Also by Richard Hornby: Script into Performance: A Structuralist View of Play Production (1977) Patterns in Ibsen's Middle Plays (1981)
Drama, Metadrama, and Perception
\
Richard Hornby
Lewisburg Bucknell University Press London and Toronto: Associated University Presses
Ifc^l © 1986 by Associated University Presses, Inc.
Associated University Presses 440 Forsgate Drive Cranbury, NJ 08512
Associated University Presses 25 Sicilian Avenue London WClA 2QH, England
Associated University Presses 2133 Roval Windsor Drive Unit 1 Mississauga, Ontario Canada L5J 1K5
'Fhe paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hornby, Richard, 1938Drama, metadrama, and perception. Bibliography: p. Includes index. I. Title. PNI631.H58 1986 809.2 ISBN 0-8387-5101-6 (alk. paper)
85-47936
Printed in the United States of America
For Yvonne
Contents
Acknowledgments N •*
1
Part I 2 3 4 5 6
13
Drama and Reality Varieties of the Metadramatic
The Play within the Play The Ceremony within the Play Role Playing within the Role Literary and Real-Life Reference within the Play Self-Reference Part II
7 Sophocles, Oedipus the King 8 Shakespeare, As You Like It 9 Buchner, Vi/oyzeck 10 Strindberg, The Father 11 Ibsen, The Master Builder 12 Pinter, Betrayal 13
Afterword
List of Works Cited Index
31 49 67 88 103
Drama and hreeption 121 133 148 158 164 171 179 181 185
1 Drama and Reality
i For over a century, realism has been the touchstone of dramatic criticism and theory. Not that plays have all been realistic; far from it. Rather, realism has provided the theoretical basis for all that has gone on in the theatre. Everything is defined in terms of realism: we hear of selective realism, stylized realism, abstract realism, narrative realism, epic realism, and of course naturalism, which is defined as an “extreme” form of realism. Even nonrcalistic theatrical forms need realism for their definition; an avant-garde theatre artist who despises realism will typically describe his work as being “unrealistic” even before coming up with a positive term for it. Similarly, theatre history textbooks categorize genres such as symbolism, expressionism, or theatricalism as all being part of the revolt against realism. Realistic doctrine has dominated the American theatre in particular. Wc tend automatically to polarize theatre into the realistic or the unrealistic, and to categorize what we perceive, whether it is the dialogue or the design or the actors’ performances, in relation to one of these two poles. The underlying doctrine is thus not limited to realism as a genre, but is a device for categorizing everything in theatre. Whether one likes realism or not, the defining trait for the theatre is always how “close to” or “far from” everyday life it seems. Structuralists influenced by L^vi-Strauss will recognize this realistic/antirealistic polarity as a kind of bina^ opposition, a pattern that is fundamental to all human thought. All cultures view the world through polarities: up and down, good and bad, male and female, positive and negative. No doubt we evolved this mode of thinking because it is the simplest and most effective means of processing information, as seen in such stripped down systems as Morse Code or computer languages, in which everything can be conveyed through a pattern of dots and dashes, or the binary digits 0 and 1. The problem, however, is that while wc easily recognize binary systems like Morse Code as abstract fabrications, when it comes to matters of language and culture, we tend to think of binary oppositions not as human constructions applied to reality, but rather as attributes of reality itself. Male and female, for 13
Drama and Reality
Drama and Reality
example, come to be seen as absolute categories, standing for more than just biological differences; they become opposed in every conceivable way—in so cial, economic, political, and personal contexts. Actually, however, a binary opposition may be inappropriate to the reality that it describes, leading to sterile, automatic thinking that obscures more than it reveals. Certainly the extreme polarization of male and female in our culture can be damaging to women, type-casting them in roles that are far too limiting. It is not that there are no differences between men and women; it is rather that the differences may not form a polarity. Levi-Strauss describes primitive tribes as seeing a solemn, fundamental polarity between honey and ashes;* although we have little trouble differentiating the two, it seems rather odd to think of them as opposites. Polarization arises when we start paralleling binary oppositions, so that, as in mathematical proportions, A: B :: C: D :: E: F, and so on; thus many believe that male is to female as strong is to weak, as rational is to emotional, as profession alism is to domesticity. The artificiality of some of these parallelings becomes clear, however, when we observe other cultures. In Iran, for example, men commonly embrace and hold hands in public, weep easily, and arc considered intuitive but not too logical, while women arc seen as rational and practical, though somewhat cold;^ the polarity that our cultures takes for granted is simply reversed. We should thus be careful never to accept such parallelings of polarities without question. The realistic/antirealistic polarity in dramatic theory may at last be dying out, as new theories from structuralism and poststructuralism supersede it. This is not to say that realistic drama is dying. Realism in the theatre answers funda mental needs for a scientific, technological society; realistic plays will continue to be written and performed as long as science is at the center of our beliefs. But we must distinguish realism as drama from realism as doctrine. Realism as drama is simply one genre among many, a form influenced by science that arose in the late nineteenth century, characterized by psychologically deep and complex motivation in the characters, behind a continuous facade of mundane detail in setting and action.^ Realism as doctrine is a device for categorizing all drama, polarizing it into realistic and antirealistic. This polarity is paralleled with other polarities: realism is to antirealism as “represeivational” is to “presentational,” as acting “in person” is to acting “in style,” as being “close to” life is to being “far from” life, as Stanislavski is to Brecht, as Ibsen Is to Maeterlinck, as .Marlon Brando is to Laurence Olivier. These paralleled oppositions, along with many others, have become embedded in the brains of theatre practitioners and scholars (especially in the United States), but are largely false or misleading. In par ticular, as I shall argue, no form of drama or theatre is any closer or farther from life than any other, in any way that truly matters. No plays, however “realistic,” reflect life directly; all plays, however “unrealistic,” are semiological devices for categorizing and measuring life indirectly. Realistic doctrine, whose basis is found in Aristotle’s term mimesis in the
Poetics, has waxed and waned over the centuries, and will always have a limited usefulness, but when it is pressed too hard it becomes as artificial as the male/ female opposition. Contemporary American directors and actors of Shake speare, for example, have great difficulty with his plays because of being straitjacketed by realistic d(x:trine, which does not actually fit Shakespeare at all well. At times, his plays seem as realistic as those of Lanford Wilson (allowing for obvious differences of time and place), at other times as antirealistic as those of Samuel Beckett, at still other times neither realistic nor antirealistic. It is \^luable to be able to point out to actors that Corin, the greasy-handed shepherd in As You Like It, has an earthy, life-like quality, while Silvius, his “pastoral” counterpart, is intentionally artificial. It is not valuable to have to waste time trying to justify to actors, in terms of realistic doctrine, the fact that Shakespeare writes In blank verse, even though real people do not talk that way. Verse in drama is neither a movement toward nor a withdrawal from everyday life; it is a formal technique of no mimetic significance whatever. A major idea of modern structuralists, based on the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, is that meaning is always carried by a system as a whole, rather than just the individual elements in actual use in a given communication. We do not understand a sf>eaker in piecemeal fashion, word by word, or even sentence by sentence, but rather by relating what he is saying to the entire language. 'Fhus, if 1 were to say, “I came to work this morning by motorized conveyance,” you would immediately recognize the pompous tone in the choice of my words, because you are aware of the other locutions available: “I came by car,” “I drove,” “I dragged out the old jalopy,” and so on. Your full understanding of the concept embodied in my words is informed by your knowledge of the English language as a semantic system. This is w'hy, in learning a foreign language, one does not really know any of it until one knows all of it, or enough to have a sense of it as an interconnected system; a second-year student of English as a foreign language would probably know 75 percent of the vocabulary and 100 percent of the formal grammar that the average native speaker would know, but the foreign student would probably not notice the jx)mpous level of my sentence about the motorized conveyance, because he would m)t yet be able to see how my choice of words relates to other possible choices. A binary opposition, then, forms a kind of subsystem, in which a given term is paralled and contrasted to a whole series of terms. Realism is defined by the related terms, “close to life,” “in person,” etc., but also by its oppositions, so that we can sav that realism is not far from life, not stylized, etc. Indeed, polar terms tend to be more strongly defined by their opposites than by their parallels. One cannot discuss masculinity without thinking of femininity, or peace with out war, or health without sickness. Fhe pleasure of leisure is enhanced w hen we think of the work we are temporarily avoiding; work is all the more tedious when we think of the pleasures of leisure. Fhe joy of winning a sports event is generated by the contemplation of the agony of losing, and vice versa; a game
14
15
16
Drama and Reality
Drama and Rcalitv
that both teams won would be as pointless and boring as one that both teams lost. Again, terms arc typically defined by their opposites: “real men” don’t cry, don’t play hopscotch, don’t eat quiche. “Real women” don’t work outside the home, don’t initiate sex, don’t understand sports. Similarly, in the theatre, realism and antirealism arc defined in terms of each other. Stanislavski, a realist, wanted his actors not to employ cliches, stereotypes, artificialities. Bertolt Brecht, the antirealist, wanted his actors not to identify with the character, not to be “in a trance”; his theatre was to be »o«empathetic, ;;o;7illusionistic, nonAristotelian. Such rhetoric, so typical of human communication in its nega tiveness, has led to a good deal of confusion among actors today, since we can no longer experience the kinds of acting that Stanislavski and Brecht were setting their concepts against. Similar confusion has resulted when modern theatre practitioners have looked at other cultures or times, and interpreted them in terms of realistic doctrine. Modern actors, for example, find Hamlet’s speech to the players, in which he advises them “to hold . . . the mirror up to nature” (3.2.2(C21),‘* familiar yet perplexing. Holding the mirror up to nature sounds Stanislavskian, yet the dramatic speeches that the players, and Hamlet himself, actually perform seem antirealistic to an extreme, the kind of thing we would expect in the hyperpoetic theatre of Yeats or Maeterlinck. The reason for this apparent contradiction is not the condescending one that is usually heard, that the Elizabethans had more naive ideas about reality than we do. Instead, their ideas about art and reality were organized dijferently. The modern actor’s confusion results from imposing the realistic/antirealistic code on a play from a period in which the code did not operate. The polarity that dominated Renaissance art and literature was instead the Platonic one of Idea/Imitation. In calling for the players to mirror nature, Hamlet is not asking them to avoid artifice, as would a modern acting teacher; instead, he is asking them to avoid complications, distortions, or additions— anything that might blur the audience’s perception of an Ideal form. Thus, in the same speech, he tells them to “o’erstep not the modesty of nature” (3.2.18); the whole thrust of the passage is not toward making the players perform as in everyday life, but rather to perform with restraint and polish. Hamlet’s nature is not a world of scratchings and burpings and mumblings, but a world of pure ideas; in that context, everyday life is ««natural. A significant aspect of structuralist dramatic theory was that it implicitly rejected the realistic/antirealistic bipolarity; the question of whether a given work is “close to” or “far from” everyday life was simply not at issue. ITie same holds true for poststructuralist approaches, including semiotics, deconstruction, reader-response theory, information theory, or phenomenological criticism. The whole tenor of contemporary aesthetics is nonmimetic. This is, again, not the same thing as being antimimetic. The mimetic aspect of art is not denied, but it is no longer seen as its defining trait. 'Fhe present rev'aluation of Ibsen’s plays provides an example: critics of the past few decades have been treating Ibsen
primarily as a dramatic poet, whose plays are filled with symlx)lism and meta physical reflection; the realistic Ibsen, the astute observer of bourgeois life, is no longer of much interest.
17
11 Such nonmimetic criticism leaves op>en the question of just how drama, or any other art form, actually does relate to life, if it docs so at all. Certainly the traditional, simple bipolarity of “close to” versus “far frmn” will not do. It leaves too many elements in drama unexplained; it leads to rigid, narrow thinking (especially noticeable in American actors, because excessively realistic training has rendered them timid, confined, and querulous); it makes drama into some thing far too passiv’e. We should not view drama as reflecting life, but rather as operating on it, though in a complex manner. Drawing on structuralist and poststructuralist theory, 1 suggest the following axioms for relating drama to reality: 1. A play does not reflect life; instead, it reflects itself. 2. At the same time, it relates to other plays as a system. 3. This system, in turn, intersects with other systems of literature, nonliter ary performance, other art forms (both high and low), and culture gener ally. Culture, as it centers on drama in this wav, I shall refer to as the “drama/culture complex.” 4. It is through the drama/culturc complex, rather than thnmgh individual plays, that we interpret life. 'Hie first two axioms draw on the ideas of such structuralists as Roland Barthes and Northrop Frye, who saw creative writing as a surprisingly recursive activity. Barthes insisted that the verb “to write” was actually intransitive, that the writer does not really write “about” anything, but rather writes writing.^ Frye, in his influential b(X)k Anatomy of Criticism, maintained that literature forms a vast system that reflects the basic rhythms of life. His method is sometimes misinterpreted as simple genre criticism, in which the critic merely sets up categories for pigeonholing individual works. Instead, Frye was doing something very different: for him the relationship of the individual work to the overall literary system is like that of parole to langue in Saussure’s structuralist linguistics. Langue is, in the “motorized conveyance” example given earlier, the underlying, unstated system of grammar, syntax, and semantics that speakers and listeners must master in order to make or understand individual utterances (parole). Frye’s system is the underlying langue that remains unstated, but which both author and reader or audience member must know in order for a given work to communicate.
Drama and Reality
Drama and Reality
Barthes seems right in stressing the self-contained quality of artistic creation. Everything we know about the creative process tells us that it does not have much to do with “recording” something, like newspaper reporting. 'Fhe creative artist focuses on the work itself, on making it seem fitting and right. If realistic plays are “close to” life, that closeness certainly does not come from direct observation. Realistic playwrights (at least the successful ones) have not gone nosing around with notebooks or tape recorders taking note of what people say and do. Instead, they compose in the study. Often, they arc far from the locales they describe—Ibsen wrote plays about Norway while living in Italy, for example. While they may be inspired to write a play by a real-life event, they do not fully research that event, nor show much concern for what actually hap pened in detail. (In fact, the finished play is typically very different from the event or events that inspired it.) Instead, the play comes to have an independent life for the playwright; Ibsen said that, while writing his plays, he felt as if he were watching them take place on a stage. There is indeed a certain passivity to creative writing, at least from the subjective viewpoint of the author, who feels more that he is being acted upon than that he is “doing” something. From Frye’s theories, we can infer that what is, in fact, acting upon the author is the received literary tradition, the archetypal characters, plots, and situations that he has grown accustomed to from reading literary works or seeing them enacted. His real-life experiences merely trigger associations with these arche types, so that, while real life may indeed be a stimulus, and will show up in his writing in some sense, it will only show up where it seems to fit. (Fhe film All the President's Men was a good example of this; although all its characters were based on actual people and all its events actually happened, the film succeeded not because of its “accuracy,” but rather because those characters and events happened to fit the standard pattern of the detective story.) The author, as he writes, is not checking the episodes against reality—indeed, he will cheerfully change reality as it suits him, to make the play seem right in terms of its own exigencies, which are in turn based on his intuitive feelings for archetypal patterns. The literary work is like a mathematical pnK)f—self-contained in the sense of having all its parts interconnect according to logical rules, yet reflecting an underlying system consisting of those very rules, plus axioms, definitions, and propositions already proven. A theorem in mathematics reflects both inward and outward, but the outward reflection is not toward life, but rather toward the mathematical system as a whole. 'Fhe situation for the audience parallels that of the author. The audience certainly does not sit there testing what it sees moment by moment against its real-life memories. Occasionally, something will occur in the work that triggers such an association, either for an individual audience member or for the whole group, but if anything, such moments are intrusive on the basic experience of seeing the plav, rather than being characteristic of that experience. If a character reminds someone of his aunt Mary, the play stops for him for a while; if the
action suddenly and obviously depicts the election of Ronald Reagan, the dramatic illusion for the audience is broken rather than enhanced. A good production of a good play seems isolated and self-contained; for a while, it is all in all. Again, its self-contained quality derives from the intuitive sense of what a play is—how action progresses, how characters are supposed to behave, what kind of situations are interesting. As it does for the playwright, the play for the audience reflects primarily inward, and secondarily outward, to the unstated but crucial conventions of the theatre. The major objection to this notion of the play as a self-contained work in a self-contained system is that it seems to cut off life from art entirely, and thus apparently trivialize artistic activity. Barthes seems toimply that literature is a meaningless game, perhaps a highbrow form of crossword puzzles. Frve’s sys tem does reflect life ultimately, but only on a very general level—the seasons, the rhythms of birth, growth, maturation, and death.In the same vein, the Czech structuralist Jan Mukafovsky maintained that all literature, no matter how realistic, reflects no particular reality, but instead reflects reality as a whole.^ Literature thus becomes something solely and entirely existential, an idea that at times has struck me as pleasingly profound, and at other times as irritatingly vacuous. Implying that literature has nothing to do with everyday life or anv immediate concern seems to be playing directly into the hands of the philistines in our society who maintain that art and literature and drama are totally impractical, serving at best as patrician amu.sements, of no interest or impor tance to the average person. Furthermore, the notion of creative passivity leads to questions about artistic value. If a knowledge of archetypes is all that is required to write a good play, why are more gexx! plays not written? Why is it that when I, a critic who has read more widely than either Shakespeare or Ibsen, sit down and try, “intran sitively,” to write a play based on the archetypes that 1 know extremely well, the results are so paltry? Under realistic doctrine, one could at least say that Shakespeare and Ibsen were better observers of life than I, but under struc turalism it will not do to say that they were better observers of literature. 'Fhey were not. Shakespeare, with “small Latin and less Greek,” was well read in the popular literature of his day, but in little else; Ibsen, during the time of his greatest creativity, read little except newspapers. It is inadequate to try to understand drama entirely in terms of literary archetypes. The postructuralist solution to this dilemma is to sec archetvpal systems like those of Frye as existing concentrically within other cultural systems of mean ing. A play relates to drama as a whole, but also, simultaneously, to literature as a whole, to theatrical performance as a whole, and to communal eexies of speech, dress, and gesture, as well as of artistic convention, px)litical ideology, social convention, and religious belief. (Both Barthes and Frye have maintained as much in their later work.) I'his is the reason that a Shakespeare or an Ibsen can write great plays, while even an intelligent, educated person without their
18
19
20
Drama and Reality
Drama and Realitv
talent cannot. Their “talent” consists of an extraordinary sensitivity to all the vast, shifting systems of thought within which their dramatic creations operate. It is possible to teach ordinary individuals these systems, in piecemeal fashion, but only the talented person has the intuitive grasp to be able to use the entire, universal system in a dynamic wav. This “universal system,” consisting of all the systems of meaning by which a society thinks and acts, is what is commonly known as a culture. Drama, no matter how much it may seem to redect life directly, is always reflecting it through the cultural system in which it functions. Even “kitchen sink” realism achieves its effect by breaking a cultural taboo against showing kitchen sinks (or nudity, violence, sexual behavior, etc.). Without the cultural taboos, which are those that in turn generate the literary and theatrical taboos affecting the play, no one would even notice the kitchen sinks. It is the fact that a talxx) is being broken that creates the audience’s sensation that it is seeing something very “real,” very “close to life,” even though the tab(K) item is actually no closer to life than the rest of the elements onstage. And, indeed, once kitchen sinks become acceptable, no longer taboo, they lose their magical power of appearing to break through to a noumenal reality, which is why theatre artists in our century have so restlessly and endlessly sought new taboos to break.
whole literary genre. In Henry /V, Fart I, Falstaff is enjoyable first and foremost because of the way he functions in that particular plav, we enjoy his li\-clv antics, his healthy sensuality, his unashamed cowardliness, and, ultimatciv, his loyalty to Hal. We do not think of him as a traditional braggart soldier bomolocho^ while we arc watching, but nonetheless, our experience with this archetype in an abundance of other drama is nguide to the character, showing us what to look for. In the same way, the archetype was an unconscious^ guide for Shakespeare as he created the character, steering Shakespeare thrtmgh the play’s potentialities as the play developed on the page. At the same time, Shakespeare and his audience would ha\c been uncon sciously aware of other cultural systems overlapping the whole system of drama. Drama is a subsystem of literature as a whole; the archetype of braggart soldier is not limited to drama, but is found in the epic, the novella, and the narrative poem of Shakespeare’s time. In addition, drama is a subsystem of theatre, which includes a multitude of performance practices that arc nonverbal. Thus, the incident in which Falstaff lifts the dead Hotspur on his back draws upon the standard stage business, in the morality play, in which a devil or a character personifying a vice carried someone off to hell on his back. Furthermore, the creation of the character of Falstaff is a product of the surrounding cultural cerate wholistically. Fhus when a primitive tribe has a myth in which its ancestor was sired by a bear, this should not be taken as a literal, historical statement. The tribesmen are aware that bears do not really father human beings, just as we are aware, when reading Aesop’s fables, that animals do not really talk. The story of the tribe’s animal ancestry cannot Ik understood outside the whole system of mythology in which it operates. In the whole system one might find, for example, that a neighboring tribe had been sired by an eagle. 'Fhe true meaning of the tale is thus an analogical one: our tribe is to theirs as bears are to eagles. Bears and eagles, in turn, will have a
Ill
To recapitulate, a play is first and foremost what the New Critics described as “autotelic”: it reflects no external reality (at least not directly), but instead reflects inward, mirroring itself. A notable example of this is a play’s narrative structure, in which each event triggers the next, so that there is, in Aristotle’s terminology, a beginning, a middle, and end. This structure connects the plav, so that, as the audience experiences each e\’ent, it is recalling previous events and anticipating those to come. Many plays, especially in modern times, avoid traditional narrative structure, but nevertheless still have all kinds of interconnected rela tionships among their parts: characters reflect other characters, scenes reflect other scenes, verbal images reflect other verbal images, and so on, generating the motifs that hold the play together. The playwright, as he composes his play, is unconcerned with external realities, and instead concentrates on the play as a self-contained entity; similarly, the audience, as it watches the play, is primarily aware of it as a self-contained experience. Nevertheless, although this self-contained quality is in the foreground for both playwright and audience—and, indeed, for the performers as well—their sense of what a play is and of the very rules that hold it together have been formed through their experience with other drama. Just as a theorem in geome try is self-contained, yet at the same time is a product of geometry as a whole discipline, so too a given play is self-contained, yet also is a product of drama as a
21
Drama and Reality
Drama and Reality
whole range of associations connected to them that will make this analogy rich in meaning. As with Shakespeare’s play, the myth will operate within a vast, interconnected system of mythology, ritual, natural ordering, social structure, cosmology, etc. It is through this system as a whole that the tribe members view the world, enabling them to grasp reality as a whole and to develop strategies for dealing with it. 'I'hus, myth and ritual are not primitive science and technology; they are primitive literature and theatre. Conversely, literature, theatre, and the arts generally function for us like myth and ritual for primitive tribes. Like the primitive mvth, a play operates within a system of drama as a whole, and, concentrically, also within the systems that form culture as a whole. Culture, centered on drama in this way, 1 am dchning for the sake of brevity as the drama! culture complex. The drama/culturc complex, like the myth complex of the primitive tribe, provides our society with a vast model for understanding reality. A play is “about” drama as a whole, and more broadly, about culture as a whole; this drama/culture complex is “about” reality not in the passive sense of merely reflecting it, but in the active sense of providing a “vocabulary” for describing it, or a “geometry” for measuring it., A mathematical sysem, though self-contained, and part of a system of defini tions, axioms, and other theorems that is also self-contained, nevertheless may turn out to have important practical applications as a side effect. When Ricmann, in the mid-nineteenth century, invented non-Kuclidean geometry, the result was seen as as intellectual curiosity only, a self-contained system that was as intellectually rigorous as traditional Luclidean geometry, but which of course did not “fit” real space as did Euclidean geometry. Later, Einstein showed that Reimannian geometry did indeed fit, that in fact the apparent practicality of Euclidean geometry was an illusion brought about by our limited human viewpoint. In the age of modern physics, Riemann’s ivory tower system turned out to be realistic and useful. Riemann, however, had not been thinking about reality when he invented his geometry; he was thinking only about making it consistent and complete. The practical application came as an unintentional side effect. In the same way, the playwright or actor is only concerned with making the play or performance unified and entertaining, which he does by making it adhere to his intuitive sense of the drama/culture complex in which he operates. Nonetheless, plavs and performances may very well effect how people behave in practical circumstances. William Manchester, in his memoirs of the Second World War, writes;
Here the B movies provided a criterion for behavior in actual combat. Certainly, the actors Manchester mentions had no intention of doing this when thev made their films; they were intent only on giving exciting performances, which they did by following role models that they had seen or read about in other plays or novels or films. But, unquestionably, society does use such performances in trying to understand the world and how to behave in it. Note, however, that it is again the entire system of culture that is operating here: not just “serious” works by a Hemingway or a Remarque, but grade B movies, pulp novels, commercial plays. (More recently, FV dramas can be added to the list.) Nor does Manchester mention only a single film or even a single actor, but implies that there had been manv recklessly heroic perform ances to establish the archetypal role mtxlel. The individual work rarely has any direct influence on reality; this is why it is naive to think that any single plav will cause a revolution, defeat fascism, end exploitation, make people more loving, or achieve any other worthwhile goal, just as it is naive to think that any single play will, in the fantasies of the Moral Majority, incite blasphemy, treason, or promiscuity." Again, the individual work is really addressing itself to the total system by which we choose to do these things or not. Manchester writes of Hemingway, his idol:
22
Combat as I saw it was exorbitant, outrageous, excruciating, and above all tasteless, perhaps because the number of fighting men who had read Heming way or Remarque was a fraction of those who had seen B movies about bloodshed. If a platoon leader had watched Douglas Fairbanks, Jr, Errol Flynn, Victor McLaglen, John Wayne, or Gary (hooper leap recklessly al)out, he* was likely to follow this role model.
23
Before the war I thought that I lemingwav, by stripping battle narratives of their ripe prose, was describing the real thing. .Afterward I realized that he had simplv replaced traditional overstatement with romantic understate ment.^^ In other words, Hemingway was not trying to describe war directly, but to attack the traditional way of depicting war in literature and drama, d'here has developed a whole genre of anti-war literature, not only by such authors as Hemingway or Remarque, but Shaw^, Brecht, and innumerable others. This genre was a major reason for the extensive opposition in the United Stales to the Vietnam War; Americans had a vehicle for thinking about w'ar in a negative way—the anti-war novel or the anti-w’ar play—which earlier Americans had not had during wars in our past, which may have been equallv brutal and unjust but which went largely unopposed.
IV
We can now see the distinction between the serious work of art and the work of a hack: the hack play merely reinforces the drama/culture complex in effect at the time of its composition, while the serious plav attempts to attack that system in some way. Fhus both the serious and the conventional play will be full of traditional elements, but the serious play will call some of those very elements into question, making them seem strange—“alienated,” to use Brecht’s termi
Drama and Reality
Drama and Rcalitv
nology, or “defamiliarized,” in the terminology of the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky. Ibsen in his day seemed revolutionary not because he wrote com pletely new kinds of plays, but rather because he wrote traditional plays with a new slant. Thus A Doll House is a traditional nineteenth-century Well-Made Play, setting a heroine, Nora, against a villain, Krogstad, in a struggle revolving around a suppressed secret (the forgery), and developed through the use of simplistic devices such as the letter in the visible mailbox. As in many WellMade Plays, the villain undergoes a sudden conversion of conscience, and the heroine emerges victorious. The difference is that Ibsen has Krogstad undergo this change one scene too early (Nora is not even on stage at the time), and in the 6nal scene, where audiences would expect a confrontation between the heroine and the villain, there is instead a confrontation between the heroine and her husband, who turns out, surprisingly, to be the true villain of the piece. Critics who dislike Ibsen have pointed to all his Well-Made Play machinery with scorn, while those who like him have tried to explain it away. (One such critic insisted that Ibsen really got all the devices from Shakespeare and Holberg, which was somehow better than if they had come from Scribe.)*’ Both sides miss the point. A Doll House, like any effective play, is really about drama, not about life, and its originality comes not from being as unlike hack plays as possible, but from making new uses of the conventions upK>n which those hack plays are based. TTiis is the reason that playwrights who seem revolutionary always turn out, after critical analysis, to l)e embedded in a tradition. Shaw seemed revolution ary, but, as Martin Meisel showed in his excellent book, Shaw and the Nineteenth Century Theatre, he was actually a master of every nineteenth-century theatrical trick and convention. Chekhov seemed revolutionary but was actually writing traditional melodramas turned inside out, with the pivotal action (a suicide, a duel, an auction for the family estate) placed offstage. Beckett seems revolution ary, but, as Albert Bermel has ably demonstrated, he actually is placing tradi tional characters in plots and situations that parody those of traditional drama. *■* Thus, the drama/culture complex gradually changes, in movements that may at the time seem rapid and drastic but which are actually slow and evolutionary. Here again one can make an analogy with language, which always evolves slowly, despite the fact that at anv particular time an innovation, such as the use of “Ms.” instead of “Miss” or “Mrs.,” will seem to be disrupting it radically. The crest of the wave may be turbulent and frothy, but the wave itself retains its size and shape, moving in a steady and orderly manner. In fact, plays that attempt to break totally with tradition—the dream of every sophomore in a playwriting class—simply do not and cannot succeed. Orig inality in playwriting comes not from writing something completely new, but from putting old things together in new ways. Thus, the most original play wright of our century, Bertolt Brecht, borrowed from the most places. This was because Brecht, like any serious artist, was actually addressing himself to the conventions and traditions by which society views the world.
Brecht’s Mother Courage, for example, is an anack on the traditional Cierman history play, of the sort established by Goethe and Schiller. Such plays were heroic and nationalistic, setting a courageous, idealistic, talented man of the people against a privileged, feudal, outdated, fragmented aristocracy. The plavs were simultaneously individualistic and nationalistic, and were a major force in changing the German people from a fragmented, agrarian society into a unified, industrialized nation. A nineteenth-century Cierman capitalist struggling with internal tariffs, a stultifying bureaucracy, and aristocratic privilege may seem a far cry from an Egmont or a Wilhelm Tell, but those hen>ic, anti-aristwratic plays did provide a frame of reference, an underlying way of thinking, that enabled the capitalist of the nineteenth century to understand himself and his problems. In Mother Courage, Brecht created a heroine who is indeed individu alistic and courageous, like the heroes of Cierman Romantic drama, but her individualism destroys her children, and her “courage,” far from being ide alistic, was solely in search of a profit: she drove through the bombardment of Riga because she had fifty loaves of bread to sell, and they were getting moldy. The play is really “about” Egmont and Don Carlos and Wilhelm Tell and their hundreds of imitations, without which Mother Courage would never have been written. Again, this is not because Brecht was engaged in some sterile exercise of copying other playwrights, but rather because he believed that German drama had formed a system of ideas and beliefs for the German people that had ultimately l)ccome pernicious. All great drama is parody, but it is a parody of a complex and serious nature. In parodying the received dramatic tradition, the serious playwright is attacking and ultimately altering the means by which people think, behave, and decide. The split between conventional and serious art exists in our society because of the rapid way our society has changed. Primitive societies, which are relatively static, do not have an artistic avant-garde, fhe primitive artist’s function is conserv'ative, to reaffirm the cultural order. In a dynamic society like ours, however, the changes that are occurring require a constant reexamination of the culture. Thus, Brecht attacked the conventions of Romantic historical drama because changing social conditions had made those conventions no longer apt. The serious artist’s function in a dynamic society becomes radical, not to reaffirm the social order but to hold it up for examination and—if his new vision catches on, as Brecht’s did—to alter it.
24
25
V
The principal fallacy in realistic dramatic theory was in its assigning a passive role to drama, which was seen as merely reflecting reality in a point-blank manner. 'Fhe ingenuousness of this theory is the same as that of the traditional, naive view of language, which was also seen as merely describing reality in a
26
Drama and Reality
simple, one-to-one relationship. Twentieth-century linguists have instead stressed the operative nature of language. Edward Sapir, for example, noted that “distinctions which seem inevitable to us may be utterly ignored in languages which reflect an entirely different type of culture, while these in turn insist on distinctions which arc all but unintelligible to us. . . . It would be difflcult in some languages, for instance, to express the distinction which we feel between ‘to kill’ and ‘to murder,’ for the simple reason that the underlying legal philoso phy which determines our use of these words does not seem natural to all societies.”'^ Eskimo languages have some thirty or so words for water in its frozen stale, in contrast to the half-dozen or so we have in English (ice, snow, slush, etc.). Such words do not merely reflect what is “out there,” but are instead a device for categorizing and measuring the enormous range of phenomena that are actually perceived. At any given moment we are bombarded with such phenomena, which we must organize and catalog if we are to function at all efficiently. Thus, if I were to ask a visitor to my office what the walls were made of, he would immediately answer, “bricks.” But suppose he were someone from a culture unfamiliar with that word or the concept it stands for. He would then have to launch into a long description, such as “it appears to l)e made up of some rectangular stones, ranging in color from dark brown to light orange, in between which are bands of hard, grayish white stuff.” When someone says that some thing is a brick wall, his words are not just duplicating some “things” out in the world, but are actually summing up a wide range of sensations, and composing them into a single, elegant concept. Drama has an operative function similar to that of language. Rather than mirroring life passively, drama is instead a means of thinking about life, a way of organizing and categorfemg it. Drama as a whole, both serious and con ventional, in all its media (stage, film, televison, etc.), generates archetypal categories of events, characters, situations, and themes, which we then apply to real life in order to understand and deal with it. For example, our nuclear policy is shaped by the archetype of the Western gunfight, in which the hero must allow the villain to draw his gun first, but must then draw his own gun quickly enough to kill the villain before he can effectively fire. Thus, we must never use our nuclear weapons first against Russia, but instead allow them to attempt a first strike, at which point we are morally justified, even required, to obliterate them. There is strong evidence that the “quick-draw” duel never actually took place in the Old West; there are no direct reports of it, and the types of guns and holsters then in use would not really have allowed it. \ he quick-draw duel is thus “unrealistic,” in the historical sense, but such unrealism is beside the point, since the purpose of the archetype is not to reflect reality, but rather to provide a model of behavior that is an ethical norm for violent confrontations in our own lives. Thus Americans, for all their violent history, have always been slow to go to war. ITie villain must always draw first, by firing on Fort Sumter, blowing up the Maine, torpedoing the Lusitania, bombing Pearl Harbor. At that |X)int, we
Drama and Reality
27
are morally enabled to shoot back with full and horrible force; according to the “quick draw” archetype. Pearl Harbor justified Hiroshima. This is not an archetype found in other cultures, and is not even Christian—the Christian cowboy would “resist not evil,” turn the other cheek, and allow himself to be shot. It is uniquely our own dramatic archetype, and it dominates our thinking on everything from gun control to nuclear retaliation. In the 1960s the “adult Western” began to alter the traditional Western form. Films and television dramas depicted villains with some redeeming qualities, and heroes with misgivings or weaknesses; the quick-draw duel was often averted, or, if it occurred, had unpleasant consequences rather than a clear moral victory. This modification was a typical case of “serious” works modifying the drama/culturc complex through which we view life, and, indeed, the rise of the adult Western coincided with a new era of detente with the Russians. In recent years the system has shown signs of regressing, with the quick-draw duel returning, not in Westerns but in science fiction and fantasy films such as Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark, and we find ourselves entering another period of hostile confrontation with the Soviets. The drama/culture complex is thus not something beyond our control that fatefully rules our lives; it can change. It changes gradually, however, and rarely in response to any individual work. I he changes come in response to changes in life itself; there is a feedback loop through which changes in reality stimulate changes in the complex, while changes in the complex alter the ways in which we comprehend reality. This semiological theory attaches much more importance to drama (and the other arts) than does realistic theory. If drama reflects reality directly, what is the purpose of it? Why bother to study it, when one can just as easily study life itself? Why study life at second hand, when one can tackle it directly, using the social sciences of psychology, anthropology, sociology? Indeed, the present low value of humanistic studies in contrast to the social and physical sciences is in large measure the very result of realistic doctrine, which fails to recognize the crucial function that drama has for us. Drama is not a mirmr held up to nature, but rather a gauge.
Notes 1. Claude Levi-Strauss, From Honey to Ashes, trans. John and Doreen Weighiman (London: Jonathan ('ape, 197 3), passim. 2. Edward T. I lall, The Silent language (Garden (litv, N.V.: Doubicdav, 1973), 44. 3. I have dealt with this at length in chapter two of my bs .\ngeles; University of California Press, 1949), 27.
Part I
Varieties of the Metadramatic
2 The Play within the Play
1 In recent decades there has been a growing scholarly interest in metadrama (or, variously, metatheatre, or metafiction in drama) as an element in the drama. Books like Lionel Abel’s Metatheatre, James L. Calderwood’s Shakespearean Meta drama, Robert Egan’s Drama within Drama, Sidney Homan’s When the Theatre Turns to Itself, Robert J. Nelson’s Play within a Play, and June Schlueter’s Metafictional Characters in Modem Drama are only a few examples of the new attention being paid to this aspect of theatre. Yet these various studies tend to be rather limited in their range; metadrama is rarely given an adequate definition, nor is its extraordinary ubiquity appreciated, nor its many varieties categorized. For example, Lionel Abel’s seminal book. Metatheatre, although original and striking, is actually a collection of only loosely connected essays, of which only about half actually deal with metatheatre—which is never clearly defined. Calderwood, Egan, and Homan limit themselves to Shakespeare; Schlueter, to modern drama. Nelson’s book is broader in scope, but contains no systematic taxonomy, nor any significant philosophical treatment of metadrama as a whole. I do not intend these characterizations to denigrate these works, however, which are of high quality, but rather to suggest that it is time for a broader overview of metadrama as a phenomenon. Briefly, metadrama can be defined as drama about drama; it occurs whenever the subject of a play turns out to be, in some sense, drama itself. There are many ways in which this can occur. In one sense, as I argued in the last chapter, all drama is metadramatic, since its subject is always, willy-nilly, the drama/culture complex. A playwright is constantly drawing on his knowledge of drama as a whole (and, ultimately, culture as a whole) as his “vocabulary” or his “subject matter.” At the same time, his audience is always relating what it sees and hears to the play as a whole, and beyond that, to other plays it has already seen and heard, so that a dramatic work is always experienced at least secondarily as metadramatic. Metadrama is thus not a narrow phenomenon, limited to a few great play> 31
32
Varieties of the Metadramatic
Wrights or to a few periods in theatre history, but is always occurring. Neverthe less, the manner in which a given play is metadramatic, and the degree to which the metadramatic is consciously employed, can vary widely. Great playwrights tend to be more consciously metadramatic than ordinary ones, and their plays to employ metadramatic devices more obviously, because the great playwright conceives his mission to be one of altering the norms and standards by which his audience views the world, and is thus more likely to attack those norms frontally. But again, this is only a tendency, and in fact every metadramatic device Wnd in great plays can also be found in ordinary ones, even among the most crass and pedestrian.
11
The possible varieties of conscious or overt metadrama are as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
The play within the play. 'Fhe ceremony within the play. Role playing within the role. Literary and real-life reference. Self reference.
