Text & Presentation, 2008 (Comparative Drama Conference)

TEXT & PRESENTATION, 2008 This page intentionally left blank TEXT & PRESENTATION, 2008 Edited by Stratos E. Constan...

Author: Stratos E. Constantinidis

105 downloads 2120 Views 1MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

TEXT & PRESENTATION, 2008

This page intentionally left blank

TEXT & PRESENTATION, 2008 Edited by Stratos E. Constantinidis

The Comparative Drama Conference Series, 5

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London

ALSO

BY

STRATOS E. CONSTANTINIDIS

Text & Presentation, 2007 (McFarland, 2008) Text & Presentation, 2006 (McFarland, 2007) Text & Presentation, 2005 (McFarland, 2006) Text & Presentation, 2004 (McFarland, 2005) Modern Greek Theatre: A Quest for Hellenism (McFarland, 2001) Greece in Modern Times: An Annotated Bibliography of Works Published in English in Twenty-Two Academic Disciplines during the Twentieth Century (vol. 1, 2000) Theatre under Deconstruction? A Question of Approach (1993)

ISSN 1054-724X • ISBN 978-0-7864-4366-6 softcover : 50# alkaline paper

©2009 The Executive Board of the Comparative Drama Conference. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover photograph: Euripides, the ancient Greek playwright (ca. 480 B.C.–406 B.C.) Manufactured in the United States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 611, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com

Acknowledgments This issue of Text & Presentation and the 32nd Comparative Drama Conference were funded, in part, by the Department of Theatre and Dance, the College of Communication and Fine Arts, and the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles; as well as by the Department of Greek and Latin at The Ohio State University. This publication would not have been possible without the commitment and expertise of our editorial board: Marvin Carlson (City University of New York, Graduate Center), Miriam Chirico (Eastern Connecticut State University), Harry Elam (Stanford University), William Elwood (Southern Connecticut State University), Les Essif (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Yoshiko Fukushima (University of Oklahoma), William Gruber (Emory University), JanLüder Hagens (University of Notre Dame), Karelisa Hartigan (University of Florida), Graley Herren (Xavier University, Cincinnati), William Hutchings (University of Alabama, Birmingham), Baron Kelly (Chapman University), David Krasner (Emerson College), Jeffrey Loomis (Northwest Missouri State University), Helen Moritz (Santa Clara University), Jon Rossini (University of California, Davis), Elizabeth Scharffenberger (Columbia University), Laura Snyder (Stevenson University), Tony Stafford (University of Texas, El Paso), Ron Vince (McMaster University), Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. (Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles), and Katerina Zacharia (Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles). I am also grateful to a significant number of additional specialists who participated in the anonymous review of the many manuscripts submitted to me for publication consideration. I would like to thank our associate editor, Kiki Gounaridou (Smith College), who assisted with the proofreading of this volume, and our book review editor, Verna Foster (Loyola University Chicago) who solicited, edited, and proofread the book reviews. The past editors of Text & Presentation deserve recognition for their contribution in establishing the reputation and standards for this annual publication: Karelisa Hartigan (1980–1993), Bill Free (1993–1998), and Hanna Roisman (1998–1999). The inclusion of photographs in some of the articles of this volume was made possible with the permission of the following copyright owners: Stratos E. Constantinidis for the photograph in the Preface; Keith Ian Polakoff the photograph in Stephen H. Fleck’s article; the Washington Shakespeare Company for v

vi

Acknowledgments

the three photographs in William Hutchings’ article; David Paxman and Michael Hatch for the figures in their article. Last but not least, I want to thank the Executive Board of the Comparative Drama Conference and the hundreds and hundreds of scholars who presented the results of their research — both creative and analytical — at the Comparative Drama Conference, an annual three-day event which is devoted to all aspects of theatre scholarship.

Contents Acknowledgments Preface 1. Martyred Masculinities: Saint Sebastian and the Dramas of Tennessee Williams and Federico García Lorca ( José I. Badenes)

5

2. How to Do Things with Witches: Performing The Crucible on Stage and Screen (Katherine Egerton)

18

3. Molière’s Revolutionary Dramaturgy (Stephen H. Fleck)

28

4. Constructions of Motherhood in Euripides’ Medea ( John Given)

42

5. Becoming Romantic: Women’s Sexual Encounters with the Other in Mourning Becomes Electra and Machinal (Les Hunter)

55

6. “To Be, Or to Be Recorded”: The Burton Hamlet, the Wooster Group, and the Miracle of Electronovision (Lindsay Brandon Hunter)

67

7. “Is This a Dagger I See Before Me?”: José Carrasquillo’s All-Nude Production of Macbeth (William Hutchings)

78

8. Cognitive Model Transformation in Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle (David Paxman and Michael Hatch)

90

9. Parables for His People: Legal and Religious Authority in the Plays of Stephen Adly Guirgis (David Pellegrini)

vii

110

viii

Table of Contents

10. Classroom Drama: Beckett for the High School Set (Doug Phillips)

123

11. Anne Hébert’s La cage: A Masque of Liberation (Gregory J. Reid)

132

12. Mohammad bin Tughlaq: A Fourteenth Century Muslim Sultan in 1960s South India (Kristen Rudisill)

145

13. The Music Man Cometh: The Tuneful Pipe Dreams of Professor Harold Hill (Michael Schwartz)

157

14. Tragic Ways of Killing a Child: Staging Violence and Revenge in Classical Greek and Chinese Drama (Fei Shi)

166

15. Brecht and Bullough: Measuring the Distance in Mother Courage (Diane M. Somerville-Skinner)

180

16. The Argonautic Myth as Subtext of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Mary Frances Williams)

192

17. American Musical Theatre: A Review Essay (Stacy Wolf )

205

Review of Literature: Selected Books Graley Herren, Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television (Mary Bryden)

211

Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy (Miriam Chirico)

213

Enoch Brater, ed., Arthur Miller’s Global Theater (Katherine Egerton)

217

Mary Luckhurst, Dramaturg y: A Revolution in Theatre (Christopher Innes)

219

Kiki Gounaridou, ed., Staging Nationalism: Essays on Theatre and National Identity (Siyuan Liu)

221

Table of Contents

ix

Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten. Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen ( Jeffrey B. Loomis)

223

Philip C. Kolin, Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook; Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. and Alycia Smith-Howard, eds., Suzan-Lori Parks: A Casebook (Annette Saddik)

226

Simon Goldhill, How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today ( James T. Svendsen)

230

Amy Scott-Douglass. Shakespeare Inside: The Bard Behind Bars (Sara L. Warner)

232

Index

235


Preface Text & Presentation is an annual publication devoted to all aspects of theatre scholarship and represents a selection of the best papers presented at the Comparative Drama Conference. For the past 31 years, participants at the Comparative Drama Conference have come from 35 countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Cyprus, Denmark, Egypt, England, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, South Africa, Taiwan, Tanzania, Turkey, the United States of America, and the Territory of Guam. This volume of Text & Presentation features sixteen research papers, one review essay, and nine book reviews. The papers included were among a total of 151 research papers that were presented and discussed at the 32nd Comparative Drama Conference. The presentations, which were divided into 62 sessions of 75 minutes each, were discussed by 179 program participants at the Radisson Hotel in Los Angeles, California, from March 27 to 29, 2008. The four concurrent sessions per day were complemented by four plenary sessions and a show. The keynote address, “Whitewater Canoeing through the Rapids of Native Theatre and Humor,” was given by Drew Hayden Taylor (First Nations Playwright, Canada) on March 28. Professor Ann Haugo (Illinois State University) and production manager Rose-Yvonne Colletta (Autry National Center) responded to the keynote address. The second plenary session — Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs— included a performance and a roundtable discussion. The session began with a 30-minute performance of selected scenes, based on the 2007 Stanford Summer Theatre production directed by Harry J. Elam, featuring Anthony J. Haney, Courtney Walsh Phleger, and Rush Rehm. The panelists were Anthony J. Haney (associate artistic director of Theatre Works), Courtney Walsh Phleger (television series LA Law), and professor Rush Rhem (artistic director of Stanford Summer Theatre). The session was moderated by professor Katerina Zacharia (Loyola Marymount University) on March 27. The third plenary session —“Teaching, Texts and Theatre: A Discussion with Lee A. Jacobus”— on March 28, was moderated by professor Miriam Chirico (Eastern Connecticut State University) and featured Lee A. Jacobus, the editor of the Bedford Introduction to Drama. 1

2

Preface

The final plenary session, “Author-Meets-Critic,” on March 29, was devoted to the discussion of one of the books (The Stagecraft and Performance of Roman Comedy) that was reviewed in Text & Presentation, 2007 (pp. 241–245). Its author, C.W. Marshall (University of British Columbia), discussed his book with the following critics: Professor Eleni Bozia (University of Florida), professor Chiara Sulprizio (University of Southern California), and professor Amy Richlin (University of California, Los Angeles). The show Samarkand: Rites and Rituals of Markets Old and New, adapted and directed by Wole Soyinka, was performed in the Sacred Heart Chapel and in the Sunken Garden of Loyola Marymount University on March 29. In addition, staged readings of five new plays were presented at the conference by their authors with a cast drawn from conference attendees: These plays were: Carmelo’s War by José Luiz Passos; Christmas with Clytemnestra by David Starkey; Rorschach by Kelly Younger; Bounty of Lace, by Susan Merson; and Leavings by John Menaghan. The Executive Board welcomes research papers presenting original investigation on, and critical analysis of, research and developments in the field of

The conferees of the Thirty-Second Comparative Drama Conference attended the performance of Wole Soyinka’s Samarkand: Rites and Rituals of Markets Old and New in the Sunken Garden and the Sacred Heart Chapel of Loyola Marymount University on March 29, 2008. Sacred Heart Chapel readers, from left to right: Kwesi Boake Botaeng, Michael Learned, Kwame Botaeng, Jerome Hawkins, Nenad Pervan, CCH Pounder, Constance Ejuma and Belita Moreno.

Preface

3

drama and theatre. Papers may be comparative across disciplines, periods, or nationalities, may deal with any issue in dramatic theory and criticism, or any method of historiography, translation, or production. Text & Presentation is edited by scholars appointed by the Executive Board of the Comparative Drama Conference, of which it is the official publication. Text & Presentation is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography. Stratos E. Constantinidis December 2008


¡ Martyred Masculinities Saint Sebastian and the Dramas of Tennessee Williams and Federico García Lorca José I. Badenes Abstract Gender and sexual identity issues are common to Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) and Tennessee Williams (1911–1983). This essay focuses on constructions and subversions of patriarchal masculinity, particularly the representation of masculinity in relation to homoerotic desire. It analyzes Lorca’s and Williams’ complex dynamic of simultaneous admiration and belittlement of stereotypical heteronormative masculinity. It compares the dramatic techniques both authors employ to depict male bodies in their plays with visual representations of Saint Sebastian, a saint to whom both authors were attracted.

Gender and sexual performances are rooted in desire, a term that can be related to “Christian notions of guilt and atonement” (Clum 1997:131). In the dramatic works of Federico García Lorca and Tennessee Williams, desire is an operative term. Given their same sex orientation, both men struggled throughout their lives between their own constructions of an experienced personal and liberating God and an internalized erotophobic religious conventionality handed down to them by society and family. As a result, they connected the inevitable expression of desire with a violation of the established order and, therefore, with guilt, atonement, sacrifice, and immolation. Saint Sebastian, the arrow-pierced early Christian martyr, subject of many pictorial representations, was a figure to whom the two playwrights were attracted given the saint’s homoerotic depictions throughout the ages. The attraction to the image of Saint Sebastian is a point of convergence between the two men, since both lived desire in general and their sexual orientation in particular as martyrdom. Saint Sebastian becomes an appropriate icon to highlight gender and sexuality issues in Williams and Lorca, particularly with regards to performances 5

6

Text & Presentation, 2008

of masculinity and their relationship to homoeroticism. This essay focuses specifically on the immolation of patriarchal masculinity as it is intertwined with the internalization of the homophobic discourse in the dramatic works of both artists. In so doing, this analysis seeks to do away with binary understandings of the works of Williams and Lorca by different scholars who see in them either rebellious transgressors of the patriarchal order before their time or repressed and conflicted men with regard to their sexual orientation and therefore victims of their own homophobia. The legend of Saint Sebastian is one of the richest in the history of Christianity. It accounts for the many images of the saint from the dawn of Christianity down to our own time. These images proliferated particularly during the time of the Renaissance when artists began representing the saint as a handsome young man. Many of these youthful images encoded homoerotic desire. However, it was not until 1909 that the saint’s explicit connection with homoeroticism was noted.1 As a result, Saint Sebastian became the clandestine, unofficial, and popular patron saint of homosexual men. In his study “Losing his religion: Saint Sebastian as contemporary gay martyr” (1996), Richard A. Kaye has traced Sebastian’s religious and queer identifications in relationship to his most recent past and contemporary visual depictions. He declares that the saint’s deployment as “emblem of homosexual consciousness” (1996:86) is imbedded in his legend. According to Christian sources, such as Jacobus de Voragine’s thirteenth century Legenda Aurea or Golden Legend, popularly known as Lives of the Saints, Sebastian was an officer in the guard of Roman emperor Diocletian ( A. D. 245–313). Because of his professed Christianity, he was condemned to be shot with arrows by his fellow soldiers. Left for dead he was nursed back to health by Irene, the devout Christian widow of a friend. However, soon after, he defied the emperor publicly during a royal procession. As a consequence, he was sentenced again to death, this time by being clubbed. Unknown and undocumented sources claim that it was Sebastian’s openly singular devotion to Christ that led him to refuse Diocletian’s amorous advances. This refusal incurred the emperor’s wrath resulting in the officer’s death sentence, thus Sebastian’s homoerotic connection.2 The saint’s iconography represents him tied naked, except for a loincloth, either to a tree or a column, with his body exposed and pierced by arrows. During the late Middle Ages he was represented as a bearded mature fellow invoked against the plague. That depiction changed during the early modern era when he was metamorphosed into a young man of Apollonian beauty writhing in ecstasy from both the pain of the piercing arrows and the pleasure of his winning the martyr’s crown. It was a covert screen for projected homoerotic desires. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the saint’s continuous pictorial transformations from an athletic muscular Christian soldier in consonance with Victorian masculinist imperialist values to a Decadent androgyne of masochistic tendencies. Our own times have associated him with the AIDS

1. Martyred Masculinities (Badenes)

7

plague, self-awareness and self-disclosure, gay sensuality, sadomasochism, victim of violent homophobia, and militantly defiant activism for gay rights.3 Thus, it is difficult to assign the saint a single meaning. His multivalence is an asset for appropriating his figure to say different things at different times under varied circumstances, as many artists have done throughout the ages, particularly same sex oriented ones. Federico García Lorca and Tennessee Williams are two such examples among many others like Oscar Wilde and Yukio Mishima. Williams’ oeuvre includes two explicit major adaptations of the legend of Saint Sebastian. The first is a poem, “San Sebastiano de (sic) Sodoma,” which he began in Rome in 1949 and ended up publishing in 1954 in the collection Winter of Cities. The second is in his play Suddenly, Last Summer (1958). The central figure in the play, Sebastian Venable, is named after the saint. He is never seen, though the action of the play revolves around him. However, he is used to exploit the theme of sexual martyrdom in a demonically parodic way. Sebastian Venable is cannibalized by the materially deprived young men from whom he would solicit sexual favors, his self-sacrifice to his own idea of a predatory God. Among Williams’ many Sebastians which inspired him and whom he conflated for his purposes are the early modern paintings by Sodoma and Guido Reni. Gabriele D’Annunzio’s early twentieth century staged Le martyre de St Sébastien with music by Claude Debussy is also a source. A third influence is Yukio Mishima’s autobiography, Confessions of a Mask. In it the Japanese author, whom Williams had the pleasure of meeting, mentions his fascination with the saint from looking at Reni’s painting.4 Lorca’s explicit fascination with the saint is intertwined with his relationship to Spanish painter Salvador Dalí. Both had met as college students in Madrid and frequented each other’s company. During that time, Dalí shared with Lorca his attraction to the saint. Saint Sebastian, therefore, became a link and a homoerotic code between the two young artists.5 Whereas Dalí wrote a piece on the saint to accompany a drawing he had made of him, Lorca drew three sketches of the saint, one of them being a series of iconographic doodles associated with the martyr which he superimposed on a photograph of himself.6 Moreover, Lorca had planned a series of three conferences on the saint. He had also started to collect reproductions of him to accompany his lectures, as evident in his letters to Dalí and other friends. Unfortunately, he never saw them to completion.7 Both Williams and Lorca produced individual works directly inspired by Saint Sebastian which explicitly bear his name. These establish a link, albeit superficial, between them. However, their individual connection to the saint lies much deeper than at first seen. The iconology of the saint provides them with a visual point of convergence for discussing issues common to both having to do with the body, desire and gender performance. There are several general reasons for the connection between Lorca’s and Williams’s male bodies in their plays and the body of the saint. In the first place, and most obvious, the pictorial representations of Saint Sebastian stress the fact

8


that it is a body to be looked at, just as in both playwrights’ works the actors’ bodies are meant in many cases to be seen by an audience. Moreover, both saint and actors perform, whether statically in the case of painting or actively in the case of drama, through and with the body. The attention given to the body of Saint Sebastian and his poses is a common feature of his representation down through the ages. Similarly, in several plays, much more prominent in Williams than in Lorca, the male body commands the attention and gaze of the viewer. Secondly, just as the saint’s body has been homoeroticized, so are Williams’ and Lorca’s male characters read with a queer eye. This particular reading exposes an indirect, oblique, subterranean discourse which is intertwined with the more direct, obvious, established dramatic plot. Thirdly, in much the same way that Sebastian’s body is a site of violence and suffering for contesting the status quo, Lorca’s and Williams’ plays embody the violent struggle between flesh and spirit, and between erotic freedom and conventional religious and social constraints. The arrows with which the body of the martyr is pierced correspond to the phallic arrows of desire with which so many of Williams’s and Lorca’s characters are penetrated. These characters die physically or psychologically for either repressing their sexual instinct or giving into it. In turn, the conflict mirrors the personal struggle each author had with his religious upbringing (Lorca was raised Catholic in Spain while Williams was an Episcopalian who converted to Catholicism late in his life in the U.S.A.).8 Finally, Saint Sebastian provides a visual template in order to focus on the immolation of patriarchal manhood in both Lorca and Williams. The performance of patriarchal heteronormative masculinity (machismo) brings out mixed reactions in both Lorca and Williams. On the one hand, the two authors are fascinated by and are attracted to stereotypical virile men. On the other hand, they are always ready to bring these paragons of manhood down, either by ridiculing them or even killing them. Thus, a curious love-hate relationship vis à vis heteronormative patriarchal masculinity gets played out. The legends, representation, and iconology of Saint Sebastian mirror these dynamics in Lorca and Williams, since both the exaltation of stereotypical masculinity and its sacrifice can be read onto the body of the saint in its various renditions. Williams’s representation and placement of the eroticized male body on stage was revolutionary in its day. For example, in A Streetcar Named Desire Blanche DuBois, who according to Dean Shackelford “projects the gaze of the gay playwright” (2000:145), gazes admiringly several times on her working class brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski’s naked well built torso (especially as performed by Marlon Brando in both the stage and film versions). It is he rather than she who is made by Williams to be “the principal object of the gaze” (2000:145) in the play. Whereas he is comfortable displaying his muscular frame around the house, she tries to conceal her own body whether by staying out of the light, spending long hours locked in the family bathroom, or wearing all sorts of accessories. Moreover, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, “the visual erotics ... keep returning


9

to Brick ... [a]s the characters try to get his attention and draw the attention of other characters to him ... (thus) bring[ing] the gaze of the audience to [him]” (Gross 1997:12–13.) It is not Maggie the Cat who commands the erotics of the gaze in the play, rather her husband Brick, “slim and firm as a boy” (Williams 2000a:884). In addition, in Sweet Bird of Youth, gigolo Chance Wayne is described in the stage directions as “exceptionally good-looking ... a body that white silk pajamas are, or ought to be, made for” (2000a:157–158). He is the object of Williams’ and the audience’s gaze via aging film star, the Princess Kosmonopolis, Alexandra del Lago. Finally, in Orpheus Descending, Val Xavier’s “wild beauty” (2000a:19) captivates the attention of the women of the Southern town where the play takes place. Lorca’s attraction to the masculine male body is not as insistent or direct as Williams’. However, his fascination with stereotypical virility is strongly felt through his characters and stage directions. For example, in When Five Years Pass, the directions describe the Football Player to whom the Bride of the play is physically attracted as follows: “The Football Player does not speak, he only smokes and crushes the cigar on the floor. He exhibits great vitality and embraces the Bride with impetuosity” (García Lorca 1992:124).9 It is a portrait of stereotypical machismo. He foreshadows the virile character of Leonardo in Blood Wedding. Unlike the Football Player in the former play, who is described though he does not have a speaking role in it, Leonardo is not sketched in the stage directions of the latter work. However, his actions and how other characters speak about him compel the director to cast a hypermasculine figure, betraying the author’s desires. His beauty burns the Bride of the play who does not want to go with him —“I must be mad! I do not want to share your bed and your food” (García Lorca 1993:90)— but cannot help being attracted to him because for her it is “as if I drank a bottle of anisette and fell asleep on a quilt of roses. And it draws me under, and I know I’m drowning, but I follow” (1993:48). Such is his masculine magnetism. Similarly, Víctor, in Yerma, attracts the eponymous protagonist with his voice “like a gush of water filling your whole mouth” (1993:133)— and his touch, who made her “tremble so hard (her) teeth rattled” (1993:127). Conventional masculinity is also portrayed in most images of Saint Sebastian. It is interesting to note that all of the official and unofficial stories about Saint Sebastian coincide with the fact that he was a military man at the service of the Roman emperor, therefore aligning him with stereotypical heteronormative masculinity. In fact, as noted before, early depictions of the saint portrayed him sporting a beard, an outward sign of his virility. Moreover, the arrows, which are his inseparable companions in most pictorial renditions, may be read as phallic signs. His almost naked body reveals a musculature product of manly military discipline. It is thus a masculine body for the gaze, such as the bodies of masculine men found in Williams’ and Lorca’s plays mentioned above. If both Williams and Lorca provide attractive stereotypically masculine

10


male characters for the object of the gaze, they also provide absent virile male characters for the subject of fantasy. In the article “Tennesee Williams’ Unseen Characters,” Susan Koprince points out Williams’ “repeated and consistent use of this character type ... to reveal the incredible hold that one individual can have over another, even from a distance, and even from the grave”(1994:87), inspiring in others through their charm “an almost religious devotion” (1994:90). She provides three examples of this: Mr. Wingfield, “the father in The Glass Menagerie who deserted his wife and children sixteen years earlier” (1997:87); Rosario delle Rose, “the late husband of Serafina delle Rose in The Rose Tattoo ... an amorous truck driver who was killed while smuggling drugs under a load of bananas” (1997:87); and Skipper, “Brick Pollit’s football teammate and close friend in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ” (1997:87), whose sexual attraction to Brick led him to suicide. These men fit the virile manly type. By way of different strategies which Koprince points out and develops, these men are presented by Williams “as gods in human form” (1997:94). They fuel the erotic fantasy life not only of the characters who are devoted to them, but the audience’s as well. As a consequence, the public is invited to engage in its own fantasies about them, which tap into the fantasies of the author. Lorca takes this one step further. In the last play he wrote before he died, The House of Bernarda Alba, men are entirely absent from the stage. They are relegated to the invisible space outside the house. Men in the play are thus the subject of fantasy. This is particularly so with regard to Pepe el Romano. He is “the best looking man around” (García Lorca 1993:218). In fact, three of matriarch Bernarda Alba’s sex-starved daughters are attracted to him. Pepe is then the repository of repressed desires by the confined women. It is precisely Pepe’s absence from the stage which allows the power of fantasy — whether that of the playwright by way of the characters onstage or the audience’s — to take over, hypermasculinizing his figure and endowing him with hypervirile attributes. He becomes a blank screen for projected desires. Pepe, therefore, grows not only in the minds, hearts and loins of Bernarda’s daughters, but in the audiences’ as well. He thus confirms the ironically lucid though demented grandmother’s description of him as “a giant” who will in the end “devour all” (1993:281). In much the same way, Saint Sebastian, like many saints, has grown in the collective imagination. His many legends and artistic renditions attest to the power of fantasy with regard to his figure. Depending on the historical context and the individual artist’s purpose, his figure, as mentioned before, has meant different things at different times for different audiences. At the same time that both Lorca and Williams are drawn to the figure of the macho man, making him the object of the gaze or the subject of fantasy, they are ready to attack him, twisting him, ridiculing him, humiliating him, even killing him. For example, according to scholar Robert Lima, the playwright “shows an evolving negativity toward male characters when presented in malefemale interaction ... negativity (which) leads (eventually) to the exclusion of


11

men from the stage” (2001:137). In both The Shoemaker’s Wonderful Wife and The Love of Don Perlimplín and Belisa in the Garden, the older Shoemaker and Don Perlimplín are “only a means to an end: the makeover of the (younger) wife” (2001:137). In Mariana Pineda and Doña Rosita the Spinster, the female protagonists’ love interests abandon them cruelly and are thus portrayed negatively. Leonardo and the Bridegroom from Blood Wedding and Yerma’s husband Juan from the play by the same name suffer violent deaths. Finally, in The House of Bernarda Alba, “the pattern for male death foregrounded in earlier works devolves into the extreme, for now males are missing in the action of the play altogether” (2001:138). In addition, not only are the men in this last play made invisible, they “are also denigrated ... through sarcastic, often biting words from female characters” (2001:145). Williams also deals with his macho men negatively, though somewhat differently than Lorca. In the case of Stanley (Streetcar), Brick (Cat), Chance (Sweet Bird), and Val (Orpheus), these men are suddenly feminized when they become objects rather than subjects of the gaze despite their macho posturing. Thus, the very act of admiration becomes an act of denigration in Williams. At the same time that he eroticizes and displays the masculinity of his men, he is depriving them of their patriarchal power by turning them into the objects of the gaze. In addition, several of them, for instance Brick and Chance, are sketched as “maimed by society either physically or psychologically” ( Jones 1977:549). They are portrayed as “passive victims both of domineering women and of the social group” (1977:549). These men, therefore, exist in the plays as passive sexual objects in order “to satisfy, if they can, the physical or psychological needs of women” (1977:550). Moreover, some of them are physically dealt with cruelly. For example, both Chance and Val are violently and grotesquely punished for their phallic (mis)deeds. Chance is castrated and Val is burned with a blow torch. Macho posturing is nowhere as blatantly communicated and as immediately put down as in The Glass Menagerie through the character of Jim O’ Connor. Laura Wingfield’s gentleman caller “tries to recall and to recuperate his image as a lover/powerfully sexual man that the script undermines” (Kolin 2000:132). His “performances of hyperbolic virility are driven by his narratives of boundless masculinity” (2000:132). At the same time, Williams “deflates (his) own representations of manhood (by) unpacking into the script (of the play) the problematics of the gentleman caller’s virility” (2000:133). Finally, through the figure of Alvaro Mangiacavallo, Serafina delle Rose’s suitor in The Rose Tattoo, Williams creates a caricature of virility. He juxtaposes the truck driver against the widow’s deceased unfaithful but sexually satisfying husband. At one point in the play Serafina describes him as “My husband’s body with the head of a clown” (Williams 2000a:704). He is, according to Kolin, “the character who does most textual violence to the conventional image of male sexual prowess” (2000:142) through the accumulation of physical and behavioral eccentricities he shows throughout the play.

12


This dynamic of abasement also finds a visual correspondence in the iconography of Saint Sebastian. As has been pointed out, the homoerotic gaze is attracted to the masculinity of the office of the saint and his athletic body. Nevertheless, at the same time, by depicting the saint tied up and shot at with arrows this same masculine power is also being brought down, tortured, killed, and sacrificed. It is rare to find an image of the saint where he is not represented in this state. Saint Sebastian’s iconography underscores his stereotypical manliness. However, at the same time that this representation is being destroyed, it is important to point out that almost all of the different images of the saint from the early modern era down to ours feminize him to a greater or lesser degree, with a few notable exceptions. In these tableaux the masculinity of his office blends with the femininity of his representation. The result is a gender ambivalent character. This blending of the masculine and the feminine can also be found in both Lorca and Williams. Their simultaneous exaltation and abasement of macho males exists not in isolation from but in juxtaposition with unconventional performances of masculinity and sexuality, which sometimes blend with one another, just as in representations of Saint Sebastian. Against Williams’s gallery of masculine men-turned desirable sex objects there are also other male characters that do not conform to the former’s stereotypical machismo. These fall under different categories. Two of them belong to Susan Koprince’s list of unseen characters. One is Allan Grey, “Blanche DuBois’s late husband in Streetcar ... a gentle, poetic young man who took his own life after his wife discovered his homosexuality” (1994:87). The other is Sebastian Venable, the deceased homosexual poet in Suddenly, Last Summer “who exploited people and who became a victim of cannibalistic murder” (1994:87). One other, Harold Mitchell, “Mitch,” of Streetcar, belongs to Philip Kolin’s list of unsuitable suitors. In addition, not belonging to any list, is Tom Wingfield, the son in The Glass Menagerie. What groups these men together is precisely their unconventional performance of masculinity. Allan, Sebastian and Tom are artists, poets, not “athletes, truck drivers, manual workers ... hustlers” ( Jones 1977:549–550) as the other virile men are. Mitch, for instance, is described as a momma’s boy. However, such unconventionality also exists precisely in the virile men, as seen above. For example, Brick’s friend Skipper may have been an athlete, but he harbored a desire for his football teammate. Chance may be a stud, but he is a hired hustler, a commodity in the hands of his female employer. But if most of these masculine men are immolated in some way for embodying patriarchy, the other group against which they are juxtaposed does not come off easily. Allan and Sebastian, for instance, are both killed, the latter in a most gruesome manner. There is, therefore, a continuous blending of admiration and denigration, of exaltation and immolation, even with this other category of man. Critic Robert Emmet Jones writes about Williams’ depiction of the “unisexual character, a person in whom only the organs of generation define the differences between the sexes” (1977:545). For him, many of Williams’ characters


13

are sketched as sexually ambivalent and fluid. In other words, they ostensibly could be played by a person of either sex in some cases when “the sexual boundaries are dropped ... [and] the sexes are often interchangeable” (1977:557). This statement opens up a debate about Williams’ recourse to the Albertine strategy.10 Moreover, it leads into the controversy surrounding Williams’ attitude towards homosexuality. Some scholars, such as John Clum, attack Williams for the way in which he deals with homosexuals in his plays, a clear example of his internalization of the homophobic discourse. Others, like Dean Shackelford, highlight the complexity with which he treats the topic in his plays, pushing the envelope and advocating change in many cases. There is no doubt that Williams’ plays deal creatively and progressively with issues regarding gender and sexuality. However, there is also the fact that there are vestiges of homophobia in them given his personal struggles between personal desire and religious and societal conventions. Thus, as John Clum has indicated, if men are sacrificed in the Williams canon it is because they “represent some violation of the socially acceptable principle of masculinity ... [being] threats to marriage and patriarchy” (1997:130). Lorca too has his share of men who perform unconventional masculinities against his more stereotypical virile men. The Young Man in When Five Years Pass, for example, struggles “to come to grips with his own sexuality ... [fantasizing] himself in various heterosexual and homosexual encounters” (Klein 1975:115). As Dennis Klein points out, “his obsessive talk about his sex life is an attempt to overcompensate for a basic insecurity about his manhood” (1977:120). Against the virile physicality of the Football Player, he stands no chance at winning the Bride’s love. Moreover, in Blood Wedding the Bridegroom’s presentation as an ineffectual lover stands in contrast to Leonardo’s hypervirility. As Carlos Feal has analyzed, the Bridegroom’s relationship to his Mother does not allow him to develop his masculinity. Only when confronting Leonardo in the third act and fighting against him to the death does he have access to it. In other words, the Bridegroom finally becomes a man when spilling his blood fighting a virile man. This contrast between types of men is also seen in Yerma. Juan, Yerma’s husband, lacks sexual drive, as opposed to Víctor, Yerma’s former suitor, whose touch makes her tremble and whose voice is powerfully potent. As with Williams, some scholars have recognized Lorca’s creative ways in which he contests codified gender and sexual performances while proposing alternative ones. However, others have pointed out his internalization of the homophobic discourse. For instance, Beatriz Cortez, sees Lorca’s avant-garde play, The Public, as a challenge against compulsory heterosexism. Carlos Jerez-Farrán, on the other hand, regards it as an expression of internalized homophobia. The image of Saint Sebastian also blends the masculine with the feminine. It once again mirrors the dynamic at play in Lorca and Williams. However, it is not only patriarchal heteronormative masculinity which is being immolated in the paintings when a handsome soldier is being shot down with arrows. It is also an effeminate man who is being killed. Since these arrows may stand for

14


phallic power, it can also be said that at the same time that heteronormative patriarchy is being tortured and killed, it is precisely the power of this same heteronormative patriarchy which is killing the transgressive body. And it is curiously through violent penetration that it is doing it, as if the nonconforming genderambivalent body were being raped for its defiance and transgression of the gender and sexual status quo. Lorca and Williams simultaneously exalt and abase their men, especially the more virile variety that embodies heteronormative patriarchal masculinity. If this is so it is due to a dynamic which Carlos Feal has analyzed with regard to Lorca and Blood Wedding, but could also be extended to include Williams. By exalting virile masculinity both Lorca and Williams seem to be expressing the desire to possess the strength and the power which the macho man enfleshes. At the same time, however, the virile male’s abasement is the authors’ wish to destroy that power which represents the source of oppression for those unlike them, for example women and men with alternative lifestyles. Embodied patriarchal heteronormative manhood is thus immolated and sacrificed onstage by both artists in various ways throughout their work in order to allow more fluid ways of performing gender and sexuality to surface. Nevertheless, these alternative performances also suffer, as has been seen, although not in all cases. In other words, running parallel with the dynamic just mentioned and intertwining with it is the desire to open up possibilities for non-normative gender and sexual performances. These possibilities are also simultaneously blocked and dealt with in different ways as they emerge, revealing an internalization of the homophobic discourse in both authors. Moreover, if performances of gender and sexuality are a focus for both Williams and Lorca, it is religion which provides them with the language to express the coexisting and complex dynamics presented and analyzed above. As seen, both authors connect the inevitable expression of desire with a violation of the established order and therefore with guilt, atonement, sacrifice, and immolation. By desiring the macho man and at the same time killing him whether literally or metaphorically, both Lorca and Williams violate the institution of patriarchal heteronormativity as established by society and religion. They do so on two counts: desire of a man for a man and subversion of the status quo. Therefore, they must consequently atone for such an act. It is precisely through the non-normative figures of masculinity with whom they tend to identify that guilt is assuaged. Thus, at the same time that the immolation of machismo gives birth to the possibility of other ways of being masculine, the very same resurrected body of possibilities is also sacrificed as punishment for such a daring deed. Such a death into martyrdom because of the fact that this immolation is the result of an act of sacrifice for a higher cause — freedom for expressions of gender and sexuality in the long run. The image of Saint Sebastian to whom the two playwrights are attracted is thus an appropriate icon to speak about the bodies of men in the plays of Williams and Lorca.


15

In most images of Saint Sebastian the saint is represented as a martyr, whether what is being depicted is the actual punishment or just the soldier saint holding the instruments associated with his ordeal. As mentioned, most of Sebastian’s pictorial depictions conflate the masculinity of his office with the femininity of his representation. It is interesting to note then that it is this man who combines the masculine and the feminine, who is thus gender ambivalent and defies the status quo, which wins the martyr’s crown and is worshiped as a saint. It is as if, in a way, his non-normative gender performance was being canonized as well. Tennessee Williams and Federico García Lorca struggled deeply with the issue of identity, particularly gender and sexual identity. They also wrestled with desire as the root of identity. For both, freedom to express desire as a vehicle to express identity was fundamental to living life fully regardless of the cost. Such a commitment pitted them against the repressive forces of conventional society and religion, both externally through man-made institutions and internally through the internalization of their oppressive discourses. The main characters of their works — all of them martyrs of desire — embody the subtleties of such a struggle. As this essay has demonstrated, Saint Sebastian’s representation as sexual martyr mirrors the complex dynamics of gender and sexual performance which Williams’ and Lorca’s plays dramatize, particularly through their male characters. The saint’s ambiguous iconography through time reflects the dramatic techniques employed by Williams and Lorca when depicting male bodies in their works. At the same time that stereotypical heteronormative masculinity is revered, it is brought down. The image of Saint Sebastian serves to underscore the religious roots of both authors’ sexual struggles that many characters in their plays enflesh. Thus, Lorca’s and Williams’s representation of masculinity in relation to homoerotic desire reveals their complexity as men and as artists. LOYOLA MARYMOUNT UNIVERSITY

Notes 1. For a more detailed exposition please see Georges Eekhoud’s article “Saint Sébastien dans la peinture.” Akademos 1 (15 February 1909):171–175. According to Giovanni Dall’Orto in “San Sebastiano ‘santo gay’?” (http://digilander.libero.it/giovannidallorto/saggistoria/sansebastiano 1999) Eekhoud was not really so much responsible for initiating the trend of linking Saint Sebastian and homoeroticism as the first to openly articulate a point of view which preceded him by several centuries and which circulated underground. 2. According to Giovanni Dall’Orto in “San Sebastiano, ‘santo gay’?” (see note above), the homoerotic connection with Sebastian is a twentieth century phenomenon. However, Karim Ressouni-Demigneux in St Sébastien (Paris: Éditions du Regard, Collection L’art du regard, 2000), declares that already during the Renaissance the saint was associated with homoeroticism. Derek Jarman’s film Sebastiane (1976) taps into this tradition. 3. See Gerald Matt and Wolfgang Fetz’s Saint Sebastian: A Splendid Readiness for Death. Vienna: Kerber, Verlag, 2003 as well as Richard A. Kaye’s “Losing His Religion: Saint Sebastian as Contemporary Gay Martyr” (see References Cited for the latter) for a more thorough exposition and analysis of the image of Saint Sebastian in the twentieth century.

16


4. Brian Parker has studied these influences in his study “Tennessee Williams and the Legends of St Sebastian.” University of Toronto Quarterly 69.3 (Summer 2000): 634–660. 5. In Sebastian’s Arrows: Letters and mementos of Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca. Chicago: Swan Isle, 2004, editor Christopher Maurer has collected and translated letters, texts and images exchanged between Lorca and Dalí, both wounded by the love arrows of St. Sebastian. 6. As analyzed by Cecelia Cavanaugh, among others, in her book Lorca’s Drawings and Poems: Forming the Eye of the Reader. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995:59–62. 7. As mentioned in Rosario F. Cartes’s “El mito de San Sebastián en Federico García Lorca: Breve estudio comparado.” Federico García Lorca, clásico moderno (1898–1998). Ed. Andrés Soria Olmedo. Granada: Diputación de Granada, 2000. 629–642. 8. Lorca’s and Williams’s biographers, notably Ian Gibson (Federico García Lorca: A Life. New York: Pantheon, 1989) for Lorca and Lyle Leverich (Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York: Crown, 1995) and Donald Spoto (The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. Boston: Da Capo, 1985) for Williams, comment on their respective authors’ religious upbringing and the effect it had on them. In addition, there are articles and books that analyze this topic (see, for example, Eutimio Martín’s Federico García Lorca, heterodoxo y mártir. Madrid: Siglo veintiuno de España, 1986; also Thomas Adler’s “The Search for God in the Plays of Tennessee Williams” Renascence 26 (1973): 48–56; and John J Fritscher’s “Some Attitudes and a Posture: Religious Metaphor and Ritual in Tennessee Williams’ Query of the American God” Modern Drama 13 (1970): 201–215. 9. The translation is mine. 10. David Savran explains the Albertine strategy succinctly with regard to Williams in his section on Tennessee Williams in Communists, Cowboys and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992, p. 115: “Beginning in the late 1950s, with an increasing public suspicion (or awareness) of Williams’ homosexuality, a species of criticism emerged that attempted cunningly to decipher the language of ‘obscurity’ and ‘indirection’ in Williams plays by translating his heroines into homosexual men in drag and, as a result, turning many of his heterosexual couplings into homosexual liaisons in disguise. This particular maneuver dates back to a 1958 essay by Stanley Edgar Hyman in which he decries a ‘somewhat unattractive’ trend that, he alleges, enfeebles the American ‘tradition’ and compromises its most ‘virile’ achievements. The ‘Albertine strategy,’ as he calls it (commemorating Proust’s ‘Albert-made-Albertine,’ whom he believes to be the ‘godfather’ of all such transpositions), entails metamorphosizing a boy with whom the male protagonist is involved into a girl.”

References Cited Clum, John M. “‘Something Cloudy, Something Clear’: Homophobic Discourse in Tennessee Williams.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 88.1 (Winter 1989):161–179. _____. “The Sacrificial Stud and the Fugitive Female in Suddenly Last Summer, Orpheus Descending, and Sweet Bird of Youth.” In The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams, edited by Matthew C. Roudané, 128–146. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Cortez, Beatriz. “Sadomasoquismo y travestismo en El Público de Federico García Lorca: Un reto al heterosexismo compulsivo.”Hispanófila 133 (Septiembre 2001): 31–42. Feal, Carlos. “El sacrificio de la hombría en Bodas de sangre.”MLN 99.2 (March 1984): 270–287. García Lorca, Federico. Federico García Lorca: Mariana Pineda ... Así que pasen cinco años ... México: Editorial Porrúa, 1992. _____. Three Plays: Blood Wedding, Yerma, The House of Bernarda Alba, edited by Michael Dewell, et al. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993. Gross, Robert F. “The Pleasures of Brick: Eros and the Gay Spectator in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 9.1 (Winter 1997):11–25. Jerez-Farrán, Carlos. “El sadomasoquismo homoerótico cpmo expresión de homofobia internal-


17

izada en el cuadro 2 de El público de García Lorca.” Modern Philolog y 93.4 (May 1996): 468– 497. Jones, Robert Emmet. “Sexual Roles in the Works of Tennessee Williams.” Tennessee Williams: A Tribute, edited by Jack Tharpe, 545–557. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1977. Kaye, Richard. “Losing His Religion: Saint Sebastian as Contemporary Gay Martyr” Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures, edited by Peter Horne et al., 86–105. New York: Routledge, 1996. Klein, Dennis A. “Así que pasen cinco años: A Search for Sexual Identity.” Journal of Spanish Studies 3 (1975): 115–123. Kolin, Philip. “The family of Mitch: (Un)suitable suitors in Tennessee Williams.” Magical Muse: Millenial Essays on Tennessee Williams, edited by Ralph F. Voss, 131–146. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000. Koprince, Susan. “Tennessee Williams’ unseen characters.” The Southern Quarterly 33.1 (Fall 1994): 87–95. Lima, Robert. “Missing in Action: Invisible Males in La casa de Bernarda Alba.” The Bucknell Review 45.1 (2001): 136–147. Sheckelford, Dean. “Is There a Gay Man in this Text?: Subverting the Closet in A Streetcar Named Desire.” Literature and Homosexuality, edited by Michael Meyer, Michael, 135–159. Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000. Williams, Tennessee. Tennessee Williams: Plays 1937–1955. New York: Library of America, 2000. _____. Tennessee Williams: Plays 1957–1980. New York: Library of America, 2000.

2 How to Do Things with Witches Performing The Crucible on Stage and Screen Katherine Egerton Abstract In adapting The Crucible for the screen, Arthur Miller and director Nicholas Hytner found new ways to show both cruelty and intimacy in Salem. The word “witch” has a powerful legacy both on and off stage, and this essay traces how that concept changes when both purported magic and the eroticism it contains are exposed to the audience. The Crucible is also bound by many histories — witch hunts ancient and modern, as well as Miller’s own life story — that productively interact beneath the surface of this modern classic.

In The Crucible, Arthur Miller uses the specter of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts to tell a contemporary story about the abuse of public power. At the same time, he also uses witchcraft as a metaphor representing an intimate, and private, kind of guilt. This pairing of public and private morality is a familiar theme in Miller studies, and one which permeates nearly all of his work. But it is worth examining this particular feature of Miller’s early stage success of the 1950s in tandem with The Crucible film, released in 1996. Over more than forty years, both the public and private contexts had, of course, changed radically.1 Miller picks up the story of Salem’s witch hunts from 1692, adapting it for his own purposes more than three hundred years later. Next to that leap, the adaptation of the play from stage to cinema within Miller’s lifetime, and with his direct involvement and support, may seem like a trivial change. But as Linda Hutcheon explains in A Theory of Adaptation, Adaptation is repetition, but repetition without replication. And there are manifestly many different possible intentions behind the act of adaptation: the urge to consume and erase the memory of the adapted text or to call it into question is as likely as the desire to pay tribute by copying [2005: 7]. 18

2. How to Do Things with Witches (Egerton)

19

On stage, Miller expects his modern audience to dismiss witchcraft as a delusion even as he uses what the witches invoke — devilish malefice and female power — to set the stage for a parable about the efforts of a corrupt authority to crush a righteous man. On film, it becomes harder to discount witchcraft when Tituba’s twilight sabbat opens the movie, and the camera draws the audience into her circle. Like Rowley, Dekker, and Ford before him, Arthur Miller found witches less interesting than the purportedly pious folk who willed them into existence. On the London stage in 1621, Elizabeth Sawyer, the witch of Edmonton, noted of her neighbors that “Some call me witch,/And being ignorant of myself, they go/About to teach me how to be one” (1986: 159, 11.1.8–10). In a similar vein, in his 1999 Massey lecture at Harvard, Miller reflected that “there was something of the marvelous in the spectacle of a whole village ... whose imagination was literally captured by a vision of something that wasn’t there” (2005: 32). Both statements focus, tellingly, on the perceivers rather than the perception. Miller’s word ‘marvelous’ shows his wonder in finding a compelling historical analogy for the political witch hunts for American Communists while also invoking the supernatural illusions the Salem folk claimed to see. On screen, this kind of double meaning haunts The Crucible even more than on stage as Miller and his cinematic collaborators use visuals to at once invoke and deny what director Nicholas Hytner called “a whiff of the devil” (2004) in Abigail’s sexual awakening. Yet one of Miller’s primary choices in the stage play replaces an imagined witchcraft with a more familiar, erotic bewitchment, that of Abigail Williams and John Proctor for each other. In the essay preceding The Crucible’s opening lines, Miller explains that Salem’s “witch-hunt was not, however, a mere repression. It was also, and as importantly, a long overdue opportunity for everyone so inclined to express publicly his guilt and his sins, under the cover of accusations against the victims.... One could not ordinarily speak such things in public” (1964: 7). The Crucible compels audiences through this combination of accusation and confession, which is why any change in the balance between them deserves attention. On stage, Miller shows Hale, Putnam, and Parris creating the evil they fear. Witchcraft, representing everything they claim to hate, including Satan’s hand in human affairs, must exist in order to uphold their positions of power and authority over the people of Massachusetts. This is not a new move; just as Rowley, Dekker, and Ford’s audience was too ready to believe in witchcraft, spectators in Miller’s theatre are just as ready to write it off as silly superstition, the stuff of children’s Halloween costumes and television sitcoms. But since the play plants a kernel of truth in the judges’ accusations, we cannot dismiss them entirely. This skillful sleight of hand allowed him to conflate his public concern with the Communist witch-hunts of the 1950’s and his own relationships with women, which, from his first acquaintance with Marilyn Monroe in 1951, became very complicated, indeed. When Miller collaborated with director Nicholas Hyt-

20


ner on the film, the project was a departure for a playwright who, as R. Barton Palmer describes, always held the movies at arm’s length. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Palmer notes, “during his early career [Miller] remained, with the notable exception of The Misfits, rather indifferent to what Hollywood or other filmmakers made from his work” (1997: 184). And like The Misfits, The Crucible was colored by Miller’s relationship with Marilyn Monroe. Throughout The Crucible on stage, Miller displays the spell-casting skills not of the witches, because he does not believe in witches, but of Reverend Hale and his fellow men of the church who invoke the devil in order to uphold what they see as the power of God. In the early days of the Cold War and the panic over Communists on American shores, authority figures run amok was an evil Miller not only believed in, but obsessed over. Therefore, he portrays their righteousness as a craven, if sincere, desire to maintain social power. In the stage play, Miller has characters report the witches’ sabbat — Tituba’s entertainment for the girls of the town — but he keeps the ritual safely off-stage, in the dark wood of the audience’s imagination. Reverend Parris reports what he saw in the forest outside Salem village, but the account is clearly touched by his paranoid concern for his own reputation. Because the audience only learns about the girls’ actions through Parris’s words and from the brief statements he wrings from those gathered at Betty’s side, Miller creates room for doubt. This ambiguous space widens so long as the audience keeps searching for more logical explanations. This carefully measured and ordered exposition, along with the coercive mechanics of Tituba’s interrogation, gives the impression that the church authorities investigating Betty Parris’ illness may be creating the facts they claim to suppress. While Miller’s determined focus in 1952 and afterwards was on Joe McCarthy and his campaign against American communists, today’s audiences tend to lose sight of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s witch hunts despite Miller’s continual efforts to preserve the play’s original context. These include Miller’s commentary on The Crucible film and The Crucible in History, published in 2005, the year of Miller’s death. Still, for some viewers, the sexualized bodies of very young women continually bear the brunt of male anxiety about social power and sexual guilt. When Miller finally oversaw the filming of The Crucible in 1996, the temptation to show those same bodies making mischief on the screen was too attractive to pass up. On film, when the audience sees what Reverend Parris claims to have seen in the wood —“someone naked running through the trees” (Miller 1964: 11)— Abigail and the girls of Salem appear at once more culpable and more vulnerable than when their misdeeds were reported, but not seen, on the stage. In the first lecture of How To Do Things With Words, J. L. Austin introduces the “performative,” or words which are also acts, by asking “can saying make it so?” (1962: 7). Austin explains “[t]he uttering of the words is, indeed, usually a, or even the, leading incident in the performance of the act.” In Miller’s


21

Salem, words frequently stand for actions. Accusations become facts, and the word “witch” puts an exotic spin on more banal evils, on poverty, disease, and jealousy. Early in the first act, the Putnams make it clear that they must blame somebody for the deaths of seven of their eight children, and since they cannot blame God, witchcraft affords them another option. To complicate matters still further, in The Crucible, the leading utterance is logically confounding, because only by admitting to congress with the devil can the accused “[speak] a wish to come to Heaven’s side” (1964: 46). As Miller himself noted in the New Yorker in 1996, “There had to be witches in the world or the Bible lied” (1996c: 162). And Miller equips Reverend Hale not only with the Bible, but also with a range of texts from European authorities, not least of which is the Malleus Maleficarum, or the Hammer of Witches, first published in 1486. Naming someone witch, whether for power or pollution, always changes the subject. Mother Sawyer explains, in The Witch of Edmonton, “’tis all one/To be a witch as to be counted one” (Rowley 1986: 162, 11.1.118–9), and in the European cradle of the witch persecutions, “witch” was a label for old women, not for nubile young girls. In her study Witchcraze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany, Lyndal Roper asks “Why did such fantasies focus so relentlessly on women, old women in particular? ... [E]very witch who confessed,” Roper explains, “had to make that story her own, furnishing it with the details of place and character that could persuade her hearers it was all true. And witch after witch did just that,” adding to a communal narrative with expected spectacular elements, building the fire ever higher [2004: 11].

This is, of course, what Tituba refuses to do when she first vigorously proclaims “I don’t truck with no devil!” (1964: 43), but only a few moments later, she has figured out the narrative Hale and Parris require. Once Parris and Putnam threaten Tituba with death by hanging and whipping, she claims “I tell [the Devil] I don’t desire to work for him, sir” (1964: 44), which gives Hale a point of entry. Now that the slave woman has acknowledged the devil’s existence, he leads her through a confession, supplying all the right cues himself. “You have confessed yourself to witchcraft, and that speaks a wish to come to heaven’s side,” Hale pronounces, “And we will bless you, Tituba” (1964: 46). The problem is that she doesn’t stop there — she dives into a story that perfectly fans Reverend Parris’s paranoia, when she “suddenly [bursts] out: Oh, how many times he bid me kill you, Mr. Parris!” (1964: 47). Since Parris, already anxious about his position in the community, is prepared to believe any kind of threat, this is the moment when Miller’s Salem goes straight to hell in a handcart. Miller’s Abigail, tainted by actual sin, will not let it leave without her. In the 1996 film version of The Crucible, Miller and director Nicholas Hytner reintroduced contextual elements that the play avoided, but that appear in

22


Miller’s notes on the original text (Bigsby 2005: 168). The stage play several times describes the witches’ sabbat in the woods, where Tituba and the girls dabble in the wickedness of getting away with something, which Reverend Parris describes as a confusing scene of dancing, “screeching and gibberish” (Miller 1964: 11). As Christopher Bigsby notes in Arthur Miller: A Critical Study, Miller’s Crucible notebooks, however, include a verse passage — much of the play was drafted in verse as Miller worked on the language — in which Abigail asks Tituba for a potion to regain Proctor’s love: O Tituba, I can’t wait. I am of age, my blood, my blood, My blood is thrashing in my hips, My skin revels at every breeze, I never sleep but dreams come itching Up my back like little cats With silky tails! You promised When I came of age you’d work a charm No man can break outside my love [quoted in Bigsby 2005: 169].

The film takes advantage of cinematic freedom and shows us what Bigsby calls “the sexually charged scene in the forest” (2005: 167) and Miller, uncharacteristically, reveled in “a flow of images which had to be evoked through language for the stage” (Miller 1994: ix). For much of his career, Miller kept his distance from those who wanted to adapt his work for the movies, largely because of his experience of political censorship at Columbia Pictures in the 1950s and Jean-Paul Satre’s unsuccessful adaptation of The Crucible, Les Sorcières de Salem, in 1957. Ironically, Les Sorcières de Salem, made in France at a time when the controversy around Miller and his play made it too risky for Hollywood, showcases one result of mixing on-screen eroticism into The Crucible. As Palmer describes it, the opening scenes of Les Sorcières show Proctor “leaving the bed of his frigid wife” and “fall[ing] into Abigail’s willing embrace, only to be caught by an outraged Elizabeth” (1997: 208). Hytner’s version of The Crucible was in production at the time Palmer was writing, and he begins and ends with the wish that this version, with Miller’s full support, would fulfill the play’s cinematic potential. The Crucible was based on Miller’s own screenplay, for which he was nominated for an Oscar, was produced by his son Robert Miller, and was directed, with Miller’s joyful approbation, by Nicholas Hytner, who, as Miller noted, “had the theatrical background to preserve him from the fear of language” (1996b: xi). This perfect storm of creative control seemed to unleash in Miller a highly unusual willingness to deviate from his own text. Introducing his screenplay, he wrote directly about “a new excitement in being able to actually show the girls out in the forest with Tituba in the wee hours, playing — as I had always imagined — with the powers of the underworld


23

to bring to life their secret heart’s desires. But it was gay, harmless juvenilia, I was sure, until one of them intimated her wish that her former mistress, wife of her beloved John Proctor, might simply die” (Miller 1996b: ix–x). Bigsby describes Miller’s notes for an opening montage of daily working life in Salem, demonstrating how much the final version emerged on the set (2005: 169–170). In his essay “Filming The Crucible,” Hytner recalls “The Crucible flashing across [Miller’s] computer screen as if he’d written it yesterday” and his “persistent readiness to refashion his screenplay as I strove to visualize it image by image” (1996: xviii). Part of this dual refashioning changed the sabbat in the woods from one where Abigail either begs Tituba for the chicken’s blood charm to kill Elizabeth Proctor or is forced by the slave to drink it, to one where Abigail becomes the defiant caster of her own spell. The film exacerbates Miller’s insistence on seeing the girls through two distinct lenses at once. What may start as games in the “wee hours,” mere “playing,” and “gay, harmless juvenilia” becomes, through a blood ritual created this time for the camera, something much darker. In A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon discusses how “the separate units of the story.... may well change — often radically — in the process of adaptation.... Shifts in the focalization or point of view of the adapted story may lead to major differences” (2006: 11). One of the major alterations in The Crucible film comes when Miller and Hytner recast the first act, showing the events in chronological order rather than slowly revealing details around Betty Parris’s sleep. The film opens with rapidly cut shots of the girls emerging from bed, furtively dressing, putting feet into shoes and wrapping themselves in heavy cloaks as they prepare to join their friends. As they approach their goal, the girls shuck off their caps and let down their long hair, in itself a familiar sign of sexual freedom and readiness on both stage and screen. When they arrive at Tituba’s cauldron, which is surrounded by the powered white figures of a vodou vévé, or representation of the spirits, they still play games about love. When Tituba asks the girls what they have brought for her, they thrust out their hands laden with flowers. This innocence recalls the childhood he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not game, and yet becomes jarringly sensuous when one girl clasps a suggestively phallic bloom against her lips. The girls are children playing in the forest, but at the same time, at least one of them is shown to be a woman burning with lust and dreaming of murder. In the published screenplay, which reflects the film’s final cut, Miller records the action in the forest as Abigail whispers something to Tituba that makes the older woman object “No — Abby, that be a bad t’ing!” Then, Abigail defiantly grabs the rooster from TITUBA and violently thrashes it against the kettle, catching the blood in her palm and raising it to her lips. TITUBA: Abby — no! Defying TITUBA, ABIGAIL drinks from her palm. A climactic scream of release from all around — as MERCY LEWIS and several others tear off their clothes and dance naked [Miller 1996a: 3].

24


In the stage version, young Betty Parris confronts Abigail early on with the heart of this allegation —“You drank blood, Abby! ... You drank a charm to kill John Proctor’s wife!” (1964: 19), but the child’s language fades into the merely descriptive when Abigail “smashes her across the face” (1964: 19). In the film, long before this moment of violence, Abigail’s grotesque spell-casting corrupts even the younger girls, who, once Abigail has smeared the blood, mask-like, over her mouth and face, rush to join her sexualized revelry. They strip off the clothes the audience has just seen them put on, pose and prance naked in the woods, falling into a delirium of erotic transgression. When Parris first sees one of these naked girls, the girl isn’t merely “running through the trees” (1964: 11) as he tells Abigail in the play, but standing by Tituba’s cauldron, bent over at the waist so that at first he sees only her bare, white buttocks as if she were presenting them for his personal delectation. The harm Abigail unleashes in Salem, what Hytner in his director’s commentary calls “the potentially vindictive and destructive sexuality of a girl who is emerging from adolescence into womanhood” (2004), is thus cinematically proven to be authentic, based on real actions in the woods outside the town. However, this visual evidence undercuts the power of the performative word spoken both in the theatre and later on screen; the cinematic revelation makes Abigail somewhat less interesting because as she becomes more fearsome, she becomes easier to hate. In her 1994 article “Re(dis)covering the Witches in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible: A Feminist Reading,” Wendy Schissel rebukes Miller and scholars alike for what she terms “the vicarious enjoyment [they] have found in a cathartic male character [John Proctor] who has enacted their sexual and political fantasies” (1994: 461). Schissel leans heavily on an interpretation of the European witch craze that holds both Catholic and Protestant church authorities responsible for a “women’s holocaust” of nine million. She attributes this figure to Andrea Dworkin and Donna Read’s film The Burning Times, but scholars of both European history and European paganism consider the number to be wildly inflated.2 Schissel uses this tenuous historical claim to add heft to an argument that needs none, that Miller infuses the Salem story with women’s sexual sins for purposes of his own. Schissel contends that The Crucible is evidence that Miller partakes of ... fears ... about wicked, angry, or wise women; even if his complicity in such gynecophobia is unwitting — and that is the most generous thing we can accord him, a “misrecognition” of himself and his reputation-conscious hero John as the authors of a subjectivity which belongs exclusively to men — the result for generations of women has been the same [1994: 462].

By accusing Miller of this kind of false consciousness, Schissel draws a line between the playwright and the witch hunters, men who only saw what they wanted, or feared, to see. Schissel’s argument predates the 1996 film, but is per-


25

haps strengthened by it when the girls of Salem become “construct[ed] ... as image, as the object[s] of the spectator’s voyeurist gaze” (de Lauretis 1987: 13). Following this line of thought, perhaps no story of witch persecutions or other traumas should be used as metaphor, lest it perpetuate the original wrongdoing. Were that the case, much of Miller’s dramatic corpus, from Incident at Vichy to Broken Glass, should never have been written. But Miller both trusted and embraced the audience’s willingness to see their own culture and context in whatever circumstances were portrayed on the stage. This willingness led him to adapt Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People in 1950 in order to ask “whether the democratic guarantees protecting political minorities ought to be set aside in time of crisis” (1977: 8), a question as relevant in Ibsen’s day as in our own. Miller’s rationale in forming The Crucible, however, may be both more personal and therefore more complicated. In both the stage and film versions, Miller’s great departure from the historical evidence is, of course, as Schissel points out, the very existence of a sexual affair between John Proctor and Abigail Williams. Originally aged 60 and 11, respectively, Miller constructed for his own purposes an illicit relationship between a 35 year old farmer and his 17 year old servant. In “Why I Wrote The Crucible,” Miller, in his normally forthright fashion, offers an autobiographical context for this flowering of sexual attraction and sexual jealousy. “I had not approached the witchcraft out of nowhere or from purely social and political considerations,” he explains. My own marriage of twelve years3 was teetering and I knew more than I wished to know about where the blame lay. That John Proctor the sinner might overturn his paralyzing personal guilt and become the most forthright voice against the madness around him was a reassurance to me, and, I suppose, an inspiration; it demonstrated that a clear moral outcry could still spring even from an ambiguously blemished soul [Miller 1996c: 160–162].

Miller first met Marilyn Monroe in 1951, the year before he wrote The Crucible, and he spent much of the rest of his career baring his heart in public, often at the expense of the women he loved. Miller wrote the story “The Misfits,” first published in Esquire, while sitting in a cabin in Nevada, waiting for his divorce from Mary Slattery. Miller later adapted The Misfits into a film script for Monroe, meant as a gift to help her explore her dramatic range. Monroe’s erratic behavior and drug use on the set threatened the film. And while Miller met Inge Morath, his third wife, when she arrived in Reno to photograph the stars and the film set for Magnum, the story of Monroe’s shockingly public decline stayed on his mind. From 1964’s After the Fall, which notoriously featured onstage versions of all three of Miller’s wives, to his last play, 2004’s Finishing the Picture, which revisits the set of a film like The Misfits, paralyzed by the star’s druginduced catatonia, Miller wrote what he knew, creating characters who invoked

26


the drama of his own heart for public judgment. In a late short story called “The Bare Manuscript,” Miller invented a somewhat nebbishy writer who, in order to bring forth the story of the love of his life, hires another woman through the personals so that he may compose his story on her body, back and front, in ink. This pattern reveals less gynecophobia, to use Schissel’s term, than a search for meaning through the marriage of public history and private pain. In “Why I Wrote The Crucible,” Miller describes the image from Charles Upham’s 1867 history of the Salem witch trials that inspired the core of the play between Abigail and the Proctors. During the examination of Elizabeth Proctor, Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam ... both made offer to strike at said Proctor; but when Abigail’s hand came near, it opened, whereas it was made up, into a fist before, and came down exceeding lightly as it drew near to said Procter, and at length, with open and extended fingers, touched Procter’s hood very lightly. Immediately Abigail cried out her fingers, her fingers burned [Miller 1996c: 160].

In this brief and peculiarly intimate scene, Miller found the space to create a new story within “the quite suddenly human center of all this turmoil” (Miller 1996c: 160). A twitch becomes a love affair, and accusation itself embodies confession. Miller, seeing a proud but guilt-haunted man in the space in between, performed his own forthright phantasms, hoping upon hope — for decade after decade — that saying it could make it so. BEREA COLLEGE

Notes 1. In 1989, Miller admitted “that it feels marvelous that McCarthy is what’s-his-name while The Crucible is The Crucible still” (Brater 2007: 6). 2. This figure originated with Matilda Gage, an American suffragist and a colleague of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. In her 1893 book, Woman, Church and State: A Historical Account of the Status of Woman Through the Christian Ages: With Reminiscences of the Matriarchate, Gage “computed from historical records that nine millions of persons were put to death for witchcraft after 1484, or during a period of three hundred years, and this estimate does not include the vast number who were sacrificed in the preceding centuries upon the same accusation” (Gage 1893: 247). Ronald Hutton, author of The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, theorizes on the persistence of this number in American popular culture, drawing a complex path from Gage through the American search for Communists in mid-century (and The Crucible) to American appropriations of the Holocaust in the 1970s, to which “[t]he figure that Gage had provided — of nine million — provided a symmetrical counterpart to that of the Nazi death-camps” (1999: 343). 3. To Mary Slattery, who Miller divorced in June of 1956, just before marrying Marilyn Monroe. Miller and Monroe met and had a brief affair in 1951.


27

References Cited Adler, Thomas P. “Conscience and Community in An Enemy of the People and The Crucible.” In The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller, edited by Christopher Bigsby, 86–100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Austin, J. L. How To Do Things With Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962. Bigsby, Christopher. Arthur Miller: A Critical Study. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Brater, Enoch. “Cross-Cultural Encounters: Arthur Miller and the International Theatre Community.” In Arthur Miller’s Global Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. The Crucible, DVD, directed by Nicholas Hytner (1996); Beverly Hills, CA: Twentieth CenturyFox, 2004. de Lauretis, Teresa. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Gage, Matilda Joslyn. Woman, Church and State: A Historical Account of the Status of Woman Through the Christian Ages: With Reminiscences of the Matriarchate. Chicago: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1893. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006. Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Hytner, Nick. “Filming The Crucible.” In The Crucible Screenplay. New York: Penguin, 1996. Hytner, Nicholas, and Arthur Miller. “Commentaries.” The Crucible, DVD, directed by Nicholas Hytner. Beverly Hills, CA: Twentieth Century-Fox, 2004. Miller, Arthur. “The Bare Manuscript.” New Yorker 16 December 2002. 82–93. _____. The Crucible. New York: Viking, 1964. _____. The Crucible in History and Other Essays. London: Methuen, 2005. _____. The Crucible Screenplay. New York: Penguin, 1996 (1996a). _____. “Note on The Crucible as Film.” In The Crucible Screenplay. New York: Penguin, 1996 (1996b). _____. Preface to Arthur Miller’s Adaptation of An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen. New York: Penguin, 1977 _____. “Why I Wrote the Crucible.” New Yorker 21 October 1996. 158–164 (1996c). Palmer, R. Barton. “Arthur Miller and the Cinema.” In The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller, edited by Christopher Bigsby, 184–210. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Roper, Lyndal. Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Rowley, William, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford. The Witch of Edmonton. In Three Jacobean Witchcraft Plays, edited by Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge, 143–209. The Revels Plays Companion Library. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1986. Schissel, Wendy. “Re(dis)covering the Witches in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible: A Feminist Reading.” Modern Drama 37.3 (1994): 461–473.

3 Molière’s Revolutionary Dramaturgy Stephen H. Fleck Abstract Molière has been identified too narrowly as the great satirist who authored The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, School for Wives, and Learned Ladies. However, Molière also developed a new dramaturg y in the genre of comedy-ballet, which was yielding its first great fruits during the last years of his life. Incorporating close collaborations with the greatest composers and choreographer of the time, this new dramaturg y upended the aims, means, and underpinnings of neoclassicism; but Molière’s death and the politics of absolutism substantially killed off both the genre and appreciation of its real attainments. Its greatest examples, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, the Bourgeois gentilhomme and the Malade imaginaire, are the foundation of what constitutes a pre-modern lyric theatre of the absurd.

The Molière of much current scholarship is not yet Molière. The real Molière — actor and director as well as playwright — remains largely hidden. The loss is all the greater because, during his final years, he was inventing a mostly unrecognized but nonetheless truly revolutionary dramaturgy which drew more deeply than ever upon all of his talents. As an actor, Molière sang and danced very well; as director, he staged ten, twenty, even forty minute-long intermèdes composed with words set to fabulously varied music and dance. These highly complex stagings were the product of the greatest composers, choreographer, set designers, and machinists of the French seventeenth century, and were performed by the greatest musicians, dancers, and comic actors of the period. That Molière has fallen by the wayside in scholarly accounts because of an excessively literary approach to the works of the greatest homme de théâtre in all of French history. As for the comedy-ballets which Molière created with sharply increasing frequency and brilliance over the latter part of his career, critics have often misread their real status and even structure, to which music and dance are increasingly central. Thus, the Bourgeois gentilhomme is a slapdash work (“bâtie à la 28

3. Molière’s Revolutionary Dramaturg y (Fleck)

29

diable”) for Antoine Adam (1948, 3: 383); not one of Molière’s best plays for Robert Leggewie (1990: 179); or even “un monstre” for René Bray (1953: 254). More recently Patrick Dandrey (1992: 270–271) compares the comedy-ballets’ music and dance to a charming but inessential, merely decorative “jewelbox” (“un écrin souvent charmant”). Other scholars differ. The comedy-ballet specialist Marie-Claude CanovaGreen regrets the longstanding neglect, even contempt for the genre (2007: 13). Musicologists in particular appreciate the genre far more than many Molière critics: James Anthony notes that comedy-ballet leads to the doorstep of both opéra-comique and tragédie lyrique (1987: 73), while John Powell believes that the late comedy-ballets are the greatest examples of comic musical theatre before Mozart began working with Da Ponte. Rather than being mere fluff turned out to satisfy the court, these works developed into full-blown proto-comic opera — a kind of opera, however, unlike any other. Can these different Molières be reconciled in critical analysis? Can the grand auteur de la nation, an icon of French classicism in his finest grandes comédies morales (five-act comedies in verse) rejoin the multifaceted homme de théâtre whose creations were wider-ranging than those of any other French playwright (Hubert 1962: 268)? We might start by asking whether the Misanthrope can dance; or whether M. Jourdain can be serious about anything. Next, we need to acknowledge a profound change in Molière’s output: from 1669 to 1673 he produced only two works without music, Les Fourberies de Scapin (1671) and Les Femmes savantes (1672), highly polished but not innovative plays. The Fourberies, too, might well have been conceived as a comedy-ballet; if so, then it would have fallen victim to the rupture between Molière and Lully (Gaines 2002: 186). Les Femmes savantes, announced in 1668, was not completed until 1672, almost certainly because Molière’s real interest was in the elaborate musical works that he produced in the period. His real focus in the last four years of his life was almost entirely on musical theatre — and the innovation is stunning. Just before the Bourgeois gentilhomme and the Malade imaginaire, Molière and Lully produced Monsieur de Pourceaugnac (1669), which contains the comedy-ballets’ greatest music and dance up to that point. In the eleventh scene of the first act, a troupe of outlandishly clad doctors chases the panicked title character around the stage while menacing his hindsides with enormous syringes. The rustic nobleman has gotten himself caught in a Parisian funhouse designed to prevent an arranged marriage with a young woman who does not want him. The doctors urge Pourceaugnac in song and dance to accept their vigorously offered injections of early-modern Prozac: “Please take it right now, oh good Mr. Sir....”1 Few critics treat the work at all. Gérard Defaux, however, notes the scene’s great dramatic brilliance, nearly surrealistic yet somehow at the heart of reality too (1982: 256–257). Pourceaugnac never catches on to the wild tricks played on him. He eventually flees Paris for his very life, so he thinks, disguised as a “dame de qualité”

30


to exit a city which he believes has gone completely mad. The work ends on a choral hymn to folly in the service of laughter: “When for laughter’s sake we gather, the wisest, so I deem, are the zaniest” (III, 8).2 Appreciation of comedy-ballet depends on either direct knowledge through excellent performances, which remain extremely rare, or else on the ability to imagine their complete staging, including music and dance. In his preface to L’Amour médecin, Molière specifically discouraged reading the work except for those with eyes to imagine the entire staging (“tout le jeu du théâtre”). He also emphasized the centrality of Lully’s music to the work’s impact (1971: 2: 95). Recent directorial efforts, particularly by Jean-Marie Villégier, have aimed at reversing centuries of general neglect or, even worse, serious deformation of the works in question (music and dance cut back or excised entirely, or other music substituted) with a Malade imaginaire at the Théâtre du Châtelet in 1990. Villégier presented Charpentier’s score complete for the first time since 1673; and, in 2005, he also directed two beautiful Comédie-Française productions of Le Sicilien and L’Amour médecin, well outside the canonical Molière. All three shows were staged with period musical performances by Les Arts Florissants. The latter two works are little-known gems offering nearly everything that the betterknown comedy-ballets have, albeit in miniature. Most importantly, they lack the outsizedly crazed protagonists of the Bourgeois and the Malade. The degree of folly of these last two characters, M. Jourdain and Argan, makes a veritable quantum leap beyond that of any previous protagonists (Forestier 1998: 558–560), and constitutes one of the main features of the radically new late dramaturgy. Unlike in other works, where characters surrounding the comic protagonists strive to defeat them in order to resolve the intrigue and allow young love to triumph, Jourdain and Argan are not just accommodated in their outlandish manias; instead their wishes are realized onstage through a carnivalesque change of identity. Each of these characters is thus crowned upon the throne of his folly, as M. Jourdain turns into the world’s only known Mamamouchi (IV, 5), while Argan is anointed a festive doctor (III, 14): their desires are spectacularly fulfilled in musical and danced ceremonies which transport us out of the ordinary, everyday world. While the secondary characters — Covielle in the Bourgeois (V, 6 ) or Cléante in the Malade (III, 13)— may speak of tricking the protagonist, accommodating his fantasies through these spectacles, that is only a rearward-looking departure-point for the audience’s experience: rather than being concerned about reality, we are instead affectively drawn into the festivities through the music and dance, and rejoice along with all the characters, who at the end no longer speak individually, but instead through singers, dancers and especially, choruses. As carnivalesque festivities transform the stage into the immediate site of joyful festivities, collective rejoicing replaces individual concerns. One further transformation occurs in the Bourgeois, namely the elevation of the scene into courtly festivities in the forty-minute-long ballet de cour, the Ballet des Nations, of which the Mamamouchi and his entourage


31

become onstage spectators: a clearly articulated spectacle-within-a-spectacle. Such transformations never occur in grande comédie. Monsieur Jourdain is an astounding creation, one of unprecedented comic depth and complexity. He is intimately bound up from beginning to end with the work’s music and dance, which capture at once his own fantasies of gentilhommerie, the consummately elegant ideals of the honnête homme, and Jourdain’s hilarious deformations of those ideals. While the music and dance masters’ offerings convey the elegance and grace demanded of a nobleman, Jourdain’s juxtaposed imitations burlesque those arts into a pervasive farcicality. The results entail a phenomenally virtuosic interplay of elevated norm, present in the masters’ successive (and totally futile) attempts to teach Jourdain the ideals and practices of their arts, with Jourdain’s grotesquely abnormal imitations, which are at once thoroughly physical and supremely metaphysical. Jourdain absolutely massacres his attempted song “Je croyais Janneton,” (I, 2), and also his minuet. Through juxtapositions of professional singing and dancing with Jourdain’s versions, Molière establishes comic tensions played out in music and dance, the learnedly elegant juxtaposed with the thoroughly disarticulated. A perfect indication of M. Jourdain’s degree of folly can be seen in the consummately multifaceted performance of Louis Seigner (Bourgeois gentilhomme film, Jean Meyer, director, 1957/2008), as he shows how well he can dance: “Ah! Minuets are my dance...” (II, 2).3 The minuet was a supreme test of noble carriage, intended to convey a deeply cultivated sensitivity to one’s partner and a re-enactment of social ideals (Hilton 1986: 57). M. Jourdain’s impossible performance, clearly evaluated in the dancing master’s numerous and pointed directives to him, in exasperated counterpoint to the slight but elegant tune,4 destroys not just the physical mechanics of the dance, but even more tellingly its social and ethical implications. Seigner’s beatific smile at the end of the music conveys the inviolability of Jourdain’s fantasy of having achieved perfection. Jourdain continues his burlesque approach to the arts as he wishes to acquire knowledge, but rejects the natural world: “too much noisiness” (II, 4)5 in favor of investigating the mysteries of language, which lead him to the successive revelations of vowels, consonants, and prose. The two other masters, of fencing and philosophy, heighten the tensions noted earlier by enabling Jourdain to engage the audience in another sort of burlesque striptease as he peels off the veneer of knowledgeability associated with the masters’ professional standards. We see them quickly relinquishing their status as proudly individual professionals when confronted with Jourdain’s unfathomable mania. By eliciting their unspoken complicity in his flagrantly impermeable ignorance, Jourdain turns them subtly into caricatures of their self-image — into foolish pedants on a level with farcical dottori. Thinking themselves superior, they are drawn into Jourdain’s game of fantasy-nobility and rapidly become part of the comic texture being woven. After his recital of vowels and consonants (“A, E, I, O, I, O ... Da, da!”) under the philosopher’s bemused but supposedly serious tutelage (II, 4), Jourdain’s

32


continued basking in such “learning” forms a touchstone of the different comic currents intersecting in the character. Le Bourgeois gentilhomme brings us up against a major question in comic theory: the interplay of individual character and caricatured type, or “particulier” and “général” as the period expressed it. Far more than the various masters, Jourdain incorporates the ambiguous shuttling between individual and type which Henri Gouhier sees as inherent to every comic character (2004: 204). Molière’s early biographer Grimarest assures us that every Parisian bourgeois saw his neighbor depicted realistically in Jourdain (quoted in Molière 1971: 2: 700)— that Jourdain represented the very type of a socially ambitious merchant. One doubts, however, whether the typical bourgeois was eager to throw vast quantities of money at a nobleman in return for mere words, or to sing and dance as hilariously as M. Jourdain. Many bourgeois in fact paid the crown large sums to accede to the lower, administrative ranks of the nobility; not Jourdain, who fancies himself leaping directly into the nobility’s highest, hereditary ranks — and doing so by imitating its dress, manners, and activities. Inimitably individual, apparently of the real world around him and yet somehow not of it (his permanent high spirits could well suggest the painted-on smile of a clown) Jourdain incarnates as no other of Molière’s characters the paradox of his title: realistically drawn for many bourgeois of the time, yet also defined by his deeply farcical fantasy. While eliciting our interest in categorizing him, he also eludes unambiguous interpretation as either truly realistic or simply caricatured. In fact, as shown by his delight in the new, extravagant clothes which he immediately wishes to show off around town (III, 1), M. Jourdain incorporates a principle which gradually leaves such logical considerations behind: he desires to realize his fantasy by quite literally making a spectacle out of himself. We start out laughing at this unbelievably deluded buffoon; but as his harmlessness and infectious good humor make themselves felt, and as he increasingly eludes any realistic criteria with which to pin him down, unlike in ordinary satire, we gradually begin to laugh with him; our initial superiority gives way to a “rire complice,” complicit or empathetic laughter (Kintzler 1987: 12; similarly Defaux 1982: 282). And as music, dance, rhythmic language and gesture pull us more and more pleasurably along with his fantasy, his spectacle becomes ours. Interrupting the lesson of the révérence with which Jourdain intends to show his respects to his desired lady, Dorimène, the fencing master barks out his orders with comic rhythms clearly implied: “Advance. Straighten your body. One, two. Back. Advance. Straighten your body. One, two. Back....” (II, 2).6 Once again, the incoherent gestures of the pupil attempting to comply with the master’s insistent repetition add to the comic dislocation. More importantly, however, the quasi-musical or choreographed rhythms, timbres, and movements add, in a burlesque mode, to the actual music and dance which have been presented in earlier scenes.


