original. Unlike T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party (pr. 1949), which uses the same myth allusively as a vague underpinning for a contemporary parable, or Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (pr. 1931), which takes the outlines and psychology of the Orestes and Electra stories and redresses them at a different time and place, Wilder creatively adjusts the myth to reflect contemporary philosophical currents, especially existentialism, as Jean-Paul Sartre had done in Les Mouches (pr., pb. 1943; The Flies, 1946). Act 1 begins with a confrontation between Apollo, the force of light, and Death, the force of darkness, who introduce the issues that inform the entire play: the relationship between the divine and the human and the problem of discovering a meaning to life. Although Apollo admits that there exists much that human beings are incapable of understanding, he insists that what meaning does exist flows from him. Death, on the other hand—and later Tiresias, the wizened seer, will echo him—argues that it is the gods who cause human torment. By meddling in human affairs, the gods make people unhappy and distraught. On her wedding day, Alcestis decides not to marry the King of Thessaly unless she receives a clear sign from the gods; she will forsake humans, finite and of this world, to love only God, infinite and other-worldly. Alcestis desires absolute certainty and the assurance that the gods have not abandoned humankind; without that, life is reduced to meaningless nonsense, and humankind is left in a condition similar to that of the absurdists, with life made all the more unbearable because human beings have been given hope of some meaning only to see that hope dashed. The God Apollo, by becoming human in the form of one of Admetus’s herdsmen, must save Alcestis by forcing her to recognize that God is within each and every person, that the divine can be found within the human, the infinite within the finite. When Admetus enters wearing a blue cloak like Apollo’s, the sight is an epiphany for Alcestis, who pledges to marry him and live totally for him, ready even to die for him. Act 2, which occurs twelve years later, finds Admetus at the point of death and Alcestis finally favored with the long-sought-for message from Delphi, which indicates that the gods do demand the difficult. The message challenges her to do what she was prepared to do at the close of act 1: die in place of Admetus. The Watchman, the old nurse Aglaia, and the Herdsman all offer to sacrifice themselves so that Admetus might

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live, but Alcestis insists that the role fall to her. It is not that Alcestis has no hesitation, for she dreads to cease to be, to leave the sunlight, and she still craves the right to understand the ways of God to humankind that would make human beings more than animals. Finally, though, her love for Admetus dominates her love for life; she will die for him and, what is perhaps even harder, die from him, believing a divinity shapes her end. Yet, as Apollo intervenes in act 1, here Hercules, though in fear and trembling, descends into the Underworld to bring back from the dead the all-forgiving Alcestis, the “crown of women.” The last image of the resurrected Alcestis led forth from Hell provides a further instance for the audience of the way in which classical and Christian myth and iconography fuse in Wilder: Apollo/Christ became man; Alcestis/Christ died and rose so that others might live. If act 2 forms a meditation on death, act 3 is a metaphysical inquiry into the existence of human suffering, with Death taunting Apollo to explain why so many innocent in Thessaly have died in the pestilence: Do the gods make human beings suffer only so that people will remember rather than reject them? Admetus is now dead, and Alcestis is an old slave under King Agis. Epimenes, the only surviving son of the former queen, returns to what has become a wasteland, vowing butchery and revenge, only to have his hand stopped by his mother. Rejecting all of those who see God’s influence only in the evil in the world and never in the good, Alcestis says that the gods’ ways are not human ways; they do not love one minute and then turn against the loved one in the next. She counsels Agis, whose daughter Laodamia dies in the plague, that evil does have a purpose within the divine scheme and that suffering can make him open his eyes and learn wisdom. Her final visionary pronouncement recalls that of Emily in Our Town: Human beings should despair at the point of death only if they have not really lived, if they have failed to experience fully and treasure the here and now. The meaning of life is in the living of life. Alcestis herself becomes the sign that life does possess a meaning in and of itself, and, freed from the grave by the grace of Apollo, she experiences an apotheosis as her reward. A Life in the Sun, as much a paean to woman and her role in the cosmic order as are The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden and The Skin of Our Teeth, provides a dramatic summation of much of Wilder’s philosophy: To become divine, human beings must first be fully human; the extraordinary is to be discovered in the ordinary; the power of myth is timeless, cutting across cultures and religions, synthesizing the past and the present, making the past ever new and vital. The Watchman’s words in act 1 of A Life in the Sun, a play that is essentially an undiscovered country for all but ardent enthusiasts of Wilder, might be paraphrased as an epigraph for all Wilder’s dramatic works: The essential facts of human life do not change, nor should humankind expect them to, from millennium to millennium, from year to year, from minute to minute. What must change is human beings’ way of seeing. Other major works long fiction: The Cabala, 1926; The Bridge of San Luis Rey, 1927; The Woman of Andros, 1930; Heaven’s My Destination, 1934; The Ides of March, 1948; The Eighth Day, 1967; Theophilus North, 1973. screenplays: Our Town, 1940 (with Frank Craven and Harry Chantlee); Shadow of a Doubt, 1943 (with Sally Benson and Alma Revelle). nonfiction: The Intent of the Artist, 1941; American Characteristics and Other Essays, 1979; The Journals of Thornton Wilder, 1939-1961, 1985. translation: The Victors, 1948 (of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Morts sans sépulture).

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Bibliography Blank, Martin, ed. Critical Essays on Thornton Wilder. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996. A collection of essays on the works of Wilder. Bibliography and index. Blank, Martin, Dalma Hunyadi Brunauer, and David Garrett Izzo, eds. Thornton Wilder: New Essays. West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 1999. A collection of essays containing critical analysis of the literary works of Wilder. Bibliography and index. Bryer, Jackson R., ed. Conversations with Thornton Wilder. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. A collection of interviews with Wilder, presenting interesting perspectives on the man and his literary works. Index. Burbank, Rex J. Thornton Wilder. 2d ed. Boston: Twayne, 1978. In this updated version of the 1962 edition, Burbank traces the history of critical controversy surrounding Wilder’s work, offers insights into his methods of fictional and dramatic composition, and assesses his work’s relative merits. Chronology, bibliography. Castronovo, David. Thornton Wilder. New York: Ungar, 1986. This biography of Wilder focuses on critical analysis and interpretation of his literary works. Bibliography and index. Harrison, Gilbert A. The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder. New Haven, Conn.: Ticknor & Fields, 1983. A biography of Wilder that covers his life and works. Bibliography and index. Lifton, Paul. Vast Encyclopedia: The Theatre of Thornton Wilder. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. An examination of the contribution that Wilder made to American theater. Bibliography and index. Walsh, Claudette. Thornton Wilder: A Reference Guide, 1926-1990. A Reference Guide to Literature. New York: G. K. Hall, 1993. An annotated bibliography of works on or by Wilder. Indexes. Wilder, Amos Niven. Thornton Wilder and His Public. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980. An interesting account of the relationship between Wilder and his critical and reading public, written by Wilder’s older brother, a theologian. His aim is to offer a sophisticated discrimination, both aesthetic and sociological, of his brother’s work in the light of contemporary American reality, particularly its symbolism, dynamics, creative modes, and registers of meaning. Bibliography and appendix. Thomas P. Adler, updated by Genevieve Slomski

Tennessee Williams Tennessee Williams

Born: Columbus, Mississippi; March 26, 1911 Died: New York, New York; February 25, 1983 Principal drama • Fugitive Kind, pr. 1937, pb. 2001; Spring Storm, wr. 1937, pr., pb. 1999; Not About Nightingales, wr. 1939, pr., pb. 1998; Battle of Angels, pr. 1940, pb. 1945; This Property Is Condemned, pb. 1941, pr. 1946 (one act); I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix, wr. 1941, pb. 1951, pr. 1959 (one act); The Lady of Larkspur Lotion, pb. 1942 (one act); The Glass Menagerie, pr. 1944, pb. 1945; Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton, pb. 1945, pr. 1955 (one act); You Touched Me, pr. 1945, pb. 1947 (with Donald Windham); Summer and Smoke, pr. 1947, pb. 1948; A Streetcar Named Desire, pr., pb. 1947; American Blues, pb. 1948 (collection); Five Short Plays, pb. 1948; The Long Stay Cut Short: Or, The Unsatisfactory Supper, pb. 1948 (one act); The Rose Tattoo, pr. 1950, pb. 1951; Camino Real, pr., pb. 1953; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, pr., pb. 1955; Orpheus Descending, pr. 1957, pb. 1958 (revision of Battle of Angels); Suddenly Last Summer, pr., pb. 1958; The Enemy: Time, pb. 1959; Sweet Bird of Youth, pr., pb. 1959 (based on The Enemy: Time); Period of Adjustment, pr. 1959, pb. 19s60; The Night of the Iguana, pr., pb. 1961; The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, pr. 1963, revised pb. 1976; The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, pr., pb. 1964 (revision of Summer and Smoke); Slapstick Tragedy: “The Mutilated” and “The Gnädiges Fräulein,” pr. 1966, pb. 1970 (one acts); The Two-Character Play, pr. 1967, pb. 1969; The Seven Descents of Myrtle, pr., pb. 1968 (as Kingdom of Earth); In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, pr. 1969, pb. 1970; Confessional, pb. 1970; Dragon Country, pb. 1970 (collection); The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, pb. 1971-1981 (7 volumes); Out Cry, pr. 1971, pb. 1973 (revision of The Two-Character Play); Small Craft Warnings, pr., pb. 1972 (revision of Confessional); Vieux Carré, pr. 1977, pb. 1979; A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, pr. 1979, pb. 1980; Clothes for a Summer Hotel, pr. 1980; A House Not Meant to Stand, pr. 1981; Something Cloudy, Something Clear, pr. 1981, pb. 1995 Other literary forms • Besides his plays, Tennessee Williams produced essays, letters, memoirs, music lyrics, original screenplays, poetry, short stories, and novels. Achievements • By critical consensus, Tennessee Williams ranks second after Eugene O’Neill among American dramatists. He was greatly influenced by Anton Chekhov in his ability to universalize strongly realized local settings, in his portrayal of frail characters in a cold and alien world, in his frequently superb use of symbol and in his development of a natural structure that does not call attention to itself. Like Chekhov’s best works, Williams’s best plays appear to unfold as naturally as life itself. Williams has been accused at times of “purple” writing, sentimentality, and an overemphasis on violence and depravity. Although such criticism may occasionally be justified, Williams remains one of the most dramatically effective and profoundly perceptive playwrights of the modern theater. Biography • Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi, the son of Cornelius Coffin Williams and Edwina Dakin Williams. He lived his early years in the home of his grandparents, for whom he felt great affec1016

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tion. His grandfather was a minister, and Williams’s father was a traveling salesperson, apparently at home infrequently. In about 1919, his father accepted a nontraveling position at his firm’s headquarters in St. Louis. The move from a more or less traditional southern environment to a very different metropolitan world was extremely painful both for Williams and for his older sister, neither of whom ever really recovered from it. The Glass Menagerie is clearly a play about the Williams family and its life in St. Louis, though Williams’s Memoirs (1975) and other known facts make it clear that the play is by no means a precise transcription of actuality. On the other hand, The Glass Menagerie is not the only Williams play that has biographical elements. His father, his mother, and his sister (Sam Shaw, courtesy of New Directions) (who became mentally ill) are reflected in his characters in various plays. Williams’s homosexuality, which he examines in some detail in his Memoirs, is also an important element in a number of his plays, including A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Suddenly Last Summer. Williams attended the University of Missouri and Washington University and was graduated in 1938 from the University of Iowa. His adult life involved considerable wandering, with periods in such places as Key West, New Orleans, and New York. After various attempts at writing, some of which gained helpful recognition, Williams first won acclaim with The Glass Menagerie. Most of his plays from that point through The Night of the Iguana were successful, either on first production or later. He won Pulitzer Prizes for A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and New York Drama Critics Circle Awards for those two and for The Glass Menagerie and The Night of the Iguana. The many plays that he wrote in the last twenty years of his life, however, achieved almost no success, either in the United States or abroad. Depending on one’s point of view, either Williams’s inspiration had run out, or he was writing a kind of play for which neither the public nor most critics were yet ready. Williams died in New York on February 25, 1983, having choked on a foreign object lodged in his throat. Analysis • If the weight of critical opinion places Tennessee Williams below Eugene O’Neill as America’s premiere dramatist, there should be no question that the former playwright is without peer in either the diversity of genres in which he wrote or his impact on the cultural consciousness of mid-twentieth century America. In the course of his long career, Williams wrote essays; letters; memoirs; music lyrics; original screenplays, including that for the controversial Baby Doll; poetry; short stories; and novels,

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one of which, the bittersweet The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, was made into a major motion picture. It is as a playwright, however, that Williams’s genius shines most brightly, particularly from the early 1940’s to the early 1960’s, a period comprising The Glass Menagerie, Summer and Smoke, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Rose Tattoo, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer, Sweet Bird of Youth, and The Night of the Iguana. These plays encompass an unrelenting exploration of the dark underbelly of human experience: frigidity and nymphomania, impotence and rape, pedophilia and fetishism, cannibalism and coprophagy, alcohol and drug addiction, castration and syphilis, violence and madness, and aging and death. These themes place Williams squarely in the gothic tradition and reflect his early interest in the bizarre and grotesque. As a child he was fed large doses of Edgar Allan Poe by his grandfather. Tormented by a sense of existential loneliness, Williams was able to sublimate his dark vision into plays that bring to life such iconic characters as Big Daddy, Stanley Kowalski, Blanche Dubois, and Amanda Wingfield in language that has been compared favorably with William Shakespeare’s. Williams is second to none among American writers whose works have been successfully made into major films. His plays have been translated into more than a score of languages and continue to be performed in theaters throughout the world. The Glass Menagerie • Williams’s The Glass Menagerie was regarded when first produced as highly unusual; one of the play’s four characters serves as commentator as well as participant; the play itself represents the memories of the commentator years later, and hence, as he says, is not a depiction of actuality; its employment of symbolism is unusual; and in the very effective ending, a scrim descends in front of mother and daughter, so that by stage convention one can see but not hear them, with the result that both, but especially the mother, become much more moving and even archetypal. The play is also almost unique historically, in that it first opened in Chicago, came close to flopping before Chicago newspaper theater critics verbally whipped people into going, and then played successfully for months in Chicago before finally moving to equal success in New York. One device that Williams provided for the play was quickly abandoned: A series of legends and images flashed on a screen, indicating the central idea of scenes and parts of scenes. This device provides a triple insight into Williams: first, his skill at organizing scenes into meaningful wholes; second, his willingness to experiment, sometimes successfully, sometimes not; and third, his occasional tendency to spell out by external devices what a play itself makes clear. The Glass Menagerie opens on a near-slum apartment, with Tom Wingfield setting the time (the Depression and Spanish-Civil-War 1930’s); the play’s method as memory, with its consequent use of music and symbol; and the names and relationships of the characters: Tom, his sister Laura, his mother Amanda, and an initially unnamed gentleman caller. A fifth character, Tom says, is his father, who, having deserted his family years before, appears only as a larger-than-life photograph over the mantel, which on occasion—according to Williams’s stage directions, but rarely in actual production— lights up. Tom works in a shoe warehouse, writes poetry, and feels imprisoned by the knowledge that his hateful job is essential to the family’s financial survival. Apparently, his one escape is to go to the movies. His relationship with his mother is a combination of love, admiration, frustration, and acrimony, with regular flare-ups and reconciliations. His relationship with his sister is one of love and sympathy. Laura is physically crip-

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pled as well as withdrawn from the outside world. She is psychologically unable (as one learns in scene 2) to attend business college and lives in a world of her phonograph records and fragile glass animals. Amanda, a more complex character than the others, is the heart of the play: a constantly chattering woman who lives in part for her memories, perhaps exaggerated, of an idealized antebellum southern girlhood and under the almost certain illusion that her son will amount to something and that her daughter will marry; yet she also lives very positively in the real world, aware of the family’s poverty, keeping track of the bills, scratching for money by selling magazine subscriptions, taking advantage of her membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution. She is aware, too, that she must constantly remind her son of his responsibility to his family and that if her daughter is ever to marry, it must be through the machinations of mother and son. Yet, on the other hand, she is insufficiently aware of how her nagging and nostalgia drive her son to desperation and of how both son and daughter act on occasion to protect her illusions and memories. Scene 1 provides a general picture of this background; scene 2 is a confrontation between mother and daughter. Amanda has discovered that, rather than attending business college, Laura has simply left and returned home at the proper hours, spending her time walking in the park, visiting the zoo, or going to the movies. Amanda must accept the fact that a job for Laura is out of the question, and she therefore starts planning for the other alternative, marriage. The scene introduces a second symbol in a nickname that Laura says a boy gave her in high school: “Blue Roses.” Roses are delicate and beautiful, like Laura and like her glass menagerie, but blue roses, like glass animals, have no real existence. Scene 3 shows Amanda trying unsuccessfully to sell magazine subscriptions on the telephone and ends in a shockingly violent quarrel between mother and son, concluding with Tom throwing his overcoat across the room in his rage and unintentionally destroying some of Laura’s animals. One of Williams’s most notable uses of lighting occurs in this scene. A pool of light envelops Laura as Tom and Amanda quarrel, so that one becomes aware without words that the devastating effect on Laura is the scene’s major point. Scene 4 shows Laura talking Tom into an apology and reconciliation, and Amanda taking advantage of Tom’s remorse to persuade him to invite a friend from the warehouse home to dinner, in the hope that the “gentleman caller” will be attracted to Laura. Scene 5 is long, building up suspense for Amanda and for the audience. Tom announces to his mother that he has invited a warehouse friend, Jim O’Connor, to dinner the next evening. Amanda, pleased but shocked at the suddenness of this new development, makes elaborate plans and has high expectations, but Tom tries to make her face the reality of Laura’s physical and psychological limitations. Scene 6 shows the arrival of the guest and his attempt to accept Amanda’s pathetic and almost comical southernbelle behavior and elaborate “fussing,” and Laura’s almost pathological fright and consequent inability to come to the dinner table. Dialogue between Tom and Jim makes clear Jim’s relative steadiness and definite if perhaps overly optimistic plans for a career. It also reveals Tom’s near failure at his job, his frustration over his family’s situation, and his ripening determination to leave home: He has joined the merchant seamen’s union instead of paying the light bill. The scene ends with the onset of a sharp summer storm. Laura, terrified, is on the sofa trying desperately not to cry; the others are at the dinner table and Tom is saying grace: a combination remarkable for its irony and pathos.

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At the beginning of scene 7, the lights go out because of Tom’s failure to pay the light bill, so the whole scene is played in candlelight. It is the climactic scene, and in it, Williams faced a problem faced by many modern playwrights: What kind of outcome does one choose, and by what means, in a situation where if things go one way they might seem incredible, and if they go the other, they might seem overly obvious? It is perhaps not a wholly soluble situation, but Williams did remarkably well in handling it. By Amanda’s inevitable machinations after dinner, Jim and Laura are left alone. Jim—who has turned out to be the “Blue Roses” boy from high school, the boy with whom Laura was close to being in love—is a sympathetic and understanding person who, even in the short time they are alone together, manages to get more spontaneous and revealing conversation out of Laura than her family ever has, and even persuades her to dance. Clearly, here is a person who could bring to reality Amanda’s seemingly impossible dreams, a man who could lead Laura into the real world (as he symbolically brought her glass unicorn into it by unintentionally breaking off its horn), a man who would make a good husband. For the play to end thus, however, would be out of accord with the facts of Williams’s family life, with the tone of the whole play up to that point, and with modern audience’s dislike of pat, happy endings in serious plays. Jim tells Laura that he is already engaged, a fact made more believable by Tom’s unawareness of it. Laura’s life is permanently in ruins. What might have happened will never happen. When Amanda learns the truth from Jim just before he leaves, the resulting quarrel with Tom confirms Tom in his plans to leave home permanently, abandoning his mother and sister to an apparently hopeless situation. Yet as he tells the audience—who are watching a soundless Amanda hovering over Laura to comfort her by candlelight—his flight has been unsuccessful. The memories haunt him; Laura haunts him. Speaking to her from a faroff world, he begs her to blow her candles out and thus obliterate the memory. She does, and the curtain falls. A Streetcar Named Desire • Williams’s next successful play, A Streetcar Named Desire, is generally regarded as his best. Initial reaction was mixed, but there would be little argument now that it is one of the most powerful plays in the modern theater. Like The Glass Menagerie, it concerns, primarily, a man and two women and a “gentleman caller.” As in The Glass Menagerie, one of the women is very much aware of the contrast between the present and her southern-aristocratic past; one woman (Stella) is practical if not always adequately aware, while the other (Blanche) lives partly in a dream world and teeters on the brink of psychosis; the gentleman caller could perhaps save the latter were circumstances somewhat different; and the play’s single set is a slum apartment. Yet these similarities only point up the sharp differences between the two plays. A Streetcar Named Desire is not a memory play; it is sharply naturalistic, with some use of expressionistic devices to point up Blanche’s emotional difficulties. Blanche is not, as is Laura, a bond between the other two family members; she is, rather, an intolerable intruder who very nearly breaks up her sister’s marriage. A more complex creation than anyone in The Glass Menagerie, she is fascinating, cultured, pathetic, vulgar, admirable, despicable: a woman who, unlike Amanda, cannot function adequately outside the safe, aristocratic world of the past, but who, like Amanda, can fight almost ferociously for what she wants, even when it is almost surely unattainable. Her opponent, Stella’s husband, Stanley Kowalski, is also a much sharper figure than Tom Wingfield.

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One of the major critical problems of A Streetcar Named Desire has been whose side one should be on in the battle between Blanche and Stanley. The answer may be one that some critics have been unable to accept: neither and both. Blanche’s defense of culture, of the intellectual and aesthetic aspects of life, may be pathetic coming from one who has become a near-alcoholic prostitute, but it is nevertheless genuine, important, and valid. Life has dealt her devastating blows, to which she has had to respond alone; her sister has offered no help. Yet she herself is partly responsible for the horrible world in which she finds herself, and her attempts to find a haven from it are both pitiable and (because she is inadequately aware of the needs of others) repellent. Stanley, the sort of man who might, in later years, be called “macho,” uncultured and uninterested in culture, capable (as Blanche also is in her own way) of violence, is nevertheless an intelligent man, a man who functions more capably than do any of his friends in the world in which he finds himself, a man who loves his wife and would be pathetically lost without her. Stanley would find any intrusion into his happy home intolerable, but he finds it doubly so when the intruder is a woman who stays on indefinitely, a woman with Blanche’s affectations, her intolerance of any lifestyle other than that of her own childhood, her obvious dislike of her sister’s marriage, and her corrupt sexual past, which makes her attempts to attract one of Stanley’s best friends more than Stanley can tolerate. It is ironic that the play should end on a “happily-ever-after” note for Stanley and Stella (though surely Blanche can never be wholly forgotten), but this is life, not a model of life. Indeed, the life that both find, apparently, wholly satisfying and sufficient is itself a sort of irony. Stella has had to give up everything that Blanche believes in, everything from her own past, in order to accept it and welcome it. The setting of A Streetcar Named Desire is the street and outdoor stairs of the building in which the Kowalskis live, and the interior of their two-room apartment. As scene 1 opens, neighbors are out front talking. Stanley and Mitch come in, prepared to go bowling. Stanley is carrying a package of meat. Stella comes out. Stanley throws the meat to her, and even the neighbors are amused at the symbolism. Stanley and Mitch proceed to the bowling alley, and Stella follows. Then Blanche comes around the corner, with her suitcase, dressed all in white—another ironic symbol—in a fashion appropriate to an upper-class garden party. In a stage direction, Williams compares her to a moth, and throughout the play, she fears the alluring but destructive light. She fears people seeing how she really looks. She fears facing the truth or having other people learn it. As she later says, she fibs because fibs are more pleasant; symbolically, she covers the overhead light bulb in the apartment with a paper lantern. Paper, indeed, is a recurring symbol throughout the play. For example, two of the melodies one hears from a distance are “Paper Doll” and “Paper Moon.” Blanche has never before seen Stella’s apartment or met her sister’s husband. To mark her progress through New Orleans to get to the apartment, Williams took advantage of actual New Orleans names (or former names); Blanche has to transfer from a streetcar called Desire to one called Cemeteries in order to arrive in the slum, called Elysian Fields. While the first of the streetcars gives the title to the play, Williams wisely makes use of the names only once after the opening scene. Blanche’s progress in the play is from a wide range of desires (for culture, security, sex, and money) to a sort of living death, and while the slum may be an Elysian Fields for Stanley and Stella, it is a Tartarus for her. Williams also, like many earlier dramatists, gave some of his characters meaningful, and in this case, ironic names. Blanche DuBois is by no means a White Woods (though the name is a reminder of Anton Chekhov’s Vishnyovy sad, pr.,

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pb. 1904; The Cherry Orchard, 1908, and hence of the sort of life she has lost), and Stella is no Star. Such devices can be overdone: The name of their lost plantation, Belle Reve, may be an example. A neighbor who owns the building lets Blanche into the apartment, and another neighbor goes for Stella. Blanche is alone. Like Laura on the night of the dinner, she is skittish, but her reaction is different: She spots a bottle of whiskey and takes a slug. Stella rushes in and, as is common in plays that begin with an arrival, the audience learns a great deal about both sisters as they talk—learns about their past, about Blanche’s hostile attitude toward her environment, about the grim string of family illnesses and deaths, about the loss of the plantation. The sisters love each other but are obviously at odds in many respects. Blanche has been a schoolteacher, but one may doubt the reason she gives, a sort of sick leave, for being in New Orleans in early May while school at home is still in session. Stanley comes in with Mitch and another friend. Williams’s description of him here, as the gaudy, dominant seed bearer, is famous. With Stella in the bathroom and his friends gone, Stanley encounters Blanche alone. He is surprised, but he tries to play the friendly host. Presently, he asks Blanche if she had not once been married. Blanche says that the boy died, promptly adding that she feels sick. The scene ends. A prominent feature of this first scene, one that continues throughout the play, is the use of sound effects. There are sound effects in The Glass Menagerie, too, such as the glass menagerie thematic music and the music from the nearby dance hall, but in A Streetcar Named Desire, the sound effects are much more elaborate. As the curtain rises, one hears the voices of people passing and the sound of the “Blue Piano” in the nearby bar, and the piano becomes louder at appropriate points. Twice a cat screeches, frightening Blanche badly. As the subject of her husband and his death comes up, one hears—softly here but louder when Blanche reaches a crisis—the music of a polka, clearly a sound inside Blanche’s head and hence an expressionistic device. At the end of scene 2, in which Blanche and Stanley have had a conversation that is both hostile and covertly sexual, a tamale vendor is heard calling “Red-hot!” Similar effects, notably of trains roaring past, occur throughout the play. Scene 2 begins with a dialogue between Stanley and Stella. It is the next evening. Stella is taking Blanche out to dinner in order not to interfere with the poker night Stanley has planned. Stanley learns of the loss of the plantation and is angry, especially after he examines Blanche’s trunk and finds it full of expensive clothes and furs. Stella has postponed telling Blanche that she is pregnant. Blanche enters and, seeing the situation, sends Stella on an errand so that she can have it out with Stanley. Stanley must accept the fact that the plantation has been lost because it was heavily mortgaged, and the mortgage payments could not be made. Blanche grows playful with him, and Stanley implies that she is being deliberately provocative. Stanley comes across Blanche’s love letters from her dead husband, and Blanche becomes almost hysterical. Stanley tells Blanche of the coming baby. The men begin to arrive for poker. Stella returns and leads Blanche away. Scene 3, entitled “The Poker Night,” opens on a garish and, Williams says, Van Gogh-like view of Stanley and his three friends playing poker. Stanley has had too much to drink and is becoming verbally violent. The women return from their evening out. Blanche encounters Mitch at the bathroom door—she wants to take another of her endless hot baths—and they are clearly attracted to each other. Stanley, hating the presence of women during a poker game, becomes physically violent, and (offstage) hits Stella. The other men, who are familiar with this behavior but feel great affection

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for Stanley, subdue him and leave. Blanche, horrified, has taken Stella to the upstairs apartment. Stanley realizes what has happened, sobs, and screams for Stella, who presently joins him on the outside stairs. They fall into a sexual embrace, and he carries her inside. Clearly, this series of events has occurred before; clearly, this is the usual outcome, and is one of the attractions that Stanley has for Stella. Blanche comes down the stairs, even more horrified, and Mitch returns and comforts her. In scene 4, Blanche returns from upstairs the next morning and is shocked to learn that Stella accepts all that has happened and wants no change in her marital situation. With some justice, Blanche describes Stanley as an uncultured animal in a world in which culture is essential—a speech that Stanley overhears. He comes in, and to Blanche’s horror, Stella embraces him. It is in this scene that Blanche, uselessly and desperately, first thinks of an old boyfriend, now rich, as a source of rescue from her plight, a futile idea that she develops and tries harder and harder to believe in as her plight worsens. Scene 5 contains an example of Williams’s occasionally excessive irony: Stanley asks Blanche her astrological sign, and it turns out that his is Capricorn and hers is Virgo. The major import of the scene is that Stanley confronts Blanche with stories he has heard about her life back home—and afterward Blanche admits to Stella that some of them are true. Blanche and Stella agree that marrying Mitch is the solution to Blanche’s problem, and Blanche is left alone. A young newsboy comes to collect money, and Blanche comes very close to trying, consciously and cynically, to seduce him. Clearly, sex, like alcohol, has been both a cause of and a response to her situation. Mitch arrives for a date, holding a bunch of roses, and the scene ends. Scene 6 opens with the return of the two from their date. Its major import is Blanche’s telling Mitch about her dead husband, whom she encountered one evening in an embrace with an older man. Later that evening, while they were dancing to the polka she now keeps hearing, Blanche, unable to stop herself, told him he disgusted her. A few minutes later, he went outside and shot himself. Telling the story is a catharsis for Blanche and deeply enlists Mitch’s sympathy. They are in each other’s arms, and he suggests the possibility of marriage. In scene 7, several months later, with Blanche still there and with the marriage idea apparently no further advanced, Stanley tells Stella of his now detailed and verified knowledge of Blanche’s sordid sexual past, including her having seduced a seventeenyear-old student. As a result of this last action, Blanche lost her job, and Stanley, as he explains to Stella, has told Mitch the whole story. Stella is horrified, both at the facts themselves and at their revelation to Mitch. It is Blanche’s birthday, there is a birthday cake, and Mitch has been invited. Scene 8 shows the women’s mounting distress as Mitch fails to show up for the party; Stanley gives Blanche a “birthday present,” a bus ticket back home for the following Tuesday; he makes it clear that Blanche’s presence all this time has been almost too much to endure. Stella develops labor pains and leaves with Stanley for the hospital. Scene 9, later that evening, shows Mitch coming in with very changed intentions, tearing the paper lantern off and turning on the light to see Blanche plainly for the first time, telling her she is not clean enough to take home to his mother, and trying to get her to bed. She reacts violently, and he runs out. In scene 10, the climactic scene, Stanley comes back. Blanche has been drinking and is desperately upset. With Stanley, she tries to retreat into fanciful illusions— Mitch has returned and apologized, her rich boyfriend has invited her on a Caribbean tour. Stanley exposes her lies, and her desperation grows, as indicated by lurid, darting shadows and other expressionistic devices. Their confrontation reaches a climax, and

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after she tries to resist, he carries her off to bed. In scene 11, some weeks later, one learns that Blanche has told Stella that Stanley raped her, that Stella must believe that the rape is merely one of Blanche’s psychotic illusions if her life with Stanley is to survive, and that Stella has made arrangements to place Blanche in a state institution. A doctor and nurse come to get her. Blanche is terrified. The nurse is cold and almost brutal, but the doctor gains Blanche’s confidence by playing the role of a gentleman, and she leaves on his arm, clearly feeling that she has found what she has been seeking, a man to protect her. All this occurs while another poker game is in progress. The play ends with Stella in Stanley’s arms, and with one of the other men announcing, “This game is seven-card stud.” The brutes have won, and Stella has permanently denied her heritage, yet one must remember that the “brutes” are not without redeeming qualities. Stanley has displayed intense loyalty to his friends, genuine love for his wife, and a variety of insecurities beneath his aggressive manner. The other men have displayed loyalty to Stanley, and Mitch has shown much sympathy and understanding. As Blanche has said early in the play, Stanley may be just what their bloodline needs, and that point is emphasized when, near the end of the final scene, the upstairs neighbor hands Stella her baby. Life must go on; perhaps the next generation will do better; but long before the play opens, life has destroyed a potentially fine and sensitive woman. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof • Of Williams’s four plays analyzed here, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, his next big success, is the only one that falls into a special Williams category: plays that at some stage or stages have been heavily revised. Williams has said that, because of advice from Elia Kazan, the director of the first Broadway production, he made changes in the third act. The changes include the appearance of one of the main characters, Big Daddy, who had been in the second act only, and adjustments changing the bare possibility of an affirmative ending to a probability. Revisions of considerably greater scope than this were made by Williams in other plays, including plays that were completely rewritten long after their original productions (Summer and Smoke into The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, and Battle of Angels into Orpheus Descending). Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is famous for its somewhat expressionistic set, the bedroom of Brick and Margaret (Maggie) Pollitt. The two major pieces of furniture, both with symbolic value, are a large double bed and a combination radio-phonograph-televisionliquor cabinet. The walls are to disappear into air at the top, and the set is to be roofed by the sky, as though to suggest that the action of the play is representative of universal human experience. The powerful expressionistic psychology of the play recalls the theater of August Strindberg, but Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is deeply embedded in revealed reality, with one major exception: One does not know the truth, one cannot know the truth, behind the crucial relationship between Brick and his dead friend Skipper; the degree (if any) of Brick’s responsibility for Skipper’s decline and death; or of Maggie’s responsibility. The bedroom, outside of which is a gallery running the length of the house, is in the plantation mansion of Brick’s father, Big Daddy, on his twenty-eight-thousand-acre estate in the Mississippi delta. The first act is largely a monologue by Maggie, talking to a mostly inattentive and uninterested Brick, and interrupted only by brief appearances of Brick’s mother, Big Mama, and his sister-in-law Mae and two of her five, soon to be six, children. Maggie, like Amanda and Blanche before her, is a loquacious and desperate woman who may be fighting for the impossible; unlike her predecessors, she lives entirely in the present and without major illusions, and hence fights more realisti-

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cally. She wants Brick to return to her bed: She is a cat on a hot tin roof, sexually desperate but interested only in her husband. As the largely one-sided conversation continues, one learns the circumstances underlying Brick’s loss of interest in her. Maggie tells Brick the news that his father is dying of cancer. Brick and Maggie have been living in the house for several months. Formerly an important athlete, a professional football player, and then a sports announcer, he has given up everything and lapsed into heavy drinking. He is on a crutch, having broken his ankle attempting, while drunk the previous night, to jump hurdles on the high school athletic field. Mae and her husband, Brick’s older brother Gooper, a lawyer in Memphis, are visiting in hope, as Maggie correctly guesses, of Big Daddy’s signing a will in Gooper’s favor, because, while Brick is Big Daddy’s favorite, he will want the estate to go to a son who has offspring. Maggie is from a society background in Nashville, though her immediate family had been poor because of her father’s alcoholism. Big Daddy himself is a Mississippi redneck who has worked his way to great wealth. Brick and Maggie met as students at the University of Mississippi. Formerly, according to Maggie, an excellent lover, Brick has made Maggie agree that they will stay together only if she leaves him alone. Unable to bear the frustration, Maggie is ready to break the agreement and fight to get Brick back. The roots of Brick and Maggie’s conflict are fitfully revealed when Maggie begins to speak of Skipper, their dead friend, any mention of whom greatly upsets Brick. In Maggie’s version of the story, from college on, Brick’s greatest loyalty was to Skipper. She says that Brick’s standards of love and friendship were so pure as to have been frustrating to both Skipper and Maggie; that on an out-of-town football weekend when Brick had been injured and could not go, Maggie and Skipper, out of their common frustration, went to bed together; that Skipper could not perform, and that Maggie therefore, but in no condemnatory sense, assumed that he was unconsciously homosexual, though she believes that Brick is not. Maggie told Skipper that he was actually in love with her husband, and she now believes that it was this revelation that prompted Skipper to turn to liquor and drugs, leading to his death. Maggie now tells Brick that she has been examined by a gynecologist, that she is capable of bearing children, and that it is the right time of the month to conceive. Brick asks how it is going to happen when he finds her repellent. She says that that is a problem to be solved. Act 2 is famous for consisting almost entirely of a remarkably effective and revealing dialogue between Brick and Big Daddy. The act opens, however, with the whole family there, as well as their minister, the Reverend Mr. Tooker. The minister is there ostensibly because of Big Daddy’s birthday, and there is to be cake and champagne. From the family’s point of view, he is also there because after the birthday party (which is as big a failure as Blanche’s), they are going to tell Big Mama the truth about Big Daddy’s cancer, and they want his help in the crisis. From his own point of view, he is there to hint at a contribution, either now or in Big Daddy’s will or both, for ornamentation for his church. He is totally useless in the crisis and is therefore, in spite of Williams’s deep affection for his own minister grandfather, typical of Williams’s ministers. The birthday party will take place in Brick and Maggie’s bedroom because Brick is on a crutch: an ingenious pretext for limiting the play’s action to a single setting. Big Daddy is one of Williams’s most complex characters, and the contradictions in his nature are never fully examined, any more than they are with Blanche, because, as Williams says in a stage direction in act 2, any truly drawn characters will retain some mystery. Big Daddy is a loud, vulgar, apparently insensitive man who was originally a

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workman on the estate, then owned by a pair of homosexual men. He is now in a position of power and worth many millions. Desperately afraid to show any real feelings, he pretends to dislike his whole family, although in the case of Gooper and Mae and their children, the dislike is genuine and deep. One never learns his real attitude toward Maggie. Near the end of his talk with Brick, with great difficulty, Big Daddy expresses the love he has for him. His real attitude toward Big Mama remains uncertain. He has always teased her, made gross fun of her, and in his ostensibly frank conversation with Brick, he says that he has always disliked her, even in bed. He is clearly moved, however, when at the end of the familyscene part of the act, she, who is in her own way both as gross and as vulnerable as he, yells that she has always loved him. The conversation with Brick reveals his sensitivity in another direction: his distress over the intense poverty he has seen while traveling abroad and particularly an instance in Morocco when he saw a very small child being used as a procurer. The motivation for the long father-and-son talk is that Big Daddy, hugely relieved at having been told, falsely, that he does not have cancer, wants to find out why Brick has given up working, given up Maggie (as everyone knows, because Gooper and Mae have listened in their bedroom next door), and turned to heavy drinking. Apparently, he has attempted frank talks with Brick in the past, with no success, even though each clearly loves and respects the other, and because of Brick’s lack of interest and determined reticence, it would appear that that is how the conversation is going now. Having just gone through a severe life crisis himself, however, Big Daddy is determined to help his son. He gets the beginning of an answer out of Brick by taking away his crutch so he cannot get at his liquor. Brick’s answer is that he is disgusted with the world’s “mendacity.” Finding that answer insufficient, Big Daddy finally brings himself to make the climactic statement that the problem began when Skipper died; he adds that Gooper and Mae think the Brick-Skipper relationship was not “normal.” Brick, at last unable to maintain his detachment, is furious. In a stage direction, Williams says that Skipper died to disavow the idea that there was any sexual feeling in the friendship, but whether Skipper did have such feelings is necessarily left uncertain. Brick himself, in his outrage, makes painfully clear that the very idea of homosexuality disgusts him. The relationship, he believes, was simply an unusually profound friendship, though he is finally forced to grant the likelihood that, from Skipper’s point of view, though emphatically not his own, sexual love existed. (Whether Brick is himself bisexual is left uncertain, but it is clear that he could not face this idea if it were true.) He grants that liquor has been his refuge from a fact that Big Daddy (who has no prejudice against homosexuals) makes him face: that Brick’s unwillingness to believe in the possibility of a homosexual reaction in Skipper, and to help Skipper recognize and accept it, is the major cause of Skipper’s death. In a statement strongly reminiscent of some situations in the plays of O’Neill, Brick says that there are only two ways out: liquor and death. Liquor is his way, death was Skipper’s. Then, in a state of strong emotional upheaval, Brick makes his father face the truth as his father has made him face it: He is dying of cancer. There is justice in Brick’s remark that friends—and he and his father are friends—tell each other the truth, because the truth needs to be faced. As the act ends, Big Daddy is screaming at the liars who had kept the truth from him. In the original version, as act 3 opens, the family and the Reverend Mr. Tooker enter. Big Daddy, one must assume, has gone to his bedroom to face his situation alone. The purpose of the gathering is to have the doctor, who presently comes in with Mag-