I shall deal with the first of these types in this chapter, and the remaining four in subsequent chapters. 1 shall deal with a sixth type, drama and perception, in the final section of this book, since this type is broader and subtler than the more overt ones. Serious drama, again, always moves toward the metadramatic, and beyond that, toward the theme of human perception, via the drama/culture complex. In the final section of the book 1 shall discuss, in six plays from differing periods, the ways in which the serious playwright examines the manner in which his society perceives reality. These types of metadrama should be seen not as passive categories, but rather as instrumental ones. ITcy are rarely found in pure form, but often occur together or blend into one another. They are not truth in and of themselves, but rather a means of discovering truth. Phenomenologically, there is much more to metadrama than the simple technical definition of “drama about drama.” The metadramatic experience for the audience is one of uncase, a dislocation of perception. It is thus possible to talk about the degree of intensity of metadrama, which varies from very mild to an extreme disruption. At times, metadrama can yield the most exquisite of aesthetic insights, which tht'orists have spoken of as “estrangement” or “alienation.” This “seeing double” is the true source of the significance of metadrama, and is the true subject of this book.
The Play within the Play
33
iii With regard to the play within the play, there are two general kinds: in one, the “inset” type, the inner play is secondary, a performance set apart from the main action, like The Mousetrap in Shakespeare’s Hamlet; in the other, the “framed” type, the inner play is primary, with the outer play a framing device, like the Sly episodes in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Sbrem The two types are usually distinct—until mcxlern times, in fact, it was always obvious which of the two plays, the inner or the outer, was primary. With both the inset and the framed types, the degree of connection between the outer and the inner play can vary considerably. In Hamlet there is a continuous link between the outer and the inner play; the characters in the outer play fully acknowledge the existence of The Mousetrap {performance, preparing for it, watching it, and commenting on it. Hamlet himself breaks up the performance, thus actually intruding upon it. In other plays, howev’er, there may be much less integration between inner and outer play; such plays may contain interludes, choruses, songs, dances, dumb shows, and so on, that arc not really part of the outer play. Bertolt Brecht’s A Man's a Man, for example, contains a playlet called 'The Elephant Calf which, while having strong thematic connections with the main play, is in no way acknowledged by the main play’s characters or action. In the popular theatre, with its long tradition of entr’acte entertainment (which has disappeared only recently from our theatre), the animal acts, songs, dances, acrobatic feats, jokes, music, and the rest were even less integrated than The Elephant Calf, being chosen with no regard for the main play at all. Conversely, the inset play within the play can be even more integrated with the main play than The Mousetrap is in Hamlet. 'Fhere may be long stories, set speeches, reports of messengers (standard in classical Greek and Roman dramaX pageants, songs, or dances that are capable of standing apart, yet which arc still presented as fully part of the main action, llie “Bleeding Sergeant” speech at the beginning of Macbeth is set in traditional epic style, and would have provided a nice opportunity for a trained orator to deliver as a recitation, yet it is essential for carrying forward the plot of the play, since it reports the story of the battle to Duncan and his entourage. Furthermore, the speaker is not just an orator, but a full-fledged character, a soldier who has Iwen injured in that battle, and whose wounds ultimately make him faint. In 'Twelfth Night, Sir Toby and Festc, the Clown, sing a song that is also dialogue: [sings] “Farewell, dear heart since I must needs be gone.” Nay, good sir Toby. CLOWN, [sings] “His eyes do show his days are almost done.”
TOBY,
MARIA.
MALVOLio. Is’t even so?
34
Varieties of the Metadramatk
'Fhe Play within the Play
[sings] “But I will never die.” [sings] “Sir Toby, there you lie.” MALVOUO. This is much credit to you. TOBY, [sings] “Shall I bid him go?” CLOWN. “What an if you do?” TOBY, “Shall I bid him go, and spare not?” CLOWN. “O, no, no, no, no, you dare not!” TOBY,
CLOWN,
(2.3.93-103) Here the song, like the Bleeding Sergeant’s speech, is recognizably an inset performance, yet it too is an integrated part of the dramatic action, being used directly to mock Malvolio. The play within the play in Hamlet also achieves an aim of one of the characters—to cause Claudius to confess—but that aim is not apparent to the rest of the court, so that the inner p>erformance there stands more apart than it does here. With the framed type of play within the play, the outer, framing play can be strongly integrated with the inner play. In George Pcele’s Elizal)ethan play The Old Wives' Tale (ca. 1588-94), for example, the Old Wife spins a story that turns out to be the main play. She and her listeners comment on the inner play from time to time (like the watchers of 'The Mousetrap in Hamlet). The frame is completed with a little scene of about twenty lines at the end—she, it seems, had fallen asleep during her own story/play, but her listeners awaken her and go off to breakfast. In The Taming of the Shrew, the frame is apparently not completed; Sly and his fellow watchers simply disappear from the printed text, though they may not have done so from the original performance. Other plays may employ a narrator or a chorus as a frame, which is only loosely integrated with the main play. For centuries it was common to have prologues or epilogues written for the occasion of a performance by someone other than the playwright, which did not frame the main play except thematically. Finally, just as entr’acte (Irntertainment, totally disconnected from the main play, used to be common in the popular theatre, so too were the “curtain raiser” and the “afterpiece,” one-act plays or other types of short performance that also had no relation to the evening’s principal entertainment. From all this, we can distinguish between play within the play situations that are truly metadramatic, and those that are not. On the one hand, there must be some integration of the inner play with the outer; that is, the outer play must in some way acknowledge the inner play’s existence. Curtain raisers and afterpieces do not really create a metadramatic frame; interludes are not really metadramatic insets. I would insist further that full-fledged metadramatic framing does not occur unless the outer, framing play contains at least a minimal degree of characterization or plot, as in 'The 'Taming of the Shrew or 'The Old Wives' 'Tale. Prologues, epilogues, choruses, narrators, and the like, usually do acknowledge the existence of the main, inner play, and certainly do set it off within a frame,
35
but it is more a frame of convention, which is noticed only subliminallv bv the audience, than a frame that makes the audience “sec double.” An exception would have to be a play like Shakespeare’s Pericles, where the Chorus, a single character, is given a name (Gower), and comments repeatedly on the action (rather than just at the beginning, or beginning and end), sometimes describing events while the characters act them out simultaneously in dumb show. Or dinarily, however, we do not feel that conventional framing devices like a chorus or prologue are a layer between us and the main action, but instead soon forget them. Conversely, with the inset type of play within the plav, true metadrama does not arise when the inner performance is too well integrated. Set speeches (like that of the Bleeding Sergeant), choral odes, reports of messengers, and the like, are indeed acknowledged by the outer, main play, but, like prologues, epilogues, choruses, and narrators in the framed type of play, they are more conventional than metadramatic. The characters in the outer play acknowledge the existence of such ifiset pieces, but they do not acknowledge them as performance. The theatre audience accepts such devices because they are used to them, noticing no strong shift in the mode of representation. Again, they do not feel as if they are seeing double, through one level of performance into another. In sum, for a play within the play of either the inset or framed type to be fully metadramatic requires that the outer play have characters and plot (although these may both be very sketchy); that these in turn must acknowledge the existence of the inner play; and that they acknowledge it as a performance. In other words, there must lie two sharply distinguishable layers of performance.
IV
Such use of the play within the play is not found in Western drama before the Renaissance. Classical Greek and Roman drama do not employ the device, although they do employ all the other metadramatic devices, some of them in abundance. They also employ many of the conventional framing and inset techniques already discussed, such as the chorus and the prologue, that have little or no metadramatic effect of estrangement. The choral odes in ancient Greek comedy and tragedy are certainly differentiated, in many ways, from the main action shown in the episodes, but they cannot be considered either an outer or an inner play as they function in any extant plavscript. In the latest plays we have, Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, f^uripides’ The Bacchae, or Aristophanes’ Plutus, the role of the chorus is considerably reduced from what it had been—in some earlier plays, in fact, it was even the protagonist—so that, at times, the choral odes seem to be lyric interludes rather than integral parts of the play. Nonetheless, even in these late plays, the chorus is always given a charac terization that is part of the world of the play, and always interacts, at least some
Varieties of the Metadramatic
The Play within the Play
of the time, with“the main characters. In later Greek drama, and in Roman drama as well, it seems that the chorus did become detached from the action.' This kind of interlude can be seen as literally a play within a play, but functions differently from the kind of piece in which the inner play is acknowledged by the characters in the outer play. Aristophanes, in The Frogs, provides numerous inset pieces in the form of lines and parodies from the plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides, which are potentially metadramatic. They do not have a strong metadramatic effect, however, because they arc merely recited out of context; even the charac ters who originally sp>oke the lines often remain unidentified. Rather than plays within the play, they are actually examples of literary references (see chapter 5). As far as we can tell, then, the full-fledged play within the play never occurred in the classical Greek and Roman period. Classical oriental drama at times used the play within the play, however. Kalidasa, the fifth-century a.d. Hindu playwright, made use of the inset type in his play Vikramorvashe. In it, a celestial nymph falls in love with a mortal king. Taking part in a celestial play, she misses her cue and pronounces her lover’s name during the performance, an error that gets her banned from heaven. Kalidasa’s successors appear to have frequently used the inset play within the play as a device.^ In another oriental tradition, the Japanese Noh theatre used the retrospective, framed play within the play as a stock convention. In many of these plays, a traveler encounters the hero in the form of a ghost, who proceeds to act out in dramatic form the story of his earthly life.^ This framed enactment becomes the main play. In the English Renaissance, the integrated play within the play became common for the first time in Western drama. Both the framed and the inset type appear. Shakespeare employs the inset type in three of his plays: The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Hamlet. This list is greatly expanded, however, if we include nondramatic performances like the masques in Love's Labour's Lost, As You Like It, and The Tempest; the apparitions and show of kings in Macbeth; the dumb shows in Pericles; the dream sequences in Richard HI, hricles, Cymbeline, and Henry VIII; the pageantry in Troilus and Cressida and Richard II; and the songs that occur in almost every play. 'I'hese examples, however, might better be included in the second type of metadrama, the ceremonial within the play. We might also include as plays within the play the informal play acting of Falstaff and Hal in the Boar’s Head lavern in Henry IV, Part 1, or of Lear performing the mock trial of his daughters with the F(K)1 and Fxlgar playing judges. These, however, might better be included in the third type of meta drama, role playing within the role. In fact, as already noted, the varieties of metadrama tend to blend into one another, or to operate in tandem; when a play contains a ball (the ceremonial), for example, it will often turn out to be masked (role playing). I he play within the play In English Renaissance drama is not limited to Shakespeare. It is found as early as 1497 in Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres,
which Nelson cites as probably the first use of the device."* In Norton and Sackville’s well known political play Gorboduc (1562), a different dumb show appears at the beginning of each act. These dumb shows are not integrated into the main play, however, since they neither directly acknowledge nor are ac knowledged by it. Instead, they anticipate Brecht’s “alienation effect,” by ser\ing as didactic commentary on the play’s events. Later, dumb shows apj>ear in such plays as Lvly’s Endymion (1588), .Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus (ca. 1588-92), Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (ca. 1589-92), Webster’s The White Devil (ca. 1612-14), and Middleton and Rowley’s ’The Changeling (1622). All of these are integrated into the dramatic action. A masque appears in Marston’s 'The Dutch Courtesan {Ca. 1603-5), a mountebank performance in Jonson’s Volpone{cA. 16056X and a puppet show in his Bartholomew Fair{\6\A)- There is even an audition, in the anonymous The Return from Parnassus, Part 11 (ca. 1601-3), and, of course, songs, pageants, and dances abound in drama throughout the period. As for the framed type of play within the play, many plays in the period employ induc tions, such as the anonymous Mucedorus (ca. 1588-98), Drayton’s The Merry Devil cf Edmonton (ca. 1599-1604), or .Marston’s The Malcontent (1604), while framing plays arc found in Pcele’s 'The Old Wives' 'Tale already mentioned, Greene’s James the Fourth (ca. 1590-91), and Beaumont’s 'The Knight of the Burning Pestle (ca. 160710). This last is interesting in that the framing play arises from the audience, thus anticipating Pirandello; similarly, in Pccle’s Arraignment of Paris, the audience becomes the framewhen Paris gives the golden apple at the end of the play to— whom else?—Queen Elizabeth, the principal audience member. 'The all-time metadramatic record, however, must go to Thomas Kyd’s 'The Spanish 'Tragedy (ca. 1584-89). This amazing play contains both the framed and the inset type of play within the play. The ghost of a former Spanish courtier, and his companion, the allegorical character Revenge, form an induction and chorus for the main play, which contains, in turn, three inset pieces: a parade of the victorious Spanish army with its captives (which the Spanish king likes so much he orders to be repeated), a masque glorifying Spain’s earlier defeat by little England (most unlikely entertainment for the Spanish court, but no one seems to mind), and a play, Soliman and Perseda, delivered in several different languages! 'This last inner play also has a Pirandcllian quality, foreshadow ing Six Characters in Search of an Author, as the deaths within it turn out to be real deaths in terms of the surrounding play. The experience of the audience seeing The Spanish Tragedy is thus not only triple-layered—the play within the play within the play—but also ambiguous, as the principal inset play intrudes back upon the main play. 'The play within the play, then, was so commonplace in the English Renais sance as to become almost a cliche. This fact may shed light on a problem in theatre history: in the only pictorial evidence we have of a performance in that period, the Swan drawing of Johannes DeWitt, there is a small group of people lined up on a balcony above and behind a thrust stage, on which three actors are
36
37
38
Varieties of the Metadramatic
performing. Historians have wondered whether these watchers arc other actors, or if they are audience. The former possibility presents difficulties, since actors not actually performing ought to be in the tiring house rather than out in full view; some historians have thus suggested that what is depicted is in fact not a performance but a rehearsal. But the latter possibility is also troublesome, since there are no other audience members depicted in the entire auditorium; why would DeWitt show audience members only in the worst viewing place of all, and nowhere else? A solution might be that what is depicted is one of the prevalent plays within the plays of the period, with the actors on the thrust taking part in the inner play, and those above in the outer. 'I'his would have worked for either the framed type of play, with the people above forming the frame, like Sly and his deceivers watching the main action of The Taming of the Shrew; or for the inset type, with the actors on the thrust performing an inner piece like The Mousetrap or Soliman and Perseda for the large “audience” above, who are actually in the main, surrounding play. 1 he play within the play is found in C>ontinental Renaissance drama almost as frequently as in the English. Lope de Vega’s Lo Fingtdo Verdadero (ca. 1600) contains two inner plays. A more well-known example is Life Is a Dream, written by the Spanish playwright Pedro Calderon dc la Barca around 1636, in which the inner play is really a dream, and a faked one at that. The protagonist, a young prince reared in confinement, is drugged by his father the king and brought to court, where he behaves abominably. The kind has him drugged again and returned to imprisonment, where he is told that what had occurred was a dream. Since he never afterward knows whether what is happening may be a dream or not, he eventually becomes a good king. I he idea expressed is the traditional Christian one of contemptus mundi, with a new, theatrical twist. Calderon pursued a similar metaphor in his Great Theatre of the World (ca. 1645), and eventually become a priest. ^ In France a number of plavs having plays within them were written as late as the 1630s and 1640s: Jean Retrou’s Le Veritable Saint Genest (1645) has for its subject an actor who becomes converted through his acting.6 Ciougenot’s La Comedie des comediens (1633), de Scudery’s play of the same name written two years later, Corneille’s LTllusion comique (1636), and de la Fessoneries Le Triomphe des cinq passions (1642) arc all apologies du theatre that employ plays within them.^ These pieces, which were mainly essays in dramatic form rather than plays to be performed, mark the end of the play within the play for centuries. After the Renaissance, the device went out of fashion. We do not find it much in the ncoclassic period, nor in the romantic, despite the admiration for Shakespeare in the latter era, when his plays were consciously imitated. Of course, inset songs and dances continued to be popular; indeed, it is hard to find plays without them at any time or place before the modern period. (Despite the vague prejudice that exists today among intellectuals against musical theatre, it is
'Fhe Play within the Play
39
really the norm in theatre history.) Nonetheless, they were rarely metadramatic in the fullest sense; music and dance tend to be either too little integrated (as ^ entr’acte entertainment and the like) or too much integrated (as merely con ventional elements, like the arias in opera, rather than offset performances) to have an effect of estrangement. Certainly, the full-fledged performance within the play, like I lamlet’s Mousetrap, virtually disappears with the coming of the neoclassical age. MoHere, for example, provides endless examples of role playing within the role—it is his stock in trade—but rarely anything resembling the play within the play. LTmpromptu de Versailles (1663) takes place at a rehearsal where, although we do hear brief lines declaimed from a few other plays, we do not see the play being rehearsed. Others of Moliere’s plays contain interludes; the hilarious Turkish ceremony in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670) is one of these, but, signifi cantly, it is not the sort of play that would have been seen on Moliere’s own stage. In fact, such interludes are really examples of the ceremonial within the play, which has less metadramatic impact than an inner performance that is truly a play. The Italian neoclassical stage, and the English Restoration and eighteenthcentury stage, similarly made little use of the play within the play. The framed type appears occasionally, in attenuated form, as in John Gay’s The Beggar's Opera (1728), which has a brief induction by a beggar, the supposed author of the piece. The inset type appears in burlesque plays like Villiers’s The Rehearsal (1671) or Sheridan’s The Critic (1781), but not in nonsatiric drama. (The Beggar's Opera is also satiric.) In general, as Robert J. Nelson notes, by the late eighteenth century, the play within a plav figures at best merely as an episode of the outer plav. As interest shifts from tlic action to the actor, we go not only backstage with the man but offstage with him. In play after play about actors, we do not see the hero onstage, or, when there is a play within a play, it is used only inciden tally. ” What is the reason for this disappearance of a device that had once been so common? The change does coincide with drastic innovations in staging tech niques; perhaps the new illusionistic, proscenium style of staging that replaced the simple thrust platform of the Renaissance with its minimal, emblematic scenery, made the play within the play too difficult to stage. We must remember, however, that Shakespeare’s plays were performed continuously through the neoclassical and romantic periods; the actors of those times must have managed somehow to stage the inner plays. And, as mentioned, the play within the play was used in parodies like The Beggar's Opera, The Rehearsal, and The Critic. Ultimately, the dramatic conventions of a given era are not determined by! staging mechanics, but by the social and philosophical concerns of that era. The' near disappearance of the play within the play around the middle of the
40
I
Varieties of the Metadramatic
seventeenth century represents a change in world view, which I shall discuss shortly.
V
From the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries, then, the play within the play appears only occasionally, usually in a play parodying the prevailing theatrical styles. Even there, it is sometimes used less than one might expect; L'Impromptu de Versailles, for example, would l>e much funnier if Moli^rc had thought to include a full-scale performance rather than a few snippets. In the romantic era, the play within the play occurs hardlv more frequently than in the neoclassical. Goethe’s Faust contains a double frame—a prelude on the stage and a prologue in heaven—plus many songs, dances, and choral pieces, as well as the Walpurgisnacht dream sequence. But, although we have come to think of Faust as the quintessential romantic play, and although it had enormous influence on other playwrights, the play within the play device was still not nearly as popular in the period as it had been in the Renaissance. Again, even where we would expect it to occur, playwrights seem to avoid it. Robert J. Nelson notes that in Alexandre Dumas pere’s Kean (1836), Fhe fact that Kean is an actor is paradoxically almost forgotten. . . . Kean is formally onstage for only a relatively short period. . . . Even in the play within a play—the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet—Kean seems to be onstage only to come off it.*^ Significantly, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s twentieth-century adaptation of the play, Kean is on stage much more of the time, and there is much more exploration of the nature of theatre, than in the source play. As realism replaced romanticism, the play within the play was used even less frequently. Realism often dealt with the everyday life of the middle classes, but, even though theatregping was a regular part of that life, realistic plays do not depict it. (Characters arc often shown going to or coming from the theatre, but rarely in the theatre.) A drastic change began around the turn of the century. I Icre, two plays by the influential playwrights, August Strindberg and Anton Chekhov, are signifi cant: A Dream Play (1902) and Fhe Sea Gull (1896). The former play is of the framed type, with the whole play being in dream style: 'Fhe characters are ^lit, double and multiply; thev evaporate, crystallise, scatter and converge. But a single consciousness holds sway o\”er them all— that of the dreamer.*** I he play itself begins with a prologue in the heavens; in it, the Daughter of Indra, an oriental god, descends to the earth to observe the suffering of human
'Fhe Play within the Play
41
beings. Two things differentiate this play from dream plays and dream se quences of the past: For one thing, dream-like though the play may be, it is not clear who “the dreamer" Strindberg refers to in his author’s note is supposed to be, or even whether this dreamer is anywhere in the play itself. Second, the Daughter of Indra appears, in various characterizations, in both the prologue and in the framed play. (Actually, the prologue does not truly frame the play, as a separate performance or as a dream, but merely introduces it.) Such confusions and moving across boundaries will become typical in twentieth-century metradrama. The Sea Gull contains a play of the inset type, a pretentious yet strangelyfascinating piece by a Decadent playwright, Treplev. The main play contrasts Treplev with the realistic writer, 'Frigorin, and includes two actresses, Arkadina, an older actress who is 'Freplcv’s mother, and Nina, a young actress who performs Treplev’s play. 'Fhere is a good deal of discussion about art, literature, and drama; like so much of twentieth-century literature, the play is directly about the nature of art and the role of the artist. A Dream Play and The Sea Gull can be seen as prototypes for much of twentieth-century metadrama. ’Fhe framed type of play within the play, in which the inner play is bizarre, nightmarish, and confusing, and in which the outer frame is only vaguely defined, became common in the second and third decades of the century with both German expressionism and French surrealism. In both cases, the playwrights were more interested in creating a dream-like quality than in specifying explicitly that someone in the play is experiencing an actual dream. Indeed, plays in which dreamer and dream are explicit, as in the imitative expressionist play. Beggar on Horseback (1924), by the Americans Kaufman and Connelly, seem tepid by comparison with the plays of Kaiser, Toller, Kokoschka, Cocteau, Breton, or Artaud. I'hc disturbing quality that is central to the experience of expressionist or surrealist metadrama disappears if one can say, “Ah, well, he’s only dreaming all this." Beggar on Horseback is more literally metadramatic than, say,. Artaud’s of Blood (1925), since its double layers of performance are more clearly defined. Yet the existential concerns that are raised by plays like Jet of Blood are more true to the spirit of earlier metadrama like Hamlet or Life is a Dream. 'Fhis style of metadrama continues with the later movement beginning in mid century, the theatre of the absurd. Here, the frame of the inner play is even less clearly defined than with expressionism or surrealism. Expressionist plays, for example, often had a central “Ich” figure (usually an artist), whose vision the audience shared. Sometimes it might be implied, vaguely, that he was dreaming the whole thing; more often, that he simply had a unique and fascinating subjectivity, which enabled him to sec the world more sensitively and genuinely than the rest of us. I'hc central figure thus both framed and performed in his own play, making the boundary between inner and outer rather fluid, but nonetheless well defined. In the absurdist plays of Beckett, Ionesco, or Pinter,
42
Varieties of the Metadramatk
the same subjective, dream-like quality remains, but there is usually no central figure in the play itself to whom we can attribute this dreamy subjectivity. The boundary between inner and outer play have dissolved completely, taking us away from metadrama in structure, yet retaining the mctadramatic tone or style. The play within the play has widened out into the “perception” type of metadrama that will be discussed in the final section of this book. The inset type of play within the play in The Sea Gull, which provides the playwright with the opportunity to examine the function of theatre, the per former, and the artist generally, also became a major type of twentieth-century metadrama. It is found extraordinarily often even in popular theatre, including the movies. The show business play or musical comedy is a Broadway staple; Shov) Boat, Once in a Lifetime, Babes in Arms, Annie Get Your Gun, Gypsy, The Sunshine Boys, Follies, A Chorus Line, Forty-Second Street—the list is endless. Recent movies have included The Goodbye Girl, Fame, Tootsie, and The Cotton Club. In the “show biz” piece, the principal focus is on the actor rather than, as in The Sea Gull, the playwright; the action of the play or film usually involves a young actor or actors achieving stardom. I he fascination with show business in American culture has its roots in the loss of traditional Christian religion; the self-transcen dence that religion once promised must now be attained by becoming a “star.” (Note the heavenly nature of the metaphor.) It is interesting that in such plays and films, stardom is r^arely achieved through training; instead, the young performer gets a “break,” or is “discovered.” He or she turns out to have “talent,” which is as mysterious as God’s grace. As with grace, talent is given to only an elite few; its essence is beyond man’s comprehension; it cannot be obtained through one’s own efforts. You examine your behavior in hopes of perceiving it, but actually it is God (the Broadway or Hollywood producer) who elects you to one of the blessed (a star). John Calvin could not hav^ put it better. tatuous as the show business play or film may seem, then, it did not come into existence merely because the writers know nothing but the theatre, as is often charged. (Besides, there is nothing wrong with that; all playwrights write about theatre in some manner.) Such works arc actually related to more serious drama or literature, in which the playwright or p>oet or novelist or artist is depicted as a special, rare, sensitive, blessed creature. This archetype, like all archetypes, is found throughout the entire spectrum of the drama/culture com plex, including both serious and popular forms. The difference is that in serious drama and literature the artist’s greatness is likely to be much more complex, and his relation to society more ambiguous, than that of the actor/star of popular fare. The Sea Gull ends with Freplev committing suicide; we do not really know whether he could have become a great playwright or not. Chekhov gives evi dence for his being talented, but also for his having serious deficiencies as a writer, just as he shows the young actress Nina as having had mixed success, and as being both dedicated and confused about her art. Nor does artistic success bring transcendence; the successful artists in the play, Trigorin and Arkadina,
The Play within the Play
43
seem quite ordinary people at bottom, especially in contrast to the tormented Treplev and Nina. The inset type of play within the play is less common in serious twentiethcentury drama than is the framed type, but is still widespread. Notable play wrights who have used the device include jean Cienet, in such plays as The Balcony and The Blacks; Samuel Beckett in Krapp's Last Tape; and Tom Stoppard in The Real Inspector Hound, 'Travesties, and 'The Real 'Thing. In these plays we often find multiple layering—'The Blacks contains no less than six levels of performing within performing—as well as characters moving across iKmndaries. In The Balcony, the ordinary men playing the roles of Bishop, Judge, and General at the brothel are required also to play them in the outer, “real” world. Krapp in Beckett’s play listens constantly to tape recordings—of himself, as a younger man. 'Travesties revolves around a 1916 production of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, but the outer, “real” play echoes the inner, both in scenes and specific lines. Such plays show the influence of Pirandello, who deserves special mention. In the 1920s the most strikingly metadramatic playwright was Luigi Piran dello. In his “trilogy of the theatre in the theatre”—Six Characters in Search of an Author, Each in His Oven Way, 'Tonight We Improvise—Pirandello was concerned not so much with the function of the theatre artist, but rather with the theatre itself, and illusion generally. (His Henry IV, which 1 shall discuss in chapter 4, is associated with this trilogy, but is really an example of role playing within the role rather than the play within the play.) A cliche in the criticism of Pirandello is that he saw no distinction between illusion and reality; this is actually a more suitable description of the expressionists and their successors than of Pirandello, who always provided clear, distinct layers of plays within his plays. Rather, the significant thing about Pirandello’s plays is that the truth value given to the different layers is subjected to drastic revision as the play progresses. Although in the twenties (and often even today) Pirandello was often considered to be a freak playwright, interesting but isolated and unique, there was in fact nothing new about the play within the play, nor in using the device for an exploration of the nature of reality. Nor had the breaking of boundaries between inner and outer play been previously unknown; the death of the Boy at the end of Six Characters, for example, which destroys the boundary between the inner and the outer play, is prefigured by the deaths in Soliman and hrseda, the inner play of Kyd’s The Spanish 'Tragedy. What was truly original and striking about Pirandello was that he was the first playwright to amalgamate the framed and inset type of play within the plav. In Six Characters, for example, it is impossible to say whether the inner or the outer plav is the main one. I he rehearsal that starts the outer play can be seen as an induction, framing the inner, “real” play, but the six characters in the inner play first intrude on the rehearsal and raise the philosoph ical issues (not discussed in the inner play) that become the overall principal focus, thus making the inner play into an inset type, a demonstration. The six
44
Varieties of the Melodramatic
characters appear in both the outer and inner plays—tbemselves~b\st, until the end, are represented in the Inner play by actors whom we saw rehearsing in the outer play, while the six characters themsclv'es, until the end, stay in the outer play, and, like Hamlet and the members of the court watching The Mousetrap, comment upon it. The inner play is both framed and inset, both primary and secondary. A final type of play within the play that has been important in the twentieth century, but which is unrelated to the Dream Play and Seagull prototypes, is found in the epic style of theatre. Here the framing may not be found in the script, but in performance only; indeed the framed play may be a traditional one from a historical period. A prototype might be the Russian director F.ugene Vakhtangov’s production of Carlo Gozzi’s Turandot, in Moscow in 1922. 'I'he play itself is a fantastic, eighteenth-century Italian piece, which Vakhtangov presented in a graceful Commedia dcll’Arte style. This by itself would not be unusual, although the appalling conditions in Moscow at the time, during the Civil War, led to expediencies in costumes and decor that turned out to be fascinating visually. But, in addition, Vakhtangov placed a Commedia style platform on the stage floor—already creating a visual doubleness—and began the play with a prologue in which the actors donned their costumes in full view of the audience, and a group of zanies put up the scenery. The zanies also changed the scenery during the play, and performed a pantomime that paral leled the action of the play itself" This production is related to the aesthetic theories of the Russian Formalists of the time, who maintained that the function of art was in its ostraneniye, which literally means “making strange.” In 1917 Viktor Shklovsky, a leading formalist, had written: The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Shkiovsky’s theory as expressed here is basically apolitical, as was Vakhtangov’s production of Turandot. Most of Vakhtangov’s successors, however, have used this type of framing for making strong political statements. As with Turandot, the defamiliarization may be achieved through an induction, or with interpo lated material like the pantomime; interpolations can include songs, slides, films, interludes. From the epic theatre of Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht (whose famous “alienation effect”—Verfremdungsejfekt—was taken directly from Shkiovsky’s ostraneniye), to more recent experiments bv Jerzy Grotowsky, Joan Littlewood, Richard Schechner, Peter Stein, Andrei Serban, and many others, the framing of a traditional play has acted like a frontal assault on the drama/ culture complex. Sometimes an original plav will be produced, with an induc tion included to frame it, as in Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, but more often the play is a well-known one, which the director wants the audience to reconsider in
Fhe Play within the Play
45
a radical new way. The framed play may even be held up to outright ridicule, as in Charles Marowitz’s productions of Shakespeare; it may also be altered so drastically that its only true relation to the original is in its title. In better examples, however, the framed play is explored with care and fidelity; the attack may even turn into a reaffirmation of cultural values that the director feels are being lost. Despite the strong political thrust of such productions, there is little or no direct propaganda in them. The best directors sense that drama docs not really work that way. In the theatre, blatant sermonizing that capitalism should end, that war is evil, or that racism or sexism are ruinous, is ineffective, since it docs not alter the habitual ways in which people think alxmt those things, ways that are ingrained, automatic, unquestioned. “Agit-prop” type productions can therefore convince only those who are already convinced; others will simply reject the overt messages as wrong. Theatre works in subtler ways, at a deeper level. By forcing audiences to reexamine famous plays, one is making them reexamine not political issues themselves, but the way in which they perceive those issues. This is not to say that such productions are always gerfectly fulfilled ceremony from the point of view of the usurpers, but to the audience it is a blasphemous perversion, a coronation in reverse, that should never have been performed. In ancient Greek tragedy, we see an example of the pen’erted type of cere mony in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. The entire play is an inquest, which is a ty|>e of ceremony, but in addition, the inquest has as its fWther goal the purification of the city from the plague, which adds to its ceremonial signifi cance. In fact, the inquest is successful, the murder being uncovered, but this “success” turns out to be bitter indeed. In Euripides’ The Bacchae, the final rite of Agave and the Bacchantes is similarly “successful,” in their tearing apart what they suppose is a lion’s cub in a ritual frenzy, but the cub turns out actuallv to be Pentheus, Agave’s own son. In Euripides’ The Trojan Women, there is an offstage ceremony in which the victorious Greeks divide the spoils of war, but again, the
56
57
58
Varieties of the Metadramatic
ceremony is perverted, as result of the Greeks’ cruelty and callousness, seen most vividly in their decision to kill the innocent child, Astyanax. The most common kind of perverted ceremony (which is sometimes disrupted as well) in Greek tragedy is the homecoming. This occurs in such plays as The Persians, Medea, Hippolytus, and Heracles, in which the hero’s welcome home goes wrong in some way. In Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, the action centers on Clytemnestras triumphal welcoming of her husband, which is perverted by her intent to murder him, and interrupted by the actual deed. This event is mirrored by the homecoming of Orestes in the next play of the trilogy, The Libation Bearers, in which the homecoming protagonist murders Clytemnestra. Homecoming cere monies are important means of signifying a restoration of order, to both family and state, after the chaos of war. When they are perverted or disrupted, the feeling engendered is extremely tragic, because of the suffering and dislocation that has already gone on, which will not end after all. In Shakespearean tragedy, as Herbert R. Coursen, Jr., has noted in his book Christian Ritual and the World of Shakespeare's Tragedies, “the tragic hero tends to move away from the creative and healing power of the supernature and pulls his world with him, so that the world itself plunges away from the possibilities of Communion, further and further away from the positive potentiality of social and religious ritual. Any ‘new society’ emerging at the play’s end does so only over the heros dead body.^ It is interesting how, in Shakespearean tragedy, there are so many ceremonies that go wrong in some way: Richard III wooing Anne in interruption of the funeral procession; the trial by combat at the beginning of Richard II interrupted and ended by Richard himself; the funeral and the fencing match in Hamlet both going wrong (as does the play within the play); Lear’s deposition scene collapsing; the second banquets in both Macbeth and Timon of Athens being disrupted. Furthermore, as (Coursen implies, it is the hero himself who, wittingly or unwittingly, is the cause of the ceremonial disruption. In this way, the tragic feelings caused by any broken ceremony center on the hero; tragedy is something the hero does as well as experiences. In tragedy subsequent to Shakespeare, we can note three significant types of ceremony: the offstage ceremony, ;the anti-ceremony‘}and the t^uasi-ceremony: In all these types, the ceremony is absent in some way, yet also is oif great importance. The significance of what is not there, “the presence of absence,” is a central idea in contemporary, poststructural criticism, following the ideas of Jacques Derrida. The importance of absence, however, can be traced to Saussure’s notion of langue; the speaker and listener are always relating a particular utterance (parole) to the surrounding language (langue) as a whole. As we saw in the first chapter, this notion can be expanded to include all the cultural systems or codes within which any kind of symbolic expression occurs. The fact that we do recognize absence when it occurs is evidence that these cultural systems are indeed there, in the background for us. Indeed, the very notion of a tragic, broken ceremony implies that we have a sense of what a proper, completed ceremony should be.
The Ceremony within the Plav
59
The ceremonies m post-Shakespearean tragedy, however, are more specifically conspicuous by their absence, rather than being only broken. 'Fhe most obvious kindofabsence occurs with the ceremony that is placed offstage The offstage -c^ony occurs frequently in neoclassic tragedy, where it is the natural result of the principle of restraint; originally intended as prohibition against showing violence onstage (which would either look foolish because of obvious unreality of the depiction, or vulgar if the illusion were successful), restraint was extended by the French to prohibit almost all overt action. A result is that full-scale ceremonies on stage are relatively rare in neoclassic drama, but they remain important as offstage events. In Racine’s Phaedra, the homecoming of 'Fheseus is perverted by illicit passions. I heseus complains: When to itself my soul returns and takes its fill Of that dear sight, for welcome I receive A shuddering fear and horror. All flee; all shrink From my embraces. And I feel the terror That I inspire.^ In Racine’s Britannkus, there are examples, placed offstage, of the interrupted ceremony: Britannicus dies by drinking a cup of poisoned wine given to him by Nero in a solemn ceremony of feigned reconciliation; later. Narcissus drags Julia from the altar of the Vestal Virgins, where she had been pledging herself. We do not see these events, but they are elaborately described, and are in fact the ■ climax of the play’s action. The^^anti-ceremony ^s a major element in Romantic drama. The most wellImown eHmpI^ istRe Witches’ Sabbath scene in Goethe’s Faust. This parody of the mass is anticipated in Goethe’s principal source, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, and in the witches’ incantations in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but the “black mass” becomes much more widespread in the Romantic period than in the Renais sance; we see it in Cenci’s banquet in Shelley’s The Cenci, the troll scene in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, the barroom scenes in Buchner’s Woyzeck, where an apprentice preaches a mock sermon: Yea, v’erily I say unto you: how should the farmer, the cooper, the shoe maker, the doctor, live, had not God created Man for their use.^ How should A c endowed Man with the need to slaughter himselP And therefore doubt ye not, for all things are lovely and sweet! Yet the world with all its things is an evil place, anT even money passeth into decay. In conclusion, my beloved brethren, let us piss once more upon the Cross so that somewhere a Jew will die!^ Here the Protestant rather than the Catholic service is being mocked, with a sermon full of biblical language and references, and drinking communally instead of by the priest alone. The sermon, however, is full of hatred and vulgarity, and the imbibing, of schnapps rather than wine, is drunken and vile. Since Christ himself was a Jew, who died on the cross, the final suggestion to
Varieties of the Metadramatic
The Ceremony within the Play
“piss upon the Cross” is particularly blasphemous. Such “black mass” scenes, however, are not so much an attack on Christianity, Catholic or Protestant, as they are a mourning for it, full of the despairing sense of its failure. Offstage ceremony is again important in mcxlern naturalistic tragedy. Ibsen provides many examples: the masquerade ball in A Doll House, the dinner and later the prayer meeting (when the orphanage catches fire) in Ghosts, the bachelor party in Hedda Gabler. 'I*he impulse for setting ceremony offstage in naturalistic tragedy did not arise from a desire for restraint, for action was certainly permissible onstage. Indeed, naturalistic tragedy provides many examples of ceremonies onstage as well as off. Instead, the impulse came from a desire to depict an extended world, of which the onstage world is merely a part, a “slice of life.””’ There is less direct focus on the offstage ceremony, as in neoclassic tragedy, and more emphasis on the realistic connections between the seen and the unseen. (’hekhov is famous for placing important actions offstage in his plays, and these actions are often ceremonial: the duel in Three Sisters, the auction in The Cherry Orchard. I'he focus in the plays is on the causes of these ceremonies (which can be seen as examples of the “corrupt” type), and the results that they cause in turn. Furthermore, the ceremonies themselves are downplayed in more ways than just by being placed offstage. The duel in the final act of Three Sisters is potentially a melodramatic climax such as had occurred in any number of plays and novels; in this case, however, half the characters arc not even aware that a duel is going on. Fhe two men are dueling over the love of a woman, a standard enough motivation—except that the woman herself does not really love either of them. Irina has agreed to marry Tuzcnbach, de mieux, but feels little for him except friendship; his love for her seems almost equally pallid, in 'The Cherry Orchard, similarly, the characters that the auction will most affect simply choose to ignore its existence, despite repeated, insistent reminders. These are modern examples of perverted ceremonies, but the perversion does not result from wicked ends, as with Shakespeare, but rather from a general boredom, a refusal to recognize the ceremonial turning points in life. (Chekhov’s plays thus in a sense reflect the decline of the importance of ceremony in modern life, a trend that has continued since his day, to the point where the very words “ceremony” and “ritual” have become pejorative. Oddly enough, farce is another dramatic genre to make wide use of unfulfilled ceremony, ("hekhov’s own farces provide excellent examples: in The Marriage Proposal, The Wedding, and The Anniversary, the ceremonies denoted by the titles break down repeatedly. In The Bear, a widow is keeping up formal mourning for her dead husband far too long; this perverted ceremony, which is due to pride rather than grief, breaks down when a man arrives to attempt to collect a debt. This attempt (not exactly a ceremony, but nonetheless a recognizably standard situation) itself collapses in furious rages, and then, charmingly, in love. In On the Harmfulness of Tobacco, a lecture on the dangers of smoking barely gets started
before the lecturer goes off the track, complaining about his wife, and revealing the frustrations of his largely wasted life. With regard to ceremony, then, farce is a genre closer to tragedy than to comedy. It is thus not surprising that ancient Greek tragedy should have developed out of the farcical satyr play, or that Chekhov himself should have shifted gracefully from writing farces to tragicomedies. Similarly, postmodern “theatre of the absurd” drama mixes farce and tragedy; Ionesco’s The Chairs is even subtitled “A Tragic Farce.” The,.quasi-ritual is the stock-in-trade of theatre of the absurd. ’I'here are also some broken ceremonies of the traditional type, such as the ludicrous partly of "a tutorial in Ionesco’s The Lesson, or the pan)dies implied in the titles of Pinter’s The Birthday Party, 'The Homecoming (which has connections with ancient Greek tragedy), and 'Tea Party.. More common, however, are ceremonies resembling that of Desdemona’s murder, in which the events do not reflect any particular social or religious ceremony, but instead have an overall ceremonial quality, as a result of their solemn tone, their structured organization, their independence from the surrounding action, an.’, above all, the mcaningfulness that the charac ters—but not the audience—place in them. Examples are endless: the nonsen sical incantations at the end of Ionesco’s 'The Bald Soprano, the “I adore hash browned p»otatoes” formula in his Jack, or the Submission, the idiot lecture in his The Chairs, the intern>gation of Stanley in Pinter’s The Birthday Party, the “training” of Kaspar in Handke’s Kaspar, the stoning of the baby in Bond’s Saved, the vicious games in Albee’s Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the playacting scenes in Genet’s The Balcony, 'The Maids, and The Blacks. (These last can also be seen as exarnj^es^ plays within the play, but since they apparentiv have been repeated many times, and seem to be reaching toward some kind of eternal transfigura tion, they are at least in the process of becoming ceremony.) Such quasi ceremonies have the air of being invented for the nonce, which only adds to their empty, grotesque qualities. The plays of Samuel Beckett similarly abound in invented, quasi-ceremonies, as the characters desperately attempt to make mean ing out of the mundane elements of their paltry, restricted lives. In the world of the theatre of the absurd, ritual andy:eremony have JijsLthcir. mining, but the characters persist in trying to invent them. Ssot only are the results cruel and perverted, but the very impulses behind them seem mindlessly obsessive. Man cannot live without ceremony, but the traditional ones arc dead, and the new ones he invents are meaningless. The compulsion toward ceremony in contemporary drama has carried over into theatrical production. Like the characters in theatre of the absurd plays, stage directors have attempted to create ritual onstage. A manifesto calling for such a ritualized theatre is found as early as the 1930s, in the writings of Antonin Artaud: Every spectacle will contain a physical and objective element, perceptible to all. Cries, groans, apparitions, surprises, theatricalities of all kinds, magic
60
61
62
Varieties of the Metadramatic beauty of costumes taken from certain ritual models; resplendent lighting, incantational beauty of voices, the charms of harmony, rare notes of music, colors of objects, physical rhythm of movements whose crescendo and decrcscendo will accord exactly with the pulsation of movements familiar to every one, concrete appearances of new and surprising objects, masks, effigies yards high, sudden changes of light, the physical action of light which arouses sensations of heat and cold, etc."