33

Music and dance, sound and movement, are thus increasingly woven together in a continuum so as to constitute much of the work’s texture. Louis Auld notes “with what consistency gestures and movements are called for, not by staging directions but by the text itself [employing the] power of tempo, sound, and visual effect to reinforce words and even to express what words cannot” (1968: 69). Defaux designates the Bourgeois essentially a spectacle created by — and also bounded by — its own performance, rather than a literary work (“essentiellment et d’abord un spectacle que sa représentation épuise” 1982: 267). In a similar vein, Judd Hubert characterizes it as a “Te Deum of theatricality” (1962: 229). And that spectacle is created increasingly through music and dance, which first infuse, then take over from, prosaic words and movement: they elevate the action poetically. All action tends toward music, dance, and spectacle. We are, to be sure, in a work whose theatrical dimensions are far from evident, and resonated with both court and town. The court, where the Bourgeois debuted, was famously a theatre, each nobleman the self-conscious actor of his own life; Jourdain’s imitation of noble manners thematizes performance as such; and in Molière’s subtle comic refraction process, all characters are eventually, like the masters, seen to be playing ambiguous roles, with individual and typical aspects in palpable but elusive tension. Jourdain, the most elusive of all characters in this respect, is apparently so stupidly buffoonish as to rival any stereotyped farce character; yet he is also a unique creation. Ordinary categories simply do not apply. Instead, reality and fantasy become paradoxically embroiled as we see elements of each play out together, to our ever greater enjoyment. Moreover, Jourdain’s fantastic naivete in trying to play the role of a nobleman will triumph as spectacle over other characters apparently more astute and grounded in reality. How can M. Jourdain believe, after all, that anything he does imitates the nobility successfully? How can a character not clearly insane or moronic — he maintains accounts, after all, down to the last sou of the thousands of livres that Dorante has borrowed from him (III, 4)— desire to study the almanac in order to know “when the moon is out and when it isn’t,” or find the notion of his having been “speaking prose” all his life a revelation (II, 4)? On reflection, we can see that like his brother-in-folly Argan, Jourdain never stops playing with what others take more seriously. After determining the astronomical sum that Dorante owes him, Jourdain once again plays into the gentilhomme’s con game by agreeing to lend him thousands more livres. Jourdain clearly wants the game never to end, for it feeds his fantasies of nobility —“I mentioned you again just this morning in the King’s chamber” (III, 4), 7 — and associates him with Dorimène. Dorante claims to be reeling in the lady for Jourdain, but he himself is in love with her and will wed her at the end: a further dimension of the games afoot. Molière plays constantly with verisimilitude in this work, juxtaposing a relatively ordinary reality that is demonstrated by the work’s secondary characters, whose concerns are recognizably those of the ordinary world, with a farce-derived ludic

34


verisimilitude (that of Jourdain’s extravagant mindset) in which playing the game of Jourdain’s fantasies gradually takes precedence over all others’ everyday reality (Fleck 2006). Jourdain may seem to partake of the bourgeois world, but he acts more like an alien sent from a world where all is play. His introduction of that alien play-world into the world of the Parisian bourgeoisie is at the heart of the work’s paradoxical and ludic texture. The other characters are entirely unable to puncture his hermetically sealed, playful fantasy-world with their realistic attitudes, however sharply his servant Nicole may poke him with a sword, or his wife may try to deflate him with downto-earth argument. At every turn, the secondary characters’ attempts to deal with Jourdain on a realistic basis are instead converted by the Bourgeois into the game of his own desires: singing, dancing, fencing, learning, all become burlesqued playthings in his hands. The Bourgeois is after all incurably in love with the idea of nobility, as well as with its incarnation, the lovely Dorimène: this most flatfooted and balourd among Molière’s protagonists walks on air. Directly opposed to the protagonists of grande comédie such as Arnolphe, Orgon, or Alceste, whose perverse character flaws become their comic signature and require their defeat for the happiness of others, Jourdain embodies a “folie généreuse” (Gutwirth 1967: 198), radiating his wonderful good humor outward to all those around him and thus drawing them into his game, which will eventually win out because it is so enjoyable: pleasure, poetically heightened by music and dance and its disguised avatars in language and gesture, will trump the prosaic reality to which Mme Jourdain holds fast. The snowballing interplay of these two kinds of verisimilitude, the ordinarily comic and the ludically extraordinary, starts unraveling any stable sense of an outside world, the necessary basis for the realistic-seeming satire of the grandes comédies. Furthermore, both types of verisimilitude will themselves eventually be transcended in the encompassing festivities of what I call an antiverisimilitude of the marvelous (invraisemblance merveilleuse), in analogy to the vraisemblance merveilleuse (verisimilitude of the marvelous) which Catherine Kintzler sees as a cornerstone of Lully’s lyric tragedies (2006: 220–225; Fleck 2007). In the Turkish ceremony festivities which transform M. Jourdain into the “Mamamouchi,” virtually all sense of connection to the real world slips away: the audience is caught up instead in the joyfulness of the music and dance, which is heightened by the delicious absurdity of the experience.8 The last hints of any real-world connection, Covielle’s aside about Jourdain’s craziness and Jourdain/Mamamouchi’s dismissal of his wife (V, 6), are swept away in the ensuing great ballet de cour which elevates the whole world, apparently — or rather experientially— to the elegant vision of noble divertissement which M. Jourdain dreams of, but could never realize by himself. Reborn as the Mamamouchi, he turns into the master of ceremonies for a festiveness which goes far beyond Jourdain as individual character, but for which his enormous monomania has laid the groundwork and furnishes the mainspring.


35

The Ballet des Nations forms a forty-minute long, elegantly varied summation of vocal and dance forms of the grand siècle. Its charms are infinite and as the final chorus has it: “The very gods have nothing sweeter.”9 While courtly elegance and pleasures thus win out over the Bourgeois’ aping of noble deportment, one understands the Sun King’s hesitation over the work. Not only is the one gentilhomme onstage, Dorante, an elegant con artist, but the Bourgeois’ imitations of noble airs gradually become so pervasively absurd as to imply uncomfortable questions for a courtly audience: do manners make the man? Is there a noble essence, an être, after all — or is all mere appearance, only paraître? At a court where conformity to the monarchy’s demands was rapidly liquidating the centuries-old bases of aristocratic independence, and where all were aware of the crown’s determination to punish those nobles unable to prove the unquestionable validity of their titles, such considerations could well explain the nobility’s evidently cool reception of the work — until, that is, the king expressed his enthusiastic approval (Molière 1971 2: 698–700). Le Malade imaginaire outdoes even the Bourgeois gentilhomme in scope, inventiveness, and absurdity: a phenomenally modern work. Because of these qualities, which Molière developed steadily throughout the comedy-ballet’s alltoo-short history, I have been calling Molière’s late dramaturgical evolution the workshop of a lyric theatre of the absurd (2007b; similarly Cronk 1993). The work employs unprecedented manipulations of verisimilitude which are enabled by the scale of Argan’s craziness, but also by another factor: the multiplication of fictional worlds, that is, ontologically separate spheres of experience (Pavel 1998: 11–42). We may note the presence of three such worlds in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme: Jourdain’s bourgeois household, the explicitly fantastic theatrical world of the Turkish ceremony, and that of the final ballet de cour. In the Malade, we have six such worlds, expressed in as many dramatic modes or genres: the pastoral prologue; the bourgeois comedy; the first intermède’s commedia dell’arte; the petit opéra impromptu (II, 5); the second intermède’s ballet de cour; and the concluding carnivalesque medical ceremony. These various fictional worlds articulate an enormous theatrical scope, with an overall architecture in which the prologue, a gently parodied Arcadia, forms a counterpart to an entirely different, but no less fantastic realm in the final ceremony (Powell 1992: 228–30). In the twenty-minute-long prologue, during which shepherds attempt to praise the king with amateur-hour singing while a magnificent chorus takes up the slack, in which elegance rubs up against bumptiousness and beautiful harmonies against choreographed swordplay, what looks from its verbal text alone like vapid praise for the king drowned in a slew of pastoral clichés, is revealed with its music restored as a brilliant confection of iridescent textures, alert to comic or courtly possibilities at every turn, changing registers and tones with breathtaking ease.10 The troupe spent a small fortune and ten weeks to rehearse this work, far more than for any previous play, and clear proof of the seriousness with which Molière took the genre. It drew in nearly unprecedented crowds for its first run,

36


Argan (Victor Talmage) clings desperately to Beline (Linnea Pyne) in the Long Beach Opera production of Le Malade imaginaire (courtesy Keith Ian Polakoff ).


37

during Carnival time, until Molière burst a blood vessel during the fourth performance and the rest, alas, is a much reduced and misshapen history. The work’s original overture was played before the prologue, then again just before Argan’s entrance in his wheelchair: a double curtain-raising for this most theatricalized (or metatheatrical) of Molière’s works (McAuley 1974: 13–14). I find it impossible after listening to this overture, the most brilliant of its century in my experience,11 to imagine Argan as some sort of gloomy prefiguration of Molière’s own death, as does Jean Le Poulain (preface to Molière 1986: 10). This belief neglects the tone that the music and the dance clearly convey, and even more their centrality to this work’s very structure and unfolding. Even after the deeply painful loss of the troupe’s leader, too, the troupe’s memorialist, La Grange, still called it “cette agréable comédie.”12 The only “deaths” in the work are outright faked (II, 8; III, 12; III, 13) or bombastically empty verbal threat (III, 5). From start to finish, death in the Malade remains an object of play. The prologue and repeated overture together, however, do point up Argan’s solitude as he engages an imaginarily present apothecary in arguments over his monthly enema bills: the contrast produced could not be more complete. But the music’s joyful exuberance will return, enlarged into absurd festivities fully worthy of Carnival, to close the work. The first and second intermèdes expand on the brilliance of the overture and prologue with first a sharply satirical, then an elegantly courtly series of musical compositions, each of intricate construction.13 The work’s nearly twentyminute-long musical ending ceremony transforms Argan into a newly-minted doctor — a doctor sworn to a millennium’s worth of eating, drinking, bleeding, purging and merrily sending patients off into the next world, in a carnivalesque orgy of excess: “For a thousand years may he imbibe and kill and...” (III, 14).14 Thanks to Les Arts Florissants, we can hear the original ending in glorious form,15 instead of the recently commissioned music which the Comédie Française has been offering audiences since 2001. Molière’s death after the fourth performance of the Malade had wide-ranging, profound effects on French theatre, music, and culture such as are difficult to imagine in a less centralized society. Backed by a series of royal edicts, Lully immediately seized the opportunity to suppress nearly all theatrical music and dance besides his own, as he had tried, but not yet been able to do while Molière was alive. Charpentier was soon forced to compose smaller-scale music for the Malade. The Florentine took possession of Molière’s Palais Royal theatre, recently renovated precisely to accommodate large-scale music and dance, in order to stage his tragédies en musique, thus forcing the late dramaturge’s Troupe du Roi to move to more cramped quarters. Without Molière, comedy-ballet’s performance tradition, its viability as a still-developing genre, and its later historical status were radically, in some ways even unrecognizably altered.16 The main innovations of late comedy-ballets’ dramaturgy may be summarized thus:

38


First, the protagonists with their unprecedented depth of craziness dominate the action as in no earlier Molière’s works. Unlike in Tartuffe or Le Misanthrope, no other character approaches their importance; and the enormous depth and range of their comic manias place them so distinctly at the edges of everyday reality that finally no real-world solution is possible. Second, the protagonists’ status at the boundaries of the ordinary world represented by the other characters gradually reveals the game which the monomanes make of the reality represented by others. Jourdain cannot but play at being noble through his ludicrous — and deeply ludic— imitations. Argan too cannot but play at being ill in order to continue to live out his perverse pleasures. The developing interplay of ordinary verisimilitude with ludic verisimilitude in each work undermines the realistic status of the ordinary world on which grande comédie depends to focus its satirical portraits and action. Late comedy-ballet can thus be seen to play on, and subtly expose, the limits of grande comédie. Third, the multiplicity of fictional worlds, already crucial to the workings of the Bourgeois gentilhomme but far wider and subtler in the Malade imaginaire, is never found in grande comédie, whose characters occupy one world only and cannot imagine an alternative. Alceste may speak of escaping to his désert, but we may be sure that he means nothing more remote than the Faubourg SaintGermain: he needs society in order to enact his melancholic denunciations of it, his very raison d’être. However factitiously or precariously, the normal world triumphs in grande comédie. Quite the opposite obtains in the late comedy-ballets: the presence of varied and explicit fictional worlds relativizes the comic world’s claim to central, much less exclusive verisimilitude; it is finally replaced altogether. Fourth, the very nature of plot and character changes fundamentally in the transformation of the comedy into thoroughgoing, musical and danced festivities. In both the Bourgeois and the Malade, the plot is much like a parody of a grande comédie intrigue: Jourdain threatens to marry his daughter to a duke, Argan to lock his away in a convent, if they disobey their father’s wishes. But the audience feels the fundamentally ludic nature of the protagonists too clearly (Argan is tricked even by a six-year-old!) to take such threats seriously. At every moment, Molière plays with our expectations from other comedies, as if daring us to try to take this one straight: we are held teetering on the edge of outright disbelief. In this deeply theatricalized world, the plot itself is another playful thing, just substantial enough upon which to weave the eventual, spectacularly transformative festivities. When the festive world of invraisemblance merveilleuse replaces wholesale the everyday world, normal considerations drop away. The protagonist is converted into a festive mask, an entirely different persona; Jourdain becomes the Mamamouchi, Argan the Novus Doctor: carnivalesque kings. The almost completely insubstantial plot is not so much resolved as it is swept away, sublimated: carnivalized.17 Now all are free to participate in the universal folly instigated by these fantastically extravagant characters.


39

Finally, as the audience is drawn into the festivities, the setting changes also: the fourth wall dissolves. Directly contrary to grande comédie, in which the audience’s distanced superiority is carefully safeguarded, its rational judgment mobilized in the search for an adequate dénouement, here time and space are reconstituted together as music and dance. The reality principle maintained through deployment of linear plot, believable character, and recognizable setting in ordinary verisimilitude is replaced by the pleasure principle inherent in the repetitions of singing and dancing : a deeply enjoyable, deeply absurd antiverisimilitude takes over. What the audience knows rationally to be impossible — i.e., the existence of a Mamamouchi or a Doctor graduated by a chorus summo cum gaudio— becomes the unquestionably present cornerstone of audience pleasure. As long as the festivities continue, there is no ending, and certainly no implied restoration of normal society, as in more ordinary comic conclusions. Instead, the audience is in an entirely new and absurd fictional world, one of “super-delirium” in Jacques Guicharnaud’s formulation (1964: 11), constituted directly in music and dance which here assume an ontological necessity, just as in opera (Kintzler 2004: 298). Their joyful echoes and patterns resonate with the audience after the curtain falls, and in that sense the audience remains part of this newly created festive world. The depth of inventiveness in these works remains hard to grasp. W. G. Moore and other distinguished critics, however, have dissented from the traditional view that they are mere court entertainment, discerning in both of them great innovation. Moore wrote of a “new principle of dramatic structure [which] might be said to depend on suffusion rather than deduction” (1949: 78–79). Moore even saw “a revolution in comedy” in the Malade’s innovative uses of language (Ms 8˚ E44, 163) while others have noted an implicitly subversive cast (Hubert 1962: vii; Vialet 1990: 57; Abraham 1994: 66). It is difficult, finally, not to see these late works as an expression of Molière’s need for artistic freedom, which under absolutism could only be dangerous. Ordinary laughter was generally held to be suspect (Bertrand 1992: 142). The deeper laughter provoked by the popular, carnivalesque elements so prominent in late comedy-ballet (Baudelaire’s comique absolu) was surely all the more suspect (Bakhtin 1968: 11). In creating through this profoundly anti-classical dramaturgy a great space of dramatic freedom, a new kind of total spectacle which radically recasts all the elements of theatre as he found them, Molière’s final, greatest creations deserve to be seen not just as implicitly subversive of the social order but, for theatre at least, as revolutionary. CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, LONG BEACH

Notes 1. “Piglialo sù, Signor Monsu....” See Lully-Molière, Comédies-ballets CD track 4. Space considerations prevent me from reproducing musical examples. However, I indicate recorded pas-

40


sages where available. All translations are mine. For an extensive analysis of the music of the comedy-ballets, see Fleck: 1995. 2. “Quand pour rire on s’assemble, les plus sages, ce me semble, sont ceux qui sont les plus fous.” 3. “Ah! Les menuets sont ma danse.” 4. Lully CD 1 2002: Track 34. 5. “trop de brouillamini là-dedans.” 6. “Avancez. Le corps ferme.... Une, deux. Remettez-vous.... Avancez. Le corps ferme.... Une, deux.... Avancez. Le corps ferme.” 7. “...et je parlais de vous encore ce matin dans la chambre du Roi.” 8. Lully CD 2: Tracks 12–22. 9. “Les dieux mêmes, les dieux n’en ont point de plus doux” (Lully CD 1: Tracks 2–19). 10. Malade imaginaire CD, 1990: Tracks 2–7; Fleck 2003: 313–317. 11. Charpentier CD track 1. 12. Quoted in Mongrédien 1973.2: 436. 13. Charpentier CD tracks 10–11, 13–15. 14. “Mille annis et bibat et tuat et....” 15. Charpentier CD tracks 16–18. 16. For a more extensive account, see L’Ultime Molière: vers un théâtre éclaté, Presses universitaires de Dijon (forthcoming). 17. Of course the daughters will marry their choice, and two more couples will marry for good measure in the Bourgeois.

References Cited Abraham, Claude. “Farce, ballet, et intégrité: les dernières comédies-ballets de Molière.” In Fritz Nies, Offene Gefüge, 65–73. Tübingen: G. Narr, 1994. Adam, Antoine. Histoire de la littérature française au XVIIe siècle. 5 vols. Paris: Domat, Monchrestien, 1948–56. Anthologie de la littérature française, edited by Robert Leggewie. 3rd ed. Volume 1. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Anthony, James R. French Baroque Music. 3rd ed. Portland, OR: Amadeus, 1987. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 1968. Bertrand, Dominique. Dire le rire à l’âge classique: représenter pour mieux contrôler. Aix en Provence: Université de Provence, 1995. Bray, René. Molière homme de théâtre. Paris: Editions du Mercure, 1953. Caldicott, C.E.J. La Carrière de Molière entre protecteurs et éditeurs. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998. Canova-Green, Marie-Claude. “Ces gens-là se trémoussent bien...”: ébats et débats dans la comédieballet de Molière, Biblio 17, vol. 171. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2007. Charpentier, Marc-Antoine. Le Malade imaginaire, complete music. Les Arts Florissants, dir. William Christie. Harmonia Mundi France compact disk HMC 901336. Cronk, Nicholas. “Molière-Charpentier’s Le Malade imaginaire: the first opéra-comique?” Forum for Modern Language Studies 29.3 ( July 1993): 216–231. Dandrey, Patrick. Molière ou l’esthétique du ridicule. Paris: Klincksieck, 1992. Defaux, Gérard. Molière, ou les métamorphoses du comique. Lexington: French Forum, 1982. Fleck, Stephen H. Music, Dance, and Laughter: Comic Creation in the Comedy-Ballets. Biblio 17, vol. 88. Paris, Seattle, Tübingen: PFSCL/Biblio 17, 1995. _____. “L’imaginaire du Malade: Musique, voix, et masque dans la fête ultime de Molière.” In Molière et la Fête: Actes du colloque international de Pézenas 7–8 juin 2001, edited by Jean Emelina, 307–330. Pézenas: Ville de Pézenas, 2003.


41

_____. “The Mirror and the Looking-Glass: Vraisemblance and Invraisemblances in Later Molière.” In Formes et formations au dix-septième siècle, edited by Buford Norman, 273–282. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2006. _____. “Représentation et Spectacle dans les Comédies-Ballets.” In L’Age de la représentation: L’Art du spectacle au XVIIe siècle, edited by Rainer Zaiser, 195–206. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2007. Forestier, Georges. Esthétique de l’identité dans le théâtre français (1550–1680). Geneva: Droz, 1988. Gaines, James F. “Les Fourberies de Scapin.” In The Molière Encyclopedia, edited by James F. Gaines. Westport, Ct, and London: Greenwood, 2002.

Gouhier, Henri. Le Théâtre et l’ existence. Paris: J.Vrin, 2004 (Aubier, 1952). Guicharnaud, Jacques. Introduction to Molière: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Jacques Guicharnaud, 1–13. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964. Gutwirth, Marcel. Molière, ou l’ invention du comique. Paris: Minard, 1966. Hilton, Wendy. “Dances to Music by Jean-Baptiste Lully.” Early Music 14.1 (Feb. 1986): 51–63. Hubert, Judd D. Molière or the Comedy of Intellect. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962. Kintzler, Catherine. Poétique de l’opéra français de Corneille à Rousseau. 2d ed. Paris: Minerve, 2006. _____. ‘Trois degrés dans l’art du ballet comique.’ Cahiers Comédie Française 154, 155 (1987): 12–14, 14–15. Lully, Jean-Baptiste. Lully ou le Musicien du soleil, Volume 4. Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, comédieballet, complete music. La Simphonie du Marais, dir. Hugo Reyne. Accord-Universal 2 compact disks 472 512–2. Lully-Molière, Comédies-ballets, musical excerpts. Les Musiciens du Louvre, dir. Marc Minkowski. Erato compact disk 2292–45286–2. McAuley, Gay. “Language and Theatre in Le Malade imaginaire.” Australian Journal of French Studies 11 (1974): 4–18. Molière, Jean Baptiste Poquelin. Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, with Louis Seigner, directed by Jean Meyer. 1957. Paris: Jean Chateau, 2008. DVD. _____. Le Malade imaginaire. Preface by Jean Le Poulain. Commentary and notes by Alain Lanavère. Paris: Livre de Poche, 1986. _____. Œuvres complètes. Edited by Georges Couton. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. Mongrédien, Georges. Recueil des Textes et des Documents du XVIIe siècle relatifs à Molière. 2d ed. 2 vols. Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1973. Moore, W.G. The French Idea of the Comic. Typescript, 164 pp. Taylor Institution Library (Oxford), Ms 8˚ E44. _____. Molière: A New Criticism. Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1949. Pavel, Thomas. Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Powell, John S. “Music, Fantasy and Illusion in Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire.” Music and Letters 73.2 (May 1992): 222–243. Vialet, Michèle. “Le Bourgeois gentilhomme en contexte: du texte au spectacle.” Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature 17 (1990): 51–58.

4 Constructions of Motherhood in Euripides’ Medea John Given Abstract In Euripides’ Medea, Medea’s hesitation to kill her children in her deliberative monologue is startling in its new concern for a mother’s love for her children. This essay examines how motherhood is constructed in the tragedy up to the monologue. I argue that Jason and Medea both see motherhood primarily as a familial role, albeit a role with different emphases. The Nurse, in contrast, has a primarily affective view of the mother-child relationship. The monologue brings these two views into conflict.

In the deliberative monologue of Euripides’ Medea, Medea considers whether or not to kill her children. Euripides constructs the monologue as a conflict between Medea’s desire for revenge against Jason (the husband who has abandoned her to marry the local princess) and her desire to act like a loving mother and spare her sons. Critics have long recognized that Medea’s desire for revenge closely resembles the violent desires of male heroes such as Achilles in Homer’s Iliad and Ajax in Sophocles’ Ajax.1 Far less attention has been paid to the other side of the tragic conflict, to Medea’s role as a mother.2 Perhaps this lack of attention is attributable to an ideological blindness by critics who too easily accept the naturalness of a mother’s love for her children, a naturalness that Euripides’ tragedy itself encourages.3 Yet, when differentiated according to the various perspectives of the play’s characters, the constructions of motherhood in this play raise questions of class and the place of emotions in ethical decisionmaking.4 Most of the tragedy’s plot is driven by concerns for the stability and preservation of a male-centered household (oikos). All of the play’s elite characters work to perpetuate a household ( Jason and Creon), begin a household (Aegeus), or annihilate a household (Medea). Their concerns are explicable by reference to the tragedy’s historical context. From the earliest periods of Greek history, the oikos was central to social and political structures throughout the Greek world (Patterson 1998: 44–106; Pomeroy 1995: 16–56). In Athens, the centrality of the 42

4. Construction of Motherhood in Euripides’ Medea (Given)

43

oikos was particularly heightened after Pericles had a law passed in 451 B.C. that Athenian citizenship was to be granted only to children whose parents were both Athenian citizens.5 Medea was produced in 431 B.C. Pericles’ law codified marriage as the institution for preserving citizens’ property and codified a woman’s primary civic role as the (present or future) mother of citizen children. A woman was legally a daughter, then a wife, then a mother. All authority in the household rested in its male head, the kurios. A nubile woman passed from the kurial authority of her father to the kurial authority of her husband. In the event of divorce, a woman returned to her father’s kurial authority. In the event of a husband’s death, she passed into the kurial authority of her husband’s male relatives.6 Ancient political theory reflects the notion that family members had welldefined roles to perform. It tends to focus on adults’ relations with one another rather than the relationships of parents and children.7 Aristotle defines the household members according to their functions: “the first and fewest possible parts of a house are master and slave, husband and wife, father and children” (Politics 1253b). He describes the duties of the husband and wife in this way: “the duty of the one is to acquire, and of the other to preserve” (Politics 1277b). In the treatise Oeconomicus, Xenophon holds out the possibility that women can produce material prosperity in addition to children (3.15, 7.10–12). Even in his gender-based division of labor, though, while a woman’s duties go beyond childrearing and weaving to include ruling over the domestic slaves, she still is responsible for performing the roles of wife, mother, and slave-owner, roles he defines by the obligations specific to the context of the oikos (7.29–43) (see Pomeroy 1994: 31–67, Scaife 1995). Both Aristotle and Xenophon mention in passing the affection that exists between parents and children (Xenophon, Oeconomicus 7.24; Aristotle, Politics 1262a–1262b, 1335a; cf. Nicomachean Ethics 1161b), but their primary concerns are to describe how the various members of the household best perform their functions. In Medea, both Jason and Medea, like the political theorists, view the ideal of the successfully functioning oikos as motivating actions under the rubric of carefully defined household roles. Jason views motherhood as a role derivative of his function as head of the household. In the play’s agÉn he expresses a wish that he himself may be happy and live a good life (eudaimonia, 565).8 The content of this good life is the successful performance of the role of a kurios: to be a good friend (philos) to his wife and children (549; cf. 459), to overcome difficult circumstances facing the family (552), to provide sufficient material prosperity that the family might live well and not in need (559–561), to raise children “worthy of my house” (562), and to bring together the children from his two marriages into the same noble station (563–564). He determines how to act by figuring how he may best be a good husband and father, a status that entails calculating how best to advance his and his sons’ political and financial fortunes.9 In other words, Euripides motivates his actions by reference to his role as a husband and father. Insofar as all household activity, including the adult female’s,

44


needs to be directed toward the father’s goals, Jason assumes a familial hierarchy in which the mother is inferior to both father and sons.10 There is no space for the reciprocity that is the hallmark of Greek notions of friendship (philia). There is no space for emotional attachment. Fathers, mothers and children are philoi to each other only in the sense that they jointly advance the household’s material prosperity. Jason envisions a joint household encompassing an equal brotherhood between his sons by Medea and his future sons by Creon’s daughter (562–564). This will be possible only if the two mothers fade into the background. We see this way of thinking also in the question Jason poses to Medea immediately after his wish that he himself may be happy: “What need do you have of children?” (565). Many commentators and translators assume that Jason means “more children.”11 After the litany of his paths to happiness, however, Jason’s question hints that Medea’s happiness is grounded not in her role as a mother but only in her role as a wife. Unlike him, she does not need children to fulfill her household role. While the content of his happiness as kurios is being a good philos, overcoming difficult circumstances, etc., the content of Medea’s happiness, on his account, is virtually null. Being Jason’s husband ought to be enough for her. Indeed, Medea’s satisfaction as a wife, he strongly implies, lies solely in good sex (569–573).12 And even this degradation is not the truly ideal situation for Jason. He declares that females ought not to exist; “then there would not be any evil for humans” (573–575). All human evil — if we count only men as human — arises from the fact that women necessarily play the role of mother. A father’s happiness would best come about if a mother were unnecessary to the family. Since there is no acknowledgment of the reciprocity traditionally demanded by philia, the mother is a hindrance rather than a helpmate. For this reason Jason can interpret Medea’s resistance to his plans as a form of irrationality, which he repeatedly explains as emotional excess.13 Medea uses Jason’s construction of motherhood against him when it comes time to deceive him (870–871).14 She links her past anger to madness (873, 885) and claims that she “now has planned things better” (893). Like him, her planning is now good, from Jason’s perspective, because it is directed toward the success of Jason’s household. Good planning, she suggests, means that she ought to have been a bridesmaid at Jason’s wedding (887–888)! She ought to have utterly devalued her own position in Jason’s household. Medea’s deception confirms Jason’s conception of motherhood. The stark contrast between Jason’s happiness as a kurios and the lack of value attached to motherhood brings out how thoroughly, from Jason’s perspective, men and women pursue their ends based on the best performance of their familial roles. Yet Jason’s consistent interpretation of Medea’s actions as irrational reveals a contradiction in his perspective: mothers ought to pursue the rational goals of the oikos, but they are generally incapable of doing so. Medea, up until the monologue, refuses to perform her role as mother, but


45

her very refusal reveals that she partially shares the ethical reasoning that shapes Jason’s conception of motherhood, though only partially. She rejects the content of Jason’s conception of happiness.15 For her, a happy home life is not one that achieves material prosperity but one that correctly honors the reciprocal demands of philia. Euripides makes her perspective clear from the very beginning of the play. In the prologue, the Nurse reports to the audience that Medea complains about the “oaths” Jason has violated, the “pledge of his right hand,” and the wicked “return she receives from Jason” (21–23).16 Rather than lamenting the loss of her husband’s love or some other emotional violation, Medea’s grievance names the aspects of marriage that require reciprocity. As Melissa Mueller has shown, the language of reciprocity runs throughout the play, especially in the agÉn and in the scenes concerning the poisoned “gifts” Medea wickedly exchanges for Jason’s goodwill (Mueller 2001). This notion of reciprocity also informs Medea’s descriptions of her natal household. She repeatedly admits that she “betrayed” her home oikos to take on a new role in a new oikos, namely as Jason’s wife (483, 503). She rejected her father’s kurial authority and chose a husband for herself,17 in contradiction to traditional Greek marriage rituals.18 She repeats the same word used elsewhere to pick out Jason’s “betrayal” of his oikos (17, 489).19 Her betrayal and Jason’s are equally violations of the reciprocal requirements of kinship. Despite rejecting the content of Jason’s conception of happiness, Medea largely shares the form of his ethical reasoning, namely that household roles motivate action.20 This is clearest when Medea speaks of exacting revenge. For just the same reason that Jason desires to preserve the household, namely to preserve his family’s power and property, Medea aims to destroy it, namely so that the aristocratic clan and its property will fall into ruin. She links the destruction of an enemy to the destruction of his “whole house” (114, 486–487, 794; cf. 468). It is necessary to destroy not only the man (or, in the case of her final revenge plan against Jason, not even the man) but also all those whose identities are derivative of his. She kills her children in order to make clear to Jason the value of the ties he ignored.21 She “persuades” (9) the daughters of Pelias to murder their father so that their daughterhood is tainted by their deadly act. She betrays her father, rejects his authority and murders her brother in order to marry Jason and aid his escape. Far from undervaluing the ties that bind these families,22 Medea’s careful dismantling of each household demonstrates the centrality of household roles to her perspective. Not only does her own role as Jason’s wife motivate her destruction of Jason’s enemies,23 namely her own natal household and Pelias’s household, but she overvalues kinship ties to the extent that she punishes people because of their kinship ties to Jason’s enemies. In Jason’s case, his failure to fulfill his role as father and as husband (partially) motivates the infanticide.24 The missing component in the discussion of Medea’s perspective on kinship ties is her role as mother. Although the play is filled with references to chil-

46


dren and their importance in the household (L. Golden 1971) and although household role-based motivations are central to Medea’s justification of her actions, Medea’s motherhood is frequently disregarded, at least before her deliberative monologue.25 Typical is Medea’s first speech onstage in which she works to gain the Chorus’s sympathy. She assimilates her own situation as a foreigner in a Greek city with Everywoman’s situation as a foreigner in her husband’s house (cf. Nugent 1993). Children appear in the speech only once, in Medea’s striking declaration that she “would prefer to stand in battle three times than to give birth once” (250–251). Motherhood is reduced to a painful labor and delivery. If Medea were to mention other obligations of motherhood, it would undermine her claim that she is helpless because Jason’s betrayal has left her without kin (255–258). The logic is either that Jason’s household need not be preserved, that therefore she need not consider the children who would preserve it, and that therefore she can omit them from her speech, or that even with the household’s disintegration Medea retains obligations as a mother, that therefore she has motivations for actions other than revenge, and that therefore she omits them from her speech in order to deny any contrary motivations. In either case, we see that Euripides shapes Medea’s rhetoric to reflect the inescapability of performing a household role.26 To emphasize Euripides’ omission of Medea’s motherhood, Medea and the children never share the stage until the boys enter to affirm Medea’s feigned reconciliation with Jason (894–895). The sight of them at this point causes her to weep, a moment to which we shall return below. Euripides thus achieves a fine effect. Since household-centered motivations are her normal justifications for action, Medea consistently turns to her roles as (failed) daughter and (injured) wife when she needs to explain her actions. She mostly avoids motherhood motivations lest she display any hesitation in her revenge plans. The absence of motherhood from her discourse with the strong presence of other familial roles suggests that, if she were ever to recognize the children’s salience in her life (as she will), the audience should expect her to justify her actions by her role as the mother of the household (she will not). Euripides counters Jason’s and Medea’s “normal” view of household-centered motivations with the wholly different perspective of the Nurse. Although she is not immune to using political language to describe the disintegrating household (cf. Mastronarde 2002: ad 15), she shows little concern for the preservation of the aristocratic clan to which she belongs as a slave nor does she show understanding of what motivates those concerned for the household. When Medea wishes that the “whole house may fall” (112–114), the Nurse fails to understand that Medea threatens the children because their survival would guarantee the survival of Jason’s household.27 Instead, she zeroes in on the emotions Medea expresses toward the children and asks how she can hate them when they are innocent of their father’s crimes (116–117). Even before this, Euripides has the Nurse make a surprising leap in logic that reveals her perspective. She first reports how Medea laments that she “betrayed” her natal home (28–35). She next says,


47

“And she hates the children and does not take pleasure in seeing them” (36). Euripides’ juxtaposition of Medea’s act of betrayal and her hatred for her husband’s children suggests that the Nurse finds explanation for Medea’s action in her penchant for hating her kin, rather than in her desire to slough off the role of mother to play the aggrieved wife just as she jettisoned the role of daughter to play Jason’s wife. In both passages, faced with Medea’s bad treatment of the children, the Nurse interprets her mistress’s actions as motivated by (inappropriate) emotion. Her words reveal a perspective in which the relationship between a mother and her children — as well as between a father and his children — is primarily an affective relationship. Unlike Jason’s view that emotions detract from correct performance of roles, the Nurse treats emotions as definitional of relationships. A mother is someone who has a particular emotional attitude, namely love, toward her children. The sight of children ought to cause their mother pleasure. That Medea fails to feel love and experience pleasure signals, from the Nurse’s perspective, her failure as a mother and, worse, a threat to the children. This might suggest a natural connection between motherhood and love for children, and so the Nurse generally acts. But it is not so simple. The dominant attitude of Jason and Medea shows that the more typical definition of motherhood in the world of the tragedy is an oikos-centered role. A mother may love her children; as we have already noted, that is a cliché in Greek literature (see n. 3) and Medea relies on it to deceive Creon. It is, however, at least in this play, normally not a mother’s love that motivates her care for her children, but her obligation to perform the role expected of her in the household. The Nurse’s perspective is the one that calls out for explanation. Euripides suggests an explanation when he has the Nurse identify a reason — though hardly justification — for Medea’s failures. “Tyrants,” she says immediately after asking why Medea hates the children, “alter their angry emotions with difficulty because they are ruled in few things but rule in many things” (119–121). She faults the propertied elite for allowing their anxiety about power to direct their emotions rather than allowing emotions to guide their actions. She associates the latter with “living on equal terms” (122) and “moderation” (125), which is “the best thing for mortals by far” (126–127). The rejection of tyranny and promotion of moderation is a commonplace in Greek literature,28 but the Nurse puts it to an uncommon use here. Elsewhere, the rhetorical move is used to persuade a wrongdoer to let go of evil ambitions or desires for great wealth. The Nurse, in contrast, uses the trope to urge Medea to adopt more appropriate emotions. The life guided by emotions, on her view, is egalitarian insofar as all people experience emotions, and it is moderate (one of the highest terms of commendation in popular and theoretical Greek morality outside of epic poetry)29 insofar as it enables one to react appropriately in any situation without going to immoral extremes. Clearly if emotions are named as reliable guides to a good life, they are not conceived as irrational impulses that cause one to wander from the good life, but rather rational guides to what is and is not

48


valuable and salient in one’s life. This reading coheres with recent work in ancient and modern philosophy, which finds rational, evaluative content in human emotions.30 The elite, on the Nurse’s view, become so single-minded in their desire to rule that they direct their emotions at inappropriate objects or they direct inappropriate emotions at correct objects. They fail to alter emotions according to the complexities of a situation. In Medea’s case, her focus on manipulating authority in the household causes her incorrectly to hate her children and therefore willingly to objectify them as pawns in her power game rather than (as is more appropriate) to treat her children as objects of love. The play thus sets up a contrast between the Nurse’s affective understanding and the performance-based understanding of Jason and Medea. The two views clash as Medea puts her plan into motion. As the children come onto stage for the first time since the prologue, Medea begins to weep (899–903). She looks upon the “dear (philos) arm” of one of her sons (902). She confesses that she is “full of fear” (903) and later that “pity” overcomes her (930–931). For the first time in the play, she experiences emotions the Nurse would call appropriate and, more importantly, for the first time we see her emotions reshaping her actions, albeit unintentionally.31 When the Tutor announces that the boys’ exile has been reprieved, Medea weeps again (1005). This time, her tears bring to the fore the conflict, simmering since the prologue, between being motivated by affective relationships and being motivated by role-based relationships.32 As Medea approaches the moment when she will exercise her greatest power, Euripides reintroduces the possibility that one may be guided by one’s emotions, a position the play has associated with those who lack power. Medea’s emotions here are not irrational impulses. The tears indicate that Medea now experiences the children as objects of love and pity, rather than as pawns in her revenge plans. As objects of her love, she determines that they are valuable to her and worthy of being saved. Her household-based reasoning (and her single-mindedness toward revenge) could never have reached this conclusion.33 The tears thus query the limitations of Jason’s and Medea’s elite conception of family. Medea herself acknowledges this meaning of her tears and emotions by entering upon her great deliberative monologue. If the emotions had no rational content, if they did not signal that the children had a newly valuable place in Medea’s ethical makeup, there would be no point to the monologue. The function of the monologue is to provide space to revise Medea’s conception of motherhood and what it requires from her new perspective. What it requires is that she love the children and therefore preserve their lives. She does not dismiss the claims of revenge entirely nor the household roles that motivated her revenge, but the monologue indicates the new obligation of accounting for her children as beloved.34 Their safety is not to be. After her vacillation whether to carry out her revenge, after she comes to see the children as rightful objects of love with their “most beloved hand” and “most beloved mouth, and shape, and noble face” (1071–1072), after she grasps her child’s right hand in her own (the


49

same gesture she performed with Jason when she betrayed her father and chose her own husband, but a gesture now signifying love rather than the adoption of a familial role)35— after all her anguish, she concludes that their deaths are inevitable because the revenge plan is already in motion. The motivations of the heroic code and her desire to see Jason’s household destroyed cannot be overruled. There is little consolation in the fact that Medea goes off to murder the children as their newly loving mother. The limitations of the aristocratic attention to the household’s proper roles have created the conditions for the children’s death. Newfound appreciation for the low-class, even servile, regard for the place of affective relationships in the family cannot save them.

Notes 1. See especially Knox 1977, but also Bacalexi 1999, Bongie 1977, Gellie 1988, Schmidt 1997. 2. Visser (1986) and Rabinowitz (1993: 125–154) touch on Medea’s role of mother but do not consider explicitly what it entails. Vester (2004) does not discuss Medea, but her studies of motherhood in Andromache and Ion are instructive for the ideological work Euripidean tragedy performs. Scharffenberger (1999) is an excellent study of the ideological work done by the pervasive male heroic code in Medea. 3. For example, when Medea breaks down in tears, she explains to Jason that a woman “is naturally prone to tears” when she faces losing her children (925–931). (All translations from Greek texts are my own.) As much as it is absent from most of this play, a mother’s love for her children is mentioned so often as to become cliché in Greek lawcourt speeches, philosophical treatises, scientific accounts of procreation, comedy, funeral dedications, and elsewhere in tragedy. See M. Golden (1990: 97–100) for a collection and analysis of the many relevant texts. 4. With the phrase “ethical decision-making” I mean to pick out a particular type of rational justification for action based in agents’ determination of how they may best pursue what is valued or good in their lives, especially within the interpersonal, socio-cultural roles and practices that are central to their lives. On such ethical reasoning in archaic and classical Greek literature, see Gill (1996, especially 62–68). 5. Nagle (2006: 1–30) stresses the interconnections of oikos and polis throughout the archaic and classical periods of Greek history. Their interconnectedness is prominent in Medea also, for example, in Medea’s lament that she is not only “deserted” by kin but “without a city” (255). Space does not permit me to pursue this issue. Visser (1986) and Rehm (1994: 97–109) are among those who read Medea in the light of Athenian law. 6. On the legal complexities of Athenian marriage, including a man’s rights as kurios, see Harrison 1968: 1–60. For a woman’s relationships to her male protectors in the context of tragedy, see Rabinowitz 1993: 4–8. 7. Recent scholarship on ancient family history likewise tends to pass over adults’ relations with children, primarily because of lack of evidence in legal and political texts. The major exception is M. Golden 1990, whose chapter on parenthood (80–114) argues forcefully against the modern misconception that ancient Greek parents did not experience a deep emotional bond with their children. Another exception is Demand 1994, but the “motherhood” in her title refers only to parturition. When modern scholarship does discuss parents and children, it is often from the perspective of inheritance law. See, e.g., Patterson 1998: 70–106. 8. Eudaimonia is one of the commonly used terms in Greek literature — both in poetry and in philosophical literature — to pick out the ethically good or complete life. See McDonald 1978 for a survey of the use of eudaimonia and other “happiness” terms in Euripides and earlier poetry. 9. As several scholars have noted, Jason displays an understanding of “living well” limited to material prosperity. See Fartzoff 1996: 159–162, McDonald 1978: 46–47, Mueller 2001:

50


476–482. The women and children in his life are, like wealth, instruments for achieving his goal of performing the role of kurios well. This is true even of his future family. When he says that he will benefit his present children by means of his future children (566), he uses the dative case, a grammatical form normally reserved for inanimate objects. See Harrauer 2000: 39: even Creon’s daughter is “nichts anderes ... als das Mittel zur Erreichung seines Lebensziels.” On both Jason’s and Medea’s corruption of friendship (philia) bonds, see Schein 1990. 10. Cf. 448–450, where Jason blames Medea for not “lightly bearing the plans of your superiors.” “Plans” (bouleumata, with the cognate verb bouleuein) is a frequent lexical choice throughout the play to pick out Jason’s claim to rational superiority and to name Medea’s mimicking of Jason’s way of thinking. See 449, 567, 874, 886 ( Jason); 317, 372, 402, 769, 772, 893, 1079 (Medea). Medea’s dismissal of her own infanticide “plans” (1044, 1048) is thus marked as a dismissal of Jason’s way of thinking. 11. The translations of David Kovacs and Philip Vellacott give “more children,” while Rex Warner and Diane Arnson Svarlien translate simply “children.” Mastronarde (2002: ad 565) suggests that the audience might hear an ominous foreshadowing that Medea does not even need her present children. 12. Critics who find Medea’s primary motivation for revenge in her sexual jealousy too quickly follow Jason’s misogyny here. See, most recently, McHardy 2008: 61–63, who in fact cites these lines (spoken by Jason) as evidence of Medea’s jealousy. For further criticism of such readings, see Burnett 1998: 194. 13. Jason’s first sentence in the play chastises Medea for her “harsh anger” (447) and calls it “an impossible evil.” The word for “impossible,” am`chanon, derives from m`chan`, a “device” or “plan,” a synonym of bouleuma (see n. 10 above for the importance of Jason’s “plans” to his perspective). Medea’s anger is irrational insofar as it is an evil that disrupts Jason’s plans. Jason interprets almost all of Medea’s actions, past and present, whether they benefit him or not, as motivated by irrational emotions. See also 463, 530, 568–570. 14. As Foley (2001: 247) shows, in this scene Medea most fully comes to resemble Jason: “Although she is in full control of her reason throughout, Medea never elsewhere indulges in such bloodless decision making; indeed, she aims in her revenge precisely to make Jason feel the emotions he once rejected.” Foley refers to Medea’s mimicking of Jason’s mode of ethical reasoning as “playacting.” On Medea as an actor — a point usefully highlighted by Michael Walton when I presented this as a paper — see also Zerba 2002. As I bring out in the next paragraph, the point for our purposes is that, whether she considers reciprocity or whether she imitates Jason’s cold logic, she begins from the same ethical structures about familial roles in the household. See also the scholarship cited in n. 20. 15. Cf. her own sarcastic use of eudaimonia at 598–599. 16. The Nurse also introduces the motif that Medea is “dishonored” (20), another important motivation for Medea’s revenge. This refers to the male heroic code Medea adheres to. See the literature cited in n. 1. The heroic code, which requires one to be good to one’s friends (philoi) and bad to one’s enemies, coincides very well with Medea’s expectation of reciprocal kindness from one’s philoi. 17. Rabinowitz (1993: 138–139) shows how Medea’s self-determination undermines not only her natal family structure but is also a threat to Jason’s household and the institution of marriage itself. Visser (1986) explores the tragedy’s dynamic of natal family versus conjugal family to show how Medea undermines traditional notions of marriage. See also McDermott 1989: 81–93. 18. For a description of the traditional wedding at Athens, particularly the ritual of engu` (betrothal), see Oakley and Sinos 1993: 9–10; in the context of Athenian tragedy, see Rehm 1994: 11–29. 19. After the infanticide, Jason also calls Medea a “betrayer of your father and the land which reared you” (1332). The contrast between Colchis as the nourishing mother of Medea and Medea as the murdering mother of her children is particularly sharp and brings out the fact that Medea has failed in her roles as daughter and mother by betraying her homeland and her children. 20. Many scholars have commented that Medea gradually comes to resemble Jason, especially in his male values, as she seeks to take vengeance on him. See, e.g., Boedeker 1997: 144–146, Foley 2001: 264–266, Rehm 1989: 105–110. For further bibliography, see Boedeker 1997:


51

144nn.56–57. In the respect being described here, however, Medea shares Jason’s perspective from the beginning. Williamson (1990) argues for just the opposite interpretation of Medea’s association with the oikos, namely that Medea radically dissociates herself from the oikos in order to destroy it. 21. Even after the murders, Euripides makes Jason slow to learn. At 1347, he laments that he will not “profit” from his new marriage. At 1397, he calls out, “O dearest (philtata) children!” and Medea corrects him that the children were dearest “to their mother but not to you,” a line that turns on Jason’s limited and Medea’s richer understanding of philia. At 1403, Jason states a desire to “touch the soft flesh of the children,” in a line that echoes Medea’s monologue (1075), where she too, as we shall see, reformed her attitude toward the children. The effect seems to be that at the very end of the play, Jason deepens his valuation of kinship. 22. Thus one of the anonymous referees of this paper argues. 23. Euripides notably never has Medea comment on her motivation for marrying Jason. The Nurse (8) and Jason (530) pointedly say that Medea was motivated by love. As I am arguing, the Nurse and Jason each have a place for love and other emotions in their perspective on human motivation. It is not that Medea does not experience emotions, but Euripides does not present these emotions as motivations that move Medea to action. Instead, he concentrates on Medea’s adherence to the male heroic code and to the proper reciprocity in social roles. One passage that might suggest otherwise is 506–508, where Medea says that she cannot return to her father’s house since “I have made enemies of my loved ones (philoi) at home.... When I showed favor (charis) to you, I held them as hostile.” Her description of her natal family as philoi may have overtones of regret-laden affection, but the point of the passage is that Medea has badly reversed the roles of who ought to be friends and who ought to be enemies under the heroic code. (See n. 16.) She uses the word philoi to emphasize not her love for her family but her obligations toward them as her “friends.” 24. In the overall characterization of Medea, Jason’s failure as a father is a minor motivation, but one that shows particularly well how her motivations are shaped by anxieties about the household. On the other hand, his failure as husband is a major motivation. (See, most forcefully, Medea’s first speech to the Chorus, where she portrays herself not as a woman in love, now scorned, but as a woman abandoned by the man who failed to play his correct role in their marriage.) See Burnett 1998: 194–96, on the appropriateness of Jason’s punishment for one who has become an enemy to his own household. On the complexities of Medea’s motivations, see inter alia Bevegni 1997, Easterling 1977, Foley 2001: 243–271. 25. Manuwald (1983: 33–34) suggests another plausible reason why Medea rarely mentions the children: Euripides constructs the tragedy to lead the audience to believe that the Nurse’s initial fears for the children’s safety are unfounded. Only when Medea announces her intentions to kill them do we realize the Nurse’s prescience, and our being misled. McDemott (1989: 37) has a similar argument. The plot-based and character-centered motivations of Medea’s silence about motherhood are not mutually exclusive. This trait of the text is significantly overdetermined. 26. Medea’s pattern of undervaluing her motherhood for her immediate rhetorical purpose continues in later scenes. She pleads with Creon to grant her a day’s reprieve so that she may “devise resources for my children since their father prefers not to” (342–343). The audience, however, must doubt her motivation when she confesses to the Chorus moments later that she was only “flattering” Creon to bring about her vengeance (368–369). She elsewhere agrees with the Chorus that she will be most wretched when she kills the children (818–819), and she briefly shows recognition of her immorality when she uses a strong moral superlative, “most impious” (796), to censure it. Her impiety lies in her failing to fulfill her mother’s obligation to raise the children who are her closest kin (philtatoi, 795). Even here, although most moral instincts would lead us to believe in Medea’s regret, it may be right to wonder how much she is working to hold the Chorus’s sympathy, by acquiescing to their moral instincts, as she proposes her horrific revenge. 27. Manuwald (2005: 521–523) also sees that in the prologue Medea acts not out of anger toward the children but out of desire to destroy Jason’s household, but he does not tease out the implications of why the Nurse attributes violent hatred to Medea. 28. Numerous parallels are cited by Mastronarde 1994: ad 549.

52


29. On the importance of moderation (sÉphrosun`), figured as the control of appetites, in Athenian ideology, see Davidson 1997. 30. See Ben-Ze’ev 2000, Konstan 2006, Nussbaum 2001. Konstan writes, “The Greeks did not conceive of emotions as internal states of excitation. Rather, the emotions are elicited by our interpretation of the words, acts, and intentions of others, each in its characteristic way.... one consequence of this approach is that it is possible to alter people’s emotions by changing their way of construing the precipitating event” (2006: xii). It is particularly important to interpret emotions correctly in this play, in which Medea’s ethical conflict has so often been read as a conflict between reason and passion. For bibliography and refutation of this reading, see Foley 2001: 243–71. 31. The possibility of unintentional but rational emotions may intuitively seem like faulty logic, but on the evaluative view of emotions it is not. To put the case too briefly, emotions pick out what is salient in one’s life according to one’s moral values. As correct judgments of what is morally valuable, emotions are rational. They may arise, however, as anyone who has experienced emotions can testify, without an agent’s deliberate decision, i.e. unintentionally. How emotions arise in a person is a philosophical issue far beyond the literary concerns of this essay. See the philosophers cited in the previous note for very full discussion, and see the next note on the questions of literary characterization raised by Medea’s tears. 32. From the perspective of characterization, Medea’s tears present a problem. They indicate the sudden irruption of an unmotivated emotion, and interpreters must invent characteristics of Medea to explain the new emotions. The question of how and when Medea develops the idea for infanticide is a similar problem in this play. There is no reason based in Medea’s characterization why she should announce the infanticide plan immediately after Aegeus’s exit. Gibert (1995) has shown that Athenian tragedians had a range of options for motivating actions, from character-centered motivations (which have been the main subject of this essay) to motif-centered motivations. He uses the infanticide problem as an example: “I submit that these occurrences of the ‘child motif ’ (including Aegeus’ affliction) move Medea to her new plan. The strategy of the text keeps loss of children before our eyes, and the solution to the old puzzle is to cross the boundary of the individual character’s consciousness and accept Medea’s plan as the final goal of this strategy. Her presumed mental activity is simply not the center of gravity as we watch this development take place” (1995: 53–54). I, in turn, submit that Medea’s tears are caused by the text’s strategy to bring different constructions of motherhood into conflict. 33. Gill (1996: 217–221) interprets Medea’s conflict along similar but ultimately incompatible lines. He recognizes only one conception of philia, namely a reciprocal relationship. Therefore Medea’s conflict is a negotiation between dealing with “Jason’s breach of the fundamental principles of philia, and the more standard claims on her philia represented by the children” (217). My argument is that, while Jason does violate the norms of philia, the claims represented by the children — based on affective relationships that are not necessarily reciprocal — are not standard in the world of the tragedy. 34. On the ethical conflict and decision-making in Medea’s monologue and the admittedly controversial interpretation summarized in this paragraph, see Given (forthcoming). 35. On the symbolism of the hand, especially Medea’s hand, see Flory 1978.

References Cited Bacalexi, Dina. “Médée heroique: persistance ou perversion du code?” Bulletin de l’Association Guillaume Budé 1999: 274–299. Ben-Ze’ev, Aaron. The Subtlety of Emotions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Bevegni, Claudio. “I Motivi-guida della Medea di Euripide: riso, odio, virilità.” Humanitas 52 (1997): 209–227. Boedeker, Deborah. “Becoming Medea: Assimilation in Euripides.” In Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy, and Art, ed. James J. Clauss and Sarah Iles Johnston, 127–148. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.


53

Bongie, Elizabeth Bryson. “Heroic Elements in the Medea of Euripides.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 107 (1977): 27–56. Burnett, Anne Pippin. Revenge in Attic and Later Tragedy. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1998. Davidson, James. Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. Demand, Nancy. Birth, Death, and Motherhood in Classical Greece. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Easterling, P. E. 1977. “The Infanticide in Euripides’ Medea.” Yale Classical Studies 25 (1994): 177–191. Fartzoff, Michel. “Le pouvoir dans Médée.” Pallas 45 (1996): 153–168. Foley, Helene P. Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Flory, Stewart. “Medea’s Right Hand: Promises and Revenge.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 108 (1978): 69–74. Gellie, George. “The Character of Medea.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 35 (1988): 15–22. Gibert, John. Change of Mind in Greek Tragedy. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1995. Gill, Christopher. Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy and Philosophy: The Self in Dialogue. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1996. Given, John. “Ethical Motivations in Medea’s Monologue (Eur. Med. 1021–80).” forthcoming. Golden, Leon. “Children in the Media [sic].” Classical Bulletin 48 (1971): 10–15. Golden, Mark. Children and Childhood in Classical Athens. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Harrauer, Christine. “Die Tragödie der Glauke: Euripides, Medeia 1185–1202.” Wiener Studien 113 (2000): 31–52. Harrison, A. R. W. The Law of Athens: The Family and Property. Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1968. Knox, B. M. W. “The Medea of Euripides.” Yale Classical Studies 25 (1977): 193–225. Konstan, David. The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Manuwald, Bernd. “Der Mord an den Kindern: Bemerkungen zu den Medea-Tragödien des Euripides und des Neophron.” Wiener Studien 17 (1983): 27–61. _____. “Jasons dynastische Pläne und Medeas Rachekalkül: zur Konzeption der Rachehandlung in der ‘Medea’ des Euripides.” Gymnasium 112 (2005): 515–530. Mastronarde, Donald J., ed. Euripides: Phoenissae. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994. _____. Euripides: Medea. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. McDermott, Emily A. Euripides’ Medea: The Incarnation of Disorder. University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989. McDonald, Marianne. Terms for Happiness in Euripides. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1978. McHardy, Fiona. Revenge in Athenian Culture. London: Duckworth, 2008. Mueller, Melissa. “The Language of Reciprocity in Euripides’ Medea.” American Journal of Philolog y 122 (2001): 471–504. Nagle, D. Brendan. The Household as the Foundation of Aristotle’s Polis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Nugent, S. Georgia. “Euripides’ Medea: The Stranger in the House.” Comparative Drama 27 (1993): 306–327. Nussbaum, Martha C. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of the Emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Oakley, John H. and Rebecca H. Sinos. The Wedding in Ancient Athens. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993. Patterson, Cynthia. The Family in Greek History. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1998. Pomeroy, Sarah B. Xenophon Oeconomicus: A Social and Historical Commentary. Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1994.

54


_____. Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity. 2nd ed. New York: Schocken, 1995. Rabinowitz, Nancy Sorkin. Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1993. Rehm, Rush. “Medea and the Logos of the Heroic.” Eranos 87 (1989): 97–115. _____. Marriage to Death: The Conflation of Wedding and Funeral Rituals in Greek Tragedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Scaife, Ross. “Ritual and Persuasion in the House of Ischomachus.” Classical Journal 90 (1995): 225–232. Scharffenberger, Elizabeth. “The Instruction of the Athenians, Revisited.” Text & Presentation 20 (1999): 6–18. Schein, Seth L. “Philia in Euripides’ Medea.” In Cabinet of the Muses, ed. M. Griffith and D. J. Mastronarde, 57–73. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990. Schmidt, Jens-Uwe. “Medea und Achill: Euripides und die männlich-heroischen Handlungsnormen.” In Zugänge zur Wirklichkeit: Theologie und Philosophie im Dialog: Festschrift für Hermann Braun zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Thilo Holzmüller and Karl-Norbert Ihmig, 141–161. Bielefeld: Luther-Verlag, 1997. Vester, Christina M. “Citizen Production, Citizen Identity: The Role of the Mother in Euripides and Menander.” Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 2004. Visser, Margaret. “Medea: Daughter, Sister, Wife and Mother. Natal Family versus Conjugal Family in Greek and Roman Myths about Women.” In Greek Tragedy and its Legacy: Essays Presented to D. J. Conacher, ed. Martin Cropp, Elaine Fantham, and S. E. Scully, 149–165. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1986. Williamson, Margaret. “A Woman’s Place in Euripides’ Medea.” In Euripides, Women, and Sexuality, ed. Anton Powell, 16–31. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Zerba, Michelle. “Medea Hypokrites.” Arethusa 35 (2002): 315–337.

5 Becoming Romantic Women’s Sexual Encounters with the Other in Mourning Becomes Electra and Machinal Les Hunter Abstract In both Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra and Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal, the female protagonist undertakes a tenuous sexual journey circuitously connected to a marginalized space outside the world of the play. In Mourning, Lavinia’s tragedy is rooted in her sexualized journey to the South Sea Islands, an offstage space where the inhabitants are “without knowledge of sin.” In Machinal, Helen Jones acquires sexual liberation through the figure of Richard Roe, a journeyman who “killed a couple a spig” below the Rio Grande. Roe, a “subject” of Mexico, occupies the space of the other in all but name. These female protagonists’ encounters with the romanticized other result in an inalterable transformation wherein they themselves become romantic in terms of both their connection to an exotic locale and their newfound primitive sexual freedom. This process of becoming romantic signifies their tragic trajectory and points to cultural anxieties over race, religion, and sexuality. They live in as near the Garden of Paradise before sin was discovered as you’ll find on this earth! Adam Brant, Mourning Becomes Electra

Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal (1928) and Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), written only three years apart, dramatize the female protagonists’ desire to escape social constraints. In both plays the central female character, The Woman (Machinal) and Lavinia (Mourning), holds a dream for escape which is juxtaposed to the physical space the stage represents — the “machine” of daily life and the stifling, death-like Mannon household respectively. The main character acts on the desire to flee the pressures of her environment through a tenuous sexual journey circuitously connected to a marginalized space outside the stage and the world of the play. 55

56


In Machinal, the only way The Woman (Helen Jones) finds escape from the mechanized world of New York of the 1920s where all her choices are predetermined is through a sexual encounter with Richard Roe, a journeyman and resident of Mexico who “killed a couple a spig” (214) “below the Rio Grande” (223). In Mourning, Lavinia attempts to free herself from her family’s curse and forget the past by taking a trip to the South Seas with her brother. In this other space outside the world of the play she has an ambiguous sexual encounter with Avahanni, a South Sea Islander. For both Lavinia and The Woman, the primary means of flight lies in a sexually laden adventure which is complicated by the presence of the other. Their sexual interludes are deeply influenced by the presence of the non-white postcolonial world in the form of Mexico and The South Sea Islands. Both women are irreversibly altered by these sexual encounters. These encounters become the precipitating event that sets the stage for the tragic endings in both plays and seals the fate of both heroines by cutting them off from society. The situation arising from these female protagonists’ desire to undertake a journey to Mexico and the South Seas evokes several crucial concerns of Romantic literature as noted by M. H. Abrams, especially the journey to self-realization, the desire to escape to nature, and the elevation of the social outcast (2000: 9). Each of these concerns could describe both Roe (the object of The Woman’s affections) and Brant (the man most closely aligned with the South Sea), as well as the man who impresses Vinnie at the beginning of Mourning Becomes Electra with his “romantic experience” (902). It is because of these romantic notions created by the world of the play and the characters (especially Roe and Brant who tell stories of their brave exploits in foreign lands) that Vinnie and The Woman hope to escape their current circumstances. However, these notions in the two plays rely heavily on the American society of the 1920s for their meanings. In the manner of Edward Said in Orientalism I will analyze the “dynamic exchange between individual authors and the large political concerns” shaped by the American empire “in whose intellectual and imaginative territory the writing was produced” (1979: 15). By focusing on the relationships of two women with the other in the selected plays, I will discuss how their dramaturgical structures reflect American ideology, with all its prejudices and stereotypes, towards Mexico and the South Seas. My concentration is less on racist and prejudicial attitudes, and more on America’s relationship with Mexico and the South Seas through “detailed work within the very wide space opened up” (1979: 15). Machinal and Mourning were written in the late 1920s, a time of great social and political upheaval, but also a time, at least until the Wall Street Crash of 1929, of economic prosperity in the United States. Two forces dominated the social scene — imperialism and urbanization. American imperialism was evident in the final acts of domestic westward expansion in the late eighteenth century and in the invasions to control the South Seas in the early 1900s. The invasions

5. Becoming Romantic (Hunter)

57

resulted in the acquisition of Guam, the Philippine-American War, the 1917 Pancho Villa Expedition in Latin America (which popularized and mythologized the bandido south of the border), and the invasions of Cuba and Haiti in the Caribbean. The increasing urbanization, as populations migrated from rural areas into cities, created job opportunities. This urbanization was facilitated by the mass production of the automobile and the improvement of city infrastructures. American imperialism and urbanization created a cultural “moment” which was not only an “empirical reality,” but represented a “battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections” (Said 1979: 8). In this “moment” these “desires, repressions, investments, and projections” manifest through literature in the romantic desire for escape to nature, the elevation of the social outcast, and the journey to self-realization. Both plays explore these romantic themes specifically in how they relate to women. Treadwell often employs female leads in her plays, as in An Unwritten Chapter (1915) and Hope for a Harvest (1942). So it does not come as a surprise that a woman is the protagonist in Machinal. The surprise comes from O’Neill’s play because his plays are generally male-centered — except for his later plays that feature strong female roles. Nancy Vunovich notes that out of O’Neill’s fortyfour plays, only ten employ women as principal characters (1966: 7). His midcareer play, Mourning, is atypical because it sets the central agon around two strong females, Lavinia and her mother. In Mourning the central problem on which dramatic action hinges focuses on questions of women’s sexuality and adultery. To better contextualize the central problem, I will begin with a brief summary of the play and then will look at the sea chantey “Oh, Shenandoah,” sung throughout the play, as a male counter-narrative which frames Vinnie’s final punishment as specifically feminine. I will proceed to critique the sexualized space that the South Sea Island occupies in the play and how the term “romantic” as it is used by the characters in the play, comes to represent Vinnie’s tragic journey. The story for O’Neill’s trilogy set during the American Civil War comes from the Greek myth of Orestes. On the eve of the return of her war-hero father Ezra and her shell-shocked brother Orin, Lavinia Mannon discovers that her mother Christine has been having an affair with Adam Brant, a disgraced distant relative. Christine murders Ezra upon his return in order to run away with Brant. In retaliation, Orin kills Brant with Vinnie’s help. Driven to despair, Christine kills herself. In an attempt to forget the past, Lavinia takes guilt-ridden Orin on a journey to the South Seas where she has an ambiguous sexual relationship with Avahanni, a native. This is the last straw for Orin and, after their return to America, he commits suicide. Lavinia, driven to guilt and despair, locks herself up in the Mannon household for the rest of her life in a “worse act of justice than death or prison” (1053). Mourning takes place in seemingly the most stolid of American settings: the mansion of a prominent Protestant family in a small New England town at

58


the end of the Civil War. At the onset of the play, the Mannons are influential, at the top of the American class hierarchy, and in the center of power. Ezra Mannon is a Civil War general and the town mayor. The physical space that the Mannon household occupies on stage represents class and wealth in their austere grandeur. The house is described as having a “white Grecian temple portico with ... six tall columns” (893). All of the characters are white and most of them are upper class. However, a confluence of worries over class, race, and religion surface in the margins of the play. This marginality, which is expressly interlaced with sexual overtones, is perhaps best exemplified in the chantey “Oh, Shenandoah.” The song is sung by Seth, the Mannon’s caretaker, at the beginning and end of nearly every play in the trilogy. It is sung a total of six times, always by Seth, and book-ends each episode with a reminder of the invariably darker world outside the stage, which both tempts and threatens the characters within. “Oh, Shenandoah” is a song that, according to folklore, tells the story of a young, white riverboat sailor who falls in love with the daughter of an Indian chief. The sailor tells the chief of his intent to take the girl with him far to the West, across the Missouri River. The “Shenandoah” of the song refers to the Indian chief himself, not to the Virginia River or its valley. Oh, Shenandoah, I long to hear you A-way, my rolling river Oh, Shenandoah, I can’t get near you Way-ay, I’m bound away Across the wide Missouri [893].

The song establishes within the text a gender specific counter-narrative to Lavinia’s journey — i.e., the counter-narrative of a white man who is betrothed to a non-white woman. This bi-racial story is a sexual fantasy similar to the one played out in the “Pocahontas” story. For the sailor in “Oh, Shenandoah,” the Indian chief ’s daughter signifies a kind of sexual freedom which can only be lived out in the West where the couple will be free of the East’s heavily established mores and presumed condescension towards inter-racial love. He cannot return East with his new-found sexual freedom as embodied in the Chief ’s daughter. It is only “away, across the river” in the West that the freedom can be maintained. The sailor, as a man, has more freedom to go away with the Indian, but even his newly acquired sexual status in relation to the other would not be accepted in the East. Accordingly, he has to leave his society. Similarly, the space of the Mannon household onstage, where nearly all of the play occurs, is too confining for sexual freedom. Lavinia must acquire liberation elsewhere. The Mannon household, a space of power and wealth, is also a space of stifling tradition and death. The song “Oh, Shenandoah” embodies the desire for sexual freedom, the trope of escape, and highlights the stifling envi-


59

ronment of the East. Also, it is a song which “more than any other holds in it the brooding rhythm of the sea” (Walton 1953: 157). In the economy of space presented in Mourning, the sea represents all that the confining Mannon household does not. It becomes the promised exit route for Christine and Brant. For Orin and Vinnie the sea ultimately leads to the off-stage space of The South Sea Islands which instigates their tragic downfall. In South Sea Maidens: Western Fantasy and Sexual Politics in the South Pacific, Michael Struma tracks the construction of the South Sea Maiden as a trope wherein aspirations of sexual freedom and promiscuity were posited. In the public’s mind, the South Seas, an area outside of Christendom, became a romanticized locale where sexual mores were not in place. In this construction, the South Sea Island, filled with dark beauties uninhibited by modern civilization, religion, and morality, becomes a kind of Edenic sexual paradise. Though the study is specifically on South Sea Maidens, Struma holds that “Western women often identify with similar fantasies ... the Pacific created a space of adventure and liberated sexuality for women as well as men” (2002: 2). Moreover, the islands themselves promise an “escape from social pressures. They offer a place for refuge from political despotism, religious persecution, and the processes of urbanization and industrialization. They also promise a freedom from sexual restraint” (2002: 6). O’Neill himself envisioned the islands as illustrative of the Mannon’s “longing for the primitive and mother symbol-yearning for prenatal, noncompetitive freedom from fear” (Gelb 1960: 724). It is by these associations and premises — which come from Brant’s stories and from society in general — that propel Lavinia to go to the islands: ORIN: ... I’ve written about your adventures on my lost islands. Or should I say, Adam Brant’s islands! ... Were you thinking of that when we were there?” [1030]

For Lavinia, the voyage to the South Sea has startling effects. The journey may or may not result in a sexual encounter with Avahanni, as her return to the Mannon household leaves room for ambiguity. The most obvious answer to the question of whether or not Lavinia had actually consumated a relationship with Avahanni is that she did not, even though she was strongly attracted to the islander. Vinnie tells Peter: “I had kissed him goodnight, that was all” (1031); and during the last moments of the play Vinnie tells Orin: LAVINIA: (Suddenly, with a hopeless, dead finality) Always the dead between! It’s no good trying any more! ... (Then suddenly seizing on this as a way out— with calculated coarseness) All right! Yes, if you must know! I won’t lie any more! Orin suspected I’d lusted after him [the native Avahanni]! And I had! ... (watches him go — then with a little desperate cry starts after him): Peter! It’s a lie! I didn’t [1052].

60


Vinnie’s “it’s a lie” would seem to settle the case. However, her saying that “it’s a lie” contradicts earlier stage directions which indicate, along with the allegations of Orin, that she did have a relationship with Avahanni. Multiple stage directions indicate that the relationship was consummated. For example: “One would mistake her for her mother ... she seems a mature woman” (1016); “at the sight of Lavinia [Peter] stops startledly, thinks for a second it is her mother’s ghost” (1019), which both suggest a distinctly sexual transformation that Lavinia has undergone since her trip; Lavinia is “seizing on this as a way out — with calculated coarseness” (1052). This stage direction suggests that Vinnie said she had sex with the Islander only to make Peter abandon her. Her transformation due to her trip to the South Sea points towards the argument that her relationship with the islander was consummated. Her physical transformation is abrupt, swift, and total upon her return. LAVINIA enters ... one is at once aware of an extraordinary change in her. Her body, formerly thin and undeveloped, has filled out. Her movements have lost their square-shouldered stiffness. She now bears a striking resemblance to her mother [1014].

Before her trip she was “underdeveloped” (a term often used to describe a pre-pubescent girl). Now she has “filled out.” Vinnie has undergone an “extraordinary” transformation in the South Seas. Because of her trip to the islands she begins to become like her mother — namely, a sexual being. Like her mother Lavinia is now prone to conniving, convincing, and pleading in order to fulfill her longing for a sexual (or at least romantic) life with Peter. The sheer totality of the transformation that occurs in Vinnie after their return from the island signifies that something truly important must have happened there. Since the only significant act discussed by Orin and Vinnie of what occurred on the island refers to Vinnie consummating her relationship with Avahanni, it is reasonable to consider the possibility. It is Orin’s consideration of this possibility that brings about his mania and connects both he and Vinnie to the tragedy at the end of the play. The mere specter of a sexual relationship with the other is enough to construct her tragic downfall. Lavinia’s transformation because of the trip is drastic and total. Both her body and soul are noted as having transformed from those of an asexual girl to a sexual woman. Her sexual awakening with the “naked,” “Pagan” (1021) Avahanni, represents a depravity for a member of the Mannon clan. Unlike other fallen women in O’Neill canon (such as Anna Christie), Vinnie has fallen, so to speak, for a non-white and a non–Christian. Her sexual encounter therefore renders her made other in a new and inalterable fashion. As such, her fate, unlike Anna’s, is also unalterable in its tragic trajectory. Every character who exhibits sexual feelings towards another character evokes the image of the islands as a sexual overtone. Brant wants to go to the islands with Christine. Christine wants to go to the islands with Brant. And in


61

this narrative rife with incestual longing, Orin wants to go to the islands with Christine. Lavinia wants to “make” her own island with Peter (1024). The only exception to this island-as-metaphor rule of attraction is in Mannon’s lust for his own wife. Mannon, too closely related with the Mannon family past, the house, the land, and thereby the history of the United States itself, could never enter into the problematic sexualized island/other scenario. At the opening of the play, Brant is the character most closely connected to the sexual freedom associated with the islands. Brant is also by far the most sexualized of the male characters in the play. For Brant, and later for Christine, Peter and Lavinia, the islands themselves become a place to posit sexual longing. For much of the play, the islands and the sea that surround them are positioned as in competition with the women of the play for male attention. Brant notes that, “women are jealous of ships. They always suspect the sea” (909). Brant later relates that “I ran away to sea — and forgot I had a mother” (912). Christine, aware of the competitive dialectic constructed by Brant’s dialogue, later contends in an aside, “You’ll never dare leave me now, Adam — for your ships or your sea or your naked Island girls — when I grow old and ugly” (927). Brant is also the character that introduces the term “romantic” to Mourning. The word is first used to describe Brant early in the play in response to Lavinia’s comment that, “He’s sailed all over the world — he lived on a South Sea island once, so he says,” Peter jealously describes Brant having “plenty of romantic experiences, if you can believe him” (902). The term in this context refers to Brant’s history of travel, and specifically the place, the South Sea Island, as romantic. Later Brant discusses the women on the island with Vinnie: LAVINIA: I remember your admiration for the naked native women. You said you had found the secret of happiness because they had never heard that love can be a sin[...]. BRANT : [...] (then romantically) Aye! And they live in as near the Garden of Paradise before sin was discovered as you’ll find on this earth! ... The Blessed Isles, I’d call them! You can forget there all men’s dirty dreams of greed and power. LAVINIA: And their dirty dreams — of love? [910, emphasis mine].

Within the first two uses of the term romantic in Mourning, (i.e., the “romantic experiences” line and the stage direction where Brant “romantically” describes the natives of the island), there is a dialectic constructed between the meanings of the term. The word can refer to both an exotic locale and a romance in a sexual way. Thus the site of exoticism is conflated with the possibility of a sexual connection. As both of these contexts are used to describe Brant, it can be assumed that Brant has experienced both the locale and the connection. It is generally assumed by both Christine and Lavinia that Brant has not only visited the islands, but he has engaged in sexual activities in that space as well, and that

62


the naked island girls are “his” (927). Thus, the line that states that after her trip to the South Seas, Lavinia, too, “has become romantic,” opens up the possibility that a transformation has taken place within Vinnie which not only makes her more like her mother but also more like Brant as well. Vinnie’s tragic trajectory, thus, is a journey of becoming romantic. Near the end of the play, once she has been influenced by the islands, she, too, wants to create her own island with Peter. Once she has come to replace the sexual status of her mother, she sounds far more like Brant than she does herself (being that they are both tied up in sexual longing which is depicted as a desire for the island). She tells Peter, I loved those Islands. They finished setting me free. There was something there mysterious and beautiful ... the native dancing naked and innocent — without knowledge of sin! ... We’ll be married soon, won’t we, and settle out in the country away from folks and their evil talk. We’ll make an island for ourselves on land [1052].

Lavinia notes that the islands themselves have “finished setting (her) free.” She has managed to momentarily evade the stiff expectations and mores of the stifling milieu of the Mannon household. Ironically, it is Lavinia being set free through a relationship with an outsider that ultimately bounds her to the confining space of the Mannon household. Her punishment then, is not only for the death of Christine, as Orin believes, but also for her foray outside the social constraints of her own class, race, and religion. The tragic trajectory of Lavinia, complicated by her sexual position towards the other, is startlingly similar to that of Helen Jones (or The Woman) in Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal. In Machinal, The Woman, like Lavinia in Mourning, searches for a way out of the machine-like world in which she lives. The play is written in an expressionist fashion where sounds, lights and dialogue take on an exaggerated style that evokes rigid mechanization, suggesting that the rigors of daily life have become more like an assembly line. The Woman’s inward reality of stifling conformity and the lack of choices available to her result in intense feelings of isolation and confinement. These feelings are expressed through sights, sounds, and dialogue. The plot unfolds in nine “episodes” which depict the lack of opportunities available to women in America during the 1920s. While the style is avant-guard, the plot is relatively traditional. The Woman (Helen Jones), arriving late to work, is brought into her boss George Jones’ office where he proposes to her instead of chastising her. Distraught at the idea of marrying someone she does not love but seeing little choice in the matter, she confides in her mother, who ridicules her for her inability to follow social expectations. Not knowing what to do, The Woman marries her employer, and submits to having intercourse with him on their honeymoon. She suffers a nervous breakdown at the birth of their child, and is shown to be estranged from the baby.