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gie, tell Big Mama the truth. Brick is in and out during the scene, but—in spite of appeals from Maggie and from Big Mama—he remains wholly aloof and is still drinking. If the shock of his conversation with Big Daddy is going to have an effect, it has not yet done so. After much hesitation, the doctor tells Big Mama the truth, to which she reacts with the expected horror. He tells her that Big Daddy’s pain will soon become so severe as to require morphine injections, and he leaves a package. Big Mama wants comfort only from Brick, not from Gooper. The Reverend Mr. Tooker leaves promptly, and the doctor soon follows. Gooper tries to get Big Mama to agree to a plan he has drawn up to take over the estate as trustee. Big Mama will have it run by nobody but Brick, whom she calls her only son. She remarks what a comfort it would be to Big Daddy if Brick and Maggie had a child. Maggie announces that she is pregnant. Whether this lie is planned or spontaneous, one has no way of knowing, but Brick does not deny it. Gooper and Mae, whose behavior throughout the scene has been despicable, are shocked and incredulous. Big Mama has run out to tell Big Daddy the happy news. Gooper and Mae soon follow, but just before they go, a loud cry of agony fills the house: Big Daddy is feeling the pain the doctor has predicted. Maggie and Brick are left alone. Maggie thanks Brick for his silence. Brick feels the “click” that results from enough liquor and that gives him peace, and he goes out on the gallery, singing. Maggie has a sudden inspiration and takes all the liquor out of the room. When Brick comes in she tells him what she has done, says she is in control, and declares that she will not return the liquor until he has gone to bed with her. He grabs for his crutch, but she is quicker, and she throws the crutch off the gallery to the ground. Big Mama rushes in, almost hysterical, to get the package of morphine. Maggie reiterates that she is in charge and tells Brick she loves him. Brick, in the last speech of the play, says exactly what Big Daddy had said earlier when Big Mama said she loved him: “Wouldn’t it be funny if that was true.” Apparently, he has yielded. The curtain falls. The ending is dramatically effective, but in a different way from Williams’s earlier endings. The Glass Menagerie’s ending is final in one way, because it is all in the past, and A Streetcar Named Desire‘s in another, because Blanche is escorted off, and Stanley and Stella are reconciled. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, one can only assume that Brick will “perform,” that the result will be a pregnancy, and that the eventual effect of Maggie’s use of force and of Big Daddy’s shock tactics may be Brick’s return to normality. Even in its original form, as here described, that is what the ending suggests, and Williams’s instinct to leave an element of uncertainty seems correct. The Night of the Iguana • The Night of the Iguana was Williams’s next (and last) unmistakably successful play, after a series of plays of varying degrees of stage success but with more or less serious flaws. Unlike all of his earlier plays except Camino Real, The Night of the Iguana is set outside the United States and does not in any significant sense concern southerners. It also differs from almost all the plays after The Glass Menagerie in being free of serious violence. Besides A Streetcar Named Desire, with the suicide of Blanche’s husband, Williams had used castration, murder by blowtorch, death by cannibalism, and other extreme acts of violence, prompting the accusation, at times with some justice, of sensationalism. The Night of the Iguana takes place on the veranda of a third-rate, isolated hotel in Mexico, in a rain forest high above the Pacific. Like several other Williams plays, it grew out of what was originally a short story. Unlike any of the others, except possibly the expressionistic Camino Real, its ending is affirmative, suggesting hope not only for

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the three major characters but also for humanity in general. The central male character, a minister who has been locked out of his church because of fornication and what was regarded as an atheistic sermon, may be prepared in the end for a life of selfsacrifice—which may turn out to be richly fulfilling, because the woman to whom he may “sacrifice” himself is a woman who knows what genuine love means. The other woman, who is the central character, is Blanche’s opposite: a New Englander instead of a quintessential southerner, she is in no sense handicapped by the past; she retains a sense of humor; she sees things clearly; and she accepts her situation. She is tied to an elderly relative in a wheelchair but she is not bitter about it; the relative is neither a frustration nor an embarrassment. Finally, she uses whatever weapons she must to keep her grandfather and herself able, if sometimes only barely, to survive. Without being an obviously fierce fighter like Amanda, Blanche, or Maggie, she has come to terms with her circumstances and has prevailed. She is the first and only Williams character to do so, a new conception in his gallery of characters. At the opening of act 1, Lawrence Shannon, the former minister, arrives at the hotel with a busload of female teachers and students on a Mexican tour for which he is the guide. He is in one of his periodic emotional breakdowns and has chosen to bring his tour party to this hotel in violation of the itinerary in order to get emotional support from his friends, the couple who run the hotel. It turns out, however, that the husband has recently drowned. The wife, now the sole owner, the brassy Maxine Faulk, clearly wants Shannon as a lover and may well be genuinely in love with him. Throughout the tour, and indeed on some previous tours, Shannon has ignored the announced tour route and facilities, leading the group where he chooses. He has also, and not for the first time, allowed himself to be seduced by a seventeen-year-old girl. The women are in a state of rebellion. Their leader, another of Williams’s homosexuals, though an unimportant one, knows of the sexual liaison and later in the play reports the whole story to the tour company for which Shannon works, with the result that in act 3, he is replaced on the spot with another guide. He has the key to the tour bus, however, and refuses to relinquish it, so the passengers (most of whom never come up to the hotel) are helpless. Shannon’s situation is in some ways similar to, although milder than, Blanche’s: He was pushed out of the church as Blanche was dismissed as a teacher; he is seriously distraught, and confused in his sexual orientation, he is attracted to young girls, as Blanche was to boys. Presently, there is another arrival at the hotel, Hannah Jelkes and her ninety-seven-year-old grandfather, whom she calls Nonno. She has pushed him up the hill and through the forest in his wheelchair. They are without funds, and she is desperate for a place for them to stay. Maxine, for all her rough exterior, cannot turn them away in their plight, but she is upset over their literal pennilessness. She is also upset over Hannah’s desire to earn money, as she has done all over the world, by passing through hotel dining rooms so that, on request, her grandfather may recite his poetry or she may make sketches of guests. The only other guests at the hotel, because it is the offseason, are a group of Nazis, whose presence in the play may seem puzzling, as they have nothing to do with the plot. They are in and out at various points, a raucous group, delighted with radio news of German successes in bombing Britain. Totally without feeling, they are probably in the play for contrast; their lack of feeling contrasts with Hannah’s genuine sympathy for anything human except unkindness, with Nonno’s sensitive artistry as a recognized minor poet, with Maxine’s apparent ability to love, and with the growing evidence, as the play develops, of Shannon’s potential for overcoming his self-centered and almost uncontrollable desperation.

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The major focus in both act 2 and act 3 is on the dialogues between Hannah and Shannon, which, in revelation of character and effect on character, resemble the dialogue between Big Daddy and Brick. Indeed, act 2 and act 3 are so intertwined as to make it difficult to separate them. One learns about Hannah’s past, about her having suffered from emotional problems similar to Shannon’s, from which she recovered by sheer determination. In a sense, she has sacrificed her life to caring for her grandfather; she feels only pride and love for him, and concern over his age, his periods of senile haziness, and his inability to finish his first poem in twenty years. In a moment of symbolism, one sees that Hannah is capable of lighting a candle in the wind. Seeking for God, she has so far found him only in human faces. In sharp contrast, Shannon’s view of the world is summed up in a memory of having seen starving persons searching through piles of excrement for bits of undigested food. Hannah’s insight into Shannon’s problem is deep, and she is adept in techniques, from sympathy to shock, to help bring him out of his somewhat self-indulgent despair. At one point in act 2, the Mexican boys who work for Maxine bring in an iguana and tie it to a post, planning to fatten it and eat it: a normal occurrence in their world. It escapes once and is recaptured. Maxine threatens to evict Hannah and Nonno but relents when Hannah makes her understand that she is not a rival for Shannon. Nonno provides embarrassing evidence of his intermittent senility. The act ends in the early evening with a heavy thunderstorm. Early in act 3, later in the evening, Shannon’s replacement arrives, and the bus key is taken from him by force. Shannon, growing more and more hysterical, tries to pull the gold cross from his neck and threatens to go down to the ocean and swim straight out to sea until he drowns. Maxine and her Mexican boys tie him in the hammock. Maxine tells Hannah that Shannon’s behavior is essentially histrionic, and Hannah soon sees for herself that he is deriving a masochistic pleasure from the situation. She tells him, in a key speech, that he is enjoying an ersatz crucifixion, thus denying Shannon the role of Christ-figure that Williams had tried unsuccessfully to give his central male characters in certain earlier plays. Hannah as model and as psychiatrist begins to have an effect. He releases himself from the ropes, as she has told him all along he is able to do, and their conversation reveals enough about Hannah’s past to make him admire her stamina, her hard-won stability, and her love of humanity, and to make him want, perhaps, to emulate her. He learns of the minimal, pathetic encounters she has had with male sexuality—in one instance, a man with a fetish for women’s undergarments—and while they in no way disgusted her, since nothing does except cruelty, she is nevertheless a permanent virgin who is comfortable with her virginity. Shannon suggests that they should travel together, platonically. She rightly refuses, and puts in his mind the idea that Maxine needs him, as Nonno needs her, and that he needs to be needed in order to achieve stability. Hannah persuades Shannon to free the iguana, which is, as he has been, “at the end of its rope.” Nonno wheels himself out of his room, shouting that he has finished his poem. He reads it, and they find it moving. Maxine persuades Shannon to stay with her permanently, though Williams seems undecided as to whether one should regard Shannon’s acquiescence as a sacrifice. In any case, however, it is evidence that he may no longer be sexually askew and that he may be capable of living a life that has some kind of meaning. The change is quicker than the change that may occur in Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, though both plays take place in a few hours, and though Williams says in a stage direction in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that even if events have occurred that will result in changing a person, the change will not occur quickly. Perhaps one may say that the dif-

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ference is justified in that Big Daddy, for all his love and honesty, is no Hannah—there are very few Hannahs in the world. Hannah’s own trials are not over: After Maxine and Shannon go off together, as Hannah prepares to take Nonno back to his room, he quietly dies. Hannah is left alone. No one needs her any more. The curtain falls. The play is notable for its atmosphere, its memorable characters, its compassion, its hard-won optimism. The ending of The Glass Menagerie is devastating. The ending of A Streetcar Named Desire may represent the best solution for Blanche and happiness for Stanley and Stella, but there is nevertheless a sense in which all three are victims. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, it is possible that the future will bring happiness to Brick and Maggie, but it is far from certain; the future means a horrible death from cancer for Big Daddy, a life deprived of much of its meaning for Big Mama, and wholly meaningless and despicable lives for Gooper and Mae. The contrast with The Night of the Iguana is enormous. With his poem, Nonno has at last, like his granddaughter, “prevailed,” and one must assume that he is ready for death, a death that, in contrast to Big Daddy’s, is swift and peaceful. Maxine is no longer alone and has someone to love. Shannon seems on the road to psychological recovery and a useful and satisfying life. Hannah, to be sure, is left alone, as Tom and Blanche are alone in their worlds, but the contrast between her and those others is sharp and unmistakable. She has faced previous crises, survived, prevailed. Happy endings in modern drama are rarely successful at a serious level. In The Night of the Iguana, Williams wrote that rare modern dramatic work: a memorable, affirmative play in which the affirmation applies to all the major characters and in which the affirmation is believable. Other major works long fiction: The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, 1950; Moise and the World of Reason, 1975. short fiction: One Arm and Other Stories, 1948; Hard Candy: A Book of Stories, 1954; The Knightly Quest: A Novella and Four Short Stories, 1967; Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed: A Book of Stories, 1974; Collected Stories, 1985. poetry: In the Winter of Cities, 1956; Androgyne, Mon Amour, 1977; The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams, 2002. screenplays: The Glass Menagerie, 1950 (with Peter Berneis); A Streetcar Named Desire, 1951 (with Oscar Saul); The Rose Tattoo, 1955 (with Hal Kanter); Baby Doll, 1956; The Fugitive Kind, 1960 (with Meade Roberts; based on Orpheus Descending); Suddenly Last Summer, 1960 (with Gore Vidal); Stopped Rocking and Other Screenplays, 1984. nonfiction: Memoirs, 1975; Where I Live: Selected Essays, 1978; Five O’Clock Angel: Letters of Tennessee Williams to Maria St. Just, 1948-1982, 1990; The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, 2000. Bibliography Bloom, Harold, ed. Tennessee Williams. Modern Critical Views series. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. This collection of critical essays carries an introduction by Bloom that places Williams in the dramatic canon of American drama and within the psychological company of Hart Crane and Arthur Rimbaud. Authors in this collection take traditional thematic and historical approaches, noting Williams’s “grotesques,” his morality, his irony, his work in the “middle years,” and the mythical qualities in his situations and characters. Kolin, Philip, ed. Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998. A helpful collection of twenty-three essays devoted to indi-

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vidual plays except the last three, which are devoted to Williams’s fiction, poetry, and films respectively. Contains three indices that allow the reader easily to locate specific information. Leverich, Lyle. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York: Crown Publishers, 1995. This is a sympathetic and meticulous study of Williams’s life and work concluding with the theatrical triumph of The Glass Menagerie in 1945. Divided into five parts, this massive work contains a detailed genealogy of Tennessee Williams; numerous photographs of Williams, his ancestors and friends; and a useful index. Although Leverich felt that writing a biography of someone as sensitive and prickly as Williams was akin to “performing an autopsy on a living person,” he admirably fulfills Williams’s request to “report, in truth, his cause aright” even as he presents divergent views of this complex man. Of particular interest are the opening pages on the writer’s death by strangulation in New York’s Hotel Elysee and his convoluted relations with his parents and sister, Rose. Rader, Dotson. Tennessee: Cry of the Heart. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985. The title and opening, explaining the author’s first encounter with a “flipped out” Williams, give a flavor to this chatty biography. Although it does not have the virtue of notes or a scholarly biography, it does have the appeal of a firsthand account, filled with gossip and inside information, to be taken for what it is worth. Rondane, Matthew C., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997. A collection of fourteen essays using a variety of critical approaches with an introduction by the editor summarizing each. Particularly useful are Jaqueline O’Connor’s survey of Williams scholarship, “Words on Williams: A Bibliographic Essay,” and R. Barton Palmer’s “Hollywood in Crisis: Tennessee Williams and the Evolution of the Adult Film.” Contains a chronology from Williams’s birth in 1911 to 1996, seven photographs of major actors in scenes from stage productions of the plays and a selected bibliography. Spoto, Donald. The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. Boston: Little, Brown, 1985. Spoto’s literary biography begins with a description of Williams’s parents, Cornelius and Edwina. Beginning with early separation, the Williams couple gave their children a stormy beginning in life. Spoto’s lively chronicle details in ten chapters Williams’s encounters with such diverse influences as the Group Theatre, Frieda and D. H. Lawrence, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Fidel Castro, Hollywood stars, and the homosexual and drug subcultures of Key West. Forty-two pages of notes, bibliography, and index. Williams, Dakin, and Shepherd Mead. Tennessee Williams: An Intimate Biography. New York: Arbor House, 1983. One of the more bizarre duos in biographical writing, Williams (Tennessee’s brother) and Mead (Tennessee’s childhood friend) produce a credible biography in a highly readable, well-indexed work. Their account of the playwright also helps to capture his almost schizophrenic nature. A solid index and extensive research assist the serious scholar and general reader. Windham, Donald. As if . . . Verona, Italy, 1985. This reminiscence of Williams’s onetime friend portrays the writer as a man of bizarre contradictions and reveals in telling vignettes the downward spiral of his self-destructive lifestyle. Jacob H. Adler, updated by Rebecca Bell-Metereau and Robert G. Blake

August Wilson August Wilson

Born: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; April 27, 1945 Principal drama • Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, pr. 1984, pb. 1985; Fences, pr., pb. 1985; Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, pr. 1986, pb. 1988; The Piano Lesson, pr. 1987, pb. 1990; Two Trains Running, pr. 1990, pb. 1992; Three Plays, pb. 1991; Seven Guitars, pr. 1995, pb. 1996; Jitney, pr. 2000, pb. 2001; King Hedley II, pr. 2001 Other literary forms • Although August Wilson is known primarily for his plays, some of his poetry was published in black literary journals, such as Black World, in 1969. He published a teleplay, The Piano Lesson, in 1995, and a nonfiction work, The Ground on Which I Stand, in 2000. Achievements • Critics have hailed August Wilson as an authentic voice of African American culture. His plays explore the black experience historically and in the context of deeper metaphysical roots in African culture. Since 1984, his major plays have been successfully produced by regional theaters and on Broadway; in fact, he is the first African American playwright to have had two plays running on Broadway simultaneously. Wilson has received an impressive array of fellowships, awards, and honorary degrees: the Jerome Fellowship in 1980, the Bush Foundation Fellowship in 1982, membership in the New Dramatists starting in 1983, and the Rockefeller Fellowship in 1984. He has also been an associate of Playwrights Center, Minneapolis, and received the McKnight Fellowship in 1985, the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986, six New York Drama Critics Circle Awards from 1985 to 2001, the Whiting Foundation Award in 1986, the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 1987 (for Fences) and 1990 (for The Piano Lesson), the Tony Award by the League of New York Theatres and Producers (for Fences), the American Theatre Critics Award in 1986, the Outer Circle Award in 1987, and the Drama Desk Award and John Gassner Award in 1987. Wilson’s goals are “to concretize the black cultural response to the world, to place that response in loud action, so as to create a dramatic literature as powerful and sustaining as black American music.” While the form of his plays breaks no new ground, the substance and language produce powerful emotional responses. Rooted in the black experience, Wilson’s plays touch universal chords. Biography • August Wilson was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on April 27, 1945, in the Hill District, a black neighborhood. He was one of six children born to Daisy Wilson from North Carolina, and a German baker, Frederick August Kittel, who eventually abandoned the family. Wilson left school at fifteen when a teacher refused to take his word that a twenty-page paper on Napoleon was his own work. He spent the next few weeks in the library, pretending to be at school. It was through reading, especially all the books he could find in the “Negro” subject section, that Wilson educated himself. Later, he worked at odd jobs and spent time on street corners and at a cigar store called Pat’s Place, listening to old men tell stories. Coming into adulthood during the Black Power movement of the 1960’s, Wilson was influenced by it and participated in the Black Arts movement in Pittsburgh, writing and publishing poetry in black jour1032

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nals. With longtime friend Rob Penny, he founded the Black Horizons Theatre Company in Pittsburgh in 1968. He produced and directed plays, but his efforts at playwriting in those years failed, he later recalled, because he “didn’t respect the way blacks talked” so he “always tried to alter it.” He formed a connection with the Penumbra company in St. Paul and moved there in 1978. It was in this much smaller black community that he learned to regard the “voices I had been brought up with all my life” with greater respect. Married in 1981 to Judy Oliver (he has a daughter, Sakina Ansari, from an earlier marriage), Wilson began to write scripts for the children’s theater of a local science museum. This effort led him to submit his scripts to the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Center in Waterford, Connecticut. His work caught the attention of conference director Lloyd Richards, who was also the dean of the Yale School of Drama and the artistic director of the Yale Repertory Company. Under Richards’s direction, a staged reading of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom was performed in 1982 at the Eugene O’Neill Center, followed by a production at Yale and a Broadway success. The succeeding plays by Wilson followed the same pattern, with intervening production at regional theaters. Wilson eventually dissolved his relationship with Richards and turned to director Marion McClinton to stage Jitney and King Hedley II. Divorced in 1990, Wilson moved to Seattle, Washington, where he continued to write his cycle of plays. He also participated as a dramaturge at the Eugene O’Neill Center when one of his own works was not being produced. After Seven Guitars, Wilson and his co-producer, Ben Mordecai, formed a joint venture called Sageworks, which gave Wilson artistic and financial control of his plays both as a writer and producer. Wilson refined his plays through a series of separate productions, writing and editing through each production’s rehearsal process. Before reaching its New York run, King Hedley II received six regional productions. Wilson married Constanza Romero, and they had a daughter, Azula.

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August Wilson in 1989 (AP/Wide World Photos)

Analysis • Each of August Wilson’s major plays dramatizes the African American experience in a different decade of the twentieth century, and the action of each play is driven by the arrival or presence of a character who has what Wilson calls the “warrior spirit,” the quality that makes a man dissatisfied and determined to change or disrupt the status quo. Each of the plays is affected by Wilson’s feeling for the blues, music that he calls the “flag bearer of selfdefinition” for African Americans. Characters sing the blues, music is called for in scene transitions, and

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the rhythms of the dialogue reflect the blues. His plays are written to be performed on a single setting with action that is chronological. While he writes within the genre of psychological realism, each play displays a different degree of adherence to structure and plotting. His characters, mostly men, are African Americans uncertain of their own places in the world. One of Wilson’s greatest strengths is with language: The authenticity and rhythms of the dialogue and the colorful vitality of metaphor and storytelling connect him to the oral tradition of the African American and African cultures. He discussed in an interview the indirect quality of black speech, with its circling of issues and answers that are not answers. Characters answer the question they think is intended, not necessarily the one that is expressed. This language, in fact, often becomes the unique poetry of his drama. The language is full of implied meanings and dependent on tonal quality for interpretation. Wilson also places increasing emphasis with each play on the superstitions and beliefs that affect his characters. These superstitions seem to come from a mixture of Christianity, ancient African religions, and street wisdom. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom • In Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Wilson uses a historical figure, “Mother of the Blues” singer Ma Rainey, and invents a story around her. The setting is a simultaneous representation of a 1927 recording studio and a bandrehearsal room. Overlooking the studio from the control booth are Ma’s white producer and white agent, their presence and location a graphic symbol of white society’s control over black music. The dialogue seems to meander through silly and inconsequential matters. The underlying seriousness of these matters becomes apparent as the characters reveal their ways of coping with the white world. Ma Rainey plays the prima donna (note the pun in the play’s title) while she acknowledges to her band that, like all black artists, she is exploited. Her music is her “way of understanding life.” Wilson centers her in the play, a dynamic and colorful presence, but the character central to the action is Levee. Levee has that warrior spirit. The tragic irony is that when he lashes out and kills, he kills the only educated band member in the play. His urge for self-sufficiency (to have his own band and make his own music) becomes self-destructive. By application, Wilson suggests that the misplaced rage of his race can result in self-destruction. The grimly serious resolution to this play does not describe the tone of lightness and humor in much that precedes it. It is Levee’s appetite that drives the play, sometimes comically, and it is his frustrated hunger that causes an unnecessary death. Fences • Wilson’s second major work, Fences, won a Pulitzer Prize in Drama as well as Tony Awards for Wilson, the director, and two actors. It centers on the dynamic, volatile character Troy Maxson and takes place primarily in 1957. Troy is the warrior character whose spirit disrupts his own life as well as those of his sons and wife. Often inviting comparison with Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (pr., pb. 1949), the play dramatizes the life of a baseball player prevented from realizing his big-league dreams by the color barrier, overcome too late for him. Fences is about a man’s battle with life and his emotional, sometimes irrational way of facing unfairness, pain, love, and hate. The fence that Troy built around his life, like that built around his home, could neither shut out the world’s injustice nor protect his family or himself from his shortcomings. The final scene occurs after Troy’s death in 1965, when others can express feelings about Troy that were not articulated before. This scene provides a quietly emotional contrast to the intensely alive Troy of the previous eight scenes. It is a necessary scene

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and yet points up the failure of father and son to express directly what they felt in their earlier confrontation. Troy’s brother, Gabriel, whose head injury from the war has made him believe himself to be God’s angel Gabriel, provides a kind of mystical presence. Wilson uses his madness for a theatrically effective closing to the play. When Gabriel discovers that his horn will not blow to open the gates of heaven for Troy, he performs a weird “dance of atavistic signature and ritual” and howls a kind of song to open the gates. This marks the beginning of Wilson’s increasing use of ritual, myth, and superstition in his plays. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone • In Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Wilson reaches farther back into the historical black experience. As in the old blues song of the same title, the brother of the governor of Tennessee, Joe Turner, found and enslaved groups of black men. Herald Loomis, the mysterious central character in this play, was so enslaved in 1901 and not released for seven years. The play dramatizes his search for his wife, which is actually a search for himself. His arrival at a Pittsburgh boardinghouse in 1911 disrupts and disturbs, creating the tension and significance of the drama. Another boardinghouse resident, Bynum, establishes his identity as a “conjure man” or “rootworker” early in the play. Bynum’s search for his “shiny man” becomes a thematic and structural tie for the play. At the end of the first act, during a joyous African call-and-response dance, Loomis has a sort of ecstatic fit, ending with his being unable to stand and walk. Some kind of dramatic resolution must relate Bynum’s vision and Loomis’s quest. It comes in the final scene when wife Martha returns and Loomis learns that his quest is still unrealized. Wilson describes Loomis’s transformation in actions rather than words. His wife does not restore him, nor does her religion restore him. In desperation, he turns a knife on himself, rubs his hands and face in his own blood, looks down at his hands, and says, “I’m standing. My legs stood up! I’m standing now!” It is at this point that he has found his “song of self-sufficiency.” Wilson’s rather poetic stage directions articulate a redemption that Loomis cannot verbalize, risking audience misinterpretation. Bynum’s final line of the play recognizes Loomis as a shiny man, the shiny man who can tell him the meaning of life. The suggestion of a Christ figure is unmistakable, and yet Loomis’s soul is not cleansed through religious belief. He has denied the Christ of the white man, despite Martha’s pleading. His epiphany is in finding himself. Joe Turner has come but he has also gone. Herald Loomis finds his identity in his own African roots, not in the slave identity that the white Joe Turner had given him. The Piano Lesson • With his fourth major play, Wilson crafts a more tightly structured plot. In fact, The Piano Lesson is stronger thematically and structurally than it is in character development. The characters serve to dramatize the conflict between the practical use of a family heritage to create a future, and a symbolic treasuring of that heritage to honor the past. The piano, which bears the blood of their slave ancestors, is the focus of the conflict between Boy Willie and his sister, Berniece. Its exotic carvings, made by their great grandfather, tell the story of their slave ancestors who were sold in exchange for the piano. Its presence in the northern home of Berniece and her Uncle Doaker represents the life of their father who died stealing it back from Sutter. Berniece is embittered and troubled not only by the piano and her father’s death but also by her mother’s blood and tears that followed that death and by the loss of her own husband. In contrast, Boy Willie is upbeat and funny, an optimistic, ambitious, and boyish man who is sure he is right in wanting to sell the piano to buy Sutter’s land.

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He has the warrior spirit. Throughout the play, the presence of Sutter’s ghost is seen or felt. Sutter’s ghost seems to represent the control that the white man still exerts over this family in 1937. Boy Willie chooses to ignore the ghost, to accuse his sister of imagining it, but ultimately it is Boy Willie who must wrestle with the ghost. Wilson has said that this play had five endings because Berniece and Boy Willie are both right. The conflict is indeed unresolved as Boy Willie leaves, telling Berniece that she had better keep playing that piano or he and Sutter could both come back. The lesson of the piano is twofold: Berniece has learned that she should use her heritage, rather than let it fester in bitterness, and Boy Willie has learned that he cannot ignore the significance of this piano, which symbolizes the pain and suffering of all of his ancestors. There is little in the play that deviates from the central conflict. The skill of Wilson’s writing is seen in the interplay of characters bantering and arguing, in the indirect quality of questions that are not answered, and in the storytelling. While characters may serve primarily as symbols and plot devices, they are nevertheless vivid and credible. Two Trains Running • The disruptive character in Wilson’s fifth play is Sterling, but the theme of Two Trains Running, set in 1969, is found in the character Memphis, the owner of the restaurant in which the action occurs. Memphis came north in 1936, driven away by white violence. He has always meant to return and reclaim his land. In the course of the play, he learns that he has to go back and “pick up the ball” so as not to arrive in the end zone empty handed. He must catch one of those two trains running south every day. He must not surrender. The major characters in the play represent varying degrees of tenacity. Wilson skillfully builds a plot around two threads: Memphis’s determination to get the city to pay his price for his property, and Sterling’s determination to find a place for himself and gain the love of Risa. Hambone is a crazy character, driven mad almost ten years ago when the butcher Lutz across the street refused to pay him a ham for doing a good job of painting his fence. Hollaway, a commentator character, observes that Hambone may be the smartest of them all in his refusal to give up—each day going to Lutz and asking for his ham. The unfortunate fact is, though, that his life has been reduced to this one action; all he can say is “I want my ham. He gonna give me my ham.” Risa, a woman determined not to be dependent on a sexual attachment, has scarred her own attractive legs to make herself less desirable. In spite of herself, she is attracted to the vitality and optimism of Sterling, and Sterling is most tenacious of all. His warrior spirit has landed him in prison and may do so again, but his zeal and good humor are compelling. The constant reminders and presence of death give resonance to the lives and efforts of these people. When the play opens, the Prophet Samuel has already died and the offstage mayhem surrounding the viewing of his body is evident. Characters talk about several other deaths, and no sooner is Prophet Samuel buried than Hambone is discovered dead (again offstage). The reactions to his death make up the ending of the play. Memphis and Sterling, trusting in the prophecies of the 322-year-old seer Aunt Ester, both triumph. Sterling runs across the street, steals a ham, and presents it to Mr. West, the undertaker, to put in Hambone’s coffin. This final flourish of the play is an assertion of character identity and life. Two Trains Running may be Wilson’s most accomplished work in blending character, plot, and theme. Seven Guitars • Two Trains Running was followed in 1995 by Seven Guitars. Set in the 1940’s, it tells the tragic story of blues guitarist Floyd Barton, whose funeral opens the

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play. The action flashes back to recreate the events of Floyd’s last week of life. Floyd had arrived in Pittsburgh to try to get his guitar out of the pawn shop and to persuade his former lover, Vera, to return with him to Chicago. A record he made years earlier has suddenly gained popularity, and he has been offered the opportunity to record more songs at a studio in Chicago. The play’s central conflicts are Floyd’s struggle to move forward in his musical career and his personal strife with Vera and his band mates. A subplot centers on Floyd’s friend Hedley and his deteriorating physical and mental health as his friends attempt to place him in a tuberculosis sanitarium. The play contains some of Wilson’s familiar character types, including the mentally aberrant Hedley; the troubled-by-the-law young black male protagonist, Floyd; the capable and independent woman, Louise; and the more needy, younger woman, Ruby. It also contains elements of music, dance, story telling, violence, and food. Jitney • Wilson reworked an earlier, short play Jitney. Becker, a retired steel-mill worker, runs a jitney station, serving the unofficial taxi needs of the black community of Pittsburgh’s Hill district during early autumn of 1977. The jitney drivers are a rich collection of troubled but hard-working men. The station offers the men a living and a sense of independence that is threatened by the city’s plans to tear down the neighborhood in the name of urban renewal. Becker also faces a personal crisis. His son, Booster, is about to leave prison after serving twenty years for murdering his well-todo white girlfriend. Father and son have not spoken for two decades. Becker is bitter that his son threw away a promising career, and Booster sees his father’s lifetime of hard work and submissiveness to white landlords and bosses as demeaning. Father and son never reconcile, but they indirectly attempt to redeem themselves to each other. Becker decides to organize the jitney drivers and fight the urban renewal. Yet, just as Becker begins the move to resistance, he falls victim to his rigorous work ethic and dies unexpectedly. As the dispirited drivers praise his father, Booster begins to respect his father’s accomplishments and prepares to carry on Becker’s mission to save the jitney station. King Hedley II • King Hedley II takes place in the back yard of a few ramshackle houses in the Hill District of Pittsburgh in 1985. Its protagonist, King Hedley II, is a petty thief and a former convict engaged in selling stolen refrigerators. Believing that he is being held back while everybody else is moving forward, Hedley dreams of a better life. His partner in crime is a shady character named Mister. Hedley’s wife, Tonya, is pregnant with a child she does not want to raise in the rough life she knows. Hedley’s mother, Ruby, is a former jazz singer who is reunited with an old lover, the con man Elmore. The next-door neighbor, Stool Pigeon, is a crazy old man who stacks old newspapers in his hovel. He is the play’s mystic messenger who buries a dead cat in the backyard and brings to its grave various tokens that he believes will bring the animal back to one of its nine lives. The yard, barren except for weeds and garbage, is a major symbol. Hedley tires to raise plants in it, even fencing off a small patch with barbed wire. However, like Hedley’s efforts to better himself, the attempt to grow something is doomed. Other major works nonfiction: The Ground on Which I Stand, 2000. teleplay: The Piano Lesson, 1995 (adaptation of his play).

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Bibliography Bigsby, C. W. E. Modern American Drama, 1945-1990. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992. The author interviewed Wilson for pertinent biographical data and includes some in-depth analysis of the first four plays. Bogumil, Mary L. Understanding August Wilson. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. Bogumil provides readers with a comprehensive view of the thematic structure of Wilson’s plays, the placement of his plays within the context of American drama, and the distinctively African American experiences and traditions that Wilson dramatizes. Brustein, Robert. Reimagining American Theatre. New York: Hill and Wang, 1991. Brustein, critic and former artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre before Lloyd Richards, is one of the few negative voices criticizing Wilson’s drama. He finds particular fault with the mechanisms and symbols of The Piano Lesson and hopes that Wilson will work to develop the poetic rather than historical aspects of his talent. Elkins, Marilyn, ed. August Wilson: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1994. The essays investigate such thematic, artistic, and ideological concerns as Wilson’s use of the South and the black human body as metaphors; his collaboration with Lloyd Richards; the influences of the blues and other writers on his work; his creative method; and his treatment of African American family life. Herrington, Joan. I Ain’t Sorry for Nothin’ I Done: August Wilson’s Process of Playwriting. New York: Limelight Editions, 1998. Herrington traces the roots of Wilson’s drama to visual artists such as Romare Bearden and to the jazz musicians who inspire and energize him as a dramatist. She goes on to analyze his process of playwriting—how he brings his experiences and his ideas to stage life—by comparing successive drafts of his first three major plays. Hill, Holly. “Black Theatre into the Mainstream.” In Contemporary American Theatre, edited by Bruce King. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Hill’s analysis of the plays sets them in the context of their period. Nadel, Alan. May All Your Fences Have Gates. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994. Nadel deals individually with five major plays and also addresses issues crucial to Wilson’s canon: the role of history, the relationship of African ritual to African American drama, gender relations in the African American community, music and cultural identity, the influence of Romare Beardern’s collages, and the politics of drama. Theater 9 (Summer/Fall, 1988). This special issue includes the script of The Piano Lesson with an earlier version of the ending, production photographs, and two informative essays. The articles “Wrestling Against History” and “The Songs of a Marked Man” explore Wilson’s themes, especially the importance of myths and superstitions. Wolfe, Peter. August Wilson. London: Macmillan, 1999. A comprehensive analysis of Wilson’s theater. Wolfe sees the dramatist as exploding stereotypes of the ghetto poor, through his juxtapositions of the ordinary and the African American surreal, which evoke anger, affection, and sometimes hope. Sally Osborne Norton, updated by Rhona Justice-Malloy

Lanford Wilson Lanford Wilson

Born: Lebanon, Missouri; April 13, 1937 Principal drama • So Long at the Fair, pr. 1963 (one act); Home Free!, pr. 1964, pb. 1965 (one act); The Madness of Lady Bright, pr. 1964, pb. 1967 (one act); No Trespassing, pr. 1964 (one act); Balm in Gilead, pr., pb. 1965 (two acts); Days Ahead: A Monologue, pr. 1965, pb. 1967 (one scene); Ludlow Fair, pr., pb. 1965 (one act); The Sand Castle, pr. 1965, pb. 1970 (one act); Sex Is Between Two People, pr. 1965 (one scene); This Is the Rill Speaking, pr. 1965, pb. 1967 (one act); The Rimers of Eldritch, pr. 1966, pb. 1967 (two acts); Wandering: A Turn, pr. 1966, pb. 1967 (one scene); Untitled Play, pr. 1967 (one act; music by Al Carmines); The Gingham Dog, pr. 1968, pb. 1969; The Great Nebula in Orion, pr. 1970, pb. 1973 (one act); Lemon Sky, pr., pb. 1970; Serenading Louie, pr. 1970, pb. 1976 (two acts); Sextet (Yes), pb. 1970, pr. 1971 (one scene); Stoop: A Turn, pb. 1970; Ikke, Ikke, Nye, Nye, Nye, pr. 1971, pb. 1973; Summer and Smoke, pr. 1971, pb. 1972 (libretto; adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s play; music by Lee Hoiby); The Family Continues, pr. 1972, pb. 1973 (one act); The Hot l Baltimore, pr., pb. 1973; Victory on Mrs. Dandywine’s Island, pb. 1973 (one act); The Mound Builders, pr. 1975, pb. 1976 (two acts); Brontosaurus, pr. 1977, pb. 1978 (one act); Fifth of July, pr., pb. 1978 (two acts); Talley’s Folly, pr., pb. 1979 (one act); A Tale Told, pr. 1981 (pb. as Talley and Son, 1986; two acts); Thymus Vulgaris, pr., pb. 1982 (one act); Angels Fall, pr., pb. 1982 (two acts); Balm in Gilead and Other Plays, pb. 1985; Say deKooning, pr. 1985, pb. 1994; Sa-Hurt?, pr. 1986; A Betrothal, pr., pb. 1986 (one act); Burn This, pr., pb. 1987; Dying Breed, pr. 1987; Hall of North American Forests, pr. 1987, pb. 1988; A Poster of the Cosmos, pr. 1987, pb. 1990 (one act); Abstinence: A Turn, pb. 1989 (one scene); The Moonshot Tape, pr., pb. 1990; Eukiah, pr., pb. 1992; Redwood Curtain, pr. 1992, pb. 1993; Twenty-one Short Plays, pb. 1993; Collected Works, pb. 1996-1999 (3 volumes; Vol. 1, Collected Plays, 1965-1970; Vol. 2, Collected Works, 1970-1983; Vol. 3, The Talley Trilogy); Lanford Wilson: The Early Plays, 19651970, pb. 1996; Day, pr., pb. 1996 (one act); A Sense of Place: Or, Virgil Is Still the Frogboy, pr. 1997, pb. 1999; Sympathetic Magic, pr. 1997, pb. 2000; Book of Days, pr. 1998, pb. 2000; Rain Dance, pr. 2000 Other literary forms • Besides stage plays, Lanford Wilson has written works in a number of other dramatic forms: several teleplays, The Migrants (1973, with Tennessee Williams), Sam Found Out: A Triple Play (1988), and Taxi! (1978, not to be confused with the television series Taxi ); two unproduced screenplays, “One Arm,” written in 1969 and based on a Williams story, and “The Strike,” based on the book Last Exit to Brooklyn (1988), by Hubert Selby, Jr.; and the libretto for Lee Hoiby’s opera Summer and Smoke (1971), adapted from the Williams play. Achievements • Lanford Wilson’s plays have been produced throughout the United States and abroad; several have appeared on television, and The Hot l Baltimore was adapted as a television series. Wilson is the winner of numerous awards: a Vernon Rice Award (1967); Obies for The Hot l Baltimore, The Mound Builders, and Sympathetic Magic; a Pulitzer Prize and a New York Drama Critics Circle Award (as best-of-best) for Talley’s Folly; the American Theater Critics Award for best play for Book of Days; the Brandeis 1039