Artaud never actually staged such performances, however; his ritualized theatre has been fulfilled only in the past few decades, by directors who either insert rituals into traditional plays, “ritiwHze” the production style of an entire play, or occasionally even create an entire, original production in ritual form, as in the Peter Brook-Ted Hughes Orghast, performed with an invented, meaningless language in front of ancient ruins in Iran. Such ceremonies, again, are not directly based on any traditional ones in our culture, although they may borrow random elements from such things as the Catholic mass, or lake over rituals wholesale from other cultures, as when Richard Schechner inserted a New Guinean birth ritual into a production based on Euripides’ TheBacchae. As in the theatre of the absurd plays, however, the effects of such concocted or sec ondhand rituals on an audience are disturbing. They are not part of our culture, and in no way relate to it. As Richard F. Hardin has noted in a comprehensive article on ritual in recent literary criticism, ‘‘Rites cannot exist in an aesthetic or formalist vacuum; they require the context of community'We 'do'not invent the great ceremonies of our culture butT rather, come to them as parts oFa whole. Ceremohres that convey no meaning'to an audience,“that make no connections ',^with a surrounding, stable culture, seem merely bizarre or exotic. Unlike true \ ceremony, which orients its watchers to a whole order of society and the universe, such quasi-ceremonies confuse and disorient, increasing rather than 1 overcoming our feeling that the world is meaningless. Thus, attempts to create ceremony fail both in dramatic literature and in theatrical performance. This failure, however, is sociological rather than aes thetic. Indeed, the feelings of dislocation and estrangement generated by such quasi-ceremonies are similar to those that are common to modern art generally. Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of ostraneniye, or defamiliarization, is again relevant here: Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.’^ It is certainly valuable to “recover the sensation of life,” and the shock value of the quasi-ceremony in avant-garde drama and theatre may indeed help individu-
The Ceremony within the Play
63
als to see life anew in a semiologically overloaded world, where the slogan, the image, the abstraction have detached themselves from reality and, instead of being a means of ordering and understanding life, have become a meaningless substitute for it. Yet the fact that such avant-garde works are asocial, functioning for the individual in isolation only, raises grave problems. It means that such art works will remain avant-garde forever, never becoming integrated into the drama/culture complex, never appealing to large groups of people, and never providing the social cohesion that theatre has created in the past. The function of an avant-garde should be not just to break down culture, but to renew it, to recreate it. The reader or audience member, similarly, should feel not just defamiliarization, but reintegration. The purely private ceremonies that are so widespread in contemporary drama and theatrical practices have a counterpart in everyday life: in the behavior of patients suffering from obsessional neurosis. Charles Rycroft writes: The patient attempts to reduce anxiety by carrying out a more or less complex and stereotyped series of actions. Obsessional rituals can be regarded as a private^ constructed system of counter-magic by which the patient attempts to war(f off fantastic fears by equally fantastic actions, the logic of both bemg animistic and dependent on primary process thinking. In washing rituals, patients feel compelled to wasn themselves according to a rigidly prescribed and complex routine in order to allay a dread of being infected or of infecting others, the fear of infection being one which their own intelligence does not endorse. In this respect, obsessional rituals differ sharply from the rituals of the ignorant, superstitious, and religious. They also )le has described how, in such cultures, the actor, like the shaman, takes his audience back to the illud tempus—”a time of origins, the period of Creation and just after, when gods walked the earth, men visited the sky, and the great archetypal events of myth . . . took place.The time of origins for the universe can be seen as a metaphor for the time of our own personal origins, the state of “limitless narcissism" again. Role playing within the n>le is particularly shamanistic in this sense, since it seeks directly to take us back ot our original, limitless selves. The actor toys with role, to help us temporarily rediscover rolelessness. Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, seems to write disparagingly of the oceanic feeling—the very phrase “limitless narcissism” suggests that it is some thing unseemly. Nevertheless, this concept is a rare case where science, art, and religion all meet. Although it is literally a regression to infantilism to experience the oceanic feeling, it is wrong to consider it therefore to be trifling or con temptible. lb recncounter our origins, to l)e reminded of who we truly are, creatures of-—rather than merelv in—the universe, is valuable whether consid ered mystically or scientifically.
11
Role playing within the role sets up a special acting situation that goes beyond the usual exploration of specific roles; it exposes the very nature of role itself. The theatrical efficacy of role playing within the role is the result of its remind ing us that all human roles are relative, that identities are learned rather than innate. Unconsciously, we are made to recall the infantile state of “limitless narcissism,” when there were no roles, no boundaries, only an oceanic feeling of being at one with the universe. This oceanic feeling is both pleasurable and
73
Ill
Role playing within the role occurs in three broad types: voluntary, involun tary, and allegorical. Voluntary role playing is the most straightforward kind; a character consciously and willingly takes on a role different fmm his ordinary self in order to achieve some clear goal. Thus, in The Merchant of Venice, Portia takes on the role of “Balthasar,” a Doctor of Laws, in order to get into the Venetian law court, serve as judge, and save Antonio’s life. Horner, in Wy cherley’s The Country Wife, plavs the part of eunuch in order to have access to women, to seduce them in safety. Engstrand, in Ibsen’s Ghosts, plays at being pious in order to deceive and manipulate Pastor Manders. Sometimes the role played is a complete disguise, a totally different person from the character’s ordinary self—with a different name, a different background, even a different sex, as with Portia/Balthasar. At other times, the role may simply be a false attitude or pose; when lago manipulates Othello, he is still “lago,” but in the
74
Varieties of the Metadramatic
guise of being “honest” (every other major character calls him that), although his true self is utterly wicked. The effect on the audience is much the same in either case; the fact that the character is consciously, wittingly feigning creates a distinct uneasiness about role generally, especially since we cannot help but remember that the character himself is being feigned by an actor. Voluntary role playing within the role is theraost metadramatic type. ------ rhvoTuntary role playing within the role may be caused by factors outside the character, or caused by some inner weakness, or, quite commonly, caused by some combination of outer and inner factors. Christopher Sly, in the Induction of The Taming of the Shrew, provides an example of externally caused, involuntary role playing: the other characters convince him that he is actually a noble gentleman, who has been asleep for fifteen years, during which time he has presumably dreamed of being the lowly Sly. (The device is similar to that used in Calderon’s Life is a Dream and Pirandello’s Henry IV.) Used in tandem with the play within the play. Sly’s externally caused role playing enhances the meta dramatic effect of The Taming of the Shrew as a whole. In Wycherley’s The Country Wife, Sparkish provides an example of involuntary role playing that is primarily caused from within. Although his feigned elegance has a conscious goal of social success, it actually achieves the opposite; Sparkish’s foppishness is so exagger ated and ridiculous that its actual cause is to be found in his own inner insecurities. Finally, Malvolio in Twelfth Night provides an example of role playing within the role that results from both external and internal forces; the manipulations of Maria and her crew as well as Malvolio’s own inner weaknesses cause him to put on yellow cross-garters and behave like a fool. In all such cases of involuntary role playing, we feel less estranged than when the role playing is voluntary, because we are more secure as to who the character really is. His false self has been forced upon him. Even when the role playing is his own fault, as with Sparkish or Malvolio, he cannot really help himself; his sin is venial, not mortal. Allegorical role playing within the role is more subtle than the voluntary or involuntary types. It can, in fact, be seen instead as an example of the fourth type of metadrama, references to other literature, rather than strict role playing. Allegorical role playing within the role arises whenever the play’s situation, action, or imagery contrive to relate a character to some well-known literary of historical figure. Religious allegory, for example, occurs often in Shakespeare. Thus, the opening scene of As You Like It has for its action the falling out of two brothers, Orlando and Oliver. The scene takes place in an orchard; a third character, not Orlando’s biological father but a father figure to him, is named “Adam.” For the original audience, drilled since childhood in biblical lore, there was an obvious reference here to the story of the rivalry and hatred of Cain and Abel, whose father was Adam, who was expelled from an “orchard,” the Garden of E^en. These allegorical associations are not noticed by the characters, nor made
Role Playing within the Role
75
explicit in any other way, but are nonetheless apparent. Under the doctrine of correspondences that was widely accepted in Shakespeare’s time,'*' events in the Bible were believed to be continually reenacted in real life; everyone was replaying the archetypal roles found there. In the drama of the period, there are two main types of allegorical role playing; cither it is made explicit in the play, and fully noticed by the characters, or it is implicit only, as in the Orlando/ Oliver quarrel at the beginning of As You Like It. When the allegorical role playing is explicit, it can also simultaneously be voluntary or involuntary. An example of explicit allegorical role playing occurs in The Merchant of Venice, where Launcelot Gobbo kneels down, backward, in front of his blind and senile father and asks for his blessing (2.2). Old Gobbo feels his hairy head and, thinking it is Launcelot’s face, exclaims, “Thou hast got more hair on thy chin than Dobbin my fill-horse has on his tail” (2.2.87-88). There is a clear reference to the biblical story of the wily Jacob fooling his blind father, Isaac, by placing a hairy goat skin on his smooth neck. Here Launcelot is fully aware of the story, and indeed, sets up consciously to play the allegorical role in order to fool his father. Later in the play, there is another example of biblical allegory. Actually, the allusion is to the Apocrypha, widely known in Shakespeare’s time: when, in the trial scene, Shylock thinks he is about to win, he praises Portia (here playing Balthasar), crying “A Daniel come to judgment! yea, a Daniel! / O wise young judge, how I do honor thee” (4.1.221-22). Here there is double-layered role playing, or, if we count the boy actor who played Portia, triple-layered: a boy is playing Portia, who is playing Balthasar, whom Shylock praises for playing Daniel. But the allegorical role playing, inter estingly, turns out to be implicit as well as explicit. The story in the Apocrypha to which Shylock is referring is of Susanna and the Elders. In it, the Elders try to pervert the law to gain vengeance on Susanna, but Daniel, as a wise lawyer, turns the law against them, and exposes their wickedness. Shylock recognizes ! -Portia/Balthasar as a Daniel, but does not recognize himself as an Elder, who is trying to use the law in a perverse way to gain vengeance on Antonio. Like -Daniel, Portia turns the law against Shylock, which is why Gratiano mocks him by repeating his own words, “A second Daniel! a Daniel, Jew!” (2.2.331). In general, the interesting types of role playing within the role are like this one in The Merchant of Venice, where one type of role playing turns into another. I have already mentioned how playwrights often use the role within the role to suggest something basic about the character. Hamlet’s feigned madness seems especially appropriate for him, not because he is literally mad, but because there appear to be hidden, unconscious elements in his character that are at least akin to madness. His procrastination and generally erratic behavior suggest that his madness is not entirely feigned; his role playing is both voluntary and involun tary. Similarly, lago starts out by giving numerous justifications for using the role of “honest” friend to destroy Othello; he says he is angry at having been passed over for promotion, that he fears that Othello has cuckolded him, even
76
Varieties of the Metadramatic
that he himself is in love with Desdemona. Here would seem to be voluntary role playing indeed. As the play progresses, however, these apparent motivations become almost forgotten, while lago comes to act not so much like someone in pursuit of a conscious goal, but rather like a man who has at long last found his true vocation. Using g(x>d in the serv’ice of evil is no longer a voluntary act toward a conscious end, but an end in itself, the delightful satisfaction of an obsession. ('Fhis is the reason for Coleridge’s “motiveless malignity” theory.) In Wycherley’s The Country Wife, Horner’s playing a eunuch also seems particularly appropriate to the character. It is obvious to the audience—and to the female characters—that he is not literally castrated, but his supposed state does reflect a certain emotional emptiness in the character, an inability to feel love or even lust. The women cease to interest him sexually the moment he has had them. For him, the chase is everything, the prize nothing; the offstage act of sexual intercourse in the famous “China Scene” lasts about thirty seconds. He is not a eunuch of the body, but of the emotions. In all these examples, then, the role playing shifts from the voluntary type to the involuntary, inner type. In ancient Greek drama we find numerous examples of role playing within the role that have the same quality of shifting from the voluntary to the involuntary, or from externally caused to the internally driven. In Greek comedy, the two stock characters of alazon and eiron arc both role players; the former, a boaster and imposter, presenting himself as better than he is, the latter, a self-dcprecator, presenting himself as worse. A famous example of imposter occurs in Aristophanes’ I'hesmopboriazusae, in which Euripides at one point impersonates a woman. (Two other impostors, his kinsman and the tragic poet Agathon, do the same.) Euripides’ ostensible purpose is to intrude on the chorus of women’s Fhesmophorian festival, where they are planning to attack him for his treatment of women in his plays, but again, the role playing device exposes Euripides’ effeminate nature, which Aristophanes is lampooning. The tragic counterpart of gender role playing occurs in f^uripides’ own The Bacebae, where the protagonist, Pentheus, dresses as a woman in order to observe the Dionysian rites of the ecstatic bacchantes. Here there is a double shift: the impersonation has a conscious goal, but it is also brought about by Dionysus casting a spell on Pentheus. At the same time, the lurid fascination that Pentheus feels toward the women, and his delight in dressing up as one of them, expose an inner cause of this involuntary aspect of role playing: dressing as a woman expresses the feminine side of his essential nature, which for the male chauvinist Greeks meant the irrational, emotional, sensual side.
IV
There are many other examples of role playing within the role in Greek drama, and in subsequent drama as well. As critics have long noted, the alazon
Role Playing within the Role
77
and eiron types of role players are stock figures in all comedy subsequent to Aristophanes. Terence’s The Eunuch provides a good example in Roman comedy, since it is the source of Wycherley’s The Country Wife; in 'The Eunuch, a young man passes himself off as a eunuch in order to get into a courtesan’s house to seduce a girl living there with whom he is in love. He is thus an example of the eiron type, passing himself off as less than he is. 'Fhe play’s cast also includes a boastful soldier as an alazon type; the boastful soldier, or miles gloriosus, was a popular figure in Roman comedy, appearing as the title character in a play by Plautus, and having since become a stock figure in its own right. In Plautus’s The Menaechmi we find a hilarious example of involuntary role playing of the exter nally caused sort, as a pair of twins find themselves each unwittingly playing the role of the other. Medieval drama also contains many examples of role playing within the role. In the secular Robin Hood plays, the outlaw Robin Hood often goes about disguised; similarly, in the twelfth-century religious play hregrini, performed at the Cathedral of Rouen, Christ appears to his disciples after the crucifixion; they fail to recognize him until, seated at the table, he breaks bread “unto them” and disappears." In the German Play of Frau Jutten (1480), the Devil leads krau Jutten to pursue learning in male attire, until she becomes popc.'^ The central device of gender role playing is similar to that of the recent Barbra Streisand film Yentl, but with a different moral conclusion, since in the medieval play she is ultimately damned for having presumed to play the wrong sex! In the Wakefield Second Shepherds' Play of the fourteenth century, Mak the Shepherd steals a sheep, which his wife passes off as a baby to which she has supposedly just given birth. I'his is interesting in that there is an animal impersonating a human, in a re^rsal of the standard fairy tale action of a human becoming an animal, but also in that there is a religious allegorical role playing going on as well. The “newborn” sheep suggests the lamb of God, or Jesus, and since the play also contains the birth of Jesus, the allegory is made clear in a comic correspondence. I have already given several examples of role playing within the role in Renaissance drama in the plays of Shakespeare. All types of role playing within the role can in fact be found in Renaissance drama in abundance, but two types are of special interest. First is the “white devil” sort of role playing, as in Webster’s play of that title, or in Othello or Macbeth. I he white devil, or devil with a fair outside, whose “false face must hide what the false heart doth know,” was of special fascination in Shakespeare’s time, since it challenged people’s basic Christian ideas about identity. In theory, the soul was supposed to be stamped on the face; beauty supposedly reflected a person’s g(X)dness, and ugliness a person’s wickedness. Duncan, in Macbeth, is expressing a traditional view when he says, “'Fherc’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face”'^ (1.4.1112). Similarly, lago is playing on Othello’s traditional mind when he says, “Men should be what they seem; / Or those that be not, would they might seem none!”
78
Varieties of the Metadramatic
Role Playing within the Role
(3.3.126-27), to which Othello immediately replies, “Certain, men should be what they seem” (3.3.128). The fact that both Duncan and Othello turn out to be wildly wrong about identity would have been seen in Shakespeare’s time as a result of man’s fallen state; in the Garden of Eden, presumably, everybody’s outward identity would have accurately reflected his soul, but since then, one had better be careful about jumping to such a conclusion. Probing a little deeper, however, we can see that such misgivings about identity reflect the growing size of cities, the rise of international commerce, the increases in the size and complexity of gov’crnment, and the resultant increased amount of social intercourse in the Renaissance as compared to the Middle Ages. In a small medieval town, or on a medieval fief, everyone knew everybody else at least by sight, encountering more or less the same small group of people every day throughout a lifetime. In such circum stances, one can be fairly comfortable about identity. People do not try to hide who they are, or cover their dealings with a false face of honesty, when all of their dealings are with the same group of people, over and over, because it would do no good. But when one is always dealing with new people, whether in government or in commerce, trickery becomes eminently possible. Conversely, one must now be on one’s guard against false identities, because men may not be “what they seem” at first. The examples of role playing in medieval drama were rarely of the good-covering-evil type; usually the hidden identity—Robin Hood, Jesus, Frau jutten—was a good one. As society became more complex, identity became more of a predicament, and the drama explored it in more subtle and intriguing ways. 'llie other interesting type of role playing found in Shakespeare and his contemporaries is the converse of the “white devil” type; instead of hiding his true identity, a character plays at l>eing himself. This is most striking in Richard II, where Richard appears to be playing at being king, even though he actually is one.
speech, contrasting the player who has just finished a tearful performance to his own inept “performance” as a prince seeking rightful vengeance. Similarly, in Twelfth Night, .Malvolio (a comic Hamlet in some ways) really is in love with Olivia, but can express his love only through play-acting, first all alone in his fantasies and then, after finding the forged letter, to Olivia, with his yellow cross-garters and faked smile. Elusion is perhaps most clearly seen in Shakespeare in the “seven ages of man” speech of Jaques (another comic Hamlet) in As You Like It. Jaques seems always to be performing, as his fellow banished lords often comment, describing his “weeping and commenting / Upon the sobbing deer” and drawing “a thousand similes” (2.1.66, 45), like an actor in a poetic drama. Now he sees all the world as a stage, and all the men and women “merely” players, with life a meaningless charade, a “strange eventful history” (2.7.139-66). Ihis alienation from life is what Laing calls “ontological insecurity,” in which a person lacks “a centrally firm sense of his own and other people’s reality and identity.”'** For Jaques, all the world is a stage, and all identities, including his own, are bogus. All men and women are “merely players,” role playing their own roles. Because society has grown ever more complex since the Renaissance, identity continues to fascinate us, and hence to provide a major subject for playwrights. 1 have already mentioned, in a previous chapter, that role playing within the role is Moliere’s stock in trade. Every single Moli&re play contains role playing as a) major element. He explores all types: 'lartuffe, for instance, is a strong examplej of voluntary role playing; Sganarelle, in The Doctor in Spite of Himself an example of involuntary role playing, externally caused; .Argan, Monsieur Jourdain, and the Precious Ladies examples of involuntary role playing, internally caused. Moli^re’s masterpiece. The Misanthrope, is the perfect counter-example, since its hero, Alceste, is a character who despises role playing, and devotes himself to attacking it. When asked how people should reasonably behave, he insists:
.
Yet looks he like a king. Behold, his eye. As bright as is the eame’s, lightens forth (^ontrmling majesty. Alack, alack, for woe, That anv harm should stain so fair a show!
79
I’d have them be sincere, and never part With any word that isn’t from the heart. (3.3.68-71)
But alack, alack, Richard’s kingship is all “show”; his actual rule is weak and erratic. (Ironically, he only begins to seem like a real king when he is deposed.) The same sense of playing a role in life, a false outward show even when it is reasonable and proper behavior, occurs from time to time with many of Shake speare’s heroes, including Lear, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Antony, and Richard’s successor, Henry IV. This is Laing’s “elusion” again, in which a neurotic individual, because of fundamental insecurities, feels that his self is a sham. Hamlet expresses such feelings in the “O what a rogue and f>easant slave”
All the other characters in the play are elaborate role players, most of them obsessively; even Alceste’s servant. Monsieur Dubois, when he arrives to bring a message, comes in disguise—for no particular reason! But even Alceste himself turns out not to be immune to role playing, as he takes masochistic delight in taking on the identity of wronged innocent: It may cost twenty thousand francs; but I Shall pay their twenty thousand, and gain thereby The right to storm and rage at human evil. Since he would rather “storm and rage” at injustice than see it corrected, his role of moralist has clearly overwhelmed its function. 'Fhe message of the play is that
80
Varieties of the Metadramatic
role playing is not only a social necessity, it is a matter of inner compulsion, and is thus inescapable. This would seem to be similar in attitude to the cynicism expressed by Shakespeare’s Jaques in the “seven ages of man” speech, but there is a crucial difference.[TnTV1olidre’s plays, all the men and women are indeed players, acting out roles by design, by coercion, or by impulse, but all the world is not a stage. Some of his lesser characters seem to be actors all the time, like his pompous doctors who talk medical mumbo-jumbo even among themselves, but Moliere’s principal characters usually have real, “offstage” identities to show us. Sganarelle is not always shown as a bogus doctor; the audience has seen that he is a simple workman underneath. Tartuffe lets his mask fall in the scene in which he pursues Elmire, and is further unmasked in the final scene, by an officer of the king, as a long-time villain and con man. Moliere, an actor himself by profession in addition to being a playwright, shows_rflle playing as ap inescapa-1 hie human need, but not an overwhelming one. The ideal is to be like Philinte,' Alceste’s friend and raisonneur in The Misanthrope, who plays roles (infuriating Alceste) out of a sense of propriety and common sense: It’s often best to veil one’s true emotions. Wouldn’t the social fabric come undone If we were wholly frank with everyone? In role playing, as with everything else in the neoclassical age, balance and moderation were the ideals; to try to avoid it altogether was as foolish as to be “on” all the time. Comedy of Manners, developed in this period, has ever since stressed the importance of “proper” role playing, which amounts to presenting a witty, elegant focade to the world. I his is to be done voluntarily, rather than compulsively, while one’s true self remains aloof but solid, to be exposed at rare genuine moments, as in declarations of true love. By contrast, a good deal of modern drama has depicted principal characters who role play incessantly, and who seem to have no true identities at all. Ibsen’s Peer Gynt is the classic prototype. In the famous onion scene (5.5), Peer peels an onion, attempting to find its kernel, relating the peels to the multitudinous roles he has played in his own life. He mentions shipwrecked man, passenger, prospector, fur trader, archaeologist, prophet, man of pleasure, slave trader, which arc actually only a few of the many identities that he has had. “These layers just go endlessly on!”"^ he remarks in frustration, finding that the onion has nothing but layers, with no kernel at all. In relation to the Christian tradition, which depicted man as having an immortal soul, this is a frightening idea. Moliere’s characters may have been compulsive role players, but, as noted, they also had true selves. At the end of Tartuffe, the officer maintains that Tartuffe’s uncovering was inevitable: We serve a Prince to whom all sham is hateful, A Prince who sees into our inmost hearts,
Role Playing within the Role
81
And can’t be fooled by any tricker’s arts. His royal soul, thougli generous and human. Views all things with discernment and acumen.*^ In other words, the Prince (who does not appear) is just like God, who sees into men’s true souls, no matter how deeply hidden. But Peer Gynt has no soul, no “inmost heart,” only layers, like the onion. All the world is once again a stage. Modern drama (and modern literature in general) is full of characters who are like Peer Gynt, those identities are like the peels of an onion, covering no core. Unlike Moliere’s characters. Peer and his successors are cither depicted as being always “onstage,” or else their “backstage” personalities seem just as forced and artificial as their onstage ones. In Strindberg’s Dream Play, already discussed in chapter two, “the characters are split, double and multiply; they CN'aporate, crystallise, scatter and converge.It is thus impossible to say which are their true personalities, or, indeed, if they have any, since they may all be the imaginings of an unseen dreamer. (In this play, even the scenery seems to play roles, a cupboard becoming a stage door, a tree a hat stand and then a can delabra, an organ the walls of a grotto, etc.) Pirandello’s six characters, similarly, may have no true selves, but may be only the chimeric creations of a playwright who dropped them, half-created, without finishing their play. 'Rie same kind of cynicism about life in general that is found in modern drama is also found about identity. In this regard, characters who exhibit elusion and ontological insecurity occur in abundance. Shaw, who usually wrote in the Comedy of Manners tradition, in which role playing is balanced and controlled, also wrote Heartbreak House, in which aristocrats play at being aristocrats, a burglar plays at being a burglar, an industrialist plays at being an industrialist (imitating the big bosses he has seen in the movies, he is forced to admit), and a hero. Hector Hushabye, plays at being a hero—even though he is really brave, and has “a whole drawerful of Albert medals,”^* he makes up lies about things he never did in adventures that never happened. Bertolt Brecht, in The Good Person of Setzuan, created a woman, Shen Te, who takes on the identity of a man, Shui Ta. Unlike Shakespeare’s heroines who do the same, however, this split character seems to have no genuine identity; when she becomes a man, her new persona completely overwhelms the old. Kind, generous Shen Te becomes ruthless and brutal as Shui Ta, losing all traces of her (his?) former self. This is not so much one identity covering another as two identities covering nothing. More traditional forms of role playing arc also widely found in modern drama. The (Comedy of Manners tradition, carried on by playwrights like Wilde, Shaw, and Coward, gives us plays in which role playing is voluntary, positive, and balanced. In Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, it is important to be named Ernest, but not be too earnest, to be somewhat aloof and light hearted about one’s identities. One must take one’s social role seriously but not too much so. Shaw, in Misalliance, depicts this philosophy very clearly; the prim
Varieties of the Metadramatic
Role Playing within the Role
young man, Joey Percival, tells Hypatia, “I’m not prepared to cast off the social bond. It’s like a corset: it’s a support to the figure even if it does squeeze and deform it a bit.”^^ Hypatia, however, ends up chasing him through the woods, finally convincing him that there are times when it is important to take off the role of proper English gentleman, to let oneself go, to loosen the corset of identity, and submit to one’s sexual instincts. Identity and sexual propriety, which are always related in our unconscious minds, are depicted in the same way in Comedy of Manners; both are necessary, but one must be able to cast them aside. Examples of involuntary role playing, externally caused, in modern drama occur in Brecht’s A Man's a Man, whose hero, Galy Gay, is transformed by soldiers from a simple porter into a “human fighting machine”; O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon, in which two brothers exchange roles, the good farmer going away to sea while the dreamer stays home to farm;^^ Pinter’s The Birthday Party, in which the hero is brainwashed into becoming an aphasic moron; Ionesco’s Jack; or the Submission, in which rebellious Jack is made to conform, by being forced to recite a ridiculous phrase; and Peter Handke’s Kaspar, in which unseen prompt ers drill the title character through language to become “normal” and sub missive. In examples written prior to World War II, the forces that coerce the characters to become what they are not are usually obvious. Either “society” is at fault, as in A Man's a Man, or else a simple human weakness like sexual attraction. The totalitarian horrors of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, how ever, have led later playwrights to show characters manipulated by an unseen, mysterious, powerful authority. 'Die literary influences here are Kafka and Orwell; the real-life influences are Stalin, Hitler, and the ruthless authoritarian systems they created, which are seen as continuing today in subtler forms. Some examples of involuntary, compulsive role playing in modern drama include Strindberg’s Miss Julie, in which the servant, Jean, feels compelled to act like an aristocrat, while Miss Julie, his mistress and briefly his lover, feels compelled to act like a servant; Shaw’s Heartbreak House, whose characters, as already mentioned, compulsively play at being themselves; O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet, in which the Irish immigrant hero is obsessed with l>ehaving like an English aristocrat and military hero; and Pinter’s The Lover, in which an ordinary middle-class couple act out roles in an elaborate sexual fantasy. The plays of Samuel Beckett provide any number of examples, perhaps the most interesting of which is Hamm, the protagonist of Endgame, who is apparently carrying on a running performance all during the play; his opening line is “Me—to play,” and from time to time he comments on his own delivery, saying things like “Nicely put, that,” or “I’m warming up for my last soliloquy.”^"* As previously, interesting examples arise in the areas of voluntary and invol untary role playing when one form turns into the other. In Shaw’s Pygmalion, Eliza’s role playing as a fine lady is at first voluntary (she is even ready to pay
Hi^ins to help her make the transformation); then coerced, as he turns her into a ridiculous mechanical doll, aping the speech and outer qualities of a lady while maintaining the attitudes of a street girl; and finally voluntary again, as she becomes an integrated person, who throws off the lx)nds that Higgins created, and takes control of the role that he had enabled her to play. Eliza reaches the point where she has no “role” separate from her self; like Galy Gay, she is tranformed, rather than merely having a new layer added to her personality, but it is a transformation into a true person rather than into a soulless machine. Pirandello also uses shifting types of role playing, in a characteristically interesting manner. (Pirandello did not invent metadrama, but he did use it in nontraditional ways.) Before, playwrights like Shakespeare depicted voluntary role playing that became involuntary, as the character either got carried away by his role, like lago, or revealed that he had always had a special affinity for it, like Hamlet. Pirandello, in Henry IV, provides a character who goes the other way, his involuntary role plaving becoming voluntary. An Italian nobleman, injured in a fall from a horse during a masquerade, came to believe that he was the historical German emperor Henry IV. After twelve years, he recovers his sanity, but continues voluntarily to play the role because he finds the real world, in which he has lost the woman he loved, to be a j>oor substitute for his imaginary one. Finally, he murders the woman’s lover, which means that he must keep up the pretense of insanity if he is to avoid prosecution. His n)le playing has become involuntary again—though as a result of his own choice. The shift from voluntary to involuntary role playing became a device ex ploited by the theatre of the absurd playwrights, most notably Jean Genet. The brothel patrons in The Balcony and the maids in The Maids shift from compulsive role playing to voluntary, while the oppressed Blacks in The Blacks shift from coerced role playing to voluntary, as they delightedly carry out elaborate rituals of nigritude. Allegorical role playing occurs in modern drama, biblical allegory being a popular sort, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that Christianity has declined in our culture. In T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, the death of Celia is described at the end as a crucifixion by plague-stricken cannibals in Africa, has a rather too obvious Christian meaning. Hamm in Beckett’s Endgame at times seems to be Hamlet (one meaning of his name), but at other times. Ham, the son of Noah. In Synge’s Playboy of t^ Western World, there are multiple layers of role playing. The hero, Christy, is a compulsive role player who passes himself off as a parricide, but the character has resonances of mythical figures like Oedipus (another father killer) and Christ—his name “Christy Mahon” implies that he is both Christ and Man; he is also the son of Mahon; he undergoes a mock crucifixion in the play’s final scene. Finally, any number of modern playwrights, influenced by Sir James Frazer and the Cambridge anthropologists, have used the hypothetical, prehistoric
82
83
Varieties of the Metadramatic
Role Playing within the Role
“Year King” ritual as an allegorical layer to their plays. Fxhoes of this ritual occur in such unlikely places as Shaw’s Major Barbara, Pinter’s The Homecoming, and Sam Shepard’s Buried Child, among many other examples. In the long run, however, allegorical role playing is probably less important in modern drama than it is in other literary forms, such as fiction (especially that of James Joyce) and lyric poetry (especially that of T. S. Eliot).
tion demands it. Both types of actor are under the influence of the antiitheatrical prejudice; both aa* avoiding acting.
84
vi
V
It is interesting to consider what has happened to the notion of role playing in the practical theatre. As Jonas Barish has noted, the anti-theatrical prejudice has carried over into the theatre itself in modern times. Theorists of acting have moiftited campaigns against role playing; the Stanislavskian actor, notes Barish, “undergoes an arduous discipline to learn how not to mimic. . . . Instead, he is to copy the romantic poet. He is to look into the deep well of his own consciousness.”25 Actually, this approach characterizes Stanislavski’s American followers more than it does Stanislavski himself, who encouraged self-transfor mation (in Building a Character, a book not widely read in the United States), and did not promote excessive introspection. It was the New York Actors’ Studio, under its influential leader, Lee Strasberg, that created the non-acting actor. Sirasberg’s advice to his student actors was “don’t act—be.”2*5 It is usual to contrast the Stanislavski-Strasberg type of actor with the type promoted by Bertolt Brecht, who wanted an “alienated” or “estranged” style of acting. The good Brechtian actor was supposed to separate himself entirely from his role: “The coldness comes from the actor’s holding himself remote from the character portrayed.” Thus if an actor were to play Richard III, Brecht main tained that he should say to himself, “I don’t want to feel myself to be Richard III, but to glimpse this phenomenon in all its strangeness and incomprehen sibility. ”2^ This is certainly different from the Stanislavski-Strasberg approach to acting, but there is an underlying similarity that has gone unnoticed. In both cases, the actor’s ego boundary remains intact; one places the performance entirely inside that lx)undary, the other, entirely outside, but the boundary (i.e., the actor’s sense of everyday self) does not change. If the Brechtian actor says, “I am not Richard III; I remain myself, aloof and detached from him,” the actor influenced by the Actors’ Studio says, in essence, “I am not Richard III either; I too continue to be myself onstage, exploring my own identity rather than taking on another one.” The former type of actor is like a voluntary role player in Comedy of Manners, completely in control of his role, which he can take on or remove at will; but since there is no unconscious component, no compulsion, in his acting, it will have little cohesion of force. The latter type is like .Molicre’s Alceste, trying desperately to avoid role playing entirely, even when the situa-
85
(
In summation, where the play within the play was a device for exploring existential concerns, and the ceremony within the play a device for exploring social concerns, role playing within the role is a device for exploring the concerns of the individual. I his is not the individual in isolation, however, but in relation to his society. Human identity is a social phenomenon, which has to be learned; the first stage of this learning occurs at our earliest social interac tion—with our mother’s breast. The infant is originally roleless, because he does not distinguish self from other. In Freud’s theory, the infant learns this distinc tion at the breast, an “other” that is sometimes there and sometimes not, sometimes providing pleasure and sometimes withholding it. The infant thus develops a sense of a boundary between himself and the rest of the world. This “ego boundary” is redefined at various stages of life. Theatre exists as a device to enable us to redefine it, teaching us how to play roles and, equally important, how and when to drop them. Thus, role playing within the role, like the ceremony within the play, is a widespread dramatic device. There has been a definite acceleration in its usage since the Renaissance, however, because of the growing complexity of society, which has made identity an ever more complex problem. There is a parallel between the strongly dualistic characters found in the plays of Shakespeare or Moliere, and the dualistic model of man posited around the same time by Descartes. As with role playing within the role, Cartesian dualism was not new. Bipolar oppositions such as soul and body, reason and emotion, or mind and body had been acceptt'd since antiquity, and are even found in primitive so cieties. What was different was that Descartes exaggerated such dualities, by proposing a self that was perpetually, inescapably hidden. Previous ideas of the soul had seen it as a kind of blueprint, which could be seen stamped upon the body; it was an immortal, ideal self, in the Platonic sense, that would outlast the body, its imperfect reflection. It was thus not mutually exclusive from the body, but was at least roughly congruent with it. For Descartes, however, the two were forever apart. This implied that everybody was a role player in life, having a double identity, the one visible, the other not. This doublencss is found in the drama from the Renaissance forward, as role playing within the role becomes more widespread, and more obsessive. Role playing within the role becomes a norm rather than an aberration in modern drama. Similarly, in the practical theatre, Cartesian dualism has come to dominate. Whether proponents of “Method” or of “Technique” acting, teachers assume that a human being is made up of two polarized parts, an inside and an
r 86
Varieties of the Melodramatic
outside; they differ only as to which parts should be trained. Lately, theatre schools have begun to train both parts, but still in a typically unintegrated fashion: voice, speech, and movement are taught by one set of teachers, while improvisation and scene work are taught by completely different teachers in different classes. The two polarized approaches to acting, under various names (Method vs. Technique, internal vs. external, realism vs. style, etc.), have dominated Amer ican acting for many decades. The fact that they are polarized tends to limit people’s thinking about them, since they seem to cover all possibilities. Yet neither allows for character acting, which resembles involuntary, inwardly con trolled, compulsive role playing, as found in many plays. In character acting, the actor’s ego boundary is temporarily let slip, as the actor, under the influence of powerful unconscious forces, is transformed into another identity. He is not detached from the character; nor does he remain himself, exploring his own iderftity introspectively. Instead, he becomes a nev) self, is possessed and driven by ir. This kind of acting is neither taught nor much appreciated in the United States, with the result that our acting so often seems so timid and narrow. At recent auditions held by the University Resident Theatre Association (URTA), which were used by most major theatre schools in the United States in selecting students for admission, the instructions insisted that the auditionees pierform only pieces that corresponded to their own age and type; they also solemnly warned against using dialects. A brilliant character actor like Peter Sellers would not only never have succeeded in our theatre, he would not even have been able to receive training. The situation in the Broadway theatre or in Hollywood is really no different. 'Hie commercial theatre shares with serious theatre a contempt for character acting. The commercial actor is supposed to have a “personality,” a gaudy identity created for him by agents and publicity people, which he must cling to at all times, in films and plays as well as in real life, and which he never dares to change. Again, Stanislavski should not really be blamed for this; in fact, he rated character acting highly, and was actually an outstanding character actor himself, as photographs of him in his many, wide-ranging roles make vividly clear. Instead, our restricted approach to acting is related to our fears about identity generally. In a society where people’s roles seem so fluid and unpredictable, so weak and undefined, we fear letting go of the feeble identities that we have. Not only actors, but politicians and business leaders hire press agents to give them identities. Our political stance as a nation is one of forever having to prove ourself around the world, to stand up to real or imagined challenges by stri dently pressing our “Americanism,” as if we would lose this identity if we dared to relax and be conciliatory. The weaknesses in American acting are a reflection
Role Playing within the Role
87
of our national “ontological insecurity,” the weak sense we have of who we are as a people.