63

Deciding finally to “not submit” (206) anymore, she goes to a speakeasy with a colleague, where she meets the romantic journeyman Richard Roe who tells her about his adventures in Mexico, where he killed two men. Roe in turn seduces The Woman, whereupon she finds it nearly impossible to return to the stifling environment of her unhappy marriage. In a fit of desperation, she kills her husband in the same method that Roe used to kill the Mexican men. In the last two episodes, The Woman is held in trial where she ultimately admits to killing her husband, a crime for which she is given the death penalty. The Woman appears ready to face her death, but at the last minute, a barber is sent in to shave her head. At this last indignity, The Woman finally breaks down, realizing that even on the way to her own death, she will never “be let alone” (251) to do as she chooses. Each of the opening episodes depicts the expressionist manifestation of the machine into which she is locked. She finds no respite in each of the traditional social roles of interrelations — the worker, the mother, the spouse, and the child. Each social role only serves to intensify her loneliness. The journey of the play is a search for release from the social machinations that entrap women. The resulting freedom from this journey is ultimately only found in a sexual encounter with Richard Roe, a man whose social position is closely connected to the subaltern space of Indian country in Mexico. After the dehumanizing experiences of the opening episodes, The Woman’s last desperate attempt for freedom lands her at a pick-up bar with the Telephone Girl, a woman who is “young, cheap, and amorous” (177). Their intention is to meet two men. The Telephone Girl knows the premise of this meeting, and quickly flees the scene with the first man, presumably to a hotel or rented flat. The Woman, on the other hand, needs some cajoling, but is ultimately convinced to go with the second man (Richard) to his apartment for sex. It is Roe’s connection to the other that draws Helen to him. Roe is just in from Mexico, and, like Brant with his stories of the islands, he is an outsider who has left behind the city to return to nature. In short, he is another romantic figure, filled with tales of his adventures below the Rio Grande. The other man at the bar with him boasts of Roe’s sexual prowess among women: “they all fall for you — even my wife likes you — tries to kid herself that it’s your brave exploits, but I know what it is” (209). According to the other man, it is not the “brave exploits” that make women fall for Roe. To explore “what it is” that attracts women to Roe, it may be beneficial to look at another moment when Roe’s sexual prowess is best exemplified. After The Woman has consummated her relationship with Roe, she admits that she went home with him because he said she “looked like an angel.” In this moment, however, it becomes evident that Roe’s socialization is not a product of an American setting, but is instead a manifestation created by his long tenure in the non-white world. Roe contends, “Jeez, honey, all women look like angels to me — all white women. I ain’t been seeing nothing but Indians, you know, for the last couple a years” (222).

64


Roe’s ability to attract a white woman is entirely vested in his life in Mexico and his experience with non-white women. Though Roe’s ability to perform romantically (to tell of his “exploits”) is attractive to women, what “it” is that truly attracts Helen to Roe is his disclosure of his own perceptions, which were formed in a marginalized space. The language by which he seduces her is entirely predicated upon his experience in a subaltern space. To Roe, the experience of racial identification in regard to sexual attraction has been reversed. All white women, who supposedly belong to the social group which he is part of, now occupy the space of the other — they have all become the same, indistinguishable from each other, all “angels.” And so, what “it” is is not Roe’s “exploits” alone. It is not the fact that he has merely gone out into the world of the other, but the fact that his perceptions have rendered himself othered. Through this other, Helen can vicariously experience the freedom she so desires. She conflates Roe’s romantic journey of adventure with her own romantic yearning for sensual freedom. When Roe speaks of horseback riding on the Sierras in the West as a child, he asks The Woman, “You ever been off like that, kid?— High up? On top of the world?” “Yes,” she answers, “today” (225). The high that she feels is not that of being on top of the world in a space outside the confines of metropolitan female existence, but through her sexual experience with Roe. The West occupies a special place in the story of Machinal as well as the historical meta-narrative of American history. Traditionally, the West was a place where the white man could find land — often at the expense of the native Indians, who were either displaced or killed. As the territory of the white man expanded, the Indian’s domain was deterritorialized. As is often the case in a postcolonial study, our reading of Machinal, and here in the American West (and later Mexico) specifically, rests on the gray space between systems, which renders both parties somehow changed. The idea of the West in American popular myth has long since afforded a possibility of redemption. “From time immemorial the West has beckoned to statesman and poets, existing as both a direction and a place, an imperialist theme and a pastoral Utopia. Great empires developed ever westward (Kitses 1969: 57). In the West, the conquest of the land and the ability to occupy the land necessitated taking the place of where Indians lived. Those Indians who were not killed directly at the hands of the white man, or were not moved to reservations, were slowly killed off from centuries of disease introduced by Europeans and decades of famine brought on by new competition for resources. Soon, only the white settler was left. In this sense, the white settler would become the Indian, occupying his space, and hopefully claiming the freedom that the Indian enjoyed — freedom from the stratified culture and social constraints of the East, as well as a new found closeness with nature. This is the classic subject of American sublimity: the frisson of experiencing the unknown (whether in terms of the frontier or the other) is that which is


65

the context for so much of American literature from Last of the Mohicans, to Moby Dick, to Huck Finn. However, in these classic literary examples it appears that the male characters have the ability to truly experience the horror of the sublime in a Burkian sense: they can return from their journey (Gross 1995: 229). Their flight into the unknown yields a safe way to come back to the fold, broadened by the experience. For females who experience the journey to the unknown, there is no coming back, as they are ultimately punished for their attempt at escape. The closing of the frontier in the late 1800s left little recourse in popular imagination for a continuing narrative of flight in the West. Therefore, new frontiers had to be explored. As the West was no longer an option for freedom, the South became a new space for conquest — both real and imaginary. In Machinal, the same economy of space and identity plays out as in the American West. Roe is quintessentially a character marginalized by the closing of the American West. He was born in San Francisco, a city at the western terminus of the continental United States. He romanticizes his past, which was filled with memories of horses, hills, mountains and open air. The possibility of sexual freedom is interlaced within this space as well, THE MAN: Just ride — over the hills.... At night, we’d make a little fire and eat — and then roll up in the old blanket and — THE WOMAN: Who? Who was with you? THE MAN: ...Anybody. [1928: 224].

Yet as the traditional western frontier becomes comes to a close, Roe is forced to find other lines of flight in order to “live free.” To continue his adventure, as only a man in these plays can truly and unequivocally do, he must journey south of the border to Mexico, where he now can live free. Once in Mexico, Roe finds himself placed in captivity at the hands of the other. As he would have been to the Indians of the American West, Roe represents a threat to his Mexican captors. Though a prisoner, we can only assume that Roe enjoys a certain position of privilege in Mexico by the mere fact that he is white. As an outside representative of not only a dominating race but a dominating country as well, Roe may often present himself as a menace down South. There, Roe kills his captors in order to “get free.” By killing the Mexicans, Roe can freely occupy their physical space and their metaphysical place of freedom — both sexual and social. In this sense, he takes the place of the Mexicans in their marginalized space outside of the mores of American hegemony. He becomes the Mexicans by destroying their presence, and gains his freedom at their loss of freedom. The same economy of space and the same metaphysical question of being, which take place in the earlier American West, have now taken cycle below the Rio Grande. As the court attorney later points out, Roe is a “resident of the Republic of Mexico” (247) Even in this civic context, Roe is outside the jurispru-

66


dence of American law, just as he is outside of any kind of American system of class and social constraint. If Roe occupies the space of the other, and he sees Helen is an “angel,” then he would see Lavinia, as a white woman, as an angel as well. If they are both angels, then they are both fallen angels. In this light, it seems certain that the specter of religious credence casts a shadow across these characters. The quest to regain the simple freedoms of paradise is as old as the Bible itself. In Machinal and Mourning, the sexual subaltern unseen beings, both the Indian and the Islander are non–Christian, and thus other by race, class, and finally, by religion. STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK, STONY BROOK

References Cited Abrams, Meyer Howard. “Introduction.” In The Norton Antholog y of English Literature: Seventh Edition, Volume 2A, The Romantic Period. New York: W.W. Norton, 1962. Gelb, Arthur and Barbara. O’Neill. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960. Gross, Robert F. “Consuming Hart: Sublimity and Gay Poetics in Suddenly Last Summer.” Theatre Journal 47.2 (May 1995): 229–251. Kitses, Jim. “Authorship and Genres: Notes on the Western.” The Western Reader. New York: Limelight, 1969. O’Neill, Eugene. Complete Plays of Eugene O’Neill, Volume II: Complete Plays 1920–1931. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1988. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. Sturma, Michael. South Sea Maidens: Western Fantasy and Sexual Politics in the South Sea. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002. Treadwell, Sophie. Machinal. In Plays by American Women: 1900–1930. Edited by Judith Barlow. New York: Applause, 1985. Vunovich, Nancy. The Women in the Plays of Eugene O’Neill. Dissertation, University of Kansas, 1966. Walton, Ivan H. “Eugene O’Neill and the Folklore and Folkways of the Sea.” Western Folklore 14. 3 ( July 1955): 153–169.

6 “To Be, Or to Be Recorded” The Burton Hamlet, the Wooster Group, and the Miracle of Electronovision Lindsay Brandon Hunter Abstract On three successive evenings, seventeen cameras recorded the 1964 Broadway production of Hamlet starring Richard Burton. The edited version of the performance was shown in more than 1,000 movie houses across the country on two nights only, billed as a new form: Theatrofilm, presented via Electronovision. Though the video record of the performance was to have been destroyed after the showings, a copy was found among Burton’s possessions after his death, and it is now widely available on DVD. My paper investigates the recorded Burton/Gielgud Hamlet as a complex site of performance, one that productively disturbs the conventional binary that opposes the live and the mediated. In my investigation I discuss live and mediatized performance; I also discuss the Wooster Group’s current use of the recorded Burton Hamlet in their Hamlet production, and how their deconstruction of Burton Hamlet complicates the notion of an absolute liveness as essential to theatrical performance.

There is more to the discussion of liveness — its boundaries, its value, its implications — than debates regarding the ontological status of performance. High political stakes are involved when durable records stashed safely in the archive determine which previously “live” performances are studied, which artists are funded, and which voices are remembered. In an era in which much of the public engages almost reflexively in documenting the present moment — via cell phone cameras and live blogging feeds — something like “pure” liveness, or the absolute exclusion of media, is increasingly difficult to imagine. The act of recording does not in itself eviscerate live performance; increasingly as performers of all stripes integrate media into their work the boundaries between live and mediated or mediatized1 performance becomes, or is revealed as, blurry and porous. What Matthew Causey calls “the maniacally regenerating 67

68


now of performance” is not distinct from “the reproducible flow of the televisual,” but increasingly finds itself in conversation with it, colluding and colliding in sites of performance which cannot be wholly accounted for when live and mediatized are opposed as distinct and mutually exclusive categories (2006: 6). This paper is an investigation into that porous boundary. Using the recording of Richard Burton’s stage Hamlet and the Wooster Group’s use of that same recording as sites of analysis, I investigate what transpires when liveness is dismantled, fractured, or made partial. Conceding that liveness can function as one among multiple, perhaps contradictory qualities, rather than an ontological sentence that precludes the introduction of media, may be a first step towards the fruitful consideration of options other than the neo–Shakespearean “to record, or not to record.” To assert that records of the live, regardless of their strategy, can never be the thing itself is to echo a truism, but it is also true that there are varying approaches to the practical dilemma of expanding the reach of the live act. The goal of records of the live — ephemera, para-products, and recordings of varying durabilities — might seem to be longevity, even immortality, but increasing the compass of a live performance can be as much about dissemination as preservation. Technologies and practices like web simulcasts, “live” television broadcasts of sporting events, or amplifiers used in large performance venues (to project a live experience into the cheap seats) all share the performance experience across space. When we speak of the presence of the media in the putative domain of the live, the end effect may be the dissemination of a transitory experience that, though mediated, does not result in a permanently accessible archival record. Or, sometimes, it can be something of both. In a particularly interesting experiment, seventeen cameras recorded the Broadway production of Hamlet starring Richard Burton and directed by John Gielgud on three successive evenings in late June and early July of 1964 (Sterne 1967: 27). The edited version of the performance was shown in at least a thousand movie houses across the country on two nights only, billed as a new form: Theatrofilm, delivered through “the miracle of Electronovision” (Trailer, Richard Burton’s Hamlet 1995). Though the video record of the performance was to have been destroyed after the showings, a copy was found among Burton’s possessions after his death, and it is now widely available on DVD. The makers of the new Theatrofilm didn’t necessarily intend to document the live performance for the archive — the advertised intention to destroy the film after its run reads as an attempt to coerce the evanescence we associate with theatrical performance, as if to claim for this product something of the unique ontology Peggy Phelan ascribes to live performance even as it prominently displayed its status as other-than-live. This move to create a film recording as an evanescent object is something of an inversion of what we might think of as the commonly articulated aims of documentation: to preserve, to render the vanishing live eminently repeatable. Rather than to leave this Hamlet behind for the

6. “To Be, Or to Be Recorded” (Hunter)

69

archive, the aim of the Electronovision experiment was to spread a specifically theatrical experience — a Broadway experience — outside the confines of New York, and potentially outside the social and economic borders of the theatregoing class. The producers attempted to secure the name of theatre for this film recording by providing for (and publicizing) its incipient destruction, attempting to manage the disappearance through which Phelan argues performance becomes itself (1993: 146). By way of contrast, consider that Ian McKellen’s acclaimed 1992 production of Richard III was similarly recorded live during a public performance in the Littleton Theatre on May 26 of that year, “as part of the British Museum’s experiment in saving plays for the future” (McKellen 1996: 7). In this case, preservation was the explicit objective, and McKellen took pains to ensure that the viewing of the recorded version was neither widely available nor a theatrical experience: It was agreed that the three separate videotapes [taken simultaneously from three different camera angles during the same performance] would never be edited and could only ever be viewed simultaneously by a visitor to the Museum in Covent Garden. The adjacent screens show the full stage, the principals in each scene, and a close-up of whoever is speaking, so that the viewer, rather like a theatre audience, can “edit” the production, by switching attention between the three images. This triple record may be adequate for academic study, visually augmenting the stage-manager’s prompt-book that tabulates the actors’ moves. It does not, unfortunately, capture much of the impact of the original occasion [1996: 7–8].

Here again contractual agreements limit how and when the product can be viewed, and here again care is taken to ensure the record is read according to the desires of the producers — in this case, not as theatre, but expressly as documentation. It was built for the archive, not for popular enjoyment, and accessible only through the British Museum. McKellen also produced a film adaptation of his Richard III, the existence of which is perhaps the clearest indication that he did not consider the three-camera recording to carry the artistic aura of the stage production. In the McKellen example, there is nothing approaching “Theatrofilm,” only a strict documentary project, followed by a separate adaptation into a fully cinematic medium. While McKellen seems to have taken pains to render the recording of his theatre piece anti-theatrical, making no effort to safeguard its status as theatre, the Burton Hamlet Electronovision experiment is presented to the public as near live, live-in-quotes — the trailer for the cinematic release actually refers to it as a “‘Live’ Broadway Play” and heralds it as “the theatre of the future.” This assertion of the theatricality of the Electronovision experience was not based solely on an enforced evanescence of the product. Burton, speaking as

70


both an actor and a producer, was adamant that the “Theatrofilm” product could be read as theatre because it was recorded “live”: INTERVIEWER: Will we get the immediacy of the live Broadway production of Hamlet when this is translated onto Theatrofilm with Electronovision? BURTON: I think you will. I think you will because the nervousness of the actors — knowing that they can’t go back on it, that this is it for all time, unlike, shall we say, in films where you can if you make a mistake go back and do it again. I think the particular intensity and nerves of this is probably the same kind of thing that excites a real live audience in the real live theatre [1995 Interview in Richard Burton’s Hamlet].

While Burton is adamant that the presentation is theatrical insofar as the actors have made no concession to the cameras, and because they cannot, in his words, “go back on it,” the truth is that three stage performances were recorded in order to produce the film. The film, while not particularly cinematic, has been edited — there are zooms and cuts — and it includes, in addition to close-up shots, at least one camera angle that represents a point of view unavailable to the audience.2 The Burton Hamlet, perhaps as befits a hybrid product with a name like Theatrofilm, makes a claim on theatricality while disposing of some of its more troublesome aspects. Significant, too, is Burton’s emphasis, in the above interview, of peril as constitutive of live performance. Leaving aside for a moment the extent to which the actors’ situation was actually comparable to the strictures of live theatre, it is interesting that Burton (or whoever wrote his copy) locates liveness in this idea of danger, that “this is it, for all time.” This locution itself is an interesting slippage; by invoking eternity, Burton uses as leverage the idea that the record produced will be somehow durable. The record of the performance did in fact persist, but was not necessarily meant to; when you consider the professed plan to burn all prints of the Electronovision recording, to what exactly Burton’s “for all time” refers becomes an interesting question. Perhaps he refers to the memory of a nation, to reputation — the less photographic records left behind after the fleeting performance, as Phelan puts it, “disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious” (1993: 148). Or perhaps no formal decision had been reached regarding the disposition of the recording after the nation-wide showing: in an interview, when questioned about the “flight plan” of the Electronovision experiment, Burton mentions the public showings, and then rather uncertainly adds that afterwards the film “will never, possibly, be shown again” (emphasis added, 1995 Richard Burton’s Hamlet). Burton emphasizes the risk involved in live performance by pointing out that the Theatrofilm version of the play will be subject to the same rules of


71

chance and tests of skill as any individual live performance, in which the actors will be revealed as “adept or inadequate or good or fluffing or being articulate, just as they would if you went to see a production tonight at the Lunt-Fontanne theatre.” Here, liveness is roughly equated with vulnerability to failure, the singular nature of the performance moment becoming significant because there is no opportunity to repeat it should it misfire. It seems possible, as noted earlier, that plans to destroy prints of the film were uncertain, and so without enforced evanescence to safeguard the theatrical nature of the product, emphasis was placed all the more heavily on the “live” nature of the recording. However, it seems also likely that this excitement regarding the potential for disasters big and small registers as like live theatre because it is where much of the liveness of conventional American commercial theatre lies. In Liveness, Philip Auslander interrogates Noel Carroll’s argument that individual instances of theatre “count” as works of art in a way that individual showings of a film do not because film provides a direct template from which the spectacle can issue repeatedly without variance, and theatrical work involves the interpretation of a text at each showing. While it takes no particular interpretive skill to be a projectionist, Auslander understands Carroll to mean, “it takes artistry and imagination to embody an interpretation” (Carroll quoted in Auslander 1999: 49). On the surface, Carroll’s argument seems hard to refute, but it occasions some investigation into where, exactly, interpretation occurs, particularly in the lavish and intricately planned productions that inhabit Broadway stages. Without foreclosing the possibility of spontaneity on a small scale, or of growth over the course of a show’s run, it seems sensible to point out that long or intensive rehearsal periods and out-of-town try-outs (both of which the Burton Hamlet went through) are meant to cohere the production into a satisfying and consistent whole; by the opening of a run a show’s timing, mood, tone, stage picture, and movement (not to mention such concrete objects as costumes and properties) have usually been set, and are often militantly protected from detectable variation by a stage manager. The interpretive choices which define the tone and arc of the play have been made, and deviation from them usually indicates not the appearance of a new and original interpretation, but an error. Under the standard regime, what is allowed to actors in the moment of performance is the nuance involved in manifesting an already-conceived plan of action. In a newspaper interview, Burton describes one such occasion: Let a footnote be added [to Hamlet scholarship], courtesy of Mr. Burton, to say how the man up on the stage can tell which kind of “Hamlet” each audience wants, since the audience, too, is an active member of the cast. Not too far into the play there is a speech by Hamlet which can be greeted with “a rustle approaching a slight giggle.” This comes from an audience which wishes to be amused, and the play may last perhaps three minutes longer as the audience appreciates the jokes. If there is silence, it is “an older house, interested in the

72

Text & Presentation, 2008 language.” The words —“Thrift, thrift, Horatio! The funeral bak’d-meats/Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables” [Nichols 1964: X1].

By the end of a standard rehearsal process (during which the actor may certainly be an important player in the task of interpretation), this is the sort of tiny shift available to those who accomplish an individual performance of a play: a slight giggle, a matter of three minutes over the course of a three-hour evening.3 I do not argue that actors are not part of the work of interpretation, but rather that performance is not always where such work most meaningfully happens. Especially within the commercial theatre, actors’ in-performance labor is not best described as autonomous interpretation. Both films and conventional theatre performances are iterative propositions, though the performance on film is usually iterated more precisely. When headed to a Broadway theatre to see a play, the chance that the rehearsed interpretation will be spontaneously adjusted to a noticeable degree is arguably less likely than the possibility that a fencing foil will land in the audience, or an actor go up on her lines. Burton’s emphasis on risk is therefore understandable: in a very real way, this is where the excitement of the live lives on Broadway, in the chance that something will go horribly wrong. I do not mean to belittle the excitement that accompanies the knowledge that at any point, a live performance can derail; it is no small thrill. I mean to point out, however, that while the vagaries of human response and audience reaction mean that no two iterations of a play are ever exactly the same, surely — at least in the context of commercial theatre — they are far more similar than they are different. The run of a theatrical production is a chance for a standardized product to be distributed to multiple audiences across many weeks, not unlike the run of a film in a cinema. In fact, it is possible to consider the wide release of the Electronovision “movie” functionally similar to the time-honored theatrical practice of extending the run of a live show — one need only substitute geography for temporality: rather than making the run longer, the producers made it wider.4 Peggy Phelan, in arguing for “performance’s independence from mass reproduction” describes it as “honor[ing] the idea that a limited number of people in a specific time/space frame can have an experience of value that leaves no visible trace afterward” (1993: 149). Not only is it unclear in what meaningful way Broadway resists the economy of reproduction, but had the destruction of the film prints been absolute, the Electronovision recording itself would have met Phelan’s own criteria. A “limited number of people” can still be a large number of cinema-goers, and the United States nights on of September 25th and 26th is arguably a specific time and space. The idea of a recording as evanescent is an interesting inversion of conventional thinking; it is difficult to argue with a notion of recording devices as reproductive technologies. As Sean Cubitt puts it, however, a medium for recording (he refers specifically to video) “is also a medium for erasing” (1993: 147).


73

The uses of reproductive technologies are varied and not absolute; as Auslander writes, film and video are not ontologically required to deliver repeated access to a once-live performance. Rather, if they provide such experiences, it is due to “an historically contingent effect of their culturally determined uses” (1999: 45). He points out that audiences’ experience of films were at one time remarkably similar to their experience of theatre: movies were perishable, usually seen once before they moved out of circulation and remained, though perhaps extant, inaccessible. Cubitt, too, avers that video need not provide a repeatable experience; the “possibility of repetition is only a possibility” (1991: 2–3). Significantly, then, this diversity across time of popular conceptions of movies — as fleeting experiences or everlasting documents — is not due to any material evolution in the medium itself, but rather changes to the way we employ it. The Electronovision Hamlet, while leveraging ideas that resonate with Phelan, actually bears out arguments made by Auslander and Cubitt: that film and video can “provide an experience of evanescence” (1999: 47). Or at least, in this case, could have. The Electronovision recording has been, at various times over the last three-and-a-fraction decades, publicly available, extant but practically inaccessible, recovered, and, finally, publicly available again, this time on a massive and probably enduring scale — all without any change to the intrinsic properties of video itself. The Wooster Group’s recent treatment of the Electronovision Hamlet seems sure to be a “culturally determined use” unanticipated by the film’s creators. In this production the recorded Burton Hamlet, which loses some of its arguments for liveness by the fact of its continued existence — its failure to have disappeared — is re-enlivened through the Wooster Group’s performance. Taking the recording as their jumping off point, the group performs a deconstruction of that record that the critic Jane Kramer called “a virtual downloading of the film” (2007: 3). In the loosest terms, the performance is based around a re-creation of a filmed record of the stage play: video from the recording is projected against a large upstage screen, and the few set elements that appear in the recorded stage production are echoed on the Wooster Group’s stage: a platform, a table, a chair. At times, the mimicry is impressive (the mastery with which the actors, particularly Scott Shepherd as Hamlet, re-create line readings and gestures), at times it is amusing, almost tongue-in-cheek (as when the actors trundle the table and chair closer together, then further apart in an effort to match the stage furniture’s placement to zooming or widening camera shots), and at times it falls away altogether (there are musical breaks where the performer playing Laertes, Casey Spooner of the music and performance group Fischerspooner, delivers some of his lines in electro-pop song; the lead player’s Priam speech is dispatched by a projected recording of Charlton Heston’s performance in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet film). Not only does the group display inconsistent and contradictory efforts towards imitation of the source video, that video itself has been overtly manip-

74


ulated. They have mangled the template: human figures have been erased from the video, in full or in part; the tape has been altered in places to affect the meter of the lines, resulting in stutters and pauses; and at times the video is fast forwarded, interrupted by snippets of video from other sources, or removed from the screen altogether, resulting in a somewhat alarming blue screen reading, “no signal.” The Wooster Group has shaped and impinged on the video record left by Burton and company, has bent it according to their own desires before embarking on the task of (sort of ) re-creating it. The result is a self-consciously deformed and interrupted version of Burton and Gielgud’s Hamlet, one which might not warrant the title “version” at all. Matthew Causey writes that when live actors perform alongside recorded actors displayed via video, “Priority, aura and authenticity are left tilted and skewed in the configuration of human subject in, around, outside and between the technological interventions of video” (2006: 38). Authenticity, particularly, becomes sticky in the Wooster Group production — and not only because any search for an ultimate, “original” work is likely to be frustrated by the genealogy that brings this iteration of the play to The Public Theatre’s stage. The live performance’s inclusion of the performer contained within the televisual screen makes subjecthood difficult to assign or locate. On a practical level, too, when we watch Shepherd doing Burton doing Hamlet, notions of truth, volition and mimetic performance get tangled. To the extent that he mimics Burton, recreates with precision his voice and gestures, Shepherd is making a copy of a fairly conventional mimetic theatrical performance, in which the outward signs of heightened emotion are taken as an expression of internal motivation. Shepherd mimicking Burton, however, is not logically the expression of an internal motivating force; it is closer to a functional task, a piece of unmatrixed performing, one that involves matching exteriors rather than giving expression to an interior. However, the more successful the imitation, the easier the imitative task can be received as the very thing it copies: “authentic” acting; matrixed performance. After observing the performance for a while, one becomes unsure whether Shepherd’s compelling, driven performance is better characterized as “acting,” as we perhaps think of it more traditionally, or as an almost mechanical, if technically masterful, reproduction — a confusion that further gives the lie to the idea that conventional acting is necessarily interpretive work. It probably goes without saying that the production seems designed to give the lie to any assumption that live and mediatized performance are mutually exclusive, but by making a game of mimesis, the production fundamentally subverts — perhaps perverts — the proposition of copy-making. Not only do embodied actors mimic projected film actors; their voices are amplified with microphones and mixed with the recorded vocals in varying concentrations, so that it becomes impossible to discern what part or percentage of the vocal sound received by the audience is live and what recorded. The way the production plays at replicating, sometimes with impressive technique and sometimes laughably,


75

the filmed stage action on a “live” stage questions our most basic assumptions about liveness, begging the question of how we characterize performance when an organic, corporeal body attempts a mimetic task with, broadly speaking, accuracy arguably similar to that of a crude camera. A work that continually demonstrates that mimesis is a function of both live and mediatized performance — that live performers can (and do) do the work of reproduction — is a powerful vehicle for de-stabilizing the opposition between the two. Of course, the Wooster Group’s performance is not solely or even consistently mimetic. The Group is deconstructing the Burton Hamlet, providing a misreading that is an intriguing reading in its own right. While Burton goes on record arguing for the authenticity of the Electronovision Hamlet as theatre, saying that it reflects the Broadway production “exactly as is ... with no cheating of any kind,” the Wooster Group’s appropriation of the recordings pretends to no authenticity, claiming neither to be a perfect record of what is past nor a wholly original work (1995 Interview, Richard Burton’s Hamlet). One might say that the cheating Burton forswears becomes the new rule, here — a sentiment that is wryly illustrated by a particular moment from the performance: Gertrude and Ophelia are both played by Kate Valk, in different costumes and in different voices and manners, and at one point, as the company approaches a portion of a scene in which Gertrude and Ophelia appear on stage simultaneously, Scott Shepard murmurs, “Uh-oh. We’d better skip this part,” and motions for the technicians to fast forward through the awkward bit. They do, and the audience laughs. While the Electronovision Hamlet professes to be the genuine article despite the cameras, the Wooster Group piece exposes authenticity as something of a canard. The Wooster Group’s work here is a self-consciously flawed, purposefully incomplete copy that points to all copies as flawed and partial. Despite the “Theatrofilm” moniker, and despite being heralded in its own trailer as “the theatre of the future,” the Electronovision Hamlet turns out to be less a radical hybrid of stage and cinema than just another attempt at preserving the live, an effort to master the ephemerality of theatrical performance long enough to distribute it to a national audience while still maintaining a distinction between itself and film. Bosley Crowther’s New York Times review of the Electronovision product called it “a mere mechanical transmission”: Despite all the technical mystification about the Electronovision production of Richard Burton’s “Hamlet” ... there is nothing mysterious about it. It is a straight black-and-white photographed recording of the Shakespeare play.... The fact that it was done with small electronic cameras that fed their impulses by cable to a standard motion picture camera set up in a truck outside the theatre does not alter the ultimate consequence. What they got was a motion picture of a play on the stage [1964: 46].

Electronovision failed to revolutionize. In fact, the audio recording of the play made at Columbia Studios, for which no claims of liveness were made, was

76


reviewed more positively by the same paper in terms of its ability to carry the aura of the original stage work (Lask 1964: X19). Crowther, while tepid about the aesthetic value of the recorded play, does express regret regarding the planned destruction of the record. If it does not satisfy as a cinematic work nor qualify as theatre — and similar complaints as were made of the telecast of the Central Park production of Hamlet in June of the same year, suggesting that Electronovision was no more successful at the paradoxical task of preserving the theatrical than any other technology — it does “constitute a record that would be useful to libraries and schools” (1964: 46). In other words, its putative “liveness” may be the least of its qualities. The changeable cultural and historical contexts of which Auslander writes currently feature an undependable real, the ubiquity of fractured subjectivity, and a relationship with technologies of reproduction that is still — as it ever was — by turns celebratory and suspicious. “Live” events that are amplified by microphones, simulcast across the web, or repeated verbatim at the same time tomorrow night have a tenuous grasp on ontological purity, and wobble when set up as original, unreproducible, unmediated performances. Rather than ask whether an event qualifies as live — which assumes an agreement on definition and criteria that may itself be hard to come by — I would rather examine performance for the extent to which it is live, for what claims it makes on liveness and by what strategy; for what qualities or results its degree of liveness makes possible. There may well be more value in pondering liveness than assigning it. Just as Auslander’s argument holds that the notion of the live was constituted by the advent of media, the advent of so many media-heavy performance practices requires an understanding of liveness not as an inviolable, totalizing category but a characteristic that may be thickly or thinly applied, partially achieved, or productively gestured toward. If performances themselves are, increasingly, incompletely live, if they have already been touched by media, and if we can conceive of that touch as something other than a necessarily sullying intervention, perhaps “record or be silenced” no longer adequately represents all options on the table. As liveness in the context of performance is acknowledged as an imperfect state, we would do well to look to the archive in order to claim something of the same complexity for our efforts at documentation: not necessarily lesser, though never identical; not necessarily a practice that precludes or obliterates liveness, though always one that meaningfully — occasionally even productively — distorts it. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES

Notes 1. I follow the distinction Auslander makes between the two terms: mediated performance involves the use of media, as in amplification, while mediatized performance specifically makes use of reproductive technology — video or audio tape, for example (52).


77

2. As most of the company exits via a set of stairs upstage left at the end of the players’ scene, a reverse camera angle shows them from the perspective of someone standing more or less upstage and facing the audience. 3. It bears mentioning that Burton — a famously uninhibited stage actor — would almost certainly have disagreed with me, and did not himself perform as a model of consistency in this production. In an interview he describes certain motivations and even stage business changing from night to night in the production, though he professes not to know what spurs his choices. When asked why he plays a given scene sadly in some performances and “other nights intensely angered,” he answers: “That I don’t know. And that I’ve never been able to know about my acting on the stage. I never preplan any variation on anything I do — it just occurs” (Sterne 286). 4. And not only in terms of geography: the Electronovision version of the work was available not only to those unable to get to New York, but to those for whom the Broadway experience was inaccessible. The four showings of the film in New York metropolitan area cinemas sold at roughly fifty percent of capacity, and grossed $380,000 (“Filmed Hamlet”).

References Cited Auslander, Philip. Liveness New York: Routledge, 1999. Causey, Matthew. Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. Crowther, Bosley. “Electronic Cameras Record Play.” New York Times 24 September 1964: p. 46. ProQuest. UCLA Library, Los Angeles, CA. 17 November 2007 . Cubitt, Sean. “The Discontinuity Announcer.” Timeshift: On Video Culture. London: Routledge, 1991, 1–20. _____. Videography. “Magnetic Memories: Truth, Power and Representation.” New York: St. Martin’s, 1993, 133–151. “Filmed ‘Hamlet’ Gets Costly Push.” New York Times 19 September 1964: p. 19. ProQuest. UCLA Library, Los Angeles, CA. 17 November 2007 . Hamlet. By The Wooster Group. Dir. Elizabeth LeCompte. Perf. Dominique Bousquet, Ari Fliakos, Alessandro Magania, Daniel Pettrow, Bill Raymond, Scott Shepherd, Casey Spooner, Kate Valk, Judson Williams. The Public Theatre, New York. 11 November 2007. Kramer, Jane. “Experimental Journey.” Newyorker.com 8 October 2007. 1 December 2007 . Lask, Thomas. “Burton’s Hamlet.” New York Times 7 June 1964: p. x19. ProQuest, UCLA Library, Los Angeles, CA. 17 November 2007 . McKellen, Ian. William Shakespeare’s Richard III: A Screenplay. New York: Overlook, 1996. Nichols, Lewis. “This Burton, This Hamlet.” New York Times 5 April 1964: p. x1. ProQuest, UCLA Library, Los Angeles, CA. 17 November 2007 . Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge, 1993. Richard Burton’s Hamlet. Directed by John Gielgud. Cast: Richard Burton, Hume Cronyn, Eileen Herlie, Linda Marsh, and John Cullum. Image Entertainment (Atlantic Programmes, 1964) DVD, 1995. Sterne, Richard. John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton in Hamlet: A Journal of Rehearsals. New York: Random House, 1967.

7 “Is This a Dagger I See Before Me?”: José Carrasquillo’s All-Nude Production of Macbeth William Hutchings Abstract Almost four decades after Kenneth Tynan’s long-running Oh! Calcutta! and other plays made full-frontal nudity a commonplace occurrence on the contemporary stage, it should come as no surprise that Shakespearean theatre would become the vehicle for such an all-nude staging — as was done, apparently for the first time in Anglo-American theatre, by the Washington (D.C.) Shakespeare Company during the summer of 2007. Its all-nude production of Macbeth, predictably, provoked considerable controversy and sold out all performances during an extended run. For some, including many who did not see it, such a production seemed little more than shock for shock’s sake. Directed by José Carrasquillo and performed on a minimally bare stage, with only a collection of Giacometti-like statues as decoration, the cast of six men and four women, who remained nude throughout the entire play and on-stage the entire time, provided a remarkably effective and affecting performance — not only sans costume but sans props as well. The production had been freed from the usual distractions. Fine costumes, fancy props, clanging swords, and special effects all proved expendable, subtracted in furtherance of a bold new form of theatrical minimalism, a brazenly daring coup de théâtre. As Shakespeare’s dark study of naked ambition became a study of literally naked ambition, theatre itself seemed ingeniously stripped to its essence.

Almost four decades after Kenneth Tynan’s long-running Oh! Calcutta! and other plays of the late 1960s and early 1970s made full-frontal nudity a commonplace occurrence on the contemporary stage, and in an era when such groups as Pilobolus and Cirque du Soleil present stylish acrobatic displays of the nearlynude human form, it should arguably have come as no surprise that Shakespearean theatre should itself become the vehicle for such a staging, as was done, 78

7. “Is This a Dagger I See Before Me?” (Hutchings)

79

apparently for the first time in Anglo-American theatre, by the Washington (D.C.) Shakespeare Company during the summer of 2007.1 Its all-nude production of Macbeth, predictably, provoked considerable controversy and sold out all its performances for an extended run. For some, including many who did not see it, even the concept of such a production seemed little more than shock for shock’s sake, one more attempt to épater the by-now-surely-more-or-lessinured-to-anything bourgeoisie, yet another affront to long-beleaguered defenders of Decency, Propriety, and ever-nearing-its-end Civilization-As-We-Know-It. “And what,” huffed a Renaissance-specialist colleague in my department, “is to be gained from doing that?” My answer, having attended a performance thus, is “surprisingly much”— though not at all what one might expect. It was a production freed from the usual distractions: fine costumes, fancy props, clanging swords, and special effects all proved expendable, subtracted as if in furtherance of a bold new form of theatrical minimalism, a brazenly daring coup de théâtre. Directed by José Carrasquillo, the cast of six men and four women, who remained nude throughout the entire performance and on-stage the entire time, provided a remarkably effective and affecting performance — not only sans costume but sans props as well. The acting area was an almost-bare stage, slightly raised off the floor but only a few yards from the front row of bleacher-like risers to which seating had been attached. To stage left (audience right), a rectangular pool of water that measured perhaps three feet by four feet was inset into the stage. Nine Giacometti-style statues by Marie Schneggenburger provided the sole decoration behind Giorgos Tsappas’ triangular set; they loomed up at the back of the stage, four on one side and five on the other, looking like elongated and emaciated Easter Island stone figures. When not involved in current action on stage, the actors stood solemnly between the statues, facing front, hands at their sides, under the rather dim lighting that was used throughout the performance. Music and mechanical sound effects had also been banished from the production, apart from those produced by the actors’ bodies as well — through rhythmic percussions such as synchronized slapping of the chest or legs, stamping of feet, or sounds generated using the mouth, such as chants, moans, whistles, animal sounds, or wind-like blows. Nor were any props in evidence, even during the play’s multiple fight scenes; the fights, though aggressively staged, were stylized movements alone. Those who might have come to the theatre expecting an erotically charged evening of Shakespeare — or those who cannot tell the difference between a serious theatre and a bawdy-house, as the old saying goes — would have been sorely disappointed. There would be none of the eroticized display of idealized human form associated with Cirque du Soleil productions or much modern ballet, for example; neither would there be any of the full-lights-up titillation associated with Oh! Calcutta! and its progeny.2 The entire production was dimly lit — appropriately so for one of Shakespeare’s darkest tragedies — with soliloquies

80


often lit by a stark spotlight from directly overhead for a striking and stark chiaroscuro effect over and across the strategically placed body. Some of the actors’ bodies — particularly those of the witches — were colored with body-paints that looked more like pastel smears of colored chalk, whereas the men were daubed with mud from battle. With all due respect to the production’s remarkably courageous and self-confident cast, it is vitally important to realize that they were trained Shakespearean actors who happened to be nude —not Abercrombie-and-Fitch-type models who happened to be playing Shakespeare. In terms of photography, the aesthetic effect of the production design was much more that of Eadweard Muybridge rather than that of Robert Mapplethorpe or Bruce Weber. Like the nude subjects in Muybridge’s famous freeze-frame studies of motion, the actors in Carrasquillo’s Macbeth appeared unselfconscious and natural, as opposed to narcissistic or alluring. It was, in deliberate effect, an uneroticized body that was on display amid the dim lights and attendant shadows. In contrast to, for example, the hyper-defined muscularity and dominant physicality Marc Singer and Fredi Olster in William Ball’s renowned production of The Taming of the Shrew in the 1970s, these actors had not been chosen primarily because of their buff physiques; indeed, according to Jane Horwitz’s account of the production in The Washington Post, there was to be “no weight training” during rehearsal. Several of both genders could fairly be described as portly, and the men had almost without exception remarkably hairy bodies — not only their chests but their backs and legs as well. Carrasquillo reportedly had prohibited any “shaving, waxing, tweezing, or dyeing” of any body hair for six weeks during rehearsal — in order to contrast his performers with the hairless idealized form of the human body in mass marketing, popular culture, and many sports (Horwitz 2007). The six men and four women of the cast moved with poise, stately posture, and ritualistic uniformity, especially in making their entrances and exits in single file. Still, Horwitz notes, Carrasquillo’s actors “admit they had to test the strength of their belief in the [production’s] concept. Kathleen Akerley, who plays Lady Macbeth, says she thought, ‘It will work if we’re all hairy. If we’re a groomed and airbrushed style of naked, it’ll be misleading’” (2007). Accordingly, within a remarkably short time — literally a matter of minutes, certainly well within the first act — their nudity came to seem quite natural, unremarkable, unsensational, and certainly unprurient. Consequently the audience’s attention soon focused elsewhere — as theatre itself seemed stripped to its essence in a bold new form of theatrical minimalism. When each theatergoer approached the box office for the Sunday matinee I attended relatively late in the play’s sold-out run (but before its announced two-week extension, which also sold out), he or she was asked by the ticket seller to affirm that he or she understood that this performance was to be done in the nude and that he or she had no objections to this. Only then was the ticket and program passed under the window grille; presumably a refund awaited those


81

who demurred, though I saw or heard no one who did. An article by Matthew Barakat for Associated Press contended that Folks in the front sometimes cringe and move back a few rows during intermission. One man watched the play with a program in front of his eyes, blocking out the lower half of his field of vision.... There have also been more intermission walkouts than before [2007].

None of that was the case at all at the sold-out performance I attended, “screened” at the box office though attendees were. The audience was in fact surprisingly “mixed” for a Sunday matinee — old and young, male and female more or less evenly distributed, with no one seeming even slightly offended as theatergoers earlier in the run were reported to have been. Many of the most potentially smirk-provoking double-entendre lines were downplayed through rather ingenious blocking of the actors’ bodies, often making particularly original use of the (minimalist) pool of water at stage left. For the “Is this a dagger I see before me ...” soliloquy, Daniel Eichner as Macbeth crouched on all fours, gazing into the water like Narcissus, seeing there a reflection of his own face while visually de-emphasizing the blatantly phallic symbolism of the dagger. Vainly (in both senses of the word), he then plunged his hand into the pool in an attempt to seize the dagger that may or may not have been there. In his self-regard, he came up with nothing more than a handful of water as he tried to seize all that he desired, as if to emphasize the narcissism that is inherent in his (or arguably in any) ambition. Apart from a slight difference in blocking, the production’s tableau was remarkably similar to John William Waterhouse’s painting of “Echo and Adonis” (1903). Eichner’s legs were more Daniel Eichner as Macbeth (photograph by Ray tucked under him rather than Gniewek, courtesy Washington Shakespeare Comsprawled behind him (as in pany. All rights reserved).

82


Waterhouse’s depiction) during this particular scene. Accordingly, given the dim light and his all-fours crouch, Eichner’s lower body was entirely concealed from the audience’s view throughout this speech as the elusive and invisible dagger was evoked and sought. Similarly, Lady Macbeth’s hand-washing scene was (quite naturally) performed as she similarly knelt alongside the pool, literally washing her hands in its water, unable to cleanse them of blood that she alone could see. This scene too is more radically innovative in Carrasquillo’s production than it may at first appear to be : few productions if any have involved actual hand-washing as opposed to hand-wringing, since they have almost invariably assumed that (a) the water is as non-existent as the blood that it is intended to expunge, and (b) hand-wringing, whether advertent or inadvertent, is inherently a signifier of psychological guilt. John Wilders, whose extensive annotation of the scene in the edition of Macbeth in the Cambridge University Press “Shakespeare in Production” series focuses primarily on differences in costumes, set, entrance, and costuming from 1784 to 1976, makes no reference whatsoever to the presence of actual water in any of them (2004: 192–193n, re: V.i.15 SD). Her “Unsex me here” speech was delivered with arms extended straight up into the golden spotlight above her, the posture of a sort of pagan prayer; due to very careful positioning of her body beneath the light, stark shadows crossed her body diagonally. Reviews tended to be mixed and rather tepid overall. In the Washington Post, the headline of Celia Wren’s assessment announced that the production was “Not Exciting” (itself an unfortunate choice of phrasing that may have told the readership more than intended), while in the Metro Weekly Tom Avila complained of “a lack of consistency in the performances” (2007). While Eichner was widely praised for his passionately intense Macbeth, Glen Weldon’s review in the Washington CityPaper remarked that “As Lady Macbeth, Kathleen Akerley[’s] ... quiet, controlled performance ... [makes w]hat she’s doing with the part ... so subtle that, frankly, it eluded me” (2007). Her doubling as Hecate was markedly more intense, as indeed were the three witches (Ashley Robinson, Heather Haney, and Manshu Chang), whose slithery approach to the cauldron (again, the water pool at stage left) caught and held the audience’s attention from the outset — as did their unconcealed amusement as they watched their foretold events transpire. Their cauldron dance resembled Matisse’s painting The Dance as well as Picasso’s illustrations for his own play, The Four Little Girls. The murder of Duncan was narrated beneath blood-red light rather than enacted, as the king (played by Christopher Henley) stood motionless facing a post at the back center wall of the set and the Macbeths faced forward. With the exception of Eichner as Macbeth, all of the actors played multiple roles — necessarily so, since there are twenty-eight roles to be covered by the ten actors (no third murderer ever appeared). This doubling and tripling of roles proved, in my opinion, to be the biggest problem caused by the absence of costumes: it was often quite difficult if not impossible to differentiate adequately which among the secondary char-


83

Kathleen Akerley as Lady Macbeth (photograph by Ray Gniewek, courtesy Washington Shakespeare Company. All rights reserved).

84


acters was being portrayed at any given moment, particularly when the entire cast remained visible on stage all the time and insufficient physical or vocal variations among them had been attempted. The actors themselves were quite frank in discussing the rehearsal process and their personal processes of adapting to the nudity, particularly as reported by Matthew Barakat of the Associated Press: Cast members say the audience response has varied from performance to performance. Kathleen Akerley, who plays Lady Macbeth, said the audience has been much more willing to volunteer its opinions, both positive and negative.... An especially telling scene — in terms of audience reaction — occurs in the second act, when a drunken porter pointedly refers to alcohol’s effect on lechery and sexual arousal. The humorous scene evokes laughter from some audiences and uncomfortable silence from others, said Sasha Olinick, who portrays the porter [2007].

These comments exemplify a number of issues that have long been the subject of analysis in terms of performance theory: the presentation of the actor’s body, costumed and/or not; the body as icon and as focal point of audience attention, both of which are directly affected (and manipulated) by lighting and the definition of theatrical space; the eroticization of the body or lack of same; and the subjectivity of audience response. Few if any stage productions since Oh! Calcutta! have as clearly embodied (in both senses of the word) the issues involved.What, then (to return to my departmental colleague’s question) was to be gained from staging Macbeth entirely in the nude? Carrasquillo’s production was, in my opinion, a bold experiment that extended the definition of theatrical minimalism beyond even Beckettian limits. Its purpose, I believe, was the elimination of long-traditional elements of Shakespearean (and other classical) dramaturgy — specifically, spectacle, pageantry, and costume, all of which bedazzle and distract the eye. In their place, in an almost Beckettian “dimmost dim,” there came bare bodies — colored, mud-daubed, uneroticized, and (among the men) hirsute. The nudity thus became quickly undistracting as well, and — exactly as in Beckett’s minimalist theatre — the play’s language became more important than usual, for all the reasons that Les Essif has explored in his study entitled Empty Figure on an Empty Stage. Specifically, the components of this Beckettian stage aesthetic are most prominent in his later stage works, for which he coined the term “dramaticules”: • an emphasis on dim light, creating a seemingly boundless liminal darkness (Breath, Rockaby, Footfalls) • stark pinpoint lighting from overhead, creating a strong chiaroscuro effect on the body (Rockaby)


85

• stylized, formal movement (Come and Go, Footfalls, Rockaby, Quad) or a near absence of movement (Ohio Impromptu), which in turn leads to • a concentration on language and voice, necessitated in part by the absence of other (primarily visual) distraction (Beckett 1984, 211, 273, 239; 273; 194–95, 239, 273, 291, 285–88). Accordingly, among the many productions of Macbeth that I have seen, Carrasquillo’s is the one in which I found myself most closely listening to the words, coming as they did from nude figures on an almost-empty stage. Although Beckett obviously did not ever display the nude body on stage, preferring instead to obviate it as much as possible with the almost-trademark use of almost identical greatcoats (Come and Go, Ohio Impromptu) or cowled floor-length gowns (Quad), he had no such reticence about it in his prose (most notably in the novel How It Is). For those familiar with the iconography of the Beckettian stage, the presence of the Giacometti-like statues on the otherwise bare set of this production of Macbeth seemed themselves perhaps an obliquely Beckettian homage, since Giacometti (a personal friend of Beckett’s) had designed the tree for the original production of Waiting for Godot and the cover illustration for Beckett’s final prose narrative, Worstward Ho. Carrasquillo’s stage production was not the first Macbeth to have provoked controversy while featuring full nudity, however; a German production directed by Jürgen Gosch, which opened in Düsseldorf ’s Schauspielhaus in October 2005, was subsequently staged in several European cities, and was invited to Berliner Theatertreffen. It too was performed on a nearly bare (but brightly-lit) stage and featured a cast that was fully nude most (but not all) of the time, but there the similarities end. Gosch’s cast was entirely male, and the production proved controversial not primarily because of its nudity but because of its literally set-smashing “genuine” violence that left the stage-space strewn with broken tables, scattered lawn chairs, and large plastic jars that had held the gallons of stage blood with which the then-nude actors were doused during scenes of battle (Wald 2006). With its aesthetic as well as its ethos clearly based in Artaudian Theatre of Cruelty, Gosch’s production was in almost every way an exact antithesis of Carrasquillo’s, aside from the presence of nudity.3 Furthermore, Gosch’s production was not an influence on Carrasquillo’s; as Washington Shakespeare Company’s press relations officer Jay Hardee confirmed to me in a phone interview, they learned of it “only later in the run” of the production (or perhaps soon after it), certainly long after its conception and design had been completed. Kathleen Akerley was not, however, the first to have performed Lady Macbeth’s sleep-walking scene in the nude. That distinction belongs to twenty-fiveyear-old Francesca Annis, in Roman Polanski’s film of the play released in 1971— which was produced by Hugh Hefner from an adaptation by Kenneth Tynan, whose Oh! Calcutta! had premiered just two years before. Despite

86


pre-release clamor, the film’s nude scene is surprisingly brief; Tynan blithely defended it by explaining that “in the Middle Ages, they hadn’t heard about nightdresses” (qtd. in Brode 2000: 189). As Douglas Brode asserts in Shakespeare in the Movies (2000), the youthfulness of the lead actors was almost as daring as the nude scene; Macbeth was played by then-twenty-eight-year-old Jon Finch, and the production history in John Wilders’ “Shakespeare in Production” confirms the rightness of this claim. Tynan remarked that in the Middle Ages the age of thirty was in fact middle age (Brode 2000: 189). Like Polanski’s, Carrasquillo’s youthful leads made the Macbeths seem comfortably contemporary — ambitious yuppies heedlessness of moral constraints in pursuit of wealth and power. Indeed, for theatergoers of sufficient age to remember black-andwhite television sitcoms, the embrace between Eichner as Macbeth and Akerley as Lady Macbeth when he returns home to the castle — which was decidedly the play’s most erotically charged moment — looked uncannily and disconcertingly like the welcoming hug given Dick Van Dyke by Mary Tyler Moore when he entered their apartment calling out “Honey, I’m home!” Nevertheless, in Carrasquillo’s version, Shakespeare’s darkest play about naked ambition became quite literally Shakespeare’s darkest play about naked ambition, virtually as never before. Almost invariably, the next question asked by those to whom I have mentioned this production and my reaction to it is whether I think other Shakespeare plays, or indeed the entire Shakespeare canon, could as well be adapted into performances in the nude. The answer is no, not necessarily. The benefit is production-specific and particularly well suited to Macbeth, with its emphasis on the uncanny, the eerie, and the not-entirely-explainable, all interacting with ambition and the primal psychological forces that shape — even most Shakespeareanly and even most Beckettianly —“bare, unaccommodated man.” To a certain extent, Carrasquillo’s comments during our interview4 contradict my own thesis about the production’s distinctly Beckettian aesthetic. However, I am printing both views and am quite willing for readers to consider the similarities for themselves. My own view is that the contradiction is more apparent than real—especially given his specification that it “was not a The Macbeths, portrayed by Daniel Eichner and conscious influence” (emphasis Kathleen Akerley (photograph by Ray Gniewek, mine). It may well be that, as courtesy Washington Shakespeare Company. All Les Essif argues, the Beckett- rights reserved).


87

ian aesthetic has so profoundly affected his entire generation that it need no longer be a conscious influence — whether for directors or (in this case, perhaps more importantly) for set designers and for lighting designers as well. Indeed, it seems to me that it can hardly have been otherwise. UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA AT BIRMINGHAM

Notes Acknowledgment. I am grateful to José Carrasquillo for the interview (see note no. 4), for his detailed replies, and for his permission to print them here. 1. In an online posting following Barakat’s review of the production in USA Today, a reader suggests that a production of Macbeth by the Undermain Theatre in Dallas from 20 October to 11 December 1993 (directed by Katherine Owens) was a precedent for Carrasquillo’s in its use of nudity. However, as the photographs in the archive at that company’s website (www.undermaintheatrearchive.org) reveal, that production was not done entirely in the nude. One group of photographs does feature nearly nude figures hanging, bat-like, upside down, green-lit above a dark stage space, but they are apparently wearing loincloths. 2. The witches in Macbeth were the subject of an unusual nude production in Florida in 1999, as a result of which three strippers and nightclub owner Michael Pinter were sentenced to 90 days in jail. Intending to challenge a local anti-nudity law in Seminole County that stated that only bona fide theatres could offer nude performances, the three dancers and the owner of the Club Juana near Orlando decided to defy the rule that G-strings and pasties must be worn in non-theatrical venues. The justification cited in Brabant’s account is Shakespeare’s line “Come sisters, cheer we up his sprites and show the best of our delights,” which were, accordingly, fully on display. Such a theatrical offering did not, however, make the venue into a theatre, as the court ruled. In its later (arguably more “legitimate” and theatrical) incarnation, the witches’ scene had been incorporated into a four-act stage production titled Les Femmes Fatales by playwright Morris Sullivan. The other three acts were “a quirky little detective story, a cyber sex fantasy, ... and a singing/rapping number called ‘Busted.’ ... [After] reel[ing] off a few Shakespearean phrases, [the witches] threw off their capes and — poof— were butt-naked for the rest of the show. It was definitely an eyeful” (Brown). As a series of wholly unrelated erotic sketches, however, it had exactly the same structure — and presumably exactly the same legal defensibility — as Tynan’s Oh! Calcutta! Patriotically, the evening concluded with Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” (Langley). Club Juana closed in July 2006, the property having been purchased by the U.S. Department of Transportation for $3.4 million in order to build a bridge that would alleviate traffic congestion (Stolzenbach). For further details, see Brabant, Langley, Brown, and Stolzenbach. (I am grateful to my research assistant, David Alldredge, for bringing this performance and the ensuing controversy to my attention.) 3. For further discussion (in German) of the aesthetic and ideological premises of Gosch’s production, see Wengierek. The fact that the nudity attracted so little attention in the controversy that surrounded Gosch’s production is relatively unsurprising, given the long-standing German cultural interest in “Naturism” and its concomitant unashamed attitude toward the public display of the unclad human body, Nacktkultur. German sociologist Heinrich Pudor (1865–1943) was the so-called “Father of Nudism” and (under the pseudonym Heinrich Scham) the author of a book entitled Nackende Menschen (Naked People) in the 1890s; the first known nudist camp was opened by Paul Zimmerman near Hamburg, Germany, in 1903. Critical and theoretical discussions of the cultural iconography of the body and/or the history of nudity on stage are far too numerous to assess here. Those seeking an orientation toward such issues might begin with Richard Leppert’s The Nude: The Cultural Rhetoric of the Body in the Art of Western Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Westview, 2007) and/or Stephen Kern’s Anatomy and Destiny: A Cultural History of the Human Body (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975). 4. On August 25, 2008, as I was completing the publication version of this essay, I had the opportunity to interview director José Carrasquillo via email in relation to his production of Mac-

88


beth, the Beckettian stage aesthetic, and Jürgen Gosch’s production. With his permission, our “e-conversation” is presented below. Hutchings: Having read so much pre–Macbeth publicity, interviews, etc., and ancillary interviews related to other productions, I have of course come across references to the influences to magical realism and the initial impetus to do a production of it this way, but I have not found any references to Beckett in particular or minimalism in general as an aesthetic. Did Beckett’s late minimalist stage design (e.g., Footfalls, What Where, Ohio Impromptu, etc) have any conscious influence in the conception of the visuals for this production? Carrasaquillo: I’m a great admirer of Beckett’s work, but his minimalist aesthetic did not have a conscious influence on this production of Macbeth. All of the five productions I’ve directed at WSC (Metamorphosis, Blood Wedding, The Maids, Medea and Macbeth) were done in a simple, very stripped away setting. And believe me when I tell you that simple is never easy. The last 3 productions were designed by Giorgos Tsappas, who as a set designer matches my minimalist approach to storytelling. In the last 10 years most of my productions have gone this route. This is due to several factors: first, I personally have very mixed feelings about realism on stage. (Definitely not my forte). Second, there are budgetary constraints in small companies that continually challenge directors and designers to use their imaginations. Third, working with what I called Fringe companies, allows for some risk taking. This extends to the design process. Fourth, my commitment to distill the story and its themes in the most direct and clear way without obfuscations. All of these factors have contributed to the aesthetic of my work in the last decade. The works of Lorca (specifically his collaborations with Salvador Dali) as well as the total embracing of theatre and its theatricality in a Brechtian sense, are guiding beacons of the work I have done. You would find it interesting that my next production after Macbeth—Cita a ciegas at GALA Hispanic Theatre also in DC, was inspired by Borges, but was very much a Beckett play. And as such, the setting was stunningly simple and minimalist: a park bench. And of course there is no doubt in my mind that one day I’ll be directing Waiting for Godot somewhere. Hutchings: The Giacometti-like statues are distinctly Beckettian, of course (he designed the original tree for Godot as well as cover drawing for Worstward Ho, Beckett’s last prose work). The very striking use of light and stark shadows struck me as very Beckettian. Carrasquillo: I found out about the Beckett and the Giacometti connection after the production. My cast gave me a beautiful book about Giacometti on opening night. There I read of the tree for Godot. In terms of lighting, Ayun Fedorcha has lit most of my shows in the last 15 years. Over the years her understanding of lights as an integral part of story telling (going beyond mood setting), coupled with her stunning juxtaposition of light vs. stark shadows have helped to accentuate the style of magic realism underneath my work. I am totally indebted to her for most of my achievements in theatre. Hutchings: Jürgen Gosch’s production of Macbeth in Dusseldorf in 2005 has also been mentioned an important precedent for your production and quite possibly a direct influence on it. Yet Gosch’s stage aesthetic seems to me to have been much more a legacy of Artaud, with “genuine” violence and a literally smashed set of tables and lawn chairs, plus gallons of stage blood slopped over the all-male cast. Jay Hardee [the Press Relations official of the Washington Shakespeare Company] told me that your cast and company had learned of Gosch’s production ONLY “later in the run” and that it was not an influence on the design of your production in any way, since that had been established well prior to that time, obviously. Would you comment on that? Carrasquillo: I was not aware about Gosch’s production until after we opened. After our opening night, Giorgos Tsappas, our set designer, travelled to Vienna to represent Cyprus’s (where he is originally from) in the International Theatre Quadrennium (he actually used our set from Medea as one of his representative works). It is my understanding that Gosch’s production either played at the Quadrennium or photos of it where prominently displayed or both. Through Giorgos, this was the first time that I heard of his production. I saw a nude production of Macbeth in Seattle back in 1997 by a very small theatre company, but that production used pieces of costuming, weaponry and props. My idea to do a nude production of this play was born a bit earlier than the Seattle production. It started with a viewing of Roman Polanski’s film version of the play in the late ’80s. I became obsessed with the dark and scary nature of the play in particular the weird sisters and Shakespeare’s use of them. Years later, I started imagining elements


89

of it such as setting the proceedings in some kind of magical forest with a small eye of water (cauldron) ... a forest of trees where each tree could perhaps resemble the human form. While having a conversation with my lighting designer about what I wanted to do with the production (this is five years before we actually got to do it), she casually asked what I saw the actors wearing. I said, “... wearing? they are trees....” I did not know back then, what it would ultimately mean to my production, but I continued to play with the notion of a dark forest with the characters stripped away to their basic human/animalistic form. A very long gestation period was followed by a couple of years of work with designers. This period created the visual vocabulary you saw on stage.

References Cited Avila, Tom. “Naked Ambition: A Clothes-Free Vision of Macbeth Grabs Attention But Suffers from a Lack of Consistency in Performance.” Metro Weekly: Washington DC’s GLBT News Magazine. 19 July 2007. http://www.metroweekly.com/arts_entertainment/stage.php?ak=2868. Barakat, Matthew. “MacDuff in the Buff: Nude Shakespeare Sells Despite Critics.” USA Today. 9 July 2007. http://www.usatoday.com/life/theater/2007–07–07-macbeth_N.htm. Beckett, Samuel. The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove, 1984. Brabant, Malcolm. “America’s Police Affronted by Nude Macbeth.” BBC News Online. 8 June 1999. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/363673.stm. Brode, Douglas. Shakespeare in the Movies: From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000. Brown, Linnea. “Can’t Get Enough of Macbeth in the Buff.” Central Florida Future: The Campus Newspaper of the University of Central Florida. 24 April 2003. http://media.www. centralfloridafuture.com/media/storage/paper174/news/2003/04/24/Lifestyles/Cant-Get.Enough. Macbeth.In.The.Buff-424245.shtml. Essif, Les. Empty Figure on an Empty Stage: Samuel Beckett and His Generation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Horwitz, Jane. “Staying Within Their Costume Budget: ‘Macbeth’ in the Flesh.” The Washington Post. 13 June 2007. C–5. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/ 12/AR2007061202160.html. Langley, Liz. “A Star-Spangled Celebration.” Orlando Weekly. 7 February 2002. http://www. orlandoweekly.com/artsculture/story.asp?id=2554. “No Small Parts? Nude Macbeth is Packing Them In.” CBS2 News. 6 July 2007. http://cbs2. com/entertainment/Nude.Naked.Macbeth.2.533051.html. Picasso, Pablo. The Four Little Girls. 1949. Trans. Roland Penrose. London: Calder and Boyars, 1970. Stolzenback, Issak. “Requiem for a Strip Club.” Orlando Weekly. 13 July 2006. http://www. orlandoweekly.com/features/story.asp?id=10826. Wald, Christina. “Staging Violence and Terror: ‘Genuine’ Violence on Stage? Jürgen Gosch’s Macbeth.” Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft. www.shakespeare–gesellschaft.de/publikationen/ seminar/ausgabe2006/wald.html. Weldon, Glen. “Something Naked This Way Comes: Stripping Macbeth of his Kilt Makes His Ambition, At Least, Harder to See.” Washington CityPaper. 27: 26 (29 June–5 July 2007). http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=1920. Wenigierek, Reinhard. “Gro∂e Kunst im Gewand des Chaos: Regisseur Jürgen Gosch. erregt das Publikum bis aufs Blut. Sein ‘Macbeth’ eröffnet das Berliner Theatertreffen.” Die Welt. 4 May 2006. www.welt.de/print-welt/article214191/Grosse_Kunst_im_Gewand_des_Chaos.html. Wilders, John, ed. Macbeth. Shakespeare in Production series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Wren, Celia. “‘Macbeth’ Naked, But Not Exciting.” The Washington Post. 22 June 2007. C–1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/21/AR2007062102500.html.

8 Cognitive Model Transformation in Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle David Paxman and Michael Hatch Abstract Cognitive linguists show that we store concepts or categories not as definitions encoded in language but as exemplars and prototypes. We use this model to reveal the stages by which Brecht transforms the concept of “ownership,” “justice,” and “mother” in The Caucasian Chalk Circle. In each case, Brecht evokes a prototype, discredits it, and substitutes it with a “radial” exemplar. “Mother” progresses from birth mother to nurturer; “ownership” from legally sanctioned possession to best use; and “justice” from discerning judge applying codified law to scoundrel judge deploying legal institutions to favor the poor and powerless. The model helps reveal that Brecht comes close to emptying out the meaning of each concept. However, a second cognitive model reveals how the transformed concepts blend to provide a network of inferences not available in each concept considered separately.

Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle concludes with a spellbinding image: two women almost tear a male child apart during a contest devised to determine which of them was the child’s mother. In a twist on the story of King Solomon,1 the adoptive mother, not the birth mother, lets go to avoid harming the child; and, in so doing, proves herself deserving and capable of raising the child. The child in the circle is an apt figure for what the play does to three concepts that are central to the socio-politics of life —mother, ownership, and justice. Just as the most deserving mother must let go of the child to protect it, audiences are asked to let go of established prior definitions of these three precepts. The structure of the play promotes their revision. Successive scenes evoke them, test them, challenge them, and transform them. The revision is accomplished not by discussion (though there is, to be sure, some of that) but by reworking mental images. Their “refashioning” in the play reflects how the human 90

8. Cognitive Model Transformation in Brecht’s Circle (Paxman and Hatch)

91

mind fashions and retains categories. Cognitive linguists have demonstrated that the human mind does not think of mother or ownership or justice through definitions and lists of criteria stored in words, but through prototypes (i.e., images or schemas).2 The tools of cognitive linguistics can reveal the process by which Brecht carries out this conceptual revision in his play. Our approach also answers a criticism of the structure of Brecht’s play. Some stage directors, notes Peter Palitzsch, have alleged that an entire act in the Chalk Circle is “no more than a detour” (Brecht 1974b: 302); Lauren McKinney has stressed the power of the non-rational in the play (1992: 530); and Raymond Williams found the stories within the play “quite arbitrarily related” (Sagar 1966: 11). We will examine how the progression of the scenes is designed to alter three preconceptions, and will show that the play comes close to voiding the three concepts. We will argue that Brecht rescues justice and ownership by grafting onto them values and implications generated within the conceptual category mother.

Cognitive Models Cognitive linguists have developed models, supported by empirical research, that explain how the human brain forms and uses categories. The discursive (or objectivist) approach to understanding categorization holds that the brain forms categories as definitions in the form of “genus-differentia;” i.e., as general terms with additional criteria that must be met before a category can be established. For example, the brain stores a set of propositions (or necessary and sufficient attributes) of the category furniture, and then applies the set when it is asked whether or not a stadium seat, a house plant, or a picnic table qualify as furniture. The brain determines whether it meets the definition or matches the features known to be synonymous with the category furniture. Four contentious points result from this model: (1) the brain recognizes borderline exemplars such as “stadium seats” and “house plants;” (2) the definition of furniture contains a circular terminology; (3) the location or context of the object seems to play an important role in deciding whether or not it qualifies to be a member of a category; and (4) the function of the object also plays an important role in categorization. Obviously, even a term as “simple” as furniture is a complicated one. Therefore, a different cognitive model has been proposed about the way the brain creates and stores categories. According to this model, the brain stores categories as exemplars, schemata, images, prototypes, scenarios, and even protonarratives. Or, to use Fauconnier and Turner’s term, the brain stores categories as “mental spaces” (2002: 102–103). Friedrich Ungerer and Hans-Jörg Schmid use a similar terminology. For them the brain stores the best major examples of what a given category refers to, as well as lesser examples that represent less common meanings of the category (1996: 8–9). George Lakoff uses culturally dis-

92


tant languages to demonstrate this point. It would almost be correct to say that we determine what is furniture not by reference to a furniture definition, but to a furniture story, with a scene (a room that humans inhabit) and props (items such as chairs and tables) filling certain functions (a place to sit, a place to eat). Thus, as far as the prototype of furniture goes, the brain stores a cluster of images such as a room that people occupy and the items that go in it, and assesses whether or not the furniture label fits various items by marking how closely they resemble the prototype. One advantage of the prototype model is that it accommodates the known fact that we can draw on many, potentially incompatible, versions of a category with a single name. Generally the best exemplar will be considered as a central prototype, while any other variations with relative closeness to or distance from the central exemplar will be considered as radial prototypes. A television set, a picnic table, or a microwave oven will be relatively more distant from the central prototype of furniture than an easy chair or a dinning table. They exist as radial prototypes. The theory of categories behind the prototype model seems to be a valuable tool for the analysis of drama and theatre because this art form depends heavily on images, characters, and narratives. Theatre in particular offers prototypes — characters and situations — that represent positive/negative and proper/improper versions of a category. Another asset of the prototype model is that it helps theatre scholars to see the structure of an argument carried out by means of central and radial prototypes, and to determine which radial prototypes compete for a central position within a play.

The Ownership Prototype Brecht structures The Caucasian Chalk Circle as a means of evoking the mentally stored exemplars of three categories before transforming them. The first category, ownership, appears in the framing story of a dispute during which several groups voice competing prototypes of ownership. The play starts in the Galinsk region of the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War with a debate over who should own a tract of land from which the original owners have been displaced by war. The audience learns that, during the war, military authorities moved the goat breeders to the east, out of the way of Hitler’s approaching armies, and the Rosa Luxemburg fruit-growing cooperative relocated to Galinsk to fight as partisans after their own land had been devastated by war. After the war the goat breeders return and want their land back from the fruit growers who noticed the land’s potential for orchards. The goat herders appeal to a central prototype of ownership. Their prototype is that of land occupied and possessed under the law and by right of inheritance. In keeping with the prototypes model, a more proper definition would


93

be an image: A person is standing on a piece of land to which he has a deed, rightfully gained and duly recognized; in this case, it “is” inherited through generations and used for his livelihood. A distant radial constituent of this ownership prototype is the value judgment that proper ownership requires a beneficial care and use of the thing owned. This is a radial constituent because normally the law does not inquire into whether a person improves a property or lets it sit idle. In exceptional cases, the law allows property to be confiscated from its legal owners when the way they manage it makes it hazardous to the community, or when the community has a compelling need for the property. Even though the goat herders were given new land in a different area for their goats and dairy farms, they argue that the valley has always belonged to them and it belongs to them by law (1974a: 141). Their idea of ownership, and with it, the notion of land passed down from one generation to the next, is challenged by a Soldier who retorts: “Nothing has always belonged to anybody. When you were young, you didn’t even belong to yourself, you belonged to the princes Kazbeki” (141). The Soldier undermines the central prototype of ownership by calling into question the idea that animate and inanimate objects can rightfully belong to anyone. A Tractor Driver calls into question another idea of the ownership prototype: “The laws will have to be reexamined in any case, to see if they still apply” (141). It is worth noting that before the play resolves the ownership issue, it presents a new prototype for justice. The Political Expert aiding this negotiation sums up the tension between the contenders with this comment: “It’s true we must regard a piece of land largely as an implement for producing something useful, but it’s equally true that we must recognize people’s love for a particular piece of land” (141–142). The goat herders recognize that the final decision will go against them, so they resign their claim. In this way Brecht brings about a transformation of the category ownership, and this becomes a pattern throughout the play — i.e., Brecht reaches out to a lesser radial prototype and forcefully moves it into a central position. What was seen as radial in the beginning of a scene becomes central in the end. This easy pattern is not yet rhetorically effective. So, the delegation sent to resolve the ownership dispute proposes an “entertainment” consisting of a fable acted out by a singer and musicians/actors. This play-within-a-play is vital because it allows two other important categories (mother and justice) to be transformed in such a way as to bolster the revision of ownership. The mother category is transformed because it provides an important analog to ownership, and the justice category is transformed because it comprises an important constituent, the legality of claims. The ownership issues will be confirmed only at the end of the play in line with the resolution of the tug-of-war in the chalk circle. As the play puts ownership under pressure, the transformation nearly does away with this concept — i.e., when ownership becomes the temporary awarding of land to those who care for it, under the authority of the state, the concept of ownership just about disappears. However, no central or radial prototype is sug-

94


gested whereby such an arrangement can become permanent. If ownership is a grant of stewardship to those who make best use of a resource, the meaning of the concept is radically attenuated, and questions immediately spring to mind regarding the rationale, authority, and processes of those bodies and institutions empowered to deprive and award resources. Insofar as the transformation of justice is concerned, Brecht ends the play in the way most comedies treat marriage, as the end of the journey, with little attention to how the couple will get along from one day to the next. Brecht avoids querying the grounds and nature of state authority — the very issue that, historically, led to the assertion of the rights of property. Instead of entangling the drama in the thorny issues of state authority and rationale, at the play’s end Brecht evokes the image of state-as-mother, the wise and nurturing caregiver who sacrifices her own interest for the sake of her offspring.

The Mother Prototype To bolster the transformation of the category ownership, the play-withinthe-play revises the prototype of mother. Brecht begins with a standard, central prototype, “the birth mother.” He then discredits it while steadily building a case for its replacement by a radial prototype, “the nurturer/protector.” As the Governor’s enemies rise up in Grusinia and the city burns, the Governor’s Wife commands her servants to gather her essentials before she flees: a green dress, her brocade jacket, red boots, the silver gown that costs a thousand piasters, her furs, and her wine colored dress. She then flees the city, leaving her infant son behind like a forgotten belt. Grusha, a young woman employed as a household servant, is left with the child. Although people warn her not to be caught near the child, and although she wrestles with her own fears and doubts, Grusha knows that the child will die if he is left without care. After compassionately watching over the child during the night, she flees the city with the child. Legally speaking, Grusha is a thief. As the singer muses, Grusha takes the child “like something stolen” and “like a thief she crept away” (161). The play now follows Grusha and the child, laying down an argument for replacing the standard prototype of mother (as “birth mother”) with one of its desirable but not necessary components, “the nurturer/protector” of the child. Lakoff observes that in ordinary discourse the concept mother is a “cluster model,” i.e., a complex model “in which a number of individual cognitive models combine.” This cluster model takes into account the diversity of possibilities surrounding motherly relationships — such as adoption, artificial insemination, remarriage, abandonment, and surrogate mother figures. The cluster includes various principal relationship models identified as the “birth mother” model, the “nurturance” model, the “genetic” model, and the “marital” model (1987: 74–75). The prototype of mother flexibly possesses several attributes —


95

such as child bearer, gene conductor, wife, and nurturer. However, these attributes may not apply in all cases, contexts, and situations. A woman may be associated only with one attribute (child bearing ) and not with another (child nurturing). When the different models in the cluster are so divided, each of the models may become a metonym for the cluster model. In other words, the term mother for a “birth mother,” or an “adoptive mother,” or a “step-mother,” or a “nurturing mother” can be used without any sense of conflict precisely because the prototype mother has many applications that are defined by situation while still evoking the full cluster in the background. The action of the play divides elements of the cluster model and distributes them on a scale of merit. Brecht proceeds by focusing, one at a time, on the attributes that the brain bundles together in a standard prototype of motherhood: birthing, caring, nursing, nurturing, protecting, sheltering, and raising the child. This last attribute proves crucial in that the play asks which constituent of the prototype of mother contributes significantly to the development of a child. Note in the diagram that mother can be used to denote women who have various relationships with a child. Brecht advances the radial prototype of “nurturer,” which, to most people, is closer to the central prototype than “hired caretaker,” or “surrogate mother.” The plot, then, is a series of tests of motherhood to determine what is most essential to that name. Brecht himself commented: “Bit by bit, making sacrifices, not least of herself, Grusha becomes transformed into a mother for the child” (1974b: 301).

Chalk Circle Categories as Prototypes.