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University Creative Arts Award, and fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations. He was admitted to the Theatre Hall of Fame in 1995, and the Missouri Writers Hall of Fame in 1997. Biography • Lanford Eugene (“Lance”) Wilson was born April 13, 1937, in Lebanon, Missouri, the son of Ralph Eugene and Violetta Tate Wilson. When he was five years old, his parents separated (and later divorced), his father leaving for California, his mother taking Lanford to Springfield, Missouri, where she worked in a garment factory and he attended school. When he was thirteen, his mother married again—a dairy inspector from Ozark, Missouri—and they moved to a farm. Wilson attended Ozark High School, where he painted, acted, and was on the track team. Although his childhood was relatively happy, Wilson never quite recovered from his parents’ marital breakup. At eighteen, after a term at Southwest Missouri State College, he headed for California for a reunion with his father, by then a San Diego aircraft-factory worker with a new wife and two younger sons. The reunion, painfully mirrored in Wilson’s autobiographical play Lemon Sky, was unsuccessful: Wilson and his father were thoroughly incompatible. After a year in his father’s household, during which he worked at his father’s factory and attended San Diego State College, Wilson left for Chicago. He lived for six years in Chicago, where he worked as an artist in an advertising agency, studied playwriting at the University of Chicago, and wrote his first plays (none produced). In 1962, Wilson moved to New York, worked as an office clerk—in a furniture store, at the Americana Hotel, and in the subscription office of the New York Shakespeare Festival—and surveyed the theatrical scene. He was disgusted by Broadway but stunned by an Off-Off-Broadway performance of Eugène Ionesco’s The Lesson at Caffé Cino, a coffeehouse theater in Greenwich Village. Soon Wilson began waiting tables and writing plays for Caffé Cino: His first play produced was So Long at the Fair, in 1963, and he achieved his first success in 1964 with The Madness of Lady Bright (which was given 250 performances Off-Off-Broadway). In 1966, Wilson had his first OffBroadway success with The Rimers of Eldritch. Wilson’s rise had been swift, but then he began experiencing some setbacks. In 1967, he lost his home base at Caffé Cino when Joe Cino, the owner-manager, committed suicide; in 1968, The Gingham Dog failed on Broadway, followed in 1970 by Lemon Sky. After the failure of The Gingham Dog, Wilson stopped writing for a time. He got back into playwriting by first doing mundane jobs for the Circle Repertory Company, which he had recently cofounded with actress Tanya Berezin, actor Rob Thirkield, and director Marshall W. Mason. In 1973, that company produced The Hot l Baltimore, and Wilson’s career was back on track. All of his major plays during the following decade were initially produced by them and directed by Mason. Over his career, Wilson has collaborated with Mason on nearly forty productions, and he has continued to prefer working with regional theater companies, even after the Broadway success of Talley’s Folly. In the late 1990’s he accepted a commission to write a play for former Circle Repertory Company member Jeff Daniels, executive director of the Purple Rose Theatre in Chelsea, Michigan. That play, Book of Days, was called his best in twenty years and was followed in 2001 with Rain Dance, also produced at the Purple Rose. Analysis • During his first period of playwriting (1963-1972), Lanford Wilson struggled to learn his trade—mainly in the convivial atmosphere of Off-Off-Broadway,

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where it did not matter if sometimes audiences did not show up. His plays from this period, mostly one-act dramas, are clearly apprentice work. They contain echoes of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and the Theater of the Absurd. Experiments include the use of overlapping and simultaneous speeches, free-floating time sequences, and characters who are figments of the main character’s imagination. Perhaps the most effective of the plays from this decade are Home Free!, about a bizarre, incestuous relationship between brother and sister; The Madness of Lady Bright, about “a screaming preening queen” losing his beauty to middle age; and two impressionistic “montage” works that draw on Wilson’s small-town Missouri background: This Is the Rill Speaking and The Rimers of Eldritch. With the exception of The Rimers of Eldritch, a two-act play, Wilson had trouble sustaining longer plays during his apprentice decade; his longer works of this period tend to be uneven, diffuse, almost plotless. Their subject matter provides the main interest. Balm in Gilead, set in and around an all-night café on Upper Broadway, pictures the New York City subculture of pimps, prostitutes, pushers, and users. The Gingham Dog, financially unsuccessful but favorably reviewed when it opened on Broadway, portrays the rancorous breakup of an interracial marriage. Lemon Sky is autobiographical—about a young man’s efforts to reunite with his father, who fled years before and is rearing a second family in Southern California. As he gained experience, Wilson’s work became more substantial in every sense: His mature plays are generally longer, more conventional, more realistic, and more successful than those of the decade of his apprenticeship. Wilson’s breakthrough was with The Hot l Baltimore, an Off-Broadway success (with 1,166 performances) produced in 1973. The Hot l Baltimore shows the playwright in control of his material, displays his sense of humor, and illustrates the format on which Wilson has relied (in lieu of plot) with repeated success—an updating of the old parlor or weekend drama that brings together a group of disparate characters in an interesting setting (usually threatened, usually around a holiday) and allows them to interact. Other plays falling into this format are The Mound Builders, Fifth of July, Angels Fall, Talley and Son (a revised version of the 1981 A Tale Told ), Burn This, and Book of Days. Even the Pulitzer Prize-winning Talley’s Folly, a romantic tour de force with only two characters, repeats the format on a smaller scale. Wilson reveals one source of this recurring device in his 1984 translation of Anton Chekhov’s Tri sestry (pr., pb. 1901; Three Sisters, 1920). The public has been accurate in judging The Hot l Baltimore, Talley’s Folly, and Burn This the best of Wilson’s plays: They are the most tightly knit and evenly written, though some critics find them marred by sentimentality. The Mound Builders, his most ambitious work, is Wilson’s favorite, but it shares, with Fifth of July and Angels Fall, a tendency toward rambling, uneven dialogue that is witty one moment and dull the next. Angels Fall, in particular, is burdened with intellectual baggage, something not found in Wilson’s early work. One simply does not look for highly structured, suspenseful plots from Wilson (the description “tightly knit,” used above, is only relative), though his plays usually rise to a climax, even if it is sometimes forced or artificial. Rather, Wilson’s work is significant for its characters and themes. His plays contain the greatest menagerie of characters in contemporary American drama—drag queens, freaks, prostitutes, academics, priests—for the most part likable because Wilson has a special sympathy for the losers and lost of society (a category that, in his work, includes almost everybody). Wilson does not really need intellectual baggage, because his characters carry his themes much more powerfully: In the world of Wilson’s plays, only “angels fall” because his

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characters are already down—but never out. This sense of humanity is Wilson’s most sterling quality. Heartland dramas • Wilson represents the most recent stage of an American cultural phenomenon that could be aptly termed “the heartland drama.” Wilson’s predecessor and fellow Missourian Mark Twain celebrated American innocence; Wilson mourns its loss. The loss occurred precisely on August 6, 1945, when Harry S. Truman, the presidential Huck Finn, ordered that the atomic bomb be dropped on Hiroshima. The United States had been trying hard for a long time to lose its innocence, but once it was gone, the nation regretted its loss. Apparently, the famed innocence had been the source of American wholeness, of Fourth of July optimism, of childlike wonder. Wilson centered his version of this American heartland drama on the family, where, according to Sigmund Freud, all the history of the world is played out. It is in the family, once the bastion of American innocence, that signs of the disintegration are most noticeable and its effects most far-reaching, and it is there that wholeness must be restored. Longing for the old innocence is expressed in Wilson’s plays through titles that sound as if they are from nursery rhymes or children’s games (some are). It is also expressed through the constant efforts to mend splintered families or to construct surrogate families. Yet the longing and the efforts are mostly in vain: The nursery-rhyme titles are mockeries, and the versions of home and family depicted are little better than cruel parodies. Extreme examples can be found in Home Free!, in which a brother and sister, huddled in their apartment in an attempt to shut out the world, play husband-wife and father-mother; in The Madness of Lady Bright, in which the fading drag queen Lady Bright, lonely in his apartment, reminisces about former lovers (whose autographs are on the wall), talks with an imaginary “Boy” and “Girl,” and waits in vain for a phone call; and in The Hot l Baltimore, in which the condemned urban hotel of the title is the home of prostitutes and poor retirees. Unfortunately, in modern America, these bizarre examples are only too real. For those seeking a substitute for the American family’s lost wholeness, Wilson has some news: There is very little balm in Gilead, especially if one locates Gilead in such places as the New York City subculture of prostitutes and drug addicts. Ultimately, in Wilson’s work, the American heartland drama is not only played out in the family but also the family itself—real or surrogate—mirrors and becomes a metaphor for the whole society. Such is the case in Fifth of July, where the extended Talley family and its holiday guests mirror the post-Vietnam state of the nation. The older generation is blessedly dead or slightly dotty; the middle generation, now over thirty, is burnt out, subsisting on drugs and memories of Berkeley idealism and sexual entanglements; and the younger generation has a precocious vocabulary and sophistication that leaves little doubt that the era of old-fashioned Fourth of July innocence is finished. Similarly, the surrogate family group (including real families) gathered for an archaeological dig in The Mound Builders mirrors the larger tensions in American society, particularly the tensions between preservation and development. In both plays, the sense of America’s loss—of its values, its history—is acute. The Rimers of Eldritch • In dramatizing America’s loss, Wilson occasionally takes on the tones of an Old Testament prophet. Nowhere is this more the case than in The Rimers of Eldritch, the best example of Wilson’s early experimental work. Reminiscent

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of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (pr., pb. 1938) and Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices (pr. 1953, pb. 1954), though with a different emphasis, The Rimers of Eldritch treats a somewhat worn subject, now a television standard—the hypocrisy of a small town. Just one big down-home family, the town’s citizens close ranks to heap their evil on a poor scapegoat and thereby preserve their appearance of innocence, but the town’s evil remains, its corruption confirmed. Appropriately, the printed play has the following epigraph from Jeremiah (the reference to balm in Gilead appears two verses later): “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved” ( Jeremiah 8:20). The Rimers of Eldritch takes place during one spring, summer, and fall, but the play skips backward and forward in time, from one conversation to another, creating a montage effect rather than presenting a chronological sequence. Less confusing than it sounds, the montage dresses the worn subject in mystery and suspense, ironic juxtapositions, different versions of what happened (thereby mimicking small-town gossip), and a memory-like quality. The town is named Eldritch and, true to the meaning of its name, Eldritch displays a weird collection of small-town characters, descendants of Sherwood Anderson’s midwestern grotesques: farmers; a garage mechanic; a trucker; Cora Groves, owner of the Hilltop Café, who is carrying on with her young and transient lover; Patsy Johnson, prettiest girl at Centerville High, who gets pregnant by the transient lover and arranges a quick marriage to a hometown boy; Skelly Mannor, the town hermit, who goes about peeping into people’s windows and who is suspected, according to an old rumor, of bestiality (boys follow him in the street shouting “Baaa!”); the town hero, a stock-car driver, now deceased, who was impotent and beat women; and a group of gossips who could substitute for the Eumenides. What characterizes the town, however, is not only its individual members but also its collective mentality. As Skelly says, the town’s citizens see what they want to see and think what they want to think, all in the name of good Christian living. The play’s slight, makeshift plot dramatizes this observation. The plot revolves around an innocent fourteen-year-old crippled girl, who dreams of flying like Peter Pan and sowing autumn rime over the town. She compares the rime to sugar, but it turns out to be more like salt. Out of her sexual curiosity, she provokes her equally innocent boyfriend to try to rape her. Skelly happens on the scene and prevents the rape, but a nearby neighbor emerges with his gun and, naturally thinking that Skelly is the molester, kills him. The two “innocents” tell the Skelly-the-molester story to the judge and jury—a story the town is only too ready to believe. As the preacher (who doubles as judge) points out to the accompaniment of hymn singing, the town is to blame for not shooting the fellow sooner. The Hot l Baltimore • Wilson’s roots in the Bible Belt make him sound like the prophet Jeremiah in such plays as Balm in Gilead and The Rimers of Eldritch, but, in his The Hot l Baltimore, they also lead him to discover Mary Magdalene, whom he immediately forgave. An example of Wilson’s mature work and his most popular play, The Hot l Baltimore is a warm and witty comedy—bittersweet, to be sure, but farcical at times. Apparently tired of turning his audiences into pillars of salt straining back toward the lost past, Wilson set out deliberately to entertain in The Hot l Baltimore—and happily succeeded with a realistic, conventional play that even observes the classical unities. The play is set during one twenty-four-hour period (“a recent Memorial Day”)

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in the lobby of a seedy Baltimore hotel. Once an ornate showplace of the railroad era, the Hotel Baltimore is now scheduled for demolition. It is the home of the expected motley assortment of Wilson characters: hotel workers, retirees, transients, and—most notably—three warmhearted prostitutes. Like an extended family, from grandparents down to teenagers, they gather in the lobby to share each other’s company and experiences. The prostitutes, in particular, share some ribald experiences concerning their clients. April observes, “If my clientele represents a cross section of American manhood, the country’s in trouble,” citing as one of the representative samples the fellow who scalds himself in the bathtub. Occasionally these scenes obtrude onstage, as at the hilarious end of act 1, when the outraged but otherwise unhurt Suzy, beaten and locked out of her room by a client, creates a commotion in the lobby by appearing wrapped in her towel and then nude. Beneath the repartee and rough sexual humor, the audience is constantly reminded of the parallel between a troubled United States and the rundown hotel. The hotel’s residents will be losing their home, the workers, within a month, their jobs, and other people with troubles appear: Mrs. Bellotti, whose crazy, thieving, alcoholic son Horse has been kicked out of the hotel and whose diabetic husband has had his leg amputated; Paul Granger III, a refugee from a reform school who is searching for his lost grandfather; and Jackie and Jamie, a sister and brother who bought salty desert land in Utah and now lack money to get their car on the road. All represent typical cases of the American blues, just as the hotel setting represents the transience of American values and society in general. Presiding over this scene, ministering to the troubled in spirit, is the trinity of prostitutes, Suzy, April Green, and the Girl. These angels of mercy provide not only sex but also therapy, laughter, and sympathy. Significantly, they, among all the characters, show the most concern about family ties—about Mr. Bellotti disowning Horse, about Paul Granger III giving up the search for his namesake grandfather, about Jackie’s abandonment of Jamie; they also have the strongest feelings about the scheduled demolition of the hotel and the dispersal of its workers and residents. “We been like a family, haven’t we?” says Suzy. “My family.” She is so broken up that she moves in with a rotten pimp, because she needs “someone; . . . I need love!” The prostitutes have lost their illusions along with their innocence, but they retain their sense of values, their humanity. As the Girl says, “I just think it’s really chicken not to believe in anything!” For Wilson, still mourning the loss of American innocence, the prostitutes were an important discovery: One takes one’s balm, however little there is, wherever one can get it. Talley’s Folly • This philosophy of balm, discovered in The Hot l Baltimore, prevails in Talley’s Folly, Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work. Talley’s Folly introduces two mature misfits who have about given up on love but finally find solace in each other’s arms. As this simple plot suggests, Talley’s Folly, like The Hot l Baltimore, observes the unities, only more so: Matt’s wooing of Sally takes place entirely in an old boathouse (an ornate Victorian structure called Talley’s Folly), and the time required coincides with the playing time (ninety-seven minutes, no intermission). Family is a particularly important consideration in Talley’s Folly, one of an ongoing series of Wilson plays about the Talley family of Lebanon, Missouri (the other plays are Fifth of July and Talley and Son). As in so many Wilson plays, however, here again the families depicted experience friction or breakup. Thirty-one-year-old Sally Talley is the family outcast, first because tuberculosis left her sterile and thus unfit to seal the

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Talley-Campbell family business partnership by marrying Harley Campbell, and second because her political views are anathema to the family, with its conservative smalltown values (she sides with the union against the family’s garment factory and is fired from teaching Sunday School). Forty-two-year-old Matt Friedman, a radical Jewish accountant, seems a likely mate for Sally, satisfying even her family’s exacting requirements (though her brother Buddy runs Matt off with a shotgun). Matt does not even want children: Because the rest of his own family was wiped out in the Holocaust, he has resolved never to be responsible for bringing a child into this world. Before the two can come together, they have to break down each other’s solitary defenses. Matt has been melted down by Sally the summer before, with a few sessions in the boathouse, so now he takes the initiative. The play consists of their love sparring— Matt’s persistence, Sally’s attempts to chase him away, their anger, their jokes and repartee, their reminiscences, and finally their confessions—until Matt wins her hand. A fine vehicle for two good actors, Talley’s Folly shows that, even in a bleak and hurtful world—no place to raise children—one can still find some balm in personal relationships. Talley and Son • The third play in the Talley family cycle, Talley and Son, a revision of the 1981 A Tale Told, is set in Lebanon, Missouri, on July 4, 1944, precisely the same evening as in Talley’s Folly. A darker play than Talley’s Folly, this play is about the financial and other machinations of three generations of Talleys, who, together with the Campbells, have run two of the most profitable businesses in Lebanon: the clothing factory and the bank. Because of the liberal use of plot devices, this story of meanness and greed has often been compared with Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes (pr., pb. 1939). Angels Fall • Lest Wilson be accused of recommending retreat from the world, it should be added that in Angels Fall, he has used his family metaphor to extend the possibilities of reconciliation and hope. In Angels Fall, the surrogate family is a group of travelers taking shelter in a New Mexico mission church from a nearby nuclear accident. The play’s title, perhaps implying that only angels stand tall enough to fall, suggests that Wilson has become reconciled to the loss of American innocence. Here the characters are all forgivably flawed and, in their mutual danger, in their mutual need, lean on one another and show a caring attitude. (Whether a nuclear accident is necessary to bring this about is unclear.) Even if the traditional American family is a dying institution, the play suggests, some of its values are still preserved in the bigger family of humankind—or perhaps in the family of God: What Wilson considers to be the fountainhead of these positive possibilities is implied in the setting (a church) and its presiding official, the genial Father Doherty. Burn This • Burn This, which premiered in January, 1987, is shocking, outrageous, and larger than life. It presents Wilson’s views on art, human sexuality, and love. Like Sally and Matt of Talley’s Folly, the characters Anna and Pale conclude the play as a couple, but here the union may be a mistake. It is a poetic and cataclysmic work, in which art is seen as a sacrament, as an outward sign for inward, often chaotic but exhilarating truths. Redwood Curtain, a disturbing yet compassionate drama that depicts Vietnam veterans eking out primitive lives in the forests of Northern California, is perhaps equally powerful.

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Book of Days • Book of Days was heralded as Wilson’s “comeback” play, his most significant production in two decades, or perhaps in his entire career. The play is set in the small town of Dublin, Missouri, a spiritual sister city to Lebanon, the setting of the Talley family plays. When a Hollywood director named Boyd Middleton arrives in town to direct a community theater production of George Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan, he sets off a chain reaction of events that upset the quiet lives of the other characters. The biblically named Ruth, cast in the role of Joan of Arc, stands up to evil in the form of big business after the mysterious murder of the owner of the local cheese factory. Wilson has returned throughout his career to thinking about the Midwest where he was born. In the Talley family plays and The Mound Builders, he explored Midwest family dynamics, creating families that survived or unraveled after meeting outside forces. In Book of Days, Wilson moves beyond the family unit to ask serious questions about how towns, especially in the Midwest, can preserve their values against the threats of the Christian right and corporate greed. Book of Days echoes elements found in Wilson’s earlier work. Small towns such as Dublin, Missouri, marred by hidden corruption, have appeared in Wilson’s plays since The Rimers of Eldritch. Ruth and Len, who manage to stay happily married because they are loyal to each other and because they have simple and honest dreams, are reminiscent of Sally and Matt of Talley’s Folly. Doubts about the roles of art and artists in healing individuals and communities are raised in Burn This. What is intriguing in Book of Days is the combination of these elements, and the unusual political nature of the underlying conflict. Other major works teleplays: One Arm, 1970; The Migrants, 1973 (with Tennessee Williams); Taxi!, 1978; Sam Found Out: A Triple Play, 1988; Lemon Sky, 1988; Burn This, 1992; Talley’s Folly, 1992. translation: Three Sisters, 1984 (of Anton Chekhov’s play Tri sestry). Bibliography Barnett, Gene A. Lanford Wilson. Boston: Twayne, 1987. The most valuable general study of Wilson. This book carries chapters on all the major plays through Talley and Son. It also includes a family genealogy and a family chronology for the entire Talley clan. Bryer, Jackson R. Lanford Wilson: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1994. This collection includes ten critical articles, covering plays through Burn This. Also includes an introduction and chronology, and two interviews with Wilson. Busby, Mark. Lanford Wilson. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1987. Busby’s brief monograph focuses on how Wilson’s own family history has influenced his dramatic themes of longing for the past and conflict between generations. Literary influences, including Franz Kafka, and the influence of Wilson’s early theater-going experiences, are also explored. Dean, Anne M. Discovery and Invention: The Urban Plays of Lanford Wilson. Rutherford, Md.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995. Written with the cooperation of Wilson, Marshall Mason, and other members of the Circle Repertory Company, this passionately affirming book examines Wilson’s themes and the use of realistic yet poetic language, particularly in Balm in Gilead, The Hot l Baltimore, and Burn This.

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Herman, William. “Down and Out in Lebanon and New York: Lanford Wilson.” In Understanding Contemporary American Drama. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987. Herman’s chapter includes explications of Wilson’s major plays. He praises Wilson for the “delicate poetic language at the heart of his style” and for his “epic encompassment of American experience and mythologies.” Robertson, C. Warren. “Lanford Wilson.” In American Playwrights Since 1945, edited by Philip C. Kolin. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. An accessible reference to primary and secondary sources through 1987. Robertson provides a complete primary bibliography of Wilson’s works and brief discussions entitled “Assessment of Wilson’s Reputation” and “Production History.” The article also includes an informative survey of secondary sources and a complete secondary bibliography. Harold Branam, updated by James W. Robinson, Jr., and Cynthia A. Bily

William Wycherley William Wycherley

Born: Clive(?), near Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England; May 28, 1641(?) Died: London, England; December 31, 1715 Principal drama • Love in a Wood: Or, St. James’s Park, pr. 1671, pb. 1672; The Gentleman Dancing-Master, pr. 1672, pb. 1673 (adaptation of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s play El maestro de danzar); The Country Wife, pr., pb. 1675; The Plain-Dealer, pr. 1676, pb. 1677; Complete Plays, pb. 1967 Other literary forms • Although William Wycherley’s reputation among modern readers rests entirely on his work as a playwright, he wrote poetry as well, most of it in his later years. Twenty-eight years after his last play, he published Miscellany Poems: As Satyrs, Epistles, Love-Verses, Songs, Sonnets, Etc. (1704), a collection of unremarkable pieces on a variety of subjects. The volume has lighter verses, songs of wine and women, but to the reader of the plays, there is matter of perhaps greater interest. Certain poems suggest that the dark vision of the later dramas continued to grow in Wycherley until he despaired of any hope for humanity. Achievements • William Wycherley’s dramatic canon consists of only four plays, and his stature in English letters depends almost entirely on a single work, The Country Wife. In his own day, The Plain-Dealer was his most popular comedy, but more recent criticism has called attention to certain problems with that play that have diminished its reputation. Interestingly, the play’s flaws are a result of Wycherley’s excessiveness in the very quality that makes his dramatic achievement unique. More than his contemporaries, Wycherley deals bluntly (some critics have said crudely) with the tendency of social conventions to corrupt natural human instincts. More specifically, he posits the need of men and women to come together in relationships of love and mutual respect, and he exposes the ills that result when that need is perverted by marriage for purely material reasons. As the real meaning for marriage, the strongest bond between two individuals, becomes infected and weakened by social concerns, so the more casual relationships between men and women suffer corruption as well. Finally, Wycherley’s vision is a world of grotesques, moral cripples, through which a very few good people grope their way in search of honorable relationships. Biography • It is not certain exactly where and when William Wycherley was born. The year may have been 1640 or 1641 and the place Clive in Shropshire or Basing House in Hampshire. His father, Daniel Wycherley, was serving as teller to the Exchequer at the time of William’s birth; later, he served as chief steward to the marquis of Winchester and came under suspicion of embezzlement. In 1655, young Wycherley was sent for education to France, where he became a favorite of Madame de Montausier, who was instrumental in his conversion to Roman Catholicism, although he returned to the Anglican Church in 1660. Wycherley stayed in France for four years, then returned to England and entered Queen’s College at Oxford. He took no degree from Oxford and soon entered the Inner Temple. Law, however, was never a genuine inter1048

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est for him. Court life held far greater appeal, and the ingratiating young man became a favorite of the duchess of Cleveland, King Charles II’s mistress. It was to her that he dedicated his first play, Love in a Wood, which opened in 1671 at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. He wrote only three more plays, and his entire career as a playwright spanned only a relatively few years. In 1678, as a result of ill health, Wycherley was sent to Montpellier for a rest at the expense of Charles II. When Wycherley returned, the king offered him the position of tutor to his son, the young duke of Richmond. The salary of fifteen hundred pounds a year, in addition to a pension when his services were no longer needed, was unusually generous. Unfortunately, Wycherley lost this fine opportunity and royal favor through a rash marriage. One day in 1679, he happened to meet a young woman in a London bookstore looking for a copy of The Plain-Dealer. Wycherley introduced himself to the young woman, who proved to be Countess Laetitia Isabella, daughter of the earl of Radnor and widow of the earl of Drogheda. Shortly after that meeting, they married in secret, but Charles and the duchess of Cleveland soon found out and, furious, banished him from the court. Wycherley’s new wife was ill-tempered and jealous, and her wealth was less than her debts. Their marriage was short-lived and ended with Isabella’s death in 1681. Wycherley fell ever deeper into debt and in 1685 was confined to Fleet Prison, but the new king, James II, who believed that Manly, the protagonist of The Plain-Dealer, was a representation of himself, arranged for Wycherley’s release and partial payment of his debts. The grateful author became a Roman Catholic once more. Wycherley’s later years were rather uneventful. In 1704, he published his Miscellany Poems and began a correspondence with Alexander Pope, who was then only sixteen. In 1715, he married young Elizabeth Jackson, the intent apparently being to deny any inheritance to a despised nephew. “Manly” Wycherley, as he was known after his most popular character, died only eleven days after his wedding. He was buried in St. Paul’s, Covent Garden. Analysis • When read in the sequence of their production on the stage, William Wycherley’s four plays make an interesting study of a dramatist gaining mastery of his art. The early plays display a number of structural flaws and basic problems with dramatizing a story. Through what could only be deliberate experimentation, the several elements of drama are shaped, weighed, and positioned in a variety of ways until a near-perfect formula is achieved in The Country Wife. Love in a Wood • The highest plot line of Love in a Wood, Wycherley’s first play, concerns the adventures and trials of Valentine and Christina, idealized lovers who would seem more at home in a romance than a Restoration comedy of manners. Valentine, who had fled England for France after wounding a man in a duel, has secretly returned and is staying with his friend, Vincent. Ranger, another friend of Vincent, met Christina by chance while investigating the activities of his own mistress, Lydia. Through no fault of her own, Christina has now become the object of Ranger’s desire, and this he has hastened to tell Vincent. Valentine concludes that Christina has been untrue, and five acts of the expected misunderstandings and confusions are needed to convince him that his jealousy is unfounded and to unite the pair in matrimony. A second level of the play concerns the adventures of Vincent and Ranger that do not directly involve Valentine. The fop, Dapperwit, also moves on this level, and together these three gallants generate the witty dialogue and bawdy action expected by a Resto-

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ration audience. The lowest level is occupied by an array of rogues and whores. Central are the efforts of the procuress, Mrs. Joyner, to match a mistress, a husband, and a particular suitor with the old usurer (Alderman Gripe), his sister, and his daughter, respectively. Love in a Wood is much more complex than this simplified summary suggests. Minor characters and story lines clutter the action to such an extent that all but the most attentive viewers must, like the characters, find themselves lost in a wood. The play is obviously the work of a new playwright, one who is still learning the craft. Wycherley knew well all the things that might go into a drama. He knew Ben Jonson and the humors, and he understood his age’s fondness for wit and was himself at least witty enough to satisfy that appetite. He was aware that ideal, romantic love could always find an audience, and he understood the importance of effective dialogue and could write it forcefully and naturally, if not elegantly. Unity, too, he was certain, was one of the several ingredients that a playwright should add to the pot. Conscious attention to all of these elements can be seen in this first play, but also apparent is Wycherley’s failure to understand that a cook need not empty his entire pantry to prepare one dish. Love in a Wood simply tries to do too much. There are too many characters, too many plots. Unity, which should be the natural effect of careful plotting and characterization, is lost in the stew. The rather artificial attempts to build in a kind of unity are obvious. For example, the play begins on the level of the low plot, with Mrs. Joyner being berated by Gripe’s sister, Lady Flippant, for not finding her a rich husband. More low characters are added before the action shifts to the level of the wits, as Ranger and Vincent prepare to seek new love in St. James’s Park. Ranger encounters Christina, and the audience is introduced to the high plot. In only two acts, Wycherley, in sequence from low to high, introduces his principals and plots, but there the neat if obvious organization ends as the action shifts among characters and levels quickly and too often without clear purpose. Another and again only partially successful unifying device is the use of certain key characters as links between the three major plot levels. Both Vincent and Ranger serve to tie the world of Valentine and Christina to that of the wits; Ranger is actually the catalyst for the action involving the ideal lovers. Dapperwit exists in a limbo between the wits and the low characters. He does keep company with Vincent and Ranger but is clearly more fop than wit, and unlike them, his existence affects but little the world of Valentine and Christina. Dapperwit is much more at home with Mrs. Joyner and Lady Flippant, and on this level he does help to move the action. Thus, the low is directly linked to the middle and the middle to the high. There is still, however, a quite obvious gap between the high and the low; no single character links the extremes. Construction and theme cannot be separated, and Wycherley’s failure to achieve effective unity of design is reflected in his ambiguous message. Happy marriage based on ideal love appears possible. Valentine and Christina exist in the real world of Restoration London, and their love survives nicely in that world, but there, too, live Gripe, Flippant, and Dapperwit, and their message must leave the audience quite confused as to what ideal love is really all about. The Gentleman Dancing-Master • Wycherley’s second play, The Gentleman DancingMaster, adapted from Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s El maestro de danzar (wr. 1651), suggests that he was aware of the problems with Love in a Wood, but that he was unsure as to how to resolve them, for The Gentleman Dancing-Master is the pendulum at its oppo-

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site extreme. While Love in a Wood has three major plot levels and a host of minor intrigues and adventures, The Gentleman Dancing-Master has only one story to tell, and this it does with a cast of major characters only half the size of that of the first play. Hippolita, the fourteen-year-old daughter of Mr. Formal, is unhappily engaged to Mr. Paris, her cousin and an absurd Gallophile. Mr. Formal, almost as absurd in his devotion to Spanish manners and fashion, would do all in his power to preserve his daughter’s virtue, and with the help of his widowed sister, Mrs. Caution, keeps her under careful watch. Hippolita, however, is smarter than the lot of them, and, with the unwitting help of Paris, she manages to conduct an affair with a young gallant, Mr. Gerrard, who at her suggestion poses as a dance instructor. The lovers plan an elopement, but Hippolita’s doubts about Gerrard’s motive—love or her money—and assorted other diversions postpone the nuptials until the end. In his first play, Wycherley had aimed at too many targets. The Gentleman DancingMaster aims at only one, a broad, comedic effect assisted by a large dose of farce. Wycherley himself was less than proud of this work as an indicator of his real literary skill, and critics have generally agreed that it has little to admire. First, there is the problem of the genre itself. Farce, while very popular with Restoration audiences, was held in low esteem by scholars. Truth to life was the principal criterion by which a play should be judged; so said most of the great English critics, including John Dryden, the leading dramatist, poet, and critic of the age. Believability is the least concern of a farce, for everything that contributes to a believable effect—fine characterization, realistic dialogue, tight plot development—must yield to the hilarity of the episode. Moreover, as farces go, The Gentleman Dancing-Master has been judged by many modern critics as especially uninventive. To be sure, Wycherley’s second play would never be studied as an example of Restoration comedy at its finest. Still, it is not without merit, and a brisk stage rendition reveals strengths that are lost in a reading. For example, the single plot line tends to hold together the broadly comic episodes, achieving a sense of unity that is most often lacking in farce. The play is about Hippolita’s efforts to find a suitable husband, and a Hippolita well acted can keep that design always before the audience. Hippolita, certainly one of Wycherley’s more interesting characters, is responsible for adding a rather larger dash of satire than is commonly found in farce, not so large a dash as to make the flavor noticeably bitter—after all, she does get her man—but still enough that the reader of Wycherley’s later, darker comedies can look back to The Gentleman Dancing-Master and notice a hint of what was to come. In this glimpse of Restoration society, a fourteen-year-old girl only recently returned home from boarding school is complete master of the revels. She rejects her father’s choice of a husband, engineers her own courtship, and marries the man she wants, all under her father’s roof and her aunt’s close guard, and neither is aware of what has happened until the closing lines of the play. It is she who invents the dancingmaster fiction and transforms a shallow young man, who is more interested in a dowry than a good marriage, into acceptable husband material. She displays the naïveté and frankness of a child and the insight and cleverness of a mature adult and can move between these extremes in a matter of a few lines. Yet all of this talent and effort is needed to obtain what ideally should be taken for granted: an assurance that the words of the wedding vow will be sincere, that her marriage will be based on mutual love, honesty, and respect. In Wycherley’s world, however, such assurances are difficult to find. Even a child must be devious to accomplish what is right, when her own father and intended husband are themselves prime examples of misrepresentation.