Notes 1. Erik Erikson, Identity, Youth, and Crisis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1V63X 237. 2. For a classic example, see the chapter on “The .\ctor” in Philip Weissman’s Creativity in the Theater: A Psychoanalytic Study (New York: Basic Books, 1965). Weissman starts by saying that actors are “individuals who have failed to develop a normal sense of identity and body image during the early maturational phases of infancy” (p. IIX and he becomes increasingly negative. 3. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (I930X trans. Joan Riviere (Garden (jty, N.Y.: Doubleday, n.d.), 4-5. 4. Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society, 2nd. eti. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963). 5. Freud, 5. 6. Ibid., 6. 7. Ibid., 11. 8. R. D. Laing, The Self and Others (New York; Random I louse 1969), 30. 9. on the very essence of live theatre, which is why avant-garde directors
are so drawn to it. Many critics have discussed this essence as “live presence,” stressing the actuality of the living, breathing, sweating actors in contrast to the cold, dead actuality of the printed page. In fact, the essential thing about live performance is not so much a presence, as an absence. The special, magical feeling that we experience in the theatre is the result of our awareness that there is so much that can go wrong, that a performance always teeters on the brink of disaster, yet at the same time seems so solid, so tangible, so all in all. Printed literature has been rewritten, edited, proofread, and film has been edited, but live theatre allows no revisions or retakes. It has, of course, been rehearsed, but still, if something goes wrong at a particular performance, it cannot be erased. The live nature of theatre is not a foreground element but a background one; it | is, in structuralist terms, not parole, the specific utterance, but part of langue, the i understood framework in which parole takes place. The framework of real life I gives meaning and significance to the particular utterance, just as the framework j of English grammar, syntax, and semantics gives meaning to these sentences you are reading. Live theatre is not more “present” than any other art form; that is, it is no naore inherently vKIcT or exciting. Unlike other forms, theatre is of course literally present, but if literal presence were inherently stimulating, then a Rotary Club speaker would automatically be more engaging than the finest novel or film. What gives theatre its special excitement is that its live aspect is not present but absent from our direct perception; living reality surrounds and shapes our response to what we see rather than stimulating our response directly. In other words, we experience real life in theatrical performance as a poten tial; not as what is, but as what might be. It is this “might be” that creates the air oEspecial intensity and magic surrounding living performance that is missing in filrii and' television (although it was there in the days of live TV), even when a live performance is filmed or taped and then shown unedited. There is no longer any danger in the background when we see a performance via the medium of film or taped television. Eurthermore, in the theatre, the better the production, the closer it moves to the edge of chaos, to the anarchy that threatens all live performance. This closeness to chaos is what is meant by “freshness” and “spontaneity” in performance; if a performance is too smooth and under control, it seems tame and “mechanical”—that is, resembling those media, like film or television, that operate by machine, flawlessly. Good theatrical productions are fresh, spontaneous, seemingly accidental, yet remain paradoxically controlled and focused. When an avant-garde performance like Dionysus in '69 toys with reality, it is toying with this background of danger that is always existent in live theatrical production, intentionally moving across the boundary that the good, traditional production approaches but never quite touches. It is not that showing ordinary i reality per se creates any special estrangement; we would feel nothing strange if an actor merely came up to us on the street and said, “Hello. My name is Bill
98
99
100
Varieties of the Metadramatic
1 Shephard.” Those who enthuse about the “realness” of avant-garde performance
1 are naive. What is odd and estranging about the intentional dropping of role in
avant-garde performance is that background and foreground suddenly are re/ versed. Langue turns into jOaro/c, and vice versa. It is like those optical illusions where, upon being turned upside down or seen in another, different way, the picture becomes the background and the background becomes a new picture. What had looked like a pair of faces now looks like a vase; it is then interesting to see the picture as a pair of faces again, and then try to go back and forth between the two alternatives. We become concerned not so much with either aspect of the picture, as with the relationship between the picture’s two aspects. Similarly, in avant-garde theatre performances that toy with reality, it is the relationship between theatre and reality that is explored, rather than either theatre or reality by itself.
iv Literary and real-life reference seem less important as a type of metadrama than the other types. Such usages are rarely metadramatic, and even when they are, the metadramatic impact varies with time, and even from audience member to audience member. I Nevertheless, the significance of literary and real-life reference should not be ] overlooked. Such reference is probably most important not so much in the \ literary playtext, but in performance. In fact, if we consider performance as an : art form in its own right, rather than just as a means of putting across a text, ! then literTfy feTetenCe an' even more important, real-life reference, have often \ been major dramatic elements. There is a story that Socrates, sitting in the audience and seeing himself lapooned in Aristophanes’ The Clouds, stood up so that the audience could compare his real self with the actor playing him on stage, either to rebut Aristophanes’ ludicrous depiction as slander, or, as I prefer to think, in a good-natured spirit of fun. The whole story may be apocryphal, since another story has it that Socrates never went to the theatre except when the plays of Euripides were being shown. Nevertheless, if the event really hap pened, it must have been a moment of special intensity, both hilarious and poignant, as the world of the stage and the world outside it suddenly collided. For an instant, foreground and background became one. In this example of reallife reference (and literary reference as well, since the play was not just attacking Socrates’ personality, but also his philosophy), we see the importance of meta drama generally; it produces a special, heightened, acute perception. Taken out of ourselves, we see our world, our culture, for a moment as whole. The fact that the incident occurred only once (if at all) made it no less significant in the lives of those who experienced it. Literary and real-life references are signs of a healthy theatre. Where there is
Literary and Real-Life Reference within the Play
101
poor acting, weak playwriting, or flabby direction, the references do not work at all well; there must be a solid dramatic illusion to break. Furthermore, with literary reference, tha audience must have a fair degree of literary and theatrical sophistication; it is impressive, for example, that Aristophanes could count on his audience of thousands of Athenians to be familiar with the ideas that Socrates and the sophists had been propounding in the marketplace. Similarly, with real-life reference, the playwright or director must have con fidence that the audience will be strongly engaged with the dramatic illusion before he can start toying with it. The real-life insertions and acknowledgments of avant-garde American theatre practitioners have rarely worked well outside New York, our theatre center. As professional actors know very well. New York audiences, because of their long tradition of theatregoing, are more alert and responsive than most regional audiences. Watching a theatrical performance is i not a naive experience but one requiring skill, based on having seen many performances in the past, and having thought, discussed, and read about them. ^ One has to learn how to experience the dramatic illusion with full intensity. Toying with the dramatic illusion can work with New Yorkers because they are more likely to have learned to give themselves up to the dramatic illusion, to commit themselves totally to what is happening on stage. When such experi ments are tried in regional theatres, or, more frequently, in university theatres, the audience is more likely to be merely bewildered than to experience a special insight. They do not know the theatre well enough to comprehend an attack on it. --------------- ------ -----T'hus, while avant-garde directors usually think of themselves as assaulting theatrical tradition, they are also simultaneously acknowledging the vitality of both its plays and its audiences. In Mukarovsky’s model of the moving norm, the artist is always attacking yet being absorbed by the standards and traditions of his art form, in a dialectical synthesis. In America, however, our theatrical traditions are often too weak, too limited, to enable this dialectical process to proceed with vigor. Even in New York, there is much less mass-audience theatre today than there used to be, much less than in European capitals. As a result, our avant-garde theatre seems to remain avant-garde forever, neither becoming absorbed into the theatrical norm nor really destroying it—because there is so little to destroy. The problem is that avant-garde practitioners in America assume a much more solid, established theatre than actually exists; in a strange way, they are as stagestruck as the most naive young actor, assuming that there is a wonderful, powerful theatre establishment against which to test themselves. In fact, American commercial theatre has become a loose, disorganized collection of individuals, nervously concerned for their careers no matter how well estab lished they may seem, and having very little confidence in what they produce even when it is a smash hit. Most audiences outside New York have little experience with live theatre, and no solidly established way of responding to it; in New York, declining numbers of productions and absurdly high ticket prices
A
102
Varieties of the Metadramatic
are destroying theatregoing as a practice and a skill. Against this “tradition,” our avant-garde is like an athlete who plays only weak opponents, and thus never develops his real potential.
Notes 1. Strindberg, 36. 2. (.hristopher .Marlowe, The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Irt ing Ribner (New York: Odyssey, 1963), 195. 3. Donald Rayfield, Chekhov: The Evolution of His Art (New York: I larper & Row, 1975), 224. 4. Ibid. 5. Anton Chekbov, Chekhov: The Major Plays, trans. Ann Dunnigan (New York- New American Library, 1964), 164. 6. Bernard Dukore, Bernard Shaw, Playwright: Aspects of Shavian Drama (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973), 60. 7. Sbaw, 1:248. 8. I have dealt extensively with the metadramatic elements of the play in the article, “Beyond the Verbal in Pygmalion," in Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, ed. Daniel Leary (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983), 121-27. 9. Charles Marowitz, The Marowitz Hamlet and The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), 13. 10. Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (D)ndon: Methuen, 1980), 8. 11. Euripides, The Bacchae, trans. William Arrowsmith, in Euripides V, ed. David Grene and Richard Lattimore (New York: Washington Square Press, 1968), 183.
6 Self-Reference
i Unlike literary or real-life reference, self-reference is always strongly metadramatic. With self-reference, the play directly calls attention to itself as a play, an imaginative fiction. Acknowledging this fiction of course destroys it, at least temporarily. During the first act of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, Prince Hal suddenly steps out of the world of the play, and directly addresses the audience:' I know you all, and will awhile uphold The unyoked humor of your idleness. Yet herein will I imitate the sun. Who doth permit the base contagious clouds Po smother up his beauty from the world. That, when he please again to be himself. Being wanted, he may Be more wond’red at By breaking through the foul and ugly mists Of vapors that did seem to strangle him. If all the year were playing holicmys. To sport would be as tedious as to work; But when they seldom come, thev wished-for come. And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents. So, when this loose behavior I throw off And pay the debt I never promised. By how much better than my word I am. By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes; And, like bright metal on a sullen ground. My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault. Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes Than that which hath no foil to set it off I’ll so offend to make offense a skill. Redeeming time when men think least I will. (1.2.183-205) The play stops. The audience is made to examine the play as a play, an artificial construction with events that, Hal advises his listeners, are not to be taken too seriously, because he is due to reform later on. The lines about “playing 103
Varieties of the Metadramatk
Self-Reference
holidays” carry an additional irony, however; playing is supposed to be a respite from work (specifically, Hal’s roistering is a respite from his “work” as prince), yet the speech itself is a respite from the “playing” of the drama. While the dramatic action was moving forward, it seemed to be serious and important, but here the audience is reminded that it is not. It is only a “playing holiday.” It is interesting that we call a dramatic composition both a “play” and a “work,” and here Shakespeare juxtaposes these two apparently antithetical concepts, examin ing the paradoxical phenomenon that a play can simultaneously be “sport” and “work,” trivial and serious, meaningless and meaningful. One can see relationships here with other forms of metadrama. The play within the play has this same ultimate effect of reminding the audience that what they have been watching is actually a play, but such reminders are indirect, while self-reference is direct and immediate, a splash of cold water thrown into the face of a dreaming, imagining audience. Self-reference is also literally an example of literary reference, since the play itself is a piece of literature. In the last chapter, I noted that the metadramatic intensity of such reference is propor tional to, among other things, how recent, individualized, and well-known is the literary work that is being referred to. Obviously, there can be nothing more recent than the play one is currently watching! The play under observation is also obviously well-known, as an individualized work, to the audience while they are watching it. Finally, self-reference is also an example of real-life refer ence, or, more specifically, real-life acknowledgment, since the “backstage” reality of the play as an artificial construct is acknowledged whenever the play refers to itself The difference is that real-life acknowledgment relates to the individual performer rather than to the play as a whole. In the example given above, the actor playing Prince Hal does not reveal his real-life identity but, continuing to speak as Hal, refers to the dramatic action of which he, as Prince Hal, has been and will continue to be a part. The mask is stripped off the play rather than off the individual character. Real-life acknowledgment tends to be fulfilled only in performance, while self-reference often has its metadramatic impact even when a play is only read to oneself Near the end of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Peer is apparently drowning after a shipwreck, when another passenger floats by and tells him not to worry, since “no one dies halfway through the last act.”^ This bizarre remark (again made in character, rather than by an actor as himself) is just as hilarious and disruptive to the individual reader, caught up in Peer’s moment of crisis, as it is to an audience in the theatre. We should distinguish between true self-reference and mere acknowledgment of the audience, as occurs with choruses and narrators, or with characters themselves in monologues or asides. Such devices are merely conventions of a presentational style; they do not destroy the world of the play, but instead enlarge it to include the audience. It is as if we are momentarily the characters’
confidants. Choruses and narrators, moreover, do not stop the dramatic action, but instead exist to help to move it along. Prologues and epilogues are closer to dramatic self-reference than choruses, narrators, monologues, or asides, because they do literally refer to the play as a play, but on the other hand they are not really part of the play to which they refer. Prologues and epilogues refer to the play, but not usually to themselves. Nor do they stop the action, which has either not yet begun or already concluded. They provide a gentle transition between the surrounding, real world and the inner world of dramatic illusion, rather than disrupting the dramatic world with a sudden reminder of its fic titiousness. If Puck’s epilogue to A Midsummer Night's Dream, “If we shadows have offended,” etc. (5.1.412-27), occurred during the action of the play, like Prince Hal’s speech, it would certainly be self-reference in tbe metadramatic sense, but since it occurs when the play has already drawn to a close, the epilogue instead serves only as a mild and pleasant farewell.
104
105
ii To understand the functioning of self-reference, we should first consider the nature of the dramatic illusion that is being affected, and the related matter of the nature of audience identification with that illusion and the characters who people it. If self-reference (like metadramatic devices generally) operates by interrupt ing the dramatic illusion so as to alter our relationship with it, just what is this illusion that is being disrupted? Susanne K. Langer, drawing on a long tradition of writers on asthetics including Alfred North Whitehead, Ernst Cassirer, Adolf Hildebrand, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, and Charles Morgan, has dealt extensively with the nature of both artistic illusion in general, and the dramatic illusion in particular, in her superb book. Feeling and Form. The gist of her argument is that the illusion that art provides us is not based on its being a copy of anything in the real world. Some art forms, like photography, may employ direct copying of life a great deal, while others, like theatre, may do so occasionally (as when David Belasco reproduced New York’s Child’s Restaurant on stage), but some forms, like music or architecture, hardly do so at all. (Music sometimes uses sounds like bird calls or street noises, and architecture sometimes uses decorative elements like pic tures of natural objects or bas reliefs of people, but such things are only minor aspects of these art forms.) The presence or absence of direct mimesis, for Langer, is simply not an important issue. PTfective works of art generate a “vital feeling” in the observer, which has nothing to do with real life per se. All art forms provide us with a kind of virtual reality, subject to its own inner laws, and achieving vitality as the result of its inner rhythms. Such illusion is not de\wsion—the observer certainly knows that what he is seeing or hearing is not real life—but rather an affecting presence.
107
Varieties of the Metadramatic
Self-Reference
Thus, for Langer, the essence of pictorial art is that it creates (rather than recreates) a virtual space. Citing Hildebrand, she writes;
Even the fact that unpleasant things are also entertaining on stage (such as death in tragedy) can alsa be explained in Freudian terms, since for Freud, all emotions are ambivalent. Conscious loathing is accompanied by unconscious desire, which means that when we view a loathsome object or event in the safe framework of a work of art, we enjoy it beeause it fulfills a secret, unconseious wish to experience that object or event. Freud’s view of the artistie experience, based in his book. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, and expanded by theorists like Ernst Kris and Ernest Jones, is profound in its insight. Nevertheless, it is far too limiting. It tends not to acknowledge the extraordinary variety in works of art; everything comes down to a few psychosexual patterns, such as the Oedipus complex or, in hostile works like satires, anal sadism. (With death in tragedy, we enjoy the vicarious release of an unconscious “death wish.”) The problem is that Freud conceived of “primary process thought,” the form of thinking that is found in dreams and jokes and slips of the tongue as well as in works of art, as something atavistic or merely infantile, rather than a full-fledged, but merely different, mode of eoneeption from secondary process, logical thought. The contemporary psycho analyst Charles Ryeroft has noted that Freud, writing before the days of Einstein and Picasso, of Pound and Joyce, assumed “that of the two types of mental funetioning he was describing, one, the verbal mode, was characteristic ofthe ego, of conseiousness, of health, of rational adaptation to the environment, and the other, the non-verbal, iconic mode, was irrational and eharacteristic of dreamers, neurotics, lunatics, infants, and primitive peoples.” Primary process thought, which Freud reified as the Unconscious or the Id, was “a chaos, a caldron,”* a source of energy to be sure (thus aecounting for the vitality of a work of art, and the compulsive nature of our response to it), but still something wild and irrational that the healthy adult was supposed to repress, not use. Indeed, despite Freud’s own respect for and love of literature and art, Freudian aesthetic theories tend to reduce the artistic experience to a neurotic symptom, and the artist himself to a neurotic person.*^ We should instead conceive of primary process thought not as being illogical but rather as being Kowlogical; it employs association, analogy, symbol, and metaphor rather than ratiocination, but the conceptions that it formulates are usually perfectly sane ones. In a word, primary process thought is intuition. Instead of being repressed forever in the healthily developing person by his secondary process thought, intuition eontinues to operate alongside seeondary proeess thought throughout our lives. (Some researchers have even gone so far as to maintain that the two sorts of thinking are located in the two different sides of our brains; if so, then the two processes are literally “alongside.”) Indeed, intuition is necessary for us to function effectively; how could anyone even walk across the room if he had to analyze each step logically? As we walk, we are not using “reason”—we are perhaps not even thinking eonsciously about walking at
106
The factors which the artist presents are those which make us aware of related forms in the continuum of a total perceptual space. All accents and selections, as well as radical distortions or utter departures from any “actual form” of objects, have the purpose of making space visible and its continuity sensible. The space itself is a projected image, and everything pictured serves to define and organize it. Even representation of familiar objects, if it occurs, is a means to this end.^ Langer extends this notion of a “virtual space” to all the arts. She maintains that lyric poetry provides us with a “virtual experience,” narrative literature with a “virtual past” or a “virtual memory,” and drama, because of its copstgnt orienta tion toward what will happen next, a “virtual future.”'* Even music provides us with a “virtual time,” creating “an image of time measured by the motion of forms that seem to give it substance, yet a substance that consists entirely of sound, so it is transitoriness itself”^ In each case, we imaginatively shift our selves from the real world in whieh we are eurrently living, into a hypothetical state of existence, which we can drop at any time (it is not a state of insanity), but which nonetheless is strangely eompelling. What is the reason for this compulsive nature of the artistic experience? What makes listening to a symphony or seeing a painting or watching a play pleasur able, in contrast to watching or listening to something—even the same thing—in real life? As Aristotle long ago noted, “there are some things that distress us when we see them in reality, but the most aecurate representations of these same things we view with pleasure—as, for example, the forms of the most despised animals and of corpses’^ even things that we &like in life are pleasurable in a work of art. The traditional Freudian explanation for this phenomenon is that works of art provide us with the vicarious release of unconscious drives. Because of psycho logical repression, we cannot often release such drives in life, but when the objects of the drives are disguised in artistic form, our repressive inner “censor” allows them a brief, partial liberation. Literary works, more specifically, em body psychosexual patterns that we unknowingly are responding to and enjoy ing. Eric Bentley, for example, describes the experience of watching theatrical farce in the following, traditionally Freudian terms: Farce in general enables us, seated in dark security, to enjoy the delights of complete passivity while watching on stage the most violently active creatures ever imagined by man. In that particular application of the general formula which is bedroom farce, we enjoy the acTventure of adultery, ingeniously exaggerated to the »th degree, without incurring the responsibilities or suffer ing the guilt, without even the hint of an affront to the wife at our side.^
Varieties of the Metadramatic
Self-Reference
all—but are instead intuitively adapting to the placement of walls and furniture, choosing a path and where to place each step in a perfectly sensible but unanalyzed manner. Clearly, both the process of creating a work of art, and of responding to it, are examples of intuitive thinking. Secondary process thought, or rational thinking, may be involved as well, since we should not think of the two processes as being inevitably locked in bitter opposition but rather as ordinarily operating in tandem. Thus, we may sense a lyrical intensity in a painting by lurner, and also analyze this effect as being caused by his expressive use of color at the expense of line. Nevertheless, intuitive or primary process thinking is the essential part of the creation or the response to any artistic work. Now, P'reud, again, maintained that primary process thought was governed by what he called “the pleasure principle”; it is always oriented, at least ultimately, toward the achieving of pleasure or the avoiding of pain. What he does not seem to have considered was that such thought might itself he an instinctual drive, that intuition is not merely pleasure seeking but pleasure giving. Susanne Langer writes of man’s need for symbolization that “the symbol-making function is one of man’s primary ac tivities, like eating, looking, or moving about.” “Symbol-making function” is yet another name for primary process thought; the basic need for it accounts for man’s “love of magic, the high development of ritual, the seriousness of art, and the characteristic activity of dreams. To arrive at an intuitive understanding of something, via magic or ritual or art or dreaming, is, for human beings, an end in itself rather than just a means to some other “practical” end. Human beings actually yearn for such understanding. When something seems orderly and comprehensible, whether it is the organization of society, the workings of a piece of machinery, or the behavior of a person we meet, it makes us feel comforted and pleased. Incomprehensibility in such circumstances can be painful and threatening. This is the reason people often seem to go against their own self-interest in political or economic matters. Why, for example, did so many union members vote for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, despite his conservative record of opposing nearly everything unions have worked for over the past fifty years? The answer is that workers, like everybody else, are not moved solely by their economic interests. Reagan stood for a world view that was important to them, one that seemed threatened by numerous radical changes in recent decades. The threat of unemployment seemed less threaten ing, at least at the time, than the threat of an alteration of a world view that included American supremacy abroad and an orderly social structure at home, with everything and everyone in his place. In sum, an intuitive sense of order yields pleasure, while a sense of chaos yields pain. Of course, secondary process thought can also be pleasure giving. Certainly, solving a difficult mathematical problem can be an exquisite delight. Such a sensation, however, is a deferred pleasure; we put up with the pain of ratiocination because of our hope of finding the answer, proving the theorem, unraveling the
problem’s complexities. The pleasure felt at that point is, again, primary pro cess, as we grasp the solution, at last, intuitively. Secondary process thought is not pleasurable in itself; it is “work” rather than “play.” Having evolved later in human beings than primary process thought, it is less natural to us, and thus less enjoyable. Indeed, it functions best when operating in tandem with intui tion; a mathematical text with no practical examples relating to everyday experi ence can be agony for a student, and, despite what proponents of the so-called new math might believe, it is pedagogically unsound. The joy of solving a mathematical problem does not lie in the logical procedures per se, but in the intuitive insights that they lead to. Good mathematical education involves both work and play, calling upon both the student’s reason and his intuition, and making the former serve the latter. A characteristic of intuitive thought is that it is wholistic. Logical thought isolates, analyzes, separates; intuitive thought integrates, synthesizes, unifies. As the Gestalt psychologists maintained, we perceive in integrated wholes, at least initially. Thus, we see a face as a face, not as a piecemeal collection of eyes, nose, mouth, eyebrows, etc., nor as a collection of light waves which in turn form our images of these parts. Similarly, when we think about a face in primary process terms, intuiting its emotional state, we do so as a whole—the face looks angry or happy or sad. This total, overall impression is our first impression, which we can then secondarily analyze by isolating individual elements like the width of the opening of the eyes, the set of the jaw, the tension in the forehead. As we intuitively think about something like a face, we are automatically dividing our total set of sense impressions into two parts, isolating the face from its background. We are actually receiving an enormous mosaic of light sensa tions, but we formulate a boundary separating the sensations that make up the object we are thinking about from those that make up everything else. This automatic, unconscious, foreground-background bifurcation is an essential characteristic of primary process thinking. What we are thinking about is a whole, a phenomenological “presence”; this presence is a totality, but it is surrounded by another, larger totality. (Note the analogue to Saussure’s langue and parole-, just as a specific utterance, parole, is shaped and made meaningful by language as a whole, or langue, so too a specific percept is conceived of mean ingfully by its relationship to its perceptual background.) Thus, foreground and background essentially define each other. It is impor tant to understand that a background is never “everything there is,” but is itself delimited. As we look at a portrait, the background elements like the subject’s clothing, the room he is in, etc., affect our impression of the subject’s face, but they are themselves circumscribed by the picture’s frame. I'he frame defines our field of thought at the given moment; this field is bifurcated into a foreground (the face, in this instance) and a background, but still has an additional “beyond,” which we are not thinking about at all while we are absorbed by the portrait. As we go through our day, we are constantly shifting our fields of thought—looking
108
109
Varieties of the Metadramatic
Self-Reference
at different portraits, if you will. It is also possible to redefine a field’s fore ground and background, as would happen if, for example, we focused on the subject’s hands. In that case, the face would become part of the delimited background, as the hands came to the fore. Finally, suppose someone came along and said something like, “this picture would look better if there were more light,” or, more abstractly, “this picture is influenced by nineteenth-century genre painting.” By introducing an appropriate background, the entire portrait would become foregrounded. In sum, there are three kinds of shifts in thinking possible: shifts within a field, as when we focus on different areas of it; shifting to a different field, as when we go from one portrait to another, or from the portrait to thinking of our mother or the state of the national economy; and finally, redefining the field itself, either by incorporating it into a larger field or by narrowing it down into a subfield. As examples of bifurcated fields of thought, consider our intuitive ways of thinking about time and space. We have, as usual, two different ways of thinking and talking about time. The first, using secondary process thought, is reflected in our language in mathematical terms: 4:05 a.m. , ten minutes to three, two minutes before midnight; or, for larger periods, the fourteenth of May, the Year of Our Lord 1914, the eighteenth century, the first millennium b.c. These terms are exact; it is either ten minutes to three or it is not. Even the larger units are precisely defined; Alexander the Great lived either in the first millennium b.c., or he did not. The other way of thinking about time is intuitive and is reflected in our language by a completely different set of terms: now, then, the past, thefuture, long ago, once upon a time. These terms are flexible, referring to periods of time of widely varying lengths. The sentence “Come with me now" can refer to the next few seconds, while the sentence “We now drive automobiles” can refer to the entire twentieth century. In both cases, the meaning of the word now is defined by a bifurcated field. Now is defined by then, “when it will be too late” in the former example, or “when we drove carriages” in the latter. Furthermore, now has an intuitive sense of wholeness about it. Technically speaking, the seconds, minutes, or years may be slipping away, but it does not feel that way. Now refers to a piece of time that may vary extremely in size, according to the background then that sets it off, but which seems fixed and still, an unmoving phe nomenological “presence.” Our intuitive perception of space is similar to that of time. Again, we can define space mathematically, in inches or feet or acres or cubic meters. Such secondary process terminology, however, is not what we use in ordinary con versation. Corresponding to the intuitive terms like now, then, and long ago that we use with time are spatial terms like here, there, long, wide, narrow, etc. These terms are again flexible; here can refer to this room, this city, this country, this world, or even this galaxy. (“Here in the Milky Way, we are a million light years from the nearest other galaxy.”) There is also the same bifurcation, with here defined by what is “not here”—i.e., there. Finally, despite the flexibility of the
term, here always has a unified wholeness about it. The room in which you are now sitting seems for the moment to be all in all; you are aware of a there that is beyond it, defining here, but this awareness is in the background of your consciousness. The foreground experience is of a unified presence surrounding
no
111
you. As with the example of the portrait, shifts in our perception of space and time are possible, and are indeed happening all the time. Our fields of thinking about space and time obviously change as we move through space, or with the passage of time. Our fields of thought can also be redefined, by being either expanded or contracted. Thus, the here of this room expands to the here of this country when someone starts talking about international politics. But imaginative shifts are possible as well; in our imaginations, we can place ourselves in some past or future time or place. While sitting in your living room, you can imagine yourself in the bedroom or at your office or crossing the Alps with Hannibal. Shifts of the previous type, where our fields of thinking about space or time are redefined, I shall refer to as expansions or contractions; shifts of the latter type 1 shall refer to as displacements. The dramatic illusion, then, is a form of primary process thinking. It is pleasure giving, as primary process thought is in general, because it presents us with a unified, coherent vision. We enjoy it because it is comprehensible. Fwen when the theatre depicts events that in real life are painful to consider, such as tyranny or murder or physical suffering, they are pleasurable because we experience them within an intelligible unity. Much has been written about the nature of dramatic unity, a concept that has become more and more difficult since the Romantic era. For purposes of considering the dramatic illusion, however, we can simply say that a play is unified by the very nature of its relationship to us. Because we can see it whole, it is whole. In real life, our perception of things and events is always fragmen tary; whatever we are perceiving always has further aspects of itself that at a given time are unavailable, backgrounds, causes, ramifications, and effects that we do not know about. This does not mean that we are not perceiving things wholistically; on the contrary, we are constantly forming integrated wholes out of what we perceive, but these wholes are in turn constantly being broken up, expanded, contracted, or displaced. Meaning continually competes with con fusion. In the theatre, on the other hand, the world of dramatic illusion stays put. The stage itself provides it with a frame of coherence. We know that everything we see on the stage is there to contribute to our understanding, and that, conversely, nothing that we need to know is left out. Even in a play in which enigma plays a part, as in a murder mystery, it is a controlled enigma, a well-defined problem in contrast with the ill-defined ones that life presents us with. A play may lack rational coherence, but, if it engages us, it always has an intuitive coherence. In phenomenological terms, the stage brackets a play, excluding external
113
Varieties of the Metadramatic
Self-Reference
considerations like cause or effect. Of course, the dramatic action usually includes references to events and places that are unseen, but these are again part of the “dramatic illusion” I have been talking about, since they are entirely a function of what we see and hear on stage. The “bracketing” effect of the stage should not be interpreted in crude terms, with the play providing only direct sensual stimulation. Indeed, direct stimulation tends to destroy the dramatic illusion; nudity on stage, for example, may make us forget the world of the play by stimulating us with the sexual potentialities of the actor or actress. (For this reason, nudity, which became popular in the theatre in the 1960s, is actually a metadramatic device, a form of real-life reference.) The dramatic illusion pro vides us with an intuitively comprehensible imaginary presence rather than direct stimulation. The dramatic experience is not like drinking a glass of beer or receiving a kick in the pants, but is instead a form of knowing. It is common to compare the dramatic experience to dreaming. The two are indeed closely related, but there is an important difference. Dreaming is an imaginative displacement of the self; we put ourselves into a world of our imagination. The dreamer is always present in his dream, as the principal character, experiencing all the events. Nor is he aware that he is dreaming; the events seem to be actually happening. (Occasionally one does become aware that one is dreaming, usually just prior to waking up, but this is an unusual occurrence.) In the theatre, this is not the case. There, we are never the principal character, and the events are known to be fictitious. (A play may be so vivid that its essential artificiality retreats far into the background, but we never forget it entirely, as we do in dreaming. It is always a part of our field of thinking.) Psychoanalysts sometimes speak of “the dream screen,” analogous to a movie screen “on to which the visual imagery of a dream can be imagined to be projected.”" This is a misleading metaphor, however, for in a dream the dreamer has the eyes of a character, while in a movie theatre the audience does not. In films and on television, directors have occasionally tried the technique of making the camera into a character but have met with little success. In live theatre, it is simply impossible. With the exception of moments in a play where the audience is addressed directly (and even then we are only passive partici pants), we are observers of a play, never characters in it, much less the central character. On the other hand, the theatre does provide us with a vivid imaginary world, as does a dream, and we do, in some sense, identify with the characters of the play. This identification, however, is not a displacement. It is instead an expansion of the ego boundary that defines our concept of ourself We both remain who we are and become the hero on stage. Bruce Wilshire, in his book. Role Playing and Identity, maintains that the actor “stands in” for the audience. Fhis is well put. We do not become the actor, but neither do we simply examine him like scientists making a case study; instead, the actor becomes us. He is our proxy or agent, acting for us as an extension of ourselves, but never becoming one’s entire self
The same is true for the actor in his relationship to his character. (Indeed, there is a complete congruence among the playwright’s, actor’s, and audience’s relationships with the characters, which I intend to explore in a future work.) Acting theory, especially in the United States, has tended to be polarized between those who posit a total identification of the actor with his role, and those who posit a total detachment. Instead, the effective actor, like the au dience, has a flexible ego boundary that allows him both to identify and not to identifjT with the character. The role extends his sense of self but does not displace it. UriTike the audience’s identification with a character, the audience’s response to the overall dramatic illusion is an imaginary displacement rather than an expansion. (Note that it is not necessary for identification to occur in a play; the action can be completely engrossing, yet provide no one for us to emphathize with, as in comedies where the characters evoke our disapproval.) Our attention shifts from the real here and now of the auditorium, the other audience mem bers, etc., to an imaginary here and now that the play provides for us. The here and now of the dramatic illusion, like the heres and nows in real life, has a unified, all in all quality about it. We experience a series of dramatic moments, each of which is a whole. Again as in real life, these wholes are in turn defined by backgrounds within fields of thought. The physical stage is itself one of these boundaries, with the real world of backstage and the auditorium providing a background that is not fully present in our consciousness, yet is never completely forgotten, either. The reality of the theatre defines the unre ality of the play, actually adding to the latter’s coherence by reminding us subliminally that it is all contrived and controlled, however spontaneous it may
112
seem. “Reality” is always the defining background of the dramatic illusion. The concept should not be limited to the mere physical reality of the theatre building, but extended to all the cultural realities that bring the play into existence. In the first chapter, I argued that the background langue to the foreground parole of the play itself was the “drama/culture complex,” an overlap ping set of implicit cultural codes that give the play meaning. The theatre building is but one of these codes, telling us architecturally that there is a specially defined space called “the stage” on which fictitious events are enacted for our observation. All the cultural codes impinging on the staged events are “realities” that create the defining background to the play, however. I placed quotation marks around the word reality in the previous paragraph as a reminder of what we have known at least since Kant: that there is no such thing as observing reality directly. As Edward T. Hall insists, “You can’t shed culture.”'^ We can view reality only through some cultural grid. This does not mean that culture makes us hallucinate about reality, but only that culture organizes our perception of it, reminding us what is significant and what is not. Certain things will seem more “real” in a certain culture, more significant, because the cultural codes that are in use bring those things to the fore, at the
114
Varieties of the Metadramatic
Self-Reference
expense of other things. The length of a woman’s dress or the width of a man’s lapels are important realities to us beeause our culture in a sense points to them; they seem extremely “real” to us, although to someone from another culture they could seem trivial bits of background. In our culture, the “realest” of realities has become that which is identified by science, or, in more general terms, by logical, secondary process thinking. We remain confident that the realities revealed by science are always the ultimate truth. We recognize that science can err, of course, but only because of faulty application—poor logic, inept experimentation, inadequate data. Rightly ap plied, however, the scientific method always produces truth. Where science conflicts with “common sense” (i.e., intuition), science is right. The earth is a sphere, even though it seems flat; matter is made up of molecules, even though it seems solid. The “realities” that surround and define the dramatic illusion are such scien tific, secondary process realities, in contrast to the primary process realities of the illusion itself When Northrop Frye points out that the story of Hermione and Perdita in The Winter’s Tale is a reenactment of the Demeter and Proserpine myth,'^ he is using secondary process means to demonstrate the mythical background of Shakespeare’s play. This mythical background is, again, only one of the play’s many background realities. In other words, Frye is creating a mythical field of thought, in which the intuitiveforeground, the story of Hermione and Perdita that the audience experiences, is set off by a background of a logical system of myth. In sum, we perceive a play as an intuitive foreground set against numerous logical backgrounds. The foreground is pleasurable, easy, fun; the background is onerous, hard, serious. Thus critics, whose job it is to explicate the play’s backgrounds, are accused of being killjoys. Why must they always be talking about a play’s philosophical meanings, or historical significances, or mythical influences? Why can’t they just enjoy it, like the rest of us? But, in fact, these serious backgrounds are subliminally present in our own experience of the play, which could not exist without them, just as a game could not exist without rules or a language without grammar. By setting off and defining the play’s area of playfulness, the serious backgrounds of the drama/culture complex enable us to enjoy the play freely. (“If all the year were playing holidays, to sp)ort would be as tedious as to work.”) The dramatic illusion is enjoyable “play” in the foreground, bounded by serious “work” in the background.
The quick comedians Extemporally will stage us, and present Our Alexandrian revels: Antony Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness r the’ posture of a whore.