96


It would be more correct to say that each episode in the play poses a double test, one of Grusha as a mother, and another of the community as a mother. This move extends the notion of mother to any groups of people or organizations that perform a mother-like function. Each scene tests whether society properly takes care of its children that represent its future. The child in the play (Michael) is the son of the governor, and Michael’s proper care will rebound on his society for good or ill. This theme is made clear right after the Governor’s Wife flees and abandons Michael. Grusha thinks she hears the child calling out to her, “Woman, help me.” The choric singer adds: “Consider, woman, that one who does not hear a cry for help/But passes by with distracted ear will never/Hear again the hushed call of her lover nor/the blackbird in the dawn” (160). As Grusha passes test after test, and, in so doing, demonstrates one positive radial prototype of proper mothering after another, other members of society consistently fail in their societal mothering tasks. And the birth mother, conspicuous by her absence, becomes the extreme negative instance of each quality. For example, scene three depicts the most literal aspect of nurturing, food. Grusha takes the child and flees to the mountains for protection. Because she cannot nurse the child, she must buy milk from a peasant. She engages the peasant by referring to him as “grandfather,” a filial label invoking compassion. However, the old man wants to charge half a week’s pay for a cup of milk. Grusha tries to nurse the baby but has no milk, so she grudgingly buys milk from the old man. The peasant suggests that if Grusha wants milk, she should “kill the soldiers” (163). In other words, he passes the responsibility for his petty greed to the conflict ravaging the land. “Drink, Michael,” Grusha says to the child, “it’s half a week’s wages” (163). Next, Brecht shifts the focus from food to shelter. When Grusha sees two elegant ladies pass, she mimics them, hoping to win their sympathy and share their lodging. When the ladies see Grusha’s rough hands and realize that she is a servant, they define her as dangerous, murderous, and criminal. Regardless of whether she has a needy child, she cannot share their shelter because she is a woman who works. Class trumps compassion. In the next episode within Scene Three, Brecht moves to the element of a complete family unit with food and shelter. This is the closest approximation to the cluster prototype of mother Grusha ever gets, and it promises well. The old peasant has already proven that providing even minimal food for the child will be beyond Grusha’s means, and the elegant ladies have proven that shelter will be denied to those on the far side of class barriers. Grusha now determines that it will be best to leave the child at the doorstep of a farm couple. When the couple finds the child, the Peasant Woman decides to keep the child despite her husband’s protests. When it appears that the child will be safe, Grusha flees the farm. However, the Ironshirts discover Grusha fleeing the house, and they stop her. In their conversation, Grusha discovers that the Ironshirts are looking for the child. They suspect her and move towards the farm. Grusha returns to the farm to protect the child. When she arrives at the farm she tries to convince the


97

Peasant Woman to remove the child’s fine linen and to say the child is hers. “But suppose they ask me for it?” the Peasant Woman says, “I’ve got silver for the harvesters in the house” (172). Grusha warns that the Ironshirts will kill the child if the Peasant Woman does not claim it as her own. The Peasant Woman gets scared and thinks of her other possessions: “They’ll burn the roof over our heads” (172). In this third narrative model of mother, the child has food, and shelter, and potentially a family. However, the child’s well-being is not as central to the peasant family’s concerns as is in the cluster model of motherhood. The scene climaxes in Grusha’s decision as she fights over the child with an Ironshirt. He throws Grusha to the floor and, before he knows it, Grusha hits him over the head with a block of wood. Grusha takes the child and runs away. She is the only person who risks her own safety to rescue the child. Risking one’s own safety to protect a child becomes a crucial ingredient of the radial prototype of the nurturing mother. The narrative confirms Grusha’s motherhood. “After fleeing from the Ironshirts/After twenty-two days of flight/At the foot of the Yanga-Tau glacier/Grusha Vachnadze adopted the child” (174). At this point, the child is figuratively reborn, “I’ll throw your linen out/Swaddle you in tatters/I will wash you and baptize/You in glacier water” (174). However, this is also Grusha’s rebirth as a Mother. At the foot of the glacier Grusha is tested one last time with her life. She comes to the Eastern slope of the mountain, and risks “two lives” (174) at a rope bridge. Two merchants must cross the bridge to buy and sell. Grusha must cross the bridge to save the child from the approaching Ironshirts. Brecht again juxtaposes the child with money and material possessions, as he did with the Old Man, the elegant ladies, and the Peasant Woman. When one of the merchants realizes that the Ironshirts are after Grusha and the child, he snaps at her: “Why didn’t you tell us right away?” he says and hides his merchandise (175). Grusha uses her free arm to cling to the rope and flee the Ironshirts who would have immediately killed the child. Mother and child cross safely. The child needs food, shelter, and a family, but he also needs a mother who recognizes that her life is bound to her child’s. Grusha’s test at the bridge proves what is most essential — as the bridge could not support the weight of the merchandise and the Ironshirts. Grusha earned the title of Mother (“nurturer”) because she placed the child’s well-being at the center of her decisions and actions instead of defining her relationship to the child through other forms of obligation. The implication here is that children generally are metonyms for the survival of societies, and their well-being should be at the center of all social policy. In Scene Four, Brecht plays with the marital aspect of the mother prototype, debasing it into a sexual arrangement to which Grusha submits in order to shelter Michael. In order to stay with her brother and his pious wife, Grusha and Michael try to act “as small as cockroaches” (181), so the sister-in-law will forget they are in the house. However, to quell rumors about Grusha and her child, the brother arranges for Grusha to marry an invalid farmer who is expected

98


to die soon. He turns out to be nothing but a draft dodger who recovers his potency when the war ends. So Grusha is stuck with a real but unwanted husband. However, before this arrangement becomes too permanent, soldiers arrive and arrest Grusha and the child and take them back to the capital where the custody of the child can be resolved by proper authority. In the final scene, the models of “birth mother” and “nurturing mother” are brought into direct conflict. The Governor’s Wife and Grusha are put to trial to determine which of them is best suited to be the mother of the child. At trial, each of them presents an argument about why she is the child’s mother. Representing the Governor’s Wife, the First Lawyer argues for the normal constituents of the mother prototype: “Of all human ties the ties of blood are the strongest.... She conceived in the sacred ecstacies of love, she carried it in her womb, fed it with her blood. ... even the ferocious tigress, robbed of her cubs, goes ranging through the mountains, shrunk to a shadow. Nature herself ...” (221). The Lawyer voices the constituents of the basic prototype of mother. No one can protect and educate a child as well as his birth mother, a fact pointedly illustrated in the Solomonic story. Ironically, the lawyer’s argument points up the salience of nurturing within the birth prototype of mother. Grusha responds with plain statements: “I brought him up the best I knew how, I always found him something to eat. He had a roof over his head most of the time, ... I didn’t worry about my own convenience. I taught the child to be friendly to everyone and right from the start to work as best he could” (221). Grusha’s feeble rhetoric becomes powerful to those who have witnessed her sacrifice. The two women essentially compete for a different child: the Governor’s Wife for a child that is a symbol of her status and a key to wealth to come; Grusha for a child whose needs are greater than hers and who promises nothing but his own future. The Governor’s Wife never put her child’s well being at the centre of her decisions and actions. Grusha did. When the child stands at the center of the chalk circle, he is a symbol of the future, as is the fruit within the land narrative.

The Justice Prototype The section called “The Story of the Judge” shatters the customary prototype of justice and installs in its place two radial prototypes of restorative justice. Both develop simultaneously during the judgeship of Azdak. In one of the two strands, Azdak renders decisions with the shrewdness of one who comes from the lower ranks and knows how educated and wealthy people abuse the law to control others. He has a nose for specious lawsuits and trumped-up criminality. In one case, an uncle sues his physician nephew because the nephew doesn’t charge some of his patients. It turns out that the uncle had supported his nephew through medical school and now wants to benefit from his nephew’s


99

fees. In another case, Azdak sees through the motives of the innkeeper who, claiming damages to family honor, presses charges against his stable hand for supposedly raping the innkeeper’s daughter-in-law. Such plaintiffs use the law to gain money and keep poverty in its place. In the other type of restorative justice, Azdak plays the judge who sees the potential to go far beyond administering fairness in a dispute and concentrates on overturning inequities that are so deeply embedded within social, political, and economic reality that normal case-by-case justice cannot mend them. The judge here looks at cases not from within the legal system and not necessarily with increased perception of the circumstances, but from without. This latter mode could be called revolutionary meta-justice because, by bending regulations, it aims to restore to the poor and powerless that of which they have been deprived by the economic and legal order. Insofar as it “took the law and stretched it on a rack,” this justice may even appear as injustice, but the overall movement is to help “poverty up on its rickety legs” (215) and to allow justice to be “corrupted” only by “men with nothing in their pockets” (213). By identifying the two types of justice prototypes Brecht has discredited normal justice and moved radial prototypes to central and acceptable positions. The ordinary prototype of justice requires a fair judge employing a code of equally fair law to resolve a dispute or to determine guilt or innocence. This prototype has at least four components: (a) people in conflict requiring resolution by appeal to a set of values or standards; (b) a set of equitable laws by which the judge can administer justice; (c) the person rendering a verdict (a judge); and (d) the wisdom and training the judge brings to bear in resolving the conflict. In the Story of the Judge, Brecht calls into question this central prototype. He shows that the components of the central prototype demand interrogation, not because the prototype itself is invalid, but because the components may be manipulated to produce injustice. The play asks five questions: (1) What is a judge? (2) How is a judge empowered? (3) How is a judge influenced by non-legal “arguments” such as bribes? (4) Who typically comes before a judge? and (5) What interests has the law been devised to protect? As Brecht delves into answering these questions, especially the collusion among judge, law, power and wealth, Chalk Circle illustrates that the formal aspects of the central prototype can mask what would otherwise be easily perceived as the naked manipulation of justice. It shows that one of the radial prototypes of justice is just the reverse: injustice parading in the robes of justice. Brecht allows the audience to switch back and forth in its recognition of this configuration which rests partly on Azdak, partly on the former judges, and partly on the Grusinian system of law. Brecht mocks the standard prototype and the reverence that people in the audience have for it. After discovering that the former Judge is dead, the Fat Prince tries to restore order. He proposes that his nephew, Bizergan Kazbeki, be the judge. To “test” the nephew’s ability, the Ironshirts agree to a “rehearsal.”

100


Azdak assumes the role of the Grand Duke. As the Grand Duke, Azdak is tried by Nephew Kazbeki for war crimes. However, Azdak’s purpose is less to test the prospective Judge than to demonstrate how far outside the law any Grand Duke is. “I’m accused of war-mongering. Ridiculous! Am saying ridiculous! Is that enough? If not, have brought lawyers along. About 500” (204). If one is above the law, he or she is the law. Azdak shows just how far a ruler can bend and abuse the law. As for the symbols of the law, Azdak observes that the law is a “sensitive organ” that requires decorum, solemnity, dignity, and attention — and a robe (203). Azdak uses the statutes book only to sit on. The trappings of the law lend solemnity and authority to an institution that has become a formal process for retaining wealth and oppressing the poor. The counter-prototype to normal justice is Azdak, who does many things we associate with injustice, but with a difference. He has a keen eye for his own gain and pleasure, and he solicits bribes. “I accept,” he says at the start of each trial, pocketing the money when he can. While presiding in court, he is highhanded and cavalier. He uses specious reasoning. However, he does not rule according to bribes or the interests of the wealthy and the powerful. He rules in favor of the poor and the oppressed, no matter what. For example, he endorses the thefts carried out by St. Banditus. He uses phony weights and measures and gives “to their rightful owners” the gold “he took away from Croesus” (211). He uses the language of religion and mystery to legitimize extortion, as long as he is enabling the poor to rob the wealthy. His eyes are not only on the circumstances of the case but on the general conditions: When the poor widow exclaims, “When did a poor woman ever get a whole ham without a miracle?” he retorts, “That question goes straight to the heart of this court” (213). He then condemns the land-owning farmers for not being religious enough to believe in the “miracle” of the farmer’s ham appearing in the widow’s hut. At the end of the episode he reflects, “I’ve connived with paupers ... helped poverty up on its rickety legs” (215). Many of the rulings he decrees make no sense at all unless one assumes that the poor of Grusinia never, under any circumstances, received fair treatment under the law when aristocrats and landowners ran the show. Note that even that situation is not a valid rationale for heavily biased decisions — it merely administers injustice in reverse. The prototype Brecht offers, then, is not really one of justice per se, but the use of legal institutions to correct the entrenched collusion between wealth and power. Justice in this prototype is a tool for correcting any and all abuses that come before it. In a literal sense, Brecht offers in the Story of the Judge a travesty of justice. The Singer views Azdak’s time as judge in Grusinia as “a brief Golden Age when there was almost justice” (228–229). It is a tribute to the power of Brecht’s dramaturgy that audiences accept this elegiac summary. Until the final scene when Azdak has to rule in the dispute of the two mothers, Brecht works less with positive justice than with a negation of injustice, a reversal of the terrible legal abuses that occur when the play’s aristocrats and landowners appoint judges


101

and control the decisions. Ruling in favor of the poor in every case is hardly justice, but at least the vast majority of Grusinia’s people did not have to fear law during the two years of Azdak’s judgeship, and that is something. But Brecht has succeeded in three other things that make the Singer’s claim credible. He exposes how systematic the injustice has been; he shows how a judge attentive to all the circumstances of a case can sniff out facts that bear on a just decision; and he finishes the play with Azdak’s ruling in favor of Grusha, awarding her custody of Michael, the son of the Governor’s Wife. And this is the decision that redeems the others and firmly establishes a new prototype of justice at the play’s end. All the questionable tactics, unfathomable reasoning, and screwy decisions are subsumed in this ruling: Azdak using the chalk circle to resolve a difficult custody dispute. The irony, of course, is that until the moment of Azdak’s final verdict, Grusha misreads his request for a bribe and his apparent deference to the Governor’s Wife, and she concludes that he will rule against her because she is poor. She yells at him in rebuke, and her rebuke contains one further radial prototype of justice — i.e., conscience — that is positive, essential, and even all-subsuming. She shouts: “For a job like yours they should only pick rapists and usurers, to punish them by making them sit in judgment over their fellow men, which is worse than hanging on the gallows” (225). Grusha’s outburst accomplishes two things in terms of the various prototypes of justice that have been circulating through the action. First, it expresses outrage at the type of justice Azdak has been administering. Azdak has taken bribes, has been callous in his attitude toward those who appear in his court, and has, like it or not, abused them for his gain and pleasure. Second, Grusha’s tirade alludes to conscience, a kind of judge of last appeal that holds court in each person’s psyche and renders verdicts on their behavior. Like Azdak, this conscience can weigh all sorts of circumstances unknown to others and render fair decisions. Having attached “conscience” to the prototype of justice, the play presents the case of Governor’s Wife versus Grusha for possession of the child Michael. This decision, rendered as it is under the pressure of a return to power of the aristocrats and Azdak’s conscious decision to fawn before that power, is all the more surprising and courageous. It brings together his inclination to rule in favor of the poor — but in this case, with good reason — and the role of a conscience that will think outside the legal box to reach a verdict. The paradigm of mother that Azdak’s verdict enshrines will be discussed later. In this section, we will simply mention that insofar as it presents a revision of the justice category, the play leaves the audience having trimmed away several of the constituents of the prototype of justice enumerated earlier. Trimmed away are the codes of law and the training of the judge. What is left is the role of the contestants; attention to circumstances, including tests of inner attitudes, motives, and affections; and the wisdom of the judge in relation to values that transcend law and which may not be codified at all. One of Brecht’s production notes advises that the actor who

102


portrays Azdak must be able to “portray an utterly genuine man. Azdak is utterly genuine, a disappointed revolutionary posing as a human wreck, like Shakespeare’s wise men who act the fool. Without this the judgment of the chalk circle would lose all authority” (1974b: 288–89). This comment underscores the point that justice in this play depends not on laws, traditions, or institutions. It depends on people who have wisdom and discernment. What Brecht offers in the figure of Azdak is a fleeting evocation of a justice prototype. It temporarily graces the action, but it does not fully counterbalance the weight of the entire scene. In final analysis, with the exception of Azdak’s ruling in the case of Governor’s Wife vs. Grusha, the play comes very near to destroying the category justice.

Motherhood and Justice Blend with Ownership The play strengthens its revision of ownership by blending onto it the changes in mother and justice. We stated earlier that the first scene does not develop its rationale for awarding the valley to the orchard keepers. When the framing plot is suspended, the episodes representing Grusha’s struggles to care for Michael and those representing Azdak as judge form arguments that will give substance by analogy to the issue of land ownership. Thus, transformations in the categories mother and justice are projected onto the problems of ownership because each shares latent structure with ownership, and in the overlaps, the blend yields new concepts that are not apparent in the separate category transformations. This type of blending is important to the credibility of the category transformations the play offers. Ownership and justice are both nearly gutted of meaning. Yet the blending of the revised mother concept with both restores content and credibility. Blending is the process by which the mind combines images, structures, and schemas from different domains in order to predict, make inferences, and explain. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Tuner have attempted to show, in The Way We Think, just how pervasive and robust blending is. Blending can be empirically demonstrated in almost all communication. For example, the familiar phrases, “burning the candle at both ends” and “he’s digging his own grave” are complex mappings of two domains, candles and living in the first, and living riskily and digging a grave in the second. The blends cancel out whatever is irrelevant (no one has anything like a wick at both ends of a body or a life; no one drips wax or puts off greater heat and light by fast living; no one accelerates their own death by actually digging a grave) to highlight the salient features of the blend. In the candle analogy, the salient features are that some people hazard living shorter lives by packing more, perhaps risky activities (whether emotional or physical) into their schedules; in the grave analogy, the salient inference is that people may pursue courses of action that will lead to


103

failure or death. Such blends can be diagramed in what Fauconnier and Turner call a blended network. The network specifies the connections among two input spaces (candle and living) that are blended in terms of a generic space (using up a supply of something in the process of doing something valuable) to yield a blended space (life lived so fast and furiously that the one living risks exhausting the supply of life itself ). A schematic version of the mother, ownership, justice blend looks like this:

Blended Networks in Caucasian Chalk Circle.

Blending is made explicit in the play’s last scene. When the judge awards the child to Grusha, the play-within-a-play ends, and the Singer, who has orchestrated the presentation of the now intertwined stories of mother and justice, awards the land to the orchard keepers: “Children to motherly women that they may thrive.... And the valley to those who water it, that it may bear fruit” (229). Discussion is not needed at this point because the entire play has developed the analogy. The Singer’s words illustrate how a blend works. The generic space is one of awarding possession of something to a claimant. By running the two inputs of mother and land ownership side by side, the blended space of land ownership accrues information not found in the generic space or in either input space prior to the blend. In the mother input space the decision is rendered on the basis of the role of the claimant — how does the claimant view and act toward the thing claimed? The parallel status of child and land bestows on land implications of value, of social bonding, and of need for caring, and it bestows on orchard keepers the role of mother-nurturers. The audience may or may not think of land as something requiring their care. If anything, the ideal now is to carve out wilderness areas and leave the land to itself. The blend makes children who thrive

104


parallel with land that bears fruit. The implication, not available in either input, is that of a kind of living need and moral duty in the use of land. Finally, in both cases what is absent is glaring: no mention of prior claim or legal right. Before further examining how aspects of the mother plot and the justice plot prepare the resolution of the ownership plot, we should note that the mother and justice categories form their own blend. They do so most emphatically in the culminating trial about the determination of motherhood. The blended space that combines justice and mother gains from both inputs. Motherhood is a test, and the trial is a test of motherhood. Grusha’s actions, in retrospect, line up as so many evidences of her role as Michael’s mother. Grusha’s decision to let go of Michael so as to avoid hurting him becomes one more piece in the chain of selfless actions by which Grusha qualifies as mother. Seen from Grusha’s plot, the chalk circle test is only a demonstration of what has already been true, not a new thing. Similarly, Azdak’s many judicial decisions become precedents to the motherhood trial. When he decides, again and again, to rule in favor of poor defendants and against wealthy or land-owning plaintiffs, Azdak creates a chain in which the final motherhood decision will be in one sense a culmination, in another sense a test and trial of his courage (since aristocratic princes have been restored and can now do him harm), and in another sense a consistent string of decisions based on the same anti-institutional rationale. Most important, the nearly vacated concept of justice gains credibility by harvesting, so to speak, those aspects of Azdak’s restorative type of justice that may otherwise be negated by his systematically slanted and coincidentally selfish court administration. The fleeting evocation of conscience, the value of extraordinary perception of the circumstances leading up to a lawsuit or criminal action, and the sense of fairness in Azdak’s awarding of Michael to Grusha all perform a restorative function to the category of justice. Brecht prepares for and accomplishes the resolution of ownership by a “double blend.” Inputs from both the mother and the justice plot lines are mapped onto the ownership plot. Even though the two input spaces develop into different plot lines and different scenes, in the final scene they come together. What structures and models do mother and justice bring to the blended space of ownership? In both input spaces there are associations of wrongdoing and unfairness in the traditional way of viewing the issues. So the new, blended concept of ownership absorbs the implication that something is amiss if law-as-usual awards the valley to goat herders simply because they possessed it for generations and have sentimental attachments to it. Along with the implication of unfairness, both concepts are resolved by a radical way of dealing with conflicting claims that is possible because upheaval has destroyed persons, properties, and authority structures. And in both mother and ownership cases, the rival claimants press their arguments with the accumulated privileges of heredity and wealth. Now that law has been undermined as a rationale for injustice, and the biological relations are shown to be insufficient for determining motherhood (and, by extension, other


105

naturalized relations built on descent, status quo, or innate privilege or right), the way is opened to solve the problem of who will “own” the valley. The judicial input space also yields several constituents that map onto the ownership space. When the Singer announces his decision, he functions as a judge within a trial frame just as Azdak does in the Story of the Judge. By implication, he also practices a type of justice that Azdak embodies: first, Azdak renders decisions from the standpoint of one who knows life at the bottom of the social heap and can discern circumstances the judicial system is not equipped to factor into a decision. Second, Azdak represents a kind of justice that is not just an institution within the political, social, and economic structures, but one that stands to a degree outside them and restores what the structures and ordinary justice, as a system within those structures, cannot remedy. The ordinary system, ostensibly without malice, has confirmed that generations of goat breeders own the valley. There is nothing in the ordinary institutions of justice that can take it away. That would violate the principle of ownership that ordinary justice upholds. Yet the Singer acts in the judicial space created by Azdak and can render decisions such as those Azdak rendered. The Singer also acts in a light of a principle that is projected from the revised mother category onto the ownership category. In the mother plot, a child is abandoned by the natural parent and cared for by a young servant woman. Similarly, in the ownership frame the land is vacated (though under order) by the goat herders and subsequently occupied and “taken up” by troops and partisans that see its potential productivity as orchards and vineyards. It is relevant to the blend that the mother voluntarily abandons the child, but it is not relevant that the goat herders were forced by military planners out of the path of the conflict. Only what is relevant is retained: the change of “owners” creates a space in which rival claims can be considered in a way that would be impossible during normal times. It does help the orchard growers’ case that they have sacrificed their lives defending the terrain as partisan solders and that in so doing have seen how beautiful it is and how productive it could be. This similarity is salient because it parallels Grusha’s sacrifice for and discovery of the child’s best interest. Grusha not only cares for the child but ensures his optimal development as a human being — blended over to the land ownership issue, its beauty and productivity. Owning something is having it belong to one, and having something belong to one, the play suggests, is taking care of it best. Owning is responsibility. Additionally, the “child/land” blend suggests that, just as proper care of the land will bring additional benefits of fruitfulness and beauty to those who care for it, proper care of the child will bring additional benefits of mercy and compassion to society. A Michael raised by his birth mother will most likely become cruel and mercenary. A Michael raised by Grusha will most likely turn out compassionate and just. So, the play hints, the land will benefit society more if the orchard keepers have use of it. In the other input space, justice is meted out not by precedent (that would

106


be a return to systematic repression), but by blotting out law and precedent, eliminating manipulation of the law by those who administer it, and awarding verdicts according to intimate contextual knowledge. The grounds for a new type of justice blend over onto ownership. A man, who exploits his daughter-in-law’s seduction to gain from the poor lad that he accuses, is remotely like the goat herders who send their animals out to feed on the land and then sell cheese and meat without concern for the land itself. Similarly, the doctor who has operated for free, against the wishes of one who helped pay for his studies, is exonerated and the sponsor fined. Medical practice is not just income; and land is not just a source of livelihood. The orchard keepers will irrigate and cultivate the land and make it productive far beyond what it can yield as natural pasture. As sentimental as the goat keepers are toward their valley, they treat the land as a right and a good to be exploited with almost no attempt to improve or beautify it or make it benefit more people. As the play has defined it, ownership becomes nearly void of meaning. Within the context of the Chalk Circle, no one really owns anything. Reflecting on the history of property rights in the West, that is, recognizing that property rights were primarily asserted and granted and then protected as a means to assure the rights of persons against state interests, the gutting of ownership in the play could be disturbing. Why is it not? Because Brecht blends onto it the emotional overtones of nurturing motherhood. The land becomes a child that a good-hearted person cares for, so that it becomes beautiful and productive. The stark differences in the two input spaces are not salient: no one conceives and bears land, nor does land grow up and become an independent agent. That is how blends work: by highlighting and suppressing similarities and differences.

Conclusion By examining the mechanisms Brecht used to transform the categories of ownership, motherhood, and justice, we are now in a better position to evaluate the claim made within the play that some categories should be envisioned on new prototypes. Are such category transformations only pertinent to a set of characters in a particular circumstance, or are they transferable to other circumstances? Would an individual or society act wisely to base ownership on the principle of best use, to make justice serve only the victim’s view, and define motherhood as the best nurturer? If these concepts don’t transfer, one must ask what the play is really about. If they do transfer, one must know in what form and to what degree. It is a tribute to Brecht’s theatrical power that audiences and critics are keenly interested in what these concepts mean at the end of the play (Blenkner 1970, Losel 1989, Sagar 1966). However, they are less interested in how the concepts stand up to scrutiny as ideals to be used to transform the institutions of


107

their day. True, the venerable Eric Bentley speaks glowingly of the dismantling of private property in the play, of returning to Plato’s suspicion that a given parent “may in fact be the worst person to bring up his or her child,” and that Azdak’s judicial decisions, though far from a Golden Age, “call attention to the ordinary outrages of ordinary times” (1966: 135). On the whole, however, critics have been more cautious. For example, Marxist readings tend to focus on the play’s social and historical critiques rather than on the concepts around which the play is structured.3 The Caucasian Chalk Circle achieves its power by presenting extreme situations (land in dispute, justice abrogated, a child abandoned) that cry out for resolution, and the resolution hinges on the transformation of socially important categories. There can be little doubt that Azdak dispenses better justice than do his predecessors on the bench — at least, he does better than his predecessors as described within the text. There can be no doubt that Grusha has been and will be a better mother for the child. But does the play ask the audience to map these stories, as mental models, onto the question of land ownership, justice, and motherhood generally? That question can only be answered by reference to audience assumptions about the role of drama and theatre in their society. The power of drama and theatre resides in its ability to help audiences make such re-mappings. However, any spectators who left the theatre calling for land reform and the overhaul of justice could be seen as simple minded. Brecht warned readers against seeing the play as a parable, although he acknowledged that it is “parable-like” (296–7, 300). Perhaps aware that the play’s category transformations have limited appeal outside the confines of the fictional, Brecht cautioned directors and actors against stylizing the acting, costumes, and settings or “removing whatever is unique, special, contradictory, accidental” (1974b: 295). Brecht’s comments make it clear that he wanted directors to set the play so that its meaning grows out of real, even idiosyncratic, circumstances, “real-life needs” (300). The play must be seen as a “true narrative which of itself proves nothing but merely displays a particular kind of wisdom” (296). The phrase “true narrative” points to the context-bound meaning, and the phrase “particular kind of wisdom” may be taken to mean a kind of wisdom appropriate to particular situations. The problem of applying ideas advanced in drama and theatre to society and politics reappears again. If all of story is explanation, what does this play explain? In light of the above analysis, an appropriate answer would be that the play places its meaning (like the child), in a kind of chalk circle, and at some point the audiences have to make a decision whether to tighten their grip and pull the meaning out or let it stay within the context that gave it its force. In this tug-of-war, Brecht’s comments reveal that he was acutely aware that the play’s transformed concepts have great power but limited transportability. The power and limited transportability create a tension that cannot finally be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.

108


The publication and production history of the play in the U.S.A. illustrates a tug-of-war. The prologue scene with the land dispute in the Soviet Union was omitted because it seemed too Communist for American audiences during the Cold War era.4 The omission of the opening scene also removed key inferences and blends. The cuts crippled the play. Brecht observed that without the prologue “it is impossible to understand on the one hand why it wasn’t left as the Chinese chalk circle, and on the other, why it should be called the Caucasian” (1974: 300). Working against the tendency to allegorize or project values from the play, Brecht repeatedly tried to limit the tendency to make global inferences and sweeping interpretations by drawing attention to the artifice of his art: the play-within-a-play-within-a play, the use of fable-like speeches, the summaries, and the voice of the singer/narrator. Yet for all that, his dazzling effects rest largely on the shock he creates in forcing audiences to make room for transformed categories. Radial becomes central; radical becomes mainstream; branches become roots. The transformed concepts in The Caucasian Chalk Circle have limited validity outside the play itself, but that limitation does not undermine their theatrical effectiveness. Nor does the limitation keep anyone from tugging the transformed concepts into the public arena. BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY

Notes 1. In 1 Kings 3, two women lay claim to one child. Solomon proposes to cut the child in two to resolve the dispute; the true mother begs him not to slay the child but give it to the other woman. In Brecht’s play, the birth mother keeps pulling the child. 2. The literature of prototypes is sizable. In addition to Lakoff and Ungerer and Schmid, the reader may consult Rosch and Mervis, Lehman, and Taylor. 3. Even political interpretations are not likely to query the logic behind the dramatic fable and the values it promotes. Such readings emphasize Brecht’s Marxist world view but not the degree to which specific concepts and values are transportable to actual societies. Maria Shevtsova’s essay “The Caucasian Chalk Circle: The View from Europe” argues that in both Europe and America the play has been read as “anti–Nazism and anti-capitalism” and in favor of a “utopianpopulist version of communism” (1994: 163). In “Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle and Marxist Figuralism: Open Dramaturgy and Open History,” Darko Suvin argues that the purpose of the play is to derail the direction in which “class history is moving.” The logic of the Azdak and Grusha stories “momentarily ... [cancels] out the class world and its inhuman laws” to challenge a class-based dialectic and replace it with “a theory which sees history as the development of humanity through class conflicts” (1974: 165). 4. The Prologue, which presents the land dispute frame action placed in the Georgia region of the Soviet Union, was suppressed in American performances until 1965 (Bentley 1966:129).

References Cited Bentley, Eric. “An Un-American Chalk Circle?” In The Caucasian Chalk Circle, edited by Eric Bentley, 129–144. New York: Grove, 1966.


109

Blenkner, Louis. “Redemption in Chaos: Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle.” The American Benedictine Review 21/4 (1970): 548–561. Brecht, Bertolt. The Caucasian Chalk Circle, translated by Ralph Manheim. In Bertolt Brecht: Collected Plays. Vol 7, 135–229. New York: Random House, 1974a. _____. “Notes to The Caucasian Chalk Circle.” In Bertolt Brecht: Collected Plays, vol. 7. 295–327, 1974b. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic, 2002. Lakoff, George. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Lehman, Winifred. Prototypes in Language and Cognition. Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma, 1988. Losel, Franz. “The Role of Azdak and the Question of Justice in Brecht’s Der Kaukasiche Kreidekreis.” New German Studies 15 (1989): 187–206. McKinney, Lauren D. “Weeping in the Night: Reading beyond Language in The Caucasian Chalk Circle.” Modern Drama 35/4 (1992): 530–537. Rosch, Eleanor, and Carolyn R. Mervis. “Family Resemblances: Studies in the Internal Structure of Categories.” Cognitive Psycholog y 7 (1975): 573–605. Sagar, Keith. 1966. “Brecht in Neverneverland: The Caucasian Chalk Circle.” Modern Drama 9/1 (1966): 11–17. Shevtsova, Maria. “The Caucasian Chalk Circle: the View from Europe.” In The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, edited by Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks, 153–164. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Suvin, Darko. “Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle and Marxist Figuralism: Open Dramaturgy as Open History.” Clio 3 (1974): 257–76. Taylor, John. Linguistic Categorization: Prototypes in Linguistic Theory. Oxford,UK: Clarendon, 1989. Ungerer, Friedrich, and Hans-Jörg Schmid. “Prototypes and Categories.” An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics, 1–59. London: Longman, 1996.

9 Parables for His People Legal and Religious Authority in the Plays of Stephen Adly Guirgis David Pellegrini Abstract Perhaps no other playwright examines the permutations of sin and redemption in contemporary life as thoroughly as Stephen Adly Guirgis. His characters experience existential despair due to a loss of faith, or as a result of transgressions against family or community. Confined to the limbo of prison cells, funeral parlors, bars, or a courtroom in purgatory itself, they must answer to legal and spiritual authorities which are as flawed as the institutions they represent. Like the scribes of the medieval mystery plays, in Jesus Hopped the A Train, Our Lady of 121st Street, and The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, Guirgis juxtaposes sacred and secular space, prayer and profanity, and biblical and popcultural referents to arrive at a spiritual exegesis born from the streets. Compelled to enact social rituals within urban, juridical, performative, and ultimately sacral space, his characters must accept the grace afforded to them as a result of their acts of contrition and communion, or be condemned to a life of hopelessness and despair.

As interpreted by Judas’ appeals attorney, the Hegelian dialectic serves as an apt metaphor for the dramaturgical techniques employed by Stephen Adly Guirgis as he probes sin, justice, and spiritual redemption in The Last Day of Judas Iscariot: I cite Hegel: Within every idea —Thesis— is contained its contradiction — Antithesis— and out of that struggle is created —Synthesis. Synthesis, your Honor! The union of opposites — their interdependence and their inevitable clash producing what’s next — what must be revealed: God’s Perfect Love versus God’s Rightful Justice equals what, your Honor? [2006: 12].

Fabiana Cunningham’s invocation of the Hegelian dialectic (though referring to the discrepancy between the Christian doctrine of an all-forgiving God and the 110

9. Parables for His People (Pellegrini)

111

legacy that has denied Judas divine mercy) applies almost uniformly to the method by which Guirgis interrogates the central crises faced by major characters in nearly all of his plays. That mercy and forgiveness (the synthesis that Fabiana refers to) proves to be unattainable for Judas reveals that for Guirgis: if redemption is possible at all, it is contingent upon a subject’s engagement in sacral processes, which by their very nature transcend the rules of logic or law. Although the gritty urban realities that have conditioned their language and actions transport them far from scripture or allegory, the despair afflicting Gurigis’ characters renders them distant cousins to Judas. Invariably, any prospect of redemption depends on the assumption of personal responsibility, and more importantly, on a willingness to accept the humility and grace that forgiveness entails. If dialectical inquiry is instrumental for Guirgis to delineate the paradoxes inundating his characters’ lives, resolution is possible only through the enactment of social rituals in which the sacramental acts of confession and communion are embedded. The by-product of their collective endeavors is emblematic of what appears to be Guirgis’ overall dramatic project: the revivification of the sacramental and ritualistic properties linking dramatic form with Christian liturgy so that theatre itself may become an alternate site of spiritual rejuvenation. Another noteworthy feature of Guirgis’ dramatic technique is that his plays are less plot-driven than situational; that is, he tends to construct a paradoxical circumstance from which to propel action and develop character. Frequently, Guirgis adapts the conventions of the crime or courtroom drama in order to ensnare his characters within legalistic situations that embody the tensions of the dialectic, albeit often at the expense of verisimilitude. In The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, the appeal of Judas’ sentence to eternal damnation is heard in a courtroom in “downtown Purgatory.” Pontius Pilate, Simon the Zealot, and Satan are among the biblical figures to appear alongside contemporary characters who, like Judas, also await final judgment. If the central thesis is the illogicality of Judas being denied divine mercy given the extenuating circumstances in the narrative of Christ’s crucifixion, Judas’ inability (and unwillingness) to participate in his own defense represents the play’s central conflict. Ostensibly a prison drama, Jesus Hopped the A Train explores similar terrain, except that the central character, Angel Cruz, condemns himself to a life sentence not because he refuses to cooperate, but as a result of an almost pathological need to explain the extenuating circumstances of his actions. As he awaits trial for shooting the leader of a harmful religious cult in a botched attempt to extract a good friend, Angel is confronted by both beneficent and malevolent agents of the legal system. These include Mary Jane (his public defender), prison guards, and Lucius Jenkins, a charismatic serial killer sentenced for execution. Both of these “courtroom” dramas, however, are less concerned with the culpability of the characters on trial than with exploring the potential avenues for their redemption, which in all cases, lead beyond the domain of earthly justice.

112


Guirgis’ characters confront the improbability of fully attaining justice not only because of a flawed judiciary, but also since they are beholden to authority figures who are equally tainted by their transgressions of the law. Some of Guirgis’ most complex characters work for the legal system, though their actions are not always motivated by a desire to uphold justice. Satan suggests to Fabiana Cunningham, for example, that her extraordinary interest in Judas’ appeal is tied to her own failures, the responsibility for which she continues to deflect to her “mother, the bulimia, the herpes, the booze, the abortions, the rape, the bipolar pharmaceutical adventures, the two suicide attempts, and the abject failure of every relationship you ever attempted” (2006: 66). On a somewhat similar note, Mary Jane, Angel’s public defender in Jesus Hopped the A Train, admits that she initially dedicated herself to Angel’s defense not out of professional duty, but to satisfy her pride at finessing a system in which she “regularly earned acquittal for hardened career criminals: crack dealers, arsonists, murderers even — people with jaw-dropping rap sheets — and then, six months later I’d be asking bail for the same guy for the same offense or worse!” (2003: 144). Ben Brantley notes that in Jesus Hopped the A Train, Guirgis “considers subjects of Dostoyevskyan reach: crime and punishment, free will, [and] moral responsibility” (2002). In essence, Guirgis explores a moral conundrum articulated by Mary Jane about the ethics of moral responsibility and the values of altruism as they apply both to Angel’s case and her self-identity as a public servant: Did it ever occur to you, Angel, that we, as individual people, are responsible for the individual choices that we make? And regardless of how close we may think we are to someone else, we have very little control over their choices, and absolutely zero responsibility for the consequences those choices bring on them? [2003: 142].

That Mary Jane perseveres at all is due to her recognition that Angel did act honorably, and thus has inspired her to restore honor in herself. A contrasting version of individual agency and moral responsibility is articulated by Valdez, a sadistic prison guard who espouses an ethical basis for obeying the law untainted by the relativism of religion: I am a good man because I choose to be! End of story! Not because I fear God. Not because I wanna go to some Holy Playground when I kick the bucket! I go to work, I pay my taxes, I observe the law. I didn’t kill eight people! I don’t need to be “saved!” Do you really believe that there’s a thing called God? Or is it that your pain is so unbearable that you force yourself to create a belief in order to medicate your pain? [2003: 159].

That such flawed agents of legal authority (or other characters like Angel who are or would be deemed criminals) maintain ethical principles at least nominally


113

informed by religious codes permits Guirgis to shift his attention from earthly justice to matters of faith. Jaundiced as Guirgis’ vision of the justice system tends to be, his scrutiny of religion is no less scathing, as he excoriates doctrine and satirizes holy figures often to the point of blasphemy. When Henrietta Iscariot, whose maternal love transcends “all measure and understanding,” testifies that “If my son is in hell, then there is no heaven — because if my son sits in hell, there is no God,” it is clear that both earthly and religious justice are on trial (2006: 8). Though its importance varies from play to play, Guirgis’ application of dialectical inquiry to religious and spiritual matters is a recurrent motif developed mostly through comic techniques and irony. In Den of Thieves, four safecrackers held captive in a discotheque basement are compelled to reconcile their past transgressions with perceived notions of their own inherent goodness when forced to decide who among them will be sacrificed to assuage a drug-lord’s brand of justice. Paul, the ringleader, maintains that he participated in the robbery only on the condition that half of the money be used for “a place where kids can read and learn without bullets flying past their heads” (2004: 14). Paul’s intention to build a community library permits him to rationalize his criminal conduct and simultaneously perpetuate a family legacy of philanthropy initiated by his grandfather, the founder of the original Den of Thieves: a group of poor, uneducated Jewish safecrackers who “grossed over forty million dollars” for educational causes in immigrant neighborhoods in hopes that the “poor could have a chance to catch up to the rich” (2004: 14). In Our Lady of 121st Street, perhaps Guirgis’ most compelling exploration of the value of religion in contemporary society, the vigil for an alcoholic, physically-abusive nun occasions the spiritual reawakening of her former students as they wait in vain for the return of her stolen corpse. Judging from the first scene, it appears that the play will adhere to the formal structure and conventions of a crime drama as Balthazar, a police detective, gathers evidence from the funeral home from which Sister Rose’s body has been stolen. Each successive scene, however, explores the interrelationships and troubled lives of other students compelled to honor the memory of their former teacher, difficult as those memories may be. True to form, Balthazar is soon revealed to be a flawed agent of the law who engages in twisted police tactics to reconcile his own experience of injustice. For example, his brutal interrogation of a former classmate, the volatile and drug-addled Norca, is not conducted out of the plausibility that she stole Rose’s body, but rather because Balthazar knows he can provoke Norca to punch him in the face to slake his need to be punished for his son’s death. Balthazar’s flaws pale, however, beside the awesome legacy of the absent Sister Rose or the omnipresent Father Lux, two flawed agents of spiritual authority who figure prominently in the action. If solving the mystery of Rose’s missing corpse represents the spine of the play’s action, the encounter between Father Lux and Rooftop allows Guirgis to

114


develop the central theme regarding the value of religious authority in an era dominated, paradoxically, by secular relativism and fundamentalist discourse. While it can be argued that the characters of Our Lady of 121st Street find themselves in paradoxical circumstances of their own making as a result of their loss of faith, Guirgis’ dialectic renders the inconsistencies of religious doctrine as promulgated by all-too-human religious authority figures at least partially to blame as well. The techniques Guirgis employs in developing this thesis include satirizing literal interpretations of scripture (especially when he can expose narrative or logical inconsistencies), and portraying agents of spiritual authority as comically flawed or terribly conflicted. Rooftop enters Lux’s confessional not to receive the sacrament, but to avoid a confrontation with his ex-wife Inez. A humorous exchange in the confessional booth reveals Guirgis’ take on the absurdity of fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible. When Lux suggests to Rooftop that his despair can be compared to the plight of a man falling down a well, Rooftop hears “whale,” partly due to Lux’s brogue, but also because he has been smoking marijuana in the confessional. This misperception, in turn, triggers a host of associations for Rooftop: first, he recalls that it was Sister Rose who initially told him the Jonah story; next he remembers that his father derided its relevance (“Ain’t no whales in Harlem, fool”); and finally, his regression complete, he recalls the pajamas with sewn-in feet that he felt safe in as a child (2003: 53–54). Hilariously (and economically), Guirgis exposes the inherent subjectivity in scriptural interpretation since both source and exegesis are beholden to language, which is both contextual and as slippery as Jonah’s whale. Also, because religious doctrine is encoded in narrative, extra-religious associations are inevitable when lodged within memory and imagination. Although Rooftop is a successful deejay of a nationallysyndicated radio program who takes pride in his erudition and skill at spinning language, he later confuses (and misquotes) a line from Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (“Into the valley of the dead rode the six hundred”) with scripture (2003: 90). Here, Guirgis reinforces the inexorability of intertextuality even while Rooftop’s citation becomes an ironic commentary on his own dread upon finally encountering his ex-wife. Other sets of characters associated with Sister Rose further expand upon the problematic nature of spiritual authority as it applies to religious doctrine and its earthly messengers. When we first meet Edwin, he is having difficulty composing a eulogy for Rose because he cannot help but remember the corporal punishment she freely administered (which he experienced first-hand), and also because of the constant interruptions of his brain-damaged brother Pinky. In the funeral home, Edwin meets Rose’s niece Marcia, with whom he shares a mutual attraction. When in the second act Edwin dismisses the possibility of a romantic relationship, Gail punctuates Marcia’s chagrin by quoting St. Paul: “When I became a man, I put away childish things” (2003: 87; c.f.:1 Cor 13: 11). This citation is inappropriate, however, since Edwin’s decision springs from


115

the realization that he must spare Marcia from his full-time devotion to Pinky, whose brain-damage he was responsible for to begin with. Ironically, Paul’s quotation proves more apropos to Gail’s own situation when just moments later he decides to leave his lover Flip when it finally occurs to him that their relationship has been based on play-acting and illusion. Less subtle critiques of literalist interpretations of scripture can be found in other plays, such as when Angel Cruz complains in Jesus Hopped the A Train that “the Bible ain’t no autobiography,” and that “God didn’t write that shit! Buncha muthafuckahs wrote that shit. Apostles didn’t write no Gospel, and Jesus, that muthafuckah never wrote one damn word! Not even a fuckin’ postcard” (2003: 172). In The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, Caiaphas the Elder justifies his delivery of Christ to the Romans by shifting culpability from the Jews to the “people who perpetrated the lies and exaggerations that became sacrosanct fact and led to hatred and violence for the past two thousand years,” adding that neither he nor the Jews need God’s forgiveness as much as the “writers of the Gospel” (2006: 54). Later, Pilate seems to agree with Fabiana’s accusation that Pilate’s “hemming and hawing about what to do with Jesus is just a load of made-up crap written by Jewish Christian evangelists seeking to broaden the appeal of the Jesus story to the Roman Empire” when he characterizes the New Testament as “some book written four different ways by four different Jews wasn’t even there in the first place” (2006: 61–62). Such paradoxes, coupled with the sheer illogic of Judas’ condemnation to hell without the possibility of forgiveness, provide the ideal context for Guirgis to interrogate the vagaries of divine justice. In regard to a plausible explanation for Judas’ actions, Guirgis invokes a scholarly tradition maintaining that his suicide makes sense only if one considers that he intended his betrayal to have beneficial consequences. Simon the Zealot becomes the mouthpiece of this position when he observes that “Judas was trying to throw Jesus into the deep end of the pool” in order to “make him swim” and “start kicking ass like he was supposed to” (2006: 31). Placing Caiaphas, Pilate, historical figures, and saints on the stand, and having them speak contemporary slang is a technique called “inculturation” by James Martin, a Jesuit who served as a kind of spiritual dramaturg to Guirgis and the company of the first production of The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. Martin defines inculturation as the “translation of the Gospel text not simply into a different language but for a specific culture” (2007: xvi). The nuances of Guirgis’ slang, moreover, necessitate that these characters be played by actors from a range of ethnicities; in fact, Guirgis’ poetic treatment of urban dialect is a feature of his writing for which he is most acclaimed. Celia Wren notes, for example, that the monologues of Saint Peter and Saint Matthew are “extraordinarily moving” because their “twenty-first century perspective and colloquial tone gives an unusual intimacy to sacred subjects” (2005: 22). Inculturation is not only a major source of humor in The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, it is also a means by which Guirgis can more effectively challenge the

116


authority of religious figures, often caricatured by idiosyncrasies that compromise conventional notions about their saintliness. For example, Saint Monica, the mother of Saint Augustine, swears profusely and exhibits excessive pride about her role in the early development of the Church. Although generally acknowledged as bearing the ultimate responsibility for Christ’s death, Pilate exudes smugness about having been canonized a “saint in the Ethiopian Church” and declared a “Martyr for the Christian church in 348 A.D.” (2006: 62). The most intriguing historical figure to testify by far, however, is Mother Teresa of Calcutta, particularly since Fabiana’s cross-examination echoes the charges leveled by detractors such as Christopher Hitchens who served as “devil’s advocate” at the Vatican hearings to determine Teresa’s sainthood: “You blamed the wars of the world on abortion, took blood money from murderers and thieves, and opposed a stance against anti–Semitism. I’m having trouble understanding why we’re supposed to consider you an expert on anything having to do with the spirit” (2006: 28). Although her hearing loss, malapropisms, and heavy accent make her an easy comic foil, Teresa affirms her credibility as a character witness as she describes her own period of spiritual darkness when experiencing a “terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me, of God not being God, and of God not really existing” (2006: 27). Teresa also utters a definition of despair attributed to the theologian Thomas Merton so obviously central to Guirgis’ own position that he has her speak it twice: Despair is the ultimate development of a pride so great and so stiff-necked that it selects the absolute misery of damnation rather than accept happiness from the hands of God and thereby acknowledge that He is above us and that we are not capable of fulfilling our destiny by ourselves [2006: 27; c.f.: Merton: 180].

Furthermore, Teresa’s claim that “one must participate in one’s own salvation” applies not only to Judas, but also to Fabiana Cunningham, the safecrackers in Den of Thieves, Mary Jane and Angel in Jesus Hopped the A Train, and Rooftop, Balthazar, Inez, and Edwin in Our Lady of 121st Street. Although he is not seeking spiritual guidance, once he is prodded by Lux into the discursive rituals associated with the sacrament of confession, Rooftop comes to realize that he has been living in constant despair because of his betrayal of Inez. For her part, Inez blames Rooftop for her chronic inability to love or be loved by her adoring second husband, a despair she will be forced to own up to when she finally encounters Rooftop at the vigil. Similarly, while Balthazar’s masochism springs from his inability to forgive himself for the negligence that led to his son’s rape and murder, Edwin’s self-hatred stems from his guilt for both causing Pinky’s affliction and his resentment of his role as primary caregiver. However, it is through these characters’ direct (and indirect) encounters with religious authority, as well as their commitment to the social rituals vested


117

with sacral properties that they confront (and perhaps alleviate) their despair. Through the accumulation of such encounters that comprise the play’s action, Guirgis recuperates the validity of spiritual mentorship at the same time that he endows the formal conventions of the crime drama with sacral dimensions. To achieve a revaluation of religious authority, Guirgis inscribes liturgical elements in dialogue and implants signifiers of sacramental rituals in the performative dimensions of stage space and gesture. Although all of his plays are set in New York (even the courtroom of downtown Purgatory with its “bodegas” and “movie theatres” that is the setting of The Last Days of Judas Iscariot is reminiscent of the city) and all feature characters who reflect the city’s ethnic and racial diversity, Guirgis is, for the most part, non-specific about settings and properties. Yet, this absence of specificity holds the potential to enhance commonplace, urban settings with ritual dimensions in performance. Celia Wren notes that the “fitful shape” of Our Lady of 121stStreet “mirrors the unfulfilled, untidy existence of his characters ... [who are] restless, cranky, and anxious, missing a vital element of communitas in modern urban America” (2003: 24). The first act alone requires six changes of scene between the neighborhood bar, the sitting and viewing rooms of the Ortiz Funeral Home, and the confessional. If such frequent changes are consonant with the tendency in contemporary drama to contrive cinematographic effects, any production of the play requires the imagining of a multi-functional performance space in which urban settings comingle with ritual space either side-by-side, or interpolated one on another. This blurring of boundaries has its corollary in the dialogue, best exemplified by the relative ease in which invective becomes intertwined with poetry and prayer. As Richard Hornby notes, Guirgis’ characters are “compulsive talkers” whose speeches are “wordy and repetitive, variations on some theme, or simple reiterations for incantatory effect” [2003: 338]. Moreover, the deployment of space is reminiscent of medieval theatrical practices such as the cycle plays in which town landmarks were transformed into biblical settings and thus, at least temporarily, invested with religious significance. In Our Lady of 121st Street, acts of confession occur in church, but also in the sitting and viewing rooms of the Ortiz Funeral Home, and the neighborhood bar, all of which possess communal, ritualistic properties of their own. While the courtroom setting of The Last Days of Judas Iscariot is an appropriate venue to place earthly and divine justice on trial, it also achieves mythic significance since it is located in Purgatory. Furthermore, the trial is frequently interrupted by saints and evangelists hovering above the action who comment on the proceedings from vantage-points that are anachronistic and extra-terrestrial. Similarly, the discotheque basement of Den of Thieves and the holding cells of Jesus Hopped the A Train trap the principal characters in a kind of limbo as they await final judgment on their own transgressions. While the juxtaposition of urban and ritual settings is intrinsically related to Guirgis’ linguistic inculturation as it might be played in theatrical space, it

118


also serves to reconstitute religious ritual — the antecedent of dramatic structure — in contemporary drama. Martin points out that the New Testament parables contain overtly dramatic actions with metaphoric significance that highlight the connections between scripture, liturgy, and drama, and that the Mass itself is a “dramatic retelling of the passion, death, and resurrection that includes dialogue between the presider and the congregation, who act as a kind of Greek chorus” (2007: 219). One way that Guirgis reconfigures liturgical dynamics is through the incorporation of prayer. In Jesus Hopped the A Train, Angel recites the words of the Lord’s Prayer over the taunts and curses of other inmates, while Lux uses it to re-engage Flip, Rooftop, and Balthazar with their religious tradition even though they are getting intoxicated in the bar on 121st Street. Interestingly, the contrasting reactions of each of these characters to Lux’s invitation to prayer reveal the subtext of their inner conflicts: while Rooftop fears he has forgotten the words (as he did with the Act of Contrition earlier in the confessional) and Balthazar flatly refuses to pray at all, when Flip asks Lux if he is sure it would be alright for him to join in prayer, his sense of disenfranchisement from the Church as a homosexual is palpable even though he continues to “play straight” with his friends. Although he rarely inscribes physical action in his texts, important moments require key gestural acts signifying sacramental and liturgical dynamics. Martin notes that “the gestures, symbols, and ritual of the Mass are a means of telling a story and pointing to another, deeper reality (2007: 219); in Guirgis’ hands, such gestures can reveal psychological complexity or serve as an indicator of character development. When Marcia offers her plate of food to Edwin after his tirade of self-loathing, her action is loaded with the promise that this neurotic, self-centered character could possibly be a nurturing partner to Edwin, while her sharing of bread is charged with sacramental meaning. Balthazar’s offering of rosary beads to Vic as consolation for his news that half of Rose’s body was recovered in a suitcase on the West Side Highway transcends mere kindness when he reveals that the rosary belonged to his dead son. Other actions, even comic ones, invest sacral gestures with contemporary, even topical significance. When Rooftop passes his marijuana pipe to Lux in the confessional, it is simultaneously uproarious and poignant because he sincerely believes that if Lux were to get high it would facilitate their ability to communicate. A gift of peanuts, which Pinky offers to Lux along with an innocent kiss of the cheek, sends Lux into a panic and Pinky into confusion as the sexual abuse scandals that have besieged the Catholic Church come into stark and painful relief. In order to more fully actualize the sacral quotient of his plays, Guirgis eschews conventional dramaturgical progression towards climax and catharsis. By underplaying, deflecting, or shifting focus to a peripheral character, Guirgis subverts Aristotelian dramatic structure so that he can re-position any synthesis resulting from the dialectical logic intrinsic to the crime drama to the more ephemeral realms of the spiritual. In Jesus Hopped the A Train, Angel is almost


119

acquitted of Reverend Kim’s murder until Mary Jane mistakenly permits him to take the stand where he damns himself before an uncomprehending judge and jury. In a standard courtroom drama, Angel’s sentence to life imprisonment and Mary Jane’s subsequent disbarment would constitute the logical, albeit ironic, climax to the action. Guirgis, however, reserves the final words for Charlie D’Amico, the symbolically-named but relatively minor character who guarded Lucius. In a monologue delivered directly to the audience, D’Amico recounts his trip to Tallahassee to witness Lucius’ execution, where he attempted to maximize his empathy by imagining how Lucius must have felt in his last moments. Although D’Amico’s wife (the aptly-named Mary) had “just the right expression on her face” and “cried real quietly,” Lucius’ stoicism puzzled Charlie until he later discovered that he was high on cocaine and heroin. Still, D’Amico characterizes his association with Lucius as a “blessing in disguise,” for not only did he and Mary make love for the first time in six months on the night of the execution, Lucius also inspired him to quit drinking, leave the penal system, and open a family pool-cleaning business (2003: 188–189). Richard Hornby points out that “instead of a denouement,” the climax of Our Lady of 121st Street consists of a “confession of the alcoholic cop, whose drinking problem led to the neglect of his young son, which led in turn to the child being raped and murdered” (2003: 341). Balthazar’s confession to Vic, however, also represents the culmination of all of the major characters’ quests for redemption, even if they sometimes remain unaware of how this will be realized. It is telling, therefore, that Rooftop never directly receives Inez’s forgiveness; rather, the terms of his absolution are deflected to his best friend Balthazar when he confesses to Vic the depth of his pain and his own desperate need for forgiveness. Neither Rooftop nor Balthazar would achieve such potential were it not for the public act of contrition by Lux, another problematic religious authority figure. Like Sister Rose’s severed corpse, Lux is also dismembered, having lost both of his legs in the Korean War. The corporeal mortification of both characters signifies the clerical vow of self-abnegation while linking them to the narratives of the lives of the saints. That both Rose and Lux are not without sin actually increases their spiritual authority since Guirgis positions human frailty as a precondition for a life of service. Though Lux is hyper-aware of his own inefficacy — he no longer says Mass and he has stopped ministering to the sick — his recognition of his clerical failures compels him to overcome Rooftop’s ambivalence and thus reestablish his credentials as a spiritual guide. When he publicly confesses his gravest sins at the bar (his bigotry, agnosticism, and outright fury at God) Lux is transformed in a public space through a sacramental act that he no longer performs in church. Lux’s sacrifice underscores another of Guirgis’s major propositions: that spiritual guidance, however flawed or inconsistent, serves a necessary function in contemporary life. Although the specter of Sister Rose permeates the action, Lux’s very embod-

120


iment of the sacramental catalyzes a series of confessions by which other characters achieve insight, and, if not the attainment of grace, than at least a glimmer of hope that they may be worthy of it. Edwin’s decision not to pursue a relationship with Marcia, for example, is not symptomatic of a martyr complex as Marcia suggests, but rather the result of a new-found maturity in choosing to remain loyal to his brother. When Rooftop endures Inez’s rebuke for destroying her life, his first impulse is to flee; that he returns and accepts responsibility for her desolation indicates that his confession to Lux was efficacious. Moreover, his admission to Inez that the “cross” he bears is that he killed her love propels Inez’s hasty departure, presumably to return home to her husband; here, Rooftop’s act of selflessness fosters the renewal of Inez’s faith in another sacrament: matrimony. It is through Balthazar’s admission of the role his own pride played in the death of his son, however, that the play achieves its cathartic potential. Balthatzar’s confession of despair to a relative stranger is especially powerful because it is the culmination of his long day’s search for Rose’s body, his re-establishment of communal ties with Flip and Rooftop, and his observation of the healing potential of Lux’s spiritual mentorship of Rooftop. In the final moments of The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, the confession of a seemingly inconsequential juror provides yet another example of Guirgis’ shift of focus from the logical progression of the trial’s action to the realm of the sacral. When he first appears, Butch Honeywell is described as “definitely dead” though with “no real interest in finding that out,” and he seems more concerned with lunch than with his role as the foreman of the jury hearing Judas’ appeal (2006: 19). When he appears after the unresolved confrontation between Jesus and Judas at the end of the play, Butch apologizes to Judas for, what is now somewhat anti-climactically revealed to be, the jury’s guilty verdict. Butch also confesses that while he is finally ready to accept death, he remains unprepared for final judgment on account of his many adulterous affairs. Referring to the betrayal of his wife, Butch tells Judas: “You cashed in silver, Mr. Iscariot, but me? Me, I threw away gold” (2006: 77). Though Butch’s remark is intended as consolation, by downgrading Judas’ sins in the comparison, Gurigis renders the plight of the fallen apostle relative to contemporary experience. For the final tableau, Jesus is described as washing Judas’s feet “meticulously and with care,” a sacral act that shifts the emphasis away from Jesus’ dispensation of divine mercy (which is shown to be inevitable after all) to Judas’ willingness to accept it. Though Judas’ fate is left unresolved, the notion that forgiveness and redemption are available if one is open to receiving it is a choice Guirgis’ sinners face in play after play. Ultimately, however, it is the communion that such acts of contrition make possible by which these characters may actually achieve redemption. In Our Lady of 121st Street, Flip’s recollection of Little Chrissy (his childhood friend and Rooftop’s younger brother) who at eleven years old fell down an elevator shaft, becomes an inculturated parable of communion that paves the way for Rooftop (and later Balthazar) to be more open to the possibility of attaining grace. Though


121

Rooftop initially turns Flip’s reminiscence into one more opportunity to feel guilty, what burns most brightly in Flip’s memory is actually Rooftop’s act of selflessness. Flip recalls that after the funeral, Rooftop and Bathazar shared with him their pink Champale—Flip’s first sip of wine ever — and even more significantly, that Rooftop hugged Flip without hesitation. Flip’s memory of this important rite of passage into a fraternal order signified by gestures loaded with sacramental meaning serves to inscribe the past into the present as the trio toasts Chrissy memory at the bar. A moment later Lux appears, and after downing a drink himself, cajoles Rooftop and Flip into holding hands so that they may recite the Lord’s Prayer. The contiguity of the discursive and gestural signs reminiscent of sacramental ritual is clear: the communal sharing of wine to commemorate Chrissy’s sacrifice is reenacted in the bar by the same characters, only here under the tutelage of an agent of spiritual authority who is transformed through humility and sacrifice. The intersection of the earthly and spiritual realms at the heart of Guirgis’ dialectical inquiries seems to have intensified in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York City on 11 September 2001. Guirgis noted its impact in an interview with Bruce Weber: I’ve lived my entire life in New York and it informs everything.... Sept. 11 reinforced for me that whatever I’m writing about, it better be something that really matters to me because we don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. And for me it’s stories about people in pain in New York [2003].

Even without Guirgis’ testimony, it is difficult not to associate the image of Sister Rose’s severed corpse — which Vic justifiably labels a “sacrilege”— with the Twin Towers. Prefiguring this association, Vic observes that the theft of Rose’s body would never have happened “if Rudy was still in office,” referring to the much-vaunted, though, ironically, not altogether unsullied image of Mayor Giuliani’s leadership in the wake of the attacks. Also, just prior to Balthazar’s revelation to Vic about the discovery of Rose’s severed corpse, Inez describes her own “bombed out-graveyard for a mothafuckin’ heart” as she sits before Rose’s empty coffin (2003: 95). In a speech that evokes images of Ground Zero, Inez assails Rooftop with the life-altering effects of his betrayal and her inability to experience joy: You killed my heart, Walter! Killed it! You don’t remember Sister Rose talkin’ bout “every woman has a secret garden?” Well, you took my secret garden and dropped a fuckin’ atomic bomb on it and now it’s just scorched earth and ashes — burnt up dirt [2003: 95].

Premiering almost one year to the day after the attacks, Our Lady of 121st Street encapsulates the overarching sense of loss and collective yearning for community that typified the experience of many New Yorkers at the time.

122


One of the play’s most poignant moments belongs to a minor character, Sonia, who accompanied her friend Marcia to the wake. In the final scene, Sonia lingers at the all-night vigil, chatting amiably with strangers and straining to relate details of their experiences to her own, even though Marcia is long gone and she he did not even know Sister Rose. When an exasperated Inez asks her if she has anywhere else to go, Sonia can offer no response. Her stunned silence, however, reveals Sonia’s deep need to find solace in communion with others at a ritual site of mourning. Because the audience, too, sits in vigil for the absent Sister Rose, the theatre itself is transformed into a sacral space in which the rites of confession, communion, and mourning are shared. EASTERN CONNECTICUT STATE UNIVERSITY

References Cited Brantley, Ben. “Theatre Review: Locked Up in a Place Far Beyond Redemption.” New York Times, 30 November 2002. Guirgis, Stephen Adly. Den of Thieves. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2004. _____. The Last Days of Judas Iscariot New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2006. _____. Three Plays by Stephen Adly Guirgis. New York: Faber and Faber, 2003. Hornby, Richard. “New York Hot versus LA Cool.” The Hudson Review 156/2 (2003): 338–344. Martin, S.J., James. A Jesuit Off-Broadway: Center Stage with Jesus, Judas, and Life’s Big Questions. Chicago: University of Loyola Press, 2007. Thomas Merton: New Seeds of Contemplation. New York: New Directions, 1961. Weber, Bruce. “The Sound of Fury.” New York Times Magazine, March 2, 2003, 40–43. Wren, Celia. “Apparitions and Expletives.” Commonweal 130/8 (23 April 2003): 23–24. _____. “How Do You Plead?” Commonweal 132/6 (25 March 2006): 21–22.

¡0 Classroom Drama Beckett for the High School Set Doug Phillips Abstract Drawing on contemporary pedagogical theory, biography, and personal experience, I examine in this essay Samuel Beckett’s brief but scarcely considered experience as a teacher in order to make three interrelated arguments: first, that Beckett’s self-professed failure as a teacher belies the positive and even life-changing impact on more than a few of his former students; second, that Beckett’s teaching methods, insofar as they can be described as methods, anticipate the defining characteristics of his future work (namely uncertainty, indirection, and silence); third, and most importantly, that both Beckett-the-teacher and Beckett-thewriter have much to teach us about the art of teaching, especially at the secondary level.

While Samuel Beckett’s dramatic and fictional works have received virtually endless commentary and analysis, his experience and impact as a teacher, apart from brief mention in his biographies, have been scarcely addressed. Yet, what William Hutchings has said of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot— that it “confounds conventional expectations even as it fascinates, perplexes, and provokes” (2005: ix)— might also be said of Beckett-the-teacher, whose short tenure and self-proclaimed misery in the classroom nevertheless managed to impress more than a few of his pupils, some of whom recall their former teacher in the very tones which Hutchings uses to describe Beckett’s most celebrated play. That the teacher Beckett was prone to what at least one student referred to as “long pauses” (Burrows 1989) should come as no surprise, given the general silence that shadows so much of his work; nor should we find it surprising that “he lectured entirely without notes” (Knowlson 2006: 57) if we take into account Beckett’s general erudition at such a young age; nor, still, one student’s observation that “in lecturing some people like Beckett are creating as they go along” (Knowlson 2006: 56); nor, finally, Beckett’s resignation from teaching on the grounds that he could not teach what he himself did not know — a sentiment he would echo in both his lectures and in his early work Proust: “We cannot know and we can123

124


not be known” (2006: 540). In all, Beckett’s method of teaching, insofar as it can be called a method, anticipates much of his dramatic work, and together — both the writer and his works — can give insight and example to what some scholars and educators see as the importance of teaching uncertainty, of teaching in a way, says Allan Irving, “that values permanent unresolve; proceeds by indirection, obliquity and unknowing; revels in scrambled, broken moments; and enjoys recursive undecidability” (Irving 2002). Of course, Beckett was not teaching in the age of Rate-My-Professor-dotcom, when the kind of classroom approach described above might very well be a recipe for a blue-faced ratings disaster — not that Beckett would likely care or even stick around long enough to read the reviews. After all, his tenure as a teacher, first in Belfast at the Campbell School during the spring and summer terms of 1928, next in Paris at the Ecole Normale Supérieure between 1928 and 1930, then finally in Dublin at Trinity College from 1930 to 1932, lasted less than four years. The first stint was described by James Knowlson, in a fine Beckettian negative, as “not a resounding success” (1996: 77) and by Anthony Cronin, without the hedge, as “a disaster” (1999: 73). As for the second and third stints, both biographers agree that they were of only slightly more success. By all accounts Beckett found teaching to be a futile and frustrating project for which he thought himself to have little aptitude. Knowlson says of Beckett that his “shy, diffident manner did little to disguise his disdain for the shallowness, paucity of interest and lack of literary sensitivity of most of those he was teaching” (1996: 126). Furthermore, Knowlson adds, “Beckett lacked confidence too in what he felt capable of offering to his students and has often said that he gave up his job because ‘he could not bear teaching to others what he did not know himself ’”(1996: 126). Deirdre Bair also writes that “Beckett hated lecturing, feeling that he had no knack for it” (1990: 122). “His major problem,” she says, “was, quite simply, his students. He disliked teaching” (1990: 122). Bair then adds: He used his repugnance at the thought of standing in front of a room filled with giggling young women, which he likened to exhibiting himself, as an excuse to drink heavily the night before each class in an effort to blot the coming ordeal from his mind [ 1990: 123].

Beckett did indeed dislike teaching — that much is clear — even referring at one point to his brief career as “this grotesque comedy of lecturing” (Knowlson 1996: 126); however, whether he actually lacked the knack for it is a point of contention among the very students whom he taught. To be sure, some of Beckett’s students found him to be boring, dull, or downright incomprehensible (a similar complaint would be later aired by a good many of Beckett’s theatre-going audience and critics), but there were just as many others who would, in retrospect, describe him as “brilliant and interest-

10. Classroom Drama (Phillips)

125

ing” (Knowlson 2006: 52). One former student even goes so far as to say that “a listener could develop an entire treatise from one of his sessions” (Knowlson 2006: 52). According to Cronin, Beckett’s students at Trinity “thought him impressive and classified him as brilliant, while the women found this tall, blueeyed, seemingly impassive and taciturn lecturer both intriguing and extremely attractive” (1999: 127). This admiration and attraction may be attributable in part to what Bair describes as Beckett’s “highly unorthodox” teaching technique: He was always present in the classroom before the students, staring out the window, with his back turned. When they had stopped bustling and were silent, he usually continued to stare out the window for a very long time. Finally, he would turn to face them and deliver a sentence perfectly crafted but puzzling. He spoke without notes and never seemed to have anything but the work to be discussed in front of him [1990: 123].

As a lecturer, Beckett might be profitably compared with that other twentieth-century deep thinker of language and silence, Ludwig Wittgenstein who, it so happens, was teaching at Cambridge the same year Beckett was teaching in Dublin. Wittgenstein, like Beckett, also “lectured without notes, and often appeared to be simply standing in front of his audience, thinking aloud” (Monk 289). Wittgenstein’s influence on a legion of students is by now legendary but nothing, not even a score of imitators, could quell what he believed to be his own failures as a teacher. Of course it is not unusual for teachers who make the strongest positive impact on their students to feel the least secure in what it is they do, often berating themselves for what they see as their own pedagogical inadequacies, or to feel unrecognized and underappreciated by both the institution and the students for whom they labor. One need only look at two of Beckett’s contemporaries, the aforementioned Wittgenstein and Robert Frost (both of them successful teachers) to get this point.1 One might also look at Beckett’s own most influential teacher, Thomas Rudmose-Brown, Professor of Romance Languages at Trinity College and eccentric-extraordinaire who rejected, and was in turn rejected by, the academic establishment. According to Knowlson, Rudmose-Brown, whom Beckett referred to as “Ruddy,” was “a highly unorthodox, even controversial figure, who was never part of the academic establishment” (1996: 48) and who “strongly influenced Beckett’s own taste in literature and undoubtedly affected his attitudes to life” (1996: 49). “A staunch believer in individual freedom,” Ruddy, Knowlson speculates, “would have tried to set Beckett against all systems and all orthodoxies, whether religious, philosophical or ethical” (1996: 51). In short, Ruddy very much fits the “archetypal image of the great teacher” that the theologian David Miller describes as emptied of “preachings and preachments, ego’s or society’s cherished attitudes, standpoints, and beliefs” (Miller). According to Ruddy himself, “Every one of us must strive, unflinchingly, to be himself ” (qtd in Knowlson 1996: 51)— a precept, says

126


Knowlson, for which “Beckett’s entire career could be regarded as an illustration” (1996: 51). Certainly Beckett’s demeanor — his persona — in the classroom shows this to be the case. The kind of individualism that Ruddy evidently helped to instill in one of his favorite students sounds very Emersonian in spirit, even if Ruddy’s own interests and influences were French writers rather than American. This Emersonian spirit — this antipathy toward all systems and orthodoxies in favor of individual freedom — is in many respects the basis of the late American philosopher Richard Rorty’s approach to pedagogy, one which he details in his essay Education as Socialization and as Individualization and which suggests not only Beckett’s own experience as an undergraduate but reasons for why both his tenure as a teacher and his imaginative works should serve as a model for classroom practices. According to Rorty, “the word ‘education’ covers two entirely distinct, and equally necessary, processes — socialization and individuation” (1999: 117). For Rorty, “education up to the age of 18 or 19 is mostly a matter of socialization — of getting the students to take over the moral and political common sense of the society as it is” (1999: 116). In contrast, individuation, occurring about the same age, especially for those students making a transition between high school and college, is the result of increased skepticism toward and criticism of the common sense and cultural consensus inculcated during all those years of socialization. The point of higher education, argues Rorty, is “to help students realize that they can reshape themselves — that they can rework the self-image foisted on them by their past, the self-image that makes them competent citizens, into a new selfimage, one that they themselves have helped to create” (1999: 118). Furthermore, it is “a matter of inciting doubt and stimulating imagination, thereby challenging the prevailing consensus” (1999: 118). However, as Rorty readily admits, “things get difficult when one tries to figure out where socialization should stop and criticism [individuation] start” (1999: 117). Still, insists Rorty, “Socialization has to come before individuation, and education for freedom cannot begin before some constraints have been imposed” (1999: 118). As a teacher of junior and senior English at a college preparatory school in St Paul Minnesota, I am well aware of the kinds of imposed constraints typical of most secondary schools across the country. Also, given the ages of the students whom I regularly teach —16 to 18 year olds — I am hyper-cognizant of the turn many of them take as they ready themselves for higher education, from task performing automatons to critical subjects increasingly aware of their own individuality and impending autonomy. To help facilitate and encourage this transition I have taken to making more and more use of Beckett’s short fiction and dramatic pieces in British and Irish literature, a course required for all seniors where I teach. For example, students in my class begin each year with a reading of Beckett’s short prose work Ping, followed by two of his short plays: Come and Go and Play. While Ping, predictably, leaves students baffled and frustrated, the two plays — challenging enough in their uncertainty and utter strangeness — tap


127

into what may very well be the single most recurring refrain among all high school students across the land: drama. Ask high school students about the bane of their collective existence and they are likely to rattle off a Holden Caulfieldlike litany of complaints, beginning with what they apprehend to be lockers-full of insidious gossip (“did you hear about...”), moving then to a put-upon sense of betrayal (a reneged prom date perhaps or, worse, being “dissed” in the lunch room), and concluding with a downward spiral of epistemological uncertainty (awaiting anxiously the arrival of that thin or thick letter — a kind of Godot in itself— from one’s college of choice). In short, the so-called drama in the lives of my students is the very drama in which both Come and Go and Play traffic, though defamiliarized and made strange through Beckett’s rendering (especially when students view the productions of these plays in Beckett on Film, which they all can easily access via Youtube). Both plays proceed by way of repeated whisperings (turtle-paced in Come and Go; frenetic in Play, as well as punctuated by the occasional scream) that suggest, or downright make accusations about, a betrayal of trust. Both plays also concern three characters, all of whom are linked together in life — or in death, as the case may be — by what they know or rather presume to know about each other. Together, Come and Go and Play register, in an abbreviated form, what it means to be trapped in the roundabout that is language, while offering no promise of future certainty or a firm footing, an insight too often overlooked by or denied the newly graduated. If during their long period of socialization students have been encouraged and rewarded for their resolve, determination, and understanding to choose, say, correct answer A over incorrect answer B; or to perform without question the various and sundry tasks asked of them; or to read literature as a kind of Easter egg hunt whereby the student who first finds the appropriate symbol in this or that work is duly given a gold star, then what are they to do in the face of a story like Ping or a plays like Come and Go and Play that so patently reject any notion of interpretive firm ground? What but learn to accustom themselves — with all their anxiety and unease — to Beckett’s world of uncertainty, a world into which they themselves will soon enough be immersed; a world in which, statistics show, today’s student will have ten to fourteen jobs by the age of thirtyeight; a world in which students are being trained for jobs that do not presently exist; a world in which, according to former secretary of education Richard Riley, the top ten in demand jobs for 2010 did not exist in 2004; a world in which 3000 new books are published every day; a world in which the amount of technical information is doubling every two years.2 As Stephen Dilks writes in his essay Teaching Uncertainty, “If we are to prepare students for the almost entirely denatured, man-made, culturally relative environments that most of them will inhabit, we must prepare them to confront the kinds of uncertainty that accompany the profoundly unfathomable interchangings of human construction” (Dilks). Of course it may very well be that students already understand uncer-

128


tainty, as Linda Ben-Zvi rightfully observes (1991: 38). After all, she says, “they experience it daily” (1991: 38). “But in the classroom,” she warns, “they have been conditioned to look for the bottom line and underline it in red for return on an examination” (1991: 38). I would add that this conditioning — this undue emphasis on result-based performance and interpretive clarity — is not only endemic to schools but to our culture at large. While the last several years have been no more uncertain than any other time in history (consider, for example, the Cold War Fifties or the plague-ridden Middle Ages), they have been — with the telescoping of technology — uncertain in their own way. Yet, in the face of such uncertainty are those who pretend otherwise, who make-believe that the most complex of situations can be easily simplified, and that the “real” itself can be comprehended. In contrast, Beckett favored what he termed the “incomprehensibility of the real,” an idea enacted not only in his many plays and fiction but in the work of some of his most important influences: Racine, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Proust, Joyce, and Gide.3 According to Rachel Burrows, one of Beckett’s former students, these writers “did not distort the incomprehensibility of the real”; instead, they preserved “the complexity of the real, the inexplicable, unforeseeable quality of the human being” (Burrows 1989). Burrows adds, “He’s concerned with digging into the real as he see it at that moment, and even that was relative, because the artist is changing, the material is changing, and the moment is changing” (Burrows 1989). When, then, today’s leaders (of whatever ilk or nationality) act with supposed certainty and incautious resolve it is far less admirable than it might initially appear — even through the eyes of, say, a seventeen year old. If for no other reason, it patently falsifies the particular brand of uncertainty that so defines our world, and which young students can expect to encounter. As a foil to easy decision-making and right answers, Beckett’s fiction and drama instead encourage attention, a point made by James Tomek in his discussion of Waiting for Godot. Regarding Godot, Tomek argues that Beckett’s position on waiting is an ideal for teachers and students because of its association with and emphasis on attention. “In working out a problem,” Tomek contends, “the goal is not the answer, but an increased sense of attention” (Tomek)— the very point Guy Davenport makes when he reminds us that “art is always the replacing of indifference with attention” (qtd in Mason 90). In short, what Charles Lyons writes of Beckett’s plays might also give suggestion to a certain practice in the classroom; that is, the teacher’s function is not to “produce meaning, but rather establish a series of indeterminacies which in turn play on the spectator’s [student’s] imagination and provoke a particular kind of speculation” (qtd in Beckerman 149). What T. S. Eliot said of Henry James — that “he had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it”— could most assuredly be applied to Beckett, to both the writer himself and to the “mind” of his work, which resists at every turn encapsulation, explication, or reduction. This may then be a kind of antidote to a younger generation that is bored with everything for precisely the reason that


129

everything has been explained to them. Recall for example the scene in Mike Leigh’s brilliant film Naked when the anti-hero Johnny delivers his scathing indictment of boredom and certainty: Was I bored? [he asks] No, I wasn’t fuckin’ bored. I’m never bored. That’s the trouble with everybody — you’re all so bored. You’ve had nature explained to you and you’re bored with it, you’ve had the living body explained to you and you’re bored with it, you’ve had the universe explained to you and you’re bored with it, so now you want cheap thrills and, like, plenty of them, and it doesn’t matter how tawdry or vacuous they are as long as it’s new, as long as it flashes and fuckin’ bleeps in forty fuckin’ different colors. So whatever else you can say about me, I’m not fuckin’ bored [Naked 1994].

“The danger,” Johnny might say (and Beckett did say), “is in the neatness of the identifications” (Beckett: 19). How else to explain the kind of gross public apathy — and indeed boredom — that is daily enriched by the crass simplicities of talk radio and television newscasts? Thus for Dilks, in his essay Teaching Uncertainty, it is best perhaps “to surrender to the foe of uncertainty than to the more dangerous foe of neat identifications” (Dilks). Beckett, says Dilks, learned how to “explore the deepest levels of the self and its expression (or nonexpression) by using uncertainty” (Dilks). Perhaps our students can learn to do the same, for as Dilks contends, “If habit is the great deadener, then uncertainty is the great enlivener” (Dilks). With Beckett’s texts, Dilks concludes: the teacher can shape a course that responds directly to a whole set of deadeningly habituated expectations and prejudices about the relationship between the reader and the text, and between the student and the teacher, between conventional and unconventional writing, between the word and the world, etc. The very unteachability of so much of Beckett becomes its main strength as a pedagogical instrument [Dilks 2008].

If in the classroom there is a single most dreaded reply to our carefully etched questions, then surely it must be the sometimes innocent, though more likely lazy, I don’t know— sputtered with all the enthusiasm of a clubbed fish. In the end, though, Beckett could not fault his own students for what he himself would later and repeatedly record as life’s overriding condition, one of perpetual not-knowing. It is reason enough for anyone to give up the game, if not of life itself then certainly — and at the very least — life in the classroom. However, for Stephen Dilks, David Miller, and — where this paper began — Allan Irving, such unknowing can perhaps be turned to the teacher’s advantage through what Irving calls “a posture of poetic ‘not knowing’” (Irving 2002). In turn this posture would be more in accord with Beckett who, writes Irving, “punctures the entire Western tradition of reason/knowledge/truth and intimates that the supreme motive of human existence rather than to know is not to know” (Irv-

130


ing). More than a posture or mere pose, Irving is arguing for a position of renewed authenticity with regard to what teaching can and cannot accomplish. And assuming such a position requires first that we begin to think about teaching — in the arts, anyway — as a much more “uncertain and indeterminate activity” than we have previously conceived it to be. Furthermore, suggests Irving, it requires that “we try to get aloft the image that classrooms can provide places/spaces for intellectual tumult that can be facilitated by conversations, confessions, and carnival” (Irving 2002). As Beckett himself writes in Molloy, “to be beyond knowing anything, to know that you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker” (1991: 64). And yet, as Beckett also reminds us in his poem Cascando, “If you do not teach me I shall not learn” (2006: 34). HILL-MURRAY SCHOOL

Notes 1. See Ray Monk’s Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius and Jay Parini’s Robert Frost: A Life, both of which offer detailed accounts of their subject’s teaching experience. 2. These statistics come courtesy of a once ubiquitous YouTube video called Shift Happens, created by Karl Fisch and Scott Mcleod. 3. For a discussion of Beckett’s “incomprehensibility of the real,” as well as his literary influences and admirations, see S.E. Gontarski’s interview with Rachel Burrows in the December 1989 issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies. Burrows was one of Beckett’s former students.