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Mr. Paris, who would be known as Monsieur de Paris, and Mr. Formal, who prefers to be called Don Diego, are as contemptible as they are absurd. Wycherley created the roles for James Nokes and Edward Angel, two of the most famous comic actors of the day. Indeed, Paris’s part is the largest in the play, for it was doubtless Nokes as a French fool that the audience came to see. Both Formal and Paris have rejected what they are, Englishmen, to ape foreign manners: It is small wonder that they are so unaware of Hippolita’s machinations. They have their own lies to live and would rather argue with each other as to whose lie is better than to see the reality of what is happening. That a fourteen-year-old girl with a sense of purpose can manipulate the adult world says little for that world. That the best husband available is a man so easily directed, a man who must be tested for sincerity before deemed acceptable, adds little reason for optimism, and finally that that fourteen-year-old is herself unsure of the true nature of her young man and is after all only adept at fooling fools must bring small reassurance. The Gentleman Dancing-Master is a comedy, a farce, but already the darker shadows have begun to fall. The Country Wife • With his third effort, Wycherley brilliantly overcame the problems of his first two plays. The Country Wife is generally acknowledged as one of the finest comedies of the Restoration, and it is still frequently acted, not so much as a historical curiosity but because it is good theater. The plot is somewhat more complex than that of The Gentleman Dancing-Master, but it is tightly unified by linking characters who have real business in the variety of situations; there is none of the baffling confusion of Love in a Wood. The main action is moved by Horner—who, as his name suggests, delights in making cuckolds of the London husbands. To that end, he has caused the false rumor of his own impotence to be spread about the town; as expected, husbands who would never let their wives near Horner have foolishly relaxed their guard. Lady Fidget, Mrs. Dainty Fidget, and Mrs. Squeamish are among his willing conquests. The adventures of Margery Pinchwife, the title character, form a second but closely related plot. Jack Pinchwife married his country wife because he was hopeful that such a woman would be ignorant of the fashions of the city and the promiscuity of the gallants and ladies. This decision, however, was not motivated by a sense of higher morality; indeed, Pinchwife may well be the most immoral character in the play, for, as his name suggests, his every action is directed by his intense fear of being made a cuckold and by a jealousy that can move him to viciousness. Despite her husband, Margery has learned of the way of the world and is anxious to sample it. She realizes that there are better relationships than that which she enjoys with Pinchwife and so cultivates an affair with Horner. The third plot does not relate quite so directly to the main plot, but the characters and action provide some obvious contrasts that serve to clarify and further comment on the play’s theme. Alithea, Pinchwife’s sister, is engaged to Sparkish. She is an intelligent woman of genuine honor; he is the usual ridiculous fop that so delighted Restoration audiences. Fully aware that her fiancé is a fool, she is resolved to go through with their arranged marriage, though in fact she loves Harcourt, a friend of Horner, and he loves her. At the last, Sparkish’s misunderstanding of Alithea’s part in the typically confusing episodes and intrigues that follow results in a broken engagement and a clear way to her union with Harcourt. While Alithea’s role is a relatively minor and unimpressive one on the stage, she does make a significant contribution to an understanding of Wycherley’s message. Alithea stubbornly insists on behaving honorably in a world where there is no honor. She is obliged by custom and contract to go through with the marriage arranged by

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Pinchwife and respects that obligation, though the union must result in a life of misery and wasted talent for her and in material gain for men who neither need nor deserve it. In Alithea, the audience sees real virtue turned against itself by corrupt marital customs that not only make cuckolds of fools, which may not be so bad, but also make honorable people victims of their own honor, which is intolerable. Still, at the end, it is only Alithea who appears to have a chance for real happiness. Mrs. Pinchwife’s unhappy fate is to return to her husband, while the husbands return to their fool’s paradise, as Horner convincingly reaffirms the lie about his impotency. Before concluding that Wycherley’s message is to proclaim the inevitable rewards that come to virtue, one should remember that he had little choice but to inject some measure of happiness at the ending (the play is a comedy), and that Alithea’s deliverance from Sparkish has nothing to do with the power of virtue. She is freed from the contract by Sparkish’s stupidity and the chance outcome of the intrigues of the other characters. In the world of The Country Wife, honor is as impotent as Horner pretends to be, and if anything is temporarily set right, it is only because of luck. The corruptive power of marriage without love is seen from a different perspective in the title character, Margery Pinchwife. Alithea shows the system’s effect on honor; Margery shows its effect on innocence. She enters the world of fashion a complete ingenue, and so Pinchwife would keep her, but all that is said to her and all that she sees writes on the blank slate of her character. Her jealous husband foolishly describes the pleasures of city life, pleasures to be avoided, and thus awakens her interest in them; he takes her to a play dressed as a man, so that she will not draw the attention of other men, which gives her the inspiration to assume a disguise when she visits Horner. Marlowe it would not be altogether accurate to say that Margery is corrupted, for at the end of the play, her naïve belief that she can exchange Pinchwife for Horner as her husband and live a happily married life ever after shows a character who has really learned nothing of how the system works. She does, indeed, do things that conventional morality would deem wicked, but she is merely aping what she has seen: These are the proper city responses, written on the slate by the characters around her, and against the background of her innocence, their conduct is brought into sharp relief. Hers is rightly the title role, for through her the audience clearly sees the nature of the other characters and the world they have created. There is no happy ending for Margery. Luck does not smile on her; she has not learned the true cunning of Horner that would allow her to make the best of the situation, and she is not one of the fools who can delude themselves with happy lies. She strikes a note at the end that is not quite comedy. Mr. Harry Horner has been attacked by three hundred years of critics as one of the most immoral creations of the Restoration stage. In fact, there is no question of moral or immoral conduct in the high society in which he moves. The clearly moral alternative simply does not exist, and heroes are recognizable only by their superior wit and not at all by their deeds. Thus, though Horner does invent an obscene lie to help him bed other men’s wives, his contempt for his victims manages to make him something more than simply another rake. He has honor of a sort, but certainly not Alithea’s passive honor, not the honor of the martyr. Horner’s honor allows him to use the weapons of the system against itself, and to him is the victory, for, with his lie still intact, he leaves the field strewn with cuckolds. That lie, however, is more than a tool for undoing fools; it is Wycherley’s comment on the society. As the action moves the audience among various couples, it becomes increasingly clear that marriage has nothing to do with love or basic nature. It has become a thing arranged on paper and bought with

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money. Horner’s impotence is a fiction. Ironically, the real sterility exists in the marriages of his victims. The Plain-Dealer • Wycherley’s final and longest play, The Plain-Dealer, confirms what was apparent in The Country Wife: The author had learned well the lessons of plot construction and structural unity. It poses other problems of characterization, however, that make it less a masterpiece than his third effort. The story is simple. There are only two plots, and all the principal characters occupy the same social level and have occasion to interact, thus creating a sense of unity. Captain Manly, the title character, is described by the author as honest, surly, and good-humored. He believes firmly in plain dealing, and the shortage of others who share that belief has led him to misanthropy. After losing his ship in the Dutch wars, Manly has returned to London to seek another vessel. He soon discovers that his mistress, Olivia, thought to be a plain dealer like him, has married another man and appropriated the money Manly had left in her care. Torn between contempt and affection, Manly sends his young aide, Fidelia, to arrange a meeting with Olivia. Instead, Olivia develops a passion for Fidelia, who in fact is a wealthy young heiress disguised as a boy to be near Manly, whom she loves. Manly next discovers that Olivia’s secret husband is Vernish, the only man he really trusted. At Olivia’s home, Manly fights Vernish, takes back the money, and discovers that Fidelia, who lost her wig in the commotion, is really a young woman. He immediately decides that Fidelia is a more proper object for his affection, and together the couple plan their future in the West Indies. In the second plot, Lieutenant Freeman, a young friend of Manly, attempts to marry the cantankerous old Widow Blackacre for her fortune. The widow, whose only delight is in controlling her own business and suing people, wants no part of such an arrangement. When Freeman persuades the widow’s stupid son to accept him as his guardian with full power over his inheritance, Widow Blackacre retaliates by claiming that her son is a bastard and not a legal heir. Freeman, however, discovers this to be a lie, and in order to avoid a charge of perjury, the widow is forced to grant him a handsome annuity. Captain Manly is perhaps the most puzzling character in Restoration drama, and the difficulty of the audience in interpreting him obscures the theme of the play. Like that other famous voyager, Lemuel Gulliver, Manly suffers from misanthropy, and the distorted judgment to which it leads him makes it difficult to judge how representative a spokesperson for the author he is intended to be. Certainly he has qualities to be admired. In relation to the collection of liars and frauds that surrounds him, his utter contempt is justified and his bluntness is refreshing. Still, he recognizes neither hypocrisy nor plain dealing when he sees them, and at times he is as willing to overlook or condone deliberate deception as he is at other times anxious to condemn it. Moreover, he is, like Horner, quite willing to practice a little deception of his own if it suits his purpose. If Manly were not wrong and self-contradictory most of the time, there would be no play, for his mistakes move the plot. His greatest mistake is his choice of Olivia. She mouths the same philosophy of plain dealing as Manly but marries and steals in secret. Fidelia is the cause of another mistake; the plain dealer wanders through five acts unaware that his aide, the person with whom he plots revenge against Olivia, is a woman, and when her gender is discovered, he transfers his affection with embarrassing rapidity. Throughout those five acts, he has remained blind to the fact that Fidelia displays a

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faithfulness and devotion rare in a human being, and when he decides at last to love her, he is equally unconcerned that her disguise, while for a good purpose, was hardly consistent with plain dealing. There is also the problem of Freeman. The lieutenant is really Manly’s best friend, for Vernish turns out to be a villain. In fact, Freeman is the only character who deals plainly with Manly. He quite frankly tells his captain that truth is a handicap in the social world and honestly confesses his motives in the wooing of Widow Blackacre. Manly cannot tolerate the company of most dissemblers and hypocrites, but Freeman is an exception; apparently, honest hypocrites are acceptable. Despite Manly’s several mistakes and inconsistencies, he is still clearly the hero of the play, and Wycherley certainly intended the general audience response to be positive. After all, Manly does have the love of a good woman, who seems willing to suffer almost any humiliation for his sake, and he does have the sincere friendship of Freeman, something of a rogue, to be sure, but a likable rogue. The problems with Manly’s philosophy of plain dealing are more apparent in a careful reading than they are in a lively performance, and his confusing behavior is in part a result of his being made to interact with Freeman and Fidelia, who have characterization problems of their own. Fidelia in almost any other play would present no difficulty. She is an idealized female who would be quite at home in a romance, but she seems strangely out of place in a world that requires a misanthrope for a hero. Moreover, her male disguise, which jars with Manly’s love of plain dealing, is a conventional comedic device that would present no problem on another stage. Freeman, too, is a conventional figure, but confidant to Manly is not a proper job for a lovable rogue, and while Freeman would make an ideal friend for Horner, his role in The Plain-Dealer confuses the message. Wycherley’s final play, then, cannot be judged his best. It may well be, however, his darkest comment on society. Manly is certainly the closest thing to direct spokesperson that Wycherley ever created, and in The Plain-Dealer that spokesperson was finally allowed to comment openly on the world of knaves and fools and hypocrites and whores that had been presented with increasing pessimism in the three earlier plays. The problems with Manly may well be the inevitable culmination of Wycherley’s vision: Society corrupts honor and innocence and infects with confusion even the best efforts of the best people. There is no firm ground on which a plain dealer can stand. Other major work poetry: Miscellany Poems: As Satyrs, Epistles, Love-Verses, Songs, Sonnets, Etc., 1704. Bibliography Markley, Robert. Two Edg’d Weapons: Style and Dialogue in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. This study is concerned with the comic style and language of Sir George Etherege, Wycherley, and William Congreve as the rewriting or adaptation of systems of theatrical signification in predecessors, as the reflection of particular cultural codes of speech and behavior that would be accessible to their audience, and as a comment on the culture of which they and their audience were a part. Bibliography. Marshall, W. Gerald. A Great Stage of Fools: Theatricality and Madness in the Plays of William Wycherley. New York: AMS Press, 1993. Marshall examines the concept of mental illness as it appears in the works of Wycherley. Bibliography and index.

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Thompson, James. Language in Wycherley’s Plays: Seventeenth Century Language Theory and Drama. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1984. Thompson discusses how Wycherley used language in his dramas and relates his usage to the broader context. Bibliography and index. Vance, John A. William Wycherley and the Comedy of Fear. Newark, N.J.: University of Delaware Press, 2000. An analysis of Wycherley and his works with the focus on his treatment of fear. Bibliography and index. Young, Douglas M. The Feminist Voices in Restoration Comedy: The Virtuous Women in the Play-Worlds of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1997. A study of feminism and women in the works of Wycherley, George Etherege, and William Congreve. Bibliography and index. William J. Heim, updated by Genevieve Slomski

William Butler Yeats William Butler Yeats

Born: Sandymount, near Dublin, Ireland; June 13, 1865 Died: Cap Martin, France; January 28, 1939 Principal drama • The Countess Cathleen, pb. 1892, pr. 1899; The Land of Heart’s Desire, pr., pb. 1894; Cathleen ni Houlihan, pr., pb. 1902; The Pot of Broth, pr. 1902, pb. 1903 (with Lady Augusta Gregory); The Hour-Glass, pr. 1903, revised pr. 1912, pb. 1913; The King’s Threshold, pr., pb. 1903 (with Lady Gregory); On Baile’s Strand, pr. 1904, pb. 1905; Deirdre, pr. 1906, pb. 1907 (with Lady Gregory); The Shadowy Waters, pr. 1906, pb. 1907; The Unicorn from the Stars, pr. 1907, pb. 1908 (with Lady Gregory); The Golden Helmet, pr., pb. 1908; The Green Helmet, pr., pb. 1910; At the Hawk’s Well, pr. 1916, pb. 1917; The Player Queen, pr. 1919, pb. 1922; The Only Jealousy of Emer, pb. 1919, pr. 1922; The Dreaming of the Bones, pb. 1919, pr. 1931; Calvary, pb. 1921; Four Plays for Dancers, pb. 1921 (includes Calvary, At the Hawk’s Well, The Dreaming of the Bones, The Only Jealousy of Emer); The Cat and the Moon, pb. 1924, pr. 1931; The Resurrection, pb. 1927, pr. 1934; The Words upon the Window-Pane, pr. 1930, pb. 1934; The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats, pb. 1934, 1952; The King of the Great Clock Tower, pr., pb. 1934; A Full Moon in March, pr. 1934, pb. 1935; The Herne’s Egg, pb. 1938; Purgatory, pr. 1938, pb. 1939; The Death of Cuchulain, pb. 1939, pr. 1949; Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, pb. 1966 (Russell K. Alspach, editor) Other literary forms • Throughout a literary career spanning a half century, William Butler Yeats distinguished himself principally by means of the production of some dozen volumes of lyric poems. His early work is most clearly indebted to the English Romantics, but his commitment to the cause of the Irish Literary Revival, of which he was the leader, and to the management of its showcase, the Abbey Theatre, gave him an increasingly public voice. The poetry of his last twenty years contains his most complex, modernist, and profound work and is often considered the highest achievement in that genre during the twentieth century. Yeats was also the author of a considerable body of essays, reviews, and introductions during a career of literary journalism and theatrical management: Essays and Introductions (1961), Explorations (1962), and Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats (two volumes; 1970, 1976). He collected and edited writings and promoted the work of such collaborators as Lady Augusta Gregory and John Millington Synge. Yeats’s early excursions into short fiction are collected in Mythologies (1959). Autobiographical fragments are found in Autobiographies (1926, 1955) and Memoirs (1972). A Vision (1925, 1937) sets forth a symbolic ordering of history and human character in a manner chiefly useful in explicating his poetry, while The Senate Speeches of W. B. Yeats (1960) gathers some of his public statements from the 1920’s. The Yeats correspondence is partially collected in The Letters of W. B. Yeats (1954) and in Ah, Sweet Dancer: W. B. Yeats, Margot Ruddock— A Correspondence (1970). Achievements • William Butler Yeats’s reputation as one of the masters of modern literature rests mainly on his achievements in poetry, and his dramatic work has long 1057

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been regarded less favorably as “poetry in the theater.” This aspect of his work has, however, been reassessed, and he has come to be regarded as one of the boldest and most original dramatists of the twentieth century. As one of the founders, first playwrights, and lifetime directors of the Abbey Theatre, Yeats was the central figure of the Irish Literary Renaissance. The example of efforts to develop a modern and national literature that drew on Celtic mythology, folklore, and the oral tradition of Ireland provided incentives for the latent talents of such dramatists as Lady Augusta Gregory, John Millington Synge, Padraic Colum, and Sean O’Casey. (© The Nobel Foundation) Although Yeats experimented with several dramatic styles, including peasant realism, farce, and naturalism, his genius found its true métier in a highly sophisticated drama that combined poetry, dance, mask, and symbolic action to represent a world of ideals and pure passion. These plays, borrowed from the tradition of the Japanese No for their form and from Celtic heroic tales for their subjects, expressed Yeats’s views of the primacy of imaginative or spiritual realities of which historical change and the differentiation of human character are emanations. Yeats was therefore at odds with modern realism and with its interest in individual character and social relations: An attitude of detachment and impersonality shaped his works into intensely ritualized expressions, having affinities both with religious drama and absurdism. Yeats lived through revolutions in politics and sensibility. Most important, through a lifelong remaking of dramatic and lyric form and style, Yeats achieved a continuous renovation of his own spirit. Thus, he became one of those primarily responsible for the restoration to Ireland of its cultural heritage, at the same time forging an idiom that the modern world at large considers its own. Biography • The eldest of the four children of John Butler Yeats, the painter, and his wife, Susan Pollexfen, William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount, near Dublin. When he was nine years old, the family moved to London, where he attended the Godolphin School in Hammersmith, taking his holidays with his maternal grandparents in County Sligo in the rural west of Ireland. The Yeats family returned to Dublin in 1880, and the young Yeats thereafter completed his education at the high school and the Metropolitan Art School. During this time, from 1883 to 1886, he came under the influence of George Russell (Æ) and a circle of Dublin mystics, as well as John O’Leary, the aged Fenian leader. These various influences turned the introverted boy from art to literature; from religious confusion (his mother was a Protestant, his father an agnostic) to Theosophy, the

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occult, and Rosicrucianism; and from the Oriental themes of his earliest literary efforts to Irish subjects. Yeats moved back to London in 1888. In 1890, he helped organize the Rhymers Club, where he made friends with many of the leading poets of the time, including Arthur Symons, William Morris, and Lionel Johnson, with whom he founded the Irish Literary Society in 1891. In 1888, Yeats had met Maud Gonne, an actress and activist in behalf of Irish nationalism. A lifelong, unrequited obsession with her (she rejected marriage proposals in 1891 and again in 1916) accounts for the periodic intensification of his enthusiasm for nationalist politics, the subject of much of his poetry and two of his early plays, The Countess Cathleen and Cathleen ni Houlihan. Yeats returned to Dublin in 1896, and in 1899, he collaborated with Edward Martyn and Lady Gregory in founding the Irish Literary Theatre, which in 1904 became the Abbey Theatre. The affairs of this theater—playwriting (peasant and Celtic themes), daily management, the promotion of playwrights with Irish subjects (Synge was the most notable)—were his preoccupations until about 1910. After Ezra Pound introduced him to the Japanese No drama, Yeats wrote his Four Plays for Dancers: formal, symbolic, ritual plays based on Celtic, Irish, and Christian themes. He married Georgina Hyde-Lees in 1917 and, discovering her capacities as a medium, revived his interest in Spiritualism. With her assistance, he produced the systematized A Vision, which illuminates much of his mature drama and poetry. The couple lived in Dublin and at Thoor Ballylee, a restored Norman tower in County Galway, and had two children. During the last twenty-five years of his life, Yeats produced his most mature work in poetry, prose, and drama. He was appointed a member of the senate of the Irish Free State from 1922 to 1928, lectured widely in Europe and the United States, and received widespread recognition, including honorary doctorates and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. In 1932, along with George Bernard Shaw and Æ, he founded the Irish Academy of Letters, and in 1936, he edited the controversial Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Failing health forced him to abandon Thoor Ballylee, and in the 1930’s, he spent progressively more of each year in Italy and France. In 1939, shortly after completing his last play, The Death of Cuchulain, he died in the French Riviera and was temporarily buried there. His remains were returned to Drumcliff, County Sligo, his grandfather’s parish, in 1948. Analysis • William Butler Yeats’s reputation justly rests on his achievements in poetry, yet a considerable portion of that work is written for two or more voices and, therefore, is dramatic. Indeed, his first literary compositions were long dramatic poems, and throughout his life, he continued to publish his plays and poems side by side. Yeats believed that the language of poetry best represented imaginative reality, the life of the soul, or the introspective or subjective consciousness, as opposed to the spirit of science, the modern, extroverted age, the objective consciousness that draws its identity from external circumstances and that finds its appropriate expression in dramatic realism. Therefore, throughout a career as a dramatist consisting of four distinct phases, Yeats’s sympathies remained mystical, Symbolist, and removed from the mainstream of popular drama. Nevertheless, he is one of the genuinely original dramatists of the twentieth century, with influences on verse drama and the work of Samuel Beckett. The Countess Cathleen • When Yeats joined talents and ambitions with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn to form the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899, his first contribu-

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tions to the venture were The Countess Cathleen and Cathleen ni Houlihan. The former is a rather static verse drama in which a heroic native aristocrat sells her soul to merchantdemons in order to save the starving peasants. The play aroused controversy over its doctrinal content in Roman Catholic Ireland, and its author’s doughty defense of independence in artistic and patriotic self-expression established a pattern that was often to repeat itself. Cathleen ni Houlihan • Yeats’s most dramatically successful early work, however, is Cathleen ni Houlihan, one of several peasant plays that Yeats wrote. The play depicts in realistic terms the diversion of a young man’s intentions from his impending marriage to a phase of the 1798 rebellion in Ireland. An anonymous old woman becomes a young queen because of the heroic commitment of Michael Gillane. Here is The Land of Heart’s Desire rewritten in nationalist terms: The thrifty realism of the peasants gradually yields to the incantatory power of the old woman’s lament, and the political allegory is triumphantly announced in the famous curtain line. With Maud Gonne in the title role reciting the credo of nationalist Ireland, Yeats was accused of producing unworthy propaganda. He protested that it came to him in a dream, but like the subject matter of all of his early work, its origins are demonstrably in the native folklore that Yeats had been collecting and studying since his conversion to the cause of Ireland’s cultural distinctiveness. The theme of this particular play is, indeed, traceable through popular ballad to the Gaelic aisling (vision) convention and to the theme of the lady and the king found in medieval Irish literature. Its power on an Irish stage is therefore attributable to more than its last line. Yeats was to wonder, with some justification, how much this play contributed to the Easter Rebellion of 1916. The Cuchulain plays • Before the heroism of that week burst on his and the nation’s consciousness, Yeats was cultivating in himself and on the stage of the Abbey Theatre a renewed appreciation of the literature of ancient Ireland and its exaltation of heroic individualism, eloquence, aristocracy, and paganism. In the figure of Cuchulain, the hero of the Ulster Cycle, Yeats found the embodiment of these virtues, and he wrote a series of five plays dramatizing episodes from the hero’s lone defense of Ulster, beginning with On Baile’s Strand. Among Cuchulain’s challengers is a young man in whom Cuchulain notes a resemblance to his abandoned wife, Aoife. Caught between his natural affinity for this image and his oath to King Conchubar to defend the province against intruders, Cuchulain is driven to combat. Too late, he discovers that the dead boy is his own son, and in his anguish, he rushes, sword in hand, into the waves until he drowns. This play marks a significant advance in technique on Yeats’s early dramatic efforts in its tight control and complexity of theme. The theme of conflicting loyalties operates at several levels simultaneously, so that Cuchulain’s roles as loyal soldier, independent hero, father, and son all conspire to bring on his tragic self-destruction. The framing device of the Fool and the Blind Man functions as an ironic lowlife commentary on the serious central action, while at the same time casting up counterpart images of Conchubar and Cuchulain as creatures guided by similarly fitful lights. Yeats went on to write four other Cuchulain plays, The Golden Helmet, At the Hawk’s Well, The Only Jealousy of Emer, and The Death of Cuchulain, as well as several others drawn from Celtic sources made available by translators such as Lady Gregory. His dissatisfaction with modern realism, however, with its focus on the drama of individual

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character, distanced him from the kind of work that made the Abbey Theatre popular. When Ezra Pound introduced Yeats in 1913 to the No theater of Japan, Yeats recognized the tradition which would enable him to shape his own ideas into a successful poetic drama. The Dreaming of the Bones • The Japanese No drama dates from the late Middle Ages, has strong Zen elements, and is highly stylized. It is a symbolic drama, developing the resources of mask, gesture, chanted dialogue, slow rhythmic dance, ornamental costume, chorus, and flute and drum to create an atmosphere of passionate reverie contained beneath an elegant repose. Yeats was attracted by the tone of gravity, detachment, mystery, grace, and nobility in these plays. His Spiritualist sympathies predisposed him to appreciate plays that featured figures in the process of “dreaming back” moments of extreme passion in their lives as they sought release from human desires and entrance into final peace. In his Four Plays for Dancers, especially The Dreaming of the Bones as well as in several later plays, these influences are evident. The Dreaming of the Bones is designed in two scenes joined by a choral interlude, according to the structure of a fantasy-style No such as Nishikigi. The Subordinate Player (here the Young Man) encounters the Main Players (here the Stranger and Young Girl) in a historical spot (the Abbey of Corcomroe) at a historical moment (1916). The Main Players tell the story of the place and ask for prayers and forgiveness of the Young Man, finally revealing themselves as the ghosts of Diarmuid MacMorrough and Dervorgilla (the twelfth century couple whose marriage was instrumental in the Norman invasion of Ireland). Because the Young Man is a modern Irish patriot for whom that liaison was the original sexual-political transgression, he refuses, and the couple is left to continue their purgatorial “dreaming back” of their tragic sin. The various themes of the play—dream, war, resurrection, cyclic change—coalesce in the emblems of the birds in the Musicians’ final chorus. Subsequent experiments with the No form demonstrate Yeats’s greater facility in adapting it to the expression of his own views of the afterlife and his mythologization of the Irish past—especially in The Only Jealousy of Emer, The Words upon the Window-pane, and Purgatory. The Words upon the Window-Pane • The Words upon the Window-Pane is a daringly successful combination of naturalism, Spiritualism, the “dreaming back” from the No and Yeats’s latter-day identification with eighteenth century Anglo-Ireland. In this dramatization of a Dublin séance, the tortured spirit of Jonathan Swift is invoked, though remaining unrecognized by any except the literary scholar John Corbet. Swift, the representative of intellectuality, classical ideals, and the natural aristocracy of Ireland, “dreams back” his rejection of the opportunity for fatherhood offered by Vanessa, thereby sharing Yeats’s rejection of the “filthy modern tide” that would likely be their issue. In his management of middle-class character and dialogue, Yeats shows his capacities in the naturalistic style, but the dramatic coup here comes in the final scene, when these conventions are broken and the audience is left alone with an order of reality beyond the reach of skeptic or scholar. Purgatory • In Purgatory, one of his last plays, Yeats achieved his most concentrated work for stage. The setting and action are symbolic, the language a brilliant fusion of colloquial and poetic idiom. The Old Man, the product of a marriage between a big house and a stable, lost his aristocratic mother at his birth and later murdered his drunken father. Now, accompanied by his son, the Old Man visits the scene of his

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parents’ unfortunate wedding—unfortunate because it betrayed class and because it produced him, a parricide. In an attempt to break the chain of evil, the Old Man stabs his son, but to no avail: The spirits of his parents are trapped in a perpetual repetition of their crime, unless God intervenes. Here, Yeats has devised a complex dramatic symbol for the demise of aristocratic Anglo-Ireland, the approach of global conflict, and the relationship between the living conscience and the stages of spiritual purgation to be encountered after death. The play is thus a summary exposition of Yeats’s social and philosophical views in the later years of his life, drawing on the disciplines of language and construction that he had refined over a lifetime of experimentation. Other major works short fiction: John Sherman and Dhoya, 1891, 1969; The Celtic Twilight, 1893; The Secret Rose, 1897; The Tables of Law; The Adoration of the Magi, 1897; Stories of Red Hanrahan, 1904; Mythologies, 1959. poetry: Mosada: A Dramatic Poem, 1886; Crossways, 1889; The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems, 1889; The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics, 1892; The Rose, 1893; The Wind Among the Reeds, 1899; In the Seven Woods, 1903; The Poetical Works of William B. Yeats, 1906, 1907 (2 volumes); The Green Helmet and Other Poems, 1910; Responsibilities, 1914; Responsibilities and Other Poems, 1916; The Wild Swans at Coole, 1917, 1919; Michael Robartes and the Dancer, 1920; The Tower, 1928; Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems, 1932; The Winding Stair and Other Poems, 1933; The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, 1933, 1950; The King of the Great Clock Tower, 1934; A Full Moon in March, 1935; Last Poems and Plays, 1940; The Poems of W. B. Yeats, 1949 (2 volumes); The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, 1956; Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, 1957 (P. Allt and R. K. Alspach, editors); The Poems, 1983; The Poems: A New Edition, 1984. nonfiction: Ideas of Good and Evil, 1903; The Cutting of an Agate, 1912; Per Amica Silentia Lunae, 1918; Essays, 1924; A Vision, 1925, 1937; Autobiographies, 1926, 1955; A Packet for Ezra Pound, 1929; Essays, 1931-1936, 1937; The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats, 1938; On the Boiler, 1939; If I Were Four and Twenty, 1940; The Letters of W. B. Yeats, 1954; The Senate Speeches of W. B. Yeats, 1960 (Donald R. Pearce, editor); Essays and Introductions, 1961; Explorations, 1962; Ah, Sweet Dancer: W. B. Yeats, Margot Ruddock—A Correspondence, 1970 (Roger McHugh, editor); Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, 1970, 1976 (2 volumes); Memoirs, 1972; The Collected Letters of William Butler Yeats: Volume I, 18651895, 1986. miscellaneous: The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, 1908. Bibliography Bornstein, George. Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. A study of Modernism in Ireland, England, and the United States, focusing on Yeats and James Joyce. Bibliography and index. Brown, Terence. The Life of W. B. Yeats: A Critical Biography. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1999. A biography that examines the intellectual life of Yeats as well as his works. Bibliography and index. Chaudhry, Yug Mohit. Yeats, the Irish Literary Revival and the Politics of Print. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2001. A study of Yeats’s political and social views as well as a critique of his writings. Bibliography and index. Holdridge, Jefferson. Those Mingled Seas: The Poetry of W. B. Yeats, The Beautiful and the Sublime. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2000. A study of Yeats’s poetry

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that suspends it between the philosophies of both Kant and Burke, focusing on the source of the power of Yeats’s mysticism. Larrissy, Edward. W. B. Yeats. Plymouth, England: Northcote House in association with the British Council, 1998. A basic biography of Yeats that examines both his life and works. Bibliography and index. Maddox, Brenda. Yeats’s Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. Maddox examines Yeats’s connection to spiritualism and the occult. Bibliography and index. Richman, David. Passionate Action: Yeats’s Mastery of Drama. Newark, N.J.: University of Delaware Press, 2000. Richman examines the dramatic works of Yeats and discusses Irish literature. Bibliography and index. Cóilín D. Owens, updated by Peter C. Holloran

Paul Zindel Paul Zindel

Born: Staten Island, New York; May 15, 1936 Died: New York, New York; March 27, 2003 Principal drama • Dimensions of Peacocks, pr. 1959; Euthanasia and the Endless Hearts, pr. 1960; A Dream of Swallows, pr. 1964; The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, pr. 1965, pb. 1971; And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little, pr. 1967, pb. 1972; The Secret Affairs of Mildred Wild, pr. 1972, pb. 1973; The Ladies Should Be in Bed, pb. 1973; Ladies at the Alamo, pr. 1975, pb. 1977; A Destiny with Half Moon Street, pr. 1983; Amulets Against the Dragon Forces, pr., pb. 1989; Every Seventeen Minutes the Crowd Goes Crazy!, pr. 1995, pb. 1996 Other literary forms • Paul Zindel once considered himself primarily a playwright, and in 1990 said, “basically, I’m a dramatist”; he enjoyed great success as a writer of novels for teenagers, however, and it is in this capacity that he is best known. His first such work, The Pigman (1968), sold in the millions, and sequels such as The Pigman’s Legacy (1980) followed. A 1989 book, A Begonia for Miss Applebaum, was critically well received, and the autobiographical The Pigman and Me was published in 1992. Zindel’s teen characters confront the pangs and thrills of young adult reality as they reach for friendship, for romantic love, for mature perspectives on sexuality, and for success or at least survival in school or work. In 1984, Zindel published his first novel for adults, When a Darkness Falls. During the 1990’s Zindel began writing series chapter novels including comedy, mystery, and horror for pre-teen audiences. Zindel wrote screenplays for Up the Sandbox (1972), Mame (1974), Runaway Train (1983), and Maria’s Lovers (1984), and a teleplay, Let Me Hear You Whisper (1966). He also wrote for periodicals. Achievements • Paul Zindel’s The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds gained acceptance not only in the form of broadcasts on National Educational Television in New York but also through stage performances at the Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas. Zindel secured a Ford Foundation grant as a playwright-in-residence at the Alley in 1967. In 1970, the play opened in New York, Off-Broadway; then it moved to the New Theatre on Broadway. It closed on May 14, 1972, after 819 performances. The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds received an Obie Award for the best Off-Broadway play in 1970. Also in 1970, Zindel won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play and the Vernon Rice Drama Desk Award as the most promising playwright of the season. In 1971, he received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Wagner College, and a Pulitzer Prize in Drama. The success of The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds was followed in 1971 by a Broadway production of And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little, a play previously staged in Los Angeles in 1967. The Broadway production, starring Julie Harris, ran for 108 performances, and the play made the list of the ten best plays for the 1971 season. Zindel next brought a comedy to Broadway, The Secret Affairs of Mildred Wild, which lasted for only twenty-three performances. 1064

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Joining the Actors Studio in 1973, Zindel extensively revised earlier material to produce Ladies at the Alamo, which he himself directed at Actors Studio for a two-week run in 1975. He directed the same play in a brief Broadway run in 1977, as well as a New York revival of The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds in 1978. The Coconut Grove Playhouse in Coconut Grove, Florida, premiered Zindel’s A Destiny with Half Moon Street in its 1982-1983 repertory. Zindel’s plays have moved from little and regional theaters to Broadway and back. Critics say that his later plays have not fulfilled the expectations raised by his initial success. Still, Zindel’s plays continue to be performed in high school, college, touring company, and regional repertory productions. In 1998 Zindel was honored, along with forty-three other notable dramatists such as Edward Albee, by a walk-of-fame bronze star on the Playwrights’ Sidewalk outside the Lortel Theater in Greenwich Village. In 2002, the year before his death, Zindel received the Margaret A. Edwards Award for his lifetime writing contribution to literature for young adults, an honor presented by the Young Adult Library Services Association. Biography • Paul Zindel was born on May 15, 1936, in Staten Island, New York, to Paul and Betty (née Frank) Zindel. His father, a police officer, abandoned his wife and two small children, Paul and a sister. Betty Zindel, a practical nurse, launched into numerous ventures, ranging from real estate to dog breeding, and sometimes took in terminally ill patients for board and care. The family moved almost annually. This transient lifestyle and his mother’s unwillingness, if not inability, to form meaningful relationships acquainted young Zindel with various forms of loss. Pets allowed at one home might be forbidden by the next landlord. Dogs raised for sale would eventually be sold. Board-and-care patients would sometimes die. The frequent moves, too, kept the boy, more often than not, in the role of newcomer in a neighborhood. It grew simpler to enjoy the worlds of imagination and, when possible, the manageable environments of aquaria and terraria. In school, Zindel occasionally acted in plays and skits, some of which he wrote himself. At fifteen, he contracted tuberculosis and spent about eighteen months in a sanatorium, the sole youth in an otherwise adult community. He learned some parlor games and studied piano during his stay; more important, he became an interested observer of adult behavior. Returned to health and to high school, Zindel wrote a play for a contest sponsored by the American Cancer Society; it centered on a young pianist who recovers from a serious illness to play at Carnegie Hall. The play won for Zindel a Parker pen. Zindel majored in chemistry at Wagner College in New York City. While completing his bachelor of science degree, he took a creative writing course with Edward Albee and wrote a play, Dimensions of Peacocks, during his senior year. Zindel was graduated in 1958, and after working briefly as a technical writer for a Manhattan chemical firm, he decided that he wanted to teach. Completing a master of science degree at Wagner in 1959, Zindel began teaching chemistry and physics at Tottenville High School on Staten Island. His Dimensions of Peacocks received a minor staging; more significant, he attended his first professional theater production, Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic (pr., pb. 1960), and left with his appetite for theater whetted. For the next several years, Zindel continued to teach and to write. A second play, Euthanasia and the Endless Hearts, had a brief coffeehouse production in 1960,

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and a third, A Dream of Swallows, managed a single performance Off-Broadway in 1964. The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds fared better. In 1965, it opened at the Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas. New York’s National Educational Television ran four showings of its abridged teleplay format. Recognition grew, with the Ford Foundation underwriting Zindel as playwright-in-residence at the Alley in 1967. By 1969, Zindel felt sufficiently established in theater to resign from teaching. Playing in New York, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds accrued its various awards that prefaced the Pulitzer. From the New York plaudits, Zindel went to writing screenplays in California. Paul Newman produced and directed a movie version of The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds in 1972, and Zindel wrote screenplays for Up the Sandbox and Mame. When The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds was on the rise, a publisher suggested that Zindel should write fiction for the teen market. His first teen novel, The Pigman, was both a critical and a popular success, as were several subsequent teen novels. Some critics have complained that while the argot of the young constantly changes, the teen dialogue in Zindel’s later novels was indistinguishable from that found in his novels of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. In other ways, too, Zindel was accused of merely repeating a successful formula. In 1973, following the year in California, Zindel made two major decisions. He married Bonnie Hildebrand, a screenwriter with whom he later had two children, Elizabeth and David, and he joined the Actors Studio in New York to learn the language of acting and directing as well as playwriting. At the same time, he resumed work on a manuscript that National Educational Television had turned down in 1970 as too explicit. In its earlier version, the play had centered on the exchanges and revelations of a group of women playing bridge and watching an exhibitionist in a building across the street. Zindel shifted the setting to a theater in Texas, and the conflict to a battle for control of the theater. To make the five characters more authentic, Zindel conducted in-depth interviews with five actresses from the Actors Studio. The result was Ladies at the Alamo. Beginning in the mid-1970’s, Zindel became more active as a novelist than as a dramatist, but he continued to be involved in the theater, producing new work as well as adaptations. He occasionally traveled to regional productions of his plays as part of publicity campaigns (as he did for the 1990 Cleveland Playhouse revival of The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds), and to be active as a moderator for the Actors Studio West, in the Los Angeles Playwrights Unit. According to interviews, the process of filmmaking was destructive for him. His young adult novels are sometimes turned into plays; for example, Confessions of a Teenage Baboon (1977) began as a novel but became Amulets Against the Dragon Forces, produced at the Circle Repertory Theatre in 1989. Zindel’s 1995 play Every Seventeen Minutes the Crowd Goes Crazy! was written on commission for the American Conservatory Theater’s Young Conservatory in San Francisco. Zindel intended that the play would address what he believed was the most critical issue of the decade, the failure of parents to fulfill traditional roles. At the time, his own children had recently left home for college. Zindel wrote for a big cast, believing that young actors needed and deserved as much time onstage as possible. Analysis • Paul Zindel’s plays closely follow his own life experience; certain features of his early years recur in his drama. His mother was bitter, transient, reclusive,

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and presumably uncertain of her place in life. Zindel’s major plays commonly depict women struggling for identity and fulfillment, often damaged, if not destroyed, by betrayals or deaths of loved ones. These women in turn fail to provide the adequate care so desperately needed by the young people for whom they are left responsible. Another theme of Zindel’s plays is the notion that modern society has replaced traditional religion with a secular faith of scientism accompanied by unbridled self-indulgence. Zindel’s marvelous storytelling ability has captivated millions, and several of his works have been translated. His plays, certainly not as well accepted by critics or the public, still appeal. Zindel describes the drama form as one in which the players must shout the message of the work. In this vein, his characters and events exhibit unsettling qualities: the old people border on grotesque, shambling versions of death; events are capped by illogical and unpredictable outcomes; and character motivations result in bizarre behaviors. However, Zindel’s repugnant misfits lay claim to the compassion, empathy, and integrity of the audience. As Zindel explains in commenting on his more recent prose works, humor and horror have much in common, and these qualities are readily apparent in a majority of his dramatic works. The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds • The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds opens to observers the lives of Beatrice Hunsdorfer and her two teenage daughters, Ruth and Tillie. Beatrice, overtly modeled after Zindel’s mother, is a cynical, verbally abusive paranoid schizophrenic. Her untidy home was once her father’s vegetable store. Her husband left her long ago and later died of a heart attack. For income, Beatrice boards an aged woman who needs a walker to creep slowly from bed to table to bathroom and back to bed. Ruth, the elder daughter, is the more physically attractive yet is emotionally unstable and subject to convulsions in times of stress. Tillie, the younger, is bright and eager to learn. Beatrice, more concerned about her girls’ looks and marriageability than about their intellectual growth, badgers both daughters but is most severe with Tillie. Act 1 opens with Tillie, in darkness, marveling that the atoms in her hand may trace back to a cosmic tongue of fire predating the birth of the sun and the solar system. As lights rise on the home scene, Beatrice fields a telephone call from Mr. Goodman, Tillie’s science teacher. He is concerned about Tillie’s absences. Beatrice responds with several defenses. She thanks Mr. Goodman for giving Tillie a pet rabbit and compliments him on his looks. Claiming that Tillie does not always want to go to school, Beatrice says that she does not want to put too much pressure on Tillie, lest she turn convulsive, as Ruth has done. The phone call ended, Beatrice derides Tillie and Mr. Goodman, then orders Tillie to stay home. The girl is anxious to see a cloud-chamber experiment in science class. Beatrice threatens to kill the rabbit if Tillie goes. In contrast, Beatrice encourages Ruth to go to school, lets her rummage through mother’s purse for lipstick, and gives her a cigarette on request. Ruth scratches Beatrice’s back and gives negative reports on Tillie’s activities at school. She also reveals that she has seen the school file on the family. It records the parents’ divorce, the absent father’s death, and Ruth’s nervous breakdown. The scene fades to darkness, and again Tillie speaks. She describes the fountain of atoms visible in the cloud chamber, a phenomenon that could go on for eternity. Rising lights reveal Tillie preparing to plant irradiated seeds. Beatrice, scanning realty advertisements, mixes conjecture on the potential of various properties with questions about Tillie’s science project. Nanny, the aged boarder, begins the slow trek to the ta-

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ble as Tillie tries to explain the concept of atomic half-life to Beatrice. Beatrice disparages Nanny, her daughters, and herself through derisive double meanings for the term “half-life.” Beatrice phones Mr. Goodman, expressing concern that Tillie’s seeds were irradiated, turning aside his explanations. After several other demonstrations of instability and cruelty, Beatrice shows another aspect of her character. During a thunderstorm at night, Ruth suffers another seizure. Beatrice orders Tillie back to bed in typically harsh fashion but cradles Ruth with genuine compassion and tells how her father, Ruth’s grandfather, used to sell fruit and vegetables from a horse-drawn wagon. Beatrice’s mother had died quite early, and her father fell seriously ill while Beatrice was still rather young. Anxious for her future, he urged her to marry for security’s sake. She still sees her father’s face in her nightmares. The following scene shows Beatrice again lashing out at Tillie and Nanny until Ruth dashes in. She reports excitedly that Tillie is a finalist in the science fair. The principal calls to ask Beatrice to attend the final judging and awards. Beatrice is rude and evasive. Her first thought is that people will ridicule her. Only after Tillie runs off in tears does Beatrice realize how her paranoiac response has hurt Tillie. Act 2 opens with the Hunsdorfers about to leave for the final science fair presentations. Working as an attendance aide for Mr. Goodman, Ruth has overheard gossip about Beatrice, who used to be called “Betty the Loon.” Ruth blackmails Tillie into giving her the rabbit by threatening to tell Beatrice the school gossip. Tillie concedes— she deeply wants her mother to share this one significant event in her life, even at the cost of her pet—but when Beatrice orders Ruth to stay home with Nanny, Ruth explodes with the epithet “Betty the Loon,” and Beatrice crumbles emotionally. Ruth goes to school in Beatrice’s place. In a scene change through a lighting shift, another science fair finalist, Janice Vickery, superficially explains the past, present, and future of her cat skeleton. Back at the Hunsdorfer home, Beatrice makes two phone calls. One is a bitter call to the high school. The other is to Nanny’s daughter: Beatrice wants Nanny out of the house the next day. Finally, Beatrice heads upstairs with a bottle of chloroform. In another shift by spotlight, Tillie cites the past, present, and future of her project. Lightly irradiated seeds produced normal plants. Moderately irradiated seeds produced various mutations. The heavily bombarded seeds either died or produced dwarfs. Knowing the range of effects, she believes some mutations will be good. She declares her faith in the strange, beautiful energy of the atom. Beatrice is drunk when the girls get home. She has begun to refit the living room for a tea shop. Ruth brings the dead rabbit downstairs and goes into convulsions. The play closes with Tillie declaring her curiosity about the universe, her sense of place in the order of things, and her fascination with the atom. The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds presents a family, broken as Zindel’s was, in financial straits, deriving income from a board-and-care patient, as Zindel’s family had. Beatrice’s unfinished real-estate and beauty classes mirror the varied attempts Zindel’s mother made at supporting the family. The significance of Beatrice’s preparation, in the last scene, for a tea shop is open to question. The move hints at growth in her character, yet she has killed the rabbit, the symbol of warmth and tenderness for the daughters. Tillie’s success at least has stirred Beatrice to a new beginning. Ruth has shifted from contempt for Tillie to pride in Tillie’s achievement. That pride, however, seems rooted more in Ruth’s concern for social status than in genuine