Ill
Self-reference is a rare form of metadrama. Its usage historically tends to parallel that of the play within the play. Shakespeare uses it from time to time, as in Prince Hal’s speech (1.2.183-205), for example, or in Cleopatra’s ironic lines in Antony and Cleopatra:
115
(5.2.216-21) 'Fhis speech in the original production would of course have called attention to the fact that the lines were actually being spoken by a boy in Shakespeare’s theatre—only, given the greatness of the role, the youngster was probably a superb actor who did not “squeak,” but was instead extremely impressive. A similar piece of ironic self-reference occurs in Julius Caesar, when Cassius, after murdering Caesar, says: How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over In states unborn and accents vet unknown! (3.1.111-13) The joke, of course, is that the performance that the audience is watching is itself one of the very reenactments that Cassius is referring to. As with the play within the play, self-reference recurs in the modern era, with playwrights like Brecht, Stoppard, and Handke, but is rare in other periods except in parodies or burlesques. Self-reference is even more rare, in the periods when it occurs, than the play within the play, however; only major, “serious” playwrights tend to employ self-reference, while even hacks write plays within their plays. What is happening to the audience phenomenologically, when a play sud denly calls attention to itself? I said originally that the fictitious world of the play is destroyed, but that is not precisely right, since the play does not go away. Instead, the audience’s relationship with its changes radically. Previously, the audience had been enjoying a unified foreground set against a background of overlapping realities. The “field of thought” was this set of realities, the drama/ culture complex that enables a play to happen, both in the literal sense and in the imaginative sense of establishing the conventions that make the play coherent to the audience. They experienced the foreground as themselves, but their concept of self expanded and contracted when they identified with a character, or ceased to. When a character in this experienced world suddenly says, “I know you all,” or “no one dies halfway through the last act,” audience identification ceases. There is a sudden collapse of the ego boundary back to one’s everyday self Such a collapse of the self was the aim of Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, usually translated “alienation effect” but better rendered as “estrangement effect.” For Brecht, audience empathy with the characters was anathema—as was actors’ identification with them. He seemed to believe that such empathy precluded
116
Varieties of the Metadramatic
any rational analysis of what one was seeing, that, swept away by the characters’ adventures, one simply accepted the dramatic world rather than questioning it. There is an element of truth in this, although it is crudely reductive, another example of the “anti-theatrical prejudice” that views any change of ego bound ary as a drastic threat to rational control. The oversimplifications in Brecht’s theories need not concern us here, however; what is interesting is the result in practice. A good example is his “didactic play” (Lehrstueck), written in the early 1930s, The Measures Taken (Die Massnahme). In it, four agitators in Moscow, just returned from the Orient, reenact for a “control chorus” the events that led to their having to kill one of their comrades. There is thus a play within the play of the framed type, but also, during the inner play, the agitators from time to time comment directly to the control chorus while they are performing. Furthermore, the agitators take turns playing the young comrade. Fhese devices have the effect of dramatic self-reference, destroying any empathy that the agitators, the control chorus, or we in the audience might feel for the young comrade in his plight. In the climactic moment, when the young comrade is leaning on the agitators’ arms, having agreed to be shot, the agitator playing the young comrade sud denly shifts from acting to narrating: “He then said: ‘In the interests of Commu nism. . . .’ ”'■* The three words, “He then said,” in the midst of such a moving scene, foreground the performance as performance, rather than as dramatic illu sion, and destroy the audience’s identification with a character who is, in many ways, a traditional tragic hero.'* In the observer’s concept of self undergoes a contraction when self-reference occurs in a play, the world of dramatic illusion undergoes a displacement. The field of thought remains the same, as does the boundary between foreground (the dramatic illusion) and background (the “realities” that define the illusion). What happens is that there is a shift in perception that turns the field of thought inside out. What had been background is foregrounded, and vice versa. Note that in the examples given, the “self-reference” is really a reference to a back ground rather than to the performance per se. In Prince Hal’s speech, Hal is making reference to the audience’s historical knowledge of the actual Henry V, a background reality that had been subliminally affecting their response to the performance—indeed, was the reason for their interest in the subject matter of the play in the first place. When the mysterious passenger in Peer Gynt says, “no one dies halfway through the last act,” he is referring to a theatrical convention that is also a background element for the audience. Peter Handke’s (Jffending the Audience is an extreme contemporary example of dramatic self-reference. The entire play turns out to be self-referential: You are welcome. This piece is a prologue. You will hear nothing you have heard here before. You will see nothing you have not seen here before.
Self-Reference
117
You will see nothing of what you have always seen here. You will hear nothing of what you have always heard here. You will hear what you usually see. . . . The light that illuminates us signifies nothing. Neither do the clothes we wear signify anything. They indicate nothing, they are not unusual in any way, they signify nothing. They signify no otner time to you, no other climate, no other season, no other degree of latitude, no other reason to wear them. Fh^ have no function. Nor do our gestures have a function, that is, to signify something to you.''’ The “play” goes on in this haranguing manner for some twenty-eight pages, or roughly an hour of performance. Note the nature of this “offending,” however: It is entirely a negative reference to the background of dramatic conventions that the audience had come to the theatre expecting to see and hear. Handke is operating within the moralistic tradition of Brecht, using theatre to teach a moral lesson, turning “play” into “work.” The bourgeois audience is to be taught that its frivolous concept of theatre is elitist and escapist. Where Brecht moves from “play” to “work,” however, Handke never lets the audience get to “play” in the first place. Playwrights who use self-reference are moralists, though perhaps not always so extreme as Handke. However playful a moment of self-reference may seem (“nobody dies halfway through the last act”), it always has the effect of dras tically realigning the audience’s perception of the drama, forcing them to exam ine consciously the assumptions that lie behind and control their response to the world of the play. Since these assumptions, the drama/culture complex, are also the means by which the audience views the world at large, self-reference has the effect of challenging, in a sudden and drastic manner, the complacencies of the audience’s world view. In the first chapter, we saw that the serious playwright, unlike the hack, attempts to alter the drama/culture complex rather than simply exploiting it without changing it. In the second chapter, we also saw that, while all drama is in a sense metadramatic (drama about drama), differing degrees of metadrama are possible, depending upon the intensity with which the dramatic world is estranged. Self-reference is the most extreme, intense form of metadrama—a frontal attack. It is for this reason that playwrights usually employ the device sparingly; Handke’s Offending the Audience runs the risk of estranging or “offend ing” the audience to such a degree that they become bored and indifferent, and may simply walk out of the theatre. Perhaps Brecht’s use of self-reference was the most effective among modern writers. (And even he did not use the device very often.) Brecht realized that the audience must be entertained if they are to be moved at all, that we will not do the work of secondary process thinking unless we are offered the play of primary process thinking in tandem with it. Work through play, teaching through pleasure, is the basic technique of theatre, and is ultimately the reason for its importance.
118
Varieties of the Metadramatic
Notes 1. lam assuming that I lal delivers this speech to the audience, although a case can be made that he is speaking a soliloquy, i.e., entirely to himself. This would make the phrase, “I know vou all,” rather strange, however; it would have to refer to Hal’s roisterous companions rather than to the audience, which makes little sense, given the context. Furthermore, it seems to me that the ajjologia quality of the speech implies that it is delivered to someone sitting in judgment—like the audience. 2. Ibsen, 165. 3. Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Scribners, 1953), 77. Original italics. 4. Ibid., 215, 307, 258-279, 307. 5. Ibid., 110. 6. Aristotle, 7. 7. Eric Bentley, “The Psychology of Farce,” in Let's Get a Divorce! and Other Plays, ed. Eric Bentley (New York: Hill & Wang, 1958), xiv. 8. Charles Rycroft, The Innocence ofDreams (Oxfori: Oxford University Press, 1981), 156-57, 155. 9. This is related to the tendency of psychoanalysts wrongfully to consider actors as neurotics, as discussed above in chapter four. 10. Langer, Philosophy, 45, 43. 11. Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary, 37. 12. Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubledav, 1969), 188. 13. Frye, 138. 14. Bertolt Brecht, The Measures Taken, trans. Eric Bentley, in The Modem Theatre, ed. Eric Bentley, 6 vols. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960), 6:282. 15. For a complete discussion, see mv article, “Brecht Versus Aristotle,” Drama at Calgary 3, 2:64-68. 16. Peter I landke, Kaspar and Other Plays, trans. .Michael Roloff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 7-11.
Part
II
Drama and Perception
118
Varieties of the Metadramatic
Notes 1. lam assuming that I lal delivers this speech to the audience, although a case can be made that he is speaking a soliloquy, i.e., entirely to himself. This would make the phrase, “1 know you all,” rather strange, however; it would have to refer to Hal’s roisterous companions rather than to the audience, which makes little sense, given the context. Furthermore, it seems to me that the apologia quality of the speech implies that it is delivered to someone sitting in judgment—like the audience. 2. Ibsen, 165. 3. Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Scribners, 1953), 77. Original italics. 4. Ibid., 215, 307, 258-279, 307. 5. Ibid., 110. 6. Aristotle, 7. 7. Eric Bentley, “The Psychology of Farce,” in Let’s Get a Divorce! and Other Plays, ed. Eric Bentley (New Ybrit: Hill &l U'ang, 1958), xiv. 8. Charles Rycroft, The Innocence ofDreams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 156-57, 155. 9. This is related to the tendency of psychoanalysts wrongfully to consider actors as neurotics, as discussed above in chapter four. 10. Langer, Philosophy, 45, 43. 11. Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary, 37. 12. Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (Garden City, N.Y'.: Doubledav, 1969), 188. 13. Frye, 138. 14. Bertolt Brecht, The Measures Taken, trans. Eric Bentlev, in The Modem Theatre, ed. Eric Bentley, 6 vols. (Garden City, N.Y'.: Doubledav, 1960), 6:282. 15. F'or a complete diseussion, see mv artiele, “Brecht Versus Aristotle,” Drama at Calgary 3, 2:64-68. 16. Peter Handke, Kaspar and Other Plays, trans. .Michael Roloff (New York: Earrar, Straus and Giroux), 7-11.
Part II
Drama and Perception
7 Sophocles Oedipus the King “One man cannot be the same as many. ”
Although its importance has been little noted, perception is one of the great themes of dramatic literature. Since drama is always addressing itself to the ways in which society views reality, human perception is a latent theme of all drama. Sensing this, the serious playwright in particular moves toward percep tion as an overt theme, making explicit what is always implicitly in the back ground. Drama, which is a means of perception, turns upon itself and becomes about perception. This self-consciousness is, in broad terms, the sixth type of metadrama, more generalized than the others, and less estranging upon the audience, yet of equal importance, if only because of its prevalence in plays recognized as classics. In this chapter and those that remain, I shall examine six standard plays from differing periods—Oedipus the King, Twelfth Night, Woyzeck, The Father, The Master Builder, and Betrayal. In each of these, the playwright directly and explicitly investigates the way in which his society views itself and its world. This list could be extended, however, since a great many classic plays, modern and ancient, have perception as a dominant theme. These chapters are examples of “practical” criticism, interpreting individual plays in detail, in contrast to the more general, “theoretical” criticism of the previous chapters, in which plays are cited only as examples for developing a systematic theory. Practical criticism is necessary here because of the greater generality of this type of metadrama, which tends to operate through a play as a whole, rather than through a separable part. Rather than a performance of some kind within a play or within a role, the theme of perception unfolds from beginning to end.
ii Aristotle, in The Poetics, maintained that recognition (anagnorisis) is one of the basic elements of the tragic plot. Recognition was “a change from ignorance to 121
122
Drama and Perception
Sophocles, Oedipus the King
knowledge,” and related primarily, in tragedy, to the recognition of persons.' Nevertheless, subsequent critics have interpreted dramatic recognition in a more profound sense, such as the insight a character might attain about the order of the universe, or the self-knowledge that the tragic hero receives through suffer ing. As Francis Fergusson writes, “The characters suffer the piteous and terrible sense of the mystery of the human situation. From this suffering or passion, with its shifting visions, a new perception of the situation emerges.”^ Whether or not Aristotle would hav'e approved of such definitions of recogni tion, there can be no doubt that recognition, in many forms, is one of the most basic plot elements in all kinds of drama, comic as well as tragic, popular as well as serious. Recognitions can be as profound as Lear or Othello recognizing the awesome and terrible errors they have made, or as trivial as Sherlock Flomes recognizing (for no particular reason) a man’s occupation by the state of his fingernails. They can be as tragic as Oedipus recognizing himself as the killer of his own father, or as comical as the pairs of long lost brothers recognizing one another at the end of The Comedy of Errors. Fhe ubiquity of the recognition device naturally suggests the potential for developing the theme of perception, since recognition is of course an act of perception. Nonetheless, not all acts of recognition in drama truly concern themselves with perception as a fully developed theme. To recognize someone by his strawberry birthmark is not metadramatic in this final sense unless attention somehow is called to the act of recognition itself If the focus is on the person, thing, or concept being recognized, then the device is merely neutral or transparent for the audience; if the focus is on the person doing to recognizing, however, so that the act of recognition actually reveals something important about him and the way he views things, then the audience is made to con template the nature of human perception itself When Electra in The Libation Bearers recognizes from a lock of hair and some footprints that Orestes has come home, it is conventional rather than metadramatic, since Aechylus does not focus on the act of recognizing or on the recognizer (although he might well have done so, since the evidence is feeble, later to be wittily parodied in Euripides’ Orestes). When Malvolio in Twelfth Night reads the faked letter and interprets it in terms of himself however, we are not so much interested in the letter per se as in how he reacts to it, which reveals what kind of character he is, and, more generally, how fantasy and desire color people’s judgments. Such incidents do not just involve the act of perception, but are about perception.
recognitions about himself, his parentage, his crimes, his fate, and man’s fate generally. In his superb book, 'The Identity of Oedipus the King. Alister Cameron showed how there is a progressive altering of Oedipus’s objective in the play, from trying to determine “Who is the murderer?” to asking “Am I the mur derer?” to asking, ultimately, “Who am I?”' Here recognition has gone far beyond Aristotle’s mere identification of one person by another, to an ap prehending of the mysteries of human existence. Many critics have discussed the play in similar terms; Francis Fergusson, for example, extended the notion of existential recognition to the chorus:
Ill
It is difficult to find something new to say about Sophocles’ Oedipus the King— particularly something new about recognition. It is generally held to be the quintessential play about self-knowledge, as the hero experiences a series of
123
If one thinks of the movement of the play, it appears that the tragic rhythm analyzes human action temporally into successive modes, as a crystal analyzes a white beam of light spatially into the colored bands of the spectrum. The chorus, always present, represents one of these modes, and at the recurrent moments when reasoned purpose is gone, it takes the stap with its faithinformed passion, moving through an ordered succession of modes of suffer ing, to a new perception of the immediate situation. But moving and sensitive as such critical interpretations have been, they have usually treated the recognition in the non-metadramatic sense. That is, the critics focus, or assume that Sophocles focuses, on the concept being recognized rather than on the act of recognition itself They discuss what is being recog nized, but not how it is recognized. Oedipus’s final tragic vision, shared by the other characters and ultimately by the audience, is so profound that his manner of perceiving it has received little attention. Critics have assumed without question that Oedipus is guilty of parricide and incest, and that his act of discovering his own guilt is a horrifying but otherwise neutral series of recogni tions of the obvious—a classic example of dramatic “exposition,” in which facts about events occurring before the play began are gracefully revealed, and, conventionally, are never questioned thereafter. Indeed, the very obviousness of Oedipus’s guilt is seen as an impressive piece of dramatic irony, with each new revelation resounding like another stroke of doom. But is Oedipus’s guilt truly so obvious? After all, he did not know that the man he killed was his father, nor that the woman he married was his mother. His ignorance, however, would probably not have made much difference to the Greeks. Having a “shame” society rather than a “guilt” society like ours, they saw morality in action rather than intention. Oedipus may not have intended to commit parricide or incest—indeed, he did ev^erything he could to avoid doing so—but to the Greeks, he would have seemed just as guilty as if he had. Sin was like disease; if a person is ill, it is a pollution whether it is the result of his own behavior or not. We may even feel sorry for him, but he is still a danger to us. Nonetheless, there is still a sense in which Oedipus’s guilt is doubtful. There are discrepancies in the factual evidence. If Oedipus were as good a defense attorney as he is a prosecutor, he would have made more of them. If critics were
124
Drama and Perception
Sophocles, Oedipus the King
125
more attuned to the play’s metadramatic aspects, they would make more of them The play opens with Oedipus, typically, asking a question: “Children vouna is si.ff • ^ answer IS not long in coming. A priest tells Oedipus that the city suffering from a terrible plague, which he describes lengthily^and vividly: ^ A blight is on the fruitful plants of the earth a b }ght IS on the cattle in the fields, a blight IS on our women that no children are born to them; a God that carries fire, a deadly pestilence, is on our town, strikes us and spares not, and the house of Cadmus IS emptied of its people while black Death grows rich in groaning and in lamentation. (25-30) This plague is the catalyst for the play’s action. Word comes from the oracle at Delphi that the plague is the result of the murder of Laius, the pZZTkiZ ore ^ *Pus, going unsolved, and the killers going unpunished The priest “MaTph ^ Oedipus will succeed in driving the pollution from the knd( 50). rhe first choral ode is a lamentation describing the suffering of the people m further detail. Afterward, Oedipus vows to fight the plaguX solv ng the crime. He invokes a eurse on Laius’s murderer: ^ ^ Upon the murderer I invoke this curse— whether he is one man and all unknown, or one of many—may he wear out his life m misery to miserable doom! If with my knowledge he lives at my hearth 1 pray that I myself may feel my curse. Un you I lay my charge to fulfill all this for me, for the God, and for this land of ours destroyed and blighted, by the God forsaken. (246-54) foe this is richly ironic, as many critics have noted Yet there IS something strange about this opening scene. For one thing it seems odd that Oedipus, ruler of the city, would have to ask why the suppliants have come, since he certainly knows all about the terrible plague; in foct he presently says that he has already sent Creon to the oracle at Delphi to finLut does eTtabhsh Oed of justjfymg necessary exposition, but on the other hand Jt does establish Oedipus at the outset as a very careful inquisitor. He IS not always such a careful listener, however. When Creon is later
explaining to Oedipus about the murder, he emphasizes that, as the story was told in Thebes, there were many robbers who did it: This man said that the robbers they [Laius and his party] encountered were many and the hands that did the murder were many; it was no man’s single power. (121-23) Yet, as Karelisa Hartigan has noted,* Oedipus immediately speaks of the culprit in the singular: “How could a robber dare a deed like this?” (124). Later, in the passage already quoted, he qualifies this by saying, “whether he is one man and all unknown / or one of many,” etc. (247^8), but even this qualification seems strange, since he has heard of nothing but multiple murderers. In the scene that follows with Teiresias, the old blind prophet, there is the first accusation of Oedipus himself as the killer. Teiresias says, bluntly, “I say you are the murderer of the king / whose murderer you seek” (362-63). This only infuriates Oedipus, who curses the soothsayer. In the episode following the next choral ode, he accuses Creon of the murder, and further, of now plotting with Teiresias to remove him from the throne. The issue remains unresolved when Jocasta, Creon’s sister and Oedipus’s wife, enters. With the sharp ques tions that are typical of his nature, Oedipus yet again draws out the story of the murder. What was the place, how long ago was it, what did Laius look like? For the first time, Oedipus begins to feel that Teiresias may have been right: “What have you designed, O Zeus, to do with me?” (738). Oedipus then tells the story of his encounter with an old man and his entourage: When I was near the branching of the crossroads, going on foot, I was encountered by a herald and a carriage with a man in it, just as you tell me. He that led the way and the old man himself wanted to thrust me out of the road by force. I became angry and struck the coachman who was pushing me. When the old man saw this he watched his moment, and as I passed he struck me from his carriage, full on the head with his two pointed goad. But he was paid in full and presently my stick had struck him bacKwards from the car and he rolled out of it. And then I killed them all. (801-13) It served them right. The Greeks had no notion of turning the other cheek, as Christians do; these fellows struck first, and Oedipus, heroically, struck back in double measure. Thus Oedipus never had any sense of the event being a crime— until now, when he fears that the old man may ha\'e been his own father. Yet there is a discrepancy between this story of the killing and the one that is
126
127
Drama and Perception
Sophocles, Oedipus the King
now prevalent in Thebes. Oedipus was alone, and, as he says, he “killed them all But when Lams was killed, one man escaped, who maintained that they had been attacked by many men, a band of robbers. Oedipus considers the point:
did marry his own mother, the play leaves some doubt, however small, whether he did indeed kill his own father. It is possible that there were two separate incidents, one in which Oedipus killed an unrelated old man and his traveling companions, and another in which a band of robbers killed Laius and his. Why would Sophocles have the stories differ on two major points? He could just as easily have had the man who escaped say that the king’s party had been attacked by a single person. He could also have had Oedipus say, “I think I killed them all, but in the heat of fighting perhaps one or two got away.” Of course, it is easy to imagine a reconciliation of the two stories. The shepherd in telling his version may have felt embarrassed at the fact that a lone man had been able to subdue a group of armed guards, and thus invented the business about a band of robbers. (Shakespeare has Falstaff do this, in Henry IV, Part 1, when he falsely maintains that he and his group were attacked and robbed by eleven men, when there were actually only two.) Oedipus may simply not have noticed that one of the group escaped. But the point is that w'c must infer these possibilities, the play does not tell us. There is plenty of opportunity for it to do so—Oedipus could simply continue to question the shepherd, instead of stopping after hearing the story of his parentage. After all, he earlier had made much of the discrepancy, and seemed intensely determined to clear it up. A curious point is that we never hear again about the plague after the middle of the play. At the end, do Oedipus’s self-mutilation and exile cure it? Not only are there no signs or reports on the subject, no one is even interested in it any more. Yet the plague had been so strongly emphasized at the beginning, when it was causing terrible suffering and sorrow. To suggest at the end that there has been a purification would resolve what had appeared to be a major issue in the play—and would also provide evidence that Oedipus had indeed been guilty. Yet
You said that he spoke of highway robbers who killed Laius. Now if he uses not I who killed him. One man cannot be the same as "'"'V the burden of (842-47) “One man cannot be the same as many” is a way of putting things that is evidence of a logical, mathematical mind. This discrepancy will apparently be resolved by rational means. Oedipus immediately sends for the man who escaped and told the story, in order to cross-examine him closely. In the meantime, after a short choral ode on man’s arrogance in ignoring oracles and the gods, a mesenger arrives from Corinth, where Oedipus grew up as prince, to announce that Oedipus’s father. Polybus, is dead, and that the people there have declared Oedipus king. Since an oracle had once predicted that Oedipus would one day kill his father and marry his mother, this is good news. It appears that oracles can be wrong. But, in the critical reversal of the u messenger tells Oedipus that he was not Polybus’s biological son He had been adopted, after the messenger himself had found him on the slopes of Mount Cithaeron. The messenger had gotten him from a Theban shepherd, who worked for King Laius. Inquiring about the shepherd, Oedipus discovers that he is actually the same person just sent for; the chorus tells him, “I think he IS none other than the peasant / whom you have sought to see already” (1052-53) the man who escaped to tell the story of the death of Laius. No one makes much of this bizarre coincidence. Instead, the old shepherd arrives, and tells how Laius had giyen him the child to do away with, again because of oracles, who predicted that he vyould kill his father. Instead of exposing the child on the hillside (the standard Theban form of birth control) howeyer, the shepherd, pitying him, gave him to a man from another country.’ 1 he chain of ev idence is overwhelming that Oedipus was that child. Oedipus assumes automatically that he did indeed kill Laius, as all the oracles predicted, and married his own mother, Jocasta. All leave except the chorus who bemoan Oedipus’s fate. A second messenger announces that Jocasta has committed suicide. Oedipus, having blinded himself, reenters, and after poig nant scenes with Creon, and with his daughters Antigone and Ismene, goes off into bitter exile. ® Yet the discrepancy still remains, never hav ing been resolved: Oedipus says he was alone, and killed the entire entourage, but it appears that one man escaped who then maintained that he and the others had been attacked not by a single person but by a band of robbers. Although there can be no doubt that Oedipus
here the play is oddly silent. Critics have not made much of this, nor of the other coincidences and paradoxes in the play.^ They have instead praised it for its supposed elegance of construction. Aristotle in particular liked the neat way in which its plot worked, with, for example, the messenger coming to cheer Oedipus and remove his fears in regard to his mother, but actually achieving the opposite effect; this reversal thus coincides with the main recognition in the play, which Aristotle felt to be the best kind of plotting.** Aristotle disliked irrational elements in plot con struction, preferring “impossible probabilities” to “unpersuasive possibilities.”** That is, it was all right to use gods, magic, and so in, in a logically consistent way once these unrealistic elements have been established, but not to use things just because they realistically could occur, without properly justifying them within the play itself. Yet what could be more improbable than having the messenger from Corinth show up just as Oedipus is about to question the shepherd; or to have the messenger turn out to be the same man who had taken the infant Oedipus to the Corinthian king; or to have the shepherd who had given the infant to the
128
Drama and Perception
%
Corinthian messenger turn out to be the very man who later escaped when the band of robbers (or the lone Oedipus) attacked Laius and his guards? Surely these coincidences are perfect examples of “unpersuasive possibilities.” And what about that plague that starts the play going—why do we never hear of it after the opening scenes? Did Oedipus’s self-mutilation and exile cure it? Finally, what about the discrepancies between the two stories of Laius’s death?
iv Oedipus is characterized not only as having a logical mind, but as taking great pride m It. The great coup in his life was figuring out the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx, who had been terrorizing the city of Thebes: What creature goes first on four legs, then on two legs, then on three legs? Oedipus realized that the answer is man, who crawls on all fours as an infant, then walks on two legs as a youth and adult, then finally walks on “three legs,” with the aid of a staff, in old age. When Oedipus gave this correct reply, the Sphinx killed herself; Oedipus was then made ruler of Thebes, in gratitude for his ridding the city of its oppressor, and also in appreciation of his obvious shrewdness. In a play abounding in recognitions, here was a pivotal recognition that occurred before the play began. Oedipus proudly recalls the incident: “1 solved the riddle by my wit alone” (398), he maintains, and furthermore, in contrast to Teiresias, “Mine was no knowledge got from birds” (399). Teiresias, the blind soothsayer, was useless when the Sphinx was around: For, tell me, where have you seen clear, Teiresias, with your prophetic eyes'? When the dark singer, the Sphinx, was in your country, did you speak word of deliverance to its citizens? (390-94) Oedipus solved the riddle with his intellect, his logic; blind Teiresias’s intuitive form of perception, through oracles from birds, was worthless then, and, Oedipus insists, is equally worthless now with regard to the plague. A motif of eyesight and seeing pervades the play, and is the source of multiple ironies. Oedipus can see, and Teiresias is blind; yet Teiresias “sees” the truth in this case, while Oedipus is blind to it. When Oedipus taunts Teiresias for his blindness, Teiresias taunts him back: “You have your eyes but see not where you are / in sin, or where you live, nor whom you live with. / Do you know who your parents are?’’ (413-15). Later in the play, Oedipus will be literally blind like Teiresias, as Teiresias correctly predicts: A deadly footed, double striking curse, from father and mother both, shall driv'e you forth
Sophocles, Oedipus the King
129
i
out of this land, with darkness on your eyes, that now have such straight \ ision. (416-19) There are many other references to eves and seeing. The chorus calls Oedipus “Greatest in all men’s eyes” (40), and later reminds Oedipus that CTeon has been his friend “before all men’s eyes” (656). In reporting Jocasta’s suicide, the second messenger tells the chorus, “You did not see the sight” (1238), and that “Oedipus distracted us from seeing” (1252). When Oedipus appears for the final time, after having put out his eyes, the chorus, aghast, cries, “This is a terrible sight for men to see! ... I cannot / look at you, though there’s much I want to ask / and much to learn and much to see. / I shudder at the sight of you” (1298-1306). Throughout the final scene, there are of course numerous references to Oedipus’s blindness; Oedipus stresses that to see would now be odious to him, for “why should I see / whose vision showed me nothing sweet to see?” (133435). This motif of eyesight-seeing amplifies the theme of perception. (The verbs for seeing and knowing are in fact related in Greek.) Oedipus sees himself as a great logician, an inquisitor, an analyst, a solver of riddles and problems. His knowledge does not come “from birds,” but from his own intellect. Yet, as Teiresias points out, there are many important things that he does not know, including the facts of his own parentage. And how does he actually come to know things? We see him jump hastily to conclusions when he accuses Creon and Teiresias of conspiring to depose him. We also see him forget to crossexamine the shepherd about the killing of Laius. It is as if there were some compulsive quality to his wanting to know things, a desire to find some pattern for events, no matter how painful—and no matter how the minor details may not fit the pattern. The true significance of the contradictory stories about the death of Laius, then, lies not in the discrepancy itself, for which we can easily imagine some explanation, but in how Oedipus handles the matter. His failure to pursue it does not leave us wondering who the killer actually was, as if the play were an Agatha Christie murder mystery (and the marrying of his own mother is proven beyond all question), but instead provides us with insight into Oedipus’s character, and especially into how he perceives things. He may see himself as a logician, but he actually intuits. Napoleon would warn his generals not to “form a picture,” not to infer a pattern to events on the battlefield that might in fact be disastrously incorrect. In deciding on his own guilt, Oedipus is indeed “forming a picture,” intuiting a conclusion on the basis of evidence that is still incomplete. This picture is probably correct, but has not been proven with the mathematical certainty that Oedipus led everyone to expect. One man still cannot be the same as many. Oedipus, then, is not just the man who solves riddles, the man who knows.
130
Drama and Perception
but the man who obsessively needs to know. He questions, analyzes, hypoth esizes, but then, as a grand pattern to events seems to emerge, he leaps to a conclusion. Despite the fact that this conclusion leaves him the most odious of men, it is preferable to have the pattern rather than to live with the chaos of doubt. The irony is tbat Oedipus liv'es in a world full of coincidences, paradoxes, discrepancies, uncertainties. Oracles speak, sometimes accurately, sometimes not. The gods seem to have some terrible design for man, but they do not actually appear (as they do not in most of Sophocles’ plays, unlike those of Aeschylus or p:uripides). Events can be explained in rational terms—almost. There still remains the possibility that Oedipus is not guilty, that the killer cannot be found, that life is ultimately a mystery. But Oedipus will not pursue this terrible option. He will not risk cross-examining the shepherd, and will not even concern himself about the effects of his decision upon the plague. He figuratively blinds himself to these things, and then blinds himself literally, an act of affirmation even in its self-destruction.
V
Athens in the age of Sophocles was, among other things, the great age of rational philosophy, which was to culminate in the thinking of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. All the philosophers, including the cynical sophists, prized logical thinking above all else, believing that it was the surest and finest route to truth. They laid the groundwork for the modern scientific method, with its utterly rational, non-mythical approach to studying life. The characterization of Oedipus in Sophocles’ play reflects this rationalistic spirit. “Mine was no knowledge got from birds,” but from superior intellect. He solved the riddle of the Sphinx by scientific reasoning alone. Yet, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty has written, “Science manipulates things, but gives up living in them.”'" Oedipus proudly solved the riddle of the Sphinx by answering “Man”—but it was as if he himself were not a man. Now, at the end of the play, he himself must walk on three legs,” with the aid of a staff, as he staggers about blinded. Oedipus’s scientific method told him everything about the world, but not about himself in the world. He did not know who his own parents truly were, and deeper than that, did not recognize his own weaknesses, his own obsessions, his own mortality. Oedipus can be seen as a personification of Freud’s “secondary process think ing,” just as Teiresias is a personification of primary process, intuitive thinking. Sophocles splits the two aspects of man’s mind, just as the philosophers were doing. Aristophanes Ihe Clouds, written shortly after Oedipus the King, parodies the same tendency. The hero, Strepsiades, “used to believ'e the rain was just Zeus pissing through a sieve,”" but his antagonist, Socrates, teaches him that
Sophocles, Oedipus the King
131
there is no Zeus, and that rain is actually the result of mindless convection forces. Like this fictions Socrates (probably based upon the real Socrates, but as he was in his early days of association with the sophists, rather than as he was to become by the time Plato was his student), Oedipus has renounced primary process, mythological thinking in favor of reasoning. He rejects bird divination and oracles, just as Plato was to reject theatre and most mythology, and just as scientists today reject erroneously held popular opinions as “myth.” Teiresias’s way of thinking is not for them, either. Yet even a scientist would have to admit that the flight of a bird, or the condition of its entrails, is the product of innumerable natural forces in its environment. To intuit from birds, as Teiresias does, is to be exceptionally sensitive to all these forces. Science, employing linear, secondary process think ing, can in a slow methodical manner perhaps arrive at the same conclusions. But it can also miss things, essential side causes and effects, because of its very linearity. It may tell us how to build a car, but not foresee air pollution; how to split the atom, but not how to use its energy safely; how to manipulate man, but not who man is. Primary process thinking, by contrast, is wholistic; it considers all. Its view of the world is not piecemeal and manipulative, but totalizing and contemplative. It is conservative, even passive, but it always includes man himself in its view. Of course, Teiresias can fail, as he did in trying to solve the riddle of the Sphinx. Primary process thinking is no more infallible than is secondary pro cess. But the message of the play is that Teiresias cannot really be excluded. Man’s intuition, for good or ill, must be satisfied. Ultimately, Oedipus intuits a pattern in all the chaotic events from his past, and sacrifices logic to it. Intuitive, primary process thinking allows for contradictions; one man can indeed be many. The important thing is that there seem to be a coherent whole.
Notes 1. Aristotle, 19-20. 2. Francis Fergusson, The Idea of a Theater (Garden (iitv, N.Y.: Doubledav, 1953), 31. 3. Alister t^ameron, The Identity of Oedipus the King (New \drk: New 'S'ork L'niversitv Press, 1968), 36-37. 4. Fergusson, 44. 5. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, trans. Da\ id Grene, in Sophocles I, ed. David Grene and Richard Lattimore (Ghicago: University of (Chicago Press, 1954), lines 1-2. Subsequent quotations of Oedipus the King, taken from this edition, are cited as line numbers in the text. 6. Karelisa I lartigan, “Sophocles: Oedipus Tyrranus 293,” Classical Journal 70 (.\pril -.\Iav 1975): 55-56. 7. It has not been overkxtked, however. In 1920, Gilbert Norw(x)d noted in his Greek Tragedy that everyone has forgotten the issue of whether Laius was slain bv a lone man or a group hv the time the shepherd arrives, but did not expand on the point (Greek Tragedy [New ^brk: I lill &. V\ang, I960], 149). In a crackpot article, “Who Killed Laius?” (Ttilane Drama Revieiv, 9 [Summer 1965]: 120-31), Karl I larshbarger reached the conclusion that the discrepance between the tv^o stories means that
132
Drama and Perception
the chorus killed Laius! This was not only unsupported and foolish, it was once again an example of a critic treating the perceived rather than perception in Oedipus the King. ^ .More recently Sandor Goodhart has given a deconstructive reading of the discrepancies, which lead him to decide that the play “is a critique of mythogenesis, an examination of the process by which one arbitrary fiction comes to assume the value of truth” (^Oedipus and Laius’s .Many *S " h ^ This seems to fit Qicteau’s Machine Infemale better than
8 Shakespeare
8. Aristotle, 19. 9. Ibid., 45. 10. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, ed. James ,\1. Edie (Evanston, III.: North western University Press, 1964), 159. 1962)
As You Like It
^'‘'liam Arrowsmith (New York: New American Library, "^There's no clock in the forest."
Perception is one of Shakespeare’s major concerns. His plays abound in dis guises, mistaken identities, ambiguous sights, confusing noises, misapprehensions. Images of eyesight and seeing are among his most common. King Lear alone has over a hundred of them. Characters often question their sense impressions; “Were such things here as we do speak about it?” asks Banquo concerning the witches, “Or have we eaten on the insane root / I hat takes the reason prisoner?” (1.3.83—85). Antipholus of Syracuse in Comedy of Errors ex claims; Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell? Sleeping or waking? mad or well advised? Known unto these, and to myself disguised! (2.2.211-13) Gloucester in King Lear, like Oedipus, feels that he is better off not seeing, since “I stumbled when I saw” (4.1.19). Ophelia in Hamlet cries, “O, woe is me / T’have seen what I have seen, see what I seel” (3.1.160-61). In fact, the major tragedies all turn on difficulties of perception; Hamlet must determine whether the ghost is truly his father, or a devil or a fantasy, as Horatio at first maintains. Lear disastrously misconstrues his daughters’ inten tions, as Gloucester does his sons’ in the parallel subplot. Duncan misjudges Macbeth, as he had misjudged Cawdor, and even sees Macbeth’s castle, where he is about to be murdered, as having “a pleasant seat. The air / Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself / Unto our gentle senses’ (1.6.1—3). Othello fails to see through lago’s smooth “honesty,” and as a result comes to misperceive the pure Desdemona as a foul whore. Shakespeare’s theme, which is derived from Platonic idealism as transmitted via Christian theology, is always that sense impressions are not to be trusted. 133
134
Drama and Perception
Shakespeare, Ar You Like It
Validity comes not from scientific evidence, as for us, but from God. In particular, the third person in the trinity, the Holy Ghost, which is the active spiritual presence of God in human life, is the source of truth. Thus Lear, for example, should not have concerned himself w ith the outward show of evidence his daughters put forth in the love contest at the beginning of the play, but should have looked into his own heart. Similarly, the “proof” that Othello demanded should have been the pure love he felt for Desdemona, rather than external things like the handkerchief The theme of the unrealiability of the senses is not limited to the tragedies, however. Misperception occurs over and over again in the comedies; sometimes the very titles or subtitles—yfr You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, What You Will—have phenomenological implications, suggesting that the characters’ per ceptions are in some way tainted. In the early comedies, the taint is likely to come from an external source: blind coincidence reuniting tw o pairs of twins in Comedy of Errors, Puck’s magic potion altering the lovers’ vision in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Petruchio’s coercion forcing Kate to call the sun the moon in The
always part of sense impressions as actually perceived. Malvolio’s delusion is not the result of coercion or magic; it is an all too human response with which we can readily identify.
Taming of the Shrew.