References Cited Bair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. New York: Touchstone, 1990. Beckerman, Bernard. “Beckett and the Act of Listening.” Beckett at 80/Beckett in Context. Ed. Enoch Brater. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Beckett, Samuel. “Dante ... Bruno . Vico ... Joyce.” Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Ed. Ruby Cohn. New York: Grove, 1984. _____. Molloy. 1955. New York: Grove, 1991. _____. Proust. 1931. New York: Grove, 1978. _____. Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume IV: Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism. Ed. Paul Auster. New York: Grove, 2006. Ben-Zvi, Linda. “Teaching Godot from Life.” Approaches to Teaching Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Ed. June Schlueter and Enoch Brater. New York: MLA, 1991. Burrows, Rachel. “Interview with Rachel Burrows.” Interview. By S.E. Gontarski, et al. Journal of Beckett Studies 11–12 (1989): 6–15. http://www.english.fsu.edu/jobs/. Cronin, Anthony. Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist. New York: Da Capo, 1999. Dilks, Stephen. Teaching Uncertainty: The Danger is in the Neatness of the Identifications. 15 January 2008. http://www.samuel-beckett.net/Uncertain.html. Hutchings, William. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot: A Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005. Irving, Allen, and Ken Moffatt. Intoxicated Midnight and Carnival Classrooms: The Professor as Poet. 13 September 2007. http://radicalpedagogy.icaap.org/content/issue4_1/05_irvingmoffatt.html. 2002.


131

Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. Bloomsbury: London, 1996. Knowlson, James, and Elizabeth Knowlson Eds. Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett: A Centenary Celebration. New York: Arcade, 2006. Mason, Wyatt. “There Must I Begin to Be: Guy Davenport’s Heretical Fictions.” Harpers (April 2004): 87–92. Miller, David. Nothing to Teach! No Way to Teach It! Together with the Obligation to Teach!: Dilemmas in the Rhetoric of Assessment and Accountability. http://www.mythicjourneys.org/news letter_sep07_miller. html, 2006. Monk, Ray. Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. New York: Penguin, 1991. Naked. Directed by Mike Leigh. Cast: Alison Steadman, Sylvestra Le Touzel, David Thewlis, and Wendy Nottingham. Criterion, 1994. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin, 1999. Tomek, James. Teaching Philosophy: Waiting for Godot and Simone Weil to Come to Class. 15 February 2008. http://ntweb.deltastate.edu/jtomek/WeilBeckett.htm.

¡1 Anne Hébert’s La cage A Masque of Liberation Gregory J. Reid Abstract Critics of Anne Hébert’s La cage, while approaching the play from feminist and postcolonial perspectives, have consistently ignored the implications of its dramatic genre. Mimicking the medieval forms of morality play and masque, Hébert transforms the iconic witch-figure from Quebec history known as la Corriveau into Ludivine Corriveau. Hébert celebrates la Corriveau as an emancipated, archetypal Everywoman and, in the process, satirizes the patriarchal and imperial hierarchy which these dramatic genres were designed to reinforce. Therefore, crucial to any reading or performance of La cage is an understanding and appreciation of the implications of the morality play and the masque.

Anne Hébert’s play La cage has proven an awkward enigma even for the most dedicated scholars of her work. The play must be read (though not necessarily performed) as a satire, but the object of the satire seems unfocussed, and the play contains little of the tenor and tone typically associated with satire. The irony of La cage emerges from the dramatic forms, the morality play and the masque, which Hébert adopts and adapts to enact and celebrate the liberation of women from patriarchal oppression. In “Living with the Cultural Legacy of La Corriveau: La cage,” Maureen O’Meara describes the play as “a combination of fairy tale and drama” (2001: 166) in which Anne Hébert has replaced the historical features of the legend of “la Corriveau” with “a fairy-tale, semi-allegorical scenario” (2001: 165). Scholarly analyses of the play consistently describe it as a “fairy tale” (O’Meara 2001: 165–166, Rea 2001b: 28, 32, Slott 2001: 156, Marchese 2003: 96, Rousselot 2004: 165–166). This focus on Hébert’s “use of the fairy tale form” (Rousselot 2004: 165) demonstrates how critics, approaching it from postcolonial and feminist perspectives, have ignored the implications of the play’s dramatic genre. The structure and style of La cage clearly mimic the medieval morality play and the masque. The fantastic, allegorical and pseudo-religious tenor of the morality play, as well as the spectacular, magical, celebratory pageantry of the masque 132

11. Anne Hébert’s La cage (Reid)

133

are crucial elements to consider in any reading or performance of Anne Hébert’s La cage. The play opens, not unlike the touchstone morality play Everyman, with a Prologue addressed directly to the audience. Babette, the chorus of the prologue in La cage, announces that she is the adopted daughter of Ludivine Corriveau and has sworn to recount the entire history of the how the wife of Elzéar Corriveau was convicted of murder and sentenced, by Judge John Crebessa, to be hanged and her corpse left hanging on display in an iron cage. There is substantial, though rather dry, irony in Babette’s promise to tell the whole story. Quebec audiences would be all too familiar with the story of the woman commonly known as “la Corriveau.” As Luc Lacoursière points out in an essay republished in an anthology of oral, popular, and literary stories and historiographic essays about la Corriveau, “there is hardly a woman in all of Canadian history with a worse reputation (1995: 147, my translation).1 However, la Corriveau’s name was Marie-Josephte not Ludivine; John Crebessa was not the judge of the historical court martial but a character reprised from Anne Hébert’s novel Kamouraska, and the play, as it unfolds, contradicts both the historical record and the various myths, legends, lyrics and icons of the FrenchCanadian witch called la Corriveau. According to documents from the period, in 1763, three years after the British conquest of New France at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, MarieJosephte Corriveau confessed to a garrison court martial that she had killed her husband, Louis Hélène Dodier, with a hatchet, while he slept, because of the “ill treatment” she had suffered from him.2 The court martial’s decision to ignore the marital abuse and to impose a punishment reserved for the most heinous of crimes, “hanging in chains” or gibbeting (see Lacoursière 1995: 163), were calculated, barbarous displays of patriarchal and British imperial authority over the newly-conquered French colony. However, in Hébert’s La cage, Ludivine Corriveau shoots her husband, Elzéar Corriveau, accidentally with a rifle when he returns home unexpectedly after months of working in the woods. The play suggests that she was brought to trial, in part, because she had earlier rebuffed Judge Crebessa’s sexual advances. Ostensibly out of jealousy, he accuses her of an adulterous relationship with Hyacinthe, a painter with whom she has developed a Platonic relationship. We are made to understand that Ludivine is being put on trial because of her independence, her impervious bravery in rejecting the advances of the Judge, and her refusal to accept social censure signalled by her having adopted a motley family of social outcasts. According to the play, she was impoverished, barren, marginalized and forced to submit to John Crebessa’s malign cruelty because it was her destiny as arranged by the Black Fairies at the moment of her birth. At her trial the Seven Deadly Sins are called to testify against her, while Hyacinthe and her adopted family speak in her defence. Having announced his intention to condemn Ludivine to death, Judge John Crebessa dies suddenly and inexplicably, clutching his chest, before he can actually pro-

134


nounce sentence. Ludivine is consequently released. One of the White Fairies recovers a key which fell from the deceased John Crebessa’s pocket as the Black Fairies were taking him away. The play ends with Ludivine and Hyacinthe armin-arm leading a parade of dancing children to free John Crebessa’s wife, Lady Rosalinde, from her imprisonment in the family manor. The essence of irony, as Paul de Man defines it in Aesthetic Ideolog y, is “parabasis”; that is, “the interruption of a discourse by a shift in rhetorical register” (1996: 178). Hébert’s play interrupts the discourse of historical facts and myths surrounding la Corriveau, but it also disrupts contemporary feminist and postcolonial discourse about her by creating a new character and a new story and presenting them in a form which constitutes a significant shift of register from all previous versions of la Corriveau. The allegorical simplicity of the morality play and the celebratory pageantry of the masque, which supply the tone, structure and denouement of La cage, are incongruous to and constitute a rupture with the complexity, seriousness and gravity of the historical events as well as feminist and postcolonial reflections on those events. In this context, it is perhaps not so surprising that, in her article “La Corriveau et Anne Hébert: état d’études,” Janis Pallister concludes: One could suggest that the author, who leaves the protagonist of Kamouraska in her cage, shows herself to be more and more a “femalist,” that is to say focussed on women, or “parafeminist” for, in my opinion, one cannot really see in Hébert, at least in her early works, a true feminist. The portraits of terrible mothers from “Le Torrent” to Les Fous de Bassan, and of women drowned in the vortex of their desires seem to me to prohibit inclusion of Anne Hébert in the category of radical feminist [...] [2003: 108, my translation].3

In her 1970 novel, Kamouraska, Hébert’s protagonist, Elisabeth d’Aulnières, like la Corriveau, was convicted in Quebec by a British court of murdering her husband. We should note that, although La cage is explicitly about la Corriveau (Ludivine is repeatedly identified as “la Corriveau” in the dialogue), Pallister has largely removed La cage, which was published in 1990, from consideration in reaching her conclusion. The play is Hébert’s last published drama. It was published at the height of her career, eight years after she had won le prix Femina in 1982 for her novel Les Fous de Bassan. It is, as Neil Bishop points out, the most feminist in tone of all her plays (1997: 66). O’Meara argues that the play “works to liberate its author and other Québec women from a Jansenist and fatalist tradition” (2001: 165). In “Marie-Josephte Becomes Ludivine,” Annabelle M. Rea notes that “[t]he liberation of woman’s intelligence, Ludivine’s final act of female solidarity — such acts are rare in Hébert’s work — closes the play” (2001b: 31). In “La Remise en question de la Corriveau,” Kathryn Stott describes Hébert’s reworking of the legend as a valorization of women (2001: 157). Elena Marchese also sees the theme


135

of the play as “the liberation of women from patriarchal slavery” (2003: 93, my translation).4 La cage is, and could easily be subtitled, “a masque in celebration of women’s liberation.” While Pallister rejects postcolonial interpretations of “la Corriveau” as a symbol of Quebec suffering under English oppression, and sees her as “an illustration of the tragic destiny of the battered woman” (2003: 109, my translation),5 operating from a postcolonial perspective in Re-Writing Women into Canadian History, Rousselot concludes that: “Hébert’s play [...] does suggest that Ludivine is a victim of political, and more particularly colonial, circumstances, that she is unable to fully grasp the laws by which she is judged, and that, as a result, she cannot defend herself effectively” (2004: 178). However, since Hébert ultimately chose not to make Ludivine a “victim,” observations about spousal abuse and/or colonial oppression would seem to have everything to do with the historical events surrounding Marie-Josephte Corriveau, but relatively little to do with the play which Hébert wrote about Ludivine Corriveau whose ultimate destiny was life, liberty and love. Certainly, as Marchese points out in “Le projet de réécriture,” La cage problematizes traditional concepts of history and the female condition (2003: 93), but it is hard to reckon how this play about a fictional protagonist surrounded by Fairies and Deadly Sins can be taken seriously as a “re-writing of history.” Like a morality play La cage takes as its point of departure a reified conflict between “personifications of good and evil” (Brockett 2004: 94). After Babette’s introduction, two chorus lines of Fairies enter stage left and stage right. Pregnant and carrying magic wands, they announce themselves and are dressed accordingly in either bright or dark costumes as White or Black Fairies. As John Gassner outlines in his introduction to Everyman, the initial, dominant theme of the morality play is “the conflict of Virtues and Vices for a man’s soul” (1968: 205). In his History of the Theatre, Oscar Brockett attributes the origins of the morality play to “‘Pater Noster prayers which were divided into seven petitions, each relating to the cardinal virtues and seven deadly sins [...] a framework of continual struggle between good and evil to possess man’s soul” (1974: 96). This primordial conflict supplies the basic structure of the drama, but from this perspective it is not Ludivine Corriveau but John Crebessa who plays the role of “Everyman” facing death and being called upon to change his ways. The crucial irony in Hébert’s play is the death of John Crebessa. This reversal is abrupt, unexpected, and contrary to established narratives surrounding the trial of la Corriveau as well as contradicting the expected outcome for the Everyman of a morality play, and it is incongruous at the literal or “realistic” level of the dramatic action. Although Rea suggests that “John Crebessa dies of a heart attack” (2001b: 31), in the context of a morality play, his death should be understood on an allegorical plane, as equivalent to the transcendent intervention of the gods or god-like forces. Crebessa’s death is therefore a magical event. It occurs shortly after Hyacinthe pleads for Ludivine’s life. In keeping with the tenor of

136


the morality play, Hyacinthe entreats the Judge to save himself, while there is still time, from his destiny as a man of evil, and from eternal damnation (1990: 106). Crebessa dies immediately after expressly repudiating love. He says to Hyacinthe : “I will make you eat that dammed word. Love, love, love, said with such intensity, between clenched teeth; I hear it like a cry that outrages me. No, no, I cannot stand it. Enough is enough. I have only just the time to die” (1990: 110, my translation).6 In the irony of poetic justice, Crebessa’s destiny is to choose death, but the death he knowingly chooses turns out to be his own rather than Ludivine Corriveau’s. Crebessa has a fleeting moment of anagnorisis, a sudden though faint knowledge of his own hubris and the folly of his destiny. His final words are: “I hear, in the distance, a song of love, in a strange language, slipping by at the speed of the wind, like the tolling of bells, rising above my head” (1990: 110, my translation).7 Crebessa then collapses into his chair and is pronounced dead. In Hébert’s allegory, to reject love is to abandon life and choose death, but liberty is a necessary condition of love. The judge’s death and damnation bring the morality play to a close, and allow the play’s masque-like features, its pageantry and spectacle, to re-emerge and dominate the stage. However, the judge’s death also contradicts the tradition of the masque and demonstrates how Hébert has appropriated the form and reversed its intentions. As Stephen Orgel describes it in The Illusion of Power: “The masque presents the triumph of an aristocratic community; at its center a belief in the hierarchy [...]” (1975: 40). The “cage” to which the play’s title refers derives from the French translation of “hanging in chains” as “pendu en cage.” Hanging in chains was a deliberately terrifying display of hegemonic power, but Hébert’s play explicitly overturns its symbolism. Hébert does not describe the iron structure in which la Corriveau’s body was left hanging for over 40 days beyond referring to it as simply “une cage de fer” [an iron cage]. It is therefore not possible to determine if the prop she had in mind for the stage was an abstract, generic cage or a historically accurate gibbet. There are, in fact, two cages in the play and the one assigned to Rosalinde Crebessa could not have had the form-fitting structure used for gibbeting. In the stage directions beginning Act One, on their wedding day, John Crebessa is described as entering the cage carrying his wife (1990: 35). In keeping with the features of the masque, the cages, not unlike the chariots of English masques (see Nicholl 1968: 127–137), are essential to the play’s spectacle. In Hebert’s stage directions the cages are covered but dimly visible upstage when the play opens. A few lines into Babette’s opening monologue the lights come up stage right, the cover is lifted and Ludivine’s iron cage is revealed. Moments later, the lights come up stage left, the cover is lifted and Rosalinde Crebessa’s golden cage is likewise revealed. Later in the Prologue, the Black Fairies attach crows to the bars of Ludivine’s cage, while at the opening of Act One the wedding guests dress Rosalinde’s cage in white ribbons. Throughout


137

the Prologue, the Fairies, Black and White, parade before the cages, announcing what promises and curses Ludivine’s and Rosalinde’s futures will hold. For example, the Third White Fairy promises Rosalinde gold, silver and jewels, but the Third Black Fairy announces that her husband will be a miser in all things, locking away her jewels, and depriving her even of the pleasures of love; she will produce children in the strictest economy of happiness (1990: 18–19). Historically, as Brockett points out, “the masque [...] was an allegorical story designed to honour a particular person or occasion through a fanciful comparison with mythological characters or situations” (1974: 164). The “fanciful comparison” established in La cage is multifaceted. In the first place, the historical trial of Marie-Josephte Corriveau is conflated to a mythical conflict between Black and White Fairies. Although the play begins by establishing corresponding contrasts between good and evil, the old world and the new, and between Rosalinde Crebessa and Ludivine Corriveau, this contrast is eventually overridden, as the comparison takes hold between the fictional, allegorical figure of Lady Rosalinde, her marriage at the age of fifteen to John Crebessa and her eventual liberation through his death, and the re-mythologized version of la Corriveau as Everywoman. The play honours the Marie-Josephte archetype; that is, not necessarily the historical individual but women like her, who had braved patriarchal oppression. In contradiction to both history and legend, Hébert celebrates this figure as “divine” and gives her, in a magical, a-historical fashion, her life, her liberty and the possibility of love. The occasion being celebrated in this masque is the liberation of women as represented by the continuum between Ludivine Corriveau’s liberation and the emancipation of Lady Rosalinde from the bonds of her marriage. Brockett’s observations that the text of the masque “established a context for lavish spectacle” but that “[t]he major emphasis [...] was upon dance” (1974: 164) is also applicable to La cage. In his “Introduction” to English Masques, Herbert Arthur Evans defines the masque as “a combination, in variable proportions, of speech, dance and song, but its essential feature is the presence of a group of dancers” (1933: xxxiv). In “La Danse chez Anne Hébert,” Rea underlines “the numerous references to dance in Hébert’s later works” (2001a: 251, my translation).8 “Embedded in the masque’s allegorical plot,” Brockett observes, “were usually three ‘grand masquing dances’” (1974: 165). La cage opens the Prologue with parading choruses of dancing Fairies; Act One opens with the wedding of John and Rosalinde Crebessa, the guests calling for dancing; and the play ends with a parade of dancing children, fairies and everyone else on stage. Orgel claims that “[t]he climatic moment of the masque was nearly always the same: the fiction opened outward to include the whole court, as masquers descended from pageant car or stage and took partners from the audience” (1975: 39). Hébert’s text does not mention the final pageant moving into the audience, but the spirit of the scene certainly moves in that direction (where we might imagine the Crebessa manor to be located).

138


“Many [masque] productions included ‘anti-masques,’ first introduced in 1608 by [Ben] Jonson to provide a contrast with the main story” (Brockett 1974: 165). The anti-masque not only allowed Jonson to insert more verse into the dramatic pageant, but also provided “an opportunity for the scenic designers to contrive striking transformations from ugliness to beauty” (Brockett 1974: 165). Both features of the anti-masque (more dialogue and contrasts of ugliness and beauty) are integral to La cage, although Hébert, once again, challenges the established discourses concerning the ugliness of the archetypal la Corriveau and the beautiful lives of women like Rosalinde Crebessa. Not to confuse Hébert’s intentions with the meaning of the play, it is useful to ask why Anne Hébert would choose to write a masque, when even critics with dedicated interest in her work struggle to interpret this seemingly naive, anachronistic form of drama. Hébert continued to write for theatre, radio and film throughout her career, experimenting with various generic forms. A pervasive ambition in this experimentation is the inclusion of poetic or literary language within the dramatic form. As Hébert confessed in a 1963 interview, she had four or five unpublished scripts stored away in boxes which were too literary to be played (qtd in Lasnier 1963: 74). In addition to being a vaguely familiar form, similar to the religious pageants and rituals she must inevitably have been exposed to as part of her Catholic education, the masque also offered a form within which she would be at liberty to be poetic and fanciful. A review of the dramatic literature in Hébert’s personal library, housed in the Centre Anne Hébert of the Université de Sherbrooke, reveals plays by Pirandello, Beckett, Claudel and, most dominantly, fourteen plays by Shakespeare in bilingual editions, but little evidence of background reading on the masque per se. Hints of the dramaturgical experimentation of Pirandello, the ironic philosophizing of Beckett and the religiosity of Claudel can all be detected in Hébert’s play writing in general, and in La cage in particular. Although the play is not included in the personal library which Hébert bequeathed to the Université de Sherbrooke, there are fairly obvious parallels between La cage, as Hébert’s final drama, and Shakespeare’s last complete play, The Tempest— not the least of which are the frequent descriptions of The Tempest’s use of and relation to the masque. For example, in their “Introduction” to the Arden Shakespeare edition of The Tempest, Mason Vaughan and Vaughan describe the masque as “a form embedded in The Tempest not just in the musical interlude of Iris, Ceres and Juno but in other scenes as well” (1999: 67). (See also Nicoll 1968: 19–27 and Greenblatt 1997: 3047.) The Tempest and La cage each adopt a monadic symbol which absorbs conflicting forces, serves allegory, plot and spectacle, and supplies the title, in each case, of the drama. The Tempest, as Stephen Greenblatt describes it, “is a kind of echo chamber of Shakespearean motifs [... which] resonates [...] with issues that haunted Shakespeare’s imagination throughout his career” (1997: 3047). In the play, Shakespeare uses the fantastic and magical possibilities of the


139

masque to resolve the unresolved tensions between fathers and daughters, between the pathos of young love and the ethos of marriage, and between power and responsibility which can be traced throughout his dramas. Anne Hébert remained a great beauty throughout her life, and was much admired and pursued but, in the public domain, she was never known to have had a husband, a lover or a child. La cage is a pageant of maternity: pregnant Fairies in the Prologue, Rosalinde Crebessa giving birth for the third time to open Act II, and Ludivine Corriveau, the “Earth Mother” (see Rousselot 2004: 171) parading with her adopted family in the play’s final tableau. A love affair between a woman and a painter in a pastoral setting is also at the core of Hébert’s best known play, Le Temps sauvage, and the conflict between sexual love and social propriety problematized throughout her novels is resolved in the idealized relationship between Ludivine and Hyacinthe. Hébert’s play is an allegory of love and liberty, which become associated with nothing less than goodness and life itself, in contrast to the imprisonment, oppression, death and evil personified by Judge Crebessa and the cage. However, viewing the play as a straightforward, earnest valorization of love and liberty, and nothing more, would miss the broad irony and subtle satiric implications of Hébert’s adopting a literally medieval form of drama to present her version of the metaphorically medieval events of 1763 (although gibbeting was literally a medieval form of execution). While the intention of the British tradition of gibbeting, of leaving a corpse hanging on public display, was to create a spectacle, to instil fear and assert the power and authority of the state and the monarch, in Anne Hébert’s play the cage remains a spectacular symbol but one which mocks and shames patriarchy and imperialism. La cage, as a whole, is a spectacular, ritual enactment of the empowerment of women. Not only does Hébert turn the moral authority into the epitome of evil and the archetypal witch into an icon of goodness and innocence, she does so using the traditional theatrical forms (morality play and masque) specifically designed to reinforce and celebrate the established moral and imperial authority which she is undermining. Once Hébert’s appropriation of imperialist theatrical forms is recognized, the ironic reversals which pervade the play become more obvious. For example, as we have already noted, Judge Crebessa’s death, in the play, was the result of his own fatalistic insistence on choosing death. As both Stott and O’Meara observe, in killing her husband, Elzéar, Ludivine was obeying his instructions to shoot any man who attempted to enter the house without identifying himself (Stott 2001: 155, O’Meara 2001: 174). Both the rifle and the key are reiterated phallic symbols in the play and are used, like the cage, as counter-symbols as they are taken over by and come to symbolize the empowerment and liberation of women. Virtually every scholar who approaches the play eventually engages in speculation, analysis, and deconstruction of the characters’ names, in particular,

140


Hébert’s decision to call her protagonist “Ludivine.” Rousselot, as have previous critics, notes the connection with play (ludique in French, also see Stott 2001: 154) and divinity, and adds her own connection with “deviner” (to guess, with implications of divination) and the Devin or Gaelic druid (2004: 167). Annabelle Rea sees the name choice as a repudiation of the particular religious and patriarchal implications of the names Mary and Joseph, as well as suggesting vines and the Dionysian (2001b: 30). However, Pallister suggests that interpretations of the name choice “may be a red herring, because the name is fairly well known in the French and Francophone (and in particular the Acadian) world; it comes from the Dutch saint Lydwine (or Lydwina)[...]. Furthermore, this proper name is still current, including within the Hébert family” (2003: 106, my translation).9 Pallister’s observations notwithstanding, Hébert’s onomastics are striking and deliberate and, therefore, seem to demand to be taken into consideration in any exegesis of the text. In fact, all the names of the play encapsulate contradictions and therefore ironies which invite deconstruction. The choice of names parallels the shifting of registers, ironic reversals, and the themes which run throughout the play. That these names seem, at once, familiar yet odd, typical and traditional yet strange and disturbing captures the essence of the play’s satire which is, in turn, the essence of satire. In keeping with the etymological and anthropological roots of satire, like the Saturnalian rituals from which the word and practise derive, Hébert’s play turns history, the world, the social order and established hierarchical values upside down. Certainly the name Ludivine imbues la Corriveau with a sense of divinity and play and magic, and perhaps imbues the play itself with an intimation of the Roman ludi, those spectacles which were the historical precursors of the masque. However, there is also good reason to imagine an association between “Ludivine” and the woman known as “la Divine,” Sarah Bernhardt the famous French actress who visited Quebec on numerous occasions and who, like la Corriveau, was considered a scandalous figure. Similarly, Babette is a traditional, stereotypical first name for a Québécoise dating from the nineteenth century, but by the 1970s the name had also taken on intimations of concupiscence and scandal.10 Through Ludivine Corriveau, Hébert creates an archetypal figure of the woman who is the object of attention and sexual desire but, at the same time and for the same reasons, is scandalous and marginalized. Ludivine is celebrated in the play for her boldness, for having the courage to be as she is without succumbing to the propriety and puritanism of a received, patriarchal morality, or submitting to impropriety and patriarchal lust. She braves the advances and threats of Judge Crebessa and remains independent. Through Ludivine, Hébert provides an apologia for women throughout history who have been marginalized and judged scandalous because they were objects of desire, underscoring the boldness and heroism of their independence, and the contradiction and hypocrisy of patriarchal attitudes. Rousselot suggests that “the name Rosalinde recalls Shakespeare’s Rosalind


141

in As You Like It” (2004: 172).11 While, Rousselot’s intertextual suggestion fits with the pattern of independent women, it must be noted that in the typed, penultimate draft of the play, which includes Anne Hébert’s last-minute handwritten changes to the script, the character is identified throughout as Dolly Jane. The name, Dolly Jane, suggests that Hébert was aiming for a traditional, cliché, somewhat tongue-in-cheek nomenclature, similar to Babette in French. The name would serve to signal her imprisonment inside a female stereotype. The name change, which must have been made while the manuscript was in press, suggests that Hébert reconsidered the ironic, mocking tenor of the original choice, giving her character a more classic and dignified name which nonetheless carried connotations of a challenge to gender boundaries (if we accept Rousselot’s suggestion of a connection to Shakespeare’s Rosalind and remember that for much of the play she plays the role of a young man named Ganymede). Although it is relatively common in French for men to be named after flowers, the name Hyacinthe is nonetheless rare. Once again we might consider that the name choice challenges gender stereotypes and like the name Rosalinde hints of gender bending. At this point it is useful to remember the early promise in the play that boundaries will be erased and eventually “that everything will be mixed together as salt water joins the fresh water of the river and the Corriveaus meet the Crebessas” (1990: 15, my translation). Ludivine (le-divin) and Hyacinthe (e-a-saint), as they are pronounced in French, are not only a woman’s name which sounds masculine and a man’s name which sounds feminine but uttered together, as they are throughout the play, carry a distinct aural suggestion of divinity and sainthood. The tone of Hébert’s play provokes neither the laughter nor the bitterness typically associated with satiric irony. The play is designed to be performed as a masque; its tone celebratory, fanciful and optimistic. It is only upon reflection (and re-reading) that its satiric implications fully emerge. Hébert’s use of the masque form is hardly unique in Canadian drama. In fact, the first European play in North America for which there is an extant script is Marc Lescarbot’s masque Le théâtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle-France performed in 1606 in Port Royal — what is now Annapolis, Nova Scotia. The recent 400th anniversary of Lescarbot’s play has stirred discussions of the masque form among Canadian scholars. In his introduction to Marc Lescarbot’s Theatre of Neptune in New France: Spectacle of Empire, Jerry Wasserman describes the form of the play as mirroring “the English and French courtly masques, those formal theatrical expressions of honorific praise utilizing music, allegorical poetry, and elaborate costumes and scenery in celebration of their royal audience” (2006: 31–32). If we substitute or understand the “royal audience” as being “women,” this description would also be an apt summary of La cage. Additionally relevant to La cage are observations that the masque is “a kind of mimetic magic on a sophisticated level” (Barish qtd in Wasserman 2006: 32) and “an act of sympathetic magic” (Wagner qtd in Wasserman 2006: 32). The

142


masque, like the acts of prayer and the homeopathic rituals from which it emerges, is an act of magic: it enacts what it desires in the hope and belief that these desires will be furthered and fulfilled through the process of their enactment. We can, therefore, best understand Anne Hébert’s play as a masque in celebration of the emancipation of women through the allegorical figures of Ludivine Corriveau and Rosalinde Crebessa, and a ritual enactment, for the benefit of all women, of that cherished liberation. UNIVERSITÉ DE SHERBROOKE

Notes 1. “Il n’est guère de femme dans toute l’histoire canadienne qui ait plus mauvaise réputation que Marie-Josephte Corriveau, appelée communément la Corriveau” (Lacoursière 1995: 147). 2. Lacoursière’s French translation of la Corriveau’s confession is quoted in L’histoire des femmes aux Québec edited by Dumont et al which is in Anne Hébert’s personal library housed in the Centre Anne Hébert of the Université de Sherbrooke. (See Dumont 1982: 120.) The original confession signed by Marie-Josephte Corriveau was in English (although it is generally assumed that she could not have known the language) and is as follows: “Maria Josephe Corriveaux Widow Dodier declares she murdered her husband Louis Helene Dodier in the night, that he was in bed asleep, that she did it with hatchet; that she was neither advised to it, assisted in it neither did any one know of it; she is conscious that she deserves death, only begs of the court she may be indulged with a little time to confess, and make her peace with Heaven; adds, that it was indeed a good deal owing to the ill Treatment of her husband, she was guilty of the crime” (qtd. in Lacoursière 1995: 162). Note that Elzéar Corriveau is identified as Ludivine Corriveau’s husband, whom she kills in the play. As indicated in her confession la Corriveau was convicted of murdering Louis Hélène Dodier, her second husband. Her first husband was Charles Bouchard. Although Ludivine is repeatedly identified as “la Corriveau” in the play, Hébert definitively alters the specifics of the character and events turning la Corriveau into a generalized “Everywoman” and vice versa. 3. “On pourrait suggérer que l’auteure, qui laisse la protagoniste de Kamouraska dans sa cage, se montre de plus en plus femelliste, c’est-à-dire axée sur les femmes, ou paraféministe car, à mon avis, on ne peut pas vraiment voir chez Hébert, du moins dans ses premières oeuvres, une vraie féministe. Ces portraits de la mère terrible du “Torrent” jusqu’aux Fous de Bassan, et de la femme noyée dans les mouvements de son désir me semblent interdire l’inclusion d’Anne Hébert dans la catégorie des féministes radicales [...] (Pallister 2003: 108). 4. “[...] l’affranchissement de la femme de l’esclavage patriarchal.” (Marchese 2003: 93). 5. “Il est tentant de voir dans la Corriveau le symbole du Québec même,[...]. La Corriveau n’est pas cela; elle constitue, comme Élisabeth dans Kamouraska, une illustration de la femme battue et de son destin tragique [...] (Pallister 2003: 109). 6. “[...] et vous avez la bouche pâteuse des ruminants. Je saurai bien vous le faire ravaler, ce mot maudit. Amour, amour, amour, dites-vous si fort, entre vos dents, que j’entends comme un cri qui m’outrage. Non, non, je ne puis supporter. Trop c’est trop. Je n’ai que juste le temps de mourir” (Hébert 1990: 110). 7. “J’entends, au loin, un chant d’amour, en langue étrangère, qui file à la vitesse du vent, comme une envolée de cloches brunes, au-dessus de ma tête ... (Hébert 1990: 110). 8. “[...] nombreuses références à la danse dans l’oeuvre d’Hébert” (Rea, 2001a: 251). 9. “C’est peut-être une fausse piste, car Ludivine reste un nom assez connu dans le monde français et francophone (surtout acadien); il proviendrait, semble-t-il, du nom de la sainte néerlandaise, Lydwine (Lydwina, Lywid, Lydwyna) du XIVe siècle (1380–1433),[...]. Par ailleurs, ce prénom est très courant, y compris au sein de la famille Hébert” (Pallister 2003: 106). 10. Conjecture about the meaning of names is, of course, always somewhat speculative.


143

O’Meary notes that John Crebessa’s initials are J.C. and that he “becomes a true anti–Christ” (2001: 169). She also argues that “Rosalinde, whose name’s etymological origins indicate that she is a ‘gentle or pretty Rose,’ sustains Crebessa’s abusive power through her submission” (2001: 170). We might also notice that Elzéar is a very traditional name which has become extremely rare in modern Quebec. The medieval Saint Elzéar has been adopted as a place name in various areas of the province of Quebec; in addition, the archbishop of Quebec who became Canada’s first cardinal, and the first mayor of Quebec City both bore the name Elzéar. The name Babette which is among the most common of Québécois names from the turn of century became associated with scandal and lasciviousness by the 1970s. Included in Hébert’s personal library is Françoise Ducout’s Séductrices du cinéma français 1936–1956 in which she considers the femmes fatales of French cinema in the context of feminism. The final chapter of this book is dedicated to Brigitte Bardot. In 1959, Bardot played the lead in the film Babette Goes to War. A Swedish actress named Babette Bardot played in a number of blue films during the ’70s, and Babette’s Feast, the film based on Isak Dinesen’s short story, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1987. Although conjecture about the names of the play having specific outside references is highly speculative, the pattern of Hébert’s playing with names seems overdetermined and meaningful. In her use of names Hébert consistently challenges gender stereotypes reversing respect and scandal, celebrating the marginalized (female) and marginalizing the celebrated (male), and recuperating those women who are, paradoxically, simultaneously celebrated and marginalized. 11. In support of Rousselot’s thesis that the name Rosalinde might have been taken from Shakespeare, Hébert’s personal library does include a bilingual edition of Comme il vous plaira/As You Like It. Trad. et intro. J.J. Mayoux. Aubier Montaigne, 1976.

References Cited Bishop, Neil B. “Enfance de l’oeuvre, enfance à l’oeuvre dans le théâtre d’Anne Hébert.” In Nouveaux Regards sur le théâtre québécois, edited by Betty Bednarski and Irene Oore, 59–70. Montréal: XYZ, 1997. Brockett, Oscar C. History of the Theatre (2nd edition). Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1974. Brockett, Oscar C. and Robert J. Ball. The Essential Theatre (8th edition). Toronto: Wadsworth, 2004. De Man, Paul. Aesthetic Ideolog y. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Ducout, Françoise. Séductrices du cinéma français 1936–1956. Editions Henri Veyrier, 1978. Dumont, Micheline, Michèle Jean, Marie Lavigne, et Jennifer Stoddart, eds. L’Histoire des femmes au Québec depuis quatre siècles. Montréal: Quinze, 1982. Evans, Herbert Arthur. “Introduction.” In English Masques. xi–lviii. London: Blackie and Son, 1933. Gassner, John. “The Morality Play.” In Medieval and Tudor Drama, edited and introduced by John Gassner, 204–206. Toronto: Bantam, 1968. Greenblatt, Stephen. “The Tempest.” In The Norton Shakespeare, edited and introduced by Stephen Greenblatt, 3047–3054. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. Hébert, Anne. La cage suivi de L’île de la Demoiselle. Montréal: Boréal/Seuil, 1990. Lacoursière, Luc. “Le Triple Destin de Marie-Josephte Corriveau (1733–1763).” In Il était cent fois la Corriveau, edited and introduced by Nicole Guilbault, 147–180. Québec, Québec: Nuit Blanche, 1995. Lasnier, Michelle. “Anne Hébert la magicienne.” 28–29, 74 et 76. Châtelaine (avril) 1963. Marchese, Elena. “Le projet de réécriture historique dans La cage et L’Île de la Demoiselle d’ Anne Hébert.” In Les Cahiers Anne Hébert 4: Anne Hébert et la critique, 91–101. Ville Saint-Laurent, Québec: Fides, 2003. Mason Vaughan, Virginia, and Alden T. Vaughan. “Introduction.” In The Tempest, edited and introduced by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. The Arden Shakespeare Series, 1–133. London: Thomas Nelson and Son, 1999.

144


Nicoll, Allardyce. Stuart Masques and the Renaissance Stage. New York: Benjamin Bom, 1968. O’Meara, Maureen. “Living with the Cultural Legacy of La Corriveau: La Cage.” In The Art and Genius of Anne Hébert, edited and introduced by Janis L. Pallister, 161–178. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001. Orgel, Stephen. The Illusion of Power: Political Theatre in the English Renaissance. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975. Pallister, Janis L. “La Corriveau et Anne Hébert: état d’études.” In Les Cahiers Anne Hébert 4: Anne Hébert et la critique, 103–109. Ville Saint-Laurent, Québec: Fides, 2003. Rea, Annabelle. “La Danse chez Anne Hébert: Un demi-siècle de corps féminins.” In The Art and Genius of Anne Hébert, edited and introduced by Janis L. Pallister, 251–263. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001a. _____. “Marie-Josephte Becomes Ludivine: The Family Reformed in Anne Hébert’s La Cage.” In Doing Gender: Franco-Canadian Women Writers of the 1990s, edited and introduced by Paula Ruth Gilbert and Roseanna L. Dufault, 23–35. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 2001b. Rousselot, Elodie. Re-Writing Women into Canadian History: Margaret Atwood and Anne Hébert. Dissertation. University of Kent, 2004. Slott, Kathryn. “La Remise en question de la Corriveau dans La Cage de Anne Hébert.” In The Art and Genius of Anne Hébert, edited and introduced by Janis L. Pallister, 140–149. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001. Wasserman, Jerry. “Introduction: Marc Lescarbot and the Spectacle of Empire.” In Marc Lescarbot’s Theatre of Neptune in New France: Spectacle of Empire (400th Anniversary Edition), 13–43. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2006.

¡2 Mohammad bin Tughlaq A Fourteenth Century Muslim Sultan in 1960s South India Kristen Rudisill Abstract This essay compares two plays from South India, Cho Ramasamy’s Tamil-language Mohammad bin Tughlaq (1968) and Girish Karnad’s Kannada-language Tughlaq (1964). Both plays take as their title character the fourteenth century Delhi Sultan Mohammad bin Tughlaq. I discuss how the two playwrights, independently of one another, dramatized the same historical figure into the different genres of historical psychodrama and political satire. Both allude to the national political situation, but Karnad’s historical drama looked backward sympathetically, evoking the complex feelings associated with Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. Cho’s 1 political satire, on the other hand, expressed his fears about the authoritarian ruling style of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. His play is also designed to reflect regional issues of 1960s Tamilnadu, which partially explains why its appeal has been limited to a regional audience. Girish Karnad’s work, in contrast, has brought him international acclaim.2

Cho Ramasamy’s Tamil-language political satire, Mohammad bin Tughlaq (1968), and Girish Karnad’s Kannada-language historical psychodrama, Tughlaq (1964) both take as their title character the fourteenth century Delhi Sultan Mohammad bin Tughlaq. In this paper, I examine how the same historical figure was rendered through two different genres. Even though both plays were written in South India in the 1960s, they focus on different issues and leave readers with very different visions of both Tughlaq’s time and their own. Karnad’s play looks at the past sympathetically, evoking the complex feelings that are associated with India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who died the year that this historical drama was written. Cho’s satire, on the other hand, expresses his fears about Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian ruling style (my interview, June 4, 2008). His fears were justified several years later when she declared a national Emergency 3 and abused her enhanced power. 145

146


Girish Karnad was born in the town of Matheran outside of Bombay in 1938. He grew up in a community that spoke Kannada and Marathi, but was educated in English and awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford. Nonetheless, on his way to Oxford, he wrote a play in Kannada, remembering performances of the folk theater of Yaksagana and “Natak” companies4 that he had been exposed to as a child. However, Karnad’s main influence at the time came from the West: Shakespeare, Brecht, Ibsen, and Anouilh. His first play, written in 1961, had an Indian story but a Western form. I had no theatrical form to turn to. This is a problem many Indian playwrights face today.... A playwright needs a tradition he can call his own, even if it is only to reject it.... I could only imitate Anouilh, for there was nothing to refer to: the natak companies and yaksagana seemed to belong to another world altogether. Nothing filled the void they had left [1989: 334].

Karnad’s hybrid style combines elements of Indian folk theater with western theater, and has been considered emblematic of what modern Indian theater should be. He has often been referred to as “the most significant playwright of the post–Independence Indian literature” (Dhanavel 2000: 11). Suresh Awasthi, who was both Chair of the National School of Drama and general secretary of the Sangeet Natak Akademi,5 “locates the crucial starting point of the development of an Indian ‘theatre of roots’ 6 in B.V. Karanth’s direction of a new play [Hayavadana]by Girish Karnad in 1972” (Banfield 1996: 136). Karnad is still writing plays and is very involved in the theater, but he has made his living by authoring scripts for television and film, and also as a director and actor. Cho Ramasamy, a lawyer, is one of the most important contemporary playwrights and thinkers in Tamilnadu, and has served several terms in the upper house of Parliament. He started writing plays for his younger brother and a group of his friends in the early 1950s, before he joined their drama troupe, “Viveka Fine Arts,” in 1958. The troupe has performed his plays exclusively since 1958, and he has had acting roles in all of them (see Viveka Fine Arts 2004). Cho has also acted in films and has written novels and political commentary. The sociopolitical situation in the 1960s was quite complex. After Independence (1947) and the celebration of Indian culture in the 1950s, India’s political atmosphere became more intricate. The Congress Party, flush with the victory against the British, led the country in what amounted to a one-party system for a while. Jawaharlal Nehru was the Prime Minister of India until his death in 1964. The end of his term was fraught with incidents that called into question India’s moral superiority over the West as well as its policy of non-alignment. The 1960s saw India at war with Pakistan and China, and the Indian army invaded Portuguese Goa. Following Nehru’s death, the Congress Party, went through a succession crisis. Lal Bahadur Shastri, who became the next Prime Minister, died shortly thereafter, and Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, took over the party and the country in 1966.

12. Mohammad bin Tughlaq (Rudisill)

147

Indira Gandhi’s election, however, revealed deep divisions within the party. As she solidified her power, she pushed aggressive populist policies and further centralization of an Indian government that now placed a high value on personal loyalty to the Prime Minister, and her unpopular initiatives. Conflict led to a split in the Congress party in 1969, while the country as a whole was trying to resolve issues such as reservations for disadvantaged communities7 and disputes over state borders. The turmoil invited commentary on the government’s policies and the political situation, a charge taken up by dramatists all over India.

Politics and Indian Theater Using drama as a political tool was not new to India. Nandi Bhatia argues that by the late nineteenth century, “theater in India had indeed become an expression of political struggle against colonial rule and a space for staging scathing critiques of the oppression and atrocities inflicted upon colonial subjects by rulers” (2004: 1). The British government responded by passing the Dramatic Performances Censorship Act in 1876. This led to the popular trend of staging representations of the MahIbhIrata and other mythological stories to comment on sociopolitical events, “elude censorship and at the same time disseminate nationalist ideas” (Bhatia 2004: 43). The use of the theatrical stage to spread nationalist messages seems to have reached the Madras Presidency quite late by comparison. What was taking place on Bengali and Marathi stages in the late 1870s did not happen in Tamil until the early 1920s. Tamil actors were directly involved in political activity off stage from as early as the 1928 founding of the Tamilnadu Nadikar Sangam (Tamil Actors Association) which provided “an organizational framework for the political involvement of drama artists” (Baskaran 1981: 38). They resolved at a conference in December of 1931 “to give all assistance to the Congress and to intensify nationalistic propaganda through the stage” (Baskaran 1981: 38). To all this, the government responded by requiring all dramas to receive permission from the district authorities before they could be staged. After the end of the Second World War and the promise of Independence, nationalism virtually disappeared as a subject from the theatre. Most of the professional theatre companies in Madras folded and their personnel left to make careers in cinema. The tenor of political drama changed during the post-independence period throughout India. Regional political identities that had been developing during Nehru’s rule were clearly visible in the 1960s. These identities influenced the kind of plays written and performed in different regions of India. For example, as Communism was gaining ground in West Bengal, the traditional jatra theatrical form, which was characterized by mythological and historical themes, was transformed into a social genre with such representative plays as Marx, Lenin, Hitler, and Vietnam in the early 1960s (Sengupta 1984: 5).8

148


Starting in the 1950s, the theatre scene in Madras saw a shift from elaborate mythological and historical productions by professional theater troupes to low-budget amateur comedy and detective plays. This accompanied a corresponding shift in theatrical patronage, which became dominated by cultural organizations known as sabhas. These voluntary organizations arranged entertainment schedules for their members, sponsoring programs they thought would be well-received. The new system meant that it became “difficult to commercially stage plays in Madras without the support of [s]abhas, which can provide both resources and easy access to an audience through their members” (Shankar 2001: xxiii).

The Politics of Cho Ramasamy and Girish Karnad Cho Ramasamy was one of the few playwrights who survived both within the sabha system and outside of it. He challenged what scholar S. Shankar describes as the “oppressive mediocrity and uniformity bred by the system” (Shankar 2001: xiv) and proved that the tastes of sabha audiences were broader than they had appeared to be initially. At the height of the Dravidian movement’s rise to power, Cho Ramasamy struck a chord with the population of a highly politically-literate state that has close ties between politics and the media.9 Cho’s early plays were in the style of social comedies, but in the early 1960s he began penning expressly political plays. He created the character of Mohammad bin Tughlaq, with whom he has come to be identified, in his 1968 play. An ardent supporter of Congress (Organization) leader K. Kamaraj, Cho was inspired by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to create this character. Mohammad bin Tughlaq was made into a film in 1970, the same year Cho started his Tughlaq journal, through which he became known as a political commentator.10 The journal was started with the idea of criticizing whichever government happened to be in power as well as all politicians, candidates, and policy initiatives. Cho’s brand of comedy earned a good “gate collection” (i.e., box office) for sabhas all over Chennai as well as the respect of a nationally-recognized modern theater movement through critics like A. N. Perumal, Saktiperumal, and N. S. Jagannathan. His work elicits something in between the respect granted to Indira Parthasarathy and the condescension expressed toward Crazy Mohan.11 It has led critics like N. S. Jagannathan to simultaneously denigrate and compliment him. “[W]e ... have, admittedly at the level of low farce, plays in Tamil by Cho Ramaswami,” Jagannathan wrote, “that are extraordinarily effective in the exposure of the corruption of values in Indian politics” (1989: 107). S. Shankar described Cho as a “distinguished playwright” (2001: xii) and his political opinions and writing skill are well respected by the intellectual community in Tamilnadu. Cho may attract broader audiences than most sabha plays, but his


149

Tamil-language comedies present similar obstacles to translation and production by other troupes (see Rudisill 2007), factors that have contributed to the regional nature of the sabha drama genre. Plays like Girish Karnad’s that have been accepted as part of the canon of Indian modern drama, share the characteristic of a strong translation history that is so rare in the field of Tamil-language theater: [T]he last five decades have demonstrated that in Indian theatre the prompt recognition of new plays as contemporary classics does not depend so much on publication or performance in the original language of composition as on the rapidity with which the plays are performed and (secondarily) published in other languages [Dharwadker 2005: 75].

Karnad’s Tughlaq was staged in Kannada and Hindi in 1965, and soon after in Marathi and Bengali; the English translation came out in 1970. In contrast, Cho’s Mohammad bin Tughlaq was first performed in 1968, but was not published in Tamil until much later.12 My own (as yet unpublished) English translation is the first of Cho’s play. The main part of the historical Mohammad bin Tughlaq’s story that Cho adopted as the basis for his character is the fact that he changed his capital from Delhi to Devagiri/Daulatabad and then back to Delhi. The character of Mohammad bin Tughlaq is someone who can change his mind at a moment’s notice and not feel the need to consult anyone, let alone explain or justify himself, which is Cho’s cynical vision of most politicians, particularly Indira Gandhi. The Ibn Battuta13 of the play has no problem with Tughlaq’s changing the capital; his problem is with the forced move of the population to the new capital. Cho’s Tughlaq has no regrets about these orders and atrocities (akkiraman.kal.), as the traitor Asansha calls them, and is very flippant about the loss of life en route. He is concerned only with his own image and justifies the tragedy to Ibn Battuta by citing “population control” as the “gain for the nation” in all of the shifting: BATT: Why did you tell them to return? They were going to die either way. You could have told them to go to Devagiri! TUGH: Therein you will see the brilliance of Mohammad bin Tughlaq! If they had died on the way to Devagiri, people would say that they died following the sultan’s wishes. But if they died on the way to Delhi, I had told them to go if they wanted to. So I can say that they died then, doing as they wished. BATT: In trying to change the capital, the people died. What is the gain for the nation in that? TUGH: The population is reduced14 [Ramasamy 2001: 8–9, my translation].

The flippancy and unconcern of Cho’s Tughlaq is diametrically opposed to Karnad’s Tughlaq and his reasoning for the change of capital. He says that he is changing the capital in order to “light up our path towards greater justice, equal-

150


ity, progress and peace — not just peace but a more purposeful life” (Karnad 1994: 149). He explains the decision in detail to his subjects, and explicitly tells them that they have the option to stay in Delhi, though one of the men in the audience immediately refers to the capital shift as “Tyranny! Sheer tyranny!” (Karnad 1994: 149). Tughlaq’s response addresses the relevant contemporary issue of communal relations, something that Cho’s Tughlaq never addresses or worries about: “for me the most important factor is that Daulatabad is a city of the Hindus and as the capital it will symbolize the bond between Muslims and Hindus which I wish to develop and strengthen in my kingdom” (Karnad 1994: 149). Never does Cho’s Tughlaq display the sort of reasoning, character development, and internal struggle that forms the basis of Karnad’s play. Karnad’s Tughlaq is, in many ways, an idealist. He says to his advisors at one point, “[w]hat hopes I had built up when I came to the throne! I had wanted every act in my kingdom to become a prayer, every prayer to become a further step in knowledge, every step to lead us nearer to God” (Karnad 1994: 186). Over the course of the play we watch his descent into madness.

The Two Tughlaqs Both Tughlaq plays addressed the political situation in India during the second half of the 1960s. They have also been prescient and remained relevant for four decades. Karnad has written a historical play that alluded to the contemporary national political situation, an interpretation that was voiced by author U. R. Anantha Murthy, who in his introduction to the play wrote that “[a]nother reason for Tughlaq’s appeal to Indian audiences is that it is a play of the sixties, and reflects as no other play perhaps does the political mood of disillusionment which followed the Nehru era of idealism in the country” (Karnad 1994: 143). Girish Karnad’s play is set in the past and tells the story of Mohammad bin Tughlaq’s rule as sultan. He holds many ideals at the beginning of the play, but as he becomes more involved in the politics of the country, he loses them and grows more and more cynical. As the story progresses he becomes less averse to using deception and subterfuge to continue to rule, eventually masterminding the murders of respected Muslim holy man Imam-ud-din, advisor Shihab-uddin, and even his beloved step-mother. Parallel to Mohammad bin Tughlaq’s story is the narrative of Aziz and Azam, two men who follow the logic of Tughlaq’s policies to the extremes and profit from each one. Their actions are a physical expression of the shifting morals of their sultan. The play ends with Tughlaq’s recognition of how well he has been understood by Aziz. Cho’s play, far from Karnad’s serious, tragic story, has a ridiculous premise that keeps the audience laughing. The opening scene, in the durbar of the historical Tughlaq, functions as an exposé of his character and policy. The stories first mentioned in this scene (movement of the capital, leather currency, sum-


151

mary execution of political opponents, and so on) are later exploited by Tughlaq in his successful bid for power in the India of 1968, the year in which the play is set. Tughlaq and his advisor Ibn Battuta had eaten some herbs to prevent their deaths, and remained in a box for six hundred years until history professor Rangachari unearthed them during a 1968 archaeological excavation. He brings them home to his family, where they learn how the country changed in the intervening centuries. Intrigued, Tughlaq decides to take his dictator-like ruling strategy and see how it will work in a democracy. With a historian to vouch for his identity, Tughlaq runs for public office and quickly rises to become Prime Minister. Compared to the conspicuous lack of suspicion in Cho’s play, Karnad’s Tughlaq faces suspicion on every side. Neither Hindus nor Muslims trust him, and even his advisors, friends, and relatives have their doubts and misgivings about his motives, policies, and everything else. Cho’s play is set in 1968 and addresses a number of regional and national issues, including corruption, national language, food shortages, unemployment, state border issues, and foreign policy. These issues are dealt with directly in the context of Tughlaq’s meetings with various ministers in his government. Other issues such as strikes, arranged marriage, sex education, and respect within the family, are indirectly addressed through the actions and interactions of Professor Rangachari and his family. It is not until the very last scene of the play that Cho brings the readers back into the realm of reality by revealing that “Tughlaq” and “Battuta” were actually just regular guys who faked their own deaths in order to impersonate historical figures and through them teach the citizens of the country “just how easily they could be deceived” (Ramasamy 2001: 56–7, my translation), but the lesson never gets across. The spectators get to see how easily everyone is deceived, but the level of deception is so deep that the characters never see it themselves. The themes of deception and impersonation are also central to Karnad’s play. He includes a clown character, Aziz, who functions as a foil to Tughlaq. Aziz raises his status throughout the play by taking on various identities. He begins as a Muslim dhobi (washerman) before he becomes a Brahmin, a Muslim saint, and finally an officer of the army. Neither Aziz nor the Tughlaq impersonator of Cho’s play has any desire to give up his new status and the power that goes along with it. Aziz does not deny his low status when he talks to the sultan, but he certainly does not want to go back to it. Cho’s Tughlaq won’t even reveal his previous identity to his friend and fellow impersonator, insisting on being called “Tughlaq” to the end of the play: TUGH: I have decided to continue to live as Tughlaq.... BATT: Hey! What is this injustice? When we started all this we made a vow at the Kali temple. Don’t consider betraying the goddess ... Mahadevan. TUGH: If you call me Mahadevan one more time, you will invoke Mohammad bin Tughlaq’s wrath.

152

Text & Presentation, 2008 BATT: Hey! Mahadevan! TUGH: I am not Mahadevan! Call me Mohammad bin Tughlaq. I am Mohammad bin Tughlaq, the Honorable Prime Minister of the sovereign Democratic Republic of India. Elected by the people, for the people, and working for the people [Ramasamy 2001: 57, my translation].

The other politicians in Cho’s play know that it is necessary for Tughlaq to be Tughlaq in order for their own power to remain intact. That is enough for them to kill any notions to the contrary, and “Ibn Battuta,” after revealing the original scheme to the people, is dismissed as crazy, his mind having cracked in the heat of Delhi. He is shouted down and the play ends with cheers of “Long Live Tughlaq! Long Live Tughlaq!” Cho’s play Tughlaq parodies Dravidian politicians,15 but moves beyond that narrow scope to poke fun at politicians from all parties as well as students, women, heads of household, brahminism, and democracies in general. It is an exhortation to the people, the voters, to care about who is running their country and making decisions that affect their lives. The most cutting criticism that the play makes is that people do not think. They do not force politicians to give them options. When there are no options and it makes no real difference as to who is running the government, then the people tend to be apathetic. In response to one of the politicians wondering how the people will react to some crazy policies the Tughlaq government is pushing, Ibn Battuta says: “No matter what government comes we will have the same fate.” Having thought this, these people won’t say anything, just “Let them be in the position....” Only if the people think will a good government be formed. Until people realize that, there is no reason for people like us to worry [Ramasamy 2001: 52, my translation].

This defeatist attitude can sabotage a country and invite corruption, and it is clear that Cho is imploring his fellow citizens to take their part in India’s fragile, twenty-year-old democracy seriously, and not to underestimate their importance as voters. For the most part, the two Tughlaq plays use different devices, genres, and characterizations to address different concerns. What they share is a title character, a commitment to raising political awareness, and the device of farce. Unlike Karnad’s, Cho’s play never separates the king and the clown. There is only Mohammad bin Tughlaq the clown/sultan. This play stands at the intersection of farce and satire, combining the one-dimensional characters and nonsensical reasoning of farce with the incisive wit and corrective morals of political satire. Choice of descriptive terms does, however, make a difference in the minds of readers and viewers. Farce is usually considered “low” and satire “high” in the entertainment hierarchy. The use of the word “farce” makes Cho’s work seem light and insubstantial, while “satire” praises him as a political thinker and mover.


153

The flippancy and unconcern of Cho’s flat caricature of Tughlaq is opposed to Karnad’s Tughlaq whose reasoning, character development, and internal struggle form the basis of a serious, tragic play. The farcical scenes in Karnad’s Tughlaq are part of what the author envisioned as the light, “shallow” comedy scenes interspersed with the drama of the main characters and their “deep” scenes, a technique he borrowed from the Parsi theater (Karnad 1989: 7–8).16 Darren Zook, who has argued that Indian politics are themselves so comical that even realistic dramatic portrayals of them are necessarily farces, writes that: Karnad’s play is not an anti-drama but a complex farce (prahasana vinod) in which “serious” political rule becomes increasingly indistinguishable from political charade and brute force masquerades as idealism in the hands of Muhammad Tughlaq [2001: 188].

Aparna Dharwadker calls Karnad’s Tughlaq a “psychodrama” and talks about the “political and psychological ironies” (2005: 247) in the play, and that assessment seems much closer to the nature of Karnad’s play than the designation “farce.” Karnad sees Indian theater as jumping straight from the flat, generic characters of the folk theater to the psychological revelations of western theater, and his work tries to negotiate this divide as much as possible (see Karnad 1989). His characters may seem generic and predestined, but he emphasizes their choices and psychological growth. Darren Zook understands that at the end of Karnad’s play the clown and the king are impossible to distinguish from one another, and therein lies the farce: “[t]he clown does not merely imitate the king — part of the power of farce is in recognizing the clown and the king as separate characters — but in fact elides with the king: the clown becomes the king and the king becomes the clown” (2001: 189). He writes that he uses this example of Karnad’s play in order to demonstrate that any political theater must be farcical, even outside of the Communist context of Kerala: “[t]he nonsensical reasoning through which Aziz, as the clown, justifies his heinous actions turns out to be synonymous with the reasoning through which Tughlaq has pursued his own political intrigues: government action is itself a farce” (2001: 189). The tragic figure of Girish Karnad’s character Tughlaq does not fit into Meyer Abrams’ definition of farce as “a type of comedy in which one-dimensional characters are put into ludicrous situations, while ordinary standards of probability in motivation and event are freely violated in order to evoke the maximum laughter from an audience” (in Allen and Stephens 1962: 39–40), though his minor character Aziz might. Cho’s character of Tughlaq, on the other hand, even as later developed in the Tughlaq journal, is quite flat, never serious about anything except his own power and public image. This play involves no psychodrama, no character development, no “deep” scenes. This is exactly Aparna Dharwadker’s assessment of

154


Karnad’s foil character Aziz: “[i]n the character of Aziz the will to power is unhampered by any moral or psychological complexity, and the play’s absolutist discourse of power comes appropriately from him, not from Tughlaq” (2005: 254). Girish Karnad’s Mohammad bin Tughlaq, with his internal struggle and increasing madness, is balanced by the comic character of Aziz. The two characters conflate in the end, when Tughlaq recognizes himself in Aziz and offers the man a government job. Aziz’s cynical attitude toward politics and politicians is much closer to Cho’s Tughlaq, and Karnad’s splitting of this character adds depth to the portrait of Jawaharlal Nehru that is visible in his Mohammad bin Tughlaq. It is notable that both Aziz and Cho’s Tughlaq end the plays triumphant while Karnad’s Tughlaq is “dazed and frightened, as though he can’t comprehend where he is” (Karnad 1994: 221). Cho’s Tughlaq, like Aziz, works to manipulate the system; Karnad’s Tughlaq is the system. Aziz’s definition of a king is what Karnad’s Tughlaq does, without acknowledging it, but Cho’s Tughlaq does openly. By means of allegory, Cho Ramasamy flattens and exposes the unapologetic authoritarian tendencies of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, while Karnad complicates and sympathizes with her father, former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Right up until the end when Aziz confronts him, Karnad’s Tughlaq is still trying to justify his actions to himself and his advisors, holding vainly onto his idealism and asking “what gives me the right to call myself a King?” (Karnad 1994: 181). Aziz never has a question about this: “I am bored stiff with all this running and hiding. You rob a man, you run, and hide. It’s all so pointless. One should be able to rob a man and then stay there to punish him for getting robbed. That’s called ‘class’— that’s being a real king!” (Karnad 1994: 198). When Aziz confronts Tughlaq with his actions, Tughlaq’s first reaction is to yell: “Hold your tongue, fool! You dare pass judgment on me? You think your tongue is so light and swift that you can trap me by your stupid clowning?” (Karnad 1994: 217). But in the end he admits that punishing the man he has publicly welcomed as a saint would not be a good idea and instead offers him a post as an officer in his army. He explains to his advisor Barani that “[i]f justice was as simple as you think or logic as beautiful as I had hopes, life would have been so much clearer. I have been chasing these words now for five years and now I don’t know if I am pursuing a mirage or fleeing a shadow” (Karnad 1994: 219). His uncertainty and complexity stand in very clear contrast to the certainty and flatness of the Tughlaq in Cho Ramasamy’s most famous play. In conclusion, the two Tughlaq plays in Kannada and Tamil, with their pertinent political messages, speak to the nation of India in different but equally compelling ways. Both comment on the national political situation of the 1960s, but their use of allegory to equate Tughlaq with two very different leaders and leadership styles has led to divergent images of the historical figure. The approaches of historical psychodrama and political satire, applied to the same main character, offer serious messages while simultaneously entertaining and


155

engaging audiences. Reading the two plays together is helpful in considering the different ways that Indian contemporary drama engages politics in the development of regional and national theatrical traditions. BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY

Notes 1. This writer goes by the name of “Cho.” It is common for Tamil-language authors to use pseudonyms, and the covers of his books, his articles in the Tughlaq journal, and most of the press and criticism he receives refer to him only as “Cho.” 2. June 25, 1975 — January 1977 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi revealed her authoritarian tendencies through government control of the press, arrest and imprisonment of political opponents, control of the courts, slum clearance (“city beautification”), sterilization camps (“family planning”), and other programs. 3. In a longer version of this essay, I use these two plays to discuss reasons why Tamil-language theater has generally not been accepted as part of the canon of modern Indian classic plays. Although there is a great deal of formal and linguistic diversity in the canon, there is also a set of characteristics that bring these plays together, and most Tamil plays do not meet these “requirements,” which Karnad exemplifies. See Rudisill 2007. 4. Yaksagana is a folk theater form from Karnataka that incorporates singing, drumming, dancing, words with gestural interpretation, and colorful costumes. “Natak company” refers to touring professional drama companies found throughout India who generally perform historical and mythological dramas for various village festivals. 5. The Sangeet Natak Akademi (SNA) is the national Academy for Music, Dance, and Drama. It was founded in 1956 along with the Sahitya (“literature”) and Lalit Kala (“fine art”) Akademis. The SNA has a library and publications, organizes drama festivals and conferences, and offers awards, grants, fellowships, and pensions for artists. 6. “Theater of Roots” refers to a movement in India theater to shift away from colonial influences by turning for inspiration to what were considered pan–Indian theatrical styles. Modern theater artists looked to incorporate Sanskrit drama and folk theater conventions in their work in a nationalist project that was meant to develop an “Indian” theater. 7. The reservation system functions like affirmative action. A certain percentage of seats are reserved for members of disadvantaged communities in universities and government jobs. 8. Sengupta writes that this trend was over by the early 1980s and the jatras once again became mythological and pseudo-historical, though popular as ever. Coincidentally, Cho Ramasamy wrote his last play in 1982. 9. The Dravidian Movement privileged South India and its arts as more authentic and “Indian” than those from the north, which were believed to have been contaminated by Islamic and other foreign traditions. Its proponents had a cultural agenda of promoting Tamil arts and language as classical and distinct from those of Sanskritized North India. This often extended to being an anti–Brahmin movement. Every Chief Minister of Tamilnadu since the Dravidian parties first came to power in 1967 has been a playwright/screenplay writer (C.N. Annadurai, M. Karunanidhi) or theater/film actor (M.G. Ramachandran, Janaki Ramachandran, J. Jayalalitha). 10. In a review of Viveka Fine Art’s Golden Jubilee celebrations in 2004, journalist Arup Chanda wrote, “Cho Ramaswamy is a familiar name, not only in Tamil Nadu but all over India. He is known more as a political commentator who edits a Tamil magazine, Tughlaq. But little do people know about Cho as a Tamil dramatist” (2004). 11. “Indira” Parthasarathy writes Tamil-language plays mostly based on history or mythology (Aurangzeb, The Legend of Nandan, etc.) and several have been translated into English. He is the only Tamil playwright mentioned in Dharwadker 2005. Sabha playwright Crazy Mohan, on other hand, receives little academic or critical attention (see Rudisill 2007) and is generally written off as “just comedy.”

156


12. I have not been able to find a first-run copy, but the second printing was in 1995. It is likely that the first printing was in the early 1990s, when some of Cho’s other famous plays were first published. 13. Ibn Battuta is also a real historical figure. He was a fourteenth-century Islamic scholar and explorer. 14. Family planning was one of the major issues Indira Gandhi focused on during her tenure as prime minister. During the Emergency, this item was part of her son Sanjay Gandhi’s FiveYear Plan, and its aggressive implementation through incentives, quotas, and sterilization camps led to the unpopularity of government involvement in solving the population problem. 15. Dravidian politicians are known for their great poetic and oratorical skills, and can be recognized in Cho’s play by their excessively flowery language stripped of all words borrowed from English or Sanskrit. (See Bate, John Bernard. “M`™aittamil: Oratory and Democratic Practice in Tamilnadu.” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2000.)¯ 16. While Karnad borrows this technique from Parsi stagecraft, the alternation of deep and shallow scenes can also be found in early Sanskrit dramas.

References Cited Abrams, Meyer H. “A Glossary of Literary Terms (1941).” In Satire: Theory and Practice, edited by Charles Allen and George Stephens, 36–47. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1962. Banfield, Chris. “Girish Karnad and an Indian Theatre of Roots.” In An Introduction to PostColonial Theatre, edited by Brian Crow with Chris Banfield, 136–160. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Baskaran, S. Theodore. The Message Bearers: The Nationalist Politics and the Entertainment Media in South India 1880–1945. Madras: Cre–A, 1981. Bhatia, Nandi. Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance: Theater and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004. Chanda, Arup. “Cho Ramaswamy 50 Years of Drama,” Tribune India, 11 July 2004. Accessed at http://www.tribuneindia.com/2004/20040711/spectrum/main2.htm on 8 August 2006. Dhanavel, P. The Indian Imagination of Girish Karnad: Essays on Hayavadana. New Delhi: Prestige, 2000. Dharwadker, Aparna. Theatres of Independence: Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India Since 1947. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005. Ganesan, S. “Average Voter Turnout 73 Per Cent in Tiruchi District.” The Hindu, 10 May 2006. Goel, Savita. “Folk Theatre Strategies in Hayavadana.” In The Plays of Girish Karnad: Critical Perspectives, edited by Jaydipsinh Dodiya, 204–212. New Delhi: Prestige, 1999. Jagannathan, N.S. “Interview with G.P. Deshpande.” In Contemporary Indian Theatre: Interviews with Playwrights and Directors. For the Festival of Contemporary Theatre held 3–17 September 1989 for Nehru’s Birth Centenary, 103–112. New Delhi: Sangeet Natak Akademi, 1989. Karnad, Girish. “Theatre in India.” Daedalas 118/4 (Fall 1989): 331–352. _____.Three Plays: Naga-Mandala, Hayavadana, Tughlaq. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994. Ramasamy, Cho. Mohammad bin Tughlaq. [in Tamil] 2nd Printing. Madras: Alliance, 1995. Translated by Kristen Rudisill as Mohammad bin Tughlaq (Unpublished manuscript, 2001). Rudisill, Kristen. “Brahmin Humor: Chennai’s Sabha Theater and the Creation of Middle-Class Taste from the 1950s to the Present.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas, Austin, 2007. Sengupta, Rudraprasad. “Viability of Professional Theatre in West Bengal Today.” Sangeet Natak Akademi Journal. December 1984. Shankar, S. “Introduction” In Water by Komal Swaminathan, viii–xxxi. Calcutta: Seagull, 2001. Viveka Fine Arts Club Golden Jubilee Souvenir. 2004. Zook, Darren C. “The Farcical Mosaic: The Changing Masks of Political Theatre in Contemporary India.” Asian Theatre Journal 18/2 (Fall 2001): 174–199.

¡3 The Music Man Cometh The Tuneful Pipe Dreams of Professor Harold Hill Michael Schwartz Abstract During the summer of 1912, a self-deluded salesman has to face the truth about his biggest “pipe dream.” This realization leads to the arms of the town librarian and earns him respectability as the leader of the boys’ band. The time frame, the job of salesman, and the attitude toward women are just three elements that Professor Harold Hill and Theodore Hickman share. Screenwriter Jessica Westfeldt astutely comments that The Iceman Cometh and The Music Man tell essentially the same story, but Harold Hill’s fate is arguably more disturbing than that of Hickey. O’Neill’s salesman will attain peace through death, but Hill has to live up to the most unlikely of miracles — his pipe dream of being a real conductor comes true. This “dark” element of The Music Man at least partially accounts for its success, and is also important in understanding the failure of the highly anticipated Disney TV production in 2003.

Seventy-six trombones, trouble in River City, barbershop quartets and Wells Fargo wagons — these are images and phrases familiar to those with even a casual knowledge of Meredith Willson’s The Music Man. The show’s hero, Professor Harold Hill (this trip — he’s known to at least one old friend as “Gregory”), convinces the town of River City, Iowa that “there’s terrible trouble”— not only because of a new pool table, but because the kids have started to read Cap’n Billy’s Whiz Bang and introduce scandalous slang such as “swell” and “so’s your old man” into their vocabulary (Willson 1958: 37).1 Hill and his world would appear to be at a great remove from the world of one of Eugene O’Neill’s most dark and disturbing tragedies, The Iceman Cometh. Nevertheless, the kinship between Hill and O’Neill’s salesman of death Hickey reveals the interesting dark territory of Music Man that is largely responsible for its long-term appeal — or at least, responsible for the strange and subversive way that it works as entertainment. Furthermore, it is a lack of understanding of this dark side that spelled 157

158


ruin for the much-publicized (and perhaps, quickly forgotten) 2003 Disney televised remake. The daily New York critics on December 20, 1957 spoke almost unanimously in heralding Harold Hill as a success. As Hill himself might have put it, certain words crept into the dailies’ vocabulary — words like “corn,” “wholesome,” “innocent,” and “warm-hearted”— all elements, as the Sun’s Frank Aston poetically commented, of “a strength drawn from the fertile breast of this continent’s Middle West” (Aston “Tune Show”).2 Two critics, Richard Watts from the Post and Walter Kerr of the Herald Tribune, recognized, if only in passing reference, something perhaps less innocent and wholesome in Hill’s character — they both used the term “racy” (Watts “Charm,” and Kerr “Music Man”). To understand just how racy, it could be useful to make some direct comparisons between the salesmen Hill and Hickey. Hickey, in his climactic “aria,” describes in detail his longtime friendships and dalliances with prostitutes — ranging from the madam who “staked” him to his first job, to the “tart in Altoona” from whom Hickey “pick[s] up a nail”— a venereal disease he in turn passes on to his simultaneously beloved and despised wife Evelyn, whom we learn Hickey has killed (O’Neill 1967: 236).3 While Hill has apparently dodged the clap at least as adroitly as he has the law, he shares with Hickey an appreciation of women of easy virtue, as he recounts in song in “The Sadder-But-Wiser Girl.” Not only does Hill “spark” and “grin/when the gal with the touch of sin walks in,” but, to put the issue of carnal knowledge more explicitly, he claims toward the end of the number, “I hope and I pray/for Hester to win just one more ‘A’” (Willson 1958: 71). Willson’s musical was a triumph of nostalgia to begin with —1950s big city audiences savoring an idealized small-town 1912. Nostalgia further fuels the vision of The Music Man as a “family” show, which is supported by the practical fact of the chorus requiring a fairly large number of kids. What high school drama instructors and community theatre directors (along with the parents) might have overlooked are the less-than-wholesome plans of Professor Hill. What young aspiring actors encountering Hill for the first time might well miss is the fact that for Hill, right until the stylized “Till There Was You/76 Trombones” duet, the heroine Marian the Librarian is nothing more nor less than a potentially memorable one-night stand. As Hill assures Marcellus, who protests that one’s making-out opportunities are limited at the notorious footbridge, “There’s a place over’t Madison Park near the sociable makes this footbridge look like the old ladies home” (Willson 1958: 141). Nostalgia for the musical (and, in many cases, the 1962 film version) combines with the nostalgia within the play itself to encourage audiences to reinvent an often “racy” tale as a “wholesome” musical for the whole family. As Fredric Jameson points out, audiences effect a similar reinvention “about the past and about specific generational moments of that past” when watching “nostalgia films” such as Star Wars (1998: 7–8). Perhaps even more sordidly, Hill enjoys the reputation of a mass ravager of

13. The Music Man Cometh (Schwartz)

159

spinster music teachers. As disgruntled anvil salesman Charlie Cowell reports to Marian, “he’s got a girl in every county in Illinois, and he’s taken it away from every one of ’em! And that’s 102 counties!” (Willson 1958: 127) It is a number impressive enough to give Marian pause, even as she’s falling for the professor — she nearly asks him point blank to verify the figure a little later. One would imagine Hickey would be impressed as well.From the standpoint of genre, the differences between The Music Man and The Iceman Cometh might not be so clear cut as (musical) comedy vs. tragedy. O’Neill himself found a great deal of humor in his play, as he commented in an interview shortly before Iceman’s Broadway opening: “I think I’m aware of comedy more than I ever was before; a big kind of comedy that doesn’t stay funny very long” (Gelb 1973: 871). O’Neill further employs a considerable amount of songs and music throughout the course of the play — the sodden law student Willie Oban sings a lewd song about a sailor and a girl; the broken anarchist Hugo consistently breaks into his French revolutionary song “La Carmagnole;” the play ends with a cacophony of different and competing songs of the period and the generation earlier, and perhaps most significantly, Hickey himself “puts on an entrance act” (O’Neill 1967: 76) complete with boisterous singing. The viewer and reader can discenrn further similarities in the physical, costumed aspects of Hickey and Hill. O’Neill’s typically detailed description of Hickey could conceivably serve as a descripton of Hill as well: You get the impression ... that he must have real ability in his line. There is an efficient, business-like approach in his manner, and his eyes can take you in shrewdly at a glance. He has the salesman’s mannerisms of speech, an easy flow of glib, persuasive convincingness. His clothes are those of a successful drummer whose territory consists of minor cities and small towns — not flashy but conspicuously spic and span [1967: 76].