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understanding of either Tillie or the experiment. Tillie herself has not changed significantly in the play. At the outset, she speaks of her fascination with science. At the end, her success confirms her self-esteem and potential for growth in spite of the abuse from home. Thus, the play relies on revelation of character more than on development of character in response to conflict. In a decade accustomed to “slice-of-life” literature and ambiguous if not bleak conclusions to many stories and plays, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds presents a positive faith in the future through science, and hope for one character in overcoming the emotional damage common in modern life. And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little • And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little offers a different constellation of women but still mirrors several aspects of Zindel’s personal experience. The three Reardon sisters, Ceil, Catherine, and Anna, embody many of the ills of teachers long settled in the education system, ills well-known to Zindel and anyone else with some teaching experience. Of the three sisters, Ceil has been the assertive one. She has taken the courses necessary to carry her from classroom to administrative work with the board of education. She took the chance of marrying Edward Adams, although Catherine dated him first. Ceil, too, arranged for their dead mother’s estate to be settled seven months before the night of the play’s action, and now Ceil is the one bringing papers for Anna’s commitment for psychiatric care. Act 1 begins with Mrs. Pentrano, the wife of the building superintendent, entering the Reardon sisters’ apartment. She asks if the new lock has satisfied Anna and expresses concern for Anna’s condition. A delivery boy brings groceries, including chopped meat, which Catherine arranges in a candy box. Untipped, the delivery boy exits with flippant sarcasm. Mrs. Pentrano has been pressing Catherine for a cosmetics and toiletries order despite Catherine’s objections. Ceil arrives and dismisses Mrs. Pentrano with little more than a greeting. Catherine berates Ceil for making scant contact since their mother’s death. She also complains that her fellow faculty members believe that Catherine’s position as assistant principal is a consequence of Ceil’s being on the board of education. Ceil cuts through the criticism with questions about Anna; she also expresses her concern for Catherine, who, people say, has taken to drinking. During their exchanges, Catherine eats raw meat from the candy box. Since her breakdown, Anna has turned vegetarian and wants no meat or animal byproducts in the apartment. Slaughter of animals is too reminiscent of human death. Catherine explains to Ceil the development of Anna’s condition. During a trip to Europe after their mother’s death, Anna suffered a cat bite. She grew convinced that she had rabies. She demanded shots for the disease and thereafter was on tranquilizers so that she could return to teaching in September. Suffering harassment by students, however, Anna eventually broke down, committing some unspecified form of sexual indiscretion with a male student. Anna enters. Groggy with medication, she had forgotten that Ceil was due for dinner. Catherine goes about preparing fruits and vegetables for their meal. Anna worries about the presence of Mother’s old pistol in the apartment. Ceil assures her that Mother kept only blanks in the gun. Anna searches desk and bookcase until she locates the pistol in an album. Anna rambles about her condition, criticizes Ceil for taking Edward away from Catherine, then fires the pistol. Catherine tries to humor

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Anna, retrieves the pistol, and puts it back in the album, saying that Ceil can take it away later. The second act opens with the sisters, still at dinner, interrupted by Fleur Stein. Fleur, an acting guidance teacher at the school where Catherine and Anna work, brings an official faculty get-well gift. Her husband, Bob, is getting the package from the car. Fleur says she debated whether the gift should be religious. Anna responds with a long story of losing religion because she saw a puppy hit by a truck. When Bob presents the gift, Anna loses control. They have brought her leather gloves. She throws them across the room. Ceil explains Anna’s aversion to animal products, and Catherine belatedly introduces Ceil to the Steins. Fleur is counselor for the boy involved in Anna’s case, and she pressures Ceil for help in securing her guidance teacher’s licensure. In return, she will persuade the boy’s parents not to sue for damages. Fleur downplays judgment on the incident, attributing a loss of traditional religious attitudes to modern acceptance of science. Bob Stein, given certain provocations, bluntly attributes Anna’s breakdown to lack of male companionship. He offers to get Anna a date for the evening and drapes Fleur’s fox fur stole over Anna’s shoulders. She screams and kicks the stole away, deploring the cruelty of the fur trade. Bob reacts in anger, insulting all three sisters in turn. Catherine suggests that Anna show Bob their mother’s album. As the third act opens, Anna fires the pistol at Bob’s face. Bob grabs the gun, telling Anna that she has real problems. Anna, in response to an earlier comment by Fleur, asks Bob why he never uses his own bathroom at home. He retorts that he hates the soaps and rough paper that Fleur steals from the school. Fleur attempts to smooth over Bob’s irate exit, assuring Ceil that she will do her best to help. With the Steins gone, Ceil wants to discuss business with Catherine alone, but Anna insists on staying. She reminisces about an eccentric principal they once knew. Ceil brings out the commitment papers and tells Catherine to get Anna packed for travel the next day. Catherine rebels at the order. Anna asks Ceil how Edward makes love to her. Furious, Ceil shoves meat from the candy box in Anna’s face. She screams and runs off to wash. Ceil keeps Catherine from following Anna. Catherine finally admits that she hates the dominance in both their late mother and Ceil. In return, Ceil rebukes Catherine for leaving her choices in life to others. Ceil throws the commitment papers down and leaves. Catherine now must take responsibility for either keeping Anna home or committing her for psychiatric care. Examining the lives of professional educators, Zindel presents a family with the occupational stability and social standing he himself experienced in his first career. The Misses Reardon, like Tillie and Ruth Hunsdorfer, have suffered from an unhealthy family situation: an absent father and a domineering mother. Ceil, assertive in her own right, made choices that carried her out of Mother Reardon’s sphere of control and eventually to the top echelon of her profession. Her progress is a logical extension of the strength of character Tillie Hunsdorfer maintains despite Beatrice’s dominance. Catherine and Anna, in contrast, show the effects of remaining under Mother’s control to the end. Catherine shrinks from asserting herself: She cannot briskly dismiss Mrs. Pentrano as Ceil can; rather than cope with awkward comments by the Steins, she runs the blender; instead of confronting Anna with her own preference of diet, she sneaks meat into the house and eats it raw. Both Catherine’s craving for raw meat and Anna’s indiscretion represent inordinate reactions to unfulfilled needs. In addition to the parallels in family dynamics, there is another link between And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little and its predecessor. Tillie Hunsdorfer’s youthful faith in sci-

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ence has evolved, in Fleur Stein, into the laconic conclusion that science has supplanted religious faith in modern life. Anna, in contrast, cannot rationalize pain and suffering; she traces the loss of her religion to the death of a pup. Ceil makes no claims regarding religion. She does live by the premise, however, that a person must accept responsibility for choices in life and must seize opportunities for change and growth. At the close of the play, she leaves Catherine with the choice of compensating for Anna’s incapacity at home or committing her for psychiatric care. Catherine seems, at last, ready to accept the responsibility. Amulets Against the Dragon Forces • Amulets Against the Dragon Forces, a revision of A Destiny with Half Moon Street, is exceptional for Zindel in that the protagonist and antagonist are both male; however, these characters also struggle with the issues of disappointment, inadequacy, and betrayal. A cycle of abuse is revealed as an old woman who had long ago attacked her son for his budding sexuality is brought home from the hospital to die. The son, Floyd, is the antagonist of the play. He is now a nearly deranged adult and has a history of alcoholism and child abuse, one featuring the habitual use of young male prostitutes, a series of whom he has brought to the family home where he exchanges shelter for sexual favors. A divorced, itinerant practical nurse has been engaged to care for the dying mother, and she brings her own son, the protagonist Chris, into the household. Being the youngest and most innocent character, Chris retains some characteristics of childhood, including a hobby of creating balsa wood replicas of local landmarks populated by models he has carved. These “amulets” are mere charms and seem unlikely to stave off the “dragon forces” of the play’s title. Chris uses the figures to represent characters in made-up stories. He hopes to become a writer—an ambition suggested to him by a mentally unstable teacher. For the near future, Chris plans to escape life with his kleptomaniac mother by going to Florida to live with his father, but the father refuses. Chris’s mother does finally succeed in buying a home for herself and her son, barely completing the transaction before the old woman she is caring for dies. The play ends as Floyd suggests to Chris that the passage of time may someday allow the boy to accept his own disquieting sexual urges. Zindel has indicated that this is the last play he plans to write set in Staten Island and using events and factors influential in his own upbringing. Every Seventeen Minutes the Crowd Goes Crazy! • Every Seventeen Minutes the Crowd Goes Crazy! portrays a family of teenage children recently abandoned by their parents, who communicate with the youngsters infrequently and then only via a fax machine. Written on commission for the American Conservatory Theater’s Young Conservatory, the play addresses the breakdown of family life as caused by the societal ills of commercialism and hedonism. The parents prefer the thrill of the track, where the horse races finish “every seventeen minutes,” and so have fled their failing careers and dependent offspring—children they find to be unbearable users. They express regret over leaving the youngest child, Ulie, who is only twelve years old, but predict his inability to escape a future of self-centeredness. The older children plan various means of economic survival, including charging admission to regular keg parties, but they are meanwhile cleaning out any remaining cash advances available on their parents’ credit cards. The overall effect is ironic and painful as the young protagonists bravely hide or perhaps even abandon their feelings of disappointment and longing for a return to a more normal life. A one-act play, the work begins and ends with the “Oprah-

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Speak Gap Chorus” chanting a jumble of slogans, ads, and National Enquirer-type headlines. Other major works long fiction: When a Darkness Falls, 1984. screenplays: Up the Sandbox, 1972; Mame, 1974; Runaway Train, 1983; Maria’s Lovers, 1984. teleplays: Let Me Hear You Whisper, 1966; Alice in Wonderland, 1985 (adaptation of the story by Lewis Carroll); A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 1989 (adaptation of the novel by Mark Twain). children’s literature: The Pigman, 1968; My Darling, My Hamburger, 1969; I Never Loved Your Mind, 1970; I Love My Mother, 1975; Pardon Me, You’re Stepping on My Eyeball!, 1976; Confessions of a Teenage Baboon, 1977; The Undertaker’s Gone Bananas, 1978; A Star for the Latecomer, 1980 (with Bonnie Zindel); The Pigman’s Legacy, 1980; The Girl Who Wanted a Boy, 1981; To Take a Dare, 1982 (with Crescent Dragonwagon); Harry and Hortense at Hormone High, 1984; The Amazing and Death-Defying Diary of Eugene Dingman, 1987; A Begonia for Miss Applebaum, 1989; The Pigman and Me, 1992 (autobiography); Attack of the Killer Fishsticks, 1993; David and Della, 1993; Fifth Grade Safari, 1993; Fright Party, 1993; Loch, 1994; The One Hundred Percent Laugh Riot, 1994; The Doom Stone, 1995; Raptor, 1998; Reef of Death, 1998; Rats, 1999; The Gadget, 2001; Night of the Bat, 2001. Bibliography Barnes, Clive. “Troubled Times for a Teen.” Review of Amulets Against the Dragon Forces, by Paul Zindel. New York Post, April 7, 1989. Barnes finds a “commonplace honesty” beneath the play’s pretentiousness in this review of the Circle Repertory Company’s production. Barnes finds “the same quality of compassion” as in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. Barnes states that the play has “the air of a work written to enable its author to get something off his chest.” DiGaetani, John L. A Search for a Postmodern Theater: Interviews with Contemporary Playwrights. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. In one chapter, DiGaetani interviews Zindel about the influences of psychoanalysis on his work and the reasons for his gradual transition to young adult novels. Zindel’s destructive relation with Hollywood is also discussed with considerable candor. Asked which playwrights Zindel admires, he replied, “I’m happy to say none.” Evett, Marianne. “’Moon-Marigolds’ Author in Nostalgic Return Here.” Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 4, 1990. This preview of Cleveland Playhouse’s revival of The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, with Marlo Thomas in the role of Beatrice, includes a telephone interview with Zindel, who remembers the first productions and his “bubbly publicity agent (Bonnie Hildebrand). I ended up marrying her.” He reports here that he “escaped East [from Hollywood] to keep my sanity intact.” Fischer, David Marc. “Paul Zindel: The Shouting Play, the Whispering Novel.” Writing 24 (February/March, 2002): 20. Presents an interview with Zindel covering a discussion of his career as teacher and writer with emphasis on distinguishing between the style of language and writing appropriate for drama as opposed to the novel. Forman, Jack Jacob. Presenting Paul Zindel. Boston: Twayne, 1988. A basic biography that includes criticism and interpretation focused primarily on Zindel’s fiction. Useful indexes and bibliography.

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Lesesne, Teri. “Humor, Bathos and Fear: An Interview with Paul Zindel.” Teacher Librarian 27 (December, 1999): 60. Zindel discusses his thematic emphasis on teenage misfits in young-adult novels and drama, citing a scene from The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds as an example of his best work. Slaight, Craig, ed. New Plays from ACT’s Young Conservatory. Vol. 2. Lume, N.H.: Smith and Kraus, 1996. Contains the text of Every Seventeen Minutes the Crowd Goes Crazy! with commentary by Slaight, Zindel, and student actors from the play. Zindel, Paul. “Beyond Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.” Interview by Helen Dudar. The New York Times, April 2, 1989, p. B5. A long interview on the occasion of Zindel’s later work, Amulets Against the Dragon Forces, twelve years after his last New York opening. He recaps his career, mostly in teen novels, and his sense of destructiveness in the maw of Hollywood. Good biographic profile, with a photograph. Ralph S. Carlson, updated by Thomas J. Taylor and Margaret A. Dodson

Dramatic Terms and Movements Dramatic Terms and Movements

Absurdism. See Theater of the Absurd. Academic drama. See School plays. Act: One of the major divisions of a play or opera. The practice of dividing a play into acts probably began in Rome but is derived from Greek drama, which separated the episodes of a play by choral interludes. In classical theory (notably in France in the seventeenth century), a play is divided into five acts; since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, the typical number of acts has varied from four to one, while some plays have entirely eliminated structure by acts and use only scene division. (See also Scene.) Action. See Plot. African American drama: Drama written by or focusing on African Americans that emerged formally in the twentieth century but has precedents in the mid-nineteenth century. Playwrights in this vein include August Wilson, James Baldwin, Ed Bullins, Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy, and Suzan-Lori Parks. Afterpiece: Short farce meant to follow a serious play, a practice adopted in France by 1650, which became a standard part of English drama during the Restoration. Agitprop: Word combining “agitation” and “propaganda” to describe drama performed as social protest rather than for its dramatic or literary merit. A German labor group called the Prolet-Bühne first used this term in New York City in 1930. Agitprop drama was performed throughout the 1930’s by the American labor movement and continues to be performed in Europe and in the United States. Agon: Greek, meaning “contest.” A segment of Greek drama in which two participants become involved in verbal conflict. The two participants may be a character and the chorus; two characters, each backed by part of the chorus; or two parts of the chorus. Alazon: Impostor or braggart of Greek comedy. The type survives in Roman comedy, as with the Miles gloriosus (The Braggart Warrior, 1767) of Plautus. (See also Miles gloriosus.) Alexandrine: In French, a verse of twelve syllables generally containing four accents (in English, the iambic hexameter is sometimes referred to as an “Alexandrine”). Established as the standard form for French tragedy in the mid-sixteenth century, the Neoclassical dramatists of the seventeenth century (Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, for example) used the Alexandrine to create the serious, elevated tone that was theoretically considered proper for the tragic mode. Alienation: German dramatist Bertolt Brecht developed the theory of alienation in his epic theater. Brecht sought to create an audience that was intellectually alert rather than emotionally involved in a play by using alienating techniques such as minimizing the illusion of reality onstage and interrupting the action with songs and visual aids. Brecht hoped an intellectually alert audience would relate the dramatic action to problems in the real world and seek solutions to those problems. (See also Epic theater.) Allegory: By representing abstract ideas or concepts through the symbolic use of char1074

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acter, plot, and situation, allegories are intended to instruct the audience in moral or political values. Allegory is an important component of classical drama and medieval morality plays. Anabasis: Greek, meaning “a going up.” The rising of an action to its climax. (See also Rising action.) Anagnorisis: Recognition or discovery. Aristotle uses this term in the De poetica (c. 334323 b.c.e.; Poetics, 1705) to refer to the moment of recognition in which a character moves from a state of ignorance to one of knowledge. In Sophocles’ Oidipous Tyrannos (c. 429 b.c.e.; Oedipus Tyrannus, 1715; also know as Oedipus Rex), which Aristotle considered the ideal example of tragedy, an anagnorisis occurs when Oedipus discovers that he himself is the slayer of his father, as predicted by the seer. This recognition is accompanied by a “peripeteia” (or reversal) in which the whole action of the play is reversed. Antagonist: Major character in opposition to the protagonist or hero. Antimasque: Grotesque interlude within a masque which contrasts violently to the beauty and harmony of the preceding episodes. Ben Jonson created the antimasque, which typically includes grotesque dances of clowns and monsters. (See also Masque.) Antistrophe: In classical Greek drama, the antistrophe is a stanza-like unit of song and dance responding to the strophe and mirroring its structure. (See also Strophe.) Apollonian and Dionysian: Friedrich Nietzsche proposed in Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (1872; The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, 1909) that Greek tragedy was composed of two opposing elements, which it held in tension and finally unified. One element, the Dionysian, represented the savage, frenzied, passionate nature of humanity. The Apollonian stood for reason, moderation, and order. Nietzsche believed that the choral songs provided the Dionysian element and the dialogue the Apollonian element. Characters were often torn between these opposing forces within their personalities, which personified larger philosophical and moral issues. Apron stage: The apron is that part of the stage that extends beyond the proscenium arch. A stage that consists entirely or primarily of an apron and on which the action is not “framed” by a proscenium may be called an “apron stage.” Asian American drama: Form of drama that emerged from the identity politics and student radicalism of the 1960’s and 1970’s. “Asian American” was coined in the 1960’s as a replacement for “Oriental,” a term that many considered a demeaning colonialist description that exoticized all individuals to whom it was attached. Thematic orientation focuses on varied topics such as the struggle against racism, ethnic profiling, economic discrimination, shared cultural heritage and ethnic identity, and invisibility. Playwrights include Frank Chin, Philip Kan Gotanda, Jessica Hagedorn, Velina Hasu Houston, David Henry Hwang, Genny Lim, and Elizabeth Wong. Aside: Short passage generally spoken by one character in an undertone, or directed to the audience, so as not to be heard by the other characters on stage. Auto sacramental: Renaissance development of the medieval open-air Corpus Christi pageant in Spain. A dramatic, allegorical depiction of a sinful soul wavering and transgressing until the intervention of Divine Grace restores order. Avant-garde: Term describing plays intended to expand the conventions of the theater through the experimental treatment of form and/or content.

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Ballad opera: Type of burlesque opera popular in eighteenth century England and modeled upon (as well as parodying) contemporary Italian operatic conventions. The story is conveyed in both spoken dialogue and songs (the latter mirroring the arias of the more serious form) set to old folk songs or ballads. The most successful work in this genre was John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (pr. 1728). Beijing Opera: Complex theatrical style of drama known in Chinese as Jingju (WadeGiles, ching-hsi), commonly called Beijing Opera. It was begun by Anhui actors sometime in the 1830’s, when two modes of music, erhuang diao and xipidiao, were brought together. By the 1870’s it had become the predominant form of Chinese drama and remains the major force in modern-day Chinese theater. The form is characterized by lavish costumes, percussive music, acrobatic dance, and colloquial lyrics. Black comedy: General term of modern origin that refers to a form of “sick humor” that is intended to produce laughter out of the morbid and the taboo. The term is sometimes inappropriately confused with “dark comedy.” Blank verse: Unrhymed iambic pentameter, blank verse that first appeared in drama in Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Gorboduc, performed in 1561, and that later became the standard form of Elizabethan drama. Boulevard drama: Body of plays produced in the mid- and late nineteenth century in Paris by writers such as Ludovic Halévy and Eugène Labiche. The term properly refers to comedies of some sophistication, designed as commercial products. Bourgeois drama: Term generally used to describe the modern realistic drama which deals with the situations and social problems of the middle class. Bunraku: Japanese puppet theater. It emerged in the twelfth century but did not become firmly established until the turn of the seventeenth century, when narrations chanted to musical accompaniment were added to puppet performances. Burlesque: Work which, by imitating attitudes, styles, institutions, and people, aims to amuse. Burlesque is distinguished from a closely related form, satire, in that its aim is ridicule simply for the sake of amusement rather than for political or social change. An example of burlesque drama is Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Patience: Or Bunthorne’s Bride (pr. 1881), which is a parody of the aesthetic movement in late nineteenth century England. Burletta: Short comic play with music that was popular in eighteenth and nineteenth century English theater. Buskin: Half boot covering the foot and calf, worn by actors in Greek tragedy, also known as a cothurnus. The purpose of the buskin was to designate the stature of the characters; while comic actors wore low, flat foot coverings, tragic figures wore platform buskins. “To put on buskins” became a term for performing or writing tragedy. (See also Sock.) Capa y espada: Spanish for “cape and sword,” a term referring to the Spanish theater of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries dealing with love and intrigue among the aristocracy. The greatest practitioners were Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderón de la Barca. The term comedia de ingenio is also used. Cape and sword play. See Capa y espada. Caroline: Of or referring to the reign of King Charles I of England, lasting from 1625 to 1649. Political strife and the violent opposition to the theater by the Puritans informed Caroline drama with a rather decadent morality and generally a quality inferior to the plays of the preceding Jacobean and Elizabethan periods, although

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Caroline drama did produce the noted tragedian John Ford and his counterpart in Caroline comedy, James Shirley. Caroline drama was effectively halted in 1642, when the Puritans closed all public theaters for the next eighteen years. Catastrophe: The conclusion of a play or narrative, especially tragedy, the catastrophe is more often called the “denouement,” meaning the unknotting or resolution of the situation. (See also Freytag’s pyramid.) Catharsis: Term from Aristotle’s Poetics referring to the purgation of the emotions of pity and fear in the spectator aroused by the actions of the tragic hero. The meaning and the operation of this concept have been a source of great, and unresolved, critical debate. Cavalier drama: Type of play performed at court in the 1630’s during the reign of Charles I of England until the ascendancy of Oliver Cromwell in 1642 and the closing of the theaters. The plays featured elaborate plots, political conflicts, lustful villains, beautiful and virtuous ladies, and their brave, honorable lovers. Dialogue was typically florid and artificial. The most notable dramatists in this genre were Thomas Killigrew and John Suckling. Centre 42: Early 1960’s British movement designed to bring theater to people outside London and to factory districts and areas where little or no theater was performed. Character: Personage appearing in any literary or dramatic work. Chorus: Originally a group of singers and dancers in religious festivals, the chorus evolved into the dramatic element that reflected the opinions of the masses or commented on the action in Greek drama. In its most developed form, the chorus consisted of fifteen members: seven reciting the strophe, seven reciting the antistrophe, and the leader interacting with the actors. The development of the role of the chorus is generally seen as one of diminishing importance: In Aeschylus, the chorus often takes part in the action; in Sophocles, it serves as a commentator; and in Euripides, its function is sometimes purely lyric. The Romans adapted the Greek chorus to their own stage, and the Elizabethans occasionally imitated the Roman chorus (reducing it to a single actor), but it never became an integral part of the structure. The chorus has been used during all periods, including the modern (for example, in T. S. Eliot’s 1935 Murder in the Cathedral ), but has survived most prominently in the opera and other forms of musical theater. (See also Parodos.) Chronicle play: Dramatization of historical material (or material believed to be historical), the chronicle play became popular at the end of the sixteenth century. Drawing heavily on the chronicle histories of Raphael Holinshed and Edward Hall, dramatists originally strung together loose scenes from history, but the form later developed greater unity in works such as Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II (pr. c. 1592) and the Henry IV (pr. late sixteenth century) plays of William Shakespeare. Also termed “history plays,” the chronicle plays developed into subtle studies of character and became more important as examinations of human strengths and frailties than as accounts of historical facts. Classical drama: Classical drama originally referred to the literature and theater of ancient Greece and Rome, but later the term also included theater composed in imitation of the Greco-Roman tradition, which was often called “neoclassical.” In more common usage, the term refers to art which possesses at least some of the following characteristics: balance, proportion, control, unity, and simplicity. Climax: Moment in a drama at which the action reaches its highest intensity and is resolved. The major climax of a play may be preceded by several climaxes of lesser and varying intensity.

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Closet drama: Play meant to be read rather than performed. Two examples of closet drama are Alfred de Musset’s Fantasio (pb. 1834, pr. 1866; English translation, 1853) and George Gordon, Lord Byron’s Manfred (pb. 1817, pr. 1834). Also, a play which, although meant for performance, has survived only as literature. Comedia: Principal form of nonreligious drama during the Spanish Golden Age (Siglio de Oro) of the sixteenth century that mixed tragic and comic elements in a complex, suspenseful plot, used a variety of verse forms, and favored realistic language and action. The comedias of the early sixteenth century were written in five acts, but by the 1580’s the number of acts had been reduced to three by playwrights such as Lope de Vega. Comedia erudita: “Learned comedy.” In the Renaissance, scholarly imitations of classical comedies (particularly Roman) were created by such writers as Pietro Aretino, Ludovico Ariosto, and Niccolò Machiavelli (the latter’s La mandragola, pr. 1520; The Mandrake, 1911; is frequently cited as an example of the genre). Comédie ballet: Theatrical form mixing elements of comedy, farce, and musical-balletic spectacle popular in seventeenth century France. Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (pr. 1670; The Would-Be Gentleman, 1675) and Le Malade imaginaire (pr. 1673; The Imaginary Invalid, 1732; also known as The Hypochondriac) are the two best examples of the form. Comédie larmoyante: French term meaning “tearful, or weeping, comedy.” This sentimental comedy was popular in eighteenth century France. A development from the earlier style of comedy, comédie larmoyante aimed to produce not critical laughter (as in the earlier style exemplified by Molière) but pleasurable tears. The chief practitioners were Philippe Destouches and Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée. (See also Sentimental comedy.) Comedy: Generally, a lighter form of drama (as contrasted with tragedy) that aims chiefly to amuse and ends happily. Wit and humor are used to entertain. The comic effect typically arises from the recognition of some incongruity of speech, action, or character development. The comic range extends from coarse, physical humor (called low comedy) to a more subtle, intellectual humor (called high comedy). When comedy tends toward the judgmental or critical, it is referred to as satiric; when it is mixed with sympathy or pathos, it moves in the direction of tragedy. There are many specific comic forms and manifestations. (See also Burlesque, Burletta, Comedia erudita, Comédie larmoyante, Comedy of humours, Comedy of manners, Commedia dell’ arte, Dark comedy, Farce, High comedy, Interlude, Low comedy, New Comedy, Old Comedy, Romantic comedy, Satire, Sentimental comedy, Slapstick, and Tragicomedy.) Comedy, drawing room. See Drawing room comedy. Comedy, laughing. See Laughing comedy. Comedy, sentimental. See Sentimental comedy. Comedy of humors: Type of drama developed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by Ben Jonson and George Chapman that dealt with characters whose behavior is controlled by some single characteristic, or “humor.” In medieval and Renaissance medicine, the humors were the four bodily fluids (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile), any excess of which created a distortion or imbalance of personality (by extension, the term came to mean “mood” or “disposition”). Jonson used this theory of character in several of his works, such as Every Man in His Humour (pr. 1598) and Every Man out of His Humour (pr. 1599). Comedy of manners: Sometimes known as “genteel comedy” (in reference to its lack of

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coarseness), a form of comedy that arose during the eighteenth century, dealing with the intrigues (particularly the amorous intrigues) of sophisticated, witty members of the upper classes. The effect and appeal of these plays are primarily intellectual, depending upon quick-witted dialogue and cleverness and facility of language. The Restoration period was particularly fond of this form, as can be seen in the plays of such dramatists as William Congreve, Sir George Etherege, and William Wycherlcy. Comic relief: Humorous incident or scene in an otherwise serious or tragic drama intended to release the audience’s tensions through laughter without detracting from the serious material. Commedia dell’arte: Dramatic comedy performed by troupes of professional actors, which became popular in the mid-sixteenth century in Italy. These troupes were rather small, consisting of perhaps a dozen actors who performed stock roles in mask and improvised upon skeletal scenarios (often derived from the traditional material of ancient Roman comedy). The tradition of the commedia, or masked comedy, was influential into the seventeenth century and still, in fact, exerts some influence. Some of the more famous stock roles are Pulchinella, Harlequin, Arlecchino, Pantalone, II Dottore, and II Capitano. Commedia palliata: Roman comedy produced in Greek costume and refined by Plautus during the second century b.c.e. Corpus Christi plays: These religious plays depicting biblical events were performed on Corpus Christi Day in England during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. The plays originated in the liturgy of the Church, but they came to be staged outdoors on large wagons that moved through towns (such as York and Chester) in a procession, so that each play was performed before several different audiences. (See also Liturgical drama, Miracle play, Trope.) Cothurnus. See Buskin. Counterplot: Secondary action coincident with the major action of a play. The counterplot is generally a reflection on or variation of the main action and as such is strongly integrated into the whole of the play. A counterplot may also be referred to as a subplot, but this more general term may refer to a secondary action which is largely unrelated to the main action. (See also Subplot.) Coup de théâtre: An unusual, striking, unexpected turn of events in the action of a play. Cup-and-saucer drama: Type of play that furthers the illusion of reality onstage through the realistic portrayal of domestic situations among the upper classes and through the use of realistic sets and authentic properties. The English playwright Thomas William Robertson (1829-1871) was the chief practitioner of this type of drama. Curtain raiser: An entertainment, sometimes a one-act play, performed at the beginning of a program. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a curtain raiser often served to entertain an audience during the arrival of latecomers, thus avoiding disturbances when the main presentation began. Cycle play. See Miracle play. Dada drama: Short-lived but important experiment in the capacity of the stage to present something other than familiar reality was Dada, an early twentieth century movement which began as a cabaret experiment in Switzerland. The guiding spirit of Dada was the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, who asserted that the first order of business for the new artist was to raze all existing structures, including logic itself, in order for a new world to be built on cleared ground. Consequently, the Dadas

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looked at reason and logic and proceeded to do the direct opposite. Tzara’s Le Coeur gaz (wr. 1921, pb. 1946; The Gas Heart, 1964), Guillaume Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tiresias (pr. 1917; The Breasts of Tiresias, 1961), and Jean Cocteau’s ballet scenario, Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel (1921; The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower, 1937), are examples of Dada drama. Dark comedy: Term coined by J. L. Styan in The Dark Comedy (1962), referring to the modern concept of the play between tragedy and farce (which evolved from the work of a wide range of predecessors, such as Euripides, medieval mystery plays, Shakespeare, and Molière). The concept reflects the existential belief in a disjunctive world where there is no possibility for conventional notions of heroism and tragedy. Such a concept imposed upon drama tends to produce a catharsis from moment to moment (not a climactic one). The term is broad enough to encompass most of the innovative works of the contemporary repertoire. Deaf theater: Form of theater that is unique because it is typically defined by its physical method of performance rather than by its literature, play script, or intended audience. Plays performed in American Sign Language (ASL), regardless of their source, content, or intended audience are said to delineate deaf theater. Spoken language scripts are translated into ASL, a process reverse from that found in other niche-based drama. Deaf theater is usually performed simultaneously in two languages, manual ASL and spoken English. The development and proliferation of deaf theater reflects first the joining of spoken and manual languages and then the struggle to separate them. Deaf theater began to embody the ASL literature of the deaf culture in the early twenty-first century. Denouement: Originally French, this word literally means “unknotting” or “untying” and is another term for the catastrophe or resolution of a dramatic action, the solution or clarification of a plot. Deus ex machina: Latin, meaning “god out of a machine.” In the Greek theater, the use of a god lowered by means of a mechanism called the mechane (usually a crane with rope and pulleys) onto the stage to untangle the plot or save the hero. In Poetics, Aristotle condemned the use of the deus ex machina, arguing that ideally the resolution of a dramatic action should grow out of the action itself. The term has come to signify any artificial device for the simple or easy resolution of any dramatic difficulties. Deuteragonist: Second actor in Greek drama, the addition of whom was an innovation of Aeschylus. The term is often synonymous with antagonist. In subsequent usage, the term has indicated a major character of secondary importance or position, such as Claudius in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (pr. c. 1600-1601) Dialogue: Speech exchanged between characters or even, in a looser sense, the thoughts of a single character. Dionysia: An annual drama festival and play contest that began in the sixth century b.c.e. in honor of the god, Dionysus, and is said to mark the beginnings of Greek drama. The Dionysia was celebrated in March and was eventually followed by a second festival in Dionysus’s honor, the Lenaea (“wine press”), held in the winter. Dionysian. See Apollonian and Dionysian. Dithyramb: Originally a choral hymn sung and danced during the ancient Greek rites of Dionysus, the tone of which was passionate and excited. In Poetics, Aristotle postulates that the tragic form developed from the dithyramb. Documentary drama: Also popularly referred to as “docudrama,” this term refers to the dramatization of actual events in a journalistic style that explores the ethics and re-

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sponsibility of issues of public concern. Documentary drama developed in West Germany in the 1960’s and is represented by works such as German dramatist Rolf Hochhuth’s Der Stellvertreter: Ein Christliches Trauerspiel (pr. 1963; The Representation, 1963; also known as The Deputy, 1964) and American dramatist Eric Bentley’s Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been: The Investigation of Show-Business by the Un-American Activities Committee, 1947-1958 (pr. 1972). Domestic tragedy: Serious and usually realistic play, with lower-class or middle-class characters and milieu, typically dealing with personal or domestic concerns. The term has been used to refer to works from the Elizabethan age to the present. Examples of domestic tragedy include George Lillo’s The London Merchant: Or, The History of George Barnwell (pr. 1731), Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (pr. 1603), several of the plays of Henrik Ibsen, and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (pr. 1949). Drama: Generally speaking, any work designed to be represented on a stage by actors (Aristotle defined drama as “the imitation of action”). More specifically, the term has come to signify a play of a serious nature and intent which may end either happily (comedy) or unhappily (tragedy). Dramatic irony: Irony is a means of expressing a meaning or significance contrary to the stated or ostensible one. Dramatic irony often lies more in the action or structure of a play than in the words of a character. Oedipus’ search for the murderer of Laius (whom he later discovers to be himself) is an example of extended dramatic irony. Dramatic irony may also occur when the spoken lines of a character are perceived by the audience to have a double meaning. Dramatis personae: Characters in a play. Often, a printed listing defining the characters and specifying their relationships. Dramaturgy: Composition of plays. The term is occasionally used to refer to the performance or acting of plays. Drame: French term employed chiefly by Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1740-1814) to denote plays that mixed realistic and comic elements with a serious, often tragic, plot. Such plays featured middle-class characters and situations and a preponderance of sentimentality. Drame héroique. See Heroic drama. Drawing room comedy: Nineteenth century form, related to the comedy of manners form, that elevated the comedy’s moral tone by banishing much of the witty sexual innuendo that had long characterized the genre. The setting is usually the drawing room, in which the social games being played are exposed for the audience’s amusement as well as for its admiration, the latter being reserved for characters who can best play the game. Dion Boucicault’s London Assurance (pr. 1841) illustrates the type. Dumb show: Dramatic performance communicated entirely through gestures, not words. The play-within-a-play in Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is a famous example of the dumb show. The term “pantomime” is occasionally used to signify the same type of performance. (See also Play-within-a-play.) Elizabethan: Of or referring to the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England, lasting from 1558 to 1603, a period of important developments and achievements in the arts in England, particularly in poetry and drama. The era included such literary figures as Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Donne. Sometimes referred to as the English Renaissance.

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Entr’acte: Brief performance, often musical, intended to entertain an audience between the acts or scenes of a drama. Environmental theater: Production style developed by the experimental theater groups of the 1960’s, emphasizing a flexible approach to the total theater space and aimed at eliminating the traditional separation between audience and stage. Environmental theater is often performed in “found” spaces such as streets, warehouses, and fields. Epic theater: Style of drama in which the action is presented in loosely related episodes, often interspersed with song, that are designed to distance the audience from the drama. Epic theater was developed by the German director Ervin Piscator in the late 1920’s but came to be associated chiefly with the work of Bertolt Brecht. (See also Alienation.) Epilogue: Closing section of a play, or a speech by an actor or chorus at the end of a play, which makes some reflection upon the preceding action or simply, as in Puck’s speech at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (pr. c. 1595-1596), requests the approval and applause of the spectators. The term is sometimes used to refer to the actor who recites such a closing speech. Episode: In Greek tragedy, the segment between two choral odes. In the larger sense, an episode is a portion of a plot or dramatic action having its own coherence and integrity. Exodos: Final scene in a classical Greek drama. Expressionism: Movement dominant in the decade that followed World War I, particularly referring to German painting. External reality, including the appearance of objects, is consciously distorted in order to represent reality as it is felt or “viewed emotionally.” Among examples of expressionist drama (which often used distorted scenery, props, music, and unrealistic lighting effects) are Frank Wedekind’s Die Büchse der Pandora (pr. 1904; Pandora’s Box, 1918), Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (pr. 1922), and the operas of Alban Berg (Wozzeck, pr. 1925; English translation, 1952; and Lulu, pr. 1937, English translation, 1977). A play may contain expressionistic devices without being specifically expressionistic (for example, Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, pr. 1944, or his A Streetcar Named Desire, pr. 1947). Extravaganza: James Robinson Planché (1796-1880) developed this form in England. An elaborate musical presentation, the extravaganza was usually based on a fairy tale. Falling action: Part of a play following the climax. (See also Freytag’s pyramid.) Farce: From the Latin farcire, meaning “to stuff.” Originally an insertion into established Church liturgy in the Middle Ages, “farce” later became the term for specifically comic scenes inserted into early liturgical drama. The term has come to refer to any play that evokes laughter by such low-comedy devices as physical humor, rough wit, and ridiculous and improbable situations and characters. A play may contain farcical elements without being, properly speaking, a farce. Feminist theater: Theater that works to highlight women’s social and political struggles, while in the process exposing patriarchal structures in society and the politics of prevailing gender roles. Feminist playwrights include Alice Childress, Tina Howe, Caryl Churchill, Megan Terry, Wendy Wasserstein, and Marsha Norman. Flashback: Scene in a play (or in film or literature) depicting events that occurred at an earlier time. Foil: Any character who sets off or contrasts with another by means of different behavior, philosophy, or purpose.