In the later comedies, however, as in the tragedies, the taint in perception often comes at least partly from within the characters themselves. The foolish suitors, Morocco and Arragon, in The Merchant of Venice, wrongly choose the outwardly attractive gold and silver caskets as a result of their own arrogance and selfishness. Orsino in Twelfth Night dotes on Olivia not for what she is, but because of his own obsessiveness about love. Malvolio mistaking the letter in the same play is an example of perfectly balanced external and internal causation. Maria, in forging the letter, uses no name but instead writes “M.O.A.I. doth sway my life” (2.5.100). Had she instead written “.Malvolio,” or even xM.A.I.O.”, the result would be simple, externally tainted perception, as in Shakespeare’s early comedies; instead, this method allows Malvolio, filled with fantssies of love and power, partly to fool himself He recognizes that “A should follow, but O does” (120-21), but nevertheless, like a comic Oedipus, he com pletes the pattern that suits him despite the discrepancy: “.M, O, A, I. Phis simulation is not as the former; and yet, to crush this a little, it would bow to me, for every one of these letters are in my name” (127-30). Shakespeare s treatment of the problems of perception in the later comedies, then, is metadramatic. When the taint of perception is externally caused, in the early comedies, our focus is on what is perceived more than on the act of perception. It is fun to watch Titania suddenly fall in love with Bottom, with his ass’s head, but since this misperception was forced upon her, the event says nothing about how human beings see in general. We could not possibly identify with Titania, since objective reality—ass-headed Bottom—contrasts so glaringly with Titania’s subjective response. Characters like .Morocco, .\rragon, Orsino, and .Vlalvolio, however, are themselves part of their misperceptions. The result is a more phenomenological \ iew of man, in w hich subjectivity is
135
ii As You Like It presents us with two overall contrasting settings, the civilized world surrounding Duke Frederick’s court, and the world of nature in the Forest of Arden. As many critics have noted, this contrast is typical of many of Shakespeare’s comedies. The civilized world, presented at the beginning, is characterized by rigidities and artificialities. Duke Frederick is a usurper and petty tyrant. He took the throne from his brother, Duke Senior, who now lives in the Forest of Arden with a band of followers. Similarly, Oliver, although he did not actually usurp his brother Orlando’s place (Oliver is the elder), has tyrannized him, and failed to raise him in a manner befitting his station of life. Spites and hates are rampant in this artificial world. In a scene reminiscent of the story of Cain and Abel, Oliver and Orlando quarrel bitterly, and Oliver then plots his brother’s death. The scene takes place in Oliver’s orchard, also inhab ited by an old retainer, Adam. Everything echoes the myth of Adam and Eve and the garden of Eden, after the fall. Man is fallen, the world is depraved, and man has inherited a propensity to sin. Oliver does not even know w'hy he hates his brother: “Eor my soul, yet 1 know not why, hates nothing more than he” (1.1.151-53). There is no modern, deep psychological “motivation” for his hatred; it is simply the result of the sinfulness of human nature. Duke Erederick is similarly possessed with sinful hatred. The kind of enter tainment he enjoys is wrestling matches in which ribs are cracked and partici pants brought near to death. When Orlando introduces himself as the son of Sir Rowland de Boys, the Duke is most displeased. It seems that although “ The world esteemed thy father honorable” (1.2.206), Duke Frederick hated him too—again, for no particular reason other than the Duke’s spiteful nature. His fear and spite similarly lead him to ban his niece Rosalind from his court, although she has done nothing disloyal to him. Life in the Eorest of Arden, to which Rosalind, her cousin Celia, the Duke’s court jester Touchstone, and (separately) Orlando and Adam, all flee, is very different from life at court. Instead of hatred, there is brotherhood among Duke Senior and his followers. Instead of scheming, there are philosophizing and lovemaking and writing of poetry. Instead of brutal wrestling matches, there are feasting and music. (There had been no music at court, significantly rare for
Shakespeare.) This contrast between an artificial civilization and what critics call “the green world” occurs in other Shakespearean cf)medies, such as A Midsummer Night's Dream or The Winter's Tale. The green world is a source of fertility and love, the
136
Drama and Perception
Shakespeare, As You Like It
natural forces that sort out the problems of civilization. (Portia’s Belmont, in The Merchant of Venice, is not a forest, but it functions similarly.) Thus, when Duke
In contrast, the refugees from Duke Frederick’s court view the forest in very different terms from those of Duke Senior’s group. Rosalind, Celia, and Touch stone, exhausted and hungry, speak of it as “a deserted place” (2.4.67), a phrase that is echoed s(X)n after bv Orlando. In what he calls “this uncouth forest (2.6.6) Orlando says to Adam, who is starving, “Thou shalt not die for a lack of dinner if there live anything in this desert” (15-16). The word “desert” (in Shakespeare’s time meaning simply any wild, uninhabited place) recurs in his speech in the next scene, when he tries to seize food from Duke Senior and his lords by the threat of his sword;
Frederiek at the end of the play comes to the forest to root out all his enemies who have taken refuge there, he is immediately converted by an old religious man. The forest is working its natural magic; rigidity and conflict are dissolved rather than being resolved. rhe Forest of Arden in Ar You Like It, howev'er, has an additional charac teristic. It seems to be a different place according to whoever is perceiving it. lb Duke Senior, it seems a wonderful place, full of meaning for man even where it seems harsh and unpleasant:
I thought that all things had been savage here. And therefore put I on the countenance Of stern commandment. But whate’er you are That in this desert inaecessible. Under the shade of melancholy boughs. Lose and neglect the creeping "hours of time; If ever you have looked on better days. If ever been where bells have knolled to chureh. If ever sat in any good man’s feast. If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear And know what ’tis to pity and be pitied. Let gentleness my strong enforcement be; In the which hope I blush, and hide mv sword. ^ '
Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile. Hath not old custom made this life more sweet Than that of painted pomp.^ Are not these woods More free from peril than the envious court? Here feel we not the penalty of Adam; The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind. Which, when it bites and blows upon my body Even till I shrink with eold, I smile and say “ This is no flattery”; these are counsellors That feelingly persuade me what I am. Sweet are the uses of adversity. Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous. Wears yet a precious jewel in his head; And this our life, exempt from public haunt. Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks. Sermons m stones, and good in everything. (2.1.1-17) This is medieval Christian idealism, in which ev'erything, no matter how ugly or painful, has its place in the ov'erall scheme of things, the great chain of being stretching downward from God. The chilling winter’s wind, like other human adversity, may seem evil, but it is actually good, acting as a form of penance, reminding man of what I am,” not a god or an angel, but a mortal. The quaint story of the toad with the jewel in his head, drawn from the medieval bestiaries, is yet another example of how evil has no real substance. “Every cloud has a silver lining would be our eliche for the same sentiment. And, indeed, this would seem to be true in Duke Senior’s own case. His “toad”—being deposed from his dukedom—has turned out to have its “jewel,” a life of good fellowship in the forest, living on nature’s bounty. He and his followers seem to lack for nothing, spending their time hunting, feasting, singing, and philosophizing. Only Jaques seems to have brought the eynicism of civilization into the forest with him, but the other banished lords view him only with an easy amusement. He is no threat, and even his cynicism seems to have little rancor in it. He is philosophical and resigned rather than bitter or spiteful.
137
(2.7.106-19)
In his distraught and starving condition, he sees the forest as “savage,” “inac cessible,” “melancholy.” By the end of the speech, however, Arden has begun to work its magic upon him, and he is coming over to Duke Seniors view. The images shift to “ehurch” and “feast,” as Orlando speaks of pity, gentleness, and hope, finally putting down his sword. Later in the play, he becomes even more idealistic than Duke Senior; the trees in the “uncouth” fi)rest, with their “melan choly boughs,” become instead charming natural surfaces for carving sonnets to Rosalind. In realistic terms, it seems strange that the Forest of Arden, so bountiful that food seems to fall into the hands of Duke Senior and his banished lords, seems so like a barren desert to the refugees. If food is so plentiful, why can they not see it? (After all, the Duke and the banished lords were once refugees too, yet they obviously got along with no difficulties.) But Shakespeare is not interested in external realism. The forest simply means different things to different charac ters, and at different times. It is amusing that he can put contrasting views in the very same scene. When Rosalind and her little group arrive in the “desert place,” they encounter the pastoral shepherd, Silv'ius, who seems unconcerned about food at all. Instead, he poeticizes endlessly about his shepherdess love object: O, thou didst then never love so heartily! If thou rememb’rest not the slightest folly
138
Drama and Perception
Shakespeare, As You Like It
139
That ever love did make thee run into, Thou hast not loved. Or if thou hast not sat as I do now, Wearing thy hearer in thy mistress’ praise. Thou hast not loved. Or if thou hast not broke from company Abruptly, as my passion now makes me. Thou hast not loved. O Phebe, Phebe, Phebe!
Touchstone and Jaques on the other. Touchstone jokes about shepherding in crude, sexual terms: To bring the ewes and the rams together and to offer to get your living by the copulation of cattle, to be bawd to a bellwether and to betray a she-lamb of a twewemonth to a crooked-pated old cuckoldly ram, out of all reasonable match. If thou beest not damned for this, the devil himself will have no shepherds. (3.2.74—80) (2.4.30-39)
The “desert place” not only turns out to have room for Duke Senior and his lords, with their medieval world view, it also is inhabited by this character straight out of pastoral poetry, a ridiculously artificial type, who nonetheless seems perfectly at home in Arden as well. In this same scene, there is another shepherd, Corin, whose approach to his profession is as down to earth as Silvius’s is ethereal: But I am shepherd to another man And do not shear the fleeces that I graze. My master is of churlish disposition And little recks to find the way to heaven By doing deeds of ho^itality.' Besides, his cote, his flocks, and bounds of feed Are now on sale, and at our sheepcote now. By reason of his absence, there is nothing I hat you will feed on.
For Silvius and Phebe, then, shepherding is heavenly; for Corin, it is earthly; and for Touchstone here, it is hellish, and shepherds are “damned.” Touchstone and Jaques are paired in the play in many ways; indeed, jaques admires the clown so much that he even says he would like to dress up in motley (2.7.34). Both have brought the attitudes of civilization into Arden, and see the forest in terms of the court and city. In the scene just quoted, Fouchstone bases his hellish theory of shepherding on its contrast with courtly life: “If thou never wast at court, thou never saw’st good manners; if thou never sawst good manners, then thy manners must be wicked; and wickedness is sin, and sin is damnation” (3.2.37-40). Earlier in the play, Jaques gazed upon an injured stag, and, we are told, moralized on his plight “into a thousand similes (2.1.45). I he stag was like a “poor and broken bankrupt” (57), abandoned by his friends; a herd passing by were like “fat and greasy citizens” (55), unconcerned with their fellow creature’s plight.
(2.4.73-82) Corin views the Forest of Arden in practical terms, of sheering and feeding, buying and selling, in contrast to the young swain Silvius, “That little cares for buying anything” (85). In a later scene with the clown Touchstone, Corin notes how shepherds’ hands are hard, greasy from handling the fells of ewes, and “often tarred over with the surgery of our sheep” (3.2.50-60), all of which again seems remote from the world of his supposedly fellow shepherds, Silvius and Phebe. Corin, then, accepts his simple rustic life, viewing it neither romantically nor cynically. He is a normative character, with a humble, natural philosophy of life: I know the more one sickens the worse at ease he is; and that he that wants money, means, and content is without three good friends; that the property of rain is to wet and fire to burn; that good pasture makes fat sheep, and that a great cause of the night is lack of the sun; that he that hath learned no wit bynature nor art may complain of good breeding, or comes of a \-erv dull kindred. (3.2.22-29) This solid, middle view is contrasted by the extreme romanticism of Silvius and Phebe (and, later, of Orlando) on the one hand, and bv the extreme cynicism of
Thus most invectively he pierceth through The body of the country, city, court. Yea, and of this our life^ swearing that we Are mere usurpers, tyrants, and what’s worse. To fright the animals and to kill them up In their assigned and native dwelling place. (58—63) For Jaques, the very animals of the forest are like civilized human beings, with all their foibles and weaknesses. Later, in his famous speech, he compares all the world to a stage—another image drawn from the city. Neither Duke Seniors medieval idealism nor Corin’s naturalistic earthiness have any place in Jaques’s world view. Like Touchstone, he sees the forest, and indeed all the world, in ultra-civilized terms.
iii In sum, the characters in As You Like It see life in the way that they want to see it, or in the way that circumstances force them to see it. The title of the play refers not just to the expected attitude of the audience, who presumably like this
140
141
Drama and Perception
Shakespeare, As You Like It
sort of entertainment, but also to the attitudes of the characters, who see life in general as they like it. The idealists—Duke Senior, Silvius, Phebe, Orlando after he is settled in Arden—view the world in romantic terms, as a virtual paradise. “Here feel we not the penalty of Adam” (2.1.5), the Duke maintains. The cynics Touchstone, Jaques, Oliver, Duke Frederick—view the world in pessi mistic, citified terms, in which the penalty of Adam is a life without meaning, a war of all against all, with a dreary succession of empty roles ending “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything” (2.7.166). Finally, the moderates—Corin and (as I shall argue) Rosalind—see the world in balanced terms, in which the fall of Adam has indeed brought suffering and disorder, but in which God nevertheless still operates behind the scenes. The movement of the play is toward the moderate, central position. Orlando comes to have a more realistic view of love in his relation to the flesh and blood Rosalind, in contrast to the girl of his dreams and sonnets; similarly, under Rosalinds influence, Silvius and Phebe come to accept each other in realistic terms, in contrast to their ridiculously affected pastoral love. Duke Senior will have to contend with the penalty of Adam” when he returns to the throne. Duke Frederick and Oliver are converted from their irreligious cynicism through the magic of the Forest of Arden. Even Touchstone, the cynical clown who ridiculed love and despised rustic life, ends up in a marriage with the country wench, Audrey. At the end of the play, only Jaques remains with an extreme viewpoint, cynieally remarking that Touchstone’s “loving voyage / Is but for two months victualled” (5.4.186), but even Jaques plans to go off to visit the newly converted Duke Frederick, for “Out of these convertites / There is much matter to be heard and learned” (178—79). Perhaps his melancholy pessi mism will be moderated after all. Throughout the play, the extreme characters, both idealists and cynics, not only see what they wish to see, but have a vision that is distorted. Here is Touchstone, deseribing the days when he, like Silvius now, was an ardent lover;
also true that it is a convention in Shakespeare’s plays that no one ever sees through a disguise, even when, as here, it consists merely of the clothing of the opposite sex. Yet surely here the convention is being metadramatically mocked. This is clear enough in act 4, scene 1, in which Rosalind, dressed as Ganymede (her male disguise), plays the role of “Rosalind” to the love-sick Orlando. I his is not only multiple-layered role playing within the role, it carries the added, exquisite irony that the innermost role coincides with the outermost reality. Orlando is so idealistically blind that he cannot see the very woman he loves, even through she is standing in front of him, “disguised” only with male garments, and playing herself. Similarly, Phebe, intoxicated with the idea, but not the reality of love, becomes enamored of “Ganymede,” failing to see through the thin disguise, even though her swain Silv'ius is obviously the man to whom she should be paying attention. None of the lovers notices the blatant irony in the little scene in the last act in which Silvius describes “What ’tis to love”:
I remember, when I was in love I broke my sword upon a stone and bid him take that for coming a-night to Jane Smile; and I remember the kissing of her battler, and the cow’s dugs that her pretty chopt hands had milked and I remember the wooing of a peascod instead of her, from whom I took two cods, and giving her them again, said with weeping tears, “Wear these for my sake.” (2.4.42^9)
Touchstone, it seems, is a character of more than one extreme—idealist then, cynic now. But his description here of the time he took a stone for his rival, and a peascod for his love, aptly describes the kind of blindness that love instills in the characters whom we see. Phebe, for example, is so blinded by the notion of love that she falls in love with a woman, Rosalind. It is true that Rosalind is disguised as a man, and it is
It is to be all made of sighs And so am I for Phebe. PHEBE. And I for Ganymede. ORLANDO. And I for Rosalind. ROSALIND. And I for no woman. SILVIUS.
and
tears;
(5.2.78-83) Although the incantation is repeated, hilariously, three times, each time ending with Rosalind’s “And I for no woman,” no one notices her double entendre— except the audience. Duke Senior is another idealistic character who fails to recognize Rosalind— his own daughter—in her male disguise. In the last scene, he at long last has some faint stirrings of memory: I do remember in this shepherd’s boy Some lively touches of my daughter s favor. ^
(5.4.26-27)
And it is about time, too. Here Shakespeare is toying with the convention of non-recognition again. Duke Senior almost eomes to the obvious conclusion that Ganymede is really Rosalind, but puts the notion aside. Rosalind must put off her male garments, and put on female ones, to show the benighted characters what should have been apparent all along. Always Rosalind is the catalyst for bringing the extreme characters back to reality. She is not only a normative character, but a raisonneur, arguing against the extremists for her moderate viewpoint. “You are a fool, she chides Silvius, “and turned into the extremity of love” (4.3.23—24), just as the other fool in the play. Touchstone, is turned into the extremity of anti-love, as he mocks the
142
Drama and Perception
Shakespeare, Ar You Like It
lovers endlessly and ruthlessly. “Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love” (4.1.96-98), Rosalind reminds Orlando. He would love her “forever and a day,” but she replies.
iv
Say “a day,” without the “ever.” No, no, Orlando; men are April when they woo, December when they wed. Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives. (133-36) Rosalind is realistic, knowing that romantic love cannot be a permanent state, but that it must be transmuted into something more down to earth for there to be a happy, lasting marriage. Romantic lovers are blind, seeing only an idealized image of their beloved; husbands and wives must accept each other as real, flawed human beings. “Say a day without the ever” might seem a cynical statement, but Rosalind has plenty of advice for the cynics of the play too. After all, unlike cynical Touchstone, she at least allows romantic love “a day.” In act 3, scene 2, she chides Touchstone for mocking Orlando’s verses; bad though they may be, she is moved by them, and rejects Touchstone’s cheap sarcasm. Later, in the “say a day without the ever” scene with Orlando just quoted (4.1), she has a parallel scene with Jaques: I prithee, pretty youth, let me be better acquainted with thee. ROSALIND. They say you are a melancholy fellow. JAQUES. I am so; I do love it better than laughing. ROSAUND. Those that are in extremity of either are abominable fellows, and betray themselves to every modern censure worse than drunkards. JAQUES. Why, ’tis good to be sad and say nothing. ROSALIND. Why then, ’tis good to be a post.
143
As already mentioned, Jaques and Touchstone are parallel characters in their cynicism, despite the fact that the former is lugubrious, while the latter is mercurially witty. Both bring city attitudes with them into the forest; both view love contemptuously; both chide others, ostensibly with the purpose of improv ing them. “Invest me in motley,” says Jaques, “and I will through and through / Cleanse the foul body of th’ infected world” (2.7.58-60). He was much taken with Touchstone from their very first meeting, and repeatedly insists that he would like to join the clown in wearing motley, as he says in this speech. When the two did meet for the first time, in the forest. Touchstone was carrying a small gadget from the city, a sundial. Jaques reports: And then he drew a dial from his poke. And looking on it with lack-lustre eye. Says very wisely, “It is ten o’clock. Thus we may see,” quoth he, “how the world wags. ’Tis but an hour ago since it was nine. And after one hour more ’twill be eleven; And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe. And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot; And thereby hangs a tail.” ^
(2.7.20-28)
JAQUES.
(1-9) Earlier, Rosalind had insisted that Orlando’s romantic love was “merely a mad ness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do” (3.2.376—77); here she insists that Jaques’s melancholy, which he loves as exces sively as Orlando does Rosalind, makes him worse than a drunkard. Rosalind, both moderate and moderator, chides all extremism, whether of the lover, the madman, the drunkard, or the melancholic. There is an echo here of the medieval theory of humors (of which Jaques’s melancholer was one); the healthy individual had his humors in balance, while the mentally or physically sick person had one or more in excess. Balance, moderation, “the golden mean” were good; imbalance, overindulgence, excess of any kind were bad, making one literally or figuratively a drunkard, and warping one’s vision. Thus Rosalind in the same scene rejects both Orlando’s and Jaques’s views of life as excessive and distorted.
Pocket sundials were nearly as common in the Elizabethan era as watches are today. Indeed, watches themselves had been around for about a century but would have been too expensive for someone like Touchstone; the small, portable “dial” was the watch of the common man. (The recent raising of a shipwreck from the time of Henry VIII uncovered many of them among the effects of the drowned sailors.) Touchstone seems to have the same kind of obsession with time as Jaques in the subsequent “All the world’s a stage” speech (2.7.139-66). Both see time as clicking mechanically forward, hour after hour, scene after scene, mindlessly taking us to a meaningless death. Time is in fact a major theme of the play, but there are other views of it than that of Jaques and Touchstone. Orlando, in a passage already quoted, says he would love Rosalind “forever and a day” (4.1.132); ever the romantic, he sees love as timeless, in the idealist, Platonic sense. Love for him is eternal and unchang ing. Rosalind, however, in the “say ‘a day’ without the ‘ever’ ” passage (4.1.13336), reminds him that time marches on, and brings in its transformations. Orlando seems to get her message, for he shortly announces that he is off to dinner with the Duke, but that he will return “by two o’clock” (164); he has come to acknowledge the passing of time, and the existence of the clock. Rosalind, however, was not speaking of time in this mechanical sense; how will Orlando even know what time it is, out there in the Forest of Arden? She therefore doubts that Orlando will be able to keep his promise, saying. Time is
144
Drama and Perception
Shakespeare, Ar You Like It
the old justice that examines all such offenders, and let Time try” (183-84). In the event, he does not return on time, because, as it turns out, he is injured fighting a lioness that had been stalking his sleeping brother. As result of the incident, the wicked brother, Oliver, has converted (as Duke Frederick will) into a decent person. Time has brought unpredictable changes. Earlier, Rosalind had more things to say about time: ROSAUND. ORLANDO.
I pray you, what is’t o’clock? You should ask me, what time o’day. There’s no clock in the forest. (3.2.285-87)
And indeed there is not, although some people, like Touchstone, may have brought them there. The clock is a human invention, which has no counterpart in nature. On the other hand, time does of course pass in nature, as processes like the movement of the sun across the sky, the changing phases of the moon, and the growth and decay of living organisms, take place. But nature itself provides no abstract measure of these things. Man had to invent the sundial, the clock, the watch, the chronometer, to do that. Rosalind goes on to make an interesting point, that psychological time, which is time as we actually experience it, is not really determined by the clock. In fact, she says, “Time travels in divers paces with divers persons” (293-94). She goes on to prove this by citing “who Time ambles withal, who Time trots withal, who Time gallops withal, and who he stands still withal” (294-96). It trots with a young maid awaiting her wedding day, it ambles with “a priest that lacks Latin and a rich man that hath not the gout” (304-5), it gallops with a thief condemned to the gallows, and it stands still “with lawyers in the vacation; for they sleep between term and term, and then they perceive not how time moves” (314-16). Just as the Forest of Arden is a different place according to whoever is perceiving it, then, so too is time different according to whoever is experiencing it. Rosalind, the normative character in the play, has little use for those who tell time by the clock: He that will divide a minute into a thousand parts and break but a part of me thousand part of a minute in the affairs of love, it may be said of him that Cupid hath clapped him o’ th’ shoulder, but I’ll warrant him heart-whole (4.1.40-44) Mathematicizing time, turning it into numbers that can be indefinitely sub divided, as we have come to do, is for Rosalind artificial and unnatural. A lover who thinks of time in the mathematical way, the way of the clock, is no true lover at all, she insists. The true reality (as always in Shakespeare) is the inner reality, the psychological sense of time, which “travels in divers paces with divers persons.”
145
V
Clocks had been around for many centuries by Shakespeare’s day, and he frequently mentions them in his plays. They were not particularly accurate or reliable; Richard III calls for one on the eve of the battle of Bosworth, and bids Ratcliffe, “About the mid of night come to my tent / And help to arm me” (5.3.77-78). Ratcliffe, however, comes late, saying: The early village cock Hath twice done salutation to the morn: Your friends are up and buckle on their armor. (210-12)
Perhaps the clock had stopped. Indeed, in Richard’s day a clock would not even have had a minute hand, since it would not have been accurate enough to warrant one. By Shakespeare’s time, however, clocks were a little better, and soon, with the invention of the pendulum, their accuracy improved dramat ically. Minute hands became standard, and, by the end of the seventeenth century, the second hand had been introduced. With the invention of the marine chronometer in the eighteenth century, it indeed became possible to “divide a minute into a thousand parts,” and in the twentieth century it has become possible to divide it into a billion.' “By its essential nature,” wrote Lewis Mumford, the clock “dissociated time from human events.It was probably the single most important invention for the creation of modern industrial society. Pre-industrial societies define time by the task itself, which takes as long as it takes to do, and is externally regulated only by the natural rhythms of the day and of the seasons. Spring is planting time, and fall harvest time; one plows until the fields are finished, sows seed until they are covered, and gathers the grain until one has stored all that has grown. In a factory, however, one continuously performs the same task of work, which, having no real beginning or end, must be externally regulated by a machine, the clock. Modern industry divides time up by the clock, sells it, and buys our labor by it. Far from being an expression of our own inner lives, controlled by our own subjectivity, time has become something objective, controlling us. Like Touchstone, we now all carry watches, or “dials,” around with us. “From hour to hour we ripe and ripe, / And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot” has become the way we look at ourselves. Touchstone and Jaques are modernists. Prefiguring modern man, they see life in objective, scientific, mathematical terms. Jaques’s “Seven Ages” speech de scribes human beings in the neutral, detached style of a scientist studying ants. Audiences today respond strongly to the existential bleakness of the passage, which is echoed in countless works of twentieth-century literature. But the meaninglessness of life, which seems simultaneously so fascinating and horrify-
146
Drama and Perception
Shakespeare, Ar You Like It
ing to us, is very much a product of the modern way of looking at things objectively rather than emotionally. Rosalind, the normative character in As You Like It, provides the corrective for Touchstone’s and Jaques’s modernism. Her view is the traditional, medieval Christian one, which measures man not with mathematical gadgets like a clock, but by the state of his timeless, immortal soul. In the traditional Christian view, God existed outside of time: “One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day,” as Saint Peter put it. Jesus advised his followers to “take no thought for the morrow,” but instead to live for the moment, the existential “present” that surrounds us, which is always invested with eternity. It is in this spirit that Rosalind advises Orlando to “say a day without the ever”; unlike God, we cannot experience eternity directly, but we can sense it in the moment if we truly give ourselves up to it. A similar attitude toward time is embodied in the Christian view of the day of judgment, when we shall be transformed not according to some measurable, mathematical process, but in “the twinkling of an eye.” The sudden transforma tions of Duke Frederick and Oliver at the end of the play reflect this kind of thinking. To us, their conversions seem awkward and “unrealistic,” not because we do not believe that people change, but rather because we believe that they only do so gradually, responding in stages to a complex of internal and external forces, like the man Jaques describes passing from infancy to adulthood to senility in “seven ages.” In other words, what is bothersome here is that the clock does not seem to be ticking, as it always is in a modern, realistic play. But then, “there’s no clock in the forest.” The forest, as Bruno Bettelheim has noted, is an important archetype in literature:
existing outside our experience, but experience itself There is no clock in the forest, and none in life as we fundamentally live it.
Since ancient times the near-impenetrable forest in which we get lost has symbolized the dark, hidden, near-impenetrable world of our unconscious. If we have lost the framework which gave structure to our past life and must now find our own way to become ourselves, and have entered this wilderness with an as yet undeveloped personality, when we succeed in finding our way out we shall emerge with a much more highly developed humanity. ° If we can no longer identity with Rosalind’s traditional Christian view of life, we can at least respond to Bettelheim’s. The unconscious mind, symbolized in As You Like It hy the Forest of Arden, recognizes no mathematical categories of space and time. Nor does it recognize the possibility of its own destruction. With its primary process thinking, it totalizes rather than divides “a minute into a thousand parts.” It offers us a kind of eternity, not in a mathematical sense, nor in any mystically religious sense, but in the way it connects us with all existence rather than breaking it into parts. Fo enter the Forest of Arden, to explore our unconscious, is to confront what we truly are, not some mindless process
147
Notes 1. David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clock and the Making of the Modem World (Cambridge; Harvard University Press, 1983), 116-18, etpassim. 2. Ibid., 16. 3. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses ofEnchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Vintage, 1977), 94.
Buchner, Woyzeck
9 Buchner
Woyzeck “/ don't see it! I don’t see it! My God, why can’t / see it?”
In 1978, I had the opportunity to direct Georg Buchner’s Woyzeck at the Univer sity of Calgary in Canada, as part of the production season of the Drama Department there. Since this German late Romantic play is deeply concerned with problems of perception, I was naturally delighted to have the opportunity to deal with it in performance. What follows here, in this chapter, is an account of how literary criticism and theatrical production can interact in a mutually productive way, something I have described in another book.' Far from yielding a sterile, pedantic approach to performing a classical work, the literary and historical skills that we brought to bear yielded a production that was strikingly avant-garde. At the same time, the process of rehearsing and performing taught us important things about the play itself. One of my deepest convictions is that, in theatrical production, one must respect the integrity of the playscript, making no changes except out of direst necessity. Furthermore, while one must certainly interpret a playscript in order to produce it, a production interpretation should not be something added to a script, but rather something found in it. Buchner’s Woyzeck, however, is a script that drastically challenges such assumptions. As is well known, the work is incomplete, but that is only the beginning of the problem. Four separate drafts have been identified. The drafts themselves were not discovered until long after the author’s death; they were in poor condition, and chemicals added to bring out the writing made them worse instead of better. Parts of the drafts are thus illegible; in addition, they contain much crossing out and revising within them. It is not even clear whether Woyzeck is supposed to die at the end of the play— surely an important matter, whichever way one chooses! How do you remain true to a script, if you are not even sure what the script is? Textual problems can sometimes be solved by studying the play’s original production, or at least by studying the stage conditions at the time of the play’s composition. But Woyzeck was never produced in Buchner’s lifetime, and it is difficult to see how it even could have been produced then. Depending on how one puts the text together, there are anywhere from twenty to thirty scenes, the 148
149
longest of which runs about five minutes. Some contain only two or three sentences. Given the illusionistic scenery and proscenium stage that were uni versally employed in 1837, the year of the playscript’s composition, it is hard to imagine a production that would not have bogged down in scene shifts. Indeed, many of the shifts would have lasted longer than the scenes themselves. But then, again, we are not dealing with a completed playscript; perhaps the staccato, episodic quality of what we have is merely accidental. Instead of envisioning some radical new form of theatre for his time, Buchner may simply have intended to flesh out the scenes later. What we have may be only an extended outline. The usual approach to producing Woyzeck is to construct—one cannot even say reconstruct—what the playscript might have been if Buchner had finished it. A logical place to start such a construction would be the German version that has become standard, that of Werner Lehmann, which is available in English translation by Henry J. Schmidt. Nevertheless, we started with the other readily available version in English, which is translated and edited by Carl Mueller. I made this choice for two expedient reasons; First, I had already performed as an actor in a production using the Mueller version, and thus I knew that, while preserving the fragmented quality of the lines in the original, its English was speakable. Second, unlike anybody else, Mueller starts the play with the scene of Woyzeck shaving the Captain, which seemed, for purely intuitive reasons at first, to be a better beginning than that of most other versions, which start with the scene with Woyzeck and Andres in the open field. The latter scene has Woyzeck imagining strange, apocalyptic sights and sounds; showing this at the beginning could make the audience decide, far too soon, that Woyzeck is simply insane, thus closing them off from later scenes m which he is shown to be by far the sanest character in the play. The production was to use environmental staging, with scenes taking place around, among, and even suspended above the audience, in a large storage room near the main theatre at the university. The choice of staging was again intuitive. I had seen some of Richard Schechner’s environmental productions and been excited by the possibilities of this form of staging; the Brechtian “alienation effect” it provided seemed vaguely right for this particular play, which was, in fact, a strong influence on Brecht. Furthermore, I hated the two standard theatre spaces available to the University of Calgary drama department: a cramped, lowceilinged studio theatre that was difficult to light, and a large regular theatre with a thrust stage modeled on the wonderful one at Stratford, Ontario, but debilitated by several bad compromises, such as the attempt to be a proscenium stage at the same time. Both the university theatres were also very bad accoustically. The storage room, on the other hand, had a high ceiling, and, being a kind of leftover space in the building, was full of odd shapes and angles that not only provided a multitude of playing variations, but also broke up sound better than either of the two theatres ostensibly designed as performance areas.
150
Drama and Perception
Buchner, Woyzeck
I would not have hesitated to use a contemporary style of staging, if I felt it were appropriate, even if it had been possible to reconstruct an original produc tion of Woyzeck. Being faithful to the text does not imply an archaeological reconstruction of an historical production. It means, rather, that one recognizes that a play is an interrelated process, a delicate web of performance patterns, which must be uncovered and projected into the staging conditions available! The director does not explore theatre history, he or she explores a script. Theatre history may be an important guide for that exploration, but it is not an end in itself The music composed for the production provides an example of what I mean. Here we can see, quite clearly, what Buchner’s intentions were. He calls for a number of standard German folk songs to be sung in the course of the play, with altered lyrics. These folk songs would have been well known to the audiences of his day; the juxtaposition of the simple, charming songs with their incongruous lyrics in ghastly contexts would have had an exciting effect of disruption on the audience. This is what, following Jacques Derrida, poststructuralist critics call deconstruction, in which what is absent affects readers or audiences more than what is present; a standard framework sets up expectations which are then not met. The difficulty with Buchner’s music today, however, is that none of our audience would have been familiar with the original tunes, or even their overall style. Thus, deconstruction had to be achieved differently. Our composer and music director, Gregory Levin of the music department, therefore employed a basic, modern cabaret style for the tunes, but with inversions, transpositions, and strange instrumentation as a projecton of the disjointure and conflict in the original. In this preliminary work before rehearsal, I became convinced that this idea of deconstruction provided a v'aluable clue not only to how the music might be composed, but also to how the production as a whole should operate. The script employs a number of deconstructive devices. The basic story, for example, if looked at in outline, is a traditional one: a love triangle, jealousy, murder, and (assuming that Woyzeck really does die) suicide. Unlike German folk songs, these elements are perfectly familiar to any Western audience. They have been used in thousands of stories and plays, most notably in Othello. Lhe source of their potency is the underlying psychosexual material: the basic Oedipal pattern of jealousy of the powerful father figure (the drum major who seduces Marie); the castration fear expressed through Woyzeck’s sexual impotence; ambivalent feelings of desire and resentment toward the mother figure, Marie; and finally, the resultant and equally ambivalent feelings of rage and guilt. Buchner’s prin cipal deconstruction of the jealousy plot is in his inversion of the hero: instead of making Woyzeck an upper- or at least middle-class figure, Buchner sets him at the very bottom of society—poor, illiterate, and oppressed. Othello was a leader, a general; Woyzeck is a private soldier. Othello was exploited by a lower-class
subordinate, lago; Woyzeck is exploited by upper-class, authority figures like the Doctor and the Captain. But the other major deconstructive device is the script’s very fragmentation and crudeness. By these means, the hostile and sexual material, instead of being disguised behind a facade of beautiful poetry and a smoothly linear plot, is laid bare. Instead of blank verse, there is verbal awkwardness, parataxis, inar ticulateness. Instead of a linear plot, there is an episodic, fragmented, disor ganized jumble. The script is remarkably frank. Excrement and copulation are called by their real names. We know, quite bluntly, what Marie and the Drum Major are doing, and what Marie and Woyzeck are not doing. In this regard, it is significant that the script contains innumerable references to animals; in fact, the cast actually includes three animals—a cat, a monkey, and a horse—the last of which urinates on stage. Man’s animal nature is exposed here; just as Buchner inverts the social hierarchy of traditional drama by making Woyzeck lower class, he also inverts the traditional natural ordering of man and beast, or, in psychosexual terms again, of ego and id. With fragmentation and inversion as operating principles, then, we were ready to work on the set. The environmental setting, designed by Douglas McCullough of the drama department, worked not just as a jazzy updating of the play, but as a highly effective device for disorienting the audience in the same way that the multiple scenes and inversions provide disorientation in the script. MuCullough’s first design actually was strongly oriented toward one side of the room, which shows how, even in a sophisticated stage designer, this proscenium convention has a strong unconscious hold. But the final design had no identifiable orientation. One never knew where to look next; an audience area could suddenly become an acting area, and vice versa. In watching the pro gression of scenes, it was not only necessary to turn 360 degrees; one also had to look up and down on various levels; there was even a bridge across the middle of the room, and nets that were strung above the audience in which the actors could play the scenes in the pond. One moment the audience would have to imagine that the entire room was a large carnival tent; the next, that they were in the street peeping into Marie’s room; the next, that they were actually under water, looking up at Woyzeck swimming out after the knife that he had just tossed into the pond. This disorientation of audience perception was to prove the most effective and intrusive aspect of the production, for reasons that I shall elaborate on below. As we moved into rehearsal, we discovered, if we had not guessed already, that Woyzeck is an extremely difficult play to perform. It is not just that the characters are grotesque and the emotions raw; there are also enormous practical problems involved in a play with twenty-eight scenes. It was hard for the actors to tell where they were in the play; using the Brechtian device of announcing scenes by slides was actually more necessary for them than for the audience. The actors constantly had to dash from one position to another as the scenes
151
152
Drama and Perception
Buchner, Woyzeck
rushed along phantasmagorically. Scenes are often supposed to begin at a fever pitch, for which the actor would have no time to prepare, and then end perhaps thirty seconds later. Nor is the episodic nature of the play limited to the scenic structure. Individual scenes themselves are full of abrupt changes, and individ ual speeches are characterized by fragmentation, parataxis, and non sequitur. Just memorizing a speech like the following could be a maddening process:
ultimate form of the text, as the actors tried to learn the difficult music and to work their way through the complicated speeches. It often happens in rehearsal that one becomes aware, through repetition, of important motifs in the script that went unnoticed in private reading, and that have not been commented upon by the critics. As I worked with the actors on their roles, I became impressed by how much looking and listening there is in the play. Woyzeck imagines that he sees visions, that he sees the knife, that he sees Marie and the Drum Major copulating, that he hears the music of their dancing. The Doctor is constantly examining Woyzeck, even when they pass by accident in the street. The carnival barker asks the audience to look at the monkey, and later at the horse. Woyzeck looks at Marie and tries literally to see her sinfulness: “I don’t see it! I don’t see it! My God, why can’t I see it! (122), he shouts. Checking the original text, I noticed the German verbs sehen and horen—”to see” and “to hear”—recurring constantly, both alone and in compound forms like ansehen, “to look at.” Often the references are casual and apparently unrelated to the story, as when the Doctor says to his medical students, “Gentlemen, I find myself on the roof like David when he beheld Bathsheba. But all I see are the Parisian panties of the girls’ boarding school drying in the garden” (127). There are numerous references to eyes, and to blindness: “Take your eyes to the Jew’s,” says Marie to her next-door neighbor, “and let him clean them for you” (112). “Why did the street-lamp cleaner forget to wipe my eyes—everything’s dark” (126), complains Woyzeck. Marie tells her little boy to close his eyes and go to sleep, or else the Sandman will look into them and make him blind (116). There are also gratuitous references to ears, as when the Doctor orders Woyzeck to wiggle his. This fascination with perception is not unusual in late romantic literature, influenced as it was by the theories of Kant. Kant distinguished between phenomena, the sense impressions that we receive, and noumena, the source of these impressions that remains forever beyond our direct knowledge. This theory provides a key as to how Woyzeck operates as a text, and how it should operate in a performance. The play has mystery at its very core. Woyzeck wants to see noumena, but sees only phenomena, as he expresses in the anguished cry, “My God, why can’t I see it?” The play embodies a philosophy of life as something essentially ambiguous and unknowable. In this regard, the un finished nature of the playscript, with its multiple drafts, must be the result of something more than just Buchner’s early death. Buchner himself, one might say, was in the same position as Woyzeck, trying to resolve problems that are inherently unresolvable. Woyzeck cannot define his world; Buchner could not define Woyzeck: Is Woyzeck’s crime caused, by his oppression, his diet of peas, his insane jealousy? Or is it free-willed, an existential act of moral righteousness, a revolt against an immoral and chaotic world? The play gives us plenty of evidence for both views; it is a problem inherent in the real-life crime upon which the play is based. Claude Levi-Strauss, the structuralist anthropologist.