Both Hill and Hickey, in their stage, TV, and film incarnations, conspicuously share a similar wardrobe — most notably, the boater hat. A gentleman’s warmweather and boating hat, it serves as a key signifier of barber-shop quartets and snake-oil salesmen — thanks, to a large degree, to The Music Man’s enduring popularity. There is also an “acting” similarity between Hickey and Hill, particularly when the researcher examines some of the notable actors who have essayed the role of Hickey. James Barton, the first Hickey, was a song-and-dance veteran of vaudeville and musical revues. Jason Robards, who gained stardom in the legendary 1956 revival of Iceman, was, not necessarily coincidentally, considered for the role of Hill. Kevin Spacey’s Hickey, in the 1999 Broadway revival, earned great acclaim, with an interesting, and pertinent, exception. Village Voice critic Michael Feingold, in his negative review that evokes Arthur Miller’s great contribution to the history of the American stage salesman, found fault with Spacey’s interpretation: “Salesmen ride on Arthur Miller’s ‘smile and a shoeshine’; Spacey

160


omits the first item, suggesting, instead of the deceitful glad-hander Hickey, an irate Harold Hill in some dark rethinking of The Music Man” (Feingold “Death of a Salesman” 1999: 2). While Feingold saw a “dark rethinking of The Music Man” as cripplingly inappropriate, the idea might not be as far-fetched as it sounds. Hickey and Hill share a profession, of course, as well as spatial and temporal territory — that is, both are successful salesmen hitting smallish towns in the summer of 1912. While Hill is more the out-and-out swindler — Hickey has not needed to change his name, and he holds a legitimate position, despite his devastating “periodicals”— Hickey freely admits that his general pitch consists of little more than kidding people. It is here, perhaps, that the kinship and twinship of Hickey and Hill are most prominent — with the issue of selling hope and lies, not only to unsuspecting rubes and suckers, but to themselves as well. For both Iceman and Music Man are grounded in what Raymond Williams referred to as “private tragedy,” or the “tragedy of the isolated being” (Williams 1969: 116). As Williams explains, “The isolated persons clash and destroy each other, not simply because their particular relationships are wrong, but because life as such is inevitably against them” (116). Thus in Iceman, Larry, “the old wise guy” who becomes Hickey’s “only real convert to death,” cries in ultimate surrender, “Life is too much for me” (O’Neill 1967: 256). Life indeed is “too much” for all the characters of Iceman, including and especially Hickey, whose pipe dream serves as the equivalent of Ibsen’s “life-lie,” the fantasy humanity requires to make life bearable. And, even when taking into account all the colors and trappings of American musical comedy at its most sprightly, the “pipe dream” or “lifelie” is just as vital to Professor Hill — life is “too much” for him, so he invents, improvises, and cajoles others into sharing his vision. Hill’s mistake, as is Hickey’s, is that he believes he is in control of the pipe dream at all times. Hickey’s success, as he reports and reveals, lies in his ability to size up the pipe dreams of others: “It was like a game, sizing people up quick, spotting what their pet pipe dreams were, and then kidding ’em along that line, pretending you believed what they wanted to believe about themselves” (O’Neill 1967: 235). Hill, for his part, understands that people’s love of music often coincides with the belief that their children possess great musical talent — inherited from the untapped talents of the parents. Both salesmen, however, nurse pipe dreams of their own. Hickey is certain that his murder of his wife was a mercy killing — he was putting Evelyn out of her misery, as he repeats numerous times, “for the peace of all concerned.” Hill’s pipe dream is considerably less violent, but perhaps no less powerful — he dreams of really being a music man, and leading a real band. This belief brings an evangelical fervor to the speech patterns of both Hickey and Hill. Just as Hickey invokes the “brothers and sisters” rhetoric of his minister father in exhorting the regulars at Harry Hope’s saloon to give up their pipe dreams, Hill’s signature song, “Trouble,” sweeps up the staid “River Cityzians”


161

in revival meeting fury, complete with references to the devil (“friends, the idle brain is the devil’s playground”) and gesticulations toward Heaven (Willson 1958: 36). A comparison of dialogue and lyrics sheds greater light on the similarity of performance between the two salesmen. In Hill’s show-stopping number, he warns the River City citizenry: “We’ve surely got trouble!/Right here in River City/Right here!” (38) Hickey reaches a fiery peak at the end of the second act: “I wouldn’t say this unless I knew, Brothers and Sisters. This peace is real! It’s a fact! I know! Because I’ve got it! Here! Now! Right in front of you! You see the difference in me! ... And I promise you, by the time this day is over, I’ll have every one of you feeling the same way!” (O’Neill 1967: 148). One could almost imagine the denizens of Harry Hope’s saloon chanting “Trouble, trouble, trouble” in support of Hickey’s slightly different kind of show-stopper — Hickey pledges to rid Harry Hope’s saloon of pipe dreams; Hill pledges to rid River City of its terrible trouble and to “figger out a/Way t’keep the young ones/Moral after school” (Willson 1958: 37). The Music Man’s original, and perhaps definitive, Harold Hill, actor Robert Preston (whose first musical role this was), succeeded in embodying a musical snake-oil salesman. (The image of snake-oil salesman is also evoked in Iceman, in circus con man Ed Mosher’s long and joking description of a shifty “physician” friend of his.4) Of the daily critics, Kerr best articulated the fervor Preston brought to Hill onstage (happily captured for future audiences in the 1962 film): “Mr. Preston is impatient with dialogue. Let a couple of people talk, and he fidgets. Let a split-second gap in chatter turn up, and his feet starts [sic] working. A fairly fierce light turns up in his eyes, an urgent whisper begins to conspire with the underscoring ...” (Kerr “Music Man” 1958: 149). This fierce light and urgency renders both Hill and Hickey vulnerable to their ultimate and respective downfalls — both caused by selfless and loving gestures by women. Hickey is emotionally destroyed by wife Evelyn’s constant love and forgiveness: “There’s a limit to the guilt you can feel and the forgiveness and the pity you can take!” he cries (O’Neill 1967: 239). In turn, Miss Marian, for all her love (and because of it), overwhelms and, in effect, traps Hill in a similar fashion. She knows he is a fraud, she accepts that “there have been many ports of call”— a polite reference to that deflowering of 102 music teachers — and she is more than willing to have Hill take it away from her, too (Willson 1958: 139). Hill’s response is similar to Hickey’s — what else can he do but fall in love and tarry long enough to get captured by a mob preparing tar and feathers? Both salesmen must face their pipe dreams — Hickey retreats into madness after recreating the moment of shooting his wife, laughing wildly and calling Evelyn a “damned bitch.” O’Neill vividly describes his terrible self-realization: “He stops with a horrified start, as if shocked out of a nightmare, as if he could not believe he heard what he has just said” (O’Neill 1967: 241–242). Hill, in turn, much like the denizens of Hope’s saloon, is pushed into making his dream a living reality. Significantly, it is the only moment of the show where Hill can

162


find neither appropriate word nor action. Part of the appeal of Preston’s performance is not only the fervent belief in what he is selling, but also the sheer improvisational joy he brings to any potential trap — the more he is caught dead to rights, the more he responds to the challenge of bare-facing his way out of it (convincing the mayor his non-existent son was born to play the flugelhorn, for example). When, however, Marian breaks the classroom pointer in two and hands half of it to Hill as a baton to lead the band (a perhaps disconcertingly Freudian gesture), Hill can only say, “No, I couldn’t.”5 The one thing Hill cannot do his live his pipe dream. As he admits earlier to Marian’s younger brother Winthrop, he has his foot caught in the door — the same door, it could be said, that in Iceman leads out of the safety of Hope’s saloon and into the real world where pipe dreams must be acted upon, or killed altogether. Appropriately for a musical comedy, Hill succeeds — the Minuet in G is butchered, but recognizable. The townspeople are proud (“That’s my Barney!” [157]), and the way is clear for Hill to assume his new roles: River City boys’ band director, Marian’s husband, and young, lisping Winthrop’s father figure. Indeed, his new role includes the “realization” of Hill’s two most fundamental lies — he not only becomes a real bandleader, but he becomes Professor Harold Hill — the name and the identity of “Gregory” is discarded along with the necessity to take the money and run. It is as if, for example, Willie Oban in Iceman returned to Harry Hope’s with a job at the D.A.’s office, or if Lieutenant McGloin did indeed get reinstated on the police force. Just as O’Neill forces the issue of whether or not the residents of Harry Hope’s place would be happy if their pipe dreams came true, a similar question arises in the case of the Professor — how happy is this happy ending? The tuneful final curtain of Music Man comes at a sacrifice — not only of laughter, for the happy ending of a comedy typically signals the end of laughter — but also a sacrifice of Hill’s vitality, his life force. As Ethan Mordden explains, Hill’s combination of “improvisation, wit, [and] fearlessness” was rather unique in Broadway musical history: “the American musical seldom confronted that kind of man except in operetta, where he was usually played by baritones with the swank of a curate and the nerve of Cracker Jack. The musical really prefers boyfriends, kiddos, or unreformable hustlers; the prospect of a solid man throws it off its foundation” (Mordden 1983: 157). The (inevitably) successful culmination of the love story brings an end to Hill’s show-driving hustle — and, not incidentally, an end to the most entertaining element of the show. Hill’s fatal flaw, in other words, is that he is a reformable hustler. It was this quality of “reformability” that Disney seized upon when producing a TV version of The Music Man for the 21st century. The Disney Company, in their quest to remake The Music Man, clearly understood that the love story element represented something of a letdown. In interviews shortly before the show’s February 2003 premiere, director Jeff Bleckner insisted that the love story between Hill and Marian would take center


163

stage —“a relationship often eclipsed in previous productions by [Hill’s] shenanigans,” as the New York Times article pointed out (Pogrebin “Love Conquers that Con Man” 2003: par. 9). For talent, Disney tapped two of the most successful musical comedy performers of the new century — Kristen Chenoweth and Matthew Broderick. The hope was that that Broderick’s subtle take on Harold Hill would give the love story a chance to blossom. The missing of the mark in Disney’s logic was that the only way for the love story to be uplifting in Music Man is if Harold Hill is miserable and unhappy conning people. Disney, and star Broderick, gave its audience a cold, unfeeling Hill who gradually finds his humanity through true love — and along the way, saps the life out of “Trouble,” “The Sadder But Wiser Girl,” and all 76 trombones. While TV reviewers enjoyed Kristen Chenowith’s Marian, critical reaction was mixed, at best, for Broderick’s rendition of Hill; the Times noted that “Mr. Broderick’s effortless charm plays a little too effortless [sic],” and the USA Today reviewer commented disparagingly that “Broderick is a natural choice to star in a TV musical. Just not this musical” (author’s emphasis).6 Broderick’s strengths, including his boyish, low-key charm, were well-suited for a production that aimed to draw attention away from Professor Hill’s “shenanigans.”7 What the Disney producers failed to reckon with was the fact that the meat of the show is, for all intents and purposes, precisely those shenanigans. Both the smile and the shoeshine were missing. For The Music Man to work as well as it possibly can, its perversion of musical comedy structure needs to remain in place — Hill is inevitably contained by the respectable domesticity of the love story, just as he has earlier promised to contain the inherent evil that has infiltrated River City in the form of a pool table. The love story represents not the typical happy climax, but the somewhat deflating anticlimax. In a sense, The Music Man is no more, and no less, a love story than is The Iceman Cometh— love drives the boisterous, fun-loving Hickey to insanity, and Professor Hill to respectability (“I knew you’d come to no good,” Hill jokingly tells Marcellus after learning his former partner has gotten an honest job and settled down with a nice girl — except, perhaps, it is not a joke [30]). Audiences must, and most likely will continue to, settle for a lively first act and the eventual (if symbolic) death of another salesman. While speculation beyond the time and world of any play is not always constructive, one might wonder how well Hill responds to love, marriage, and domesticity — the same three elements that drove Hickey to murdering his wife. O’Neill does not give his characters in Iceman the chance to live their pipe dreams in the real world, but he did write a short story, “Tomorrow,” published in The Smart Set in June of 1917, which provides a possible answer to the question of what happens when a pipe dream comes true. The story concerns Jimmy Anderson, based on the same real-life figure of O’Neill’s wandering and dissipated youth that inspired Iceman’s sodden newsman Jimmy Tomorrow. In Iceman, Jimmy Tomorrow kills his pipe dream by spending the day sobbing at the docks,

164


unable to throw himself into the river, fully aware that he can never work again. In O’Neill’s early short story, Jimmy Anderson pursues and finally attains a trial job “on one of the big morning papers,” earning the grudging respect of the drunken residents of Tommy the Priest’s (O’Neill 1988: 955).8 Anderson loses his job, and comes to the identity-crushing realization that he has lost his skill and talent: “I tell you I couldn’t do the work! I tried and tried. What I wrote was rot. I couldn’t get any news. No initiative — no imagination — no character — no courage! All gone” (963). Jimmy’s friends eventually find his dead, broken body on the ground, the result of a suicidal leap from his fire escape, and a precursor to the suicide that young Parritt commits to end Iceman. “Tomorrow had come,” O’Neill writes to close the story (967). For Professor Harold Hill, as a musical-comedy hero, tomorrow never comes — the curtain falls on the happy, march-filled ending. The responsibility of living up to a pipe dream that becomes a reality is, however, a heavy one. The Music Man’s gleefully persuasive and percussive rhythm of “harch, harch, harch” contains a human problem more tragic than comic, and perhaps this problem is too big for the musical to comfortably hold. While Iceman, Death of a Salesman, and in the 1980s, Glengarry Glen Ross may serve as generational markers for the corrosiveness of the all–American profession of salesman, it might well be appropriate to add The Music Man to that formidable list of American dramas. WIDENER UNIVERSITY

Notes 1. Quotes taken from Meredith Willson, The Music Man (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1958). 2. See Richard Watts, Jr., “The Charm of Musical Americana,” New York Post (20 December 1957); Brooks Atkinson, “Theatre: ‘Music Man,’” New York Times (20 December 1957); Robert Coleman, “’The Music Man’ is Solid Hit,” New York Daily Mirror (20 December 1957); John McClain, “A Whopping Hit, It’ll Run and Run,” New York Journal-American (20 December 1957); John Chapman, “’The Music Man’ One of the Best Musical Comedies of Our Time,” New York Daily News (20 December 1957); Frank Aston, “Tune Show Has Fun and Style,” New York World-Telegram and The Sun (20 December 1957); and Walter Kerr, “The Music Man,” New York Herald-Tribune (20 December 1957). Reviews compiled in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, ed. Rachel W. Coffin, vol. XVIII, no. 27 (New York: Critics’ Theatre Reviews, 1958). 3. Iceman quotes taken from Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh (New York: Random House, 1967). 4. O’Neill, pp. 88–90. 5. The line does not appear in the published libretto, but Preston clearly says it in the movie. 6. See Bruce Weber, “Bad Timing! Right Here in River City!” New York Times (14 February 2003), and Robert Bianco, “Broderick isn’t the ‘Man” for ABC’s Visit to River City” USA Today (13 February 2003). 7. For an opposing (that is, positive) review of the production and Broderick’s performance, see Ken Tucker, “Meredith Willson’s The Music Man” Entertainment Weekly (14 February 2003). 8. Quotes taken from Eugene O’Neill, “Tomorrow,” in Eugene O’Neill: Complete Plays 1932–1943, ed. Travis Bogard (New York: Library of America, 1988).


165

References Cited Aston, Frank. “Tune Show Has Fun and Style,” New York World-Telegram and The Sun (20 December 1957). In New York Times Critics’ Reviews, edited by Rachel W. Coffin, v. XVIII, no. 27. New York: Critics Theatre Reviews, 1958. Atkinson, Brooks. “Theatre: ‘Music Man,’” New York Times (20 December 1957). In New York Times Critics’ Reviews, edited by Rachel W. Coffin, v. XVIII, no. 27. New York: Critics Theatre Reviews, 1958. Bianco, Robert. “Broderick isn’t the ‘Man’ for ABC’s Visit to River City.” USA Today (13 February 2003). Retrieved 29 May 2008 . Chapman, John. “’The Music Man’ One of the Best Musical Comedies of Our Time,” New York Daily News (20 December 1957). In New York Times Critics’ Reviews, edited by Rachel W. Coffin, v. XVIII, no. 27. New York: Critics Theatre Reviews, 1958. Coleman, Robert. “’The Music Man’ is Solid Hit,” New York Daily Mirror (20 December 1957). In New York Times Critics’ Reviews, edited by Rachel W. Coffin, v. XVIII, no. 27. New York: Critics Theatre Reviews, Inc., 1958. Feingold, Michael. “Death of a Salesman.” Village Voice (13 April 1999). Retrieved 28 May 2008 . Gelb, Arthur, and Barbara Gelb. O’Neill. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. Jameson, Frederic. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” In The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998. London: Verso, 1998. 7–8. Kerr, Walter. “The Music Man,” New York Herald-Tribune (20 December 1957). In New York Times Critics’ Reviews, edited by Rachel W. Coffin, v. XVIII, no. 27. New York: Critics Theatre Reviews, 1958. McClain, John. “A Whopping Hit, It’ll Run and Run,” New York Journal-American (20 December 1957). In New York Times Critics’ Reviews, edited by Rachel W. Coffin, v. XVIII, no. 27. New York: Critics Theatre Reviews, 1958. Mordden, Ethan. Broadway Babies: The People Who Made the American Musical. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. O’Neill, Eugene. The Iceman Cometh. New York: Random House, 1967. _____. “Tomorrow.” Eugene O’Neill: Complete Plays 1932–1943, edited by Travis Bogard. New York: Library of America, 1988. Pogrebin, Robin. “Love Conquers That Con Man Once Again.” New York Times (16 February 2003). Retrieved 20 March 2008 . Tucker, Ken. “Meredith Willson’s The Music Man.” Entertainment Weekly (14 February 2003). Retrieved 29 May 2008 . Watts, Richard Jr. “The Charm of Musical Americana.” New York Post (20 December 1957). In New York Times Critics’ Reviews, edited by Rachel W. Coffin, v. XVIII, no. 27. New York: Critics Theatre Reviews, 1958. Weber, Bruce. “Bad Timing! Right Here in River City!” New York Times (14 February 2003). Retrieved 29 May 2008 . Williams, Raymond. Modern Tragedy. London: Chatto and Windus, 1969. Willson, Meredith. The Music Man. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1958.

¡4 Tragic Ways of Killing a Child Staging Violence and Revenge in Classical Greek and Chinese Drama Fei Shi Abstract This essay compares child killing and family revenge in the Chinese Yuan Zaju Big Revenge of the Orphan of Zhao Family, Aeschylus’ The Oresteia, and Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis and Medea. It discusses the acceptance of tragedy as a genre across two different dramatic traditions, and the immediate transgressiveness, which is esthetically imbedded in tragic theatricalities. The essay formulates a new way of articulating the problem of Chinese tragedy by analyzing the Chinese play and by tracing the trope of tragedy back to its Greek roots.

The comparability between ancient Chinese drama and Attic tragedy, two distinct dramatic and theatrical traditions, has been a debatable critical enterprise. Scholars have argued that ancient Chinese drama has no tragic heroes, and, when some plays depict the downfall of their protagonists, these tragic moments always serve political agendas of Confucian morality rather than the tragic effect of Aristotelian fear and pity. 1 Interestingly, Big Revenge of the Orphan of Zhao Family (also translated as The Orphan of China), was the first Chinese drama to be introduced to the western world, and was praised as one of the greatest tragedies in world literature by Wang Guowei in his influential History of Song yuan Dramas.2 It was first translated into French by Joseph Henri Prémare (L’Orphelin de la Maison de Tchao) in 1735 and was included in J. B. Du Halde’s book, Description Géographique, Historique, Chronologique, Politique et Physique de l’Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie Chinoise. It quickly became the major attraction for literary translators and theatrical producers of Chinese plays in Europe during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Why were the European intellectuals particularly interested in this play? How did their intercultural interest reflect their idea of tragedy and their under166

14. Tragic Ways of Killing a Child (Shi)

167

standing of the culturally remote Chinese drama? Was there an equivalent literary genre and theatrical form to “tragedy” in ancient China? What made this play a tragedy? The Orphan of China is a famous Yuan Zaju (Yuan Drama) that was written by Ji Junxiang 3 during the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) at the peak of Chinese opera as both a literary genre and a form of popular public entertainment. The play is a theatrical rendition of a story of infanticide and revenge in Jin, a vassal country, that took place sometime between 1100 B.C. and 403 B.C. Aesthetically speaking, this play is exceptional because it dramatizes the cruel and paradoxical choices of characters within a complicated social nexus of relationships (father/son, friend/enemy, master/subordinate) by transgressing major thematic patterns of love, marriage, family ethics, and the supernatural. The play seems to lead to some cathartic retribution and family reunion at the end of the story in the manner of most Yuan dramas that seek closure, but the bloody murders and the absurd decisions of sacrifice throughout the play outweigh any satisf ying closure through revenge. Do these emotionally overwhelming acts of violence and extremely pitiful human situations make this play a tragedy? The idea of tragoidia in Athens during the fifth century B.C. was different from the idea of tragédie in Paris in 1750 when Voltaire translated L’Orphelin de la Chine and from the idea of tragedy in London in 1759 when Arthur Murphy adapted into English Voltaire’s translation. Not all of the extant tragedies that were written and produced by the Attic dramatists conform to sad endings and downfalls. In many a case, Attic tragedy was a dramatic representation of mythical heroes, “noble actions,” and “noble personages,” (Aristotle 2001: 1458). By contrast, Attic comedy (komoidia) was “an imitation of men worse than the average” (Aristotle 2001: 1459). Aristotle stressed the importance of the tragic emotions of pity and fear through pathos, a deed of suffering and violence. David Kovacs points out in the foreword to his translation of Iphigenia Among the Taurians that “the common element in the two kinds of tragoidia [Oedipus the King and Iphigenia Among the Taurians] would seem to be that both sorts of play demonstrate the radical uncertainty of human life, the limitations of mortal knowledge, and man’s dependence on the power of the gods” (1999: 147). Of course, Aristotle’s idea of tragoidia does not apply to all “tragedies.” For example, Shakespeare’s Hamlet might not be a tragedy in an Aristotelian sense because for Aristotle “the worst situation [of tragedy] is when the personage is with full knowledge on the point of doing the deed, and leaves it undone” (Aristotle 2001: 1468). If the tragic hero’s failure to negotiate his baffling and painful human situation with other humans or gods is pertinent to an Aristotelian idea of tragedy, then the internalized paradox of human fate and the pathetic incoherence of human psychology redefined the idea of tragedy during the Elizabethan era. The diversity of opinion about what qualifies as “tragic” in the genealogy of western tragedy, gives me cause to raise the same question in con-

168


text of the Chinese literary and theatrical tradition. Is there a Chinese tragedy? How is the Chinese idea of the “tragic” comparable to that of the western tradition? Chungwen Shih offers an unsatisfactory explanation for the enthusiastic receptions of The Orphan of China in Europe in his book, The Golden Age of Chinese Drama: Yüan Tsa-chü. He speculates that “probably because of the universal appeal of the ideal of loyalty, this was the first Yuan play to be introduced to the western world” (1976: 84). Several Yuan dramas employ the theme of loyalty in various degrees and different domains, but, interestingly, it was The Orphan of China that drew the attention of the European intellectuals during the eighteenth century. It would seem that what excited western intellectuals more profoundly in The Orphan of China was not the theme of loyalty, but the theme of infanticide and family revenge with the attendant physical pain and emotional torture of the characters. This thematic and aesthetic attraction closely relates to the sensibilities of the European Neoclassicism and Enlightenment. The aesthetic attraction and subsequent modification are best demonstrated by Voltaire’s attempt to transform the Chinese play in keeping with the European tradition of the neoclassical unities and Goethe’s unfinished manuscript of Elpenor. These attempts reveal the multi-dimensional cultural resources of the artistic revival that Voltaire and Goethe initiated. The pathos and violence of kinship as an important dramatic theme that Voltaire and Goethe drew from the Attic tragedies and the Chinese drama constitute or reconfirm (in part) what they considered as “tragedy.” Aristotle enumerates three possible plots for a tragedy which may successfully arouse the tragic pleasure of pity and fear. He emphasizes the importance of actual pain inflicted upon the sufferer by a friend or foe. He also lists the possibility of “meditating some deadly injury to another, in ignorance of his relationship, to make the discovery in time to draw back” (2001: 1468). Then he describes in detail the tragic deed within a family — the third and most ideal possibility, when murder or the like is done or mediated by brother on brother, by son on father, by mother on son, or son on mother — these are the situations the poet should seek after. [...] The deed of horror may be done by the doer knowingly and consciously, as in the old poets, and in Medea’s murder of her children in Euripides. Or he may do it, but in ignorance of his relationship, and discover that afterwards, as does the Oedipus in Sophocles [Aristotle 2001: 1468].

Surprisingly, Aristotle’s idea of tragedy fits the theatrical representation of infanticide and family revenge in The Orphan of China, as well as the tormented hero who is troubled by ambivalent situations. The overlap of the Greek and Chinese sense of the tragic became a latent precondition for the neoclassicist reception of The Orphan of China during the eighteenth century. Thus a comparison


169

of the themes of child killing and family revenge, as well as the theatrical representation of violence between Attic tragedy and Yuan drama is important in demonstrating their cultural similarities and differences. Despite the haunting images of sacrifice and murder in Ji Jun Xiang’s The Orphan of China, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Euripides’ Iphigenia At Aulis and Medea, the theme of revenge played an important role to legitimate or offset theatrical violence. With it the above dramatists created transgressive and seductive social imaginaries. Semantically speaking, “revenge,” as either retaliation or retribution, contains the meaning of “paying back” or “remuneration” in both the Greek word timoria and the Chinese word baochou. Originally, bao meant “to decide the crime or to judge a malefactor,” and later it encompassed the meanings of “repayment,” “recompense,” or “retribution.”4 Chou meant “to reply or decide the price in words,”5 and later came to mean “correspondence,” “equality,” and “enmity.” Euripides frequently used the Greek words time and dike in the context of revenge. The Greek word time contains the meaning of “reciprocity,” while the Greek word dike contains the meanings of “worth,” “price,” leading to value, estimation, compsenstion, and reward. In legal use, time can be an estimate of damages done, hence a “penalty” or “punishment” (Kerrigan 1996: 91). However, despite the ethical, legal, and economic connotations of the words for revenge in both Attic and Yuan cultures, the juxtaposition of the bloody images of animal predations in Asechylus’ Oresteia and Iphigenia’s problematic proclamation before her sacrifice in Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis opens up another dimension for the idea of revenge beyond a circumscribed sense of social justice. What was the aural, visual, or imagined impact of Cassandra’s lines on the spectators when she recited them in the amphitheatre? Look there, see what is hovering above the house, so small and young, imaged as in the shadow of dreams, like children almost, killed by those most dear to them, and their hands filled with their own flesh, as food to eat” [Aeschylus 1953: 73].

What attitudes did spectators adopt when watching tragedies, and how did they psychologically respond to the abrupt and dangerous images, fully aware of the muthos? How did they respond to the pains and frustrations of the tragic characters on stage? What was the important theatrical dimension that transgressed the social norms and aroused Dionysian passion? No definitive answers are possible for these questions about Attic theatricality. Aeschylus juxtaposes the various violent images of animal predation and bloody child killing to play out the theatrical ambiguity of revenge. The images of haunting ghosts and unbearable bloodiness gradually become visible and even tangible as the dialogue between the chorus and Cassandra unfolds and the uncanny uncertainty of this verbal reciprocity continues.

170

Text & Presentation, 2008 CASSANDRA: No, but a house that God hates, guilty within of kindred blood shed, torture of its own, the shambles for men’s butchery, the dripping floor. CHORUS: The stranger is keen scented like some hound upon the trail of blood that leads her to discovered death. CASSANDRA: Behold there the witness to my faith. The small children wail for their own death and the flesh roasted that their father fed upon [Aeschylus 1953: 69].

Which father is feeding on his children? Atreus killed Thyestes’ children, cooked them, served them to Thyestes, and the unsuspecting Thyestes ate the flesh of his own children. Is Agamemnon this type of predatory father? In the Oresteia, Agamenmnon peacefully prayed when Iphigenia’s “supplications and her cries of father were nothing, nor the child’s lamentation to kings passioned for battle” (Aeschylus 1953: 41). The violent images of predation and blood are closely attached to the legitimate social and domestic claims for revenge and justice in the representation of the myth. The psychological torture and physical pain of the characters impact the spectators through the reverberating recitation of these verses loaded with these images. Kerrigan noted the link between dike and poine (the moral claim of justice and violent images of blood), and referred to it as a “blood stroke for the stroke of blood [...] paid” (1996: 36). Kerrigan further suggested that “in ways which seem suggestive for tragedy at large, the envy and hostility of the dead world towards the living finds scope in revenge drama, where blood calling for blood is more than a metaphor of retribution” (36). Thus the endless circle of blood and revenge is passed on to the living through the tragic pathos. There is a compelling difference between Aeschylus and Euripides’ tragic representations of Iphigenia’s sacrifice. In the Oresteia, Iphigenia’s response to her own death is mediated through the description by the chorus, “she had sung, and the clear voice of a stainless maiden with love had graced the song of worship when the third cup was poured” (Aeschylus 1953: 42). What did this maiden could have sung at the last moment and what kind of attitude or emotions did she hold towards her father when she was physically gagged and dramatically silenced? In contrast, a direct voice from Iphigenia is heard in Iphigenia at Aulis even though its incoherence is equally problematic. Iphigenia’s exclamatory interrogation of her own death in Euripides’ version seems to provide a radically different representation of the sacrificed child: “Why has that come to destroy me, father? Look at me, give me your glance and your kiss so that when I have died I may at least have that to remember you by, if you are not moved by my words!” (Euripides 2002: 299). However, Iphigenia’s last words before the sacrifice morally and ideally erase her former contestation with her father. Public consent is transformed into free choice through the words of the sufferer herself.


171

Iphigenia’s heroic proclamation seems to substitute her bodily anger with a higher enterprise of morality and social demand: “Countless hoplites and countless rowers will dare, since their country has been wronged, to fight bravely against the enemy and die on behalf of Hellas: shall my single life stand in the way of all this? [...] Better to save the life of a single man than ten thousand women!” (Euripides 2002: 319). Nicole Loraux sharply points out Iphigenia’s incoherence by arguing, “a death to which the victim submits becomes a willing death, not to say a noble one. Everything is in its right place, but nothing has the same meaning” (Loraux 1987: 43). Both the problematic silence of Aeschylus’ Iphigenia and the incoherent articulation of Euripides’ Iphigenia raise an important question of what a murdered child (and at the same time a sacrificed woman) could or would say in Attic theatre. Iphigenia’s proclamation in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis is a double manifestation of this character’s vulnerablility and potential power to subvert the violence done upon her. On the one hand, it is arguable that the dominant social discourse of ideology tends to be internalised by the oppressed subject. Iphigenia’s free voice is part of Euripides’s intentional or unconscious agenda of exerting a heroic persona upon a vulnerable heroine. On the other hand, this exciting proclamation breaks apart the third-person narrative and presents an emotional voice and body in front of the spectators. Loraux argues that inside a tragedy “the unthinkable became a recital of events, for in these deaths of virgins nothing was seen by the spectators and everything was entrusted to the power of words” (Loraux 1987: 32). However, the speech (whether it is already modified or internalised by certain dominant ideologies or patriarchal values) thrusts its direct physical and vocal impact on the spectators and the theatrical empowerment of the performer contrasts the patriarchal violence done upon the vulnerable character. Even so, Iphigenia’s cries in Euripides’ play remain a mystery. Her problematic lament seems to contain both fulfillment of her self-expression and an articulation of self-destruction as a heroic woman — the vulnerable one is sacrificed. The emotions (unrequited and irrelevant at that moment) are immersed in the rythmic recitation of the chorus. The rest is silence, the silence of the sacrificed virgin, which may provide further emotional implications of imaginaries, continually haunting the stage. In Aeschylus’ Oresteia, the chorus’ nuanced depiction of Agamemnon’s bodily movements illuminate how his actions of killing his daughter are choreographed ritually. “The father prayed, called to his men to lift her with strength of hand swept in her robes aloft and prone above the altar” (Aeschylus 1953: 41). The representation of killing seems on the surface highly regularized within the bearable forms of public violence (sacrifice, hunting, and warfare); but, simultaneously, the bloody images of theatrical violence tend to transgress what society has concealed in the sacrificial rituals in real life because, ironically, “in an effort to conceal the murder lurking beneath the sacrifice, the religious procedure in Greek cities was to ensure that the animal’s slaughter should be strictly

172


stage-managed” (Loraux 1987: 32). The interplay of the forms of violence between the social stage and the theatrical stage, the real and the imaginary, the orchestrated and the transgressive helps to simultaneously reconfirm and to destabilise moral and political boundaries. Agamemnon’s decision to sacrifice his own child contains opposing forces: the moral justification for his social responsibility and his internal pain and frustration at killing his daughter. Anger becomes manifest when he remarks painfully that “my fate is angry if I disobey them: but angry if I slaughter this child, the beauty of my house” (Aeschylus 1953: 41). The decision is almost “led by folly — that is to say by an irrational power [and] his hesitation thus assumes a new dimension and meaning” (de Romilly 1988: 27). It suggests an incoherent and complex inner life of the character, negotiating with both ethical decisions and physical sufferings. Agamemnon’s violence against his daughter is avenged later by her mother when “the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra are displayed to the chorus and the audience by the triumphant Clytemnestra, whose rhetoric demonstrates a magnificently corrupt celebration of her violence” (Goldhill 1991: 24). Other forms of violence avenge and subvert the male figure of authority, such as Clytemnestra’s violent determination of revenge in Aeschylus’ play or Iphigenia’s emotional proclamation of mastering her own violent death in Euripides’ play. As vehement representations of blood and violence disrupt the ideals of social justice, moral orthodoxy and cultural norms, the various images of the sacrificed child (Iphigenia) liberate the theatrical utterances of physical pain, psychological frustration, and embodied suffering. The theatrical violence, as a seductive expression of the deviant, remains untamable by the socially and morally justified claims of revenge. Yet the distinction between the theatrical violence and the social or familial claims of revenge is frequently blurred, as is particularly striking in the representation of the violent mother (the radical female Other) on the Attic stage. Revenge takes the form of violence in theatre, and the visually impactive violence detaches revenge from its social and institutional connotations. When Medea is about to kill her children, the chorus refers to her as one of the Erinyes.6 She is the violent avenger, embodying the chthonic fury comparable to those in Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Revenge is no longer the reason for a grandiose plan, but an instantaneous embodiment of pain and suffering, which destabilises or ironizes “Greek confidence in the logos” (Kerrigan 1996: 317). The incoherence and indecisiveness of Medea in Euripides’ Medea remains a perplexing riddle. Her actions seem extremely barbaric (consider Medea’s origin and mystic witchcraft), but she is reasonably eloquent in justifying her own ruthless actions in killing her children: “The killing of a boy child by its mother was the ultimate act of Dionysiac disorder, but what, short of the god’s madness, could a woman perform this crime?” (Burnett 1998: 178). Madness is more generally considered as “the overthrow of the reason by the passion of revenge”


173

(Hallet and Hallett 1980: 62). Is Medea’s revenge a sort of madness and how do we explain the incongruity of madness and reason in Medea? Zeitlin argues that “madness, the irrational, and the emotional aspects of life are associated in the culture more with women than with men. The boundaries of women’s bodies are perceived more fluid, more permeable, more open to affect and entry from the outside, less easily controlled by intellectual and rational means” (Zeitlin 1990: 65). Several important questions can be raised about this feminine madness. Is Medea really mad (or considered to be mad) in killing her children? Is she trying to assert her shattered self in response to social expectations? Is this madness a sort of deliberate revolt against reason and logos? Do women in Attic tragedies necessarily need this irrationality to assert their subjectivities? Is this violence necessay in disavowing her abjection? Women are not necessarily related to madness. Yet these seemingly irrational feelings of anger, hatred and grief are closely related to the representations of women in Attic tragedy. In his translation of The Orphan of China, Voltaire created this mother figure Ideme who was overwhelmed by her own grief and thus turned against her husband’s rational determination of killing their infant child. It is “essential to understand that in Greek theatre, as in fact in Shakespearean theatre, the self that is really at stake is to be identified with the male, while the woman is assigned the role of the radical other” (Zeitlin 1990: 66). Medea experiences extreme pain and indecisiveness in killing her boys. The nurse warns the children that “your mother is stirring up her feelings, stirring up her anger. Go quickly into the house, and do not come into her sight or approach her, but beware of her fierce nature and the hatefulness of her willful temper!” (Euripides 1994: 305). The “fierce nature” and “willful temper” are somehow contradictory to her troubled laments when facing her children: “What is the meaning of your glance at me, children? Why do you smile at me this last smile of yours? Alas, what am I to do? My courage is gone, women, ever since I saw the bright faces of children. I cannot do it. Farewell, my former designs!” (Euripides 1994: 391). The words the nurse uses are fascinating manifestations of the physical pain of Medea. The kardia (heart) and xolos (gall, bitter wrath) are being set in motion or stirred up (kineo). The feelings and anger are literally physical and emotional eruptions of bodily organs. But why is Medea so angry? What incites this enormous pain in Medea? What causes her “madness” to kill the children? Medea is certainly jealous that another woman will share Jason’s love and household which she has personally invested enormously in achieving and maintaining. Accordingly, Jason poignantly attacks Medea’s motherhood by stressing her unruly female sexuality and desire, condemning that “you women are so far gone in folly that if all is well in bed you think you have everything, while if some misfortune in that domain occurs, you regard as hateful your best and truest interests” (Euripides 1994: 345). Jason furthermore justifies his action of marrying another woman with social and economic reasons that he can “raise the children in a manner befitting [his] house”

174


(Euripides 1994: 345). However, the conjugal bed means more than a place of sexual pleasure for Medea, and it significantly symbolizes her social status and the public identity that the patriarchal society has assigned her. Thus the question or choice of revenge depends on the extent to which she is capable of taking vengeance on Jason with the appropriate justifications. How much anger or “madness” can she deploy to disrupt the confusion between her female subjectivity and the masculine social discourses? Thus Medea argues back in different ambiguous ways as an incoherent woman. Sometimes she is verbally adroit in asserting the importance of social institutions such as marriage and family: “If you were not a knave, you ought to have gained my consent before making this marriage, not done it behind your family’s back” (Euripides 1994: 347). On other occasions, she would release her pain as the revengeful Fury. “Call me a she-lion, then if you like, and Scylla, dweller on the Tuscan cliff ! For I have touched your heart in the vital spot” (Euripides 1994: 419). She tries to masculinize herself discursively to counter Jason’s illegal trespassing and encroachment on her territory as a wife, mother and manager of the household (Oikos); but, at the same time, “she is countercommanded by her insurgent female self, so that her finished deed demands horror and consternation from its audience” (Burnett 1998: 194). Against Jason’s ruthless invasion and venomous attack on the domestic — the last space of Medea’s social identity — the violent mother intends to destroy the male Other 7 by ruthlessly murdering his children, a crime that leads to her own destruction. Medea as a symbolically androgynous female of reason and wrath, is an opposing figure to Athena, whose “pedigree and status are necessary for reaching any workable solution to the problem of the female who resists the encroachment on her prerogatives” (Zeitlin 1995: 112). As opposed to Athena’s “androgynous compromise” (112), Medea kills her children to hurt the male other forever. It is not a workable solution, but remains an exciting manifestation. Medea occupies a paradoxical situation, trapped in the crisis of her legitimate social identity and feminine desire for revenge. She more than proudly claims that “men say that we live a life free from danger at home while they fight with the spear. How wrong they are! I would rather stand three times with a shield in battle than give birth once” (Euripides 1994: 317). Medea is also powerful in insidious tactics when she says that “we are women, unable to perform noble deeds, but most skilful architects of every sort of harm” (1994: 333). Pucci argues that Medea’s natural and physical weakness forces her to use a scheme, a detour that requires the use of her children as accomplices (Pucci 1980: 99). However, despite Medea’s physical weakness which remains questionable, her somehow weak justification of the killing and extreme contrivances for revenge result from an incoherent self that constantly wavers and displaces under the pressure of attaining its legitimacy in contradictory circumstances. Medea’s violent actions of killing and merciless aggression, especially her refusal to allow Jason’s claim of their children’s dead bodies, surpass the rhetorical limits of the


175

words and bring to life an embodied cruelty. How would the audience react when Medea “with the corpses of her children is borne aloft away from Corinth?”(Euripides 1994: 427). How would the Athenian audience consume Medea’s foreignness theatrically? Medea’s resolute cruelty that leads to the violent moment during which she sheds his children’s blood ignites the instantaneous and immanent feelings of horror. The sharp image of her commitment to violence emphasizes the theatrical actions beyond dramatic words. Like Euripides’ Medea, The Orphan of China is an exceptional play in representing infanticide, violence, and family revenge. The literal translation of Chinese Beiju is sad drama.8 However, what is considered to be sad or tragic esthetically or thematically in Chinese dramatic tradition is hetereogenous and different from what is considered to be sad or tragic in the western theatrical tradition, and specifically the Attic tragedies. The popularity of The Orphan of China in eighteenth-century Europe resulted from its proximity to its western counterparts thematically and esthetically. It adequately served as the familiar other. Ji Junxiang adapted the story from historical texts such as Shiji (Records of the Grand History around 109–91 B.C.) and Zuozhuan.9 Ling Gong, King of Jin (620–607 B.C.), had two most important subordinates in the court, the minister Zhao Dun and the general Tu Angu. Tu Angu was extremely jealous of Zhao Dun’s position and came up with various political conspiracies to destroy his rival. He finally succeeded in framing Zhao and slaughtered the three hundred members of the whole Zhao family. At that critical moment Zhao Dun’s daughter-in-law (also the daughter of the king) gave birth to a baby. In Ji Junxiang’s play, Cheng Ying, friend and dependent 10 of the Zhao family, stealthily carries the baby in his herbal medicine chest. Another round of bloody killings and sacrifices ensues. The ruthless Tu Angu announces to the whole country that all the infants will be killed lest the orphan of Zhao survive. Tu’s general Han Que commits suicide, tortured by the contradiction between his loyalty to Tu and his compassion towards the infant. Cheng Ying decides to sacrifice his own child to save the orphan and other infants in the country. Gongsun Chujiu gives up his own life, presenting Cheng Ying’s child as the orphan of Zhao to Tu. All the blood and sacrificed lives in this play seem to be the necessary cost of preserving the hope of the Zhao family and its possible revenge in the future. Ji Junxiang justifies the whole set of bloody murders in the grander framework of Confucian morality of loyalty and coherent hierarchal structure of individual, family and country to such an extent that these social values and norms become questionable and disturbing. This play emphasizes these traditional Han-Confucian values most distinctively in the dramatic frame of familial revenge, if compared to other plays in the same era thematically. Yet the violent scenes of murder and sacrifice constantly interrupt the major theme of loyalty so that the social imaginary of homicides on a tremendous scale functions as more excitingly the theatrical entertainment for the Yuan audience

176


than a reconfirmation of social values and norms that the author originally planned to emphasize. This intricate double effect (or affect) of the play relates to the larger picture of flourishing Yuan theatre as a form of public entertainment and the identity crisis of the dramatists in that era.11 In Ji Junxiang’s Big Revenge of the Orphan of Zhao Family, the morality of loyalty and piety outweighs the value of individual life, just as Gongsun Chujiu says: “death is commonplace; I will not strive for it earlier or later” ( Ji 1980: 614).12 All the blood spilt serves the grand design of family revenge and the preservation of the orphan. The physical and psychological pain of the character, however, is manifest at the moment when Tu stabs the infant. Cheng Ying does the stylized act of fright and pain and then sings, “Ah, see my child lying in the blood; that one (the infant) crying and wailing, this one (Gongsun Chujiu) rankling and worrying, I am trembling and shaking” ( Ji 1980: 621).13 Cheng Ying then performs the act of hiding tears. Gongsun Chujiu continues by saying that “Cheng Ying’s heart looks as if hot oil pours on it; he dare not shed the tears to others; stealthily he wipes them away, for no reason he parts with his own child in three stabs” ( Ji 1980: 621).14 The climax of these theatrical emotions, deriving from the incident of Cheng Ying’s sacrifice of his own child, stimulates the audience to re-imagine this historically and even culturally distant event. More importantly, Ji Junxiang leaves out a blank space of twenty years after this killing, and sets the next scene in Cheng Ying’s study when the orphan has grown up. Tu has no child of his own and takes Cheng Ying’s child (in reality the orphan) as his own stepson. Thus the audience has the chance to sense the ironic adoption of the avenger and to imagine Cheng Ying’s extreme endurance in living within the enemy’s household for twenty years. This emotional realization of irony and endurance somehow illuminates the touchy ethno-political circumstance in the city of Dadu (Beijing) of the Yuan dynasty. Ji Junxiang was able to reassert the Han-Confucian values effectively in the play, deploying the power of theatrical violence to arouse emotional and moral feelings in the audience. After living as the son of the enemy for twenty years, the orphan has not yet realized his real identity, making it a difficult and tricky task for Cheng Ying to reveal the truth and to stimulate his anger and passion for revenge. The orphan — a.k.a. Cheng Bo or Tu Cheng depending on the father — accidentally finds a painting in Cheng Ying’s study that depicts all the ministers, generals and heroes involved in the revenge. Cheng Ying finally grasps this precious chance to explain the details of the whole story, and the ideal revenge unpredictably ensues. The orphan of Zhao kills Tu on the street, forgetting the twenty years’ fosterage. The vengeance of the blood of the 300 members of the Zhao family reestablishes the supremacy of justice and familial lineage. Nonetheless, it remains a very problematic play. How can Cheng Ying convert and persuade the orphan overnight? How was the stylized acting of physi-


177

cal pains and suffering in this play displayed in the theatre? It is hardly possible to reconfigure the theatricality of this play on stage, as what remains is the text itself and related cultural memories. In addition, the dramatic text undergoes constant changes, adaptations, and translations. Voltaire, who translated it linguistically and culturally, totally changed the ending of the story into a utopian consummation in which Gengis (originally Tu Angu) is transformed by the benignity of Zamti (Cheng Ying) and willingly accepts both children as his own. By right of conquest I might have destroy’d him, But I lay down that right I late abus’d. With all a father’s care I’ll henceforth guard The Orphan and your Son. Fear not my faith [...] The victors let the vanquish’d rule! Let wisdom Preside o’er courage! triumph o’er rude force, That owes you homage! [Voltaire 1756: 63].

This heroic proclamation of the cruel and barbaric tyrant and his dramatic transformation serve Voltaire’s Enlightenment agenda of “la supériorité naturelle que donnent la raison et le génie sur la force aveugle et barbare” (Voltaire 1823: 436). But the values, themes, and semantics have evolved in the tradition of the Chinese theatre and have changed since Yuan dynasty. The idea of what is tragic in Yuan Theatre is different from that in Ming Theatre. As the major starting point of Chinese theatre, Yuan drama provided a variety of themes, stories, and esthetic forms revisited by the Chinese theatre practitioners in later years. The Orphan of Zhao remains one of the most acclaimed Chinese tragedies because its thematic and esthetic values are similar to those of its western counterparts. The deadly violence in it continues to haunt the stage and to undermine the original social and political values, which have been attached to its dramatic narrative. Theatre makes possible an abrupt encounter with the pain of suffering and the dangerous violence as untamed deviant that constantly transgresses the secured territory of morality and normality. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS

Notes Acknowledgments. I dedicate this article to Prof. Seth Schein, Prof. Marianne McDonald and the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments. 1. Various scholars have developed this idea: for one of the most articulated stances, see Fu, Jin. Xiqu meixue (Esthetics of Chinese opera). 135. Taiwan: Wenjin Chuban She, 1995. 2. See Wang, Guowei. Song yuan xiqu shi (History of Songyuan dramas). 121. Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1995. 3. There are three versions of The Orphan of China in Yuan dynasty as far as we can trace in extant materials and Ji Junxiang’s version is one of them. The second one is recorded in Yuan kan zaju sanshi zhong. This version only contains the singing lines without stage direction and dialogue. There is another longer and definite Nanxi (southern opera, another theatrical form

178


parallel to Za Ju in Yuan Dynasty) version of this play with the title of Zhaoshi guer ji. The version I am discussing here is based upon the recent revision from Quanyuan xiqu by modern scholars who edited it with several historical collections of Yuan dramas such as Yuanqu xuan, and Gu ming jia zaju of Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). 4. Some historical references can show the general development and expansion of this character’s meanings. Such as “bi bao gu bu qiong shen” (HanshuΔHujian zhuan); “bao er zhui zhi” (Hanfei ZiΔWu dou); “ya zhi zhi yuanbi bao” (ShijiΔFanjiu zhuan) and “yu qiu ba qi fu chou” (ShijiΔWei gongzi liezhuan). 5. Xu, shen. Shuowen Jiezi, one of the most important dictionary of Ancient Chinese Characters, complied in Han Dynasty around A.D. 100 to A.D. 201. See other parallel examples of Chou in such historical materials as: “chou zhe,chou ye” (ShijiΔJin shijia); “Gebo chou xiang” (Menzi); “duo chou shao yu” (HanshuΔGai Kuanrao zhuan); “yi xian guojia zhi ji er hou si chou ye” (ShijiΔLian Po Ling Xiangru liezhuan). 6. “O light begotten of Zeus, check the cruel and murderous Fury, take her from his house plagued by spirits of vengeance” (Euripides 1994: 409). 7. Zeitlin argues “[because of ] female’s full acceptance of the marital bond as necessary, natural and just, rejection of marriage leads to the masscre of the male […and] female self-assertion on her own behalf comes only at the cost of annihilating the Other” (Zeitlin 1995: 91). 8. “bei” sadness, etymologically means the pain and injury of the heart. See “bei, tong ye”(Shuowen); “bei,shang ye”(Guang ya); “you xin qie bei” (ShiΔXiaoyaΔGuzhong); “wo xin shang bei” (ShiΔZhaonanΔCaochong); “bing yu fei ze bei” (SuwenΔXuanming wuqi pian). 9. Zuozhuan was traditionally believed to have been written by Zuo Qiuming as a commentary to Chunqiu (Spring and Autumn Annals) around 500 B.C. 10. The system of dependent, or called “menren shike” is considered as an important familial system in Classical period of Chinese history that includes people outside the kinship. 11. The literary genre of drama or opera emerged and quickly flourished in Song and Yuan dynasties in China. Though different performing entertainments such as acrobatics, singing and dancing had already flourished in the court, local market places and restaurants, the theatre art did not appear as a major folk entertainment until Yuan. As the Mongols came south and conquered the Han, they set up new social regulations and governmental systems, which fundamentally violated the traditional Han-Confucian imperial examination system as the basic social mobility for Han literati. More importantly, the Mongolian leaders of the Yuan Dynasty divided all the residents inside China into four hierarchal categories: the Mongolians, the Color-eye, the Han and the Southerners, based on racial and geographical criterions. Thus after losing certain social status and corresponding traditional values, more Han Confucian students repositioned themselves with their knowledge and technique of literary creation inside the civilian society, where more frequent commercial exchanges necessitated new forms and productions of entertainment. Thus Ji Junxiang was trying to reassert a decayed Confucian value in a form of public entertainment: an unusual negotiation as complicated as his identity as a dramatist. Thus the Yuan theatre, as cultural simulacrum of that historical period, was a mixture of past Confucius values, economic challenges, and public attractions, inside which the cultural stories and memories (for example the story of The Orphan of Zhao) were “subject to continual adjustment and modifications as the memory was recalled in new circumstances and contexts” (Carlson 2003: 2). 12. si shi changshi, ye bu zheng zhe zaowan. 13. ya! jian hai’er wo xuepo, na yige kuku haohao, zhe yige yuanyuan jiaojiao, lian wo ye zhanzhan yaoyao. 14. jian Cheng Ying xin si reyou jiao, leizhu’er bugan dui ren pao. beidili wen le, mei laiyou geshe de qingshen gurou chi sandao.

References Cited Aeschylus. Oresteia. Trans. Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953. Aristotle. The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by Richard McKeon. New York: Random House, 2001.


179

Burnett, Anne Pippin. Revenge in Attic and Later Tragedy. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998. Calson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Euripides. Euripides VI, edited and translated by David Kovacs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. _____. Euripides Cyclops. Alcestis. Medea, edited and translated by David Kovacs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. De Romilly, Jacqueline. “Agamemnon in Doubt and Hesitation.” Language and the Tragic Hero, edited by Pietro Pucci. Atlanta: Scholars, 1988. Du Halde, Jean Baptiste. Description Géographique, Historique, Chronologique, Politique et Physique de l’Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie Chinoise. 4 vols. folio, plates, calf. Paris: P.G. Le Mercier, 1735. Goldhill, Simon. “Violence in Greek Tragedy” In Violence in Drama, edited by James Redmond. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Hallet, Charles A., and Elaine S. Hallett. The Revenger’s Madness: A Study of Revenge Tragedy Motifs. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. Ji, Junxiang. Zhaoshi Guer Dabaochou (Big Revenge of the Orphan Zhao Family). Quanyuan xiqu, Disan juan. (The Complete Yuan Operas, Volume III), edited by Wang Jisi. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1980. Kerrigan, John. Revenge Tragedy Aeschylus to Armageddon. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Kovacs, David. “Introduction.” In Euripides IV. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Loraux, Nicole. Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Pucci, Pietro. The Violence of Pity in Euripides’ Medea. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1980. Shih, Chung-wen. The Golden Age of Chinese Drama: Yüan Tsa-chü. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976. Voltaire, M. The Orphan of China: A Tragedy. Trans. Thomas Franklin. London: Printed for R. Baldwin [etc.], 1756. _____. Oeuvres Complétes de Voltaire. Paris: Imprierie de P. Dupont, 1823. Zeitlin, Froma I. “Playing the Other: Theatre, Theatricality, and the Feminine in Greek Drama.” In Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, edited by John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin, 63–96. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. _____. “The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia.” In Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature, 87–119. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

¡5 Brecht and Bullough Measuring the Distance in Mother Courage Diane M. Somerville-Skinner Abstract Edward Bullough’s essay “Psychical Distance” (1912) outlined important criteria necessary for achieving an appropriate level of distancing for both the spectators and the artist. Bertolt Brecht’s play Mother Courage and Her Children (1939) is an application of his theory of distancing which he called the Verfremdungseffekt. Brecht’s “distancing effect” was supposed to transform spectators from observers experiencing “Aristotelian” emotions into critical observers who reflect on the drama’s political and historical contexts. This paper discusses how and why Brecht’s ill-conceived V-Effekt in Mother Courage and Her Children ignored Bullough’s theoretical tenets, and therefore rendered its “distancing effect” unsuccessful.

Ever since Brecht, in 1936, first mentioned the term Verfremdungseffekt, also known as the “Distancing Effect,” the “Defamiliarization Effect,” or the “Alienation Effect” (Willet 1964: 89), his concept of the appropriate emotional distance between performer and role and between audience and performance has probably become the best known of all of his ideas about theater. This is understandable when considering the importance that Brecht himself placed on the neologism by stating that “the epic theatre is a highly skilled theatre with complex contents and far-reaching social objectives” (128); therefore, “a new [epic] theatre will need ... the V-Effekt” (98–99). Written nearly 25 years earlier, Edward Bullough’s “Psychical Distance” (1912) had already addressed the two values that Brecht associated with “Verfremdungseffekt”: a) emotion, which Brecht sought to de-emphasize, and b) reason, which Brecht set forth to effect. An informed re-reading of Bullough’s discussion in this paper will demonstrate how Brecht’s V-Effekt actually prevents spectators from critically reflecting on the social implications depicted in Mother Courage and her Children (1939). Brechtian Theatre is premised on an aesthetic 180

15. Brecht and Bullough (Somerville-Skinner)

181

consideration: the concept of distance.1 In Schriften zum Theatre (1922), Brecht outlined his theory about the V-Effekt: Let us avoid “one common artistic bloomer (sic), that of trying to carry people away” (Willet 1964: 9). The spectator’s “splendid isolation” is left intact ...; he is not fobbed off with an invitation to feel sympathetically, to fuse with the hero and seem significant and indestructible as he watches himself in two simultaneous versions. A higher type of interest can be got from making comparisons, from whatever is different, amazing, impossible to take in as a whole [Willet 1964: 9]. Brecht wanted to prevent the spectator’s emotional involvement with any of characters in a play. He, instead, wished that the viewers experience a “splendid isolation,” a distance whereby rational and critical judgments could be made through comparisons. He hoped to rid the viewers of emotions in order to achieve a heightened intellectual awareness. Brecht’s dramatic theory and practice is testable in his drama, Mother Courage and Her Children. The Mother does not urge her sons to fight for a noble cause during war; but rather, she insists that survival is more important than heroism. Early in the play when one of her sons kills four peasants, she smacks him in the face for “not surrendering” (Brecht 1977: 1002). However, she is not motivated by antiwar sentiments. Brecht actually presented the viewers with a paradox because the protagonist of his antiwar play is a woman who makes her living hawking wares on wheels for any fighting soldier who wants to buy her goods; Mother Courage is a war profiteer, and therefore a detestable person. The very idea that a war profiteer can be the protagonist is disconcerting. Yet this is an example of how Brecht applied his theory. Brecht disliked what he called “Aristotelian” drama, which he felt aimed to make the audience identify or empathize with the characters. Brecht argued that “such an audience may indeed leave the theatre purged by its vicarious emotions, but it will have remained uninstructed and unimproved” (qtd. in Esslin 1984: 114). Instead, in Mother Courage, Brecht introduced the V-Effekt, which means “gaining new insights into the world around us by glimpsing it in a different and previously unfamiliar light” (Willet 1964: 218). Willet reminds us that Brecht’s V-Effekt theory “did not spring from Brecht’s head ready-made” but was, instead, the results of “endless working” (1964: Intro, n.p.).2 Esslin explains Brecht’s theory in this way: By inhibiting the process of identification between the spectator and the characters, by creating a distance between them and enabling the audience to look at the action in a detached and critical spirit, familiar things, attitudes, and situations appear in a new and strange light, and create, through astonishment and wonder, a new understanding of the human situation [1984: 119].

182


Brecht wanted his audience to view the events on stage with a “new understanding” of the real world. He insisted that “by creating a distance,” spectators would be jarred from a passive acceptance of the onstage events to perceiving, with intellectual understanding, “the human situation.”3 The modern treatment of aesthetic distance derives from Edward Bullough’s seminal article “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle,” first published in the British Journal of Psycholog y in 1912. And although there seems to be no obvious evidence that Brecht knew Bullough’s argument, nonetheless, Daphna Ben Chaim, in Distance in the Theatre, states that “since the writings of Edward Bullough and Bertolt Brecht, the concept of ‘distance’... has become quite central to both theatre practice and dramatic theory” (1984: ix–x). Bullough asserted that “modern psychological aesthetics is the aesthetic impression upon the recipient’s consciousness, the study of the effects produced by the contemplation, primarily of works of art” (qtd. in Sesonske 1958: 132). Bullough claimed that “Psychical Distance” as a psychological phenomenon by which personal interest is disconnected from practical implications, is an “essential characteristic” of the “aesthetic consciousness” (1957: 90). “Psychical Distance,” Bullough explained, occurs as an attitude that “lies between our own self and such objects as are the sources or vehicles of affections, e.g., sensations, perceptions, emotional states, or ideas, which affect our being, [either] bodily or spiritually” (1957: 94). According to Bullough, Distance is obtained by putting the object, the source, and its appeal “out of gear with our practical, actual self [and] by allowing it to stand outside the context of our personal needs and ends” (1957: 95). This distanced view makes it possible to “objectively” (1957: 96) contemplate the object.4 Bullough also identified degrees of Distance ranging from “under-distancing” to “over-distancing,” which qualify the success and intensity of a work’s appeal as they “correspond with our intellectual and emotional peculiarities and the idiosyncrasies of our experience” (1957: 98). He explained that these conditions affect the degree of distance in any given case: those offered by the object and those realized by the subject. In their interplay they afford one of the most extensive explanations for varieties of aesthetic experience, since loss of distance, whether due to the one or the other, means loss of aesthetic appreciation [1957: 100].

Distance, Bullough asserted, “illuminates the most ordinary and familiar objects” and “elaborates the experience on a new basis” (1957: 95). Bullough illustrated his concept of “Physical Distance” through the use of the metaphor of the “fog at sea.” He explained that most people experience anxiety and fear of the unknown, “invisible dangers” that the fog presents (1957: 93). However, the fog “can be a source of intense relish and enjoyment” if one’s attention is


183

“objectively” directed to the features “constituting the phenomenon” (94). He encouraged the viewer to experience ... the veil surrounding you with an opaqueness as of transparent milk, blurring the outline of things and distorting their shapes into weird grotesqueness; observe the carrying-power of the air ..., note the curious creamy smoothness of the water, hypocritically denying as it were any suggestion of danger; and [...] the experience may acquire, in its uncanny mingling repose and terror, a flavor of such concentrated poignancy and delight as to contrast sharply with the blind and distempered anxiety of its other aspects [1957: 95].

This difference of outlook, Bullough claimed, is made possible because of the insertion of Distance. The same fog, the “terror of the sea” that produces “acute unpleasantness,” can also produce marvelous impressions and sensations. This transformation is a result of allowing the phenomenon to “stand outside the context of personal needs and ends, and instead, by emphasizing the ‘objective’ features of the experience” (95). For Brecht, in formulating his theory of “epic theatre,” the idea of making the familiar appear new became more than an aesthetic principle. He believed that, as Newton and Galileo had made great discoveries for mankind by looking at the familiar with a critical eye, so, too, the theatre public should look at men’s relationships with an “estranged” eye (Esslin 1984: 118). Although both Brecht and Bullough conceived distance as essential to aesthetic experience, their parameters differ. Bullough saw distance as an intrinsic factor in all art (1957: 95) but particularly in “our attitude towards the events and characters of drama” (97). Brecht, on the other hand, conceived distance, “in all but his late writings [which do not include Mother Courage] as unique to his specific kind of theatre, Epic Theatre” (Ben Chaim 1984: 70). On January 11, 1949, Bertolt Brecht and Erich Engel staged Brecht’s Mother Courage at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin (Bentley 1955: 117). In this production, in an attempt to abolish “the old theatre of illusion” (Esslin 1984: 115), to increase the emotional distance for the spectator, and to create a rational response to his didactic message, Brecht incorporated the V-Effekt by employing “historicization”: the drama is set in Europe in the 1600s during the Thirty Years’ War. Esslin points out that in Brechtian theatre, “it must be made apparent to the spectators, at all times, that they are not witnessing real events happening before their eyes at this very moment, but that they are sitting in a theatre, listening to an account of things which have happened in the past at a certain time in a certain place” (1984: 115). Brecht contended that demonstrating the actions and characters “within that particular historical field of human relations [in which] they take place, [makes it] harder for our spectator to identify himself with them [the action and the characters]” (Willet 1964: 190).

184


Bullough, too, acknowledged that “temporal remoteness produces Distance” (1957: 103) because allusions to social institutions of any degree of personal importance ... [in addition to] references to topical subjects occupying public attention at the moment ... are all dangerously near the average limit [of Distance] and may, at any time, fall below [under-distance, thereby] arousing, instead of aesthetic appreciation, concrete hostility [1957: 101–102].

Besides emphasizing historicization as a means for increasing distance, Brecht included several anti-illusionist techniques, such as stark lighting, explanatory captions, and intentional interruptions with chorus and music.5 Additionally, Brecht insisted that his actors remain detached from their characters, showing, but not “becoming them” (Willet 1964: 194): The actor does not allow himself to become completely transformed on the stage into the character he is portraying.... He never tries to persuade himself (and thereby others) that this amounts to a complete transformation [137].6

At the time of the 1949 Berlin performance of Mother Courage, the Berliner Ensemble had not yet assembled, but the actors understood Brecht’s explicit instructions concerning his preferred acting methods. Performers were encouraged to drop the fourth wall convention and directly address the audience. Brecht suggested that this method draws attention to the actors as demonstrators which, in turn, make the audience more aware of the production as a theatrical event (192). For Brecht, an increase in viewer awareness of fictionality induces a critical appraisal. However, according to Bullough’s theory, Brecht’s attempt at alienation by making the actors forgo the “illusion” to seem more “real” (while being antithetical to the fundamental experience of conventional theatre), causes problematic perspectives for the viewers. Bullough argued that distance affects the spectator’s psychological relation to and perception of the theatrical event. He wrote that it is not only “distance that renders the characters seemingly fictitious (1957: 98), but more importantly, that the “unreality of the dramatic action reinforces the effect of distance [thereby making] the character’s appeal, which would usually affect us in a directly personal manner, held in abeyance” (1957: 97–98). Bullough argued for the unreality of the dramatic action which reinforces the effect of distance. Since Brecht demanded that his actors be persons who are not “acting” as characters, but, instead, are only demonstrating the actions, words, or even the emotions of the characters, he violated the boundaries of Bullough’s “Psychical Distance” as it pertains to drama. There can be no “changing [of ] our relation to the characters [in order to] render them seemingly fictitious” (Bullough 1957: 98). In other words, the audience is unable to attain or maintain distance, a situation that,


185

according to Bullough, causes “under-distancing” (1957: 100) or emotional involvement.7 Additionally, Bullough asserted that the same qualification necessary for a playgoer to achieve an appropriate distance from a source of “appeal” (1957: 103) also “applies to the artist” (1957: 99), who “will prove artistically most effective ... only on condition of a detachment from the experience qua personal” (1957: 90). Bullough continues: “[an artist’s] concordance [to his play] renders him acutely conscious of his own [emotions]” (1957: 99). He asserted that when “keeping the Distance between the action of the play and personal feelings ..., the expert and the professional critic make a bad audience, since their expertness and critical professionalism are practical activities, [that] involve their concrete personality and constantly endanger their Distance” (1957: 99). It is no secret that Mother Courage incorporates Brecht’s Marxist ideology. In fact, in Brecht’s essay “Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction” (Willet 1964: 76), Brecht explained that the aim of Epic Theatre was first to observe the drama and then the story’s moral was to follow. Yet Brecht conceded of a Marxist agenda: “we cannot pretend that we started our observations out of a pure passion for observing and without any more practical motive” (Willet 1964: 75). Brecht’s play is not only ideologically oriented, but conspicuously presents his political aesthetic.8 Brecht also stated that “the production took the subject-matter and the incidents shown and put them through a process of alienation: the alienation that is necessary to all understanding” (Willet 1964: 71). Willet clarifies Brecht’s use of the term “alienation” in this context as being “translated from Entfremdung, as used by Marx, and not the Verfremdung, which Brecht himself was soon to coin” (1964: 76). Pursuant to Marxist teachings, the sociological content of Mother Courage emphasizes Brecht’s intent: “Man has to be made aware of his state of alienation in order to be able to change his conditions” (Grimm 1997: 42). Brecht highlights this intent by writing in his 1949 essay “From the Mother Courage Model”: “Reality, however complete, has to be altered by being turned into art, so that it can be seen to be alterable and be treated as such.... We want to alter the nature of our social life” (Willet 1964: 219). Brecht’s personal commitment to his political ideology underscores his attachment to the drama’s obvious anti-capitalistic sentiment. As a result, Brecht is too “under-distanced” (Bullough 1957: 10). In Bullough’s oft-quoted example, Brecht is as engaged as the jealous husband who witnesses a performance of Othello and is unable to separate his own emotions from the play (98–99). That is, Brecht’s own objectivity, the key to Verfremdung, is seriously compromised. Brecht wanted to purge the drama of sentimentality in order to make viewers see Mother Courage’s faults rather than feel her pain and anguish, thereby avoiding emotional identification with the character. For example, in scene 3, although Mother Courage challenges the religious pretext for the war by stating “look closer, they ain’t so silly, they’re waging it for what they can get” (Brecht

186


1997: 1004), nevertheless, she is not outraged by this pious pretension. In fact, she admits that she derives incentive from it: “Else little folk like me wouldn’t be in it at all” (Brecht 1997: 1004). Similarly, in wanting to prevent the viewer’s intense emotional involvement with Mother Courage, Brecht tries to underscore the divided loyalties she encounters between mercantile aims and maternal instincts. Mother Courage fails to save the life of her son by haggling too long over the amount of the bribe that she offers for him. To heighten the objectivity further, Brecht has Mother Courage, when asked to identify the body of her dead son, steel herself and stoically deny knowing him (1997: 109–1010). Thus, from these examples and from the many statements made by Brecht, the function of the V-Effect, as Peter Brooker explains, is “to puncture the complacent acceptance of either character, motive, narrative, [or] incident” (1988: 63). However, to his dismay, Brecht’s viewers failed to understand his aims and instead, sympathized with Mother Courage’s failures and her suffering. Ben Chaim writes, “Although Brecht is theoretically opposed to empathy and would object to Bullough’s notion of an investment of emotion in the characters, Brecht’s own plays do not eliminate such empathic responses” (1984: 37). Esslin remarks that “Brecht insists that Mother Courage herself was a negative character, a profiteer who sacrifices her children to her commercial instinct and cannot learn from her experience. But the audience never fails to be moved by her fate” (1984: 270). Thompson informs us that Brecht realized his actors “could not entirely overcome the theatergoer’s ‘deeply engrained habit ... to pick out the more emotional utterances of the characters and overlook everything else’” (1997: 78). Brecht failed to realize that several contradictory considerations arise about the protagonist that call for conflicting audience response. For instance, after her daughter is accosted, Mother Courage swears, “War be damned” (Brecht 1997: 1016). Soon after, she declares that war is a better provider than peace by confessing, “War gives its people a better deal” (Brecht 1997: 1016). Granted, both her crimes and her suffering contribute to the play’s power; nonetheless, the sheer complexity of the title character resists any formula, including Brecht’s own, that would categorize her as chiefly mercenary. Brecht intends to prevent his audience from sympathizing with Mother Courage by crafting his character with laconic cynicism and cunning ingenuity. However, these very traits are her only means of survival. In fact, Mother Courage’s “indomitable strength in the face of adversity” ( Jacobus 1997: 993) does not mean that her maternal concerns diminish. When she bargains over the price to retrieve her captured son, it is only after she learns that she does not have the full asking price and must, therefore, consider her future expenses in caring for herself and her unmarried daughter. Likewise, when she pretends that she does not recognize her dead son, she does so knowing the dire consequence that she and her daughter will suffer if she shows any signs of grief. George Steiner describes what many of Brecht’s


187

audience surely not only witnessed, but felt when Helene Weigel in the 1949 production portrayed Mother Courage: As the body of her son was laid before her, she merely shook her head in mute denial.... As the body was carried away, Weigel looked the other way and tore her mouth wide open. The shape of the gesture was that of the screaming horse in Picasso’s Guernica. The sound that came out was raw and terrible beyond any description I could give it. But in fact, there was no sound. Nothing. The sound was total silence. It was silence which screamed through the whole theater so that the audience lowered its head as before a gust of wind [1996: 353–354].

Despite his determination to keep sympathies at bay, Brecht’s Mother Courage draws many spectators right into the heart of its title character. Her woe pierces through the V-Effekt and tears down boundaries put up to prevent feeling. Even after the Munich production of 1950, in which Brecht set out to emphasize Mother Courage’s seemingly insatiable drive for income by adding a new last line to the text to read: “I must get back into business” (Willet 1964: 221), still, audiences identified with her. Peter Demetz writes, In vain, Brecht tried to point out her greed and her commercial participation in the murderous war in order to disengage the sutler woman from the emotional sympathies of the spectators. But Brecht was caught in his own snare: the more he put the stress on Mother Courage’s greed and her moral deficiencies, the more clearly she emerged as a truly mixed character, who successfully invites the audience’s empathy [1962: 14].

Although Mother Courage continues to do business after what she thinks is the death of only two of her children, she exposes more than just a merchant’s ambition. She embodies the insoluble contradictions of maternal solicitude during a horrific war by displaying her motherly duty in paying for Kattrin’s burial and by setting out with the hope of finding her son, Eilif. It is no surprise that audiences were unable to maintain “epic calm” and instead, became what Bullough refers to as “under-distanced” (1957: 100). Moreover, Brecht need not have concerned himself with arranging his scenes independent of each other as another “alienating” technique since, as Stephen Pepper notes, “the narration gives us a succession of emotions which accompany these scenes” (1946: 236) and these emotions, engendered in the scenes, are convincing enough to be experienced by the spectator. For example, in addition to the destructive consequences of war implicit in the drama, there are numerous emotions evident, such as strength, greed, courage, ambition, and hunger. Mother Courage, as the central character, displays most, if not all of these emotions. And since Brecht himself asserts that “the coherence of the character is in fact shown by the way in which its individual qualities contradict one

188


another” (Willet 1964: 124), any highly artificial arrangement for exposition cannot deter an audience from identifying with at least one of these emotions. Pepper expounds on this idea by claiming that when a perceiver experiences one or more of these emotions along with Mother Courage, he or she may not have the full intensity of the emotion as does the character, but it is, nonetheless, not a “mere intellectual concept with denotative references to the emotion.” (1946: 237). In modern Western drama, as is often the case, a shifting distance continuously draws spectators in and then pushes them away. Bullough makes it clear that Distance is “variable both according to the distancing power of the individual and according to the character of the object” (1957: 100). Darko Suvin explains this shift this way: This oscillation between distance and proximity, a complex psychological osmosis-cum-isolation, accounts for central aspects of theater communication, based on the audience’s physical absence from but psychical presence in the dramaturgic space, which is literally constituted by their minds. Such is the wellknown duality between the spectators’ indispensable modulation of attention and reaction to dramaturgic flow on the one hand ... and their tactile nonintervention on the other. Theater can and sometimes does play not only within but also with the very limits of the aesthetic distance, as it can play with any other — however fundamental — factor [1987: 329].

Brecht attempted to manipulate his audience with various alienating techniques. However, as Ben Chaim points out, “though Brecht believed that he could stimulate this critical reflection on one’s emotions by means of alienation techniques alone, ... an increased awareness of the mechanics of theatre [and] its conventions, does not in itself necessarily create a critical attitude. Distance is a relational and relative factor, and no technique has absolute distancing value” (1984: 72). Additionally, Bullough cautioned that “under-distancing is the commonest failing of the subject” and that the average individual very rapidly reaches his distance-limit in the aesthetic field, i.e., “that point at which distance is lost and appreciation either disappears or changes” (1957: 100). Hans Robert Jauss notes that “depending on the distance, the end result is always a greater or lesser emotional identification with some aspect of the work, even when shifting occurs” (1982: 152–188; qtd in Kot 1996: 650). Also, Brecht over-estimated an average person’s ability to maintain an appropriate measure of distance in order to align with his concept of “alienation.” For Brecht, “explaining the complicated role of emotions in a theatre of critical distance remained one of the greatest challenges he had to face” (White 2004: 5). Brecht’s “alienation” techniques do not serve the major tenets of his theory of distance. His play belied his theoretical pronouncements and writings about non-empathetic “epic theatre” by failing to suppress compassion for Mother


189

Courage’s suffering. Moreover, by remaining fierce in his desire to espouse a political agenda in the drama Mother Courage, Brecht violated Bullough’s antinomy of distance: “What is therefore, both in appreciation and production most desirable is the utmost decrease of Distance without its disappearance” (1957: 100). Furthermore, Brecht’s “personal implication in the event renders it impossible for him to formulate and present it in such a way as to make others, like himself, feel all the meaning and fullness which it possesses for him” (Bullough 1957: 100). CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON

Notes Acknowledgments. My grateful thanks to Dr. Ellen Caldwell for her guidance and encouragement and to the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions. 1. The concept of distance has evolved from as early as the fourth century B.C., from “aesthetic disinterestedness.” Aristotle, in Metaphysics, contends that “[w]orks of art have their merit in themselves so that it is enough if they are produced having a certain quality of their own” (981b17). In the eighteenth century, Lord Shaftesbury asserted that “disinterestedness” is a nonutilitarian concern with an object (1999: 203). Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment (1790) explains that aesthetic judgments are possible when observers maintain an aesthetic response that is exclusively concerned with the art object and not its benefits or intellectual value (49). 2. Reinhold Grimm explains that Brecht’s concept of alienation (distance) had some of its origins in “Hegelian philosophy, Marxian sociology, and the aesthetic theory of the Russian Formalists” (1997: 42). 3. Brecht was convinced that the German classic drama theories of Goethe and Schiller, having been based on Aristotle’s Poetics, must be replaced by a theatre that becomes “a tool of social engineering, a laboratory of social change” (Esslin 1984: 113). 4. According to Ben Chaim, “Bullough was the first to specifically define a conception of distance distinct from disinterestedness (a lack of personal interest)” (1984: 5). She explains that “Bullough’s ‘distance’ admits a personal interest in the work of art but one purified of any practical implications” (1984: 4) Like Kant, Bullough believes that when we engage in aesthetic experience we are removed from all practical concerns with the object. However, unlike Kant, Bullough’s theory is based on psychology rather than metaphysics. He argues that a separate psychological force determines our aesthetic perception of art works. 5. Peter Thompson claims that much of the Courage music composed by Paul Dessau “might fairly be described as ‘agitated,’ and Brecht enjoyed those occasions, for example in “The Song of the Great Capitulation,” when confidence of the sung words was contradicted and undermined (alienated by the jarring of the music).... The songs are occasions for strategic interruption of the narrative. Such interruptions are, at the simplest, reminders to the audience that it is not witnessing the imitation of an action, but the representation of a series of discontinuous actions” (1997: 65–66). 6. Hoping to increase the spectators’ distance, Brecht’s actors must not “identify” with the characters they portray. The actors were directed only to “show” the character and not to become the character in an attempt to provide a distinction between the feelings of the actor from those of the character. In “A Short Organum,” Brecht writes, “He has just to show the character, or rather he has to do more than just get into it; this does not mean that if he is playing passionate parts he must himself remain cold. It is only that his feelings must not at bottom be those of the character, so that the audience’s may not at bottom be those of the character either” (Willet 1964: 194–195). In the Brechtian style of acting, the character’s emotions are not to be experienced by either the actors or the spectators. However, Ben Chaim explains that the viewer’s

190


experience of distance is based on an awareness of the unreality of the aesthetic object (1984: 22). A decrease in the viewer’s awareness of fiction may intensify the involvement in the “reality,” increase identification with the characters and their “inner lives,” and/or produce greater empathy for the character-images (1984: 99). She maintains that “when the actor is seen as a person (not as an actor), there is a complete loss of distance; as Sartre says, when the actor seems to be looking at and into the spectator, he becomes a person who threatens the spectator’s privacy” (1984: 99). 7. Margaret Eddershaw insist that “many critics have taken issue with Brecht over an audience’s very capacity to ‘think through’ the issues raised in a play during the performance, as opposed to some kind of ‘recollection in tranquility’ after the play is over. Equally contentious, it seems, is Brecht’s theory of sustaining distance between the actor and role and between the spectator and the performance by means of emphasizing the story-telling and of narrating the past” (1996: 17). 8. Thompson claims that Brecht “maintained a stubborn confidence in his own artistic authority” (1997: 64). His adoption of strict authoritarianism demonstrated his desire to control, and not to observe. Everything in Brecht’s theatre — from theory to performance technique — was subject to Brecht’s heavy-handed political didacticism. And according to Bullough, Brecht, as the artist, could not attain the required “distance” to render this art successful.

References Cited Aristotle. Metaphysics, translated by W. D. Ross. Second edition. Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1928. Ben Chaim, Daphna. Distance in the Theatre: The Aesthetics of Audience Response. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research, 1984. Brecht, Bertolt. Mother Courage and Her Children, translated by Eric Bentley. New York: Grove, 1955. Brecht, Bertolt. Mother Courage and Her Children. In The Bedford Introduction to Drama, third edition, edited by Lee A Jacobus, 995–1026. Boston: Bedford, 1997. Brooker, Peter. Bertolt Brecht: Dialectics, Poetry and Politics. London: Croom Helm, 1988. Bullough, Edward. Aesthetics: Lectures and Essays, edited by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957. Demetz, Peter. ed. Brecht. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1962. Eddershaw, Margaret. Performing Brecht. London: Routledge, 1996. Esslin, Martin. Brecht: A Choice of Evils, fourth edition. London: Methuen, 1984. Grimm, Reinhold. “Alienation in Context: On the Theory and Practice of Brechtian Theater.” In A Bertolt Brecht Reference Companion, edited by Siegfried Mews. 35–46. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997. Jacobus, Lee A., ed. The Bedford Introduction to Drama, third edition. Boston: Bedford, 1997. Jauss, Hans Robert. “Toward an Aesthetic of Reception.” In Theory and History of Literature Series 2, translated by Timothy Bahti, introduction by Paul de Man. 152–188. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgment, translated by James Creed Meredith. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1952. Kot, Joanna. “Manipulating Distance in Zinaida Gippius’ Drama Holy Blood: A Well-Balanced Experiment.” The Slavic and East European Journal 40/4 (Winter, 1996): 649–666. Pepper, Stephen C. “Emotional Distance in Art.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 4/4 ( June 1946): 235–239. Sesonske, Alexander. “Review [Untitled].” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 17/1 (September 1958): 132–133. Shaftesbury, Lord (Anthony Ashley Cooper). Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, edited by Lawrence E. Klein. Cambridge,UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.


191

Suvin, Darko. “Approach to Topoanalysis and to the Paradigmatics of Dramaturgic Space.” Poetics Today 8/2 (1987): 311–334. Thompson, Peter. Brecht. Mother Courage and Her Children: Plays in Production. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997. White, John. Bertolt Brecht’s Dramatic Theory. Rochester, NY: Camden, 2004. Willett, John. ed. and trans. Brecht on Theatre. New York: Hill, 1964.