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Folk drama: Generally, plays on folk themes performed at popular or religious festivals by amateurs. Sometimes the term is used to indicate plays written by sophisticated, practiced dramatists on folk themes or in “folk settings” and performed by professional actors. John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (pr. 1907) may be considered, in some sense, a folk drama by this latter definition. Fourth wall: Theatrical convention intended to heighten the illusion of reality onstage and employed extensively in the late nineteenth century. An invisible fourth wall is imagined to exist between the audience and a stage, enclosed on three sides by the stage set and framed on the fourth by the proscenium arch. The audience, in effect, looks in on the action “through” the fourth wall. Freytag’s pyramid: In 1863, the German critic Gustave Freytag described the theoretical structure of a typical five-act play in Die Technik des Dramas. He categorized the dramatic action into the following segments: introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, and catastrophe—all of which can be diagramed in a pyramidal form with the climax at the apex. Fusion theater: Form of experimental theater which combines elements of non-Western traditions of acting, dramatic and storytelling conventions, music, and performance styles with its Western counterparts. New York’s Café La Mama and Berkeley’s Zellerbach Playhouse are popular playhouses that promote fusion theater. (See also Experimental theater.) Gay and lesbian drama: Dramatic works written by or focusing on gay issues and lifestyles. Early twentieth century playwrights that subtly treated the subject of homosexuality included Noël Coward, Lillian Hellman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and, in the 1950’s, Robert Anderson. Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, produced in 1968, paved the way for gay drama in the decades that followed. Among the most honest presentations of homosexuality since 1968 have been John Hopkins’s Find Your Way Home (pr. 1970), Marvin Hamlisch and Edward Kleban’s A Chorus Line (pr. 1975), Harvey Fierstein’s La Cage aux Folles (pr. 1983), and Tony Kushner’s pair of plays, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Part One: Millenium Approaches (1991) and Part Two: Perestroika (1992). The AIDS crisis, homophobia, and political representation have become modern thematic orientations of gay and lesbian drama. Grand Guignol: Type of theatrical presentation in which horror is the desired effect. This is typically achieved by skillfully naturalistic depictions of situations causing physical pain, such as amputations, eye gougings, and burnings. The effect is invariably grisly and is sometimes meant to produce an uncomfortable sort of laughter. Hamartia: Greek word for “error,” specifically an error in judgment. Aristotle, in Poetics, states that a true tragic hero should be a character “preeminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice and depravity but by some error.” This error of judgment may proceed either from ignorance or from moral fault and is sometimes referred to as a “tragic flaw.” Harangue: Speech, usually of some length, often addressed to a crowd to influence the attitudes and actions of the addressees. Antony’s ironic speech to the citizens of Rome over Caesar’s body in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (pr. c. 1599-1600) is a well-known example. Harlequinade: Play or pantomime in the commedia dell’arte tradition featuring Harlequin, the stock buffoon who has a shaved head and parti-colored tights, and carries a wooden sword.

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Hero/Heroine: Most important character in a drama. Popularly, the term has come to refer to a character who possesses extraordinary prowess or virtue, but as a technical dramatic term it simply indicates the central participant in a dramatic action. (See also Protagonist.) Heroic drama: Type of play usually written in heroic couplets and of elevated diction and seriousness of action (although there might be a happy ending). Heroic drama was popular for a short period, predominantly during the Restoration in England, and its practitioners were John Dryden, Bronson Howard, and Thomas Otway, among others. In France, the drame héroïque was likewise popular during the seventeenth century (here the verse form was the Alexandrine). The drame héroïque reached a level of accomplishment and art far surpassing its English counterpart. The great French practitioners were Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine. High comedy: Term broadly used to refer to comedy whose impulse is often satiric and whose appeal is primarily intellectual. Intellect, wit, style, and sophistication are the trademarks of this type of comedy. Plays such as William Congreve’s The Way of the World (pr. 1700), Molière’s Le Misanthrope (pr. 1666; The Misanthrope, 1709), and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People (pr. 1895) are all examples of high comedy. History play. See Chronicle play. Hubris: Greek term for “insolence” or “pride,” the characteristic or emotion in tragic heroes of ancient Greek drama that causes the reversal of their fortune, leading them to transgress moral codes or ignore warnings. An example of hubris in Sophocles’ Antigon 4 (441 b.c.e.; Antigone, 1729) is Creon’s overweening pride, which, despite Tiresias’ admonitions, brings about the deaths of Antigone as well as those of Creon’s wife and son. Humors, comedy of. See Comedy of humors. Hypokrit4s: An expositor performing recitations in early Greek tragedy that advance the action by brief dialogues with the chorus. Imitation: From the Greek mimesis, used by Aristotle in his Poetics to describe tragedy as “an imitation of an action” of a good man. Aristotle perceived artistic imitation not as an exact replica of life but as an artistic representation that transcends reality to convey universal truths, which produces pleasure in the observer. This term has remained central to Western literary and dramatic criticism, although it has been subject to various interpretations through the centuries. Improvisational theater: Performance in which action and dialogue are created spontaneously by the actors, and which is often based upon a rough scenario rather than a written, rehearsed script. The commedia dell’arte of the Italian Renaissance featured improvisation, and many contemporary theater groups use improvisation both as a performance and as a training technique. Interlude: Short play, often a farce, popular in fifteenth and sixteenth century England. The English interlude has Continental counterparts in such works as the anonymous French farce Pierre Patelin and the comedies of the German mastersinger Hans Sachs. Henry Medwall and John Heywood were practitioners of the interlude in England. Intrigue: Incidents that make up the plot or action of a play. The term is most frequently applied to plots that are elaborate and in which the schemes of various characters are involved. A play such as William Congreve’s The Way of the World is sometimes referred to as a “comedy of intrigue.” Irony. See Dramatic irony.

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Jacobean: Of or pertaining to the reign of James I of England, who ruled from 1603 to 1625, the period following the death of Elizabeth I, which saw tremendous literary activity in poetry and drama. Many writers who achieved fame during the Elizabethan age were still composing (notably William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Donne). Other dramatists, such as John Webster and Cyril Tourneur, achieved success almost entirely during the reign of James I. The theater of this period is particularly noted for its interest in the violent and the fantastical. Kabuki: Form of theater in Japan which was, traditionally, established by a former priestess of the early seventeenth century, Okuni. Okuni organized a troupe of actors that included both men and women. Kabuki enjoyed immediate popular success, and the number of companies (with both male and female performers) increased rapidly. As early as 1629, the presence of female performers caused a scandal and was banned. Female impersonators kept the tradition alive and remain very popular. Kabuki actors wear no masks (unlike the performers of the aristocratic No theater). The Kabuki drama is typically melodramatic and violent, with complex plotting. Latino drama: Drama that emerged in the 1950’s and 1960’s, written by or focusing on the numerous groups that belong to Latino culture in the United States: Mexican Americans or Chicanos (American-born Mexicans), Puerto Ricans or Nuyoricans (New York Puerto Ricans), and Cuban Americans, whose modern theater has acquired several names, including Cuban American and Cuban exile theater. Identity issues, immigration, socioeconomic status, and a postmodern political consciousness of “the other” as both outsider and insider typically grounds the thematic orientation of Latino drama. Laughing comedy: Term coined in 1772 by English playwright Oliver Goldsmith to describe a comedy, such as his She Stoops to Conquer (pr. 1773) or Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals (pr. 1775), that exposes human follies and vices for the amusement and edification of the audience, as opposed to the sentimental comedy, which dominated eighteenth century drama and which was intended to move audiences to pleasurable tears with sentimental stories about the middle class. The respective merits of these two types of comedy were hotly debated throughout the 1770’s. Lazzo: Improvised comic dialogue or action in the commedia dell’arte. Lazzi (plural) were among the prime resources of the commedia actors, consisting of verbal asides on current politics, literary topics, manifestations of terror, pratfalls, and similar actions. Leitmotif: From the German, meaning “leading motif.” Any repetition—of a word, phrase, situation, or idea—which occurs within a single work or group of related works and which serves to unify the work or works. The term has special meaning in musical drama (a signal melody or phrase of music), and the technique was used by the nineteenth century composer and theoretician Richard Wagner not only to unify his operas (most notably the four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, pr. 1876; The Nibelung’s Ring, 1877; also known as The Ring of the Nibelung, 1910) but also to add dramatic and psychological resonance and depth to the action. Libretto: Italian for “little book.” The text or script of an opera, operetta, or other form of musical theater. Liturgical drama: Plays performed as part of the liturgy of the Church during the Middle Ages. The origin of these plays was in the tropes or interpolations into the Latin

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text of the liturgy, which was chanted by the clergy. These interpolations were expanded and eventually developed into independent performances in the vernacular. The performances eventually moved out of the church proper and were performed by members of the laity. While the plays ceased to be liturgical, they continued to deal with religious themes, particularly drawn from the Old and New Testaments. (See also Corpus Christi plays, Miracle play, Trope.) Low comedy: Term broadly used to refer to the coarse elements in a play designed to arouse laughter. Such elements include physical comedy (slapstick, practical jokes) and off-color humor. Low comedy elements are to be found not only in such comic forms as farce but also in plays of high artistic repute, such as William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor (pr. 1597). Manners, comedy of. See Comedy of manners. Masque: Courtly entertainment popular during the first half of the seventeenth century in England. Derived from Italian court entertainments, it spanned from the latter part of the reign of Elizabeth I through that of James I and into that of Charles I. It was a particularly sumptuous form of spectacle including music (song and dance) and lavish costumes and scenery (the great Baroque architect Inigo Jones and the great Baroque composer Henry Purcell were frequently involved in the nonliterary aspects of these productions). Masques often dealt with mythological or pastoral subjects, and the dramatic action often took second place to pure spectacle. Ben Jonson was the greatest writer of masques during this period, and even the young John Milton composed a masque, Comas (pr. 1634), whose interest was, atypically, more literary than spectacle-oriented. (See also Antimasque.) Melodrama: Originally a drama with occasional songs, or with music of any kind (melos is Greek for “song”). It was also one of the original Italian terms for opera. By the early nineteenth century, the term acquired a new meaning: a play in which characters are clearly either virtuous or evil and are pitted against one another in suspenseful, often sensational situations. Late eighteenth century French playwright Guilbert de Pixérécourt was a well known melodramatist, best remembered for his Sélico: Ou, Les Nègres généreux (pr. 1793). This type of play became so common that the term took on a pejorative meaning which it still retains today: any dramatic work characterized by stereotyped characters and sensational, sometimes improbable situations. Method, the: An approach to acting developed by the Russian director Konstantin Stanislavsky. Commonly referred to as “the Method,” this approach emphasizes a realistic acting style based on each actor’s self-knowledge and on the entire cast’s careful analysis of the script. An understanding of the motivation behind the character’s speech and actions is essential to a believable performance, according to the rules of the Method, which was popularized in the United States by the noted acting instructor Lee Strasberg. Miles gloriosus: Braggart soldier character type found in many plays from antiquity to the modern age, particularly in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. The term derives from Plautus’s play of the same title. Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (pr. c. 1552) and William Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff are quintessential examples of the type in sixteenth century English drama. (See also Alazon.) Mime: Dramatic action portrayed by means of gesture and movement without speech. An actor who performs such actions is also called a “mime.” Mimesis. See Imitation.

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Miracle play: In English drama, this term refers to medieval religious plays dramatizing the lives of the saints and divine miracles. The term “mystery play” (derived from the French term mystère) is used to designate plays derived from the Scriptures as opposed to those dealing with saints’ lives. These plays were originally associated with the celebration of saints’ feast days and with religious processions (particularly the Corpus Christi festival) and were performed in Latin as part of the liturgical services. Later, these plays were expanded, performed in the vernacular, and moved into the streets. Trade guilds were often responsible for the performance of a particular play, so that in time a series of performances by various guilds would create a cycle of plays. Some examples of subjects derived from Scripture include Christ’s Passion, the Fall of Man, and the story of Noah. This form of dramatic entertainment reached its height in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. (See also Corpus Christi plays, Liturgical drama, Trope.) Mise-en-scène: Staging of a drama, including scenery, costumes, movable furniture (properties), and, by extension, the positions (blocking) and gestures of the actors. Modernism: An international movement in the arts that began in the early years of the twentieth century. Although the term is used to describe artists of widely varying persuasions, modernism in general was characterized by its international idiom, by its interest in cultures distant in space or time, by its emphasis on formal experimentation, and by its sense of dislocation and radical change. Seeking to revolutionize dramatic structure, playwrights often presented fantasies, hallucinations, nightmares, and other subjective experiences. In addition, they developed new lighting and staging techniques—particularly the turntable stage—that portrayed myriad moods rather than a single mood, and they excluded irrelevancy. Influenced by German expressionism, Symbolism, and Sigmund Freud, many of these playwrights were antinaturalistic. (See also Symbolism, Expressionism, Naturalism.) Monodrama: Theatrical presentation featuring only one character. Jean Cocteau’s La Voix humaine (pr. 1930; The Human Voice, 1951) is an example of this form. Monologue: An extended speech by one character in a drama. If the character is alone onstage, unheard by other characters, the monologue is more specifically referred to as a soliloquy. (See also Soliloquy.) Morality play: Dramatic form of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance containing allegorical figures (most often virtues and vices) that are typically involved in the struggle over a person’s soul. The anonymously written Everyman is one of the most famous medieval examples of this form. Motoriae: Loosely structured play, refined by the Greek writer Epicharmus of Cos during the fifth century b.c.e., the violent action of which combines mythological plots with realistic stories. Mummery: This term refers broadly to a theatrical presentation in which actors or dancers are masked or in disguise. The term is occasionally used to refer to acting in general. Musical comedy: Theatrical form mingling song, dance, and spoken dialogue which was developed in the United States in the twentieth century and is derived from vaudeville and operetta. In its earliest stages, the music often had little to do with the libretto (the text or script), but a closer integration of these elements has occurred since the early 1940’s. (See also Musical theater, Opera.) Musical theater: Dramatic production in which music, lyrics, and sometimes dance are fundamental elements. Opera, operetta, and musical comedy are all forms of musical theater. Proponents of this genre include Claudio Monteverdi, George Frederick

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Handel, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Gioacchino Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, Giuseppe Verdi, Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, and Giacomo Puccini. (See also Musical comedy, Opera.) Mystery play. See Miracle play. Native American drama: Dramatic works by Native Americans and/or about their experience in North America. The search for identity in the United States and the hope of rectifying the cultural image of the Native American commonly held in American society are often thematic poles of such works. Works often integrate religious themes, rituals, and dances that began to perish at the end of the nineteenth century with the increasing removal of Indian peoples to reservations. Representative playwrights include Hanay Geiogamah, William S. Yellow Robe, Jr., Roxy Gordon, and Leanne Howe. Naturalism: Naturalism was a type of realism, aimed at overturning theatrical convention, created in the late nineteenth century by a school of French and American writers including Émile Zola and Theodore Dreiser, who elevated the style nearly to a philosophical movement. As a genre, it professed to be unsentimental and, consequently, antibourgeois. Naturalistic drama sought to mirror life, even at its seamiest, in all its cruelty and degradation. Henry Becque and Gerhart Hauptmann were two naturalistic playwrights. (See also Realism.) Neoclassicism: Aesthetic movement that influenced seventeenth century French and English drama and was characterized by an admiration for and an emulation of classical Greek and Roman culture. French neoclassical drama is best represented by the tragedies of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, who followed the strict rules of unity and verisimilitude advocated by the Académie Française. In England, neoclassical dramatists such as John Dryden wrote heroic tragedies, which were highly artificial dramas featuring exotic settings, improbable and spectacular action, and high-flown language, usually written in heroic couplets. (See also Renaissance drama.) New Comedy: Greek comedy of the third and fourth centuries b.c.e. that coincided with the decline of Greek political power and with the decline of the satiric comic theater of Aristophanes. The New Comedy featured stereotyped plots and characters: courtesans, young lovers, foolish miserly old men, and scheming servants. After many amorous intrigues, the plays typically ended in a happy marriage. Menander was the chief proponent of the form, and the Romans Terence and Plautus were much influenced by it, finding in it an abundant source for material. No: Form of theater developed in fourteenth century Japan from ritual dance associated with Shinto worship. The plays were designed for aristocratic audiences and were highly restrained and stylized. The plays are typically mysterious and gloomy in plot and atmosphere. Performers (who are always male) wear masks and employ a distinctly unrealistic form of acting. The text is sung or chanted to musical accompaniment in low- and high-pitched voices. The influence of this Eastern form can be seen in the West in certain twentieth century works such as William Butler Yeats’s At the Hawk’s Well (pr. 1916) and The Only Jealousy of Emer (pr. 1922). Obligatory scene: Scene that a playwright has led an audience to expect (usually an emotional confrontation between characters) and without which the audience would be disappointed (also called a scene a faire). Old Comedy: Greek comedy of the fifth century b.c.e. that originated in the fertility festivals in honor of Dionysus. Of the plays in this form, only those of Aristophanes

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survive. His work is notable for its biting personal and political satire as well as its lyric beauty. The chorus takes an important role in the action, notably delivering the parabasis, an extended speech usually expressing the views of the playwright. With the decline of Greek political power in the fourth century b.c.e., this form was replaced by New Comedy. The plays in this form relied heavily on stock characters and situations. One-act play: Although there have been short, unified dramatic works that might properly be termed one-act dramas earlier on, this term has typically been employed for such works written since the late nineteenth century. The one-act play is usually quite limited in number of characters and scene changes, and the action often revolves around a single incident or event. Opera: Form of dramatic entertainment consisting of a play set to music. Opera is the most important and most sophisticated form that combines music with theatrical representation. It is a complex combination of various art forms—music (both vocal and instrumental), drama, poetry, acting, stage design, dance, and so on. Like other art forms, it has its own conventions; these are sometimes derived more from a musical perspective than from a purely theatrical perspective or tradition. The origin of opera in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in Italy resulted from the attempts of certain Humanist literary figures and musicians to recreate classical Greek drama, with its combination of speech, music, and dance. From its inception through the present, opera has undergone a diverse history of its own (which sometimes mirrors the history of purely spoken drama). Practitioners of the form include Claudio Monteverdi, George Frederick Handel, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Gioacchino Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, Giuseppe Verdi, Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, Giacomo Puccini, and Alban Berg. (See also Musical comedy, Musical theater.) Pageant: Originally the platform or movable stage upon which medieval miracle and mystery plays were performed, the term has come to refer to any large-scale outdoor procession or performance. Pantomime: Dramatic action communicated entirely by gesture and movement but not speech. Also, a type of theatrical entertainment developed in England in the eighteenth century. The story was usually acted out in both song and dance, and the scenery and stage effects could be quite lavish and spectacular. The form still survives in England in special Christmas entertainments designed for children. Parabasis: Seven-part choral number occurring toward the middle of a Greek comedy that makes a direct appeal to the audience, requesting a prize or offering advice on current events. Parodos: In classical Greek tragedy, the first scene in which the chorus appears and the first ode that the chorus sings are called parodos. The name derives from the entryway used by the chorus for entrances and exits. (See also Chorus.) Passion play: Play that depicts the life, or incidents from the life, of a god. These plays had their origin in the pagan rites of ancient Egypt and the Near East. In Christian Europe, many medieval plays presented episodes from the life of Christ and are also referred to as Passion plays. The form still survives in various pageants in Europe and the Americas (particularly notable is the famous Oberammergau Passion play of Germany, performed every ten years). Pastoral drama: Form of tragicomedy that was popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, originally a dramatic imitation of the bucolic idylls of Horace and Vergil. Pastoral drama represented a neoclassical vision of the rustic, Arcadian life and typ-

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ically mingled such elements as unrequited love, intrigues of jealousy, and threats of death to the protagonists. These tragic elements are often happily resolved by the revelation of true relationships between characters or the triumph of love. The masterpiece of the genre (and one of the most influential theatrical works of the sixteenth century) is Battista Guarini’s Il pastor fido (pr. 1596; The Faithful Shepherd, 1602). Another famous example is Torquato Tasso’s sixteenth century play Aminta (pr. 1573). Pathos: Quality in a dramatic character that evokes pity or sorrow from the audience. Peripeteia: Sudden reversal of situation in a dramatic action. Aristotle gives as an example the arrival of the messenger in Oedipus Tyrannus, who believes he will relieve Oedipus’s anxiety and accomplishes the reverse effect. Pièce bien faite. See Well-made play. Pièce de thèse. See Problem play. Play-within-a-play: Play or dramatic fragment, performed as a scene or scenes within a larger drama, typically performed or viewed by the characters of the larger drama, such as the farcical “whodunit” in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound (pr. 1968). In Elizabethan drama, the play-within-a-play was often performed as a dumb show, as in the players’ scene in Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. (See also Dumb show.) Plot: Sequence of the occurrence of events in a dramatic action. A plot may be unified around a single action, but it may also consist of a series of disconnected incidents— it is then referred to as “episodic.” Political theater: Broad term that typically refers to any production of a play that carries either an overt or covert sociopolitical message, provokes serious contemplation of social issues, or invokes an understanding of and sympathy for political causes. Often a dynamic tool for public instruction, propaganda, and entertainment, political theater instigates, examines, and sometimes suggests solutions for the problems inherent in human society. The two most common types of political theater include plays used to make a statement in order to change public sentiment concerning a social issue and those used directly to instigate social change as an agent of propaganda. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (pr. 1953), Amiri Baraka’s Slave Ship: A Historical Pageant (pr. 1967), and Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine (pr. 1979) are examples of political theater. Postcolonial theater: Theatrical works primarily driven by, focused on, or concerned with the political, social, or cultural effects or aftermath of colonial dominance after a nation’s independence. Postcolonial literature and theater often focuses on the “subaltern” (that is, those who are in a subordinate power position who fight, or have fought, the process and results of colonialism) finding their voice. Themes revolving around the intersections of nationalism, identity, and race, as well as protest and cultural revival, are often present in postcolonial dramatic works. Examples includes David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly (pr. 1988), which studies the issues of Western colonialism, and Athol Fugard’s MASTER HAROLD . . . and the Boys (pr. 1982) or My Children! My Africa! (pr. 1990), which examine the colonial legacy in South Africa. Postmodernism: Term loosely applied to the various artistic movements that followed the era of so-called high modernism, represented by such giants as James Joyce and Pablo Picasso. The term typically refers to a work that calls attention to itself as an artifice rather than a mirror held up to external reality. In drama, the mixing of several available forms and styles, often in fanciful, experimental ways, is now labeled postmodernism, a special form of which is performance art. Typified by artists such

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as Laurie Anderson, a performance art piece might include an artist working alone and presenting a statement through multimedia, music, singing, storytelling, and stand-up comedy. Examples of postmodern plays include Dario Fo’s Morte accidentale di un anarchico (pr. 1970; Accidental Death of an Anarchist, 1979), Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (pr. 1982), and Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women (pr. 1991). Presentationalism: An approach to playwriting and stage production that presents drama as an artificial, theatrical event rather than as a realistic representation of life. For example, classical Greek drama, with its masks, chorus, and circular stage, and Elizabethan drama, with its stark stage sets and blank verse, are presentational. (See also Representationalism.) Problem play: Drama in which a social problem is illustrated and, usually, a solution is suggested. This form is also referred to as a thesis play (from the French pièce de thèse) and originated in the mid-nineteenth century in France. Le Fils naturel (pr. 1858; The Natural Son, 1879), by Alexandre Dumas, fils, is an early example. A number of Henrik Ibsen’s plays can be categorized broadly as problem plays. Prologue: Opening section of a play that often provides introductory information concerning the central action of the play. Also, a speech by an actor or chorus at the beginning of a play of an expository nature. The term is sometimes used to refer to the actor who recites such an introductory speech. Properties: Usually abbreviated as “props.” Properties are the movable objects (other than scenery or costumes) that appear on stage during a dramatic performance. Proscenium: Part of a stage in front of the curtain. Also, the wall that separates the stage from the auditorium of a theater and provides the arch that frames the stage. Protagonist: Originally, in the Greek drama, the first actor, who played the leading role. In a more general sense, the term has come to signify the most important character, usually a hero, in a drama or story. It is not unusual for there to be more than one protagonist in a play. (See also Hero/Heroine.) Protasis: Section of a classical drama in which the characters are introduced and the dramatic situation is explained. The term “protatic character” has come to signify a character used only to assist in the exposition of a play and appearing nowhere else in the action. Proverbe dramatique: Play—typically of one act—illustrating an aphorism that forms the play’s title. This form began in France in the eighteenth century and was developed by Carmontelle, but its most famous practitioner was the nineteenth century poet and dramatist Alfred de Musset. Psychological realism: Sigmund Freud’s analysis of the complex psychological motivations behind human behavior led dramatists in the late nineteenth century to try to reproduce this psychological complexity in their characters rather than relying on character types. One of the earliest proponents of this psychological realism was August Strindberg (1849-1912), who argued that since human actions are caused by complex motivations in real life, they should be similarly portrayed on the stage. Radio drama: Drama written for and performed over radio and popular in the United States between 1920 and 1940. Orson Welles was a well-known practitioner of radio drama. Raisonneur: Character in a play, typically somewhat detached from the action, who acts as a spokesman for the author. This character observes the other characters involved more directly in the action and comments upon the action, expressing the author’s views.

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Realism: Broadly, any mode of art that attempts to present a replica of real life (as opposed to a fantastic or an ideal vision of life) and engage the audience in a reaction to the work as though it were real life. Particularly, realism was a reaction, beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to fantastic, superhuman, melodramatic, idealistic, and otherwise Romantic forms of art and theater. Because realism sought to put forth the actual over the ideal, it necessarily replaced the exotic with the ordinary, the superhuman with the human, poetic and elevated language with familiar dialogue, the overblown and spectacular with the understated and domestic, and exaggerated or grandiose actions with those that are more plausible and often verbal or cerebral. Realist theater—characterized by a well-devised dramatic plot, with its emphasis on psychological truth and human pathos—tended to be sentimental and moralistic and to preach social reform. Realist playwrights rejected the idea of the well-made play with its mechanical artifices and slick plotting, as well as exaggerated theatricalism. Henrik Ibsen is considered the leader of this revolution in drama, and chief pioneers of dramatic realism in the twentieth century included Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Edward Albee. (See also Romanticism, Russian realism, Well-made play.) Recognition. See Anagnorisis. Renaissance drama: European drama produced from the early sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries and often characterized by a concern for the classical ideals of composition and structure that are set forth in Aristotle’s Poetics and are demonstrated in the works of classical dramatists such as Seneca, whose five-act plays were considered to epitomize the classical structure. Renaissance drama was also characterized by a humanitarian interest in secular subjects such as history, politics, and social issues, and this interest constituted a quite marked departure from the exclusively religious/allegorical concerns of medieval drama, evidenced in the miracle and morality plays. Renaissance drama first appeared in Italy during the early and mid-sixteenth century with playwrights such as Niccoló Machiavelli, Ludovico Ariosto, and Giangiorgio Trissino. Repertory: Theater troupe or company that presents several different plays in alternation during the course of a season. Representationalism: An approach to playwriting and staging that seeks to create the illusion of reality onstage through realistic characters and situations and/or through the use of realistic stage sets, properties, and acting styles. The Naturalistic drama advocated by the French novelist Émile Zola (1840-1902) and practiced by French director André Antoine (1858-1943) at the turn of the twentieth century is an example of representationalism. The opposite approach to drama is presentationalism, which presents drama as a stylized, theatrical event. (See also Presentationalism.) Restoration: Period in English history beginning with the restoration of Charles II to the throne, bringing an end to the Puritan interregnum, which had abolished the monarchy in 1649 and closed the theaters. The Restoration period has no precise end but is commonly held to have ended about 1700. As a result of the reopening of the London theaters, there was a surge of theatrical activity, and the period was known for the wealth of new drama produced by such dramatists as William Congreve, Sir George Etherege, William Wycherley, George Farquhar, and Oliver Goldsmith. Revenge tragedy: Type of drama, particularly associated with the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, in which revenge is the central motive. Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (pr. c. 1585-1589) is said to have established the genre in English drama. Some other examples are Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (pr. c. 1589) and

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John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (pr. 1599). William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is, in an enlarged and very sophisticated sense, an example of this type of drama. Reversal. See Peripeteia. Revue: Theatrical production, typically consisting of sketches, song, and dance, which often comments satirically upon personalities and events of the day. Generally there is no plot involved, although some semblance of a unifying action or theme may unite the individual sketches and musical numbers. Rising action: Part of a play preceding the climax. (See also Anabasis, Freytag’s pyramid.) Romantic comedy: Play in which love is the central motive of the dramatic action. The term often refers to plays of the Elizabethan period, such as William Shakespeare’s As You Like It (pr. c. 1599) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but it has also been applied to any modern work that contains similar features. Romanticism: Broad term that at times fails to capture the complexity and multiplicity of European Romanticism, which was manifested in different ways and different periods in European regions during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Generally, the genre exalted individualism over collectivism, revolution over conservatism, innovation over tradition, imagination over reason, and spontaneity over restraint. Romanticism regarded art as self-expression; it strove to heal the cleavage between object and subject and expressed a longing for the infinite in all things. It stressed the innate goodness of human beings and the evils of the institutions that would stultify human creativity. Other values associated with various schools of Romanticism include primitivism, an interest in folklore, a reverence for nature, and a fascination with the demoniac and the macabre. Russian realism: Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, a movement whose leaders included Ivan Turgenev, Aleksandr Ostrovsky, Leo Tolstoy, and later, Maxim Gorky. Anton Chekhov’s plays Chayka (pr. 1896; The Seagull, 1909), Dyadya Vanya (pr. 1899; Uncle Vanya, 1914), Tri sestry (pr. 1901; The Three Sisters, 1920), and Vishnyovy sad (pr. 1904; The Cherry Orchard, 1908) are the best examples. Satire: Dramatic satire employs the comedic devices of wit, irony, and exaggeration to expose and condemn human folly, vice, and stupidity. Although subject to political and societal repression throughout the centuries, dramatic satire appears in the classical Greek comedies of Aristophanes, in the personification of vices in the medieval morality plays, in the Renaissance plays of William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, in the social satires of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in the twentieth century dramas of such dissimilar playwrights as Sean O’Casey and Harold Pinter. Satyr play: In Greek drama, a performance composed of choric dances performed exclusively by actors dressed as satyrs. Not necessarily comic, the story was often derived from epics or legends and was associated with Dionysus. Scenario: An outline of the dramatic action (plot) of a theatrical work, specifying the characters and the order of acts and scenes. Scene: Division of action within an act (some plays are divided only into scenes instead of acts). Sometimes scene division indicates a change of setting or locale; sometimes it simply indicates the entrances and exits of characters; this latter case was, for example, the typical practice of the French neoclassical dramatists such as Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine. (See also Act.) Scène à faire. See Obligatory scene.

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School plays: Plays performed at secondary schools in sixteenth century England. These plays showed the influence of the classical comedy of Terence and Plautus and were composed both in Latin and in English. The earliest known example of the form in English, of about 1566, is Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister. Sentimental comedy: With the rise of the middle class in the eighteenth century, a “new” audience patronized the theater, demanding drama which related to their social class and milieu and which upheld the traditionally accepted moral code that had brought them into increased position and power. The sentimental comedy was a type of play generally centered on the distresses of the middle class and intended to evoke the sympathies of the audience. Good and bad characters were often presented in a very schematic way without psychological complexity. Pleasurable tears, not laughter, were the mark of the successful sentimental drama. In England, the Restoration playwright George Farquhar anticipated some of the features of the sentimental comedy, but the true practitioners of the unadulterated form were playwrights such as Sir Richard Steele, Hugh Kelly, and Richard Cumberland. The corresponding development in French eighteenth century drama was the comédie larmoyante (tearful comedy), of which Philippe Destouches and Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée are the chief proponents. (See also Comédie larmoyante.) Set speech: Long, uninterrupted speech made by a single character to set forth a number of points. This device is prevalent in verse drama. Setting: Time and place in which the action of a play happens. The term also applies to the physical elements of a theatrical production, such as scenery and properties. Slapstick: Low comedy in which physical action (such as a kick in the rear, tripping, and knocking over people or objects) evokes laughter. Social realism: Philosophical movement, begun in the early twentieth century, that raised political consciousness of the working classes and often criticized governments and regimes. By focusing on topics of social justice, the attitudes and problems of several social classes, and émigré identity, the form became popular with many “ethnic” dramatists by the 1960’s and 1970’s, including Latino, Native American, and Asian American playwrights. Sock: Flat foot covering worn by actors in Greek comedy. In contrast, tragic actors wore high platform boots (buskins), which endowed them with increased stature, both physically and metaphorically. The sock was literally more down-to-earth. (See also Buskin.) Soliloquy: Properly, an extended speech delivered by a character alone on stage, unheard by other characters. Soliloquy is a form of monologue, and it typically reveals the intimate thoughts and emotions of the speaker. (See also Monologue.) Sottie: Form of medieval French farce that presented political, religious, or social satire. Stasimon: Term for the odes sung by the chorus in classical Greek tragedy after the chorus had taken its place on the stage. Stichomythia: In dramatic dialogue, a term referring to single lines, spoken alternately by two characters, which are characterized by repetitive patterns and antithesis. The Elizabethans, modeling after classical drama, used this type of dialogue with some frequency. Stock character/situation: Frequently recurring dramatic type or dramatic incident or situation. Strophe: In the choral odes of Greek drama, the strophe is a structural unit of lyric song and dance, similar to the stanza. The chorus sang and danced a strophe, fol-

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lowed by an antistrophe, which corresponded in form to the strophe. (See also Antistrophe.) Sturm und Drang: Dramatic and literary movement in Germany during the late eighteenth century that took its name from Friedrich Maximilian Klinger’s play of that title, published in 1777. Translated in English as “Storm and Stress,” the movement was a reaction against classicism and a forerunner of Romanticism, characterized by extravagantly emotional language and sensational subject matter. Subplot: Secondary action coincident with the main action of a play. A subplot may be a reflection (by means of contrast or similarity) upon the main action, but it may also be largely unrelated. (See also Counterplot.) Surrealist drama: The term drame surréaliste (literally, “superrealistic drama”) was originally coined in 1918 by Guillaume Apollinaire to describe his play The Breasts of Tiresias and was later modified and expanded by André Breton to describe a form of drama that focuses upon subconscious reality. The composition of such drama was often achieved by the practice of “automatic writing” and the study of dreams. The goal of Surrealist work is to restore the neglected subconscious to its rightful place alongside conscious perception. Symbolism: Term commonly signifying a literary movement that originated in France in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Symbols have always been used in literature and drama, but as a conscious movement and practice, Symbolism achieved its most highly developed and defined form in the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud and in the plays of Maurice Maeterlinck. Drama was conceived as taking place in the mind and soul and was not felt to be truly expressed by outward action. The Symbolists, therefore, avoided the more traditional apparatus of dramatic construction: There are no strong, detailed characterizations; no true locus of crisis or conflict; no message or catharsis is intended. Action exists almost exclusively on a symbolic level and is conveyed through symbolic language, settings, lighting, sound effects, and so on. The influence of Symbolism was widespread and appears in the work of dramatists such as Leonid Andreyev, William Butler Yeats, Sean O’Casey, Anton Chekhov, and Eugene O’Neill. Tableau: Silent, stationary grouping of performers in a theatrical performance. Also, an elaborate stage presentation featuring lavish settings and costumes as well as music and dance. Theater of Cruelty: Term coined by French playwright and theorist Antonin Artaud to signify a vision in which theater becomes an arena for shock therapy. The characters undergo such intense physical and psychic extremities that the audience cannot ignore the cathartic effect in which its preconceptions, fears, and hostilities are brought to the surface and, ideally, purged. Startling noises, violent gestures, incantatory words or phrases, and unnerving lighting, music, and scenic effects all contribute to an atmosphere conducive to this curative goal. Theater of the Absurd: General name given to a group of plays that share a basic belief that life is illogical, irrational, formless, and contradictory, and that human beings are without meaning or purpose. This philosophical perspective led to the abandonment of traditional theatrical forms and coherent dialogue. Practitioners have included writers as diverse as Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, and Arthur Kopit. Theater of the Unspoken: (Théâtre de L’Inexprimé): A form of theater developed in France after World War I that emphasized the nonverbal elements of drama. It was

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created in response to the perception that earlier French theater was too verbose, containing too much dialogue. Practitioners include Jean-Jacques Bernard. Théâtre Libre: French for “free theater.” A private theater club founded by André Antoine in Paris in 1887 for the production of new Naturalistic plays. The innovations in settings, dramaturgy, direction, and acting had a great influence on the modern theater, helping liberate the stage from its early and mid-nineteenth century artificiality. Thesis play. See Problem play. Thespian: Another term for an actor; also, of or relating to the theater. The word derives from Thespis, by tradition the first actor of the Greek theater. Three unities. See Unities. Tirade: Technical term used in French drama (and particularly associated with the seventeenth century neoclassical theater) for a long set piece or uninterrupted speech delivered by a single character to other characters on stage. A tirade is not necessarily of an angry or violent nature, as signified by the English cognate. The English term “harangue” is sometimes used as the technical equivalent. Tragedy: In its broadest sense, a form of drama that is serious in action and intent. More specifically, Aristotle defined tragedy as an imitation of an action that is serious, complete in itself, and of a certain magnitude. He also specified that this action rouses pity and fear in the audience and purges these emotions. These rather broad criteria originally had specific meanings, which have undergone tremendous evolution from their inception through the present age—a single example is the notion of the tragic hero. Where in the ancient Greek theater the tragic heroes were typically personages of high rank and position (a king, queen, or nobleman), in the modern concept (particularly since the rise of the middle class in the eighteenth century) he or she would be a member of the middle or lower class. There has been much debate on the issue of whether “true tragedy” is even possible in the modern theater, and playwrights such as Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller have tried to incorporate the criteria of Aristotelian concepts in evoking tragic feeling or effects. Tragedy, heroic. See Heroic drama Tragedy, revenge. See Revenge tragedy. Tragic flaw. See Hamartia. Tragicomedy: Play in which the dramatic action, which ostensibly is leading to a tragic outcome, is reversed and concluded happily. This somewhat loose form mingled elements theoretically associated with tragedy (such as noble characters and an action ending in death) and those theoretically associated with comedy (such as lowerclass or trivial characters and an action ending happily in celebration). The term is often associated with the early seventeenth century plays of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni (pr. 1787) is a famous example of this form in musical theater. Trope: Brief dialogue, often accompanied by music, used in early medieval religious services to dramatize certain portions of the liturgy. As tropes became more elaborate, they were separated from the religious service and evolved into liturgical drama, which later evolved into the medieval mystery and morality plays. (See also Corpus Christi plays, Liturgical drama, Miracle play.) Unities: Set of rules for proper dramatic construction formulated by Italian and French Renaissance dramatic critics (particularly Ludovico Castelvetro), purported to be derived from the Poetics of Aristotle. The “three unities” were concerned with the