I’m going. Anything’s possible. The bitch! Anything’s possible.—The weathers nice. Captain sir. Look, a beautiful, hara, gray sky. You’d almost like to pound a nail in up there and hang yourself on it. And only because of that little dash between Yes and Yes again . . . and No. Captain, sir: Yes and No: did No make Yes or Yes make No? I must think about that.^ Finally, the text seemed to present major problems that demanded decisions: does Woyzeck die, or not? Is he mad, or not? Is the murder the result of his being oppressed, or is it because of something within Woyzeck? And, of course, there was still the underlying problem of what text to use, with which scenes, and in which order. Fhe Mueller text that we were using incorporates several scenes from earlier drafts of the play, and has been severely criticized for doing so. One such scene in particular has a character identified only as the Barber talking to an army Sergeant at the Inn. Because Woyzeck is employed by the Captain as his personal barber, and because the Barber character speaks of scientific experiments being performed on him, Mueller gives the speeches to Woyzeck. Other versions universally delete the scene, on the grounds that it seems to be among those that Buchner discarded, but also, I think, because the speeches sound too educated for the Woyzeck character as he is popularly coneeived. Woyzeck is supposed to be stupid and inarticulate—one major critic has even celebrated his inarticulateness as a great dramatic break through^—yet the Barber talks like this: My name is science. Every week for my scientific career I get half a guilder. You rnu^n t cut me in two or I’ll go hungry. I’m a Spinosa pericyclia; I have a Latin behind. I am a living skeleton. All Xiankind studies me. (129) But, on hearing such wonderful speeches in rehearsal, I was reluctant to make cuts. There was something about Mueller’s liberal approach to the material that seemed better than the pedantic approach of the others, especially that of the restrictive Lehmann version. Mueller seemed to have a better sense of what the play is than Lehmann did, although it was difficult at that time for me to say why this was so. For the time being, then, I left the textual problems alone. As a practical matter, I knew it would be much easier to start with a liberal version of the play, and to cut back later, than to have to add material if we finally decided it was necessary. And in the meantime, there was plenty to worry about besides the
153
Drama and Perception
Buchner, Woyzeck
has noted that myths tend to multiply themselves in an endless number of versions; he points out that “since the purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it happens, the contradiction is real), a theoretically infinite number of [versions] will be generated.”'* In writing Woyzeck, Buchner found himself in the same position as mythmakers, trying to resolve a contradiction that is unresolvable, and hence generating multiple drafts and revisions, as well as a dramatic style that is jarring and deconstructive. As rehearsals continued, there, I came to the conclusion that a production of Woyzeck should not take the route of constructing or reconstructing an ideal text “as Buchner would have completed it.” I strongly suspected that, even if Buchner had lived another fifty years, the script would have remained in rough and incomplete form, with perhaps many more versions. Indeed, is it not the very roughness of the script that is a source of its fascination for us? If there were an easy answer as to why Woyzeck stabs Marie, the play would be greatly reduced in significance; instead of mystery, we would have the kind of simplistic explanation for crime that television drama provides us with every week. Everywhere one looks in the script, there is paradox. The carnival Barker tells us that the horse, which can count by stomping its hoof, is both a man and a beast. Woyzeck tells the Captain that the earth is “hot as coals in hell,” but that he, Woyzeck, is “cold as ice” (121). In the disputed scene between Woyzeck and the Sergeant, Woyzeck maintains that “a man with courage is a dirty dog” (129)—i.e., a coward. Woyzeck accuses Marie of “a sin so swollen and big it stinks to smoke the angels out of heaven” (122), yet is astounded to find her still so beautiful. The Doctor upbraids Woyzeck for having urinated on the street: “The musculus constrictor vesicae is controlled by your will,” he insists, “In Mankind alone we see glorified the individual’s will to freedom” (117). This last is an excellent example of an unresolvable contradiction. Urination, like other bodily functions, is both free and determined. One can, more or less, choose when and where to urinate, but one cannot choose not to urinate at all. This homely example reverberates with larger questions of human freedom, includ ing the question of Woyzeck’s guilt in killing Marie—and, for that matter, Marie’s guilt in having the affair with the Drum Major. The affair was a sin; on the other hand, she was driven to it by Woyzeck’s neglect and impotence. Yet that very neglect and impotence are caused by his overwork and diet of peas, both of which he took on in order to provide for her and their son. As one explores the circumstances surrounding the characters’ actions, one alternates saying “guilty,” “innocent,” “guilty,” until the very concepts of guilt and inno cence come to seem ridiculous abstractions. As we reached the final stage of rehearsal, the performance patterns in the script became clearer. The balancing of guilt and innocence, like that of Woyzeck’s sanity and madness, is central to the play’s dynamic; in fact, the script
embodies a series of related, balanced ambiguities, which can be listed as
154
155
follows: Guilt Madness Hot Black Evil Alive Human
Innocence Sanity Cold White Good Dead Beast
Woyzeck tries to make sense of these ambiguities, but they defy his understand ing. Man is both human and beast. Marie is both innocent and guilty, both good and evil. The murder itself is both a sane deed of retributive justice, and an insane act driven by inner voices and visions. In performance, then, the play should not be presented as a puzzle that has been solved, but rather as a puzzle to be experienced. Any production of Woyzeck should maintain rather than resolve the ambiguities, and thus maintain some of the very roughness and incompleteness of the script. Needless to say, in our production we kept in the scene between Woyzeck and the Sergeant. As I started earlier, I believe that an underlying reason that so many editors and translators are repelled by this scene is that it presents us with a Woyzeck who seems too intelligent and articulate. One of the critical cliches that has come to be attached to the play is that it is “the first tragedy of the common man,” and it does not seem proper for a common man to spout Latin phrases like Spinosa pericyclia,” or to have such a well-developed sense of irony on the matter of physical courage. But, as a matter of fact, Woyzeck is not a very common individual. He is poor, and uneducated in the formal sense, but he is constantly searching for meaning in a callous and indifferent world, and his speech echoes the learned phrases of his educated superiors. Even before he learns about Marie’s unfaithfulness, he is theorizing—about the Freemasons, about toadstools and the arcane patterns he believes them to make, about heaven and hell, about the nature of sin. For a truly common man, Buchner gives us Andres, Woyzeck’s army buddy, who never questions anything and has no moral sense at all, being content throughout the play to sing and drink and sleep. The scene with the Sergeant works in performance as an important counter point to a view of Woyzeck as too common; lest the audience merely dismiss the character as too low and beastlike to be more than a psychopathological curi osity, this strangely calm scene lets Woyzeck express his moral and humanitarian views, showing him to be more sensitive and intelligent than anyone else in the play. In other words, the scene shows the audience the human side of the human/beast paradox.
156
Drama and Perception
But in addition to including this controversial scene, I tried to show the multiple and paradoxical nature of the play through a number of deviees in staging. For example, as the audience entered the performance area, numerous scenes were already taking place, simultaneously. Indeed, even before they entered, the audience were confronted with soldiers from the play marching in and around the building. Once inside the performanee area, they saw Woyzeck already shaving the Captain, Marie telling stories to her child, the Doctor performing experiments, Andres asleep in his bunk, all at once. The experienee for the audience was thus much like that of the reader confronting multiple versions of the script; oddly enough, I was being true to my belief in not changing scripts by accepting the fragmented, multiple form of this script as being complete. It is complete in its incompleteness. In sum, the unifying principle for this play can be deseribed by the phrase, “the ambiguity of perception.” The incompleteness of the seript arises from this ambiguity, as do the multiple paradoxes within the script. And just as Woyzeck tries to make sense of the paradoxes of his world, so too did the audience try to make sense of the paradoxes of performance. It seemed to take place in a specified room, yet it was also going on outside. Did it start when one entered that room, or fifteen minutes later.^ On entering, the audience were shown to their seats by actors. At the end of various seenes, the actors did not go anywhere, but simply stayed in the room, sometimes continuing to behave in character, and sometimes watching the next seene. Fo the paradoxes on the list, then, could be added those of performanee/life, theatre/outside world, and character/performer. Which was which.^ Did No make Yes, or Yes make No? The principle of the ambiguity of perception provided the key to the question of whether or not Woyzeck dies at the end of the play. Here I differ strongly with Mueller, who for once beeomes alarmingly specifie: His Woyzeck is not only alive at the end of the play, but is present at the scene in the morgue, looking at Marie’s body. According to Mueller’s stage direetion, which is not found in any of the original versions, Woyzeck stands among the spectators, “dumbly looking at the body of Marie; he is bound, the dogmatic atheist, tall,’ haggard, timid, good-natured, seientific” (138). I rejected this, and left Woyzeck m the pond. As before, all scenes were visible simultaneously; the pond was achieved by having a large cargo net stretehed above the audience. Woyzeck tossed in the knife from above, whieh of course fell through the net to the floor, and then crawled out over the audience, on the net, searching for it. We then went immediately into the next scene, leaving Woyzeck hanging there. Was he alive or dead? It was impossible to say. At the end of the morgue scene, the final one of the play, the room lights were turned on for the first time, and the actors walked briskly out of the room, leaving the audience alone for the first time. Woyzeck was still in the net. Was it time to get up and go home? Was the actor in character, or being himself? The final state remained one of confusion and
Buchner, Woyzeck
157
disorientation. The performance left the audience with no simple answers, but rather with big questions.
Notes 1. Richard Hornby, Script into Performance: A Structuralist View of Play Production (Austin: Univer sity of Texas Press, 1977). 2. Buchner, 121. Subsequent quotations of Woyzeck, taken from this edition, will be cited as page numbers in the text. 3. George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New York: I lill Wang, 1961). 4. Claude Levi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of .Myth,” in The Structuralists from Marx to LeviStrauss, ed. Richard and Fernande DeGeorge, (Garden fiity, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972), 193.
Strindberg, The Father
10 Strindberg
The Father “Now there are only shadows, lurking in the undergrowth. ”
159
family. Torvald Helmer, in Ibsen’s A Doll House, cited religion and family in trying to persuade his wife Nora not to leave home; here the Captain wants his daughter to leave home, to study with a freethinker in town, to become an atheist, and to be independent. If Laura were truly a feminist, she would want these very things for her daughter, to prove that “women can do this and that”; instead, her feminism, which is never much articulated in the play, seems to be merely a pawn in her game with her husband. The nature of this game is made clear from their very first scene together. Masculine and feminine principles, reason and intuition (Freud’s secondary and primary process thinking), confront each other. The Captain is shown going over the family accounts, an appropriately rational activity, with which she, typ ically, does not wish to concern herself. In the argument over the raising of their child! he cites the law, again a rational strategy; she knows nothing of law. He then makes a joke out of their disagreement:
The excessive use of biographical criticism with regard to Strindberg’s plays has tended to obscure the playwright’s deeper meanings. While Strindberg’s The Father may have had its genesis in Strindberg’s domestic problems and anti feminist mania, the playscript in its final form is not really an attack on Strindberg’s wife in particular, nor on liberated women in general. The outline of the play is well known: A man and his wife argue over whether their daughter should receive a religious education. The husband is a free thinker, the wife conventionally religious. In explaining their respective rights over the child, the husband happens to mention that one can never be certain about a child’s paternity. This interesting fact surprises the wife, who questions her husband about it; her very questions raise doubts in the husband about his wife’s fidelity. The uncertainty over the paternity of his daughter gradually drives him mad, and he dies. This plot is simple to the point of austerity, which underlines the essentially allegorical nature of the play. The Father is more like a fable than a realistic expose. The husband and wife, called simply “Adolf” (or, even more emblematically, “The Captain”) and “Laura,” are not depicted as rounded, complex, real-life people. Strindberg provides very little background on them, or realistic detail; we do not even discover their last name. Instead, the Captain and Laura stand for masculine and feminine principles. With the Captain are associated all the attributes traditionally assigned to males in our culture: he is both a military man and a scientist, and is above all a man of reason, of logic. Laura, despite having some vaguely feminist views (the Captain says, for example, that she and the daughter “do nothing but talk about men being made to see that women can do this and that,”' is depicted as traditionally feminine, relying on religion, superstition, and intuition. The fact that Strind berg chose to make religion the catalyst in the plot shows how much this is not ultimately an antifeminist play. Feminism, then as now, was generally seen as an attack on tradition, on religion, on family. Yet note that in 'The Father it is the Captain who is modernist and antireligious, and who proposes to split up his 158
I want her to live in town; you want her to live at home. The mathematical mean would be for her to stop at the railway station, midway between home and town. You see? It’s a deadlock. (16—17) The witticism is excessively logical and sophisticated, and is of course lost on his wife, who merely replies, “Then the lock must be forced” (17). Throughout this scene, Laura is continually asking questions: Does she have to keep accounts now? Does a mother have no say in the religious upbringing of her child? Can’t one tell who a child’s father is? The Captain, by contrast, is the man who knows, apparently an expert on finances, law, and child-rearing, in addition to science and the military—until he confronts the one thing that he does not and cannot know, which is the paternity of their child. Significantly, the thing that drives him mad is the uncertainty of the matter. A less discerning playwright would have had Laura simply taunt the Captain with the fact of infidelity; adultery is of course a traditional theme in drama, par ticularly French drama, with which Strindberg would have been familiar as result of his stays in Paris. The silly husband driven frantic by his fear of being cuckolded is a favorite theme of French farceurs; Strindberg gives it a twist by making the Captain afraid that he has not been cuckolded, for only if he actually has can he know for certain. Laura always presents the matter hypothetically: “Supposing I am telling the truth now when I say: Bertha is my child but not yours. Supposing . . .” (28). The Captain begs her to verify these suppositions: “Free me from uncertainty. Fell me straight out that it [her infidelity] is so, and 1 will forgive you in advance” (39). But she refuses to end his doubt; m fact, when asked point blank who the father is, she tells him “you are” (40), which only serves to generate more agonizing uncertainty. Doubt, not jealousy, destroys him. Such careful patterning on Strindberg’s part reveals, again, that the Captain and Laura are something different from realistic portraits of Strindberg and his
160
wife. Nor are they merely late nineteenth-century “Everyman” vs. “Everywomen” struggling on a feminist battleground, for they are not really typical individuals of their period, nor of any other period. They are too abstract, and should not be considered people at all in the historical sense. Again, they personify abstractions, which can be described various ways, but perhaps best through the terminology of one of Strindberg’s major interests, oriental religion: the Captain and Laura stand for the yang and the yin, the male and female, p)ositive and negative principles that underlie all existence and keep it in dynamic balance. Of these, Alan Watts has written: The insight which lies at the root of Far Eastern culture is that opposites are relational and so fundamentally harmonious. Conflict is always comparatively superficial, for there can be no ultimate conflict when the pairs of opposites are mutually interdependent.^ It is this mutual interdependence that characterizes the relationship between the Captain and Laura. Although critics have written of Laura’s supposed “cunning savagery,”’ and described her as “a demon, a nightmare, ... a fanatic,”"’ she is actually characterized as neither clever nor consciously sadistic. Her behavior is intuitive, not cerebral. We are told that she has long had a tendency toward mindless obstinacy: As a child she used to lie down and sham dead until they gave in to her. Then she would calmly hand back whatever she’d set her mind on, explaining it wasn’t the thing she wanted, but simply to get her own way. (13) Her willfulness is instinctive and obsessive; although actresses have often played her erroneously as a clever schemer, consciously manipulating the Captain’s downfall, she actually behaves unconsciously and automatically, always in reac tion to initiatives taken by the Captain himself. A significant passage shows this, in her little argument with the Captain over the household accounts: Am I disturbing you? CAPTAIN. Not in the least. Housekeeping money, I suppose? LAURA. Yes, housekeeping money. CAPTAIN. If you put the accounts down there, I will go through them. LAURA. Accounts? CAPTAIN. Yes. LAURA. Do you expect me to keep accounts now? CAPTAIN. Of course you must keep accounts. Our position’s most precarious, and if we go bankrupt, we must have accounts to show. Otherwise we could be accused of negligence. LAURA. It’s not my fault if we’re in debt. CAPTAIN. That’s what the accounts will show. LAURA. It’s not my fault the tenant farmer doesn’t pay. LAURA.
Strindberg, The Father
Drama and Perception
161
Who was it recommended him so strongly? You. Why did you recommend such a—shall we call him a scatterbrain? LAURA. Why did you take on such a scatterbrain?
CAPTAIN.
He initiates the topic of their financial precariousness, and she reacts, drawing him out and making him more and more angry. When he calls the tenant farmer a scatterbrain, she does not oppose him directly, and insist that the fellow is actually hardworking and intelligent; instead, she accepts the Captains premise, but asks a question about it that exposes his part of the blame m hiring the man in the first place. Like a ju jitsu wrestler, she blithely turns her attackers own force against him. , , i mi.. This active/passive, yang/yin interdependence informs the whole play. Males initiate; females draw out the initiative to its own self-destruction. The whole issue of the doubtfulness of paternity is initiated by a man—Nojd, the trooper who got a servant girl pregnant. He first points out how the girl led him on: It the girl’s not game, nothing don’t happen” (10). The pattern of male-female interdependence being established, he goes on to point out the crucial fact that paternity, from the man’s point of view, is always uncertain: “You cant tell it you’ve always been the only one” (10). Shortly after, it is the Captain who passes on this information to Laura. If Strindberg had wanted to make Laura into a cunning demon, he could have had her raise the point herself, but instead she is utterly unaware of it, and is even surprised when her husband brings it up: Xhe law doesn’t say who the child s father is. Well, people know that for themselves. CAPTAIN. Discerning poeple say that’s what one can never know. LAURA. How extraordinary! Can’t one tell who a childs father is?
CAPTAIN. LAURA.
The issue of the essential doubtfulness of paternity, which the Captain himself raises here as part of an argument to gain control of his child, ironically becomes the means by which he loses not only the child, but also his reason, and finally his very life. Far from being destroyed by Laura, he instead destroys hiinself; m his drive toward self-destruction, she is not his antagonist, but rather his ^^Like^ all self-destructive tragic heroes, however, in destroying himself the Captain at the same time defines himself. His drive toward catastrophe is supremely rational, forever masculine and assertive. Even when he discusses his own impending mental breakdown, he does so in detached, logical terms: My emotions are still pretty well under control, but only power remains intact. And you have so gnawed and gnawed at my will that at
162
Drama and Perception
any moment it may slip its cogs, and then the whole bag of tricks will go to pieces. ... By behaving in this way you have made me so full of suspicion that my judgment is fogged and my mind is beginning to stray. This means that the insanity you have been waiting for is on its way and may come at any moment. The question you now have to decide is whether it is more to your advantage for me to be well or ill. (38). There is an unwitting acknowledgment here of his own limitations; his scien tific, rational approach to life will not survive against its ultimate ambiguity. Eventually, the yin principle that Laura personifies stands for the entire natural order, mysterious and indifferent to man’s attempt to understand and control it. Strindberg places the Captain in an entire household of females: his wife, their daughter, the nurse, and the unseen mother-in-law. All are pietistic and naive to the point of stupidity. Strindberg’s point is not that real women are actually like this, but rather that nature is. Written in 1887, the play is a sendup of the prevalent nineteenth-century scientific and technological optimism, which saw man as capable of achieving one discovery or invention after another, without limit, until he would become godlike. Now, in the late twentieth century, we can see what Strindberg saw—that nature, which seems so yielding, can destroy us with our own force. The atomic bomb, the energy crisis, and the environmental crisis are all examples of this rebound effect; nature is responding to us as the females in Strindberg’s play respond to the Captain. In the final scene, the Captain draws his revolver on these maddening females; it is a phallic symbol, a symbol of technology, and a symbol of assertiveness, all in one. But, like the gasoline that disappeared from our cars, the cartridges have been removed from the gun, turning this symbol of assertiveness into one of impotence. The symbolism is extended, as the nurse eases the Captain into a strait-jacket, all the while talking to him so soothingly that he does not understand what is going on. But before his final, apoplectic stroke, he has a moment of recognition: That’s the horror of it. If they had some foundation, there would at least be something to catch hold of, to cling to. Now there are only shadows, lurking in the undergrowth, peering out with grinning faces. It’s like fighting with air, a mock battle with blank cartridges. Reality, however deadly, puts one on one’s mettle, nerves body and soul for action, but as it is . . . my thoughts dissolve in fog, my brain grinds a void till it catches fire. (55) At the time he was writing The Father, Strindberg had been reading Greek tragedy, whose influence can be seen here. The Captain is like Oedipus in Sophocles’ play, the man who thought he knew everything, who had solved the riddle of the Sphinx, who was confident that he could similarly find the killer of Laius and cure Thebes, but who was instead to confront fundamental things about himself. The Captain, so assertive, rational, and confident, pursues his logic to its limit, where he perceives shadows in the undergrowth with grinning
Strindberg, The Father
163
faces, mocking his pretension. Oedipus blind could “see” more than he had before, recognizing his own weakness and shame; the Captain, strait-jacketed, now recognizes that all his strength and reasoning were as nothing against the blank indifference of the universe, but he is the more heroic for recognizing his limitations. Now he knows who he truly is.
Notes 1. Strindberg, 14. Subsequent quotations of The Father, taken from this edition, will be cited as page numbers in the text. 2. Alan Watts, The Way of Zen (New York: New American Library, 1959), 170. 3. V. J. McGill, August Strindberg: The Bedeviled Viking (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965), 270. 4. Gunnar Ollen, August Strindberg (Sew York: Ungar, 1972), 43.
Ibsen, 'The Master Builder
11 Ibsen
The Master Builder “/ must have willed it. Wished it. Desired it.
It has long been known that Ibsen’s late plays—7’^e Master Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman, and When We Dead Awaken—represent a departure from the famous realistic plays of his middle period. Even Bernard Shaw, who had been obsessively concerned with Ibsen the moralist, described Ibsen as now having “completed the task of warning the world against its idols and anti-idols,” and instead having now written “tragedies of the dead.”' But more than this, the late plays demonstrate Ibsen’s greatness, both as a significant (though independent) figure in the symbolist movement of the 1890s, and as a significant precursor of twentieth-century literary movements. In his late plays Ibsen anticipates such twentieth-century concerns as the function of the artist, the use of personal experience in literature, and the importance of the inner life of both the conscious and the unconscious mind. The Master Builder, published in 1892, shows all these concerns. Its hero is an artist, Halvard Solness, a successful architect (or “master builder,” as he prefers). Perfection of the work seems to have blocked perfection of the life; his artistic success has coincided with contempt for his clients, ruthlessness toward his associates, the loss of his children, the mental breakdown of his wife. He is restless, alienated, and afraid of being superseded by younger architects. Into his life comes a strange, alluring, naive young woman, who seems to know his deepest secrets, and who claims to have had a near-sexual affair with him ten years before, when she had been little more than a child. In contrast to the drab, realistic world in which he works, she talks of trolls and magic kingdoms and harps in the air, fascinating him and ultimately leading him to destruction. Solnesss psychological problems—a fear of growing artistic and sexual impo tence, and a fascination with a young girl—reflect those of Ibsen at the time he wrote the play. The Master Builder is Ibsen’s most personal play. Indeed, it has become common for critics to compare the details of the play with the pattern of Ibsens career as a playwright: Solness began by designing churches, then shifted to houses, and finally designs houses with steeples; Ibsen, at the time the play was written, had gone through three similar phases, first writing Romantic
164
165
plays, then realistic plays, and finally realistic plays with Romantic overtones like The Master Builder itself The shift in style in 'The Master Builder is not truly a reversion to romanticism, however; the play instead looks forward to the work of the surrealists and expressionists of our century, in its exploration of inner psychological states. The realistic plays of Ibsen’s middle period were far more than simplistic problem plays taking moralistic stands on social issues.^ Nevertheless, they did follow standard realistic conventions, which, as I shall attempt to show in this chapter, provide a point of departure for the pivotal late play, 'The Master Builder. In A Doll House (1879), for example, we find ordinary, middle-class characters inhabiting a mundane, realistic world. The setting is an ordinary bourgeois living room. The characters’ concerns are work, family, love, money. The action arises from conflicts between characters rather than within individual ones; Nora has forged a note to get money to treat her sick husband, Torvald Helmer, but this caused her no inner anguish—if anything, she is proud of it. Her problems arise when the loan shark, Krogstad, discovers the forgery and uses it to blackmail her. She fears being exposed (because she thinks that her husband will take the blame himself and go to prison), but she still feels no guilt. All the information needed to drive the plot forward in A Doll House, as in Ibsen’s other realistic plays, is provided by an extraordinary amount of exposi tion, necessitated by the late point of attack of the plot—in A Doll House, long after the forgery, after the husband’s recovery, and just as the note is at last about to be paid off A convention of this kind of realistic exposition is that it is always presented to the audience as factual; even though Nora has always cheerfully lied whenever it was necessary to cover up her scheme, when she explains it all to her confidant, Mrs. Linde, we take her every word for truth. This truth about the past never comes into question and is always perfectly clear. The play moves toward a climax in which Nora’s husband is exposed as a hypocrite (instead of taking the blame himself, as Nora had always expected he would, he plots a coverup), and in which Nora herself bitterly disappointed in Helmer and seeing her whole life in a new light, leaves him to cast out on her own. It is a powerfully dramatic conclusion, but it is not in any sense a psychological one. Although Ibsen’s later realistic plays, such as Rosmersholm or Hedda Gahler, are decidedly psychological, the psychology still exists within the same framework of realistic convention. The exposition, again, is presented as clear, uncontradic tory truth. Thus when Rebecca West, in her famous speech, describes how she drove Rosmer’s wife mad, it comes out in a blunt, straightforward manner: I wanted Beata out of here, one way or another. But even so, I never dreamed it could happen. With every step ahead that I gambled on, it was as if something inside me cried out: “No further! Not one step further!” And yet I couldn't stop. I had to try for a tiny bit more. Just the least little bit. And then again—and always again—until it happened. That’s the way these things do happen.’
166
Drama and Perception
Ibsen, The Master Builder
Rebecca is describing her own psychological turmoil, but her tone is clinical, as detached as a doctor describing a patient. Her conclusion—’’That’s the way these things do happen”—is a profound insight, but again, is meant to be taken as straight truth by the audience, as is her whole speech. The audience may well be shocked by Rebecca’s compulsion, but they experience no disorientation themselves. The psychology here is vivid, pitiable, even terrifying, but defi nitely understood. It is still realistic, in the sense of being clear and comprehensi ble. The Master however, is in fact a deconstruction of Ibsen’s own realism. Using conventions that would have been familiar to late nineteenth-century audiences (and which he himself had used extensively before), Ibsen first creates apparently realistic characters in a realistic situation. Gradually, however, he moves into his hero’s mind, to an inner world of unconscious desires and exotic symbolism. Written at the time of Freud’s early work, the play anticipates much of Freud’s theory, exposing the existence of the unconscious mind, the signifi cance of dreams and mistakes, the ambivalence of emotion, and the unconscious belief in the omnipotence of thought. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century tech niques are thus combined in the play, which represents a major turning point in the history of dramatic literature. The play opens in Solness’s “plainly furnished workroom” (785), immediately establishing a realistic, mundane atmosphere for the audience. Solness’s two assistants, old Knut Brovik and his son Ragnar, are seated, busy with blueprints and calculations, while a young bookkeeper, Kaja Fosli, stands at her ledger. We are in the everyday world of work. Solness enters, and in a brief aside with the girl, Kaja, reveals to the audience that the two are intimate. There follows a scene between Solness and Knut Brovik. Brovik is ill, and probably dying; he is concerned that his son be given a commission to establish his career as an independent architect. Unaware of Solness’s relationship with Kaja, Brovik speaks of his son wanting to marry her. Solness is callous toward Brovik, and frightened of giving up a commission to a younger man. Thus, all the materials for a realistic problem play are here: the realistic setting with a workaday atmosphere, the sexual hypocrisy, the problems of aging and loss of power. The audience would expect that young Ragnar would ultimately triumph, winning a commission and the girl, while Solness would either die or somehow become reconciled to his loss. The audience would also expect to draw moral conclusions about the nature and abuses of power, the importance of kindness and fidelity, the limits of individualism. Instead, the trio of Brovik, Ragnar, and Kaja turn out to be relatively unimportant in the play. After a few brief scenes, Ibsen introduces a raisonneur, in the character of Dr. Herdal; in his scene with Solness, a major incident warns us that we are in for a very different experience from the realistic power struggle that we were led to expect. Dr. Herdal tries to get Solness to see that he is really very well established, with nothing to fear from young Ragnar, but Solness is vehement. “The change
is coming, “ he insists. “Someday youth will come here, knocking at the door—” (800), when lo and behold, there actually is a knock at the door, and youth does enter, in the person of Hilda Wangel, a girl whom Solness had met ten years earlier. The moment is one of the great coups de theatre in the history of drama, grotesque, funny, shocking—perhaps even awkward. (It has often been ridiculed or parodied.) What critics have not recognized is that the literal representation of a metaphor, such as this one, is something that Freud was noticing about the time the play was written, as a common element in dreams. In The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, Freud was to give many examples, such as the dream of a horse frolicking in a field of the finest oats being an obvious manifestation of the expression, “feeling one’s oats.”“^ Expressionist playwrights, in the early decades of the twentieth century, were often to use the concrete manifestation of aphorisms as a device for inducing shock and laughter; Ibsen uses it for the same purpose here, starting his deconstruction of the realistic atmosphere and action that he had so carefully established. The scene with Hilda, despite its bizarre opening, at first seems realistic. She is no imaginary construct of Solness’s, but a real flesh-and-blood girl, the daughter of a public health officer (a position of social responsibility, perhaps echoing Ibsen’s own An Enemy of the People). Even Dr. Herdal has met her before, and recognizes her now. She has real bodily needs, too: she mentions that her underwear need to be washed, that “they’re real grimy” (802). The grimy underwear represents Ibsen’s sly evocation of naturalism, the extreme form of realism that depicted man in purely physical, animal terms. The audience seems to find itself on familiar ground once again. The familiarity is an illusion, however. Dr. Herdal soon exits, leaving Solness and Hilda alone. Gradually, without a seam showing, the tenor of the scene changes. Grimy reality melts away, to be replaced by something like a dream. Hilda describes the occasion of their first meeting, when she was a girl of twelve or thirteen. Solness had built a church tower in her town, and dedicated it by climbing to the top and hanging a wreath on the weather vane. In the late twentieth century, we hardly need to be told of the sexual symbolism of climbing a tower, or of the vane and the wreath, but to the audience of the time it would have seemed evocative and disturbing. More important, however, is what follows: Hilda says that she and Solness met afterward, alone, and that he first promised that he would come back in ten years, carry her off “like a troll” (806), and buy her a kingdom. Then, she says, he held her in his arms, bent her back, and kissed her—’’many times” (807). Solness is shocked and dazed, first denying the incident and then saying, I must have willed it. Wished it. Desired it. And so—Doesn t that make sense? Oh all right, for God’s sake—so I did the thing too! (807)
167
We have again left the external world of realism, for the inner, dream world of expressionism. This passage is extraordinary in its anticipation of Freud’s theory of “the
168
Drama and Perception
omnipotence of thought.” The infant cannot distinguish between dreams and reality between wishing a thing and doing it. As adults, we continue to equate thought and reality m our unconscious minds, which is why we can feel guilty for something that we never did, but only wished. Here Solness cannot re member whether he actually kissed Hilda or not, but he realizes that he wanted to, which in his unconscious mind is equivalent to having done it. As for Hilda she no longer seems the real live girl with the dirty underwear she was earlier She has shifted to a mythic plane, describing herself as a princess and Solness as a troll, and demanding that he come up with the promised kingdom. Troll, princess, and the enchanted kingdom show an obvious connection with the symbolist movement, ^ but we never leave the real world entirely. Ibsen’s purpose is not so much to evoke a magical, poetic vision as it is to explore, very precisely, his hero’s unconscious mind. Hilda now appears to be a fantasy, a projection of Solness’s desires and fears. The second act begins the following morning; Hilda has spent the night at Solnesss house. She says that she dreamed the night before of falling over “a terribly high, steep cliff” (819). Like the dreams that Freud analyzed, her dream seems charged with sexual significance; it also foreshadows Solness’s own fall at the end of the play. In addition, however, it signals another deconstruction of realism to expressionism. As in the first act, there is another long scene between her and Solness. He tells of a disastrous fire that consumed the house in which he and his wife lived early in their marriage. The fire helped make Solness’s reputation; he was then able to subdivide the land and build houses on it which established him as an architect. As a result of the fire, however, Solness’s two children died. Here again we have the basis for a realistic struggle of career vs. family (an echo of the great neoclassical theme of honor vs. love), but the details are odd: the children did not die in the fire itself, but rather because of Mrs. Solness having taken sick from the strain, which affected her milk. Instead of the md of simple, surface causality that we would expect in a realistic play, the causality here is strangely oblique, as if some inner, unseen mechanism were operating. The information that follows is even stranger: it turns out that Solness had noticed a crack in the chimney of the house, long before the fire, and neglected to fix it. He sensed, even then, that if the house were to burn down, he would be given a wonderful opportunity to advance his career. Here, we might think, is the kernel of the play, the original sin, like Rebecca West’s always going “a tiny bit more.” Solness’s neglect—a “Freudian slip,” fulfilling his wish to get rid of the house—brought him fame and fortune, but cost him his children. What price glory?” But then, in another bizarre and cunning stroke, Ibsen destroys our standard reaction: Solness says that “It’s been proved without a shadow of a doubt that the fire broke out in a clothes closet, in quite another part of the house” (830). It seems that Solness had nothing to do with the fire at all! Yet once again, Solness believes that his inner state at the time represented the true reality. In a key speech, he reflects on the power of wishes:
Ibsen, The Master Builder
169
Don’t you believe with me, Hilda, that there are certain special, chosen people who have a gift and power and capacity to wish something, desire something, will something—so insistently and so—so inevitably—that at last it has to be theirs? Don’t you believe that? (830) This is omnipotence of thought once again, which Solness is coming to think of as an actual reality. Such omnipotence is found elsewhere in the play. For example, Solness says that he got Kaja to come to work in his office simply by wishing it one day; then, “in the late evening, . . . she came by to see me again, acting as if we’d already struck a bargain” (797). But Ibsen in the long run is not so crude as to suggest that thought is literally omnipotent; all the things Solness wished for could have occurred by accident, or in this case, by Kaja’s sensitivity to nuances of expression and attitude in Solness. Ibsen’s focus is instead on Solness’s confusion and fear with regard to his inner life, on his awareness that it might have powers far beyond his conscious understanding, and on his guilt for the immoral desires that seem to come true. Freud maintained that unfilfilled desired actually make us feel more guilty than fulfilled ones; the undischarged psychic energy of the desire turns inward, against the self This is the case with Solness. He is not at all guilt-ridden about his sexual affair with Kaja, but feels extremely guilty about his desires for Hilda, even though they were never actually consummated. In the same vein, Solness’s wife. Aline, feels more upset about the loss of her collection of dolls in the fire than about the loss of her two sons; her imaginary love for the dolls is more real to her than her ostensibly real love for her flesh-and-blood children. The pattern in the play is always that a character’s inner life is paramount; the outer, realistic world, while genuine enough (Ibsen is no solipsist), is not the world in which one actually lives. Ibsen continues his exploration of the inner life in his depiction of Solness’s death. Solness, afraid of heights, no longer climbs towers to plant celebratory wreaths on them. Nonetheless, Hilda demands that he climb the tower on his latest building. Solness’s acrophobia is distinctly ambivalent, in keeping with Freud’s theory of the ambivalence of emotions; strong conscious feelings of revulsion against something are always accompanied by equally strong uncon scious feelings of desire for it. Solness unconsciously seems to yearn to climb and fall, just as he unconsciously wanted sex with the forbidden Hilda. In the end, it is the power of thought that again seems the catalyst: Hilda wishes his climb, twice saying, “I will see it!” (850, 851). At the ultimate moment, she excitedly snatches a white shawl and waves it at Solness, shouting from below to him high on the tower, “Hurray for master builder Solness!” (859), causing Solness to plunge to his death. Again, however, the exact nature of causality is ambiguous: Did Solness fall because Hilda distracted him by shouting and waving, or because she willed him to fall? Is Hilda a real girl with an obsessive neurosis, who destroys Solness by palpable methods, or a witch, a troll, a projection of Solness’s own fantasies, who destroys him by the power of the unconscious mind? The greatness of the
170
Drama and Perception
play is that it explores the boundary between outer and inner reality, de constructing the former to bring us to the latter. At the final curtain, the audience is as confused and upset as Solness, confronted with the power of the unconscious mind, and unable to determine its extent or its meaning. They have entered the twentieth century.
Notes 1. Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1913), in Selected Non-Dramatic Writings of Bernard Shaw, ed. Dan H. Laurence (Boston: Houghton .Mifflin, 1965), 267. 2. I have discussed this in my book. Patterns in Ibsen's Middle Plays (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1981). 3. Henrik Ibsen, Ibsen: The Complete Major Prose Plays, trans. Rolf Fjelde (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1978), 567. All subsequent quotations of Ibsen’s plays, taken from this edition, will be cited as page numbers in the text. 4. Sigmund F'reud, The Interpretation ofDreams (\9Wi), in The Basic Writings ofSigmund Freud, trans. and ed. A. A. Brill (New York: Random House, 1938), 399. 5. Maurice Valency deals with the relation of The Master Builder to the symbolist movement in The Flower and the Castle: An Introduction to Modern Drama (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 204 et passim. Errol Durbach discusses the symbolism in the play from a similar viewpoint in 'Tbsen the Romantic”: Analogues of Paradise in the Later Plays (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982), 127-36.