¡6 The Argonautic Myth as Subtext of Shakespeare’s The Tempest Mary Frances Williams Abstract The myth of Jason and Medea provides a paradigm that illuminates Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It is accepted that Prospero (5.1.33–57) quotes Medea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. But the play also contains elements of the myth: a hero who voyages on a quest, a heroine, magic, theft, love, monsters, violence, and marriage. Prospero is both an Aeëtes, an isolated king, and a Jason who attempts to regain his realm. Ferdinand is another Jason, and Miranda is a Medea who loves a stranger. Verbal echoes link Ovid and Apollonius Rhodius to the main characters and important scenes: Jason, Medea, Prospero, Caliban, the masque, classical divinities, and magic. Shakespeare’s changes to the myth highlight morality and forgiveness; and a happy ending is achieved because Prospero rejects the “Golden Fleece”: greed, lust, and violence.

Efforts to find one major source for Shakespeare’s The Tempest have been unsuccessful and scholars have concluded that there was no single model for the play. However, the cumulative effect of parallels of the story of Jason and the Argonauts and of verbal echoes from the versions of Ovid and of Apollonius of Rhodes suggests that the Argonautic myth is an influence on the play. It has long been recognized that Shakespeare knew the Argonautic myth since one of Prospero’s speeches (5.1.33–57) extensively quotes that of Medea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (7.197–209), both the Latin version and Golding’s English translation (Kermode 1958: 147–150; Vaughan 1999: 56–59).1 This significant passage indicates that Shakespeare not only was familiar with the Argonautic myth but also wished to connect it with The Tempest. But scholars have only noticed a few similarities, such as between the storm that opens The Tempest and those of ancient epic (Mowat 2000: 30; Hamilton 2000: 114–120). Mowat has pointed to some broad parallels between The Tempest and the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius such as storms, Harpies, and hints of exploration and empire (Mowat 2000: 30, 192

16. The Argonautic Myth as Subtext of The Tempest (Williams)

193

32, 35). Kermode observes that The Tempest is based on a folktale motif, of which the Jason story is an example, and that Apollonius “has an analogous theme” (Kermode 2000: lxiii, lxxi).2 Nevertheless, no one has recognized that the myth of Jason and the Argonauts is very similar to the underlying pattern of The Tempest or that the play contains extensive verbal echoes of Apollonius and Ovid. Shakespeare certainly consulted many other sources, including contemporary documents (Bullough 1975: 237–245; Nostbakken 2004; Kermode 1958: xxvi–xxx).3 Likewise, the play is open to many varying interpretations. But the pervasive and cumulative effect of similarities between The Tempest and the Argonautic myth, beginning with Prospero’s lengthy quotation of Ovid’s Medea, indicates the myth’s significance for The Tempest. These parallels include similar mythic elements, verbal echoes, and broad concepts. There are links involving deities, characters, place names, imagery, and themes, such as Harpies, storms, Venus and Cupid, Tunisia, descriptions of Jason and Medea, nymphs, Hera, Iris, games, caves, music, magic, the association between trees and monsters, and murder.4 The verbal echoes of the Argonautica which surround the main characters, Prospero, Miranda, Ferdinand, and Caliban, and which augment the betrothal masque, are of exceptional interest. Examination of these illuminates Shakespeare’s aims and clarifies the play’s essential pattern and moral themes. The tale of Jason and the Argonauts is known from Greek and Roman literature and literary fragments.5 What Shakespeare would have known is not clear — certainly Ovid’s Metamorphoses since Prospero quotes from the tale of Jason and Medea (5.1.33–57; Met. 7.197–209) and Shakespeare echoes some of Ovid’s description of events in Aea (e.g., the meeting between Jason and Medea, Jason’s contest [Met. 7.104–158], and Medea’s sudden love [Met. 7.9–13]).6 Shakespeare also mentioned the Golden Fleece in The Merchant of Venice (1.1.169–172; 3.2.240). The legend of the Golden Fleece was well-known by Shakespeare’s day: Dares Phrygius, John Gower, William Caxton, and Thomas Heywood all relate the story,7 although there are no major parallels between their texts and The Tempest. Philip II appropriated the myth as part of his self-representation, and the Hapsburgs used the order of the Golden Fleece to link their reign to ancient Greece and Rome (Hamilton 2000: 115. Tanner 1992: 109). The Golden Fleece was a popular design for elaborate tapestries that adorned European courts and churches from the late fifteenth to early seventeenth centuries (Brotton 2000: 133). But the best Argonautic source for The Tempest (1611) is the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius. Lascaris’s editio princeps of the Greek text appeared in Florence in 1496, the Aldine was published by Franciscus Asulanus in Venice in 1521, the Paris edition in 1541, and the Stephanus in Geneva in 1574. These editions were rare, but Shakespeare may have known sufficient Greek to read the Argonautica if he had access to a copy, or a friend could have told him Apollonius’s tale. But Francesco Cini’s Italian translation of the Argonautica, published in Florence in 1608, is an intriguing and more likely possibility in view of the Italian names used in The Tempest.8

194


The Argonautic myth is first suggested at the opening of The Tempest through the ship on the storm-tossed sea. This evokes not only the Argo, the first ship in history, and also the great storm that afflicted the Argo in Thomas Heywood’s Troia Britanica (7, cantos 44–52), but also the violent storms in epics — storms that are sent by the gods to torment and test heroes (e.g., in The Odyssey, Argonautica, and Aeneid). A more specific parallel is found between the lowering of the sails at the beginning of The Tempest and upon the Argo’s arrival at Colchis (“Down with the top mast! yare! lower, lower!” 1.1.34; “They let down the sails and the yard-arm” Ap.Rhod. Argon. 2.1262–1264). (The importance of the boatswain and the democratic nature of the crew hint at Apollonius’ epic, where the helmsman is more essential than Jason (Argon. 1.105–108, 2.171–176) and the men originally vote that Herakles, not Jason, be their leader (Argon. 1.327–350)). The fact that the storm is incited and calmed by Prosepero’s magic illustrates his great powers and indicates that he is like the gods of antiquity since they controlled the winds and waves of epic. At the same time, the ship alludes to the nature/culture antithesis that is inherent in the myth of the Argo since a ship is the result of human skill and indicates man’s ability to alter nature so that he is even able to dwell upon water, that most inhospitable of all places for humans. Similarly, Prospero is able to control the storm and save the ship’s crew through his magic powers. The myth is also replicated through the voyage to the end of the earth.9 The great antiquity of the Argonautic myth is suggested when Miranda says about her past, “’Tis far off,/And rather like a dream than an assurance/That my remembrance warrants” (1.2.44–46) and when Prospero responds, “What seest thou else/In the dark backward and abysm of time?” (1.2.49–50). Similarly, Prospero indicates the difficulty of determining the precise beginning of both the Argonautic story and his own when he tells his Miranda that their own past began “twelve year since” (1.2.53) when they came to the island, but he adds that this happened after he was overthrown as Duke of Milan by his treacherous brother Antonio who allied himself with the King of Naples. Prospero then says that the story really began before that, when he gave his brother political power and neglected his own duties, and he describes their exile, voyage, and arrival at the island. The early story of Prospero and Miranda parallels that of Jason since it similarly takes its inception from political treachery by a family member and involves a dangerous voyage to a new land. But all that is prologue to the main story, which in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (unlike other sources) begins in Colchis where Jason struggled to gain both the Golden Fleece and Medea from a hostile Aeëtes, and in The Tempest commences on Prospero’s island where Prospero will triumph over his enemies and Ferdinand will win Miranda. The myth of Jason and the Argonauts involves a hero who voyages on a quest and completes a contest to win a prize and the hand of a princess. In Apollonius’ epic, Jason, whose uncle Pelias stole his kingdom, sails to Colchis to retrieve the Golden Fleece and recover his realm. The Colchian king Aeëtes


195

orders Jason to perform labors to win the Fleece. But the king’s daughter Medea, who is incited by Aphrodite/Venus to fall in love with Jason, aids him through her magic. Medea’s charms enable Jason to defeat the sown men, harness the fire-breathing bulls, and put to sleep the dangerous dragon that guards the Golden Fleece. Jason and Medea flee with the Golden Fleece, pursued by the wrathful Aeëtes. Jason and Medea’s flight sets violent events in motion, including battles and the murder of Medea’s brother. During their return to Greece they marry, are purified for bloodshed, and stop in North Africa. Prospero, the former Duke of Milan, assumes two roles from the Argonautic myth: he is, like Aeëtes, the king of an isolated domain and the father of a young daughter. Foreign voyagers threaten him with violence and he is alarmed by his daughter’s interest in the stranger, Ferdinand. Just as Aeëtes angrily calls the Argonauts bandits who have come to steal his “royal power” (Argon. 3.371–376), so Prospero accuses Ferdinand of desiring to seize his kingdom (1.2.454–459). Prospero’s magic cloak and wand (1.2.24; 5.1.54) are similar to Aeëtes’ purple cloak and staff (Met. 7.103), and his armor and spear (Argon. 3.1225–1245; 4.219–224). Prospero is also like Jason since his wicked brother deprived him of his duchy and this resulted in his voyage to a remote land where he attempts to regain his political position. Prospero, like Jason, struggled against wind and sea when he sailed to his island (1.2.144–151); and Prospero and Miranda arrived possessing only “rich garments” (1.2.164), just as Jason entranced Hypsipyle with his embroidered cloak (Argon. 1.721–768) and Medea has a fine robe (Argon. 4.432–433). Both Jason and Prospero have the same aims: Jason sought the Fleece because he would be able to regain his kingdom through his possession of it. Prospero wishes to be reinstalled as the duke of Milan. Prospero, like Jason, undergoes two “labors.” Jason yoked the fire-breathing bulls and defeated the violent sown-men. Prospero controls and thwarts the animal Caliban and the plotting villains Stephano and Trinculo, and he also overcomes the murderous Antonio and Sebastian. (When Sebastian explains why his sword was drawn to kill Alonso, he says, “we heard a hollow burst of bellowing/Like bulls” (2.1.306–307), which hints at Jason’s contest). Ferdinand is another Jason, a prince who is shipwrecked onto Prospero’s island. Ferdinand falls in love with Miranda, whom he wins despite her father’s disapproval, after he undergoes a “contest” demanded by her father. Ferdinand echoes Jason’s labors when he performs his own two, less dangerous, “trials,” carrying wood and playing chess (“all thy vexations/Were but my trials of thy love, and thou/Hast strangely stood the test” 4.1.5–7).10 Miranda is like Medea, the daughter of the ruler of an isolated land, who loves Ferdinand, helps him to prevail in his “trials” in spite of her father’s hostility, and becomes engaged to him.11 The interactions between Ferdinand and Miranda closely parallel those of Jason and Medea. Just as Apollonius in his Argonautica likens Jason to a god because of his beauty (Argon. 1.307–310), so Miranda wonders if Ferdinand is “a spirit” (1.2.412, 414): “I might call him/A thing divine; for nothing natural/I

196


ever saw so noble” (1.2.420–422). Medea is touched by Jason’s beauty (Met. 7.26–28; “wonderfully among them all shone the son of Aeson for beauty and grace” Argon. 3.443–444). She thinks that there never was such a man (Argon. 3.456–457); and she falls in love at first sight (Met. 7.72–73; Argon. 3.287–298). Ferdinand and Miranda fall in love “At the first sight” (1.2.443–444) and Miranda has “no ambition/To see a goodlier man” (1.2.485–486). Miranda’s remark, “nothing ill can dwell in such a temple” (1.2.460), hints at the connection between Jason and Apollo. Medea thinks that her father’s commands are too harsh (Met. 7.14); and Miranda says: “O dear father,/Make not too rash a trial of him” (1.2.469–470) and that Prospero’s orders are “unwonted” (1.2.500–501). The masque and music that celebrate the engagement of Ferdinand and Miranda on Prospero’s island echo Apollonius’ festivities for the marriage of Jason and Medea, which occurs on the island of Phaeacia.12 Hera, the goddess of marriage (Argon. 4.96) and “queen of all” (Argon. 4.382), honors the marriage of Jason and Medea by sending nymphs with flowers (Argon. 4.1141–1155). The Argonauts sing while Orpheus plays bridal music, nymphs sing and dance in honor of Hera (Argon. 4.1155–1160, 1193–1199), and the Phaeacians leaders and country people provide a ram for sacrifice, wine, linen, and gifts (Arg. 4.1180–1191). Jason and Medea’s marriage is made “the theme of song” (Argon. 4.1143). All this is paralleled through the masque of Iris, Ceres, and Juno (Hera), who is “the Queen o’ th’ sky (4.1.70), and which celebrates the engagement of Ferdinand and Miranda with music, dancing, and singing about Ceres’ bounty, flowers, sheep, riches, vines, nymphs, and country reapers (4.1.60–117, 128–138). Music is another important connection between the Argonautica and The Tempest. Jason and Prospero both use magic to overcome dangers and to achieve their goals; and Prospero’s magic incorporates music, which he calls “charm” (5.1.52–54; Kermode 1958: 116 on 5.1.54), while Medea’s charms are expressly called “songs” (Argon. 4.41–42, 150, 157, 159, 1668; Met. 7.195, 201, 203). Prospero’s use of music provides an echo of the Argonautica since the narrator of Apollonius’ epic self-referentially calls himself a “singer” (Argon. 4.249, 451, 1381, 1773–1774) who shapes his “songs” into an epic narrative. Similarly, Prospero not only uses music and song to educate his enemies and to control events, “shaping” the outcome of his story, but he also steps back from the play in its Epilogue and directly indicates to his audience that he, through his magic and music, has created the dramatic narrative that has transpired. Moreover, Caliban assumes the role of the famous dragon of Aea, the monstrous snake (drakon) that guards the Golden Fleece (Argon. 4.123–161; 2.1207–1210; Met. 7.31, 35–36, 149–156) and which marks the edge of the world (e.g., Per. 1.1.28–30).13 The Colchian dragon represents monstrosity, rebellion, and evil since it was born from Earth out of the drops of blood that were shed by Typhaon who perished because he rebelled against the gods and was blasted by Zeus (Argon. 2.1207–1213). Similarly, Caliban, like the dragon offspring of Typhaon, is the son of a devil (1.2.321) and he is like the earth-born dragon since


197

he is called “earth” (“Thou earth” 1.2.316). His association with snakes evokes the dragon (“sometime am I/All wound with adders” 2.2.12–13), as does his connection with reptiles (“tortoise” 1.2.318). Caliban is not human but beast (“not honour’d with/A human shape” 1.2.283–284; “monster” 2.2.144, 145, 155, 159, 165, 179; “beast” 4.1.140).14 He is the Shakespearean equivalent of a dragon or a sea-serpent, to which he is likened by Trinculo (“What have we here, a man or a fish? ... this monster ... strange beast” 2.2.24–31).15 The Colchian dragon, a dangerous monster that is indigenous to the Aean locality by its autochthonous birth, is closely connected by his parentage to violence, rebellion, and opposition to the gods, is murderous (Argon. 4.154–155),16 and is always linked through the Golden Fleece that he guards to greed for money and power (e.g., avido ... draconi, Met. 7.31). The dragon has its parallel in Caliban who is similarly tied to his island, does not worship God, is rebellious against authority, and exhibits the bad and bestial side of nature through his own violence, lust, envy, and greed, and since he delights in murder. Caliban is also like the dragon through the dark magic of his mother, who is similarly associated with beasts: “All the charms/Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!” (1.2.341–342). Moreover, Caliban is, according to Aristotle’s definition, a beast because the difference between man and animal lies not in reasoning ability, which animals possess, but in the ability to distinguish between right and wrong and to explain the distinction through speech (Arist. Pol. 1253a10–18). Caliban is a beast because he cannot distinguish between good and evil. He instead acts as a domesticated beast of burden (“he does make our fire,/Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices” 1.2.313–314). Although Caliban is aware that if he is detected stealing Prospero’s clothing, he will suffer punishment, his words indicate that he is incapable of feeling remorse for the serious crime of attempting to rape Miranda (“O ho, O ho! would’t had been done!/Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else/This island with Calibans” 1.2.351–353), and he cannot comprehend that murdering Prospero is wrong (“brain him,/ ... Batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake,/Or cut his weasand with thy knife” 3.2.86–89). When Caliban learns that Stephano will kill Prospero, he says, “Thou mak’st me merry; I am full of pleasure” (3.2.114).17 Since Prospero declares that Caliban is: “A devil, a born devil, on whose nature/Nurture can never stick” (4.1.188–189), and Miranda exclaims: “Which any print of goodness wilt not take/Being capable of all ill!” (1.2.354–355), and Caliban says that he has learned language only so that he may curse (1.2.365–367), Caliban fits the Aristotelian definition of a beast since he cannot comprehend the difference between good and evil and express it through speech. Caliban represents not only bestial nature but also sin itself (Kermode 1958: xlii, xlvi–xlvii). He is not human but is instead both beast and devil (“demi-devil” 5.1.272).18 Shakespeare diverges from the Argonautic myth when he brings all the characters to one place so that Prospero might resolve the crime that precipitated his exile by confronting all of his enemies at the same time. Shakespeare also inter-

198


jects the minor characters of Trinculo, Stephano, Caliban, Antonio, and Sebastian, and their plots and Ariel’s spying. But these innovations, especially the depravity of the minor characters, still form part of the pattern of the Argonautic myth since their behavior hints at the Golden Fleece, which lurks as a sinister force within The Tempest. Shakespeare’s minor characters illustrate the bad qualities that the Golden Fleece aroused and the vices that it inspired. These include violence, treachery, theft, insolence, conspiracy, and ambition. The condemnation of these vices is intricately intertwined with Prospero’s actions and with his achievement of changing the myth so that it ends happily. Prospero’s magic powers constrain the dangerous Caliban since he, like the Golden Fleece, represents everything that will impede Miranda’s happiness. Likewise, Antonio, Sebastian, Stephano, and Trinculo are thwarted and punished for their improper desires and violent plots. Shakespeare uses elements of the Argonautic myth throughout The Tempest, together with verbal echoes that are unique to Apollonius and Ovid, but he follows the chronology of the myth only up to a point. Shakespeare only adheres to the pattern of myth until violence threatens (and the potential bloodshed itself is a link to the Argonautic myth). Instead, Shakespeare and Prospero19 act to ensure that the play does not contain violence like that at the end of Apollonius’ epic or in the tragedy of Medea that was the post-epic consequence of Jason’s sojourn in Colchis. Shakespeare and Prospero achieve a happy ending through the rejection of the “Golden Fleece” and what it represents, i.e., through Prospero’s punishment and denunciation of morally reprehensible behavior. Prospero uses his magic and music to control and alter behavior and events in order to avoid war, murder, and familial discord. Since Shakespeare and Prospero desire to make everything turn out happily and to transform incipient tragedy into romantic comedy, Prospero avoids the worst excesses of Aeëtes, who was notorious for his anger and violence, his unjust treatment of Jason, his refusal to allow his daughter to associate with a stranger, the brutal labors that he assigned to Jason, and the monstrous creatures with which he surrounded himself. Prospero, in contrast, only once displays anger (when he thinks about the plot to commit murder) (4.1.143–145), is hostile to Caliban, and is compassionate towards the young lovers and kind to Ferdinand. Prospero pretends to be harsh and only sets a very mild task for Ferdinand to perform, carrying wood, so that he will not seem to win Miranda too easily (“lest too light winning/Make the prize light” 1.2.453–455). Prospero even accompanies the young couple on their homeward voyage. As a consequence, there are no battles on Prospero’s island and war is reduced to a friendly game of chess between Ferdinand and Miranda. Similarly, although Medea’s passion for Jason was one-sided, Miranda’s love is immediately and equally reciprocated since Ferdinand exclaims that she is a “goddess” and a “wonder” (1.2.424, 429), and he, unlike Jason, declares his love to Miranda (3.1.71–3). Moreover, in spite of the very classical tone of the masque, Shakespeare, who deliberately mentions


199

Venus and Cupid, expressly says that they are not on the island (“[lest] they to have done/Some wanton charm upon this man and maid” 4.1.86–101). This alludes to the Argonautica in which Aphrodite and Eros are the instigators of Medea’s passionate love for Jason and set in motion the terrible chain of events that will culminate in many deaths (Argon. 3.23–166, 275–298). Prospero will allow his daughter to love and will permit her to marry Ferdinand (4.1.2–3, 13–14), but he will not let her experience the violently uncontrolled and immoderate passion of Medea. Instead, Miranda will get to know her lover through conversation and play and with her father’s permission (“Sit, then, and talk with her; she is thine own” 4.1.32). Although Miranda will offer to help Ferdinand carry logs (3.1.24–25) (i.e., in his labor) and will “forget” her father’s order not to speak to him (3.1.57–59), unlike Medea, she will not sneak out secretly at night to meet Ferdinand against her father’s wishes, provide him with drugs, help him steal through cheating in his contest, or run off with him. Likewise, Ferdinand promises to avoid lust (4.1.25–28, 54–56) and agrees to a decorous engagement rather than a love affair. Venus and Cupid have no place in this tale that will end in a Christian marriage (5.1.308–309). Prospero’s main “contest” consists of a confrontation with his enemies during which he forgives Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian (“Yet with my nobler reason ’gainst my fury/Do I take part: the rarer action is/In virtue than in vengeance” 5.1.26–28; “I do forgive thee” 5.1.78); “I do forgive/Thy rankest fault” 5.1.131–132), shaming at least Alonso into asking pardon (“Thy dukedom I resign, and do entreat/Thou pardon me my wrongs” 5.1.118–119). After Ariel has humiliated and punished Caliban and his companions, Prospero reveals that they have robbed him and plotted to murder him. But he offers them pardon (“as you look/To have my pardon, trim [my cell] handsomely” 5.1.292–293), and Alonso orders restitution (“bestow your luggage where you found it” 5.1.298). Prospero is not brutal or cruel and he never uses violence or seeks revenge, unlike Aeëtes who wanted to “satisfy his eager soul with vengeance” (Arg. 4.233–234). Instead, like Circe’s purification and Alcinous’ protection of Jason and Medea in the Argonautica, Prospero’s forgiveness (Peterson 1973: 214, 246) and justice counteract injustice, treachery, and violence. In addition, when Prospero reveals to the King of Naples that they will be related by the marriage of their children, he uses marriage to cement their new friendship and to assuage past conflict. Shakespeare suggests that through these virtues a happy ending is possible instead of a tragedy. Moreover, Medea is transformed from a witch, whose powers were derived from Hecate, the goddess of the underworld, and who used herbs, charms, corpses, and noxious drugs, into the gentle and innocent Miranda who does not know about witchcraft or drugs. Prospero possesses all of the power of good magic and he employs it, rather than drugs and spells, together with music, performance, and Ariel’s spying in order to effect the outcome of events. This makes Miranda less interesting and less powerful than Medea. But she is also more compassionate since she wishes to save lives (1.2.5–13), rather than murderous

200


like Medea, and she is potentially able to be happier, especially since Ferdinand insists that he will not “play [her] false” (5.1.172–173), which both hints at, and rejects, Jason’s betrayal of Medea. Inherent within the fundamental structure of the Argonautic myth are topics that were of contemporary interest in Shakespeare’s England and which are integral to The Tempest: voyages of exploration and discovery; the development of sophisticated ships and seafaring (see Hess 2000: 126–128 on the English “naval revolution” between 1580 and 1610); commercial and military interactions with foreign lands; conflicts between civilized and primitive cultures; the contrasts between legitimate authority and usurpation and between power and rebellion. In addition, the Golden Fleece symbolized not only royal authority but also commercial exploitation and eagerness for wealth and power. All these themes exist in The Tempest, but Shakespeare raises questions about what is appropriate commercial and political behavior. The implicit rejection of the Golden Fleece (wealth/lust/greed) means that there is no commerce or commercial exploitation on Prospero’s island. Its situation is what Gonzalo says that it would be if he ruled it : “no kind of traffic/Would I admit” (2.1.144–145). Similarly, the shipwrecked Italians have no interest in trade or exploiting its natural resources. Antonio and Sebastian even deride the island’s lack of sustenance (“this island seem to be desert ... Uninhabitable, and almost inaccessible” 2.1.34, 37; “means to live./Of that there’s none, or little” 2.1.49–50). There is no violence or war that is motivated by trade or plunder since there are no natural resources or goods to fight over. On Prospero’s island, just as on Gonzalo’s ideal island, there is no “treason, felony,/Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine” (2.1.156–157) as far as commerce is concerned. Prospero only possesses the same garments and books that he had when he arrived on the island, and neither he nor Miranda have, or desire to have, any other property. Only Caliban and the clowns Trinculo and Stephano are eager to steal fine clothing. Shakespeare also negates the negative political aspects of the Golden Fleece and the Argonautic myth. The Argonauts were motivated to sail to new lands in order to win political power and wealth; they waged violent war with their barbarian opponents and set in motion Greek colonization of the Mediterranean world. (The Argonauts and Medea originated Greek settlements both on the island of Thera and of the city of Cyrene in North Africa through the clod of earth given to the Argonauts in Libya, which washed into the sea and created the island of Thera [Argon. 4.1551–1594, 1748–1764; Pindar, Pythian 4.9–56]. This is hinted at in the play when Sebastian says: “I think he will carry this island home in his pocket” [2.1.86] and Antonio responds, “And, sowing the kernels of it in the sea, bring forth more islands” [2.1.88–89]). But in The Tempest, neither Prospero nor Miranda nor the Italians are interested in oppression of indigenous inhabitants, colonization, or war. All of the humans in the play (Caliban and Ariel are not human) are Italians, all speak the same language


201

(1.2.431–433), most are Prospero’s family and acquaintances, and none of them desire to stay on the island. There is no violence because Prospero’s magic is able to avert it; likewise, there is no successful theft or political conspiracy for the same reason. The play rejects commercial exploitation, war, colonization, wealth, illegitimate ambition, violence, and oppression of indigenous people. This does not mean that there is no greed or ambition in The Tempest. The eagerness of Caliban and Trinculo to steal clothing, the desire of Antonio and Sebastian to kill Alonso and seize his kingdom and also of Stephano and Trinculo to kill Prospero and gain the island, and the Italians who long to eat — all these incidents (which suggest the Golden Fleece) indicate that greed, ambition, and desire exist in The Tempest and that even on an island where there is little to steal and not much political power to overthrow, men will still try to do both. Antonio and Sebastian, in fact, are also pseudo–Jasons since after they arrive in an unknown land they try to gain political power (2.1.257–264, 287–289); likewise, Stephano is eager to become king of the island and to marry Miranda (3.2.104–105). But Prospero’s magic is able to thwart greed and improper ambition: Ariel teaches the Italians a lesson by tempting them with food and he prevents the attempted murders of Alonso and Prospero. Greed and lust do not motivate the two main Jason-figures, Prospero and Ferdinand: Prospero only wants the return of what is rightfully his, and Ferdinand denies that he wants Prospero’s island (1.2.455–459) and concentrates on his love for Miranda, unlike Jason who wanted to obtain Aeëtes’s Golden Fleece and who only used Medea as a means to get it. Ferdinand’s virtuous behavior and Prospero’s forgiveness contrast with the greed, lust, ambition, and violence of Antonio, Sebastian, Stephano, and Trinculo. Moreover, through the refutation of the attributes of the Golden Fleece and the contrast of the behavior of Prospero and Ferdinand with that of Antonio and Sebastian, and of Stephano and Trinculo, Shakespeare reveals that the main obstacles to the happiness of Jason and Medea, and of Ferdinand and Miranda, are what the Fleece represents: greed, violence, treachery, ambition, conspiracy, lust, and a father’s lack of sensitivity towards his daughter’s happiness. Just as Medea declares: “may the Fleece vanish like a dream borne on the wind to the darkness of hell!” (Argon. 4.384–385), so Shakespeare counters the Fleece, and the vices that it symbolizes, with Prospero’s magic, which is only used for good and which replaces those vices with their opposites (e.g., love, marriage, forgiveness, non-violence, and legitimate authority). Prospero uses music and magic to determine his future and his “story,” just as the narrator of Apollonius’ epic is a singer who uses song to tell his tale and shape his narrative (Argon. 4.249, 451, 1381, 1773–1774). Prospero changes the Argonautic myth and alters his own life and that of Miranda. By doing so he “writes” a new tale that is itself a narrative that is equally worthy to be recorded, remembered, and emulated and about which Gonzalo says, “set it down/With gold on lasting pillars” (5.1.207–208; cf. Argon. 4.279–280). This new tale

202


responds to ancient myth since it condemns the Argonautic myth’s violence, greed, lust, and treachery and rejects commercial and political exploitation, colonization, and war. The Tempest instead promotes a happy future for its audience through morality, forgiveness, and non-violence. INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR

NOTES 1. Citations and quotations of The Tempest are from Kermode 1958. Citations of Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica are to the Greek text (and English translation) in Seaton 1912. 2. Bullough 1975: 245–248 points to Spanish romances (cf., Kermode 1958: lxv–lxvi). Since the Argonautica was a model for Virgil’s Aeneid, tenuous links between the Aeneid and The Tempest (Vaughan 1999: 57–58; Hamilton 1990; Hamilton 2000) may also indicate Argonautic influence. For Shakespeare and the Greeks, see Nuttal 2004: 209–222. 3. E.g., Silvester Jourdon, A Discovery of the Barmudas, Otherwise Called the Ile of Divels. (13 October 1610); William Strachey, A True Reportory of the Wrack, and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates... (15 July 1610) (cf., Kermode 1958: lxix–lxx). 4. Tunisia/the Syrtis (2.1.67–68, 80; Ap.Rhod. Argon. 4.1232–1249); Hera/Juno’s aid (4.1.70, 103–109; Argon. 3.55–75; 4.781–790, 818–832); Iris (4.1.60–75, 84–86, 91–101, 128–133; Argon. 2.286–290; 4.753–778); Juno and Iris (4.1.60–117; Argon. 4.753–778); Venus and Cupid (4.1.86–101; Argon. 3.23–166, 275–298); sea nymphs or naiads (1.2.301; 4.1.128–138; Argon. 4.843–846, 930–967); caves (1.2.344–345, 362–363; 4.1.195; 5.1.166; Argon. 4.1139–1141, 1153–1155); games of chess or dice (5.1.172–175; Argon. 3.117–126); monsters and trees (1.2.277–278, 314; 2.2.16, 73; Argon. 1.1003–1011; 3.1374–1376; 4.1682–1688); Harpies (3.3.83; Argon. 2.223–235, 263–283; Ovid Met. 7.4). Medea helps murder her brother (Argon. 4.410–420, 452–481), Antonio tries to kill Alonso, and Caliban attempts to kill Prospero. 5. The earliest are the fragments of Eumulus of Corinth (eighth century B.C.) and the poet Mimnermus (late seventh century B.C.), which Shakespeare would not have known. Pindar’s Odes (fifth century B.C.) were published in the Aldine edition at Venice in 1513 and several more times in the sixteenth century (e.g., H. Stephanus in Paris in 1560 and P. Stephanus in Geneva in 1599). Other sources include Apollonius Rhodius Argonautica, Apollodorus Bibliotheca, Ovid Metamorphosis 7, Hygenus Fabulae, Diodorus Siculus, Valerius Flaccus Argonautica, Euripides Medea, Ovid Heroides 12, and Seneca Medea. (Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica, published in Florence in 1503, has no parallels with The Tempest). 6. There are also the Harpies (Ovid Met. 7.4) and the return home (Met. 7.156–158). 7. Dares Phrygius (sixth century A.D.) was popular in the Middle Ages and includes the Argonauts; John Gower’s Confessio Amantis includes Jason and Medea (fourteenth century). There is also William Caxton, Th(e) Histories of Jason (c.1477); Thomas Heywood’s Troia Britanica; and Richard Brathwaite, The Golden Fleece (1611). See Bush 1963: 3, 19, 311, 194, 328. None of these works have specific parallels with The Tempest. 8. The Italian names in The Tempest are from William Thomas’s Historie of Italie (1549) and Geoffrey Fenton’s translation of Francesco Guicciardini’s Storia d’ Italia, The Historie of Guicciardini Containing the Warres of Italie and Other Partes (1579, 1599). 9. Aea was on the Black Sea, on the Ocean that the Greeks believed circled the earth (Mimnermus (M.W. West, ed. Iambi et Elegi Graeci. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1989, fr.11a)). 10. The connection between monsters and trees in the Argonautica (Argon. 1.1003–1011; 3.1374–1376; 4.1682–1688) may be reflected in Ferdinand’s struggle with wood (3.1.1–19). 11. Greek myth supplied various names for Medea’s mother (e.g., Eidyia, Ap.Rhod. Argon. 3.243, 269), but she has no role in the myth, like Miranda’s mother’s two lines (1.2.56–57). 12. The Tempest was first performed at court in 1611 and again in 1612–1613 in celebration of the betrothal of Princess Elizabeth. It is uncertain whether the masque was included in the ver-


203

sion of 1611 or whether it was added for the engagement (Kermode 1958: xxi–xxiv). But Argonautic echoes suggest that the masque is integral to the play. 13. Maps in Shakespeare’s day depicted dragons and sea serpents. Sea serpents appear on royal grants, legal documents, and printed works such as the First Folio. Zoological studies of monsters include Ambroise Paré’s Des Monstres et prodiges (1573) (Warner 2000: 108–111). 14. For beast imagery in The Tempest, see Warner 2000: 98–104. The beasts that surround Circe are earthborn, “without human form,” and “shapeless” (Argon. 4.672–681). 15. In Conrad Gesner’s Historia animalium (1560), a sea monster is depicted (like Caliban) as half serpent or fish but with a human head (Warner 2000: 106–108). 16. Ancient dragons are connected with violence. Jason fights the sown warriors that are born from the teeth of the dragon killed by Cadmus (Ap.Rhod. Argon. 3.1028, 1176–1180). 17. Caliban is unlike Antonio, who is human by Aristotle’s definition since he acknowledges his conscience although he still wants to murder Alonso (2.1.272–279). Likewise, Ariel causes Alonso to remember Prospero and makes him uneasy; and Gonzalo says, “their great guilt,/Like poison given to work a great time after,/Now ’gins to bite the spirits” (3.3.104–106). 18. This association between sin and beasts is illustrated when Ariel’s music awakens Alonso just as Antonio and Sebastian try to kill him, and Sebastian explains their drawn swords by saying that they heard “a hollow burst of bellowing/Like bulls, or rather lions” (2.1.306–307). Antonio adds that it was “a din to fright a monster’s ear” (2.1.309). Gonzalo’s response, “Heavens keep [Ferdinand] from these beasts!” (2.1.319), is ironically applicable to the murderers, Antonio and Sebastian, who through their violence are similar to beasts. 19. Peterson (1973): 247 says that Shakespeare is identified with Prospero as Stage Director and Dramatist. Both preside over and “direct” the action and control the outcome of events.

References Cited Brotton, Jerry. “Carthage and Tunis: The Tempest and Tapestries.” In “The Tempest” and Its Travels, edited by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman, 132–137, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Bullough, Geoffrey. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Vol. 8. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, New York: Columbia University Press, 1975. Bush, Douglas. Mytholog y and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton, 1963. Hamilton, Donna B. Virgil and the Tempest: The Politics of Imitation. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990. _____. “Re-Engineering Virgil: The Tempest and the Printed English Aeneid.” In “The Tempest” and Its Travels, edited by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman, 114–120, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Hess, Andrew C. “The Mediterranean and Shakespeare’s Geopolitical Imagination.” In “The Tempest” and Its Travels, edited by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman, 121–130, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Kermode, Frank, ed. The Tempest. The Arden Shakespeare. Sixth edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958. Mowat, Barbara A. “‘Knowing I Loved My Books:’ Reading The Tempest Intertextually.” In “The Tempest” and Its Travels, edited by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman, 27–36, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Nostbakken, Faith. Understanding The Tempest: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004. Nuttal, Anthony D. “Action at a Distance: Shakespeare and the Greeks.” In Shakespeare and the Classics, edited by Charles Martindale and A.B. Taylor, 209–222, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Peterson, Douglas L. Time Tide and Tempest. A Study of Shakespeare’s Romances. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1973.

204


Seaton, Robert C., trans. Apollonius Rhodius, the Argonautica. London: W. Heinemann; New York: Macmillan, 1912. Tanner, Marie. The Last Descendant of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Vaughan, Virginia Mason, and Vaughan, Alden T., eds. The Tempest. The Arden Shakespeare Third Series. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1999. Warner, Marina. “‘The Foul Witch’ and Her ‘Freckled Whelp:’ Circean Mutations in the New World.” In “The Tempest” and Its Travels, edited by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman, 97–113, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

¡7 American Musical Theatre A Review Essay Stacy Wolf Carter, Tim. Oklahoma! The Making of an American Musical. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. 352. Hardcover $38. Kirle, Bruce. Unfinished Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-in-Process. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. Pp. 304. Hardcover $60, paperback $30. McMillin, Scott. The Musical as Drama: A Study of the Principles and Conventions Behind Musical Shows from Kern to Sondheim. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. 248. Hardcover $25.95. Wollman, Elizabeth L. The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Pp. 288. Hardcover $29.95.

As the field of musical theatre studies grows, recently published books reveal an impressive range of theories and methods, of subject matter and organization, of writing style and voice. While hagiographies, coffee-table books, and fact-driven chronicles still make up a chunk of work in our field, more scholars, including the authors of these four books, locate themselves as analysts and critics. Acutely aware of their multiple audiences in theatre and music (although less so in dance), the authors of these four monographs write accessibly without sacrificing scholarly rigor. Taken together, these studies provide a sense of the current range of new musical theatre scholarship and gesture toward exciting continued developments in our field. Oklahoma! The Making of an American Musical, by Tim Carter, is a biography of the history-making show. In what he claims to be the most detailed study of the creation, performance, and reception of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic, Carter tells a lively story of how this musical came to be. While his research builds on and makes extensive use of Max Wilks’s oft-quoted The Story of Oklahoma! and other secondary materials, Carter supplements the earlier work with details from the archives of the Theatre Guild as well as from letters and drafts from the creators’ files. What emerges is an almost day-to-day account of the decisions and negotiations that led to the musical, from debates among members of the Theatre Guild about its purpose as an American producing organization, to letters exchanged with Lynn Riggs, author of the novel on which Oklahoma! is based, regarding changes made to the story and how he 205

206


would be credited. Carter paints a picture of a process that is at once self-reflexive and more than a bit haphazard, dependent on timing and personalities more than a larger, preconceived vision of the project. Once Oklahoma! moved from an idea to reality; that is, once the newly established team of Rodgers and Hammerstein was on board, Carter recounts, the production process followed the path already established on Broadway, including the hiring of a production team, the casting of actors, rehearsals, out of town tryouts, script alterations, and musical numbers being added or deleted. Although occasionally bogged down by excessive details, Carter’s portrait captures the simultaneous self-consciousness and serendipity of the making of a musical. He also describes the immediate chemistry between Rodgers and Hammerstein, not only as creative collaborators but also as co-visionaries of what American musical theatre could be. With Oklahoma! Rodgers and Hammerstein grew to be powerful as producers, too. After documenting Oklahoma!’s opening night, critics’ responses, subsequent productions, and the 1951 film version, Carter shifts to a more analytical perspective. In this terrific chapter, “Reading Oklahoma!,” Carter surveys the key issues of the musical, from the role of outsider as embodied by Jud and Ali Hakim, to gender relations, to the larger historical significance of “farmers” and “cowboys.” Carter considers the audience’s likely frames of reference in the United States (and specifically in New York) during World War II. As in the more historical sections of the book, Carter builds on earlier work—here, that of Andrea Most, Bruce Kirle, and Alisa Roost, among others. In this way, the study provides an excellent bibliographic survey of virtually everything that has been written about the musical. From the beginning of the book, Carter argues for a self-conscious historiography. He notes forcefully and repeatedly that Oklahoma!’s fame and status as the first formally integrated musical owes as much to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s publicity machine as to the musical’s unique brilliance. For example, he cites one newspaper article that became the source for many later stories and is frequently quoted in musical theatre histories, and then reveals that it was not a review of the musical but a press release written by the Guild. Thus, Carter argues, the producers set the very terms on which Oklahoma! would be judged and would succeed critically. While Carter’s argument about theatre history’s fragmentary nature is persuasive (and not at all radical for a cultural historian), his own evidence might belie his conclusion. By the end of the book’s first section, he admits, perhaps reluctantly, that Oklahoma! was indeed something new and different and wonderful. This small, annoying contradiction aside, Carter’s book is excellent. It will become a key text for those interested in the production and reception of this important and still interesting musical as well as for those curious about musical theatre production in the 1940s more generally. If Carter’s book takes up the period that typically marks the beginning of

17. American Musical Theatre (Wolf )

207

the Golden Age of the Broadway musical, then Elizabeth L. Wollman’s The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig opens with the period that many critics and commentators consider to be the musical’s end, the late 1960s. Since Wollman writes from the dual perspective of a rock music scholar and musical theatre scholar, her study helpfully bridges the two performance genres. The Theater Will Rock considers how and when and why the two performance genres meet, and why, as Wollman argues in the end, they do not and cannot. As she asserts, the “popular music world tends to be ephemeral, forward-looking, and accepting of change, while the musical theater realm seems forever to be stepping ahead with one foot, while keeping the other rooted in its canonized, celebrated, illustrious past” (226). Although Wollman’s focus is broader than Carter’s (she explicates more than twenty musicals in some detail), her book also divides “chronology” from “analysis.” (Perhaps the discipline of musicology fosters this division?) Alternating with decade-based chapters from the 1960s to the millennium that summarize each musical’s production and reception and, most importantly, its use of rock’s musical and performative elements, are “Interlude” chapters in which Wollman considers key problems for the study of rock musicals. These incisive chapters thematize, for example, the imperative of “authenticity” in rock, the phenomenon of megamusicals, and the economic struggles of Broadway in the 1980s and 1990s, conveying a broader sense of the Broadway scene than Wollman’s title suggests. The final interlude outlines the performance paradigms of musical theatre and rock to show how they can never really and truly meet. Like Carter’s, Wollman’s study is useful both because it describes and explains the production and reception of many important musicals and also because it models a generous and generative method to explore and analyze musical theatre. Bruce Kirle’s Unfinished Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-in-Process takes a different approach, but one that supplements Carter’s and Wollman’s studies. Rather than organizing the book around a specific musical or time period or subgenre of the form, Kirle begins with a performance-oriented thesis. “Musicals,” he argues, “wed text, performance, and reception to create meaning within specific historical contexts. Works-in-process, they are open and fluid, subject to a great deal of variation, even subversion, in the way they are performed” (1). The musical was never meant to be textualized, canonized, and studied as a stable object. Kirle acknowledges that while all performance is ephemeral and unrepeatable, and while all studies of performance must navigate its very instability, the exigencies of musical theatre production mean that artistic decisions and choices were (and are) made for exceedingly practical and in-the-moment reasons. (Carter’s book supports Kirle’s argument.) In the first chapter, “Celebrating Incompleteness,” Kirle begins by surveying two intertwined sets of theories: textual incompleteness and fragmentation

208


and the rejection of authorial intent. He then offers an impressive array of examples, all situations in which either the authors’ stated intention was not realized in performance or in which critics’ textual analysis — either of the libretto or the score — misread the performance. Kirle goes on to argue that Rodgers and Hammerstein’s effort to integrate the musical was concomitant with their desire to make a product that could only be replicated according to their wishes. The current Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization is vigilant about rights and refuses all changes, and, Kirle observes, their fears of revision are well-founded, for what theatre company does not want to make a production fresh and new and relevant? Still, Kirle explains, even a production that follows the published words, notes, and lyrics to the letter cannot account for an individual performer’s interpretation of a role. Later chapters take up more specific themes within this larger thesis in roughly chronological order. In “The Star as Cocreator: Performing Jewishness During the Melting Pot,” Kirle analyzes how Jewish entertainers in musical comedies of the early-twentieth century, such as Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, and Ed Wynn, gave audiences a window into Jewish experiences as well those of other marginalized groups in the United States. In “Unfinished Business,” he recounts musical theatre’s history using the audience’s “horizon of expectations” to explain why certain musicals succeeded commercially during different historical moments. “Popular Musicals as Utopia” expands the argument to consider musicals whose subjects captured the zeitgeist and whose plots imagined a solution to social problems, especially in terms of gender and race. In “Enigmatic Characters and the Post-Stonewall Musicals,” Kirle maps the shifting history of representations of gay characters in musicals, from double entendres to those explicitly marked as gay. In this chapter, as in the rest of book, Kirle urges us to interpret musicals as shifting, temporary, and in-the-moment of their production(s). In fact, some of Kirle’s best evidence is anecdotal and personal, based in his first career as a musical director. Last but not least is Scott McMillin’s The Musical as Drama: A Study of the Principles and Conventions Behind Musical Shows from Kern to Sondheim. McMillin’s short, almost spare book is as provocative as Kirle’s, but is written from the perspective of a musical theatre spectator rather than a producer. Like Kirle, McMillin takes a hard look (as well as listening and feeling) at how the musical works as an aesthetic genre with specific practices and conventions. Taking on the now-naturalized assumption that the greatest musicals are formally integrated, McMillin argues that, to the contrary, musicals fundamentally rely on the distinction among different modes of performance. “The incongruity between book and number,” between “two orders of time, the progressive time of the plot and the repetitive time of music,” structure the musical (x). Repetition and change, the contrast between speech and song, between orchestration and singing, between walking and dancing affirm that Brecht, not Wagner, is the philosophical and artistic “father” of musical theatre.

17. American Musical Theatre (Wolf )

209

Like Kirle, McMillin organizes the book around key issues in performance, and his categories encompass conventions of the form: the book and the numbers, character and voice, the ensemble, the orchestra, and narration and technology. In each chapter, McMillin finds examples across a handful of well-known musicals, including Oklahoma!, Lady in the Dark, Guys and Dolls, West Side Story, A Chorus Line, Phantom of the Opera, and Sweeney Todd. Although Sondheim holds pride of place in the book, since he “writes musicals that are about musicals even when they are also about something else” (xii), The Musical as Drama is interested in the rule rather than the exception. In a voice that is conversational and musing but never breezy or coy, McMillin neither canonizes Rodgers and Hammerstein nor demonizes Andrew Lloyd Webber, but rather demonstrates how all musicals create pleasure and meaning through their parts. McMillin’s specific examples are at once astute and persuasive and somehow obvious (and I mean this as the highest compliment). Anyone who reads this book (and all with even a passing interest in musical theatre should) will constantly be struck with a “Why didn’t I think of that?” feeling. His examples build his case through accretion. In a chapter on the orchestra, for example — a component of the musical about which almost nothing has been written — McMillin observes, “The orchestra knows everything. It knows when to introduce the numbers, when to bring them to a close, when to keep the beat, when to keep quiet” (127). The overture is the orchestra’s “announcement of its authority” (128). As the chapter proceeds, McMillin considers the a capella opening to Oklahoma!, in which neither Aunt Eller nor Curly hears the orchestra begin to play on “eye”; the pantomime-overture waltz of Carousel, which tells the audience to expect Molnar’s European story told in Broadway’s language; and the underscoring in Show Boat and South Pacific, where the “orchestra knows what is in the minds of the characters before the characters do” (130). He asserts that the orchestra accompanying dance or pantomime, here or in the opening to West Side Story, where “the bodies of the dancers become immediately musical, as though they were the orchestra” (141), do qualify as moments of “integration” (130). Each chapter considers numerous examples, as McMillin persuasively conveys how musicals operate as a form of performance. All four authors practice an admirably multidisciplinary scholarship, but certain preoccupations are evident. Kirle’s hands-on experience allows him to capture a sense of immediacy that occasionally stands in for a close reading of the “text” that is, in actuality, there. Wollman casts a wide cultural net but gives short shrift to performance analysis. McMillin introduces a new way to interpret the form of the musical, but fails to see the political and ideological effects of genre. Finally, in spite of his claims of theatre’s fragmentary history, Carter tells a coherent, finished story. None delves into dance scholarship or analysis. All in all, these four superb books complement each other well. From the

210


minutiae of Oklahoma! to the larger expanse of rock musicals, from the polemic on musicals’ temporality to the assessment of musical theatre’s parts, these texts document histories, practice methodological innovations, make links with related fields, and overall, offer significant contributions to the study of the American musical. PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

Review of Literature: Selected Books Herren, Graley. Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television. Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Pp. x + 217. Hardcover $65. Three decades after Clas Zilliacus’s important 1976 study, Beckett and Broadcasting, Graley Herren, in his own words, “attempts to pick up where Zilliacus leaves off.” Where the latter left off was, in fact, prior to “the most sustained and productive period of Beckett’s television career” (2). In tracking Beckett’s output for screen, Herren highlights the complex functions of memory, in association with madness (Schopenhauer), in its voluntary/involuntary manifestations (Proust), and in relation to melancholia (Freud). Fruitful attention is given to Bergson, in whose Matter and Memory perception is knitted together with memory-images, having at its command the discernment only of what is already past. Insofar as subject-object relations are posited as operating on temporal, rather than spatial, grounds, they are seen to provide a hospitable framework for the agonized searchings and mind-rackings of Beckett’s televisual creatures. In gravitating to a lost, loved face, these mistake memory for remedy: however, memory “cannot be the bridge because it is already the chasm” (13). The medium of television is peculiarly compelling in this respect, since its ghosting effect results

from taking “what is done and gone — dead air,” and putting it on air. Bergson and the filmed image suggest, of course, an onward journey to Gilles Deleuze. The misspelling of the latter’s surname on its first appearance (11) activates alarm bells, but these are quickly silenced when Herren embarks on a series of careful and rewarding Deleuze-informed discussions of the Beckettian teletext. Disputing Deleuze’s allocation (in L’Epuisé) of a preludial apartness to Eh Joe, Herren sees the play, rather, as a first televisual embarkation into the waters of memory, part of a Beckettian generic sequence he styles “telegies,” to denote the presence in them of elegiac elements subjected to radical onscreen innovation. Eschewing accusations of banality, Herren’s chapter on Eh Joe proposes the play as “a complex meditation, not only on the nature of memory, imagination and mourning, but also on the nature of the medium” (66). Prior to this, a chapter on Beckett’s “apprenticeship in radio and film” takes appropriate account of precedent radio work, such as Cascando, All That Fall, and Embers, arguing that these “experiments in acoustics and virtual visualization” (35) rendered findings which Beckett would find invaluable in his later screen work. The chapter also includes a refreshingly direct and undeceived consideration of Film, somewhat bombasti-

211

212

Review of Literature (Bryden)

cally dubbed by Deleuze “le plus grand film irlandais.” For Herren, Film is bungled on several counts, given its Berkeleyan ambitions: How may the relationship and yet distinctiveness of O and E be communicated? What is the ontological status of the unaccounted-for third position, the subjective viewpoints achieved by O which are “not E”? What is to be done with those moments when O does go unperceived, off-camera? Beckett’s ongoing dissatisfaction with the formal integrity of Film is recognised here, as is the project’s role in enabling Beckett to grope towards the medium-specific demands he would work with in his television plays. The latter being the specific focus, scope and space are available to devote chapter-length discussion to each individual work. This is an attractive bonus, given that the short teleplays often have to jostle for sustained critical attention. There is time, then, to explore at length the tripartite structure of Ghost Trio, the dimension of its music, the significance of F’s final smile. With regard to the latter, the comment that Deleuze’s analysis identifies “definitive closure” (87) is perhaps overstated. Deleuze does point to the exhaustion of spatial possibility, but insofar as it provides transition to that of image. Moreover, Deleuze does make the global assertion in his Film essay that: “Rien ne finit chez Beckett” [Nothing ends in Beckett] (Deleuze 1993: 38). Nevertheless, the continuity point is well made by Herren in the context of Shades, the 1977 BBC broadcast of Ghost Trio, ... but the clouds..., and Not I. Despite technical and structural differences, the second play is seen as in some senses a sequel to the first. All three Shades components are, Herren points out, “bound by one common phenomenological link: Billie Whitelaw” (98). Whitelaw later appears in a short list of actors who force the author to contemplate the apparent contradictions in

his own performance assessments. On the one hand, he commends independent actorly investment; on the other, he repeatedly finds himself admiring certain actors who seem to cede their autonomy to the Beckettian prescription. “Am I a closeted purist after all?” he endearingly agonises (129). This is a particular example of a more general observation that might be made about this book: that it approaches the Beckettian tele-oeuvre from some unpredictable and sometimes highly personal standpoints (while, incidentally, never losing academic rigour). Elsewhere, in discussing the distinction between live and recorded theatre, the author considers the hypothetical temptation, available to a viewer of Whitelaw’s 1972 Royal Court performance of Not I, to have rushed to the stage and “rescued poor Billie from that awful contraption holding her head steady” (4). More broadly, some chapters take surprising itineraries. That on ... but the clouds ... has a slightly separate feel, being prevalently oriented towards Beckett’s nuanced attitude to Yeats. (This turns out, in fact, to be a productive and illuminating reading). The chapter on Nacht und Träume, on the other hand, opts to present the play within a vast contextual frame which includes Beckett vis-à-vis art and religion. Though interesting, the discussion, given the volume of recent scholarship on these subjects, inevitably feels somewhat foreshortened and under-referenced. A fascinating concluding chapter ensures that screen adaptations of stage plays are not neglected, detailing Beckett’s involvement in Was Wo (broadcast by Süddeutscher Rundfunk in 1986), and in Marin Karmitz’s 1966 film of Comédie, the latter constituting, for Herren, “a watershed moment in Beckett’s development as a director and as an artist for filmed media” (181). For me, the most enjoyable chapter

Review of Literature (Chirico) of the book was that dealing with Quadrat I + II. A robust and often humorous discussion attempts to give a flavour of the multifarious responses this televisual phenomenon has provoked. Here, Herren explores the difficulties which the depersonalised (or at least deindividualised) mode presents for players who might “understandably bristle at the notion of sharing equal billing with a Javanese gong” (127). If this bristling should lead to an assertion of actorly prerogative in timing or movement, the risk is run of “an embarrassing traffic accident” (130). Herren confesses to “nagging disaffection” with the piece, feeling that, in renouncing words, “Beckett has left his best instrument in the case” (132). This well-constructed study offers multiple insights and trajectories. Typographical errors are few (the pesky autocorrect is probably responsible for some of the missing French accents). One might wish to quibble over the assertion that the teleplays constitute “failed acts of memory” (19): might they in some sense be seen as necessary swabbings of the wound of memory? (A caged tiger, pacing up and down, is not so much engaged in failed journeys, as in compulsive rehearsals of past and conceivably future journeys). Be that as it may, Herren’s is an engagingly written and richly stimulating study, highly to be recommended. Taken together with Kevin Branigan’s excellent Radio Beckett: Musicality in the Radio Plays of Samuel Beckett (2008)— a study which appeared too late for Herren’s book to take account of it — this diptych of studies offers a wealth of new insights to pursuants of Beckett’s work for screen and airwave.

References Branigan, Kevin. Radio Beckett: Musicality in the Radio Plays of Samuel Beckett. Bern: Peter Lang, 2008.

213

Deleuze, Gilles. Critique et Clinique. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1993.

MARY BRYDEN University of Reading, UK

Moi, Toril. Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy. Oxford, UK : Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. 396. Hardcover $35. Toril Moi’s Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism is nothing short of an attempt to rescue Ibsen’s reputation from the dustbins of bourgeois realism and resituate him as the Father of Modern Drama. After Shakespeare, Moi believes, Ibsen is the most important writer for the stage, and yet no major theorist outside of Norway has written on Ibsen since Raymond Williams in 1969. This rescue is needed of many modernist playwrights, primarily because the elements that scholars consider key determinants of modernism, such as representations of extreme states of mind or issues of subjectivity, are best conveyed, they believe, through poetry and fiction. Very few twentieth-century writers for the theatre are objects of modernist study per se, save for avant-garde writers like the Expressionists, or Beckett, or Oscar Wilde, whose stage characters’ preoccupation with authenticity paralleled theatrical issues of performance. Modernism’s deliberate mistrust of representation in favor of the unsayable and the unrepresentable rarely permit the realism of Tennessee Williams or George Bernard Shaw to enter into the conversation, in much the same way D.H. Lawrence or E.M. Forster are overshadowed by James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. Moi challenges the aesthetic assumptions underpinning late modernism and, at the same time, identifies attributes that would include Ibsen in this tradi-

214

Review of Literature (Chirico)

tion. First, Moi argues that Ibsen could be considered modernist because of his radical socialist and feminist politics that situate him at the vanguard of social change. In so doing, she eschews the formalist aspects of modernism in light of the political. She then defines modernism as a reactionary mode and depicts the aesthetic philosophy that Ibsen was reacting against: Idealism. In order to correct the scholarly “amnesia” regarding this aesthetic period that preceded modernism, she traces in the first half of her book the aesthetic philosophies that dominated Ibsen’s time by examining the philosophic theories of Friedrich Hölderlin, G.W.F. Hegel, F.W.J. Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, German writer Paul Heyse, and Danish critic Georg Brandes. Early chapters situate Ibsen within his social culture, his background, and his time abroad; Moi works to disprove ill-conceived images of a wealthy, “postcolonial cosmopolitan” Ibsen, depicting him rather as a social outcast in the many cities where he lived and “an autodidact who never acquired the cultural ease of a well-educated intellectual from the European urban bourgeoisie” (57). She amends Michael Meyer’s biographical perspective of Ibsen as conservative based on his preference for classical or sentimental art over the new Impressionist paintings by pointing out that formalist aesthetics had not yet been broken; at that time Henry James did not care for the Impressionists either. In the second half of her book she devotes a chapter apiece to a close reading of his plays Emperor and Galilean, A Doll’s House, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, and The Lady from the Sea. Curiously, other plays such as Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, and When We Dead Awaken are ignored or get only a passing mention. Her “genealogy” of modernism is based not on the revolt against romanticism (as

Ibsen’s work is typically understood), but rather as a negation of idealism and its method of connecting ethics to aesthetic representation. Idealism, as it governed artistic convention over much of the nineteenth century, required artists to construct works of art with close alliances between beauty, goodness, and truth. This practice, derived mainly from philosophies of Friedrich Schiller, required that art ennoble the human being through providing him with a harmonious image of the world. It is no surprise that the Nobel Prize was initially given to works of art that demonstrated “an idealistic tendency” (qtd. Moi 96). Needless to say, women characters in such idealist art were depicted as transcending their material nature (i.e. sexuality) and sacrificing themselves for a higher love. Ibsen’s realism, which questioned the idealist celebration of marriage and motherhood (i.e., A Doll’s House), or rejected the artist’s self-absorbed nature (The Wild Duck), was revolutionary, and thus established a model for other playwrights to follow. This rejection of idealism is what makes Ibsen modern, she contends, albeit simplistically: “Destroyer of the old, fervent believer in the new: this is a quintessentially modernist attitude” (314). In addition to challenging the stronghold of idealism, Ibsen incorporates other elements indicative of modernism in his plays, such as skepticism, theatricality, and a mistrust of language. Moi bases much of her theorizing about skepticism and finitude on the philosophy of Stanley Cavell. For example, examining skepticism in The Wild Duck, Moi illustrates how the characters’ vague, unspecific usage of language signals the modernist mistrust of words: Gregers uses metaphors that are so obscure as to promote chaos, while Hjalmar breaks his promises, showing that his “word” is empty. Another form of skepticism Moi

Review of Literature (Chirico) points to in Ibsen’s drama is the characters’ inability to use language to connect to another person. While the idealist artist portrays the unification of souls as a possibility, the skeptical stance in Rosmersholm denies this; Rosmer and Rebecca confront the truth of never knowing what each other truly thinks or feels. Emperor and Galilean, a play long-hailed by idealists as upholding Christianity, ushers in the skeptical hero Julian as he questions the existence of a deity. Unable to find a pre-scripted destiny created by divine forces, he reveals an emerging thread of skepticism in the universe. Further, Moi looks at how characters theatricalize themselves and argues that Ibsen’s focus on their performative nature makes him modernist. The Bernick family in Pillars of Society is grouped by the window and dressed to showcase themselves to the outside world. At one point Rummel, a wholesale merchant, explains how “a citizen’s home should be like a glass cabinet” (qtd. Moi 220). Moi infers through reading the scene that “A bourgeois family should be constantly self-theatricalizing; not simply by always living as if it were on display, but by living in full and constant consciousness of the fact” (220). Moi finds frequent examples of such theatricality, and, while this reading of Ibsen is not new (many scholars have noted that Ibsen critiques the hypocrisy of society), she uses this self-referential quality to prove that Ibsen’s plays are modern. For example, she analyzes Nora’s tarantella in A Doll’s House as a scene of heightened theatricality due to her own recognition that she is dancing (performing) badly in order to discourage Torvald from finding Krogstad’s letter. Her analysis incorporates two different critical perspectives: Stanley Cavell explains that the over-exaggerated emotional quality of melodrama reveals the character’s fear of ex-

215

treme voicelessness; thus Nora’s dance movement is stagey and emotionally excessive in order to be heard. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, argues that the body reveals the soul and that here we see Nora’s self-expression of her innermost anxiety. These two philosophical stances reveal how Ibsen’s modernism expresses the unsayable (Nora’s voicelessness) in addition to representing the self through non-linguistic means (her dance): “Ibsen’s modernism is based on the sense that we need theater ... to reveal to us the games of concealment and theatricalization in which we inevitably engage in everyday life” (241). Repeatedly, Moi offers readings of the plays that do not necessarily reveal new interpretations, but work to tie Ibsen to the conventions that define modernism — in this case, reference to the art form itself. Moi devotes a chapter to Ibsen’s visual world, including color plates of the discussed paintings, and analyzes the keen interrelationship between these works and the theatre. Painters had to make their characters and stories immediately relevant to the viewers, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) led the movement of creating pregnant, dramatic moments that could be readily understood. Theatre, on the other hand, used actors to recreate the scenes from famous paintings (tableaux vivants) and emphasized the striking visual effect that would absorb the audience in the spectacle. As followers of Denis Diderot (1713–84) believed, the goal was “to maximize the illusion of reality by immersing the spectator in the experience” (qtd. Moi 121). While this discussion of melodramatic theatrical scenes situates Ibsen more firmly in the nineteenth century, it is important to recognize Ibsen’s immediate artistic influences in order to grasp how the modernist shift in paintings occurred in Ibsen’s plays, namely the interioriza-

216

Review of Literature (Chirico)

tion of the dramatic moment. Paintings such as The First Cloud (1887), by William Quiller Orchardson, wherein a wife turns her back on her husband and departs the room, shifts the focus from the climactic moment to the character’s psychological state: “the pregnant moment is no longer one of external passion and action; rather, it has become mostly psychological and internal” (134). Just as in paintings, Ibsen’s drama shifted from staging tableaux for their dramatic potential, to a dramaturgy that demonstrated the souls of the characters. The loft in The Wild Duck conveys Hedvig’s dreams. Balledsted’s empty paintings in The Lady from the Sea emblematize Ellida’s depression. In other words, Ibsen’s modernism can be seen in the slow erasure of the story and the beginnings of the Symbolist preoccupation with states of mind. It seems peculiar that in aiming to place Ibsen as a modernist, Moi does not consider other modernist writers as part of her argument, such as Symbolist playwrights. Moi might have done well to connect Ibsen’s modernity to Virginia Woolf ’s, as Woolf co-mingled the Victorian realism of domestic furnishings, armchairs, and boots with the subterranean quality of life her characters were unable to express. “What is this thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?” Woolf asks in The Waves,1 a question no different than Nora’s ineffable phrase “the most wonderful thing” to restore her marriage or Hedvig’s inscrutable reference to the loft as “the bottom of the sea.” In fact, the Symbolist connection is further supported by Moi’s summary of Inga-Stina Ewbank’s invaluable 1998 article “Translating Ibsen for the English Stage” (Appendix 2), which demonstrates Ibsen’s use of pedestrian phrases to convey resonant feelings, such as the phrase from The Master Builder “dette med oss

to” (“this with us two”). Because most Ibsen scholars read him in translation, linguistically we focus on the subtext of his characters’ dialogue rather than being able to acknowledge the impact singular words or phrases might have. Likewise, the usefulness of having Moi, a Norwegian by birth, translate Norwegian passages of Ibsen and provide us with the subtleties of his word choice cannot be underestimated, such as her demonstrating the dual meaning of “testimony” and “evidence” from the term “vidnesbyrd ” in Rosmersholm when Rosmer searches for proof that Rebecca loves him (285–286). Noticeably absent is acknowledgement of other scholarship on Ibsen, especially recent texts such as Ibsen and the Great World (Lebowitz, Louisiana State UP 1990), Ibsen’s Women (Templeton, Cambridge UP 1997), or Violence and Modernism: Ibsen, Joyce and Woolf ( Johnsen, UP of Florida 2003). She cites theater reviews from Ibsen’s contemporaries, but quotes remarkably few scholars in her discussion, relying on Errol Durbach and her own readings of the plays in the original. At one point, she mentions the vast secondary literature on Hedda Gabler and refers to a collection of essays Et skjær av uvilkårlig skjønnhet edited by Anne Marie Rekdal, which is clearly of no use to an audience of English speakers. While it is helpful to an Anglo-American audience to have a scholar of Moi’s significance read Ibsen in the original, we would have derived benefit from her translating Norwegian scholars’ remarks on Ibsen. Her book is fascinating to delve into, but overall inconsistent and hard to read as a cohesive argument; the reliance on subheadings throughout the chapters indicates the sporadic quality of the argument. Perhaps the greatest aspect of the book is Moi’s argument for Ibsen’s rightful place as an originator of modernism, and that mod-

Review of Literature (Egerton) ernism as a literary movement did not begin “on or about December 10, 1910” but had its roots firmly in the late nineteenth century.

Reference 1. London: Penguin, 1992: p. 123.

MIRIAM CHIRICO Eastern Connecticut State University Enoch Brater, ed. Arthur Miller’s Global Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. Pp. 154. Hardcover $49.50. Arthur Miller’s presence on the world stage has long been a subject of inquiry, both because of the wide-spread popularity of his earlier plays such as All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and The Crucible, and because his later works often found more appreciative audiences on stages far from home. Enoch Brater, the Kenneth T. Rowe Collegiate Professor of Dramatic Literature at the University of Michigan, contributes to Arthur Miller studies with this collection that situates Miller’s work where it is often most highly appreciated — outside the United States. The wide-ranging essays in this compact volume examine how and why Miller’s work is read and produced around the world, from Spain to China, in South Africa and Japan. At the same time, Brater also brings in voices that reflect on Miller’s reception in Scandinavia and Ireland, recalling the influence of Ibsen and the Abbey Theatre on Miller’s own theatrical sensibilities. Arthur Miller’s Global Theater grew out of the University of Michigan’s 2000 conference celebrating Arthur Miller’s eighty-fifth birthday, and compiles the work of a wide range of international scholars and theatre professionals. Brater’s introductory essay, “Cross-

217

Cultural Encounters: Arthur Miller and the International Theatre Community,” provides a useful overview of the first half of Miller’s career in America, and then begins to explore how his work — old and new — was taken up abroad. Brater considers the likely appearance of Miller’s plays both in “moments of grim political tension” (10) in Argentina or Israel, or as a vibrant contributor to the London scene where, as David Thacker remarked, “we consider [Miller] only a little lower than Shakespeare, but a little higher than God” (7). Brater also notes those countries where Miller’s work has not found wide popularity, either for reasons of censorship, as in Russia and many Arab countries, distaste (Incident at Vichy was a complete failure in France), or marginalization. In India, for example, Brater observes that Miller’s plays have yet to make an impact outside of Anglophile communities. This collection spends many of its pages considering Miller’s theatrical output in places where translation and adaptation are neither automatic nor easy. In their breadth, these essays point to several crucial features scholars should keep in mind when considering Miller’s world-wide impact, including the amazing saturation Miller’s plays have achieved in different countries. For example, Linda Ben-Zevi points out that All My Sons has been widely read and studied by college-bound Israeli high school students since it replaced Julius Caesar in the standard curriculum for advanced English classes in the 1970s. This switch becomes particularly relevant because nearly all of those Israeli students would soon enter the military, where the story of Joe Keller could be difficult to forget. Other connections between the Jewish-American Miller and the Israeli public include a production of All My Sons that ran for three years on the heels

218

Review of Literature (Egerton)

of the Six Days’ and Yom Kippur Wars and was seen by nearly 30 percent of the population, as well as his 1988 poem “Waiting for the Teacher.” This work, trembling with Old Testament cadences, appeared in Ha’aretz soon after the fiftieth anniversary of the Israeli state. “The call for justice and compassion,” BenZevi explains, “is the same one he delivered for over fifty years in his role as playwright/teacher/prophet” (17). While The Crucible may be frequently taught in American schools, it is by no means ubiquitous. More importantly, high school students in the United States do not have the same relationship to military service as their Israeli counterparts. This collection not only considers theatres in which Miller triumphs. In his essay “Not All One Song: Arthur Miller in the German Theatre,” Michael Raab explains that “[a] play as linear and tightly plotted as All My Sons is not particularly appealing to [German] directors keen to demonstrate their own uniqueness” (79). In Germany, when it thrives at all, Miller’s work succeeds in commercial theatres rather than in the subsidized realm. Surprisingly, this reversal holds even for Miller’s later plays, such as Broken Glass, Mr. Peter’s Connections, and The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, none of which were commercial hits in the United States. This volume’s greatest contribution may be to demonstrate how Miller’s work, when produced abroad, often complements larger social, political, and theatrical stories. The most notable instance here can be found in Belinda Kong’s excellent essay “Traveling Man, Traveling Culture: Death of a Salesman and PostMao Chinese Theatre.” Not least because of Miller’s own book on the subject, Salesman in Beijing, Miller’s direction of Willy Loman’s story by the People’s Art Theatre in 1983 is often read as an ex-

emplar of Miller’s impact abroad. However, Kong gently argues against Miller’s own statements on the import of his work in China to establish how, for China’s own theatre, “it is more than a little ironic that this project seemed vitally contingent on Miller’s ignorance on the ideological minefield over which he traversed” (53). Kong capably surveys this complex territory, keeping in mind that many of her readers are coming to the Chinese material for the first time. Without diminishing Miller’s stature or skills, she makes it clear how the People’s Art Theatre’s production needed Miller’s involvement for different reasons than he himself understood. Likewise, John T. Dorsey explores the cultural contexts of Miller’s plays in Japan, where “the cultural wing of the American occupation at first encouraged the reading and translating of works by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, but later discouraged dissemination of their plays because they showed America in a negative light” (108). Dorsey explains how, after the end of the occupation in 1952, Miller’s work was taken up by Japan’s Theatre Troupe of Mingei, a company devoted to social theatre and attracted to Miller’s class consciousness. Several essays address how local theatrical practices affect stagings of Miller plays abroad, whether it is the question of director- vs. actor-centered theatres in Germany, or Yiddish- vs. Spanish-language productions in Argentina. In “Miller in Scandinavia: Focus on Denmark,” Kirsten Herold explains that Miller’s post-war popularity in Denmark can be attributed to both the comforting familiarity of Miller’s “Ibsenite, socially realistic drama” (137) and to the ubiquity of Death of a Salesman in Danish schools, to the point where Herold calls Salesman “the seminal text of post–World War II drama in Denmark” (136). Unfortu-

Review of Literature (Innes) nately, in Herold’s view, this comfort has often led to somewhat stagnant productions, heavy on realism and light on Miller’s expressionistic experimentation. Arthur Miller’s Global Theater includes offerings from practitioners as well as scholars, including Brater’s interview with Darryl V. Jones on his 1995 production of A View from the Bridge that reset the play among Dominican immigrants to New York. Miller frequently rejected directors’ requests to revise or reimagine his work, but he gladly cooperated with Jones’ vision. In his essay, “The Crucible: Three British Encounters,” British producer Louis Marks describes The Crucible’s impact at the Royal Court in 1956, and his subsequent production of the play for the BBC’s Play of the Month in 1980. This valuable collection greatly broadens scholarly consideration of Miller’s legacy. The essays create a textured and nuanced view of Miller’s global impact, pointing out both his strengths and weaknesses, triumphs and trials. The often extensive notes give readers an entry into the wide range of sources drawn on by these authors, and while an index would be welcome, this relatively brief collection is still very accessible without one. Arthur Miller’s Global Theater makes a fine addition to Miller scholarship, and will be of great use to scholars and students of both American and comparative drama. KATHERINE EGERTON Berea College Luckhurst, Mary. Dramaturg y: A Revolution in Theatre. Cambridge Studies in Modern Theatre. Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. 312. Hardcover $95.00. Paperback $39.99. What is a dramaturg? The word is

219

foreign to the English language, and in terms of English theatre at least treated with suspicion and up until very recently, denied any effective place in the production process, while even the spelling of the term itself— dramaturg, dramaturge, dramaturgist — is vague. Mary Luckhurst’s book is the first extended study of dramaturgy to be published that focuses specifically on England. Luckhurst traces the origin of the word to Ancient Greek, although this must be misleading, since the Greek theatre worked on such very different principles to the modern European as to make the term untranslatable and untransferable. In fact, when it was initially introduced into German, a Greek-derived word was adopted to lend the new function of dramaturgy a sense of intellectual importance from the classical echo. If one searches the web it becomes clear exactly how confusing the term can be. For instance, International Arts Resources lists the term as follows: “Dramaturgy Resources for the Theatre.” Note: This section of Artslynx is difficult to organize since the theatre dramaturg makes use of so many resources in OTHER parts of Artslynx. With this in mind we hope you explore the [Artslynx] site in its entirety including the complete collection of theatre resources.” (http:// www.artslynx.org/theatre/drama.htm) However, perhaps because of the problems of definition (which at one point leads Luckhurst in an all-too academic trope, luckily not characteristic of her argument as a whole, to give a dictionary definition of “definition”) Dramaturg y: A Revolution in Theatre focuses only on a single and very specific type of dramaturg. The book forms an impassioned plea for the employment of dramaturgs in Britain; and as such it is an extremely valuable contribution to a highly current debate. But, while it covers the main his-

220

Review of Literature (Innes)

torical bases (which are of course primarily German: Lessing, Brecht), the book is also extremely Anglocentric, so that it is the role defined by William Archer and Harley Granville Barker at the beginning of the twentieth century, and taken on much later by Kenneth Tynan, which is promoted here. Yet, as Luckhurst so ably demonstrates, making the most of access to the Tynan papers which have recently become available at the British Library, Tynan’s position at the National Theatre was untenable; and while he managed to set the repertoire, he was personally incapable of dealing with the more practical functions of a dramaturg, even proving unable to document a production effectively, and presenting himself as too much a critic to intervene profitably in rehearsals. As a case study of how not to establish yourself as a dramaturg the section on Tynan is one of the more fascinating in the book, but it is used to promote the rather one-sided model of dramaturgy he was able to practice. This has a certain appropriateness, since Tynan was, in effect, the first practicing dramaturg in England. But paradoxically, precisely because Luckhurst is such a capable critic, she demonstrates how the nature of Tynan’s influence on the very new profession he represented is clearly limited by his personal failings, which exacerbated the structural problems of the National Theatre organization. Herself a dramaturg at the Cambridge Arts Theatre in the 1980s, Luckhurst has the experience in developing new writers that gives her comments weight (although it also leads to privileging the role of dramaturg in dealing with new work), so that while the other aspects of dramaturgical work are certainly mentioned, the role of production dramaturg is left aside, in favor of the literary manager. Taking Tynan as a model reinforces this.