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standards governing the action, time, and setting of a drama: A play should have no scenes or subplots irrelevant to the central action, should not cover a period of more than twenty-four hours, and should not occur in more than one place or locale. In reality, Aristotle insists only upon unity of action in tragedy, and simply observes that most extant examples of Greek tragedy covered a period of less than a full day (there is absolutely no indication of the concept of unity of place). This formulation held particular sway over dramaturgy in France in the seventeenth century and persisted there virtually unchallenged until the introduction of the Romantic drama in the early nineteenth century. Vaudeville: Variety show popular in the United States and Europe from the 1890’s to the 1930’s, vaudeville featured songs, comic playlets, animal acts, and sketches. These theatrical entertainments were a refined version of the nineteenth century form of burlesque. Verse drama: Written in a poetic form and intended primarily as theater rather than as literature, verse drama was the prevailing form for Western drama throughout most of its history, comprising all the drama of classical Greece and continuing to dominate the stage through the Renaissance, when it was best exemplified by the blank verse of Elizabethan drama. In the seventeenth century, however, prose comedies became popular, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries verse drama became the exception rather than the rule. Weeping comedy. See Comédie larmoyante. Well-made play: From the French term pièce bien faite, a type of play constructed according to a “formula” which originated in nineteenth century France. The most prolific practitioner of the form was Eugene Scribe (1791-1861). Scribe took dramatic devices, which had been part of comedy and tragedy since the classical theater, and wove them into a formula that he repeated with little or no variation as the underlying frame for the plot construction of his enormous theatrical canon. The plot of a pièce bien faite often revolves around a secret known only to some of the characters, which is revealed at the climax and leads to catastrophe for the villain and vindication or triumph for the hero. Misunderstanding, suspense, and coincidence are some of the devices used in the unraveling of the plot. The well-made play provided a form for the developing social drama of such playwrights as Emile Augier and Alexandre Dumas, fils, and influenced later playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw. Zanni: Stock buffoon character from the commedia dell’arte representing the madcap comic servant. Harlequin is the best known of this type. Theodore Baroody, revised by the editors

Time Line Time Line

Date and place of birth

Playwright

525-524 b.c.e.; Eleusis, Greece c. 496 b.c.e.; Colonus, Greece c. 485 b.c.e.; Phlya, Greece c. 450 b.c.e.; Athens, Greece c. 254 b.c.e.; Sarsina, Umbria c. 190 b.c.e.; Carthage November 25, 1562; Madrid, Spain February 6, 1564; Canterbury, England April 23?, 1564; Stratford-upon-Avon, England June 11, 1573; London, England April 18, 1580 (baptized); London, England January 17, 1600; Madrid, Spain June 6, 1606; Rouen, France January 15, 1622 (baptized); Paris, France August 19, 1631; Aldwinckle, England December, 1639; La Ferté-Milon, France May 28, 1641(?); near Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England 1653; Fukui, Echizen Province, Japan January 24, 1670; Bardsey, Yorkshire, England 1677 or 1678; Londonderry, Ireland November 21, 1694; Paris, France November 10, 1728 or 1730; Pallas, Ireland January 24, 1732; Paris, France

Aeschylus Sophocles Euripides Aristophanes Plautus Terence Lope de Vega Carpio Christopher Marlowe William Shakespeare Ben Jonson Thomas Middleton Pedro Calderón de la Barca Pierre Corneille Molière John Dryden Jean Racine William Wycherley

August 28, 1749; Frankfurt am Main (now in Germany) October 30, 1751; Dublin, Ireland November 10, 1759; Marbach, Württemberg January 22, 1788; London, England March 20, 1828; Skien, Norway November 18, 1836; London, England January 22, 1849; Stockholm, Sweden March 15, 1852; Roxborough, Ireland October 16, 1854; Dublin, Ireland May 24, 1855; London, England July 26, 1856; Dublin, Ireland January 29, 1860; Taganrog, Russia June 13, 1865; Sandymount, near Dublin, Ireland June 28, 1867; Girgenti, Sicily

1098

Chikamatsu Monzaemon William Congreve George Farquhar Voltaire Oliver Goldsmith Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Richard Brinsley Sheridan Friedrich Schiller George Gordon, Lord Byron Henrik Ibsen W. S. Gilbert August Strindberg Lady Augusta Gregory Oscar Wilde Arthur Wing Pinero George Bernard Shaw Anton Chekhov William Butler Yeats Luigi Pirandello

Time Line

1099

Date and place of birth

Playwright

April 1, 1868; Marseilles, France April 16, 1871; Rathfarnham, Ireland July 1, 1876; Davenport, Iowa March 30, 1880; Dublin, Ireland September 26, 1888; St. Louis, Missouri October 16, 1888; New York, New York July 5, 1889; Maisons-Laffitte, France January 9, 1890; Malé Svatonovice, Bohemia May 23, 1891; Växjö, Sweden September 13, 1894; Bradford, England April 17, 1897; Madison, Wisconsin February 10, 1898; Augsburg, Germany June 5, 1898; Fuentevaqueros, Spain October 9, 1898; Alexandria, Egypt December 16, 1899; Teddington, England June 20, 1905; New Orleans, Louisiana June 21, 1905; Paris, France April 13, 1906; Foxrock, Ireland July 18, 1906; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania November 26, 1909; Slatina, Romania June 23, 1910; Cérisole, near Bordeeaux, France December 19, 1910; Paris, France March 26, 1911; Columbus, Mississippi May 15, 1911; Zurich, Switzerland June 10, 1911; London, England May 3, 1913; Independence, Kansas October 17, 1915; New York, New York March 14, 1916; Wharton, Texas February 19, 1917; Columbus, Georgia January 5, 1921; Konolfingen, Switzerland February 9, 1923; Dublin, Ireland March 7, 1924; Tokyo, Japan January 14, 1925; Tokyo, Japan May 15, 1926; Liverpool, England July 4, 1927; Bronx, New York March 12, 1928; Virginia January 9, 1929; Killyclogher, near Omagh, Northern Ireland December 12, 1929; London, England March 22, 1930; New York, New York May 19, 1930; Chicago, Illinois October 10, 1930; London, England June 11, 1932; Middelburg, South Africa July 27, 1932; Deep Creek, Alberta, Canada January 1, 1933; Leicester, England July 13, 1934; Ijebu Isara, near Abeokuta, Nigeria October 7, 1934; Newark, New Jersey

Edmond Rostand John Millington Synge Susan Glaspell Sean O’Casey T. S. Eliot Eugene O’Neill Jean Cocteau Karel Capek Pär Lagerkvist J. B. Priestley Thornton Wilder Bertolt Brecht Federico García Lorca Tawfiq al-Hakim Noël Coward Lillian Hellman Jean-Paul Sartre Samuel Beckett Clifford Odets Eugène Ionesco Jean Anouilh Jean Genet Tennessee Williams Max Frisch Terence Rattigan William Inge Arthur Miller Horton Foote Carson McCullers Friedrich Dürrenmatt Brendan Behan Kobo Abe Yukio Mishima Peter Shaffer Neil Simon Edward Albee Brian Friel John Osborne Stephen Sondheim Lorraine Hansberry Harold Pinter Athol Fugard George Ryga Joe Orton Wole Soyinka Amiri Baraka

1100

Notable Playwrights

Date and place of birth

Playwright

May 15, 1936; Staten Island, New York October 5, 1936; Prague, Czechoslovakia October 21, 1936; Hayling Island, England April 13, 1937; Lebanon, Missouri July 3, 1937; Zlin, Czechoslovakia November 21, 1937; New York, New York September 3, 1938; London, England April 12, 1939; Hampstead, London, England February 25, 1940; Berkeley, California June 26, 1940; Delano, California June 25, 1942; Montreal, Canada December 6, 1942; Griffen, Austria November 5, 1943; Fort Sheridan, Illinois April 27, 1945; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania November 30, 1947; Chicago, Illinois October 18, 1948; Trenton, New Jersey January 2, 1949; Montclair, New Jersey October 18, 1950; Brooklyn, New York May 8, 1952; Jackson, Mississippi April 24, 1953; Woburn, Massachusetts July 16, 1956; New York, New York August 11, 1957; Los Angeles, California May 10, 1963; Fort Knox, Kentucky

Paul Zindel Václav Havel Simon Gray Lanford Wilson Tom Stoppard Tina Howe Caryl Churchill Sir Alan Ayckbourn Frank Chin Luis Miguel Valdez Michel Tremblay Peter Handke Sam Shepard August Wilson David Mamet Ntozake Shange Christopher Durang Wendy Wasserstein Beth Henley Eric Bogosian Tony Kushner David Henry Hwang Suzan-Lori Parks

Notable Playwrights

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Geographical Index Geographical Index

AFRICA. See EGYPT, NIGERIA, SOUTH AFRICA AUSTRIA Handke, Peter, 422 BOHEMIA %apek, Karel, 142 CANADA Ryga, George, 751 Tremblay, Michel, 950 CZECHOSLOVAKIA %apek, Karel, 142 Havel, Václav, 440 EGYPT Hakim, Tawfiq al-, 412 ENGLAND Ayckbourn, Sir Alan, 51 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 116 Churchill, Caryl, 181 Congreve, William, 195 Coward, Noël, 222 Dryden, John, 230 Eliot, T. S., 257 Farquhar, George, 283 Gilbert, W. S., 356 Goldsmith, Oliver, 385 Gray, Simon, 395 Jonson, Ben, 516 Marlowe, Christopher, 563 Middleton, Thomas, 578 Orton, Joe, 651 Osborne, John, 659 Pinero, Arthur Wing, 674 Pinter, Harold, 685 Priestley, J. B., 711 Rattigan, Terence, 734 Shaffer, Peter, 783 Shakespeare, William, 795

Shaw, George Bernard, 835 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 861 Stoppard, Tom, 914 Wilde, Oscar, 994 Wycherley, William, 1048 FRANCE Anouilh, Jean, 30 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de, 74 Beckett, Samuel, 83 Cocteau, Jean, 187 Corneille, Pierre, 210 Genet, Jean, 342 Ionesco, Eugène, 501 Molière, 610 Racine, Jean, 723 Rostand, Edmond, 743 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 760 Voltaire, 979 GERMANY Brecht, Bertolt, 104 Frisch, Max, 306 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 373 Schiller, Friedrich, 773 GREAT BRITAIN Ayckbourn, Sir Alan, 51 Beckett, Samuel, 83 Behan, Brendan, 91 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 116 Churchill, Caryl, 181 Congreve, William, 195 Coward, Noël, 222 Dryden, John, 230 Eliot, T. S., 257 Farquhar, George, 283 Gilbert, W. S., 356 Goldsmith, Oliver, 385 Gray, Simon, 395 Jonson, Ben, 516 Marlowe, Christopher, 563 1103

Notable Playwrights Middleton, Thomas, 578 Orton, Joe, 651 Osborne, John, 659 Pinero, Arthur Wing, 674 Pinter, Harold, 685 Priestley, J. B., 711 Rattigan, Terence, 734 Shaffer, Peter, 783 Shakespeare, William, 795 Shaw, George Bernard, 835 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 861 Stoppard, Tom, 914 Wilde, Oscar, 994 Wycherley, William, 1048 Yeats, William Butler, 1057

NORWAY Ibsen, Henrik, 480

GREECE Aeschylus, 6 Aristophanes, 42 Euripides, 270 Sophocles, 890

SPAIN Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 131 García Lorca, Federico, 329 Vega Carpio, Lope de, 969

IRELAND Beckett, Samuel, 83 Behan, Brendan, 91 Farquhar, George, 283 Friel, Brian, 295 Goldsmith, Oliver, 385 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 404 O’Casey, Sean, 621 Shaw, George Bernard, 835 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 861 Synge, John Millington, 935 Wilde, Oscar, 994 Yeats, William Butler, 1057 ITALY Pirandello, Luigi, 697 Plautus, 705 Terence, 944 JAPAN Abe, Kfbf, 1 Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 166 Mishima, Yukio, 602 NIGERIA Soyinka, Wole, 901

ROMANIA Ionesco, Eugène, 501 ROME Plautus, 705 Terence, 944 RUSSIA Chekhov, Anton, 153 SOUTH AFRICA Fugard, Athol, 315

SWEDEN Lagerkvist, Pär, 531 Strindberg, August, 925 SWITZERLAND Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, 248 Frisch, Max, 306 UNITED STATES Albee, Edward, 15 Baraka, Amiri, 61 Bogosian, Eric, 99 Chin, Frank, 173 Durang, Christopher, 241 Eliot, T. S., 257 Foote, Horton, 289 Glaspell, Susan, 367 Hansberry, Lorraine, 431 Hellman, Lillian, 447 Henley, Beth, 457 Howe, Tina, 464 Hwang, David Henry, 471 Inge, William, 493 Kushner, Tony, 526 McCullers, Carson, 542 Mamet, David, 551 Miller, Arthur, 587 Odets, Clifford, 630 1104

Geographical Index O’Neill, Eugene, 640 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 668 Shaffer, Peter, 783 Shange, Ntozake, 827 Shepard, Sam, 850 Simon, Neil, 873 Sondheim, Stephen, 885

Valdez, Luis Miguel, 961 Wasserstein, Wendy, 988 Wilder, Thornton, 1004 Williams, Tennessee, 1016 Wilson, August, 1032 Wilson, Lanford, 1039 Zindel, Paul, 1064

1105

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Categorized Index Categorized Index

ABSURDISM Abe, Kfbf, 1 Albee, Edward, 15 Beckett, Samuel, 83 Durang, Christopher, 241 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, 248 Frisch, Max, 306 Genet, Jean, 342 Hakim, Tawfiq al-, 412 Henley, Beth, 457 Howe, Tina, 464 Ionesco, Eugène, 501 Pinter, Harold, 685 Tremblay, Michel, 950 Wilson, Lanford, 1039 AESTHETIC MOVEMENT Wilde, Oscar, 994

Glaspell, Susan, 367 Henley, Beth, 457 Inge, William, 493 McCullers, Carson, 542 Wilson, Lanford, 1039 ANGRY YOUNG MEN Osborne, John, 659 Pinter, Harold, 685 ASIAN AMERICAN CULTURE Chin, Frank, 173 Hwang, David Henry, 471 ATHENIAN TRAGEDY Aeschylus, 6 Euripides, 270 Sophocles, 890

AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE Baraka, Amiri, 61 Hansberry, Lorraine, 431 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 668 Shange, Ntozake, 827 Wilson, August, 1032

AUGUSTAN AGE, ENGLISH Congreve, William, 195

AGE OF JOHNSON. See JOHNSON, AGE OF

BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT Baraka, Amiri, 61 Hansberry, Lorraine, 431 Wilson, August, 1032

AGE OF SENSIBILITY. See SENSIBILITY, AGE OF AGITPROP THEATER. See also POLITICAL PLAY Behan, Brendan, 91 Brecht, Bertolt, 104 Odets, Clifford, 630 Valdez, Luis Miguel, 961 AMERICAN LOCAL COLOR Foote, Horton, 289

AVANT-GARDE THEATER Cocteau, Jean, 187 García Lorca, Federico, 329 Handke, Peter, 422

BUNRAKU Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 166 CAPE AND SWORD PLAY Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 131 Vega Carpio, Lope de, 969 CAROLINE AGE Jonson, Ben, 516

1107

Notable Playwrights CLASSICISM: NINETEENTH CENTURY Rostand, Edmond, 743 Schiller, Friedrich, 773 CLASSICISM: SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES Congreve, William, 195 Corneille, Pierre, 210 Dryden, John, 230 Jonson, Ben, 516 Molière, 610 Racine, Jean, 723 Voltaire, 979 CLASSICISM: TWENTIETH CENTURY Anouilh, Jean, 30 Cocteau, Jean, 187 Eliot, T. S., 257 Rostand, Edmond, 743 Tremblay, Michel, 950 COMÉDIE LARMOYANTE. See also SENTIMENTAL COMEDY Voltaire, 979 COMEDY Ayckbourn, Sir Alan, 51 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de, 74 Congreve, William, 195 Durang, Christopher, 241 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, 248 Goldsmith, Oliver, 385 Henley, Beth, 457 Jonson, Ben, 516 Molière, 610 Shakespeare, William, 795 Shaw, George Bernard, 835 Simon, Neil, 873 Sondheim, Stephen, 885 Stoppard, Tom, 914 Wilde, Oscar, 994 COMEDY, SENTIMENTAL. See SENTIMENTAL COMEDY

COMEDY OF MANNERS Coward, Noël, 222 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 861 Wilde, Oscar, 994 Wycherley, William, 1048 CRUELTY, THEATER OF. See THEATER OF CRUELTY CUBISM Lagerkvist, Pär, 531 DADA Cocteau, Jean, 187 EDWARDIAN AGE Pinero, Arthur Wing, 674 ELIZABETHAN AGE Marlowe, Christopher, 563 Shakespeare, William, 795 EPIC THEATER Brecht, Bertolt, 104 Frisch, Max, 306 Genet, Jean, 342 EXISTENTIALISM Beckett, Samuel, 83 Fugard, Athol, 315 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 760 Wilder, Thornton, 1004 EXPRESSIONISM Baraka, Amiri, 61 %apek, Karel, 142 Frisch, Max, 306 Glaspell, Susan, 367 Lagerkvist, Pär, 531 O’Neill, Eugene, 640 Ryga, George, 751 Strindberg, August, 925 FARCE Pinero, Arthur Wing, 674 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 861 FEMINISM Churchill, Caryl, 181 1108

Categorized Index Howe, Tina, 464 Shange, Ntozake, 827 Wasserstein, Wendy, 988

LATINO CULTURE Valdez, Luis Miguel, 961 LAUGHING COMEDY Farquhar, George, 283

GOLDEN AGE, SPANISH. See SPANISH GOLDEN AGE

MAGICAL REALISM García Lorca, Federico, 329

GRUPPE 47 Handke, Peter, 422

MASQUE Jonson, Ben, 516

HISTORY PLAY Shakespeare, William, 795

MIDWESTERN REGIONALISM Glaspell, Susan, 367 Inge, William, 493 Wilson, Lanford, 1039

HISPANIC CULTURE. See LATINO CULTURE HOMOSEXUAL CULTURE Genet, Jean, 342 Kushner, Tony, 526 McCullers, Carson, 542 Mishima, Yukio, 602 Rattigan, Terence, 734 Williams, Tennessee, 1016 IRISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE Gregory, Lady Augusta, 404 O’Casey, Sean, 621 Synge, John Millington, 935 Yeats, William Butler, 1057 JACOBEAN AGE Jonson, Ben, 516 Middleton, Thomas, 578 Shakespeare, William, 795 JEWISH CULTURE Kushner, Tony, 526 Odets, Clifford, 630 Simon, Neil, 873 Sondheim, Stephen, 885 Wasserstein, Wendy, 988 JOHNSON, AGE OF Goldsmith, Oliver, 385 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 861 KIT-KAT CLUB Congreve, William, 195

MODERNISM Ayckbourn, Sir Alan, 51 Cocteau, Jean, 187 Eliot, T. S., 257 Hellman, Lillian, 447 Ibsen, Henrik, 480 Lagerkvist, Pär, 531 Pirandello, Luigi, 697 Priestley, J. B., 711 Rattigan, Terence, 734 Shaffer, Peter, 783 Shaw, George Bernard, 835 Soyinka, Wole, 901 MONOLOGUE Shange, Ntozake, 827 MUSICAL PLAY Gilbert, W. S., 356 Sondheim, Stephen, 885 NATURALISM Hellman, Lillian, 447 O’Neill, Eugene, 640 Strindberg, August, 925 NEOCLASSICISM Dryden, John, 230 NEOROMANTICISM Rostand, Edmond, 743

1109

Notable Playwrights NEW COMEDY Plautus, 705 Terence, 944

Ryga, George, 751 Shange, Ntozake, 827 Shepard, Sam, 850 Stoppard, Tom, 914 Wasserstein, Wendy, 988 Williams, Tennessee, 1016 Wilson, Lanford, 1039 Zindel, Paul, 1064

NEW WAVE DRAMA Osborne, John, 659 Pinter, Harold, 685 Nb PLAY Mishima, Yukio, 602

PROBLEM PLAY Ibsen, Henrik, 480 Pinero, Arthur Wing, 674

OLD COMEDY Aristophanes, 42

PSYCHOLOGICAL REALISM Ibsen, Henrik, 480 Inge, William, 493 Miller, Arthur, 587 Wilson, August, 1032

PERFORMANCE ART Bogosian, Eric, 99 POLITICAL PLAY. See also AGITPROP THEATER Fugard, Athol, 315 Havel, Václav, 440 Miller, Arthur, 587 Soyinka, Wole, 901

REALISM Chekhov, Anton, 153 Ibsen, Henrik, 480 Kushner, Tony, 526 Priestley, J. B., 711

POSTCOLONIALISM Friel, Brian, 295 Fugard, Athol, 315 Soyinka, Wole, 901 POSTMODERNISM Beckett, Samuel, 83 Bogosian, Eric, 99 Chin, Frank, 173 Churchill, Caryl, 181 Durang, Christopher, 241 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, 248 Fugard, Athol, 315 Genet, Jean, 342 Gray, Simon, 395 Handke, Peter, 422 Havel, Václav, 440 Howe, Tina, 464 Hwang, David Henry, 471 Inge, William, 493 Ionesco, Eugène, 501 Mamet, David, 551 Mishima, Yukio, 602 Orton, Joe, 651 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 668

REALISM, MAGICAL. See MAGICAL REALISM REALISM, PSYCHOLOGICAL. See PSYCHOLOGICAL REALISM RENAISSANCE Marlowe, Christopher, 563 Shakespeare, William, 795 RENAISSANCE, IRISH. See IRISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE RESTORATION Congreve, William, 195 Dryden, John, 230 Farquhar, George, 283 Wycherley, William, 1048 ROMANTICISM Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 116 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 373

1110

Categorized Index SATIRICAL PLAY Durang, Christopher, 241 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, 248 Gilbert, W. S., 356 Kushner, Tony, 526

THEATER OF CRUELTY Orton, Joe, 651

SENSIBILITY, AGE OF Goldsmith, Oliver, 385

TRAGEDY Corneille, Pierre, 210 Shakespeare, William, 795 Voltaire, 979

SENTIMENTAL COMEDY Pinero, Arthur Wing, 674 SOUTHERN REGIONALISM Foote, Horton, 289 Henley, Beth, 457 McCullers, Carson, 542 Williams, Tennessee, 1016 SPANISH GOLDEN AGE Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 131 Vega Carpio, Lope de, 969 STORM AND STRESS. See STURM UND DRANG STURM UND DRANG Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 373 Schiller, Friedrich, 773 SURREALIST MOVEMENT Cocteau, Jean, 187 SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT Yeats, William Butler, 1057

THEATRE WORKSHOP Behan, Brendan, 91

UNIVERSITY WITS Marlowe, Christopher, 563 VERSE PLAY Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 131 Eliot, T. S., 257 Rostand, Edmond, 743 Yeats, William Butler, 1057 VICTORIAN AGE Gilbert, W. S., 356 Pinero, Arthur Wing, 674 Wilde, Oscar, 994 WELL-MADE PLAY Hellman, Lillian, 447 WESTERN REGIONALISM Shepard, Sam, 850 WORKSHOP 47 O’Neill, Eugene, 640

1111

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Subject Index Subject Index

Abbey Theatre, 405, 937, 1058 Abe, Kfbf, 1-5 Friends, 3 Green Stockings, The, 4 Little Elephant Is Dead, The, 4 Man Who Turned into a Stick, The, 3 Seifuku, 3 Ue: Shin doreigari, 4 Absurd Person Singular (Ayckbourn), 57 Acharnians, The (Aristophanes), 45 Adam the Creator (%apek brothers), 150 Adventure Story, The (Rattigan), 740 Aeschylus, 6-14 Agamemnon, 11 Persians, The, 10 Prometheus Bound, 13 Aesthetic movement, 995 After the Fall (Miller), 596 Agamemnon (Aeschylus), 11 Albee, Edward, 15-29 Delicate Balance, A, 22 Goat, The, 28 Man Who Had Three Arms, The, 25 Marriage Play, 27 Play About the Baby, The, 27 Seascape, 24 Three Tall Women, 26 Tiny Alice, 21 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 19 Albertine in Five Times (Tremblay), 958 Alcestis (Euripides), 278 Alchemist, The ( Jonson), 522 Alison’s House (Glaspell), 371 All for Love (Dryden), 236 All My Sons (Miller), 590 All That Fall (Beckett), 88 All’s Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare), 813 Alzire (Voltaire), 985 Amadeus (Shaffer), 790 American Buffalo (Mamet), 556 Amphitryon (Plautus), 708

Amulets Against the Dragon Forces (Zindel), 1071 And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little (Zindel), 1069 Andorra (Frisch), 312 Andria (Terence), 948 Andromache (Racine), 726 Angel City (Shepard), 855 Angels Fall (Wilson), 1045 Angels in America, Part One (Kushner), 528 Angels in America, Part Two (Kushner), 528 Angels’ Prayer (Hakim, al-), 420 Angry Young Men, 659, 687 Anouilh, Jean, 30-41 Antigone, 37 Ardèle, 39 Arrest, The, 36 Becket, 40 Dinner with the Family, 37 Lark, The, 39 Traveller Without Luggage, 35 Waltz of the Toreadors, The, 39 Antigone (Anouilh), 37 Antigone (Cocteau), 190 Antigone (Sophocles), 896 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 820 Approaching Zanzibar (Howe), 468 Arcadia (Stoppard), 923 Ardèle (Anoulih), 39 Aristophanes, 42-50 Acharnians, The, 45 Birds, The, 47 Clouds, The, 48 Ecclesiazusae, 48 Frogs, The, 49 Knights, The, 47 Lysistrata, 46 Peace, 46 Arms and the Man (Shaw), 839 Arouet, François-Marie. See Voltaire Arrest, The (Anouilh), 36 1113

Notable Playwrights Art of Dining, The (Howe), 467 Artist Descending a Staircase (Stoppard), 919 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 812 Asian American Theater Workshop, 174 Athaliah (Racine), 732 Audience, The (García Lorca), 337 Aureng-Zebe (Dryden), 235 Awake and Sing! (Odets), 633 Ayckbourn, Sir Alan, 51-60 Absurd Person Singular, 57 Bedroom Farce, 57 Chorus of Disapproval, A, 58 Henceforward, 58 How the Other Half Loves, 56 Man of the Moment, 58 Norman Conquest, The, 57 Relatively Speaking, 55 Season’s Greetings, 58 Small Family Business, A, 58 Taking Steps, 57 Time and Time Again, 56

Marriage of Figaro, The, 79 School of Rakes, The, 76 Tarare, 81 Two Friends, The, 77 Beaumont, Francis, 801 Beaux’ Stratagem, The (Farquhar), 287 Becket (Anouilh), 40 Beckett, Samuel, 83-90 All That Fall, 88 Eh Joe, 89 Embers, 89 Endgame, 86 Film, 89 Happy Days, 87 Krapp’s Last Tape, 87 Play, 88 Waiting for Godot, 85 Bedroom Farce (Ayckbourn), 57 Behan, Brendan, 91-98 Hostage, The, 96 Quare Fellow, The, 95 Belles-sœurs, Les (Tremblay), 952 Bérénice (Racine), 729 Berliner Ensemble, 106 Bernabé (Valdez), 965 Betsey Brown (Shange), 833 Betty’s Summer Vacation (Durang), 247 Between War and Peace (Hakim, al-), 420 Beyond Therapy (Durang), 246 Big Knife, The (Odets), 636 Biloxi Blues (Simon), 881 Birds, The (Aristophanes), 47 Birth and After Birth (Howe), 465 Birthday Party, The (Pinter), 688 Bishop’s Bonfire, The (O’Casey), 628 Bizarrías de Belisa, Las (Lope de Vega), 976 Black Arts movement, 1032 Blackfriars Theatre, 801 Blacks, The (Genet), 351 Blancs, Les (Hansberry), 437 Blood Knot, The (Fugard), 321 Blood Wedding (García Lorca), 338 Boesman and Lena (Fugard), 321 Bogosian, Eric, 99-103 Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead, 103 Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll, 102

Baby with the Bathwater (Durang), 246 Bacchae, The (Euripides), 281 Bacchae, The (Soyinka), 909 Bajazet (Racine), 729 Balcony, The (Genet), 349 Bald Soprano, The (Ionesco), 507 Baptism, The (Baraka), 64 Barabbas (Lagerkvist), 540 Baraka, Amiri, 61-73 Baptism, The, 64 Dutchman, 66 Great Goodness of Life (A Coon Show), 68 Madheart, 68 Primitive World, 70 Slave Ship, 69 Barber of Seville, The (Beaumarchais), 77 Barefoot in the Park (Simon), 877 Bartholomew Fair ( Jonson), 524 Battles of Coxinga, The (Chikamatsu), 168 Beatification of Area Boy, The (Soyinka), 911 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de, 74-82 Barber of Seville, The, 77 Frailty and Hypocrisy, 81 1114

Subject Index SubUrbia, 102 Talk Radio, 101 Bonjour, là, bonjour (Tremblay), 955 Boogie Woogie Landscapes (Shange), 831 Book of Days (Wilson), 1046 Brand (Ibsen), 486 Brecht, Bertolt, 104-115, 307 Caucasian Chalk Circle, The, 113 Life of Galileo, 109 Mother Courage and Her Children, 111 Bright Room Called Day, A (Kushner), 528 Brighton Beach Memoirs (Simon), 880 Britannicus (Racine), 728 Broadway Bound (Simon), 881 Brothers, The (Terence), 947 Burbage, Richard, 800 Buried Child (Shepard), 856 Burn This (Wilson), 1045 Bus Stop (Inge), 498 Butley (Gray), 398 Butterfly’s Evil Spell, The (García Lorca), 333 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 116-130 Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice, 127 Sardanapalus, 128 Werner, 126 Cabal and Love (Schiller), 777 Cabellos de Absalón, Los (Calderón de la Barca), 139 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 131-141 Cabellos de Absalón, Los, 139 Constant Prince, The, 133 Devotion to the Cross, The, 136 Great Theater of the World, The, 136 House with Two Doors Is Difficult to Guard, A, 135 Life Is a Dream, 137 Mayor of Zalamea, The, 138 Painter of His Dishonor, The, 140 Phantom Lady, The, 135 Secret Vengeance for Secret Insult, 138 Surgeon of His Honor, The, 135 Wonder-Working Magician, The, 139 California Suite (Simon), 879 Camp of Wallenstein, The (Schiller), 778 Candida (Shaw), 840

Cape and sword play, 134, 975 %apek, Josef, 142 Adam the Creator, 150 Insect Play, The, 148 Lásky hra osudná, 146 %apek, Karel, 142-152 Adam the Creator, 150 Insect Play, The, 148 Lásky hra osudná, 146 Macropulos Secret, The, 149 Mother, The, 151 Power and Glory, 150 Robber, The, 147 R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots, 148 Captain’s Tiger, The (Fugard), 327 Captives, The (Plautus), 708 Caretaker, The (Pinter), 691 Caron, Pierre-Augustin. See Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Casey, John. See O’Casey, Sean Casina (Plautus), 708 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Williams), 1024 Cathleen ni Houlihan (Yeats), 1060 Caucasian Chalk Circle, The (Brecht), 113 Chairs, The (Ionesco), 509 Changeling, The (Middleton and Rowley), 583 Chaste Maid in Cheapside, A (Middleton), 582 Chekhov, Anton, 153-165 Cherry Orchard, The, 162 Seagull, The, 157 Three Sisters, The, 160 Uncle Vanya, 159 Cherry Orchard, The (Chekhov), 162 Chickencoop Chinaman, The (Chin), 175 Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 166-172 Battles of Coxinga, The, 168 Love Suicides at Amijima, The, 171 Love Suicides at Sonezaki, The, 170 Children’s Hour, The (Hellman), 448 Chin, Frank, 173-180 Chickencoop Chinaman, The, 175 Year of the Dragon, The, 177 Chorus of Disapproval, A (Ayckbourn), 58 Chorus, Greek, 6 1115

Notable Playwrights Churchill, Caryl, 181-186 Cloud Nine, 184 Mouthful of Birds, A, 185 Top Girls, 183 Vinegar Tom, 184 Cid, The (Corneille), 213 Cinna (Corneille), 217 Clairmont, Claire, 123 Clash by Night (Odets), 636 Close of Play (Gray), 402 Cloud Nine (Churchill), 184 Clouds, The (Aristophanes), 48 Coastal Disturbances (Howe), 467 Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (O’Casey), 628 Cocktail Party, The (Eliot), 264 Cocteau, Jean, 187-194 Antigone, 190 Eagle Has Two Heads, The, 192 Intimate Relations, 191 Come Back, Little Sheba (Inge), 495 Comedy of embarrassment, 53 Comedy of Errors, The (Shakespeare), 808 Common Pursuit, The (Gray), 402 Condemned of Altona, The (Sartre), 769 Confidential Clerk, The (Eliot), 265 Congreve, William, 195-209 Double-Dealer, The, 202 Love for Love, 203 Mourning Bride, The, 205 Old Bachelor, The, 200 Way of the World, The, 206 Constant Couple, The (Farquhar), 285 Constant Prince, The (Calderón de la Barca), 133 Cook, George Cram, 368 Coriolanus (Shakespeare), 821 Corneille, Pierre, 210-221 Cid, The, 213 Cinna, 217 Death of Pompey, The, 219 Horace, 215 Illusion comique, L’, 212 Liar, The, 219 Nicomède, 219 Œdipe, 219 Polyeucte, 218 Suréna, 220 Countess Cathleen, The (Yeats), 1059 Country Girl, The (Odets), 637

Country Wife, The (Wycherley), 1052 Coward, Noël, 222-229 Design for Living, 227 Private Lives, 228 Creation of the World and Other Business, The (Miller), 599 Crimes of the Heart (Henley), 460 Critic, The (Sheridan), 869 Critique of the School for Wives, The (Molière), 615 Crucible, The (Miller), 593 Cryptogram, The (Mamet), 559 Crystal and Fox (Friel), 298 Cuchulain plays, 1060 Curse of the Starving Class (Shepard), 856 Cymbeline (Shakespeare), 823 Cyrano de Bergerac (Rostand), 748 Damask Drum, The (Mishima), 605 Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra (Tremblay), 957 Dance and the Railroad, The (Hwang), 474 Dance of the Forests, A (Soyinka), 904 Dancing at Lughnasa (Friel), 302 Dark at the Top of the Stairs, The (Inge), 499 Death and the King’s Horseman (Soyinka), 909 Death of a Salesman (Miller), 591 Death of Pompey, The (Corneille), 219 Death of Wallenstein, The (Schiller), 778 Deathwatch (Genet), 346 Deep Blue Sea, The (Rattigan), 739 Deirdre of the Sorrows (Synge), 942 Déjàvu (Osborne), 666 Dekker, Thomas, 579 Roaring Girl, The, 581 Delicate Balance, A (Albee), 22 ’dentity Crisis (Durang), 245 Design for Living (Coward), 227 Desire Under the Elms (O’Neill), 644 Devil and the Good Lord, The (Sartre), 768 Devotion to the Cross, The (Calderón de la Barca), 136 Diderot, Denis, 77 Dido, Queen of Carthage (Marlowe and Nashe), 565 Difficult Hour, I-III, The (Lagerkvist), 537 1116

Subject Index Dinner with the Family (Anouilh), 37 Dirty Hands (Sartre), 767 Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land (Stoppard), 921 Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 574 Dfjfji (Mishima), 607 Doll’s House, A (Ibsen), 487 Don Carlos, Infante of Spain (Schiller), 777 Don Juan (Frisch), 308 Don Juan (Molière), 617 Don Sebastian, King of Portugal (Dryden), 237 Doña Rosita the Spinster (García Lorca), 340 Dos caras del patroncito, Las (Valdez), 965 Double-Dealer, The (Congreve), 202 Drame sérieux, le, 77 Dream Play, A (Strindberg), 931 Dreaming of the Bones, The (Yeats), 1061 Drums of Father Ned, The (O’Casey), 628 Dryden, John, 195, 230-240 All for Love, 236 Aureng-Zebe, 235 Don Sebastian, King of Portugal, 237 Marriage à la Mode, 233 Duchesse de Langeais, La (Tremblay), 956 Duck Variations (Mamet), 556 Duenna, The (Sheridan), 866 Dumb Waiter, The (Pinter), 690 Durang, Christopher, 241-247 Baby with the Bathwater, 246 Betty’s Summer Vacation , 247 Beyond Therapy, 246 ‘dentity Crisis, 245 History of the American Film, A, 244 Idiots Karamazov, The, 244 Marriage of Bette and Boo, The, 246 Nature and Purpose of the Universe, The, 245 Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, 245 Vietnamization of New Jersey, The, 244 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, 248-256 Marriage of Mr. Mississippi, The, 252 Romulus the Great, 250 Visit, The, 253 Dutch Uncle (Gray), 397

Dutchman (Baraka), 66 Dybbuk, A (Kushner), 529 Each in His Own Way (Pirandello), 702 Eagle Has Two Heads, The (Cocteau), 192 Ecclesiazusae (Aristophanes), 48 Ecstasy of Rita Joe, The (Ryga), 755 Eden End (Priestley), 715 Edmond (Mamet), 560 Edward II (Marlowe), 572 Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-theMoon Marigolds, The (Zindel), 1067 Egmont (Goethe), 380 Eh Joe (Beckett), 89 Elder Statesman, The (Eliot), 266 Eleusinian Mysteries, Aeschylus and, 8 Eliot, T. S., 257-269 Cocktail Party, The, 264 Confidential Clerk, The, 265 Elder Statesman, The, 266 Family Reunion, The, 263 Murder in the Cathedral, 261 Embers (Beckett), 89 Emperor and Galilean (Ibsen), 486 Emperor Jones, The (O’Neill), 642 Endgame (Beckett), 86 Enemy of the People, An (Miller), 593 Entertainer, The (Osborne), 662 Entertaining Mr. Sloane (Orton), 653 Epic theater, 106 Epicœne ( Jonson), 523 Equus (Shaffer), 789 Erpingham Camp, The (Orton), 655 Esther (Racine), 732 État des lieux, L’ (Tremblay), 959 Eunuch, The (Terence), 947 Euripides, 270-282 Alcestis, 278 Bacchae, The, 281 Hippolytus, 279 Ion, 280 Medea, 278 Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (Stoppard), 921 Every Man in His Humour ( Jonson), 519 Every Seventeen Minutes the Crowd Goes Crazy! (Zindel), 1071 Existentialism, 760 1117

Notable Playwrights Exit the King (Ionesco), 512 Eyes for Consuela (Shepard), 859 Family Devotions (Hwang), 475 Family Reunion, The (Eliot), 263 Farquhar, George, 283-288 Beaux’ Stratagem, The, 287 Constant Couple, The, 285 Recruiting Officer, The, 286 Fate of a Cockroach, The (Hakim, al-), 419 Father, The (Strindberg), 929 Fences (Wilson), 1034 Field Day Productions, 296 Fiesco (Schiller), 777 Film (Beckett), 89 Firebugs, The (Frisch), 310 Five Finger Exercise (Shaffer), 787 Fletcher, John, 801 Henry VIII, 808 Two Noble Kinsmen, The, 824 Flies, The (Sartre), 763 Flower Drum Song (Hwang), 477 Flowering Peach, The (Odets), 638 F.O.B. (Hwang), 474 Food for the Millions (Hakim, al-), 420 Fool for Love (Shepard), 857 Foote, Horton, 289-294 Only the Heart, 292 Orphans’ Home, The, 293 Trip to Bountiful, The, 292 For colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf (Shange), 829 For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again (Tremblay), 959 Forever Yours, Marie-Lou (Tremblay), 954 Fourth wall, 1007 Frailty and Hypocrisy (Beaumarchais), 81 Freedom of the City, The (Friel), 299 French Without Tears (Rattigan), 738 Friel, Brian, 295-305 Crystal and Fox, 298 Dancing at Lughnasa, 302 Freedom of the City, The, 299 Molly Sweeney, 303 Philadelphia, Here I Come!, 298 Translations, 301 Volunteers, 300 Wonderful Tennessee, 302