There are many interesting aspects to this study, not the least of which are the historical data mined to show the existence of an invisible layer of people in effect serving as unrecognized dramaturgs in the early-twentieth century, and even during the notoriously anti-intellectual period in English theatre: the Victorian actor-manager era. However, in a very British way, while espousing theory, there is nothing theoretical about Dramaturg y: A Revolution in Theatre —instead theory becomes a focus on function through history. And the most useful section of the book is in many ways the final chapter on “Dramaturgy and literary management in England today,” which describes how contemporary dramaturgs operate at the National, the Royal Court, and the Royal Shakespeare Company as well as at a number of leading regional theatres, plus the East Midlands Theatre Writing Partnership (which confirms the almost exclusively literary definition of dramaturgy in this book). However, the book’s main interest lies in the extraneous facts that emerge. After a useful overview of the status of dramaturgy in England today, Luckhurst goes on to give case histories that document the roles played by dramaturgs. This reveals some truly interesting information. For instance, with respect to the numbers of new scripts that inundate theatre managements, which seems to be the major reason why people are being hired in dramaturgical positions in England. Astonishingly, the National Theatre receives about 1,500 unsolicited scripts each year, and even the Royal Shakespeare Company gets upwards of 1,000, while the Royal Court with its longstanding reputation as a writers’ theatre deals with around 3,000 new scripts. Add to that the regional theatres, all of which emphasize new play development and which seem to receive

Review of Literature (Liu) around 500 scripts a year — and the total of new scripts produced in England each year, almost exclusively by unknown authors, since established dramatists will be commissioned, is likely in the region of 10,000 or more, even taking into account multiple submissions (which are unlikely in the regions, where the focus is on developing local talent). This is an amazing figure, because it demonstrates the existence of not only an unexpectedly wide creative culture in supposedly philistine Britain, but also the sense that the theatre (always denigrated in comparison to the audience-reach of films or television) has, in fact, a real social importance in the minds of would-be writers. It also reveals the extent to which the Literary-Manager type of dramaturg has already become formally adopted across the country in state-subsidized theatres. As Luckhurst demonstrates, in Europe at least the position of dramaturg is very much identified with the establishment of national theatres (although this is by no means the situation in North America, as the high-profile 2003 law suit of Lynn Thomas about her dramaturgical input to the musical Rent clearly indicates). This is the sort of assumption likely to make this book less appropriate for North American readers. Also it is clear this book has required extensive research, with some material coming from interviews in 1998. And in the intervening decade things have changed, even in the England that Luckhurst shows as being so backward in this respect. So, while the book tends to take on the tone of a lone voice crying in the wilderness, there are, now, as indeed is mentioned, courses and degrees in dramaturgy offered at some British universities, and it has become usual (outside the West End) for theatres to employ at least the Literary-Manger type of dramaturg. Throughout the book North

221

America is held up as an example of what could be achieved in England, although despite the number of universities in the United States teaching Dramaturgy, the dramaturg is still an endangered and very fragile species. By comparison, the revolution being called for in England seems, in fact, to be well on the road to success, perhaps more so than in North America. CHRISTOPHER INNES York University, Toronto Kiki Gounaridou, ed. Staging Nationalism: Essays on Theatre and National Identity. Jefferson, NC : McFarland, 2005. Pp. 243. Paperback $39.95. Unlike most conferences where a typical panel features three or four speakers, a “working session” of the annual American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) conference usually includes seminars with double-digit panelists who, having read each others’ papers, use the two-hour session for discussion. Among other benefits, this formula is perfectly suited to produce anthologies both because of the right number of papers and the precise focus. A good example of such a success story is Staging Nationalism: Essays on Theatre and National Identity, a collection of ten papers from the 2002 ASTR research group on National Identity/National Culture that focused on “Composing National Identity Through the (Re)Construction of National Culture.” Expertly edited by Kiki Gounaridou, these essays offer an impressive range of historical and geographical perspectives on the role of theatre in the construction of national identities in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe over the past two centuries, often during a time of a nation’s existential crisis. Taken together, these essays provide fresh evidence about and intriguing explorations

222

Review of Literature (Liu)

of the fluidity of the notion of national identity. In her introduction, apart from providing a very informative guide to each essay, Gounaridou also offers a provocative point of departure through the lens of a 1997 Greek production of The Bacchae and its hostile reception from the critics and the audience alike. Through such postmodern devices as making contemporary the chorus of women, adopting foreign dialects and casting a French actress as Agave, and using such uncontrollable stage presences as children and animals, the Zurich-born director Matthias Langhoof problematizes “the myth of a unified national cultural identity in contemporary Greek society” (4). Gounaridou’s choice and analysis of this example serves to unify the essays in the volume in two ways: by challenging the very notion of a unifying high cultural point in the past, including that of Greek tragedy as the root of Western culture, and by focusing on the role of the artist in relation to governments with strong incentives to promote that notion or myth. The essays in the collection are arranged roughly in chronological order, starting from the partition of Poland in the late-eighteenth century. In “Reconstructing the Nation: Conflicting Cultural Imaginaries in Eighteenth-Century Poland,” Natalya Baldyga considers the role of a Polish play in questioning the fallacy of a re-invented national heritage by the Polish aristocracy known as Sarmatism. The rest of the essays offer similarly illuminating explorations in other cultures and historical junctures: whether through the analysis of post–Revolution pageants and street theatre in praise of the French Revolution, as Scott Magelssen does in “Celebrating the Revolution While the King Is Still on the Throne: The Fall of the Bastille and The

Festival of Federation ( July 1790);” or through the analysis of the dedication poems at theatre openings in new American cities in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century that invoke the Athenian glory, as Gary Jay Williams discusses in “Athenian Prologue to an American Theatre;” or through the analysis of a contemporary Algerian play on the brutality of Algeria’s civil war against Islamist insurgents that recasts the conventional image of Algeria as a beautiful but distant woman into the incarnation of both national dismemberment and Algeria’s will to rise and prevail, as in “The Corpse of Algerian Identity: Achour Ouamara’s La Défunte (The Deceased )” by Susan Haedicke. In the same vein but with an additional East-West twist, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei’s “Remembering and Forgetting: Greek Tragedy as National History in Postwar Japan” examines how Greek tragedy became the vehicle for the “sense of ambiguity regarding Japan’s identity [that] reigned throughout the [post– World War II American] Occupation and continues to this day” (127) in Japan’s little theatre movement known as angura. Here, Sorgenfrei offers a nuanced reading of Japanese adaptation of Greek tragedies as the cross-interaction of the American push for Western democracy, the kabuki tradition of adopting ancient — transformed as foreign in this case — sources for oblique social commentary, and a familiarity with Western drama in modern Japanese theatre. It was the blending of these foreign and familiar traditions that provided the theatrical, cultural, and ideological tension and attraction of these Japanese adaptations of Greek tragedies. The role of the artist vis-à-vis the government’s nationalist agenda through accounts of the artists’ careers constitutes the focus of two essays. In “Robert Lepage: Product of Québec?” Karen Fricker

Review of Literature (Loomis) explores the implicit contradictions of the Québec government’s pursuit of its national culture as both nationalist and internationalist and its effect on the conflicting images of Lepage as a national hero and sometimes traitor because of his international themes, tours, and investors. Another example is offered by Evan Darwin Winet in “The Critical Absence of Indonesia in W.S. Rendra’s Village,” which studies the playwright Rendra’s relationship with Suharto’s military government when his plays were first banned for eight years but were hailed twenty years later as national classics. There is a wide spectrum in terms of the breadth of the essays, ranging from the analysis of a single play or the analysis of a single artist to the analysis of a broad movement. In the latter category, two essays stand out for their sweeping range. The first of these is S. E. Wilmer’s “Herder and European Theatre,” in which Wilmer documents the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder’s role in creating the myth of the Volkgeist, or folk culture, as the essence of national identity in “underdeveloped” European nations, often “established to further the claim of the cultural nationalist movement” (72). Apart from its forceful deconstruction of European national theatres as constructs, the essay also provides a critical tool for studying non–Western cultural movements that claim Volkgeist as the backbone of a national identity, as did India’s Tagore or China’s National Theatre Movement and peasant theatre in the 1920s and 1930s. On a similarly broad scale, David Pellegrini’s thorough and detailed survey of the Japanese avant-garde movement stands out in its depth and span. It maps works of the Japanese avant-garde onto their European counterparts and offers a reading of the convoluted relationship between the artists and the military gov-

223

ernment during the period of the two world wars that resulted in the eventual assimilation of the avant-garde discourse and praxis into Japanese fascism. The relationship between the avant-garde and authoritarianism has been a hot topic in recent scholarly research, and Pellegrini’s essay offers a great addition. While geographical and cultural diversity is a definite strength of this volume, some essays do seem to struggle somewhat in finding the most optimal balance between a tight focus and background information. As someone whose work focuses on non–Western theatre, I can easily empathize with the authors. The danger, of course, is when the overflow of background information overpowers and dilutes the main argument. Hopefully, the need to provide background information will lessen as theatre and performance studies move away from a Eurocentric tradition and more non–Western theatre studies become part of our common discourse. Until then, of course, the tricky balance is always necessary. Overall, this is an extremely welledited and written volume. It should make a considerable contribution to the ongoing discourse of theatre’s role in creating national identity in a postcolonial world. SIYUAN LIU University of Georgia Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten. Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. 271. Hardcover $32.95. Plays about science and scientists (e.g., Galileo, Einstein, Curie, Darwin) continue to appear, both onstage and in print, with ever-increasing regularity. One active Kansas City, Missouri theatre

224

Review of Literature (Loomis)

company features an entire subscription season series devoted to science plays. Hence, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr’s book has definite relevance as a scholarly study for our era. Science plays, often with basically bare stages, generally “de-emphasize spectacle,” Shepherd-Barr remarks (2), and exercise “the audience’s imagination” (2) because they explain complex notions about biology, mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, medicine, and physics. She adds that the chief theme of most science plays today is “the public responsibility of the scientist,” rather than the technicalities of the scientific disciplines. And yet, in any case, almost always, the plays have considerable amounts to say about many topics, and they are almost never at all spiritually numb. They seem to prove, at heart, as Shepherd-Barr quotes in John Stokes’s words, fairly broad-ranged “attempts to investigate human problems” simply “by reference to scientific ideas” (qtd. in Shepherd-Barr 4). Early in her monograph, ShepherdBarr foregrounds two contrasting responses to science. First of all, ever since Christopher Marlowe’s Elizabethan-era Doctor Faustus (and continuing with such Renaissance compositions as Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, such later works as Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, and such modern classics as Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth and Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo), dramatists have exposed, both in historical and fictional scientists, an array of socially plaguesome behaviors. Sometimes the character’s flaw is greed, sometimes deliberate duplicitous chicanery, sometimes mere self-absorption, or (as in Gorki’s 1905 Children of the Sun and Andreyev’s 1907 To the Stars [219–220]) sometimes a sickly nerdish withdrawal from almost all meaningful interpersonal living. Recent plays in this tradition of exposing scientists’ inner faults and/or ex-

ternalized mistakes especially include, says Shepherd-Barr, Shelagh Stephenson’s An Experiment with an Air Pump (1998), which offers us a sense of a “science ... utterly corrupted by the enticements of industry” (23). By contrast with these works, Goethe’s post–Enlightenment Faust, at least eventually, mostly posits, in Shepherd-Barr’s opinion (19–20), science as a socially useful contribution, rather than as a weapon to be used for drearily selfcentered personal aggrandizement. What surprises one, though, is how few other fullfledged science-affirming plays Shepherd-Barr (or anyone) can historically locate — although she does briefly refer to Sidney Kingsley’s 1930s hospital drama, Men in White (156). One could add, I think, from that same era, Sidney Howard’s Yellow Jack, the representation of Walter Reed’s noble fight to discover the yellow fever virus, and it seems, too, that Lawrence’s and Lee’s 1955 indictment of blind anti–Darwinians, Inherit the Wind, could be said also to herald rather strongly the value of scientific endeavor. However, even many recent studies of history’s ignored scientific achievers (e.g., Vern Thiessen’s recent Einstein’s Gift, about Fritz Haber, and Peter Parnell’s QED, about Richard Feynman [221, 229]) are pretty much just as concerned with science’s ethical dilemmas as were any drama-of-science works that preceded them. The bulk of Shepherd-Barr’s book treats, in consecutive chapters, multiple dramatic works devoted to specific scientific disciplines. In the opening chapter, concerning physics plays, ShepherdBarr begins with Living Newspaper dramas, especially E=mc 2 (1948), by Federal Theatre Project director Hattie Flanagan Davis herself. There is much value in this chapter, even if one only peruses it to uncover data concerning the

Review of Literature (Loomis) Living Newspaper movement—for Flanagan Davis’s play, with its obviously quite allegorical portrait of interactions between Atom and Professor, broadens one’s view of the stylistic range possible in Living Newspaper scripts (64). The play, however, strikes Shepherd-Barr as somewhat scientifically inaccurate — since atoms are not actually “volatile and ‘hypomanic’” in the way that Flanagan Davis feels compelled to depict them (67). Of course, Shepherd-Barr acknowledges that Flanagan Davis made her stage character Atom behave so shrilly simply because she was trying to present “nuclear energy” as both potentially beneficial and mismanageable (67). Shepherd-Barr also intelligently treats such physics plays as Heinar Kipphardt’s In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists, and Brenton’s The Genius. Then she turns to providing an entire quite valuable chapter considering nuances within Michael Frayn’s drama Copenhagen. She well defines how that highly successful production has exposed “uncertainty” as both a scientific principle and simultaneously a fit label for describing the divagations of human memory. She also reveals herself as especially skilled in treating (both by examining the blocking of its actors and the handling of its lighting effects) this play’s mimicking of an atom’s shape and patterns of movement (96). Shepherd-Barr, in this chapter, definitely demonstrates the same general gifts as a careful literary-theatrical analyst which she will later apply to lengthy and quite insightful exegeses of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s After Darwin, in Chapter Five (“Evolution in Performance”); of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, in Chapter Six (“Mathematics and Thermodynamics in the Theater”); and of G. B. Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma, Margaret Edson’s Wit, and Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney, in Chap-

225

ter Seven (subtitled “Medicine under the Scalpel”). One of Shepherd-Barr’s major contentions is that, like Copenhagen, all truly vital science plays “perform” the science that they are illustrating (36). Thus, for instance, she finds David Auburn’s Proof a good play, but not a good science play, because “the science (or, in Proof ’s case, the math) is superficially imposed on the play” (36). Despite finely detailed probing of dramatic works, however, and a competence in conveying much valuable information, Shepherd-Barr less pointedly theorizes about the drama-of-science movement. She does consult numerous other writers on the subject, of course, and sometimes the quotations she offers from them have considerable merit. For instance, in a late chapter, she evaluates an emerging sub-genre of “postdramatic” science plays, and she finds that they seem structurally “spatial rather than linear” (214). Shepherd-Barr valuably quotes here from Natalie Crohn Schmitt, who makes “the eclecticism of postmodernism” suddenly much easier to understand — as a playful literary mode in which, according to Crohn Schmitt, “the present moment includes all associations extending in time and space without bounds” (qtd. in Shepherd-Barr 214). Additionally, in her comments about “metatheatrical” dimensions in recent plays about medicine (181), ShepherdBarr, albeit offhandedly, makes one sense that once again, as in Renaissance tragedy, addressing the audience today can vitally prove an emotionally induced (and inducing) activity, rather than that stance of detached intellectualism to which Brecht at least claimed to aspire. Finally, I particularly rejoice that Shepherd-Barr has often offered me the type of solidly postulated and textually supported literary criticism for which I

226

Review of Literature (Saddik)

would most ardently advocate. Yet I would quibble that she has simultaneously shortchanged me (and others) by not defining, with full precision, all the scientific terms she uses. If she defines “complementarity,” a term that she uses a full eight times, she does so only in the evanescent, one-time-proffered, phrase “the connection between particles and humans” (102). And repeatedly, in her discussion of John Barrow’s modern mathematics play Infinities, she tosses in terms like “the Duplication Paradox” or “the Grandmother Paradox” (152–153), as well as mention of historical events like “the famous conflict between the nineteenth-century mathematicians Cantor and Kronecker” (152), with no explanation of such terminology and history at all. Even if playwrights of science dramas can be said, by her, normally to “assume a certain level of education” in their audiences (9), Shepherd-Barr, to some degree, unfairly demands a level of scientific awareness that every reader will not always be able to bring to her book. JEFFREY B. LOOMIS Northwest Missouri State University

Kolin, Philip C. Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook. London: Routledge, 2007. Pp. 207. Hardcover $120. Wetmore, Kevin J., Jr., and Alycia Smith-Howard, eds. Suzan-Lori Parks: A Casebook. London: Routledge, 2007. Pp. 150. Hardcover $95. Two recent collections of essays from Routledge do a thorough job of introducing readers to a representative range of African-American women playwrights who have revolutionized the American stage with their radical departures from the techniques and dominant philosophies of dramatic realism.

While Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook sees today’s African-American women playwrights as “heirs of Lorraine Hansberry’s legacy” (Kolin 1), these experimental playwrights have absorbed the work of the past in ways that allowed them to create their own theatrical spaces, free of the limitations of rational discourse, linear dramatic structure, and realistic staging. Philip C. Kolin emphasizes that many of these playwrights work to re-imagine new forms beyond the binaries of realistic and non-realistic theatre : Anna Deavere Smith, for example “examines African American identity in a national context, but her works are neither impressionistic nor do they adhere to the formula of the well-made realistic play” (Kolin 6). Contemporary African American Women Playwrights essentially moves chronologically to cover the work of playwrights who have helped shape the American theatre over the last eighty years or so, bringing a variety of personal, cultural, and historical perspectives to the question of just what it has meant and continues to mean to be an American, an African American, and an African-American woman on the stage. Scholars Philip C. Kolin, David Krasner, Soyica Diggs, Jacqueline Wood, James Fisher, Beth Turner, Branki Wilkins Catanese, Freda Scott Giles, Joan Wylie Hall, Debby Thompson, and Sandra G. Shannon take on the difficult task of bringing together a challenging and brilliant group of playwrights whose work reaches through and beyond the category of “African-American women” in order to examine their unique contributions as well as their intersections with the history of representation in the theatre and with each other. Suzan-Lori Parks: A Casebook focuses specifically on Parks’s contributions to the American stage and addresses, among other issues, her technique of “rep

Review of Literature (Saddik) & rev” (or repetition and revision) as her plays explore the gaps in our national myths of African-American history and culture by dismantling stereotypes and presenting revisions of hegemonic historical narratives. These revisions seek to break free of the limited images that have colonized the American cultural imagination regarding race. As Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. writes in his essay on “Re-enacting : metatheatre in thuh plays of Suzan-Lori Parks,” the stage “becomes a site by which history can literally be staged. History can be re-enacted or performed again” (Wetmore 89). Covering topics such as the “metonymic mutabilities” (Garrett 3) in Parks’s Obie-Award winning play, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, her use of the chorus in In the Blood and Venus, the metatheatrical elements of her work, and the performance of masculinity in Topdog/Underdog (the first play by an African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama) scholars Kevin J. Wetmore Jr., Shawn-Marie Garrett, Heidi J. Holder, Harvey Young, Barbara Ozieblo, Len Berkman, Jason Bush, and Andrea J. Goto illustrate Parks’s versatility, her vision, and her commitment to re-imagining more complex, complete, and inclusive narratives of American history. The collection begins with a useful Chronology, and ends with Wetmore’s interview of Parks, which nicely rounds off the variety of critical perspectives that precede it. In Contemporary African American Women Playwrights, Kolin has gathered together a very impressive collection of scholars writing on African-American drama today. The essays work well together, informing each other and opening up a variety of perspectives from which to read these plays. Through eleven original essays and one interview (with playwright Lynn Nottage), Contempo-

227

rary African American Women Playwrights represents a diversity of voices, as this volume sets out “to chart the evolutionary history of these contemporary black women playwrights and to assess their contributions to American stages” (Kolin 2). Discussing the work of noted playwrights such as Lorraine Hansberry, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Zora Neal Hurston, Marita O. Bonner, Alice Childress, Sonia Sanchez, Adrienne Kennedy, Ntozake Shange, Pearl Cleage, Aishah Rahman, Glenda Dickerson, Anna Deavere Smith, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Lynn Nottage, Contemporary African American Women Playwrights covers a range of voices that have influenced each other to create new forms for the expression of the American imagination through historical constructs of race and gender as these playwrights negotiate identity, power, loss, and recovery in their plays. In his Introduction, “The struggles and triumphs of staging gender and race in contemporary African American playwrights,” Kolin provides a historical overview of the challenges of AfricanAmerican self-representation on the stage since the Harlem Renaissance, and highlights a central focus of this volume, the rejection of realistic forms and discursive language by many contemporary AfricanAmerican women playwrights in favor of more fluid forms that are better suited to the presentation of complex identities. David Krasner’s essay, “‘Something’s going on down here that concerns me’: Johnson, Hurston, Bonner, and Hansberry,” discusses the impact of three representative playwrights of the Harlem Renaissance or earlier (Georgia Douglas Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Marita O. Bonner) on the revolutionary work of Lorraine Hansberry, one of the most important dramatists of the twentieth century and the first black woman playwright to reach Broadway with her

228

Review of Literature (Saddik)

1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun. In “Performing blackness in the drama of Alice Childress,” Soyica Diggs analyzes “performances of blackness as intersectional activities that are constantly leveraged against modes of identification” (29). She explores the role of anger in Childress’s work and examines “how performances of protest, accusation, or violent verbal confrontation create identities and identifications” (30), and discusses anger as a force of change. Diggs argues that Childress’ drama “extends the aesthetic of the Black Arts Movement” by “consistently presenting her characters as situated by discourses that define the performance of blackness as the materialization of affective, social, historical and cultural discursive networks” (34). Jacqueline Wood’s essay, “‘Shaking Loose’: Sonia Sanchez’s militant drama,” argues that Sanchez (primarily known as a black revolutionary poet of the Black Arts Movement) has also impacted black militant drama through her radicalizations of language, challenging of traditional forms, and focus on women (an under-represented group in the Black Arts Movement). In this very illuminating essay, Wood analyzes Sanchez’s five unproduced/unpublished plays and argues that they have not received the critical attention they deserve. She examines these plays in terms of the struggles of black women in the black militant community and the role of Sanchez’s female characters. In “American history/African nightmare: Adrienne Kennedy and civil rights,” Kolin reads Kennedy’s plays as part of a theatre of social resistance, and analyzes the politics of race that Kennedy complexly dismantles, examining historical and cultural events alongside her plays in order to emphasize their relevance. Kolin’s analysis is followed by James Fisher’s essay on Ntozake Shange, who

was profoundly influenced by Kennedy. In “‘Boogie woogie landscapes: The dramatic/poetic collage of Ntozake Shange,” Fisher goes on to examine the influence of Ntozake Shange on other black artists in particular and the American theatre more generally. The topics of these two essays, taken together, are representative of one of this volume’s main strengths: there is constant cross-referencing of the playwrights in a way that illustrates the development of African-American drama as a collage of influences, references, and referrals, particularly with regard to re(en)visioning dramatic form. Beth Turner’s essay, “The feminist/ womanist vision of Pearl Cleage,” departs from the focus on anti-realistic staging to discuss Cleage’s embracing of the wellmade play as the form for her “feminist/womanist perspective” (99). Turner illustrates that innovative dramatic vision can certainly make use of traditional forms and yet remain revolutionary in content. Returning to non-linear structures, Brandi Wilkins Catanese explores the “polydramatic jazz aesthetic” of Aishah Rahman in “We must keep on writing,” and explores how Rahman’s polydrama can “challenge the notions of resolution that are intrinsic to the wellmade play, conforming to the unities of time and place” (119). Freda Scott Giles describes Glenda Dickerson’s theatre as “a mythopoetic theatre framed in the reality of Black women’s experience” (133) in “Glenda Dickerson’s Nu Shu: Combining feminist discourse/pedagogy/theatre” and sees her work as uniquely fusing professional theatre with academic theatre in the service of “reclaiming and restructuring the way women’s contributions are perceived and interpreted” (134). Joan Wylie Hall explores the unique style of Anna Deavere Smith in “‘Everybody’s Talking’: Anna Deavere Smith’s documentary theater,” arguing

Review of Literature (Saddik) that Smith encourages “an identification with the other that is truly radical” (151) and uses performance as a way of playing with the “mutability of identity” (153). One of the strongest essays in the volume, Debby Thompson’s “Digging the Fo’-fathers: Suzan-Lori Parks’ histories,” is a theoretical examination of the “digging” aesthetic in Parks’ plays, particularly The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World and The America Play. Exploring her “rep & rev” model of persistent repetition and revision, Thompson moves through Parks’ metonymic slidings of language and her performance of historical absence, using Foucault’s theories as a lens with which to view Parks’ project. Thompson argues that “Parks’ plays do to race in America what Foucault’s History of Sexuality did to sexuality: it “dis(-re-)members the ruptured strands of discourse that produced contemporary knowable identities” (172). Her close reading of Parks’ Venus goes on to employ Foucault’s theories of spectacle and surveillance from Discipline and Punish to illustrate how the commodification and colonization of Venus’s black body is exposed through the play’s “archeological approaches” (182). Finally, Sandra G. Shannon covers the work of Lynn Nottage in her essay, “An intimate look at the plays of Lynn Nottage,” and in an interview with the playwright. Shannon carefully explores the central themes in Nottage’s work, themes that deal with recovering history, the dynamic of language and silence, selfdefinition for black women, race and diversity, and escape from reality. In the Introduction to Suzan-Lori Parks, Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. outlines the challenges of compiling a casebook on Parks, whose work is often difficult to define and contain. Accepting that her technique of “rep & rev” works not only within Parks’ plays but as a way to read

229

her canon thus far, Wetmore successfully presents a volume of essays that provide specific contexts for reading her plays while still leaving room for recontextualizations. The first essay in the volume, Shawn-Marie Garrett’s “Figures, Speech and Form in Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom,” explores the problem of identity, specifically the self in relation to history, in Parks’ work. In “Strange Legacy: The history plays of Suzan-Lori Parks,” Heidi J. Holder explores “historical spectacle” (19) in Parks’ work, arguing that it would be more worthwhile to read her plays as rewritings of history through “an intensification of and obsession with absence” rather than through the contextual lens of African-American drama. Harvey Young moves on to a consideration of the function of the chorus in Parks’ plays, particularly In the Blood and Venus. Young convincingly argues that Parks embraces and (post)modernizes the Greek chorus in order to seek audience identification with her black, female protagonists. Barbara Ozieblo, stressing the “fun,” or postmodern playfulness with language, that Parks embraces in her work, argues in “The ‘fun that I had’: The theatrical gendering of Suzan-Lori Parks’ figures” that Parks reveals gender as a performance, a repetition of actions in postmodern fashion, in order to re-imagine new identities through performance. In “Language as Protagonist in In the Blood,” Len Berkman examines Parks’ attention to the “shaping and tensions of words, even of components of words; to the event, shock and bleeding of words; and to the shaping and tensions of word absence” (62). Jason Bush’s psychoanalytic reading of Parks’ work in “Who’s Thuh Man? Historical melodrama and the performance of masculinity in Topdog/Underdog” argues that Parks traces the his-

230

Review of Literature (Svendsen)

torical experience of African Americans in her plays and exposes a “history of repeated cycles of trauma” (74) to “recover and mourn a historical narrative about black suffering in order to work-through and politicize the social and historical conditions of the everyday experience of African-Americans” (74–75). He sees her work as a drama of recovery, “a social ritual about mourning a communal yet contingent history of suffering” (75). In “Re-enacting : metatheatre in thuh plays of Suzan-Lori Parks,” Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. points to Parks’ use of metatheatre, particularly in Devotees in the Garden of Love, The America Play, Venus, and Topdog/Underdog, concluding that, through metatheatre, Parks presents black identities that are rewritten outside hegemonic (white) dictates in acts of selfdefinition. Andrea J. Goto’s essay, “Digging out of the Pigeonhole : AfricanAmerican representation in the plays of Suzan-Lori Parks,” effectively exposes the limitations and threats of “difference theory” (107) with regard to race, and sees Parks’ plays as going beyond the “oversimplified discourse on difference” (107) to create new ways for the expression of African-American identity. The last piece in the volume, Kevin J. Wetmore’s interview with Parks, is a relaxed and illuminating look at Parks’ writing process that informs the essays in the volume. Both volumes are very useful introductions to the work of some of the most salient playwrights writing today, and offer useful bibliographies for further investigation. ANNETTE SADDIK City University of New York Goldhill, Simon. How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp.248. Hardcover $45, paperback $18.

Simon Goldhill’s How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today is a practical and highly informative study of the perennial problems directors, actors, and dramaturgs face when producing modern productions of ancient Greek tragedy. Though Goldhill explicitly states that his book is neither “a handbook for directors and actors” nor “a study of how ancient plays were performed” (4), it contains a wealth of material on both topics. Goldhill’s approach is problem-based, and he focuses his theatrical lens on six problems or questions crucial to any modern performance: theatrical space, the chorus, the actor, politics, translation, and the gods. In assessing each problem or theatrical question Goldhill briefly but clearly summarizes the resources and practices of the ancient Greek theatre and then illustrates by examples of modern productions and crucial directorial choices. The result is a thoughtful and eminently readable contribution to performance criticism and reception studies amply illustrated by many of the major productions of Greek tragedy over the last generation. Goldhill’s discussion of the problem of theatrical space begins with a description of the ancient space with its orchestra, stage building with central door, long walkways, and vertical axis. He then illustrates how four modern productions (Ariane Mnouchkine’s Les Atrides, Lee Breuer’s Gospel at Colonus, Deborah Warner’s Medea, and Annie Castledine’s Oedipus the King) have successfully reimagined theatrical space and the implications for production. Goldhill then offers a model for investigating the “symbolics of space” (29) by a close reading of Sophocles’ Electra and contrasts the productions by Deborah Warner (1988) and Jane Montgomery (2001) in terms of design and staging. The chapter closes with the particular challenges and demands posed by Euripides’ Bacchae, a

Review of Literature (Svendsen) script needing an orchestra for its powerful chorus, long walkways for several prominent entrances and exits, a central building for the problematic “palace miracle,” and verticality for Dionysus’s final epiphany. Chapter Two is devoted to the problems presented by the Greek chorus, perhaps the most distinctive and defining feature of Greek tragedy. After a brief but incisive survey of the roles of the ancient chorus (as collective, as communal voice, as character, as narrative device, and as a “hinge between scenes” [53]), Goldhill analyzes the modern problems for production, especially the fundamental cultural issue of collectivity. He then adduces three modern examples of full-scale choruses imaginatively and successfully solving the problems presented: (1) the moving gospel choir of the Gospel at Colonus; (2) the chorus of Mnouchkine’s Les Atrides borrowed from the Kathakale tradition of India; and (3) Peter Hall’s chorus wearing highly stylized masks. He then contrasts these full-scale choruses with productions using minimal or reduced choruses and the changed dynamics of productions without a collective presence. Goldhill concludes his chapter with discussions of the roles of music and dance and some suggestions for directors trying to discover the role of the chorus by analyzing Euripides’ Trojan Women and Aeschylus’s Eumenides. Goldhill’s third chapter is devoted to the actor’s role under the categories of “physical action, the speaking of words, and development of character” (81). After establishing what Greek tragedy lacks (small talk, props, and business), he examines how symbolic and charged the few props in Greek tragedy (Electra’s urn, Philoctetes’ bow and Cassandra’s robes) are and the “heightened awareness of physical gestures” (94). He then describes three kinds of speech acts posing chal-

231

lenges for the modern actor: stichomythia or formal repartee, the messenger speech, and the ancient rhesis or set speech. He concludes this chapter with a brief but informative discussion of the ancient view of character, demonstrating how the different playwrights portray character differently (with Orestes the model). In this chapter Goldhill focuses almost exclusively on the ancient texts with few modern illustrations. In contrast, Goldhill’s chapter on tragedy and politics is laced with examples of modern productions, proving both the popularity and diversity of contemporary approaches. After a section on the ancient context, establishing the civic nature and roles tragedy played in Athenian culture, Goldhill examines how tragedy “uses the drama of otherness to question the self ” (127) by contrasting Deborah Warner’s production of Electra in Derry with Annie Castledine’s production of Trojan Women in London. Goldhill’s precise point at the heart of the chapter is the need for “negotiating the necessary distance ... letting its audience fully engage in the politics of tragedy” (134). To illustrate tragedy’s complexity of political conflict with shifting positions and changing sympathies, Goldhill focuses his attention on Sophocles’ Antigone and an entire spectrum of modern productions including Jean Anouilh’s Second World War adaptation (1943), Anthol Fugard’s The Island set in South Africa (1973), and Stephen Rea’s version set in Derry in North Ireland (1984). A section on the politics of gender, illustrated by Tony Harrison’s Oresteia and John Fisher’s Medea: The Musical, concludes the chapter. Goldhill next discusses the search for a translation to use as acting script and the implications of the translation for performance. To illustrate the problem for Aeschylus’ Oresteia he compares Fred-

232

Review of Literature (Warner)

eric Raphael and Kenneth McLeish’s The Serpent Son, Tony Harrison’s version for the National Theatre in London, and Ted Hughes’s translation also for the National Theatre. He argues that each has “fidelity” (162) and that “each is fully consistent with the three very different styles of production” (161). Goldhill notes specifically the radical effects a translation can have on politics (and gender politics) by analysis of the translations of Brendan Kennelly and Tom Paulin. He discusses the distinct problems of translation posed by the Greek chorus by comparing the translations of the brief choral ode on desire in Sophocles’ Antigone by Timberlake Wertenbaker, Brendan Kennelly, and Kenneth McLeish. In conclusion, Goldhill argues that there is no single best translation, noting, however, some of his personal favorites. His underlying theme is that the choice of translation will have a profound influence on the style of performance; and that translations, like theatre itself, are interpretations and ephemeral. A final chapter focuses on the problem of representing ghosts, monsters like the Furies, “extreme” (203) figures like Herakles and Helen, and the Greek gods themselves. The latter pose a particular problem because modern expectations of divinity differ so sharply from the ancient Greek view and because of the tendency toward “staginess” (206) when they appear, especially as the deus ex machina. Goldhill notes how differently the gods are represented in the three tragic playwrights and the directorial challenge of finding both the right religious discourse and physical staging for these problematic deities. Fittingly the chapter and overall study end with a discussion of Dionysus and Euripides’s powerful, mysterious, and theatrical Bacchae. Simon Goldhill’s How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today proves a valuable contri-

bution to performance studies and a fitting companion to his Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 1986). He brings a sensitive ear and eye not only to the literary and cultural aspects of Greek tragedy but also to the texts as scripts for performance. This study will be highly useful to theatre practitioners, to experts in the field, and to beginning actors and students. With its wealth of examples drawn from modern productions, including twenty actual illustrations showing visual designs and staging, it is, like Greek tragedy itself, both timely and timeless. JAMES T. SVENDSEN University of Utah Scott-Douglass, Amy. Shakespeare Inside: The Bard Behind Bars. Shakespeare Now! Series. New York: Continuum, 2007. Pp. 144. Paperback $17.95. According to Simon Palfrey and Ewan Fernie, the editors of the Shakespeare Now! series, the “minigraphs” in their collection are intended as “intellectual adventure stories” aimed at bridging the ever-gaping gap between scholars and public audiences (xv). In the Renaissance, they remind us in the Preface, the ‘essay’ format was employed to ‘assay’ something, to test a hypothesis by putting it to a proof. One need not be an expert to try one’s hand. So it was that Amy ScottDouglass, a Renaissance scholar and assistant Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Denison University, assayed an essay on prison theatre. A friend had turned her on to a documentary film called Shakespeare Behind Bars (which was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1995), about a prison theatre program of the same name. Scott-Douglass parlayed this film into a conference paper. Palfrey and Fernie were in the audience and induced her to write a book on the topic.

Review of Literature (Warner) Scott-Douglass was hesitant to accept the assignment, not because she was a neophyte on the topic of prison theatre, but because she knew that writing a book would require visiting the prison and, in her words, “sitting down to meet with men convicted of crimes against women and girls” at “a medium-security men’s prison with an inmate populate comprised primarily of rapists, drug offenders and murderers,” which “would require a particular kind of courage” for “a single woman in her early 30s” (ix). The author faced her fears, a decision, she says, that resulted in one of “the most important and enlightening experiences of [her] adult life” (x). Based on observations and interviews, Shakespeare Inside: The Bard Behind Bars offers a voyeuristic peek inside the prison theatre program at Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in LaGrange, Kentucky. Shakespeare Behind Bars (SBB) is an inmate acting company that performs unaltered, full-length Shakespearean plays as they appear in the First Folio. The founder and director of the project is Curt Tofteland, who does double duty as Producing Artistic Director of the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival. Since 1995, SBB has staged over thirteen plays at Luckett. The ensemble labors for nine months studying and rehearsing the script in preparation for performance. Audiences include fellow inmates and correctional officers, and, on special occasions, family and friends of the players, along with teachers, artists, and social workers. Tofteland has even created a touring company that takes the troupe to neighboring institutions. Due to time constraints and prison schedules, the performances are often divided and spread out over a period of weeks or months. Shakespeare Inside is organized into five acts (the logic of which escapes me), an intermission, and epilogue. The

233

book situates itself in terms of the history of secure-setting Shakespeare and offers points of comparison to similar programs around the country, including three programs run by women (Agnes Wilcox, Jean Trounstine, and Lauza Bates) who use the bard as a point of departure for more personal explorations. The deification of Shakespeare is problematic in any context, but especially in a prison theatre program. One of the directors the author profiles, Jean Trounstine, offers a pointed feminist critique of SBB and the limitations of staging Shakespeare with inmates, but the author does not engage this issue. While the inmates credit the bard with saving their lives, a proclamation the author neither disputes nor complicates, the former warden at Luckett, and a supporter of the program, attributes the success of SBB, not to Shakespeare but to Tofteland. “If Curt was teaching crocheting it’d be a successful program” (99). It would have been interesting to hear the director’s perspective on this, but an interview with Tofteland is curiously absent from the book, an omission the author should address. Scott-Douglass broaches a range of topics and gestures toward important questions about the efficacy of performing Shakespeare with an inmate population, such as how to tackle the issue of racism in the plays (and what it means that SBB, which proudly proclaims fidelity to the bard, has on at least one occasion edited out a slur) and the politics of gender-blind casting/cross-dressing in such a highly charged homosocial environment. Rather than engage in an indepth exploration of the issues, the author glosses over them in a narrative that suffers from hyperbole, sensationalism, and sentimentality. The truly troubling aspects of the book are too numerous to mention, so I will focus on just two: identification and the author’s projection.

234

Review of Literature (Warner)

According to the inmates, Tofteland conceives of SBB as a rehabilitation program, as a form of drama therapy, and he urges inmates to choose roles that will force them to deal with their pasts. In SBB volunteering to play the antagonist, especially when the antagonist is a criminal, signifies that the inmate has “reached a milestone and ... [is] ready to deal with [his] past ... to take accountability for [his] criminal acts” (43). Most of the men in the Shakespeare program, according to Scott-Douglass, say “that they would rather play a woman than “‘the villain’” (43). It is one thing to assert that a convicted cop-killer who asks to play Caliban in The Tempest is attempting to deal with his murderous rage or that a man who killed his mistress is trying to empathize with his deceased victim through playing Desdemona. It is a different matter entirely to equate the experience of playing the role of a victim with taking responsibility for a murder. That the inmates announce their crimes to Scott-Douglass, a complete stranger, during the first few minutes of their interview, and without being prompted to do so, is cited by the author as “evidence” that the inmates have not only acknowledged their crimes, but have come to do this as a direct result of acting in a play. This kind of logic is not only flawed, but ludicrous. This is not to say that criminals cannot come to this point, but that it takes a lot more than “Will” power to accomplish this. The most disquieting aspect of the

book involves the epilogue, which appears to have been an afterthought. The author accompanies one of the inmates, Ron Brown, who is serving time for murder, to a parole hearing. Tofteland and his wife, who routinely support their ensemble members in this way, are also there. Scott-Douglass admits that this is the first time during her research that she has thought about the “actual” victims and their survivors. During the hearing, the author watches the fiancée of the deceased. She notes that the woman “sat staring directly at Ron, with sadness but also with a kind of softness in her eyes. He returned her gaze. It was almost as though they had become the couple. In their looking was something like love” (127). To say that this kind of reading is disturbing, irresponsible, and completely inappropriate does not even begin to address the matter. The word that comes to mind is egregious. The fact that this minigraph passed editorial and peer review is, quite simply, scandalous. Scott-Douglass was no specialist on prison theatre when she assayed Shakespeare Inside: The Bard Behind Bars, but given that she is at work on a companion volume, Shakespeare in the House, one can only conclude that she imagines herself to be in the process of becoming one. This reviewer can only hope that her next book aspires to be more “intellectual” and less like an “adventure story.” SARA L. WARNER Cornell University

Index Argo 194 Argonautica (epic poem by Apollonius Rhodius) 192–204; Aldine edition (1521) 193; Cini, Francesco (1608 translation)193; Dares Phrygius 193; John Gower 193, 202; Paris edition (1541) 193; Richard Brathwaite (1611) 202; tapestries 193; Thomas Heywood 193, 202; William Caxton 193, 202 Argonauts 192, 194, 200 Ariel 198, 199, 200, 201, 203 Aristotle 43, 167- 168, 178, 180–181, 189–190; Politics 197, 203 Arnson Svarlien, Diane 50 arranged marriage 151 Artaud, Antonin 85 Arthur Miller’s Global Theatre 217–219 Asansha 149 Aston, Frank 158, 165 Athens 43 Atkinson, Brooks 165 atonement 5, 14 Les Atrides 230, 231 Aurangzeb 155 Auslander, Philip 71–73, 76 Austin, J. L. 20–21 authoritarianism 223 avant-garde 223 Avila, Tom 82 Awasthi, Suresh 146 Azam 150 Aziz 150–151, 153–154

Abraham, Claude 39, 40 Abrams, M. H. 56 Abrams, Meyer 153 Achilles 42 actor 231 Adam, Antoine 29, 40 Adler, Thomas 16 Aea 193, 197, 202 Aeëtes 192, 193, 194–195, 198, 201 Aegeus 42, 52 Aeschylus 166, 169–172, 178–179 aesthetic 180, 182–185, 188, 189, 190 affirmative action 155 African American identity 226, 230 After Darwin 225 After the Fall 25 Ajax 42 Akerley, Kathleen 80, 83, 85, 86 Albertine strategy 13, 16 The Alchemist 224 Alcinous 199 Algeria 222 alienation 184–185, 188–189, 190 Alienation Effect 180 All My Sons 217–218 All That Fall 211 allegory 132, 134, 135, 137, 138, 141, 142, 154 Alonso 195, 199, 201, 202, 203 The America Play 229, 230 American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) 221 American West 64–65 L’Amour médecin 30 Anandamurthy, U. R. 150 Andreyev, Leonid 224 Angora 222 Annadurai, C. N. 155 Annis, Francesca 85 Anouilh, Jean 146, 231 Anthony, James B. 29 anti–Brahmin movement 155 Antigone 231, 232 anti-masque 138 Antonio 194, 195, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203 Aphrodite 195; and Eros 199 Apollonius Rhodius 192–204 Arcadia 225 Archer, William 220

Bacalexi, Dina 49 The Bacchae 221, 230 Badenes, José I 5 Bair, Deirdre 124–5 Bakhtin, Mikhail 39, 40 Baldyga, Natalya 222 Ball, William 80 Barakat, Matthew 81, 84, 87 Barani 154 “The Bare Manuscript” 26 Barton, James 159 The Bastille 222 Bate, John Bernard 156 Bates, Laura 233 Battuta, Ibn 149, 151–152, 156 Baudelaire, Charles 39

235

236

Index

beasts 95, 197, 203 Beckerman, Bernard 128 Beckett, Samuel 84–85, 211–213; All That Fall 211; ...but the clouds... 212; Cascando 211; Comédie 212; Eh Joe 211; Embers 211; Film 211–212; Ghost Trio 212; Nacht und Traüme 212; Not I 212; Quadrat I & II 213; Was Wo 212 Beckett and Broadcasting 211 Beckett on Film 127 Ben Chaim, Daphna 182–183, 188–190 Bengali 147, 149 Bentley, Eric 107 Ben-Ze’ev, Aaron 52 Ben-Zevi, Linda 217–218, 128 Bergson, Henri 211; Matter and Memory 211 Berkeley, Bishop 212 Berkman, Len 227, 229 Berliner Ensemble 184 Bernhardt, Sarah 140 Bertrand, Dominique 39, 40 Bevegni, Claudio 51 Bhatia, Nandi 147 Bianco, Robert 165 Bigsby, Christopher 21–23 Bishop, Neil 134 Black Arts Movement 228 Black Fairies 133, 135, 136, 137 Bleckner, Jeff 162 blending, cognitive 102–106 Blenkner, Louis 106 Blood Wedding 9, 11, 13, 14, 88 body 7, 8, 9, 12, 14, 15 Boedeker, Deborah 50 Bombay 146 Bongie, Elizabeth Bryson 49 Bonner, Marita O. 227 Borges, Jorge Luis 88 Borrow, John 226 Le Bourgeois gentilhomme 28–35, 38–41 Brahmin 151 Branagh, Kenneth 73 Branigan, Kevin 213; Radio Beckett: Musicality in the Radio Plays of Samuel Beckett 213 Brantley, Ben 112 Brater, Enoch 217–219 Bray, René 31, 40 Breath 84 Brecht, Bertolt 90–109, 146, 180–190, 208, 219, 224; Brechtian 180, 183, 189, 190 Brenton, Howard 225 Breuer, Lee 230 Brice, Fanny 208 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 212 British conquest of New France 133 British imperialism 133 Broadway 68–70, 72, 75, 77, 206, 207, 209 Brockett, Oscar G. 135, 137, 138 Brode, Douglas 86 Broderick, Matthew 163

Broken Glass 218 Brooker, Peter 186, 190 Brotton, Jerry 193 Brown, Ron 234 Bryden, Mary 211–213 Buchner, Georg 224 Bullough, Edward 180, 182–5, 189–190 Bullough, Geoffrey 193, 202 Burnett, Anne Pippin 50–51 The Burning Times 24 Burrows, Rachel 123, 128 Burton, Richard 67–75, 77 Bush, Douglas 202 Bush, Jason 227, 229 ...but the clouds... 212 La Cage 132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 141 cages 136 Caldicott, C. E. J. 40 Caliban 192, 193, 195, 196–197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203; and beast imagery 195, 197, 203; and dragons 196–197 Cambridge 125 Cambridge Arts Theatre 220 The Campbell School 124 Canon 155 Canova-Green 32 Caribbean 57 Carousel 209 Carrasquillo, Jose 78–89; interview with 8789 Carroll, Noel 71 Carter, Tim 205, 206, 207, 209 Cartes, Rosario 16 Cascando 130, 211 Castledine, Annie 230 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 8, 10, 11 Catanese, Branki Wilkins 226 Caucasian Chalk Circle (Brecht) 90–109 Causey, Matthew 67, 74 Cavanaugh, Cecelia 16 Cavell, Stanley 214–215 Caxton, William 193, 202 Ceres 196 Chanda, Arup 155 Chang, Manshu 82 Chapman, John 165 Charpentier, Marc-Antoine 33, 40 Cheng, Ying 175–178 Chennai 148 Chenoweth, Kristen 163 Children of the Sun 224 Childress, Alice 227, 228 China 146, 223 chorus 231 Chorus (in Medea) 46, 51 A Chorus Line 209 Christianity 5, 6 Cini, Francesco (Argonautica) 193 Circe 199, 203

Index Cirque du Soleil 78 Cita a ciegas 88 Cleage, Pearl 227, 228 Club Juana (Orlando) 87 Clum, John 13 cognitive linguistics 90–92 cognitive models 90–92 Colchis 50, 194, 196, 197, 198 Coleman, Robert 165 Come and Go 85, 126–127 Comédie 212 comedy 147–149, 153, 155 communalism 150 Communism 147, 153 confession 143 Congress Party 146–148 Constantinidis, Stratos E. 1–3 Contemporary African American Women Playwrights 226, 227 Copenhagen 225 Corneille, Pierre 41 Corriveau, Ludivine 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 140, 142, 143 Corriveau, Marie-Josephte 133, 134, 135, 137, 143 corruption 151 Cortez, Beatriz 13 court martial 133 Couton, Georges 40 Creon 42, 47, 51 Critique et Clinique 212 Critique of Judgment 189 Cronin, Anthony 124–5 Cronk, Nicholas 35, 40 Crowther, Bosley 75–76 The Crucible 18–27, 217–219 The Crucible in History 20 Cuba 57 Cubitt, Sean 72–73 Curie, Marie 223 Cyrene (North Africa) 200 Dalí, Salvador 7, 16, 88 Dall’Orto, Giovanni 15 dance 137 “The Dance” (painting) 82 Dandrey, Patrick 31, 40 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 7 Darwin, Charles 223 Daughter of Creon 44, 50 Daulatabad 149–150 Davenport, Guy 128 Davidson, James 52 Death of a Salesman 164, 217–218 The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World 229 Debussy, Claude 7 Demetz, Peter 187, 190 Den of Thieves 113, 116 Defaux, Gérard 29, 33, 35, 36, 40

237

La Défunte (The Deceased) 222 de Lauretis, Teresa 25 Deleuze, Gilles 211–212; Critique et clinique 212; L’Epuisé 211 Delhi 145, 149–150, 152 de Man, Paul 134 Demand, Nancy 49 desire 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 14, 15 Dessau, Paul 189 detective plays 147 deus ex machina 232 Deutsches Theater 183 Devagiri 149 Devotees in the Garden of Love 230 Dharwadker, Aparna 153, 155 Dickerson, Glenda 227, 228 Diderot, Denis 215 Digs, Soyica 226, 228 Dilks, Stephen 127, 129 Diocletian 6 Discipline and Punish 229 The Disney Company 157, 162, 163 distance 180–185, 188–190 Doctor Faustus 224 The Doctor’s Dilemma 225 A Doll’s House 215 Doña Rosita the Spinster 11 Dorsey, John T. 218 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 128 dragon 195, 196–197; and Cadmus 203 Dramatic Performances Censorship Act 147 dramaturgy 219–221 Dravidian movement 148, 152, 155–6 Dublin 24 Du Halde, J. B. 166, 179 Durbach, Errol 216 Durrenmatt, Friedrich 225 East Midlands Theatre Writing Partnership 220 Easterling, P. E. 51 “Echo and Adonis” (painting) 81–82 Ecole Normale Supérieure 124 Eddershaw, Margaret 189–190 Edson, Margaret 225 Education as Socialization and as Individuation 126 Eekhoud, Georges 15 effeminacy 13 Egerton, Katherine 18–27, 217–219 Eh Joe 211 Eichner, Daniel 81, 82, 86 Einstein, Albert 223 Einstein’s Gift 224 Electra 231 Electronovision 67–70, 72–73, 75 Embers 211 Emelina, Jean 40 Emergency (India) 145, 156 emotions, as dramatic motivation 42, 46–49

238

Index

Emperor and Galilean 215 An Enemy of the People 25 England 200 English 146, 149, 156 Entfremdung 185 epic theatre 180, 183, 185, 188 Eros 199 Essif, Les 84, 86 Esslin, Martin 181, 183, 186, 189, 190 eudaimonia (happiness/the good life) 43–45, 49–50 Eumenides 231 Euripides 42–43, 45–49, 51, 166, 168–175, 178–179 Evans, Herbert Arthur 137 Everyman 133, 135 Everywoman 132, 137, 143 Ewbank, Inga-Stina 216 An Experiment with an Air Pump 224 familial role, as dramatic motivation 42–46 family planning 155–6 farce 148, 152–3 Fartzoff, Michel 49 Fascism 223 Fauconnier, Giles, and Mark Turner (The Way We Think) 91, 102 Faust 224 Feal, Carlos 13, 14 Federal Theatre Project 224 Feingold, Michael 159, 165 feminism 132, 134 Les Femmes fatales 87 Les Femmes savants 28, 29 Ferdinand 192, 193, 195, 196, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203 Fernie, Ewan 232 Fetz, Wolfgang 15 Film 211–212 Finch, Jon 86 Finishing the Picture 25 Fisch, Karl 130 Fischerspooner 73 Fisher, James 226, 228 Fisher, John 231 Flanagan Davis, Hallie 224–225 Fleck, Stephen H. 28, 34, 40–41 flesh 8 Flory, Stewart 52 Foley, Helene P. 50–52 Folk theater (Indian) 146, 153, 155 Footfalls 84, 85, 88 Forestier, Georges 30, 41 Foucault, Michel 229 The Four Little Girls 82 Les Fourberies de Scapin 29, 41 Les Fous de Bassan 134 Frayn, Michael 225 French Revolution 222 Freud, Sigmund 211

Fricker, Karen 222 Friel, Brian 225 Fritscher, John J 16 “From the Mother Courage Model” 185 Frost, Robert 125 Fugard, Anthol 231 furniture, as category 91–92 Gage, Matilda 26 Gaines, James F. 29, 41 GALA Hispanic Theatre (Washington DC) 88 Galileo Galilei 223–224 Gandhi, Indira 145–149, 154–5 Gandhi, Sanjay 156 García Lorca, Federico 5–16; Blood Wedding 9, 11, 13, 14; Doña Rosita the Spinster 11; Mariana Pineda 11; The House of Bernarda Alba 10, 11; The Love of Don Perlimplín 11; The Public 13; The Shoemaker’s Wonderful Wife 11; When Five Years Pass 9, 13; Yerma 9, 11, 13 Garrett, Shawn-Marie 227, 229 Gassner, John 135 Gate collection 148 gay 6, 7 gaze 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 Gelb, Arthur 59, 165 Gelb, Barbara 59, 165 Gellie, George 49 gender 5, 6, 7, 12, 13, 14, 15, 141 The Genius 225 Gesner, Conrad 203 Ghost Trio 212 gibbeting 133, 136, 139 Gibert, John 52 Gibson, Ian 16 Gielgud, John 67, 68, 74 Giles, Freda Scott 226, 228 Gill, Christopher 49, 52 Giocommetti, Alberto 78, 79, 88 Given, John 42–54 The Glass Menagerie 10, 11, 12 Glengarry Glen Ross 164 Gniewek, Ray 81, 83 Goa 146 gods 232 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 224 Golden, Leon 46 Golden, Mark 49 Golden Fleece 192–201; and Hapsburgs 193 Goldhill, Simon 230–232 Gongsun, Chujiu 175–176 Gontarski, S. E. 130 Gonzalo 200, 201, 203 Gorki, Maxim 224 Gosch, Jürgen 85, 87, 88 Gospel at Colonus 230, 231 Goto, Andrea J. 227, 230 Gouhier, Henri 32 Gounaridou, Kiki 221 Gower, John 193, 202

Index Granville Barker, Harley 220 Greenblatt, Stephen 138 Grimm, Reinhold 185, 189–190 Guam 57 Guicharnaud, Jacques 39, 41 Guirgis, Stephen Adly 110–122 Gutwirth, Marcel 34 Guys and Dolls 209 Haedicke, Susan 222 Haiti 57 Hall, Joan Wylie 226, 228 Hall, Peter 231 Hamilton, Donna B. 192, 193, 202 Hamlet 67–77 Haney, Heather 82 “hanging in chains” see gibbeting Hansberry, Lorraine 226, 227 Hapsburgs, and Golden Fleece 193 Hardee, Jay 85, 88 Harpies 192, 193, 202 Harrauer, Christine 50 Harrison, A. R. W. 49 Harrison, Tony 231 Hayavadana 146 Hébert, Anne 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143 Hecate 199 Hefner, Hugh 85 Hegelian dialectic 110–111 hegemony 136 Henley, Christopher 82 Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism 213–217 Hera 193, 196, 202 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 223 Herold, Kirsten 218 Herren, Graley 211–213; Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television 211–213 Hess, Andrew C. 200 Heston, Charlton 73 heteronormative 5, 8, 9, 13, 14, 15 Heywood, Thomas 193, 194, 202 Hilton, Wendy 34, 41 Hindu 149–151 Historia animalium 203 historical drama 145, 150, 154 History of Sexuality 229 Hitchens, Christopher 116 Hitler 147 Holder, Heidi J. 227, 229 homeopathic rituals 142 Homer 42 homoeroticism 5, 6, 7, 12, 15 homophobia 6, 7, 13, 14 homosexuality 6, 13 Hope for a Harvest 57 Hornby, Richard 117, 119 Horwitz, Jane 80 The House of Bernarda Alba 10, 11 How to Do Things with Words 20–21

239

How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today 230–232 Howard, Sidney 224 Hubert, Judd D. 33, 41 Huckleberry Finn 65 Hughes, Ted 232 Hunter, Les 55 Hunter, Lindsay Brandon 67 Hurston, Zola Neale 227 Hutcheon, Linda 18 Hutchings, William 78–89, 123 Hutton, Ronald 26 Hypsipyle 195 Hytner, Nicholas 18–27 Ibsen, Henrik 146, 213–217 idealism (philosophical concept) 214 The Iceman Cometh 157, 159–165 iconography 6, 12, 15 Iliad 42 The Illusion of Power 136 Imam-ud-din 150 immolation 5, 6, 8, 12, 13, 14 Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom 227, 229 In the Blood 227, 229 In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer 225 Incident at Vichy 217 inculturation 115 independence (of India) 146–147 India 145–147, 150–152, 154–155, 223; south 145, 155; north 155 Indonesia 223 Infinities 226 Innes, Christopher 219–221 integrated musical 206 International Arts Resources 219 intertextuality 114 Iphigenia 166–167, 169–172 Iris 193, 196, 202 irony 132, 133, 134, 135, 138, 139, 140, 141 Irving, Allen 124, 129 Islam 155–156 The Island 231 Jacobus, Lee A. 186, 190 Jagannathan, N. S. 148 Jameson, Frederic 158, 165 Japan 222 Jarman, Derek 15 Jason 42–52, 173–174, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 198, 199, 200, 201 Jatra 147, 155 Jauss, Hans Robert 188–190 Jayalalitha, J. 155 jazz 228 Jerez-Farrán, Carlos 13 Jesus Hopped the A Train 111–113, 115–119 Jewish 208 Ji, Junxiang 167, 175–177, 179 Jolson, Al 208

240

Index

Johnson, Georgia Douglas 227 Jones, Darryl V. 219 Jones, Robert Emmet 12 Jonson, Ben 138, 224 Journal of Beckett Studies 130 Joyce, James 128 Judge John Crebessa 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143 justice, as category 98–102 Kabuki 222 Kali 151 Kamaraj, K. 148 Kamouraska 133, 134, 143 Kannada 145–146, 149, 154 Kansas City 223 Kant, Immanuel 189–190 Karanth, B. V. 146 Karmitz, Marin 212 Karnad, Girish 145–146, 148–151, 153–156; and Hayavadana 146; and Tughlaq 145, 149–151, 153–154 Karnataka 155 Karunanidhi, M. 155 Kaye, Richard A. 6, 15 Kennedy, Adrienne 227, 228 Kennelly, Brendan 232 Kerala 153 Kermode, Frank 192, 193, 196, 197, 202 Kern, Stephen 87 Kerr, Walter 158, 161, 165 Kingsley, Sidney 224 Kintzler, Catherine 32, 34, 39, 41 Kipphardt, Heinar 225 Kirle, Bruce 205, 206, 207, 208, 209 Klein, Dennis 13 Knowlson, James 123–125 Knox, B. M. W. 49 Kolin, Philip 11, 12, 226, 227, 228 Kong, Belinda 218 Konstan, David 52 Koprince, Susan 10, 12 Kot, Joanna 188–190 Kovacs, David 50 Kramer, Jane 73 Krasner, David 226, 227 Lacoursière, Luc 133, 143 The Lady from the Sea 216 Lady in the Dark 209 Lakoff, George 91, 94, 108 Lalit Kala Akademi 155 Lanavère, Alain 41 Langhoof, Matthias 222 The Last Days of Judas Iscariot 110–113, 115–117, 120 Last of the Mohicans 65 Latin America 57 legend 132, 134, 137 Legend of Nandan 155

Leggewie, Robert 29, 41 Lehman, Winifred 108 Leigh, Mike 129 Lenin, Vladimir 147 Lepage, Robert 222, 223 Le Poulain, Jean 37, 41 Leppert, Richard 87 L’Epuisé 211 Lescarbot, Marc 141 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 215, 219 Leverich, Lyle 16 liberation of women 132, 134, 135, 137, 139, 142 Lima, Robert 10 Liu, Siyuan 223 liveness 67–76 Lives of Saints 6 Living Newspaper dramas 224 Loomis, Jeffrey B. 223–226 Lorca, Federico García 88 Losel, Franz 106 The Love of Don Perlimplín 11 Luckhurst, Mary 219–221 Lully, Jean-Baptiste 39–41 Luther Luckett Correctional Complex 233 Lyons, Charles 128 Macbeth 78–89 Machinal 55–57, 62–66 macho/machismo 8, 10, 11, 12, 14 Madras 147–148 Magelssen, Scott 222 magic 132, 135, 137, 138, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 199, 201 MahIbhIrata 147 Mahadevan 151–152 The Maids 88 Le Malade imaginaire 28–30, 35–41 Malleus Malificarum 21 Manuwald, Bernd 51 Mapplethorpe, Robert 80 Marathi 146–147, 149 Marchese, Elena 132, 134, 135, 143 Mariana Pineda 11 Marlowe, Christopher 224 marriage, arranged 151 Martín, Eutimio 16 Martin, S. J., James 115, 118 martyr/martyrdom 5, 6, 7, 8, 14, 15 Marx, Karl 147, 185, 189 masculinity 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 Mason, Wyatt 128 masque 132, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 192, 196, 198, 202 masque of liberation 132 The Master Builder 216 Mastronarde, Donald J. 46, 50–51 Matheran 146 Matisse, Henri 82 Matt, Gerald 15 Matter and Memory 211

Index Mauer, Christopher 16 McAuley, Gay 37, 41 McCarthy, Joseph 20, 26 McClain, John 165 McDermott, Emily A. 50–51 McDonald, Marianne 49 McHardy, Fiona 50 McKellen, Ian 69 McKinney, Lauren 91 McLeish, Kenneth 232 Mcleod, Scott 130 McMillin, Scott 205, 208, 209 Medea (character) 42–52, 166, 168–169, 172–175, 179, 192, 193, 195, 196, 198, 199, 200, 201, 88, 202, 230; in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 192, 193, 196; sons of Medea 45–51 Medea (play) 42–52 Medea: The Musical 231 media mediatized 67, 74–76 megamusicals 207 memory 211, 213 Men in White 224 Merchant of Venice 193 Merton, Thomas 116 Mervis, Carolyn 108 Metamorphoses 88 metaphysics 189 metatheatre 227, 230 Mexico 55, 56, 63–65 Meyer, Jean 31, 41 Meyer, Michael 214 Miller, Arthur 18–27, 159, 217–219; After the Fall 25; All My Sons 217–218; Broken Glass 218; The Crucible 18–27, 217–219; The Crucible in History 20; Death of a Salesman 164, 217–218; Finishing the Picture 25; Incident at Vichy 217; The Misfits 20, 25; Mr. Peters Connections 218; The Ride Down Mt. Morgan 218; Salesman in Beijing 218; A View from the Bridge 219 Miller, David 125, 129 mimesis 74–75 mimetic magic 135, 140, 141, 142 minimalism 84, 88 Minkowski, Marc 41 Miranda 192–202 Le Misanthrope 28, 38, 41 The Misfits 20, 25 Mishima, Yukio 7 Mr. Peters Connections 218 Mnouchkine, Ariane 230 Moby Dick 65 moderation, as ethical ideal 47 Mohammad bin Tughlaq 145, 148–154 Mohan, Crazy 148, 155 Moi, Toril 213–217 Molière ( Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) 28–41 Molloy 130 Molly Sweeny 225 Mongrédien, Georges 40–41

241

Monk, Ray 125 Monroe, Marilyn 19–20, 25 Monsieur de Pourceaugnac 28–30, 39 monsters 193, 197, 202, 203 Montgomery, Jane 230 Moore, Mary Tyler 86 Moore, W. G. 39, 41 morality play 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 139 Mordden, Ethan 162, 165 Most, Andrea 206 mother, as category 94–98 Mother Courage 180–181, 183–190, 191 Mother Teresa of Calcutta 116 Mourning Becomes Electra 55–59, 61, 66 Mowat, Barbara A. 192 Mueller, Melissa 45, 49 The Music Man 157–165 Musical as Drama: A Study of the Principles and Conventions Behind Musical Shows from Kern to Sondheim 205, 208, 209 musical theatre 205–210 Muslim 150–151 Muybridge, Eadweard 80 myths 133, 134 Nacht und Traüme 212 Nacktkultur (Nudism) 87 Nackende Menschen 87 Nagle, D. Brendan 49 Naked 129 “Natak” company 146, 155 National School of Drama 146 National Theatre Movement (China) 223 nationalism 147, 155, 221 Nehru, Jawaharlal 145–147, 150, 154 New York City 117, 121–122 New York Times 75, 77 Nicoll, Allardyce 138 Nicomachean Ethics 43 Nostbakken, Faith 193 Not I 212 Nottage, Lynn 227, 229 Nugent, S. Georgia 46 Nurse (in Medea) 45–48, 50–51 Nussbaum, Martha C. 52 Nuttal, Anthony 202 Oakley, John H. 50 Odyssey 194; Alcinous 199 Oeconomicus 43 Oedipus the King 230 Oh! Calcutta! 78, 79, 84, 87 “Oh, Shenandoah” (song) 57, 58 Ohio Impromptu 85, 88 oikos (household) 42–45, 47, 49, 51 Oklahoma! 205, 206, 209, 210 Oklahoma! The Making of an American Musical 205 Olster 80 O’Meara, Maureen 132, 134, 139

242

Index

O’Neill, Eugene 55, 57, 59, 60, 157, 159, 161, 163–165; The Iceman Cometh 157, 159–165; Mourning Becomes Electra 55–59, 61, 66; “Tomorrow” (short story) 163 onomastics 140 The Oresteia 166, 169–172, 178–179, 231 Orgel, Stephen 136, 137 Orientalism 56, 61, 62 The Orphan of China 166–169, 173, 175, 177, 179 Orpheus 196 Orpheus Descending 9, 11 Ouamara, Achour 222 Our Lady of 121st Street 113–122 over-distance 182 Ovid (Metamorphoses) 192, 193, 194, 195, 197, 198, 202 Owens, Katharine 87 ownership, as category 92–94 Ozieblo, Barbara 227, 229 Pakistan 146 Palfrey, Simon 232 Palitzsch, Peter 91 Pallister, Janis 134, 135, 140, 143 Palmer, R. Barton 20, 22 Pancho Villa Expedition 57 parabasis 134 parable 107 Paré, Ambroise 203 Pericles 43 Parini, Jay 130 Parker, Brian 16 Parks, Suzan-Lori 226, 227, 229–230 Parsi 156 Parthasarathy, Indira 148, 155; and Aurangzeb 155; The Legend of Nandan 155 patriarchal oppression see patriarchy patriarchy 5, 6, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 132, 133, 135, 137, 140, 143 Patterson, Cynthia 42, 49 Pavel, Thomas 38, 41 Pellegrini, David 110–122, 223 People’s Art Theatre 218 Pepper, Stephen 187–190 performance 132, 133 Perumal, A. N. 148 Peterson, Douglas 199, 203 Phantom of the Opera 209 Phelan, Peggy 68, 69, 70, 72 philia (friendship/kinship) 43–45, 48, 50–52 Philip II 193 Philippine American War 57 Phillips, Doug 123–31 Phrygius, Dares 193, 202 The Physicists 225 Picasso, Pablo 82 Pillars of Society 215 Pilobolus 78 Pindar (Pythian) 200, 202

Ping 126–7 Pinter, Michael 87 play 126–127 Poetics 189 Pogrebin, Robin 165 Poland 222 Polanski, Roman 85–86, 88 politics 43 Politics 197, 203 Pomeroy, Sarah B. 42–43 postcolonialism 134 postmodernism 229 Powell, John S. 35, 41 prayer 118 Preston, Robert 161, 162 prison 232–234 Proof 225 Prospero 192–203 prototypes, of categories 91; central and radial prototypes 92–93 Proust, Marcel 123, 128, 211 “Psychical Distance” 180, 182, 184 psychodrama 145, 153–154 The Public 13 The Public Theater 74 Pudor, Heinrich 87 Quad 85 Quadrat I + II 213 Québec 132, 133, 134, 135, 140, 143, 222, 223 queer 6, 8 Raab, Michael 218 Rabinowitz, Nancy Sorkin 49–50 race 227, 228, 229, 230 Racine 128 Radio Beckett: Musicality in the Radio Plays of Samuel Beckett 213 Rahman, Aishah 227, 228 A Raisin in the Sun 228 Raphael, Frederic 232 Rea, Annabelle M. 132, 134, 135, 137, 140, 143 Reading Greek Tragedy 232 realism 226 reciprocity, as ethical ideal 44–45, 50–51 Reed, Walter 224 Rehm, Rush 49–50 Reid, Gregory J. 132 Rekdal, Anne Marie 216 religion 5, 6, 8, 10, 14, 15 religious fundamentalism 114 Ramachandran, Janaki 155 Ramachandran, M. G. 155 Ramasamy, Cho 145–146, 148–156; and Mohammad bin Tughlaq 145, 148–154 Rangachari 151 Rendra, W. S. 223 Reni, Guido 7 Rent 221

Index reservation system 147, 155 Ressoumi-Demigneux, Karim 15 revenge, as dramatic motivation 42, 45–46, 48–50, 166–170, 172–176, 179 Reyne, Hugo 41 Rhodes Scholarship 146 Richard III 69 The Ride Down Mt. Morgan 218 Riggs, Lynn 205 Riley, Richard 127 ritual 117–122 Robards, Jason 159 Robert Frost: A Life 130 Robinson, Ashley 82 rock musicals 205, 207, 210 Rockaby 84, 85 Rodgers and Hammerstein 206, 207, 209 Romantic literature 56 Roost, Alisa 206 Roper, Lyndal 21 Rorty, Richard 126 Rosch, Elinor 108 The Rose Tattoo 10, 11 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 41 Rousselot, Élodie 132, 135, 139, 140, 141 Royal Court Theatre 219, 212, 220 Royal National Theatre 220 Royal Shakespeare Company 220 Rudisill, Kristen 145, 149, 155 Rudmose-Brown, Thomas 125 Sabha 147–149, 155 sacramental 111, 116–122 Saddik, Annette J. 226–230 Sagar, Keith 91, 106 Sahitya Akademi 155 Said, Edward 56; Orientalism 56, 61, 62 St. Paul 114–115 Saktiperumal 148 Salem, Massachusetts 18–27 Salesman in Beijing 218 Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television 211–213 “San Sebastiano de Sodoma” 7 Sanchez, Sonia 227, 228 Sangeet Natak Akademi 146, 155 Sanskrit 155–156 Sarmatism 222 satire 132, 139, 140, 141, 145, 152, 154 Savran, David 16 Scaife, Ross 43 Scharffenberger, Elizabeth 49 Schein, Seth L. 50 Schiller, Friedrich 214 Schissel, Wendy 24–25 Schmidt, Jens-Uwe 49 Schmitt, Natalie Crohn 225 Schneggenburger, Marie 79 School for Wives (L’Ecole des femmes) 28 Schopenhauer, Artur 211

243

“Schriften zum Theatre” 181 Schwartz, Michael 157 Scott-Douglass, Amy 232–234 scripture 114–115, 118 Sebastian 195, 198, 199, 200, 201, 203 Sebastian, Saint 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 15 Seigner, Louis 31, 41 Sengupta, Rudraprasad 155 Sensonske, Alexander 182, 190 September 11 121–122 The Serpent Son 232 Seven Deadly Sins 133, 135 sexuality 5, 12, 13, 14, 15 Shackelford, Dean 8, 13 Shaftesbury, Lord (Anthony Ashley Cooper) 189–190 Shakespeare, William 78–89, 138, 140, 141, 146, 192–204 Shakespeare Behind Bars 232–234 Shange, Ntozake 226 Shankar, S. 148 Shannon, Sandra G. 226, 229 Shastri, Lal Bahadur 146 Shaw, G. B. 225 Shepherd, Scott 73–74 Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten 223–226 Shevtsova, Maria 108 Shi, Fei 166 The Shoemaker’s Wonderful Wife 11 “A Short Organum” 189 Show Boat 209 Singer, Marc 80 Sinos, Rebecca H. 50 Skepticism (philosophical concept) 214–215 The Skin of Our Teeth 224 Slattery, Mary 25, 26 slum clearance 155 Smith, Anna Deavere 226, 227, 228 Smith-Howard, Alycia ix, 226 Sodoma 7 Solomon, King 90 Somerville-Skinner, Diane M. 180–191 Sondheim, Stephen 209 “The Song of the Great Capitulation” 189 sons of Medea 45–51 Sophocles 42 Les Sorcières de Salem 22 Sorgenfrei, Carol Fisher 222 South Pacific 209 South Sea Islands 55–60, 62 South Sea Maidens: Western Fantasy and Sexual Politics in the South Pacific 59 Spacey, Kevin 159 spectacle 132, 139 Spooner, Casey 73 Spoto, Donald 16 Star Wars 158 Steiner, George 186, 190 Stendhal 128 Stephano 195, 197, 198, 200, 201

244

Index

Stephenson, Shelagh 224 Stoke, John 224 Stoppard, Tom 225 sterilization camp 155–156 Story of Oklahoma! 205 Stott, Kathryn 134, 139, 140 A Streetcar Named Desire 8, 11, 12 Struma, Michael 59; South Sea Maidens: Western Fantasy and Sexual Politics in the South Pacific 59 Suburn, David 225 Suddenly, Last Summer 7, 12 Süddeutscher Rundfunk 212 Suharto 223 Sullivan, Morris 87 Suzan-Lori Parks: A Casebook 226 Suvin, Darko 108, 188, 191 Svendsen, James T. 232 Sweeney Todd 209 Sweet Bird of Youth 9, 11 Sycorax 197 Symbolism (movement) 216

tragedy 166–171, 173, 179 translation 149, 231–232 Treadwell, Sophie 55, 57, 62; Hope for a Harvest 57; Machinal 55–57, 62–66; An Unwritten Chapter 57 Trinculo 195, 197, 198, 200, 201 Trinity College 124–125 Troia Britanica 194, 202 Trojan Women 231 Trounstine, Jean 233 Tsappas, Giorgos 79, 88 Tu, Angu 175, 177 Tucker, Ken 165 Tughlaq, Mohammad bin 145, 148–149, 151– 151 Tughlaq (journal) 148, 153, 155 Tughlaq (play) 145, 149–151, 153–154 Tunisia 193, 202 Turner, Beth 226, 228 Turner, Mark 91, 102 Tutor (in Medea) 48 Tynan, Kenneth 78, 85–86, 87, 220

Tagore 223 Tamil 145, 147–149, 154–155 Tamilnadu 145–146, 148, 155 Tamilnadu Nadikar Sangam 147 The Taming of the Shrew 80 Tanner, Marie 193 Le Tartuffe 31, 38, 41 Taylor, John 108 Teaching Uncertainty 127 tears, as signs of emotion 46, 48–49, 52 The Tempest 138, 192–204 Le Temps sauvage 139 Tennyson, Alfred 114 Thacker, David 217 “Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction” 185 Theater of Roots 146, 155 Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig 205, 207 Le Théâtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle-France 141 Theatre Guild 205 Theatre Troupe of Mingei 218 theatricality 166, 169, 177, 179 theatrical space 230–31 theatrofilm 67–68, 70 A Theory of Adaptation 18 Thera 200 Thiessen, Vern 224 Thomas, Lynn 221 Thompson, Debby 226, 229 Thompson, Peter 186, 189, 191 To the Stars 224 Tofteland, Curt 233, 234 Tomek, James 128 “Tomorrow” (short story) 163 Top Dog/Underdog 227, 229, 230

under-distance 182, 184, 185, 187–188 Undermain Theatre (Dallas) 87 unemployment 151 Unfinished Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-in-Process 205, 207 Ungerer, Friedrich and Hans-Jörg Schmid 91 An Unwritten Chapter 57 Valk, Kate 85 Van Dyke, Dick 86 Vaughan, Alden T. 138 Vaughan, Virginia Mason, and Vaughan, Alden T. 138, 192, 202 V-Effekt 180–181, 183, 186, 187 Vellacott, Philip 50 Venus 193, 195, 199, 202 Venus (play) 227, 229, 230 Venus and Cupid 193, 199 Verfremdung 185 Verfremdungseffekt 180, 181; see also V-Effekt Vester, Christina M. 49 Vialet, Michèle 41, 41 Vietnam 147 A View from the Bridge 219 Villégier, Jean-Marie 33 Virgil (Aeneid) 194, 202 Visser, Margaret 49–50 Viveka Fine Arts 146, 155 Volkgeist 223 Voltaire 167–168, 173, 177, 179 Voragine, Jacobus de 6 Wagner, Richard 208 Waiting for Godot 85, 88, 123, 128 “Waiting for the Teacher” 218 Wang, Guowei 166, 177 Warner, Deborah 230

Index Warner, Marina 203 Warner, Rex 50 Warner, Sara 234 Washington (D.C.) Shakespeare Company 78, 85, 88 Watts, Richard Jr. 158, 165 Weber, Bruce 80, 121, 165 Weigel, Helene 187 Weldon, Gwen 82 Was Wo 212 Wasserman, Jerry 141 Waterhouse, John William 81–82 Webber, Andrew Lloyd 209 Wertenbaker, Timberlake 225, 232 West (American) 64–65 West Bengal 147 West Side Story 209 Westfeldt, Jessica 157 Wetmore, Kevin J. 226, 227, 229, 230 What Where 88 When Five Years Pass 9, 13 White, John 188, 190 White Fairies 134, 137 Whitelaw, Billie 212 The Wild Duck 216 Wilde, Oscar 7 Wilder, Thornton 224 Wilders, John 82, 86 Wilks, Max 205 Willet, John 180–181, 183–185, 187–189, 191 Williams, Gary Jay 222 Williams, Mary Frances 192–204 Williams, Raymond 91, 160, 165 Williams, Tennessee 5–16; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 8, 10, 11; The Glass Menagerie 10, 11, 12; Orpheus Descending 9, 11; The Rose Tattoo 10, 11; “San Sebastiano de Sodoma 7; A Streetcar Named Desire 8, 11, 12; Suddenly, Last Summer 7, 12; Sweet Bird of Youth 9, 11

245

Williamson, Margaret 51 Willson, Meredith 157–58, 165; The Music Man 157–165 Wilmer, S. E. 223 Winet, Evan Darwin 223 Wit 225 witch 132, 133, 139 The Witch of Edmonton 19, 21 witchcraft 18–27 Witchcraze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany 21 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 125 Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius 130 Wolf, Stacy 205, 210 Wollman, Elizabeth L. 205, 207, 209 Wood, Jacqueline 226, 228 Woolf, Virginia 216 The Wooster Group 67, 68, 73–75 World War II 147 Worstward Ho 85, 88 Woyzeck 224 Wren, Celia 82, 115, 117 Wynn, Ed 208 Xenophon 43 Yaksagana 146, 155 Yeats, William Butler 212 Yellow Jack 224 Yerma 9, 11, 13 Young, Harvey 227, 229 Zaju 166–167, 177–178 Zerba, Michelle 50 Zilliacus, Clas 211; Beckett and Broadcasting 211 Zimmerman, Paul 87 Zook, Darren 153


Text & Presentation, 2008 (Comparative Drama Conference)

Text & Presentation, 2007 (Text & Presentation) (The Comparative Drama Conference Series)

Text & Presentation 2005

Comparative Genomics, RECOMB-CG 2008

Presentation GNM

Basics Illustration: Text & Image

Contemporary Irish Drama & Cultural Identity

The Drama in the Text: Beckett's Late Fiction

Exploring the Language of Drama: From Text to Context (Interface)

The Play's the Thing: Exploring Text in Drama and Therapy

Radical Initiatives in Interventionist & Community Drama (New Directions in Drama & Performance)

CONCUR 2008 - concurrency theory 19th international conference, CONCUR 2008, Toronto, Canada, August 19-22, 2008: proceedings

Text

Programming Windows Presentation Foundation

Effective Databases for Text & Document Management

Presentation Skills For Managers

Flex & Bison: Text Processing Tools

Insurance Law: Text & Materials 2 e

Medical Law: Text, Cases & Materials

Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

Flex & Bison: Text Processing Tools

Flex & Bison: Text Processing Tools

Housing Law: Text, Cases & Materials

Vampir-Drama

Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

DRAMA #2

Keysha's Drama

Vampir-Drama

Pakistan (Powerpoint Presentation PDF)

Multimodal Intelligent Information Presentation

Drama City

Text & Presentation, 2008 (Comparative Drama Conference)

Text & Presentation, 2007 (Text & Presentation) (The Comparative Drama Conference Series)

Text & Presentation 2005

Comparative Genomics, RECOMB-CG 2008

Presentation GNM

Basics Illustration: Text & Image

Contemporary Irish Drama & Cultural Identity

The Drama in the Text: Beckett's Late Fiction

Exploring the Language of Drama: From Text to Context (Interface)

The Play's the Thing: Exploring Text in Drama and Therapy

Radical Initiatives in Interventionist & Community Drama (New Directions in Drama & Performance)

CONCUR 2008 - concurrency theory 19th international conference, CONCUR 2008, Toronto, Canada, August 19-22, 2008: proceedings

Text

Programming Windows Presentation Foundation

Effective Databases for Text & Document Management

Presentation Skills For Managers

Flex & Bison: Text Processing Tools

Insurance Law: Text & Materials 2 e

Medical Law: Text, Cases & Materials

Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

Flex & Bison: Text Processing Tools

Flex & Bison: Text Processing Tools

Housing Law: Text, Cases & Materials

Vampir-Drama

Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery

DRAMA #2

Keysha's Drama

Vampir-Drama

Pakistan (Powerpoint Presentation PDF)

Multimodal Intelligent Information Presentation

Drama City

Recommend Documents