Friends (Abe), 3 Frisch, Max, 306-314 Andorra, 312 Don Juan, 308 Firebugs, The, 310 Frogs, The (Aristophanes), 49 From Okra to Greens (Shange), 832 Fugard, Athol, 315-328 Blood Knot, The, 321 Boesman and Lena, 321 Captain’s Tiger, The, 327 Island, The, 322 Lesson from Aloes, A, 323 “MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys, 324 My Life, 327 Playland, 326 Road to Mecca, The, 325 Sorrows and Rejoicings, 327 Valley Song, 327 Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, A (Sondheim), 887 Gaol Gate, The (Gregory), 409 García Lorca, Federico, 329-341 Audience, The, 337 Blood Wedding, 338 Butterfly’s Evil Spell, The, 333 Doña Rosita the Spinster, 340 House of Bernarda Alba, The, 340 In the Frame of Don Cristóbal, 335 Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in His Garden, The, 336 Mariana Pineda, 333 Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife, The, 335 Tragicomedy of Don Cristóbal and Doña Rosita, The, 334 When Five Years Pass, 337 Yerma, 339 Garden Party, The (Havel), 443 Gardener’s Dog, The (Lope de Vega), 976 Genet, Jean, 342-355 Balcony, The, 349 Blacks, The, 351 Deathwatch, 346 Maids, The, 348 Screens, The, 353 Gentleman Dancing-Master, The (Wycherley), 1050 1118

Subject Index Geography of Horse Dreamer (Shepard), 855 Ghost Sonata, The (Strindberg), 932 Ghosts (Ibsen), 488 Gift of the Gorgon, The (Shaffer), 792 Gilbert, W. S., 356-366 Gondoliers, The, 365 H.M.S. Pinafore, 362 Iolanthe, 363 Mikado, The, 364 Pirates of Penzance, The, 362 Yeomen of the Guard, The, 364 Glaspell, Susan, 367-372 Alison’s House, 371 Trifles, 370 Verge, The, 370 Glass Menagerie, The (Williams), 1018 Glengarry Glen Ross (Mamet), 557 Globe Theatre, 801 Goat, The (Albee), 28 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 373384 Egmont, 380 Goetz of Berlichingen, with the Iron Hand, 378 Iphigenia in Tauris, 379 Torquato Tasso, 380 Tragedy of Faust, The, 381 Goetz of Berlichingen, with the Iron Hand (Goethe), 378 Golden Boy (Odets), 635 Goldsmith, Oliver, 385-394 Good-Natured Man, The, 388 She Stoops to Conquer, 390 Gondoliers, The (Gilbert), 365 Good and Faithful Servant, The (Orton), 653 Good-Natured Man, The (Goldsmith), 388 Grand siècle, le, 723 Grania (Gregory), 410 Gray, Simon, 395-403 Butley, 398 Close of Play, 402 Common Pursuit, The, 402 Dutch Uncle, 397 Japes, 402 Otherwise Engaged, 400 Quartermaine’s Terms, 402

Spoiled, 398 Stage Struck, 402 Wise Child, 397 Great Goodness of Life (A Coon Show) (Baraka), 68 Great Theater of the World, The (Calderón de la Barca), 136 Greater Dionysia, 8, 276, 894 Green Stockings, The (Abe), 4 Greene, Robert, 798 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 404-411 Gaol Gate, The, 409 Grania, 410 Spreading the News, 408 Travelling Man, The, 410 Workhouse Ward, The, 409 Group Theatre, 630 Gruppe 47, 423 Hakim, Tawfiq al-, 412-421 Angels’ Prayer, 420 Between War and Peace, 420 Fate of a Cockroach, The, 419 Food for the Millions, 420 Himari qala li, 418 Incrimination, 419 King Oedipus, 418 Muhammad, 417 Not a Thing Out of Place, 419 People of the Cave, The, 417 Piraksa, 418 Poet on the Moon, 420 Princess Sunshine, 418 Pygmalion, 418 River of Madness, The, 417 Shahrazad, 417 Song of Death, The, 419 Sultan’s Dilemma, The, 417 Tender Hands, 418 Tree Climber, The, 419 Voyage to Tomorrow, 419 Wisdom of Solomon, The, 417 Halliwell, Kenneth, 652 Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Shakespeare), 816 Handke, Peter, 422-430 Kaspar, 425 Offending the Audience, 424 Ride Across Lake Constance, The, 427 1119

Notable Playwrights Self-Accusation, 425 They Are Dying Out, 428 Hangman, The (Lagerkvist), 538 Hanjo (Mishima), 606 Hansberry, Lorraine, 431-439 Blancs, Les, 437 Raisin in the Sun, A, 434 Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, The, 436 Hapgood (Stoppard), 922 Happy Days (Beckett), 87 Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, The (Wilder), 1007 Haunted House, The (Plautus), 709 Havel, Václav, 440-446 Garden Party, The, 443 Increased Difficulty of Concentration, The, 444 Memorandum, The, 444 Temptation, 446 Hedda Gabler (Ibsen), 489 Heidi Chronicles, The (Wasserstein), 990 Hellman, Lillian, 447-456 Children’s Hour, The, 448 Little Foxes, The, 452 Watch on the Rhine, 454 Henceforward (Ayckbourn), 58 Henley, Beth, 457-463 Crimes of the Heart, 460 Miss Firecracker Contest, The, 461 Wake of Jamey Foster, The, 461 Henry IV (Pirandello), 701 Henry IV, Part I (Shakespeare), 806 Henry IV, Part II (Shakespeare), 807 Henry V (Shakespeare), 807 Henry VI, Part I (Shakespeare), 803 Henry VI, Part II (Shakespeare), 804 Henry VI, Part III (Shakespeare), 804 Henry VIII (Shakespeare and Fletcher), 808 Himari qala li (Hakim, al-), 418 Hippolytus (Euripides), 279 Hiraoka, Kimitake. See Mishima, Yukio History of the American Film, A (Durang), 244 History play, Shakespearean, 803 H.M.S. Pinafore (Gilbert), 362 Homecoming, The (Pinter), 694 Horace (Corneille), 215

Hosanna (Tremblay), 956 Hostage, The (Behan), 96 Hot l Baltimore, The (Wilson), 1043 House of Bernarda Alba, The (García Lorca), 340 House of Sleeping Beauties, The (Kawabata), 475 House with Two Doors Is Difficult to Guard, A (Calderón de la Barca), 135 How the Other Half Loves (Ayckbourn), 56 Howe, Tina, 464-470 Approaching Zanzibar, 468 Art of Dining, The, 467 Birth and After Birth, 465 Coastal Disturbances, 467 Museum, 466 Nest, The, 465 Painting Churches, 467 Pride’s Crossing, 468 Hwang, David Henry, 471-479 Dance and the Railroad, The, 474 Family Devotions, 475 Flower Drum Song, 477 F.O.B., 474 House of Sleeping Beauties, The, 475 M. Butterfly, 475 Rich Relations, 475 Sound of a Voice, The, 475 I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges! (Valdez), 966 Ibsen, Henrik, 447, 480-492 Brand, 486 Doll’s House, A, 487 Emperor and Galilean, 486 Ghosts, 488 Hedda Gabler, 489 Master Builder, The, 491 Rosmersholm, 488 Vikings at Helgeland, The, 486 Iceman Commeth, The (O’Neill), 647 Ideal Husband, An (Wilde), 999 Idiots Karamazov, The (Durang and Innaurato), 244 Illusion comique, L’ (Corneille), 212 Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (Parks), 670 1120

Subject Index Importance of Being Earnest, The (Wilde), 1001 Impromptu of Outrement, The (Tremblay), 957 In Praise of Love (Rattigan), 741 In the Blood (Parks), 671 In the Frame of Don Cristóbal (García Lorca), 335 In the Shadow of the Glen (Synge), 939 Inadmissible Evidence (Osborne), 664 Incident at Vichy (Miller), 597 Increased Difficulty of Concentration, The (Havel), 444 Incrimination (Hakim, al-), 419 Indian (Ryga), 754 Indian Ink (Stoppard), 922 Inge, William, 493-500 Bus Stop, 498 Come Back, Little Sheba, 495 Dark at the Top of the Stairs, The, 499 Picnic, 497 Innaurato, Albert Idiots Karamazov, The, 244 Insect Play, The (%apek brothers), 148 Inspector Calls, An (Priestley), 719 Intimate Relations (Cocteau), 191 Invention of Love, The (Stoppard), 923 Iolanthe (Gilbert), 363 Ion (Euripides), 280 Ionesco, Eugène, 501-515 Bald Soprano, The, 507 Chairs, The, 509 Exit the King, 512 Killer, The, 510 Lesson, The, 508 Man with Bags, 513 Rhinoceros, 511 Iphigenia in Aulis (Racine), 730 Iphigenia in Tauris (Goethe), 379 Irish Literary Renaissance, 405, 621, 936, 1058 Island, The (Fugard), 322 Isn’t It Romantic (Wasserstein), 990 Japes (Gray), 402 Jero’s Metamorphosis (Soyinka), 908 Jew of Malta, The (Marlowe), 569 Jidaimono, 168 Jitney (Wilson), 1037

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (Wilson), 1035 Johnson over Jordan (Priestley), 718 Johnson, Samuel, 386 Jones, LeRoi. See Baraka, Amiri Jonson, Ben, 516-525 Alchemist, The, 522 Bartholomew Fair, 524 Epicœne, 523 Every Man in His Humour, 519 Volpone, 520 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 815 Jumpers (Stoppard), 918 Juno and the Paycock (O’Casey), 626 Justice Without Revenge (Lope de Vega), 977 Kabuki, 167 Kant, Immanuel, 776 Kantan (Mishima), 606 Kaspar (Handke), 425 Kawabata, Yasunari, 602 Kean (Sartre), 769 Killer, The (Ionesco), 510 King, The (Lagerkvist), 538 King and the Farmer, The (Lope de Vega), 975 King Hedley II (Wilson), 1037 King John (Shakespeare), 805 King Lear (Shakespeare), 818 King Oedipus (Hakim, al-), 418 King, the Greatest Alcalde, The (Lope de Vega), 974 King’s Men, 799 Knight from Olmedo, The (Lope de Vega), 976 Knights, The (Aristophanes), 47 Kongi’s Harvest (Soyinka), 906 Krapp’s Last Tape (Beckett), 87 Kushner, Tony, 526-530 Angels in America, Part One, 528 Angels in America, Part Two, 528 Bright Room Called Day, A, 528 Dybbuk, A, 529 Slavs!, 529 Kyd, Thomas, 565 Lady Aoi, The (Mishima), 606 Lady Nit-Wit, The (Lope de Vega), 976 1121

Notable Playwrights Lady Windermere’s Fan (Wilde), 999 Lagerkvist, Pär, 531-541 Barabbas, 540 Difficult Hour, I-III, The, 537 Hangman, The, 538 King, The, 538 Let Man Live, 540 Man Who Lived His Life Over, The, 538 Man Without a Soul, The, 539 Midsummer Dream in the Workhouse, 539 Osynlige, Den, 537 Philosopher’s Stone, The, 540 Secret of Heaven, The, 537 Seger i mörker, 539 Lakeboat (Mamet), 556 Lark, The (Anouilh), 39 Lásky hra osudná (%apek brothers), 146 Late Henry Moss, The (Shepard), 859 Laughing comedy, 388 Lesson from Aloes, A (Fugard), 323 Lesson, The (Ionesco), 508 Let Man Live (Lagerkvist), 540 Liar, The (Corneille), 219 Lie of the Mind, A (Shepard), 858 Life in the Sun, A (Wilder), 1013 Life Is a Dream (Calderón de la Barca), 137 Life of Galileo (Brecht), 109 Like Death Warmed Over (Tremblay), 953 Literary Club, 386 Litigants, The (Racine), 728 Little Elephant Is Dead, The (Abe), 4 Little Foxes, The (Hellman), 452 Little Night Music, A (Sondheim), 887 Littlewood, Joan, 92 Look Back in Anger (Osborne), 661 Loot (Orton), 654 Lost in Yonkers (Simon), 882 Love for Love (Congreve), 203 Love in a Wood (Wycherley), 1049 Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in His Garden, The (García Lorca), 336 Love Space Demands, The (Shange), 833 Love Suicides at Amijima, The (Chikamatsu), 171 Love Suicides at Sonezaki, The (Chikamatsu), 170

Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare), 810 Luther (Osborne), 663 Lysistrata (Aristophanes), 46 M. Butterfly (Hwang), 475 Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Wilson), 1034 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 819 McCullers, Carson, 542-550 Member of the Wedding, The, 546 Square Root of Wonderful, The, 549 Macropulos Secret, The (%apek), 149 Madame de Sade (Mishima), 608 Madheart (Baraka), 68 Madmen and Specialists (Soyinka), 909 Magistrate, The (Pinero), 678 Maid of Orleans, The (Schiller), 779 Maids, The (Genet), 348 Maison suspendue, La (Tremblay), 958 Major Barbara (Shaw), 844 Mamet, David, 551-562 American Buffalo, 556 Cryptogram, The, 559 Duck Variations, 556 Edmond, 560 Glengarry Glen Ross, 557 Lakeboat, 556 Oleanna, 558 Reunion, 560 Sexual Perversity in Chicago, 556 Speed-the-Plow, 558 Man and Superman (Shaw), 842 Man of the Moment (Ayckbourn), 58 Man Who Had All the Luck, The (Miller), 590 Man Who Had Three Arms, The (Albee), 25 Man Who Lived His Life Over, The (Lagerkvist), 538 Man Who Turned into a Stick, The (Abe), 3 Man with Bags (Ionesco), 513 Man Without a Soul, The (Lagerkvist), 539 Marcel Pursued by the Hounds (Tremblay), 958 Mariana Pineda (García Lorca), 333 Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice (Byron), 127 1122

Subject Index Marlowe, Christopher, 563-577, 803 Dido, Queen of Carthage, 565 Doctor Faustus, 574 Edward II, 572 Jew of Malta, The, 569 Massacre at Paris, The, 571 Tamburlaine the Great, Part I, 565 Tamburlaine the Great, Part II, 567 Marriage à la Mode (Dryden), 233 Marriage of Bette and Boo, The (Durang), 246 Marriage of Figaro, The (Beaumarchais), 79 Marriage of Mr. Mississippi, The (Dürrenmatt), 252 Marriage Play (Albee), 27 Mary Stuart (Schiller), 778 Massacre at Paris, The (Marlowe), 571 Master Builder, The (Ibsen), 491 “MASTER HAROLD” . . . and the Boys (Fugard), 324 Matchmaker, The (Wilder), 1012 Mayor of Zalamea, The (Calderón de la Barca), 138 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 814 Medea (Euripides), 278 Melindres de Belisa, Los (Lope de Vega), 975 Member of the Wedding, The (McCullers), 546 Memorandum, The (Havel), 444 Memory of Two Mondays, A (Miller), 594 Menander, 946 Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare), 811 Mérope (Voltaire), 985 Merry Wives of Windsor, The (Shakespeare), 813 Middleton, Thomas, 578-586 Changeling, The, 583 Chaste Maid in Cheapside, A, 582 Roaring Girl, The, 581 Women Beware Women, 584 Midsummer Dream in the Workhouse (Lagerkvist), 539 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare), 810 Mikado, The (Gilbert), 364

Miller, Arthur, 587-601 After the Fall, 596 All My Sons, 590 Creation of the World and Other Business, The, 599 Crucible, The, 593 Death of a Salesman, 591 Enemy of the People, An, 593 Incident at Vichy, 597 Man Who Had All the Luck, The, 590 Memory of Two Mondays, A, 594 Price, The, 598 View from the Bridge, A, 594 Misanthrope, The (Molière), 618 Mishima, Yukio, 602-609 Damask Drum, The, 605 Dfjfji, 607 Kantan, 606 Lady Aoi, The, 606 Madame de Sade, 608 My Friend Hitler, 608 Sotoba Komachi, 604 Miss Firecracker Contest, The (Henley), 461 Miss Julie (Strindberg), 930 Mithridates (Racine), 730 Molière, 610-620 Critique of the School for Wives, The, 615 Don Juan, 617 Misanthrope, The, 618 School for Wives, The, 614 Tartuffe, 615 Versailles Impromptu, The, 615 Molly Sweeney (Friel), 303 Mother, The (%apek), 151 Mother Courage and Her Children (Brecht), 111 Mother-in-Law, The (Terence), 949 Mourning Bride, The (Congreve), 205 Mouthful of Birds, A (Churchill), 185 Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare), 811 Muhammad (Hakim, al-), 417 Mummified Deer (Valdez), 966 Murder in the Cathedral (Eliot), 261 Museum (Howe), 466 My Friend Hitler (Mishima), 608 My Life (Fugard), 327 1123

Notable Playwrights Nashe, Thomas, 565 Dido, Queen of Carthage, 565 Nature and Purpose of the Universe, The (Durang), 245 Nekrassov (Sartre), 769 Nest, The (Howe), 465 New Africa Group, 318 New Comedy, 705 Nicomède (Corneille), 219 Night and Day (Stoppard), 921 Night Music (Odets), 636 Night of the Iguana, The (Williams), 1027 Nf Mishima, 604 Yeats, 1061 No Exit (Sartre), 764 Nobel Prize Beckett, Samuel, 83 Eliot, T. S., 260 Lagerkvist, Pär 535 O’Neill, Eugene, 641 Pirandello, Luigi, 699 Shaw, George Bernard, 838 Soyinka, Wole, 902 Yeats, William Butler, 1059 Norman Conquest, The (Ayckbourn), 57 Not a Thing Out of Place (Hakim, al-), 419 O’Casey, Sean, 407, 621-629 Bishop’s Bonfire, The, 628 Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, 628 Drums of Father Ned, The, 628 Juno and the Paycock, 626 Plough and the Stars, The, 627 Purple Dust, 627 Red Roses for Me, 628 Shadow of a Gunman, The, 626 Silver Tassie, The, 627 Odd Couple, The (Simon), 878 Odets, Clifford, 630-639 Awake and Sing!, 633 Big Knife, The, 636 Clash by Night, 636 Country Girl, The, 637 Flowering Peach, The, 638 Golden Boy, 635 Night Music, 636 Paradise Lost, 634 Rocket to the Moon, 635

Till the Day I Die, 633 Waiting for Lefty, 632 Œdipe (Corneille), 219 Oedipus (Voltaire), 984 Oedipus at Colonus (Sophocles), 896 Oedipus Tyrannus (Sophocles), 898 Offending the Audience (Handke), 424 Old Bachelor, The (Congreve), 200 Old Comedy, 43 Oleanna (Mamet), 558 On Baile’s Strand (Yeats), 1060 O’Neill, Eugene, 640-650 Desire Under the Elms, 644 Emperor Jones, The, 642 Iceman Commeth, The, 647 Only the Heart (Foote), 292 Operation Sidewinder (Shepard), 854 Orphans’ Home, The (Foote), 293 Orton, Joe, 651-658 Entertaining Mr. Sloane, 653 Erpingham Camp, The, 655 Good and Faithful Servant, The, 653 Loot, 654 Ruffian on the Stair, The, 652 What the Butler Saw, 656 Osborne, John, 659-667 Déjàvu, 666 Entertainer, The, 662 Inadmissible Evidence, 664 Look Back in Anger, 661 Luther, 663 West of Suez, 665 Osynlige, Den (Lagerkvist), 537 Othello, the Moor of Venice (Shakespeare), 817 Otherwise Engaged (Gray), 400 Our Town (Wilder), 1008 Painter of His Dishonor, The (Calderón de la Barca), 140 Painting Churches (Howe), 467 Palliatae, 946 Paradise Lost (Odets), 634 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 668-673 Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, 670 In the Blood, 671 Topdog/Underdog, 672 Venus, 671 1124

Subject Index Pater, Walter, 995 Patter songs, 361 Peace (Aristophanes), 46 People of the Cave, The (Hakim, al-), 417 Peribáñez (Lope de Vega), 973 Pericles (Shakespeare), 822 Persians, The (Aeschylus), 10 Phaedra (Racine), 730 Phantom Lady, The (Calderón de la Barca), 135 Philadelphia, Here I Come! (Friel), 298 Philosopher’s Stone, The (Lagerkvist), 540 Phormio (Terence), 948 Photograph, A (Shange), 830 Piano Lesson, The (Wilson), 1035 Piccolominis, The (Schiller), 778 Picnic (Inge), 497 Pinero, Arthur Wing, 674-684 Magistrate, The, 678 Profligate, The, 681 Second Mrs. Tanqueray, The, 682 Sweet Lavender, 679 Pinter, Harold, 685-696 Birthday Party, The, 688 Caretaker, The, 691 Dumb Waiter, The, 690 Homecoming, The, 694 Room, The, 687 Piraksa (Hakim, al-), 418 Pirandello, Luigi, 697-704 Each in His Own Way, 702 Henry IV, 701 Right You Are, 699 Six Characters in Search of an Author, 700 Pirates of Penzance, The (Gilbert), 362 Pizarro (Sheridan), 870 Plain-Dealer, The (Wycherley), 1054 Plautus, 705-710, 946 Amphitryon, 708 Captives, The, 708 Casina, 708 Haunted House, The, 709 Twin Menaechmi, The, 709 Play (Beckett), 88 Play About the Baby, The (Albee), 27 Play of Giants, A (Soyinka), 911 Playbill (Rattigan), 739

Playboy of the Western World, The (Synge), 940 Playland (Fugard), 326 Plough and the Stars, The (O’Casey), 627 Ploughmen of the Glacier (Ryga), 756 Poet on the Moon (Hakim, al-), 420 Polyeucte (Corneille), 218 Poquelin, Jean-Baptiste. See Molière Pound, Ezra, 259, 1061 Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead (Bogosian), 103 Power and Glory (%apek), 150 Préciosité, 745 Price, The (Miller), 598 Pride’s Crossing (Howe), 468 Priestley, J. B., 711-722 Eden End, 715 Inspector Calls, An, 719 Johnson over Jordan, 718 Time and the Conways, 716 Primitive World (Baraka), 70 Princess Sunshine (Hakim, al-), 418 Private Lives (Coward), 228 Profligate, The (Pinero), 681 Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus), 13 Provincetown Players, 367 Publius Terentius Afer. See Terence Pulitzer Prize Albee, Edward, 16 Foote, Horton, 291 Glaspell, Susan, 367 Henley, Beth, 457 Inge, William, 493 Kushner, Tony, 526 Mamet, David, 551 Miller, Arthur, 588 O’Neill, Eugene, 641 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 669 Shepard, Sam, 850 Simon, Neil, 874, 882 Wasserstein, Wendy, 988 Wilder, Thorton, 1006 Williams, Tennessee, 1017 Wilson, August, 1034 Wilson, Lanford, 1039 Zindel, Paul, 1064 Puppet theater, 166 Purgatory (Yeats), 1061 1125

Notable Playwrights Purple Dust (O’Casey), 627 Pygmalion (Hakim, al-), 418

Robbers, The (Schiller), 776 Rocket to the Moon (Odets), 635 Rogers, Samuel Shepard, VII. See Shepard, Sam Romantics, The (Rostand), 747 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 815 Romulus the Great (Dürrenmatt), 250 Room, The (Pinter), 687 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard), 917 Rosmersholm (Ibsen), 488 Ross (Rattigan), 740 Rostand, Edmond, 743-750 Cyrano de Bergerac, 748 Romantics, The, 747 Rowley, William, 579, 583 Changeling, The, 583 Royal Hunt of the Sun, The (Shaffer), 788 Ruffian on the Stair, The (Orton), 652 R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots (%apek), 148 Ruskin, John, 995 Ryga, George, 751-759 Ecstasy of Rita Joe, The, 755 Indian, 754 Ploughmen of the Glacier, 756

Quare Fellow, The (Behan), 95 Quartermaine’s Terms (Gray), 402 Racine, Jean, 723-733 Athaliah, 732 Bajazet, 729 Bérénice, 729 Britannicus, 728 Esther, 732 Iphigenia in Aulis, 730 Litigants, The, 728 Mithridates, 730 Phaedra, 730 Raisin in the Sun, A (Hansberry), 434 Rattigan, Terence, 734-742 Adventure Story, The, 740 Deep Blue Sea, The, 739 French Without Tears, 738 In Praise of Love, 741 Playbill, 739 Ross, 740 Real Thing, The (Stoppard), 922 Real World?, The (Tremblay), 958 Recruiting Officer, The (Farquhar), 286 Red Roses for Me (O’Casey), 628 Relatively Speaking (Ayckbourn), 55 Remember Me (Tremblay), 958 Requiem for a Futurologist (Soyinka), 911 Reunion (Mamet), 560 Rhinoceros (Ionesco), 511 Rich Relations (Hwang), 475 Richard II (Shakespeare), 806 Richard III (Shakespeare), 805 Ride Across Lake Constance, The (Handke), 427 Riders to the Sea (Synge), 938 Right You Are (If You Think So) (Pirandello), 699 Rimers of Eldritch, The (Wilson), 1042 Rivals, The (Sheridan), 864 River of Madness, The (Hakim, al-), 417 Road to Mecca, The (Fugard), 325 Road, The (Soyinka), 906 Roaring Girl, The (Middleton and Dekker), 581 Robber, The (%apek), 147

Saint Carmen of the Main (Tremblay), 955 Saint Joan (Shaw), 846 St. Patrick’s Day (Sheridan), 871 Salomé (Wilde), 997 Sardanapalus (Byron), 128 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 760-772 Condemned of Altona, The, 769 Devil and the Good Lord, The, 768 Dirty Hands, 767 Flies, The, 763 Kean, 769 Nekrassov, 769 No Exit, 764 Trojan Woman, The, 771 Satyr play, 271 Schiller, Friedrich, 773-782 Cabal and Love, 777 Camp of Wallenstein, The, 778 Death of Wallenstein, The, 778 Don Carlos, Infante of Spain, 777 Fiesco, 777 1126

Subject Index Maid of Orleans, The, 779 Mary Stuart, 778 Piccolominis, The, 778 Robbers, The, 776 William Tell, 781 School for Scandal, The (Sheridan), 868 School for Wives, The (Molière), 614 School of Rakes, The (Beaumarchais), 76 Screens, The (Genet), 353 Seagull, The (Chekhov), 157 Seascape (Albee), 24 Season’s Greetings (Ayckbourn), 58 Second Mrs. Tanqueray, The (Pinero), 682 Secret of Heaven, The (Lagerkvist), 537 Secret Vengeance for Secret Insult (Calderón de la Barca), 138 Seger i mörker (Lagerkvist), 539 Seifuku (Abe), 3 Self-Accusation (Handke), 425 Self-Tormentor, The (Terence), 948 Sensibility, Age of, 388 Sentimental comedy, 387 Sentimentalism, 864 Seven Guitars (Wilson), 1036 Sewamono, 168 Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll (Bogosian), 102 Sexual Perversity in Chicago (Mamet), 556 Shadow of a Gunman, The (O’Casey), 626 Shaffer, Peter, 783-794 Amadeus, 790 Equus, 789 Five Finger Exercise, 787 Gift of the Gorgon, The, 792 Royal Hunt of the Sun, The, 788 Shahrazad (Hakim, al-), 417 Shakespeare, William, 518, 795-826, 980 All’s Well That Ends Well, 813 Antony and Cleopatra, 820 As You Like It, 812 Comedy of Errors, The, 808 Coriolanus, 821 Cymbeline, 823 Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, 816 Henry IV, Part I, 806 Henry IV, Part II, 807

Henry V, 807 Henry VI, Part I, 803 Henry VI, Part II, 804 Henry VI, Part III, 804 Henry VIII, 808 Julius Caesar, 815 King John, 805 King Lear, 818 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 810 Macbeth, 819 Measure for Measure, 814 Merchant of Venice, The, 811 Merry Wives of Windsor, The, 813 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 810 Much Ado About Nothing, 811 Othello, the Moor of Venice, 817 Pericles, 822 Richard II, 806 Richard III, 805 Romeo and Juliet, 815 Taming of the Shrew, The, 809 Tempest, The, 824 Timon of Athens, 817 Titus Andronicus, 814 Troilus and Cressida, 817 Twelfth Night, 812 Two Gentlemen of Verona, 810 Two Noble Kinsmen, The, 824 Winter’s Tale, The, 823 Shange, Ntozake, 827-834 Betsey Brown, 833 Boogie Woogie Landscapes, 831 for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf, 829 From Okra to Greens, 832 Love Space Demands, The, 833 Photograph, A, 830 Spell No. 7, 831 Shaw, George Bernard, 835-849 Arms and the Man, 839 Candida, 840 Major Barbara, 844 Man and Superman, 842 Saint Joan, 846 She Stoops to Conquer (Goldsmith), 390 Sheep Well, The (Lope de Vega), 974 Shelley, Mary, 124 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 123 1127

Notable Playwrights Shepard, Sam, 850-860 Angel City, 855 Buried Child, 856 Curse of the Starving Class, 856 Eyes for Consuela, 859 Fool for Love, 857 Geography of Horse Dreamer, 855 Late Henry Moss, The, 859 Lie of the Mind, A, 858 Operation Sidewinder, 854 Simpatico, 858 States of Shock, 858 Tooth of Crime, The, 855 True West, 857 Turista, La, 854 Unseen Hand, The, 854 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 861-872 Critic, The, 869 Duenna, The, 866 Pizarro, 870 Rivals, The, 864 St. Patrick’s Day, 871 School for Scandal, The, 868 Trip to Scarborough, A, 871 Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife, The (García Lorca), 335 Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, The (Hansberry), 436 Silver Tassie, The (O’Casey), 627 Simon, Neil, 873-884 Barefoot in the Park, 877 Biloxi Blues, 881 Brighton Beach Memoirs, 880 Broadway Bound, 881 California Suite, 879 Lost in Yonkers, 882 Odd Couple, The, 878 Simpatico (Shepard), 858 Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (Durang), 245 Sisters Rosenweig, The (Wasserstein), 991 Six Characters in Search of an Author (Pirandello), 700 Skin of Our Teeth, The (Wilder), 1010 Slave Ship (Baraka), 69 Slavs! (Kushner), 529 Small Family Business, A (Ayckbourn), 58

Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer (Tremblay), 959 Sondheim, Stephen, 885-889 Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, A, 887 Little Night Music, A, 887 Sunday in the Park with George, 888 Sweeney Todd, 887 Song of Death, The (Hakim, al-), 419 Sophocles, 890-900 Antigone, 896 Oedipus at Colonus, 896 Oedipus Tyrannus, 898 Sorrows and Rejoicings (Fugard), 327 Sotoba Komachi (Mishima), 604 Sound of a Voice, The (Hwang), 475 Soyinka, Wole, 901-913 Bacchae, The, 909 Beatification of Area Boy, The, 911 Dance of the Forests, A, 904 Death and the King’s Horseman, 909 Jero’s Metamorphosis, 908 Kongi’s Harvest, 906 Madmen and Specialists, 909 Play of Giants, A, 911 Requiem for a Futurologist, 911 Road, The, 906 Strong Breed, The, 906 Trials of Brother Jero, The, 908 Spanish Golden Age, 131, 969 Speed-the-Plow (Mamet), 558 Spell No. 7 (Shange), 831 Spoiled (Gray), 398 Spreading the News (Gregory), 408 Square Root of Wonderful, The (McCullers), 549 Stage Struck (Gray), 402 Stagecraft Aeschylus, 7 Euripides, 272 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 155 States of Shock (Shepard), 858 Stephen Joseph Theatre-in-the-Round, 52 Stoppard, Tom, 914-924 Arcadia, 923 Artist Descending a Staircase, 919 Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land, 921 Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, 921 1128

Subject Index Hapgood, 922 Indian Ink, 922 Invention of Love, The, 923 Jumpers, 918 Night and Day, 921 Real Thing, The, 922 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 917 Travesties, 919 Straussler, Tomas. See Stoppard, Tom Streetcar Named Desire, A (Williams), 1020 Strindberg, August, 925-934 Dream Play, A, 931 Father, The, 929 Ghost Sonata, The, 932 Miss Julie, 930 Strong Breed, The (Soyinka), 906 Sturm und Drang, 374 subUrbia (Bogosian), 102 Sugimori, Nobumori. See Chikamatsu Monzaemon Sullivan, Sir Arthur, 357 Sultan’s Dilemma, The (Hakim, al-), 417 Sunday in the Park with George (Sondheim), 888 Suréna (Corneille), 220 Surgeon of His Honor, The (Calderón de la Barca), 135 Sweeney Todd (Sondheim), 887 Sweet Lavender (Pinero), 679 Synge, John Millington, 935-943 Deirdre of the Sorrows, 942 In the Shadow of the Glen, 939 Playboy of the Western World, The, 940 Riders to the Sea, 938

Teatro Campesino, El, 962 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 824 Temptation (Havel), 446 Tender Hands (Hakim, al-), 418 Terence, 944-949 Andria, 948 Brothers, The, 947 Eunuch, The, 947 Mother-in-Law, The, 949 Phormio, 948 Self-Tormentor, The, 948 Theater of the Absurd, 687 They Are Dying Out (Handke), 428 Three Sisters, The (Chekhov), 160 Three Tall Women (Albee), 26 Till the Day I Die (Odets), 633 Time and the Conways (Priestley), 716 Time and Time Again (Ayckbourn), 56 Timon of Athens (Shakespeare), 817 Tiny Alice (Albee), 21 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 814 Tooth of Crime, The (Shepard), 855 Top Girls (Churchill), 183 Topdog/Underdog (Parks), 672 Torquato Tasso (Goethe), 380 Tragedy, 211, Greek, 6 Tragedy of Faust, The (Goethe), 381 Tragicomedy of Don Cristóbal and Doña Rosita, The (García Lorca), 334 Translations (Friel), 301 Traveller Without Luggage (Anouilh), 35 Travelling Man, The (Gregory), 410 Travesties (Stoppard), 919 Tree Climber, The (Hakim, al-), 419 Tremblay, Michel, 950-960 Albertine in Five Times, 958 Belles-sœurs, Les, 952 Bonjour, là, bonjour, 955 Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra, 957 Duchesse de Langeais, La, 956 État des lieux, L’, 959 For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, 959 Forever Yours, Marie-Lou, 954 Hosanna, 956 Impromptu of Outrement, The, 957 Like Death Warmed Over, 953 Maison suspendue, La, 958 Marcel Pursued by the Hounds, 958

Taking Steps (Ayckbourn), 57 Talk Radio (Bogosian), 101 Talley and Son (Wilson), 1045 Talley’s Folly (Wilson), 1044 Tamburlaine the Great, Part I (Marlowe), 565 Tamburlaine the Great, Part II (Marlowe), 567 Taming of the Shrew, The (Shakespeare), 809 Tarare (Beaumarchais), 81 Tartuffe (Molière), 615 1129

Notable Playwrights Real World?, The, 958 Remember Me, 958 Saint Carmen of the Main, 955 Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer, 959 Trials of Brother Jero, The (Soyinka), 908 Trifles (Glaspell), 370 Trip to Bountiful, The (Foote), 292 Trip to Scarborough, A (Sheridan), 871 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare), 817 Trojan Woman, The (Sartre), 771 True West (Shepard), 857 Turista, La (Shepard), 854 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 812 Twin Menaechmi, The (Plautus), 709 Two Friends, The (Beaumarchais), 77 Two Gentlemen of Verona (Shakespeare), 810 Two Noble Kinsmen, The (Shakespeare and Fletcher), 824 Two Trains Running (Wilson), 1036 Ue: Shin doreigari (Abe), 4 Uncle Vanya (Chekhov), 159 Uncommon Women and Others (Wasserstein), 990 University Wits, 565, 798 Unseen Hand, The (Shepard), 854 Valdez, Luis Miguel, 961-968 Bernabé, 965 Dos caras del patroncito, Las, 965 I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges!, 966 Mummified Deer, 966 Zoot Suit, 966 Valley Song (Fugard), 327 Vega Carpio, Lope de, 131, 969-978 Bizarrías de Belisa, Las, 976 Gardener’s Dog, The, 976 Justice Without Revenge, 977 King and the Farmer, The, 975 King, the Greatest Alcalde, The, 974 Knight from Olmedo, The, 976 Lady Nit-Wit, The, 976 Melindres de Belisa, Los, 975 Peribáñez, 973 Sheep Well, The, 974 Venus (Parks), 671

Verge, The (Glaspell), 370 Versailles Impromptu, The (Molière), 615 Verse play, 1059 Vietnamization of New Jersey, The (Durang), 244 View from the Bridge, A (Miller), 594 Vikings at Helgeland, The (Ibsen), 486 Vinegar Tom (Churchill), 184 Visit, The (Dürrenmatt), 253 Volpone ( Jonson), 520 Voltaire, 979-987 Alzire, 985 Mérope, 985 Oedipus, 984 Zaïre, 984 Volunteers (Friel), 300 Voyage to Tomorrow (Hakim, al-), 419 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 85 Waiting for Lefty (Odets), 632 Wake of Jamey Foster, The (Henley), 461 Waltz of the Toreadors, The (Anouilh), 39 Wasserstein, Wendy, 988-993 Heidi Chronicles, The, 990 Isn’t It Romantic, 990 Sisters Rosenweig, The, 991 Uncommon Women and Others, 990 Watch on the Rhine (Hellman), 454 Way of the World, The (Congreve), 206 Webster, John, 579 Werner (Byron), 126 West of Suez (Osborne), 665 What the Butler Saw (Orton), 656 When Five Years Pass (García Lorca), 337 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Albee), 19 Wilde, Oscar, 994-1003 Ideal Husband, An, 999 Importance of Being Earnest, The, 1001 Lady Windermere’s Fan, 999 Salomé, 997 Woman of No Importance, A, 999 Wilder, Thornton, 1004-1015 Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, The, 1007 Life in the Sun, A, 1013 Matchmaker, The, 1012 Our Town, 1008 Skin of Our Teeth, The, 1010 1130

Subject Index William Tell (Schiller), 781 Williams, Paulette. See Shange, Ntozake Williams, Tennessee, 1016-1031 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 1024 Glass Menagerie, The, 1018 Night of the Iguana, The, 1027 Streetcar Named Desire, A, 1020 Wilson, August, 1032-1038 Fences, 1034 Jitney, 1037 Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, 1035 King Hedley II, 1037 Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, 1034 Piano Lesson, The, 1035 Seven Guitars, 1036 Two Trains Running, 1036 Wilson, Lanford, 1039-1047 Angels Fall, 1045 Book of Days, 1046 Burn This, 1045 Hot l Baltimore, The, 1043 Rimers of Eldritch, The, 1042 Talley and Son, 1045 Talley’s Folly, 1044 Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare), 823 Wisdom of Solomon, The (Hakim, al-), 417 Wise Child (Gray), 397 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 426 Woman of No Importance, A (Wilde), 999 Women Beware Women (Middleton), 584 Wonder-Working Magician, The (Calderón de la Barca), 139 Wonderful Tennessee (Friel), 302

Words upon the Window-pane, The (Yeats), 1061 Workhouse Ward, The (Gregory), 409 Workshop 47, 641 Wycherley, William, 1048-1056 Country Wife, The, 1052 Gentleman Dancing-Master, The, 1050 Love in a Wood, 1049 Plain-Dealer, The, 1054 Year of the Dragon, The (Chin), 177 Yeats, William Butler, 405, 936, 10571063 Cathleen ni Houlihan, 1060 Countess Cathleen, The, 1059 Dreaming of the Bones, The, 1061 On Baile’s Strand, 1060 Purgatory, 1061 Words upon the Window-pane, The, 1061 Yeomen of the Guard, The (Gilbert), 364 Yerma (García Lorca), 339 Zaïre (Voltaire), 984 Zindel, Paul, 1064-1073 Amulets Against the Dragon Forces, 1071 And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little, 1069 Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-theMoon Marigolds, The, 1067 Every Seventeen Minutes the Crowd Goes Crazy!, 1071 Zoot Suit (Valdez), 966

1131