12 Pinter
Betrayal “This is the only thing that has ever happened. ”
In 1980, two “new” plays by Harold Pinter played in London, The Hothouse and Betrayal; the former was actually written twenty years earlier. Pinter had pro fessed over the years not to like the piece, but nevertheless did not discard it, and finally had it produced, even directing it himself The two plays thus allowed audiences almost simultaneously to see Pinter afresh from two very different perspectives, early and late. The Hothouse takes place in a weird mental hospital, whose inmates are known only by numbers, and whom we never see—although we do hear their sighs, whispers, laughs, and half-screams from time to time. The staff are all grotesque individuals with monosyllabic names like Roote, Gibbs, and Lush. They seem cruel, incompetent, and power hungry. In the final scene, we learn that the inmates have revolted and killed all but one of the staff members. Written about the same time as The Caretaker, 'The Hothouse is typical of early Pinter, although perhaps even more absurd than usual. It employs standard Pinteresque tech niques of terse, oblique dialogue, a menacing atmosphere, and an underlying power struggle. Gibbs, the assistant director of the asylum, is trying to take over both his boss’s job and mistress; the struggle finally surfaces in a fist fight and knife assault near the end of the play. It is another example of Pinter’s use of the Golden Bough ritual explicated by the Cambridge anthropologists: the Year King, Roote, is involved in an agon with Gibbs, his challenger. The time of year is Chrismas, “in the year that is about to die,”' as Roote says. We learn that one of the inmates has just died, and that another has just given birth, reinforcing the death/rebirth motif Cutts, the mistress, can be seen as a fertility goddess. There is even a scapegoat figure, ironically named Lamb, who is subjected to some kind of electronic brainwashing. Gibbs blames the final massacre on Lamb, for not having tested the locks, although we suspect that Gibbs himself unleashed the crazed patients. Katherine Burkman, in her book, 'The Dramatic World of Harold Pinter: Its Basis in Ritual, demonstrated the extensive use of the Golden Bough ritual in Pinter’s other plays, and The Hothouse turns out to be no exception. 171
172
Drama and Perception
At first glance, Betrayal seems very different from The Hothouse. The at mosphere of the more recent play is not menacing; the characters are not grotesque. The subject is a traditional one, concerning adultery and betrayal of frienship. Jerry, a writers’ agent, has a long affair with the wife of his best friend, Robert, a publisher. First the affair and then the marriage dwindle to an end,' and finally the wife, Emma, appears to be having a new affair with a writer named Casey. The characters are middle class, the settings realistic, the events plausible. The only oddity about the play is that its scenes run backward beginning two years after the affair is over and ending nine years previously at the moment the affair bepn. Adultery is no new theme to Pinter, of course, but Jerry’s and Emma’s affair seems, in contrast to the crude, ugly sexual rela tionships in previous Pinter plays, quite civilized and sometimes even idyllic. Eurthermore, while the changing sexual relationships can once again be seen as a ritual pattern of the type explicated by Burkman, with Emma as the fertility goddess being won in turn by Robert, Jerry, and the unseen Casey, the rela tionships among the three men could hardly be described as life-or-death agons m the manner of The Hothouse. Robert gives up Emma quite easily, having had affairs of his own for many years, and Emma moves on to Casey only after her affair with Jerry has long since burned out. The reverse timetable of the play is a radical deconstruction for Pinter. As is well known, the past in his plays is usually mysterious; conflicting accounts of what previously happened are never resolved. But in Betrayal, such conflicts do get resolved: for example, in the opening scene, Emma tells Jerry that she has just told Robert the previous night about the affair, but Robert later says that she told him four years earlier. If this were a typical Pinter play, that would be the end of It. Both Emma and Robert have reasons for lying, Emma because she would not want Jerry to know that she had told Robert years ago without telling Jerry at the time that she had done so, and Robert to save face and seem not truly deceived. The focus would be on the essential ambiguity of the situation, and on the struggle of Emma and Robert each to influence Jerry. But as a matter of fact, we actually do find out the truth, being shown the very scene in which Emma told Robert—four years earlier. An interesting mystery is resolved in the bluntest fashion possible. By reversing historical sequence, Pinter has made the past tangible and knowable, in contrast to his earlier plays where it is forever beyond our perception; the ambiguity that characterizes his usual work becomes conspicuous by its absence. On the other hand. Betrayal is not a complete departure for Pinter. We can understand it, and its relationship to The Hothouse and the intervening plays, by interpreting Pinter’s epistemology as found in both his plays and in his the oretical writing. Pinter’s theory of perception is basically phenomenological, in the manner of Edmund Husserl. I do not mean to imply that Pinter is in any way a disciple of Husserl, or even that he has ever read him. Rather, Pinter’s
Pinter, Betrayal
173
ideas about how we know the world and one another are very similar to some ideas in Husserl, and can be articulated in terms of them. Phenomenology has been called “the triumph of subjectivism.” This does not mean that it advocates withdrawing into solipsism, or even into introspection. It is very much concerned with the outer world, but with that world as it is perceived; scientific objectivity for Husserl, if not exactly fraudulent, is always hypothetical, since no one can ever know anything except through his percep tions. Husserl did not insist that we reject all hypothetical constructs of the world, but rather that, in examining anything, we are least temporarily ignore all such constructs, and instead intuitively scrutinize the actual phenomena we perceive. This process he called “bracketing” (epoche). He wanted, for example, to apply the process to psychology, rejecting genetic psychology, or “psychol ogism,” in favor of a descriptive psychology that would inspect mental processes while holding in abeyance all assumptions about motivation, consequences, or any other wider significance. Pinter, in a speech made in 1962 about his work, said much the same thing: The context has always been, for me, concrete and particular, and the characters concrete also. I’ve never started a play from any kind of abstract idea or theory. . . . When a character cannot be comfortably defined or understood in terms of the familiar, the tendency is to perch him on a symbolic shelf, out of harm’s way. Once there, he can be talked about but need not be lived with.^ It is an immediate, intuitive experience of “living with” his characters that Pinter wants for his audiences, rather than a smoke screen of theories, philosophies, motivations, histories. This does not mean that watching a Pinter play should be merely a passive, unintellectual process. Commenting on the ambiguities of his characters, he went on to say, “Between my lack of biographical data about them and the ambiguity of what they say lies a territory which is not only worthy of exploration but which it is compulsory to explore.”^ Like Husserl, Pinter believes that a descriptive psychology is not only possible but necessary. In addition to being concerned with the relationship between audience and play, Pinter’s phenomenology is also concerned with attitudes of characters within the plays. The Hothouse, for example, satirizes the very kind of objective psychology that Husserl attacked. As already mentioned, the patients are known only by numbers. The staff have no human interaction with them, except to abuse them regularly, since one patient is dead and another becomes pregnant, apparently by one of the staff, who regularly have sex with their charges. Two themes emerge: clouded perception and detachment. Lush says that Roote, the director, is a fine scientist, with knowledge of “philology, photography, anthropology, cosmology, theology, phytology, phytonomy, phytotomy” (87). Roote himself insists that he has second sight, and can see through
174
Drama and Perception
Pinter, Betrayal
walls. Yet despite his scientific knowledge and second sight, Roote does not have first sight: he cannot remember what his patients and even some of his staff look like, confuses a 7 for a 5> in his own diary, forgets that it is Christmas day, cannot determine who impregnated the patient, does not know what the weather is like outside. His only contact with the patients before they murder him is via a clogged intercom. Roote wants the reactions of his patients to be “tabulated, compared with others, filed, stamped and if possible verified” (42), but he does not want any direct experience of them. Lamb, the new staff member, says “I wish I could deal with the patients— directly. I ve thought out a number of schemes,” (34), but his schemes get nowhere, and he ends up electronically brainwashed by Gibbs and Cutts. This brainwashing is the epitome of objectivity: Gibbs and Cutts ask Lamb questions from outside the room, stunning him from time to time with a powerful noise that makes him fall to the floor. The questions seem designed purely to initimidate, since Gibbs and Cutts do not even wait for answers.
life via the arts rather than science. They are sensitive to poetry, to literature, to natural beauty, entities rarely found in Pinter’s earlier plays. The only detached character in Betrayal is the unseen Spinks, who lives alone in furnished rooms, wearing dark glasses day and night, and who has written a novel about betrayal. The three principal characters, however, are genuinely engaged with things. Like Roote and Gibbs in The Hothouse, Emma and Robert and Jerry have difficulty remembering facts, but, by contrast, they do have an intuitive under standing of the past that for Pinter is true knowledge. Robert cannot remember when he introduced Jerry to Emma, cannot remember that Jerry was best man at their wedding. Jerry cannot remember that he and Emma bought a bed for their otherwise already furnished flat, cannot remember what he did with a letter from Emma. He says that Emma wore white at their wedding; she insists that she did not. Three times during the play he remembers throwing Emma’s daughter up in the air and catching her; he says that it happened in Emma’s kitchen, she insists that it was in his. The point is that Jerry’s emotional recall is perfectly correct; the event symbolizes for him the exuberance and pre cariousness of his relationship with Emma, while his placing it in her kitchen reflects his obvious desire to be living there, with her. This emotional truth is more important than the objective fact. It is like the incident of the madeleine in Proust’s Remembrance of 'Things Past, a novel for which Pinter once wrote a screenplay. The taste of the cake and tea enables Proust, the narrator, to relive the past emotionally rather than to record it detachedly. Relived, rather than tabulated and verified, the past becomes truly real. Betrayal, then, is The Hothouse turned inside out. In The Hothouse, the patients were offstage, and the staff, their detached observers, dealt with them via intermediaries and intercoms and electronic torturing devices. In Betrayal, Spinks is the observer, offstage writing about betrayal—which is what is hap pening onstage. But we, the audience, are also observers. As the play moves backward in time, the characters’ stories are more and more revealed, as if the characters were being psychoanalyzed. All those questions like the ones asked of Lamb—’’Are you often puzzled? By women? By men?”—are ostensibly being answered for us. Rising to the bait, American critics and actors have already begun to psychol ogize the play. Critics have explained away the behavior of the characters in terms of their selfishness, or banality, or homosexuality.® Actors have made the same choices; of the two American productions of the play that I have seen, one made much of Jerry’s supposed selfishness, while the other made the homosex ual theme overwhelming. (Jerry and Robert were definitely “puzzled by women.”) Actually, the psychological pattern of Betrayal is a joke that is being played on us. As we move back into the characters’ pasts, we do uncover answers to some of the questions raised in the opening scenes, but we also find new questions. We may learn that Emma actually told Robert about her affair four years before
Are you often puzzled by women? Women? GIBBS. Men. LAMB. Men? Well, I was just going to answer the question about women— GIBBS. Do you often feel puzzled? LAMB. Puzzled? GIBBS. By women. LAMB. Women? CUTTS. Men. (69-70) CUTTS.
LAMB.
In the Pinter lexicon of sins, detachment is the deadliest. Detachment is the problem of Edward in A Slight Ache, Teddy in Phe Homecoming, and Spooner in No Man’s Land, characters who related to their fellow human beings as if they were butterlies pinned to a board. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the French phenomenologist, wrote: Science manipulates things and gives up living in them. It makes its own limited models of things; operating upon these indices or variables to effect whatever transformations are permitted by their definition, it comes face to face with the real world only at rare intervals."^ This kind of science is the credo of Pinter’s detached characters, including the top staff in The Hothouse, and it leads them to be brutal, miserable, and lacking in genuine perception. By contrast, the trio of characters in Betrayal are not detached. Their rela tionships are spontaneous and human rather than objective and manipulative. Functioning in the world of publishing rather than psychology, they approach
175
176
Drama and Perception
she said she did—but why did Robert become so complaisant about it? In the scene m Venice in which he learns of the affair, he at first seems extremely upset then suddenly passes it off His flippant line, “Maybe I should have had an affair with Jerry myself certainly suggests repressed homosexuality, but then why did he seem so upset about Emma? And why does he have affairs with other women? Of course, he could be lying about those affairs, or could have been having them to try to cover up his homosexuality, but we do not really know. Many modern plays of psychological realism, like Tea and Sympathy of The Childrens Hour or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, use homosexuality as a deux ex machina to resolve all the mystery of the characters’ behavior, but here the suggested homosexuality is simply a component in Robert’s makeup, not a full explanation or anything. In fact, there are a number of important things that we do not know about in the play, and are not supposed to know. We do not really know that Emma has gone on to an affair with Casey; it is only suggested that she has. We do not really know whether Judith, Jerry’s unseen wife, is having an affair with a doctor; we only know that Jerry suspects it. Most important, we do not really know why Jerry’s and Emma’s affair came to such a measly end. It is true that Jerry’s line when he first tries to seduce her, “You’re so beautiful. Look at the way you look at me” (136) exposes an underlying selfishness, but he also has lines that express genuine passion; I adore you. I’m madly in love with you. I can’t believe that what anyone is at this moment saying Iws ever happened has ever happened. Nothing has ever happened Nothin. This is the only thing that has ever happened, ^our eyes kill me. I’m lost, ’fou’re wonderful. (136-37) ^ As for the characters’ supposed banality, it is true that Pinter shows them to be like ordinary people, m contrast to the grotesques of The Hothouse, but they are ordinary people who read Yeats and Eord Maddox Ford, seek out and publish new novelists, visit the Lake District and Venice, are sensitive and intelligent and sometimes passionate, and who are capable of carrying off an affair that lasts seven years. ’Tis a banality devoutly to be wished. Betrayal, then, demonstrates Pinter’s attitude toward his characters’ back grounds m all his plays. It is not that we are supposed to think of his characters as having no real background, like Pirandello’s six characters (assuming that they do not, which is actually problematic in that play); the very structure oi Betrayal IS an assertion that their personal histories do exist. It is rather that Pinter’s characters should be phenomenologically bracketed; we should experience them here and now rather than speculate about their factual pasts. In this one play in which he actually does expose his characters’ pasts, the focus is just on the curving relationships. He is not giving us material from which to construct neat solutions to the enigmas of their behavior.
Pinter, Betrayal
177
This also explains why so many American productions of Pinter fail. Amer ican acting, with its obsession with motivation and character biography, is singularly unsuited to a phenomenological playwright, who wants his actors, like his audiences, to concentrate on the shaping and structuring of the charac ters’ behavior, what is seen and what is heard, and what that means in terms of the overall, virtual world of the play. For all their supposed Stanislavskian influence, American actors are rarely trained to “live the part.” Instead, they become lost in a hypothetical world of emotion memory, subtext, and character psychology. In other words, they act like Spinks, alone and remote, rather than like Jerry, who “brackets” that wonderful moment with Emma, insisting that “this is the only thing that has ever happened.” And, for that moment for him, it is. In sum, Pinter’s Betrayal represents a profound challenge to realistic doctrine in both playwriting and acting. In the first chapter, I noted that realistic doctrine presents a bipolarity of “close to” vs. “far from” life, but that is not the whole of it. Closeness to life is not meant to life as it is experienced, but rather as it is observed, clinically and disinterestedly, as if from without. One presents a “slice of life” in order to hypothesize about it, to psychologize it. Characters are shown as having serious problems, which are gradually revealed to be the result of a complex of “motivations,” which explain everything about the characters, but also reduce them to objects, categories, diseases. Like patients in a case study, characters are defined in terms of their afflictions—repressed homosexuality, nymphomania, a mother fixation—glib, easy classifications that strip both the characters and the audience of humanity. We no longer recognize the characters as extensions of ourselves. This is an approach to theatre that Artaud cogently attacked: Psychology, which works relentlessly to reduce the unknown to the known, to the quotidian and the ordinary, is the cause of the theater’s abasement and its fearful loss of energy. . . . Stories about money, worry over money, social careerism, the pangs of love unspoiled by altruism, sexuality sugar-coated with an eroticism that has lost its mystery nave nothing to do with the theater, even if they do belong to psychology. . . . This idea of a detached art, of poetry as a charm which exists only to distract our leisure, is a decadent idea and an unmistakable symptom of our power to castrate. ^ Pinter’s plays are the dramatic equivalent to Artaud’s challenge. Pinter de constructs dramatic realism, setting up characters and situations that lead us to psychologize, but the psychologizing yields only emptiness. The absence of a coherent or significant psychological background forces us to return to the present, confronting the immediacy of the world of the play in all its intensity and mystery. It is a valuable lesson for both audience and actors.
178
Drama and Perception
Notes 1. I larold Pinter, The Hothouse (New York; Grove Press, 1980), 144. Subsequent quotations of The Hothouse^ taken from this edition, will be cited as page numbers in the text. 2. Harold Pinter, “Writing for the Theatre,” in Complete Works: One (New York- Grove Press 1977), 10-11. 3. Ibid., 13. 4. Merleau-Ponty, 159. 5. See, for example, the various essays on Pinter in Modem Drama, September 1980. 6. Harold Vmter, Betrayal (London: Eyre Methuen, 1978), 87. Subsequent quotations of Betrayal, taken from this edition, will be cited as page numbers in the text. 7. Artaud, 77.
13 Afterword
Throughout this book, I have used the term drama (and metadrama) to include both playscript and performance. Script and performance are not the same thing, nor is either one reducible to the other; nonetheless, they are intimately connected, a fact that both literary scholars and theatre practitioners have often ignored or even denied. Literary scholars should remember that originally, all literature was per formed, and that even in a literate society such as ours, drama remains a literary form carrying a performance potential. This is particularly important with regard to metadrama, where the playwright often plans devices that are realized only in performace. One should always at least imagine a performance in reading a playscript, even when dealing with playwrights like Ibsen or Strind berg, whose scripts seem to require us only to visualize people living in their homes, rather than actors performing on a stage. Theatre practitioners should remember that the playscript came into being not because literary writers forced it upon the performers, but rather because performers required it. For all the talk these days about “performance art” and “pure” performance (as if a literary script were a contamination), the playscript is inevitable. As performance evolves in length and complexity, the need is apparent to everyone, including the performers themselves, to have a basic, controlling plan, which is what a script essentially is. Some of my remarks in the book are applicable to literary forms other than drama, and some are even applicable to all art forms. I have tried to avoid making such generalizations, however—drama is difficult enough for me to understand. Others may wish to pursue such connections, however. I take it as axiomatic that drama is an art form, related to other literary forms, and ul timately to all the arts. It is not a trivial hybrid (a literary “message,” with performance added to make it palatable); nor is it a form of exhibitionism, of the actors’ faces or bodies or (more pretentiously) their personal emotions. It is instead a full-fledged art form of its own, which embodies meanings, as do all the arts, but meanings that are among the most urgent for our culture. A theme running through the discussions of the plays in the final section of the book is the conflict between logical and intuitive thinking, as originally 179
180
Afterword
personified by Oedipus and Teiresias, respectively. I did not plan this theme overtly—some of the chapters were originally written before this book was even conceived. But as I began to explore the theme of perception in Western drama, I became impressed by how it recurs. Husserl saw this very conflict as a “crisis” in Western society, as there seemed a widening gap between the objective formulations of science and the subjective world in which we live. This gap goes back to the ancient Greeks, however, who invented the scientific method. Drama is a literary form particularly suited to exploring the gap. It is a cliche that “drama is conflict.” The cliche is a true one, however, if we do not limit “conflict” to simple oppositions of character vs. character, hero vs. villain, nor assume that the conflict necessarily has to be resolved. Instead, drama can be a means of exploring conflicts of ideas or principles, not necessarily to provide solutions but instead to reveal that the conflicts exist. Often the most fundamen tal problems of a society are the ones that are ignored, because of the very fact that they are so fundamental. Drama, and especially metadrama, grabs us by the scruff of the neck and makes us look at them.
Works Cited
Abel, Lionel. Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form. New York: Hill & Wang, 1963. Aristophanes. The Clouds. Translated by William Arrowsmith. New York: New Amer ican Library, 1962. --------- . The Frogs. I'ranslated by Richard Lattimore. In Four Comedies. Edited by William Arrowsmith. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969. Aristotle. Aristotle's Poetics. Translated by Leon Golden. Tallahassee: Florida State Uni versity Press, 1981. Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. Translated by Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1958. Barish, Jonas. The Antitheatrical Prejudice. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981. Barthes, Roland. “To Write: An Intransitive Verb?” In The Structuralistsfrom Marx to LeviStrauss. Mited by Richard and Fernande DeGeorge. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubledav, 1972. Beckett, Samuel. Endgame. New York: Grove Press, 1958. Bentley, Eric. “The Psychology of Farce.” In Let's Get a Divorce! and Other Plays. Edited by Eric Bentley. New York: Hill & Wang, 1958. Bermel, Albert. “Beckett without Metaphysics.” Peformance 1, 2 (April 1972): 119-26. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Vintage, 1977. Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre. Translated and edited by John Willett. New York: Hill & Wang, 1964. --------- . The Measures Taken. Translated by Eric Bentley. In The Modern Theatre 6. Edited by Eric Bentley. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960. Brocket!, Oscar G. History of the Theatre. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1968. Buchner, Georg. Georg Buchner: Complete Plays and Prose. Translated by Carl Richard Mueller. New York: Hill & Wang, 1963. --------- . Woyzeck. Translated by Henry J. Schmidt. New York: Avon Books, 1969. Burkman, Katherine H. The Dramatic World of Harold Pinter: Its Basis in Ritual. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971. Calderwood, James L. Shakespearean Metadrama: The Argument of the Play in Titus Andronicus, Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo andJuliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Richard II.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971. Cameron, Alister. The Identity of Oedipus the King. New York: New York University Press, 1968. 181
Works Cited
Works Cited
Chekhov, Anton. Chekhov: The Major Plays. Translated by Ann Dunnigan. New York: New American Library, 1964.
--------- . “Brecht versus Aristotle.” Drama at Calgary 3.2:64—68. --------- . Patterns in Ibsen's Middle Plays. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1981. --------- . Script into Performance: A Structuralist View of Play Production. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977. Ibsen, Henrik. Ibsen: The Complete Major Prose Plays. I'ranslated by Rolf Fjelde. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978. --------- . Peer Gynt. Translated Rolf Fjelde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980. Laing, R. D. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965. --------- . The Self and Others. New York: Random House, 1969. ^
182
Cole, David. The Theatrical Event: A Mythos, A Vocabulary, A Perspective. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1975. Coursen, Herbert R., Jr. Christian Ritual and the World of Shakespeare's Tragedies. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1976. Dukore, Bernard. Bernard Shaw, Playwright: Aspects of Shavian Drama. Columbia: Univer sity of Missouri Press, 1973. Durbach, Errol. ‘Tbsen the Romantic”: Analogues of Paradise in the Later Plays. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1982. Egan, Robert. Drama within Drama: Shakespeare's Sense of His Art in King Lear, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975. 4 Elam, Keir. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London: Methuen, 1980. Erikson, Erik. Childhood and Society. 2d. ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1963. --------- . Identity, Youth, and Crisis. New York: W. W. Norton, 1968. Euripides. The Bacchae. Translated by William Arrowsmith. In Euripides V. Edited by David Grene and Richard Lattimore. New York: Washington Square Press, 1968. Fergusson, Francis. The Idea of a Theater. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1953. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Translated by Joan Riviere. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, n.d. --------- . The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). In The Basic Writings of Sigmund Ereud. Translated and edited by A. A. Brill. New York: Random House, 1938. --------- . Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Translated by James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1960.
183
Landes, David S. Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modem World. Cam bridge: Harvard University Press, 1983. Langer, Susanne K. Eeeling and Eorm. New York: Scribners, 1953. ^ --------- . Philosophy in a New Key. New York: New American Library, 1948. Levi-Strauss, Claude. From Honey to Ashes. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. London: Jonathan Cape, 1973. --------- . “The Structural Study of Myth.” In The Structuralists from Marx to Levi-Strauss. ■ Edited by Richard and Fernande De George. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972. Lichtenstein, Heinz. The Dilemma of Human Identity. New York: Aronson, 1977. McGill, V. J. August Strindberg: The Bedeviled Viking. New York: Russell and Russell, 1965. Manchester, William. Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific. New York: Dell, 1979.
7 Hall, Edward T. The Hidden Dimension. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969.
Marlowe, Christopher. The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe. Edited by Irving Ribner. New York: Odyssey, 1963. Marowitz, Charles. The Marowitz Hamlet and the Tragical History of Dr. Faustus. Harmo ndsworth: Penguin Books, 1970. Meisel, Martin. Shaw and the Nineteenth Century Theater. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Primacy of Perception. Edited by James M. Edie. Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Meyer, Michael. Ibsen: A Biography. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971.
; --------- . The Silent Language. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973.
Modern Drama. 2 3
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. Garfield, David. The Actors' Studio: A Player's Place. New York: Macmillan, 1984. Gassner, John. Masters of the Drama. New York: Random House, 1954. Goodhart, Sandor. "Oedipus and Laius’s Many Murderers.” Diacritics 8 (March 1978): 5571. Gorchakov, Nikolai. The Vakhtangov School of Stage Art. Translated by G. Ivanov-Mumjief and edited by Phyl Griffith. Moscow: Foreign Languages, n.d.
Handke, Peter, (pending the Audience. In Kaspar and Other Plays. Translated by Michael Roloff. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. Hardin, Richard F. “The ‘Ritual’ in Recent Criticism: The Elusive Sense of Com munity.” Publications of the Modern Language Association 98 (October 1983): 846-62. Harshbarger, Karl. “Who Killed Laius?” Tulane Drama Review 9 (Summer 1965): 120-31. Hartigan, Karelisa. “Sophocles: Oedipus Tyrranus 293.” Classical Journal 70: 55-56. Homan, Sidney. When the Theater Turns to Itself: The Aesthetic Metaphor in Shakespeare. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1981. Hornby, Richard. “Beyond the Verbal in Pygmalion.” In Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 3. Edited by Daniel Learv. University Park: Pennsvlvania State Univer sity Press, 1983, 121-27.
(September 1980). Moliere. The Misanthrope and Tartuffe. Translated by Richard Wilbur. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1965. Mukafovsky, Jan. Structure, Sign and Function. Translated and edited by John Burbank and Peter Steiner. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978. Nelson, Robert J. Play within a Play: The Dramatist's Conception of his Art: Shakespeare to Anouilh. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958. Norwood, Gilbert. Greek Tragedy. New York: Hill & Wang, 1960. Ollen, Gunnar. August Strindberg. New York: Ungar, 1972. Pinter, Harold. Betrayal. London: Eyre Methuen, 1978. --------- .The Hothouse. New York: Grove Press, 1980.
,
184
Works Cited
--------- . “Writing for the Theatre.” In Complete Works: One. New York: Grove Press, 1977. Racine, Jean. Five Plays. Translated by Kenneth Muir. New York: Hill & Wang, 1960. Rayfield, Donald. Chekhov: The Evolution of His Art. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. / Rycroft, Charles. A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. Totowa, N.I.: Littlefield, Adams 1973. --------- . The Innocence of Dreams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. ■ Sapir, Edward. Selected Writings in Language, Culture, and Personality. Edited by David G. V Mandelbaum. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949. Schlueter, June. Metafictional Characters in Modern Drama. New York: Columbia Univer sity Press, 1979. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Work. Alfred Harbage, general editor. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969. Shaw, Bernard. Complete Plays with Prefaces. 6 vols. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1963. --------- . The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1913). In Selected Non-Dramatic Writings of Bernard Shaw. Edited by Dan H. Laurence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. Shephard, William. Group Dynamics in the Evolution of Creative Choices in the Performance Group's Production of Dionysus in '69. Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1984. Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Trans lated by Lee 1'. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1965. Sophocles. Oedipus the King. Translated by David Grene. In Sophocles I. Edited by David Grene and Richard Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954.
/
^Stanislavski, Constantin. Building a Character. New York: I'heatre Arts, 1949.
/ Steiner, George. The Death cf Tragedy. New York: Hill & Wang, 1961. Strindberg, August. Six Plays of Strindberg. Translated by Elizabeth Sprigge. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955. Includes “Author’s Notes” to A Dream Play. Tillyard, E. M. W. The Elizabethan World Picture. New York: Vintage, n.d. ^A^alency, Maurice. The Flower and the Castle: An Introduction to Modern Drama. New York: Macmillan, 1963. Watts, Alan W. The Way of Zen. New York: New American Library, 1959. ^ Weissman, Philip. Creativity in the Theatre: A Psychoanalytic Study. New York: Basic Books, 1965. I Wilshire, Bruce. Role Playing and Identity : The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.
Index
Abel, Lionel, 31 Absence vs. presence: in theatrical perform ance, 99 Absurdist drama, 41-42, 47, 61-62, 83 Acknowledgment, real life, 98, 104 Adaptation, 90, 93-97 Aeschylus, 36, 91, 93, 130; Eumenides, 57; The Libation Bearers, 58, 122; The Persians, 58 Aesop, 21 “Agit-prop,” 45 Albee, Edward, 61 Alexander the Great, 110 Alienation effect, 23, 32, 37, 44, 84, 88, 115. See also Ostraneniye Allegory, 90, 92-93, 95-96 Alleyn, Eidward, 92 All the President's Men (film), 18 Anderson, Robert: Tea and Sympathy, 176 “Anti-theatrical prejudice,” 69-71, 84-85, 116 Antoine, Andre, 95, 97 Archetype, 21, 26-27, 28n.ll, 42, 52, 76-77, 89 Aristophanes, 77, 95—96, 101; The Achamians, 56; The Clouds, 100, 130-31; The Frogs, 36, 9193; Platus, 35; Tbesmophoriazusae, 56, 76 Aristotle, 14, 20, 47n.l, 53-54, 91, 106, 127, 130; on recognition, 121-23 Artaud, Antonin, 61-62, 177•, Jet cf Blood, 41 Augustine, Saint, 69 Barish, Jonas, 69, 84 Barrie, James: The Admirable Crichton, 93 Barthes, Roland, 17-19 Beaumont, Francis, 37 Beckett, Samuel, 15, 24, 41, 6\,Endgame, 82-83; Krapp's Last Tape, 43 Belasco, David, 105 Bell, Clive, 105 Bentley, Eric, 106 Bermel, Albert, 24
185
Bettelheim, Bruno, 146 Binary opposition, 13-17, 51-52, 177; in acting, 85-86 Bisexuality, 70, 76 Bond, Edward, 61 Bracketing. See Phenomenology: bracketing Brando, Marlon, 14 Braque, Georges, 97-98 Brecht, Bertolt, 14, 16, 23-24, 37, 44, 47, 84, 88, 97, 115—17, 151; The Good Person of Setzuan, 81; A Man's a Man, 33, 82—83; The Measures Taken, 116; Mother Courage, 25; The Threepenny Opera, 89-90, 96 Breton, Andre, 41 Brook, Peter, 62 Buchner, Georg, 65; Woyzeck, 59, 121, 148-57 Burhage, Richard, 92 Burkman, Katharine, 171 Butchers, The (play), 95 Caesar, Julius (Roman emperor), 95 Calderon, Pedro, 38, 41, 74 Calderwood, James L., 31 Calgary, University of, 148-49 Calvin, John, 42 Cameron, Alister, 123 Cassirer, Ernst, 105 Ceremony, 32, 36, 39, 49-57, 60-67, 85; anti-, 58—60; fulfilled, 55—57, 65; offstage, 58-60; private, 63, 65; quasi-, 58, 61-62; unfulfilled, 55-60, 64, 66. See also Ritual Character acting, 86 Charles 1 (king of England), 64 Chekhov, Anton, 24, 61, 65; The Anniversary, 60; The Bear, 60; The Cherry Orchard, 60, 91; The Marriage Proposal, 60; On the Harmfulness of Tobacco, 60-61; The Sea Gull, 40-44, 92; Three Sisters, 60, 91; Uncle Vanya, 90; The Wedding, 60 Christie, Agatha, 129
186
Index
Index
Citation, 90-92, 95-96 Classical drama, 35-36, 47n.l, 55, 57-58, 61, 64, 76, 91 Cocteau, Jean, 41, 132n.7 Cole, David, 53, 73 Coleridge, Samuel, 68, 76 Comedy of Manners, 80-82, 84 Commedia dell’Arte, 44 Connelly, Marc, 41 Cooper, Gary, 22 Copernicus, 65 Corneille, Pierre, 38 Coursen, Herbert R., Jr., 58 Coward, Noel, 81
Farce, 61; French, 159 Fergusson, Francis, 122-23 Fielding, Henry: Tom Thumb, 93 Field of thought. See Thought; field of Flynn Errol, 22 Ford, Ford Maddox, 176 Foreground-background bifurcation, 109, 11011, 113-17 Foreman, Robert, 54 Formalism, Russian, 24, 44 Frazer, James, 83 Freud, Sigmund, 65, 68-70, 73, 85, 108, 130, 159, 166-69; aesthetic theories of, 106-7 Fry, Roger, 105 Frye, Northrop, 17, 18-19, 49, 114
Darwin, Charles, 65 Deconstruction, 16, 58, 150, 166-68, 170, 172 Defamiliarization. See Ostraneniye Derrida, Jacques, 58, 150 Descartes, Rene, 85 Deus ex machina, 89 DeWitt, Johannes, 37-38 Dithyramb, 49 Drama/culture complex, 17, 20-27, 31-32, 42, 44-45, 58, 63, 90-91, 113-14, 117 Drayton, Michael, 37 “Dream screen,” 112 Dukore, Bernard, 93 Dumas pere, Alexandre, 40 Durbach, Errol, 170n.5
Galileo, 65 Gay, John, 39 Genet, Jean: The Balcony, 43, 61, 83; The Blacks, 43, 61, 83; The Maids, 61, 83 “Genetic fallacy,” 50 Geometry; Euclidean, 22; Riemannian, 22 Gestalt psychology, 109 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: Egmont, 25; Faust, 40, 59 Goodhart, Sandor, 132n.7 Gougenot, 38 Gozzi, Carlo, 44 Greene, Robert, 37 Grotowsky, Jerzy, 44
ligan, Robert, 31 Ego psychology, 68 Einstein, Albert, 22, 65, 107 Edam, Keir, 98 Eliot, T. S., 68, 84; The Cocktail Party, 83 Edizabeth I (queen of England^ 37 Elusion, 72, 78, 81 Environmental staging, 149, 151, 156 Epic theatre, 44—45, 47, 97 E>ikson, Erik, 68, 70 Essex, earl of, 64, 96 Estrangement. See Ostraneniye Euclid. See Geometry; Euclidean Euripides, 36, 46, 56, 70, 91, 93, 100, 130; The Baccbae, 35, 57, 62, 76, Heracles, Si\Hippolytus, 58; Medea, 58; Orestes, 122; The Trojan Women, 57 Expressionism, 13, 41, 167-68
Hall, Edward T., 113 Handke, Peter, 115; Kaspar, 61, 82; Offending the Audience, 116-17 Hannibal, 111 Hardin, Richard E, 62 Harshbarger, Karl, 131-32n.7 Hartigan, Karelisa, 125 Hebbel, Friedrich, 65 Heilman, Lillian: The Children’s Hour, 176 Hemingway, Ernest, 22, 23 Henry VIII (king of Edtgland), 143 Hildebrand, Adolf, 105-6 Hitler, Adolf, 82 Holberg, Ludvig, 24 Holmes, Sherlock, 122 Homan, Sidney, 31 Hughes, Ted, 62 Husserl, Edmund, 172-73, 180
Fairbanks, Douglas, Jr., 22 Falwell, Jerry, 95
Ibsen, Henrik, 14, 16-19, 65, 179; A Doll House, 24, 60, 93, 159, 165; An Enemy of the People,
167; Glmts, 60, 73, 88-90, 93; Hedda Gabler, 60, \6S\John Gabriel Borkman, \M\ Little Eyolf, 164; The Master Builder, 121, 164—70; fter G^»r, 59, 80-81, 104, 116; Rosmersbolm, 165-66, 168; When We Dead Awaken, 164 Identity theory, 68-73, 82, 85 Illud tempos, 53, 73 Information theory, 16 Insertion, real-life, 97-98 Ionesco, Eugfene, 41; The Bald Soprano, 61; The Chairs, 61; Jack; or the Submission, 61, 82; The Lesson, 61 Johnson, Lyndon B. (U.S. president), 96 Jones, Ernest, 107 Jones, Inigo, 93 Jonson, Ben, 37; Every Man Out of His Humour, 92; Poetaster, 92 Joyce, James, 84, 107 Kafka, Franz, 82 Kaiser, Georg, 41 Kalidasa, 36 Kant, Immanuel, 65, 113, 153 Kaufman, George S., 41 Kepler, Johannes, 65 Kierkegaard, S0ren, 65 Kleist, Heinrich von, 65 Kokoschka, Oscar, 41 Kommos, 49-50 Kris, Ernst, 107 Kyd, Thomas, 37-38, 43, 94 Laing, R. D., 68, 72, 78, 79 Langer, Susanne, 50-51, 98, 105-6, 108 Lehmann, Werner, 149, 152 Levin, Gregory, 150 L6vi-Strauss, Claude, 13-14, 51, 153-54 Lichtenstein, Heinz, 68 Linguistics, 26 Literary reference. See Reference: literary Littlewood, Joan, 44 Louis XIV (king of France), 46 Lyly, John, 37 Macbird, 96 McCullough, Douglas, 151 McLaglen, Victor, 22 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 14, 16 Manchester, William, 22-23 Marlowe, Christopher: Dr. Faustus, 37, 59; The Jew of Malta, 88-89
187
Marowitz, Charles, 45, 94 Marston, John, 37 Medieval drama, 78 Medwall, Henry, 36 Meisel, Martin, 24 Menander, 47n.l Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 130, 174 Metaceremony, 55 Metadrama, 31-32, 34—36, 39, 41^3, 47, 4950, 52, 55, 68, 74, 83, 88-98, 100, 104-5, 112, 114, 117, 121-24, 134, 141, 179-180 Metadramatic. Metadrama Middleton, Thomas, 37 Miller, Arthur, 95 Modern drama, 64, 80-83, 85, 115 Molifere, 46, 80, 85; The Bourgeois Gentleman, 39, 67, 79, 89; The Doctor in Spite of Himself, 79, 80; L'lmpromptu de Versailles, 39-40; The Mis anthrope, 79, 80, 84; The Precious Ladies, 79; Tartuffe, 79-81 Morality play, 21 Moral Majority, 23, 28n.ll Morgan, Charles, 105 Morgan, J. Pierpont, 96 Mucedorus, 37 Mueller, Carl, 149, 152, 156 Mukafovsky, Jan, 19, 73, 101 Mumford, Ixwis, 145 Murray, Gilbert, 50 Myth, 21-22 Napoleon (French emperor), 129 Naturalism, 13, 167 Nelson, Robert J., 31, 37, 39-40 Neoclassicism, 39—40, 59-60, 80, 93, 168; Ital ian, 39 New Critics, 20 Newton, Isaac, 65 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 65, 69 Noh theatre, Japanese, 36, 45-46, 53-54 Norton, Thomas, 37 Norwood, Gilbert, 131n.7 “Oceanic feeling,” 70, 72-73 Olivier, Laurence, 14 O’Neill, Eugene; Beyond the Horizon, 82, 87 n.23; A Touch of the Poet, 82 Ontological insecurity, 79, 81; and American society, 86-87 Oriental drama, 36, 45 Orwell, George, 82 Ostraneniye (defamiliarization or estrangement).
188
Index
24, 32, 44-47, 62, 67, 73, 84, 88-89, 94, 99100, 117, 121, 157 Parody, 25, 39, 45-16, 89-90, 93-96, 115 Peele, George, 34, 37 Perception, 32, 42, 121-22, 128, 129-30, 133-34, 136-42, 144-48, 151, 153, 156, 173-74, 180; externally tainted, 134-35; internally tainted, 134-35 Peregrini, 11 “Performance Art,” 54, 179 Peter, Saint, 146 Phenomenology, 32, 115, 134, 172-74, 176-77; bracketing, 111-12, 173, 176-77; phe nomenological criticism, 16; “presence,” 10910 Picasso, Pablo, 97-98, 107 Pinter, Harold, 41, B2-, Betrayal, 121, 171-77; The Birthday Party, 61; The Caretaker, 171; The Homecoming, 61, 84, 174; The Hothouse, 171-76; The Lover, 82; No Man's Land, 174; A Slight Ache, 174; Tea Party, 61; his theory of character, 173, 174 Pirandello, Luigi, 37, 44, 47, 52; Each in His Own Way, 43; Henry IV, 43, 67, 74, 83; Six Characters in Search of an Author, 43, 81, 176; Tonight We Improvise, 43 Piscator, Erwin, 44, 47, 97 Plato, 46, 64, 69, 130-31; Platonism, 16, 85, 133 Plautus, 47n.l, 77 Play of Frau Jutten, 77-78 Play within the play, 32, 38-40, 43-47, 49, 63, 65, 67, 85, 93, 104, 115, 121; framed type, 3341, 43-45, 116; inset type, 33-39, 41-44, 88 Plot, 53-54 Pornography, 28n.ll Poststructuralism, 14, 16-17, 19, 58, 150 Pound, Ezra, 107 “Presence,” phenomenological. See Phe nomenology: “presence” Presence vs. absence: in theatrical performance, 99 Primary process thought. See Thought: primary process Problem play, 166 Proust, Marcel, 175 Racine, Jean: Britannicus, 59; Phaedra, 59 Raiders of the Lost Ark (film), 27 Rayfield, Donald, 91 Reader-response theory, 16 Reagan, Ronald (U.S. president), 19, 95, 108
Realism: as doctrine, 13-16, 18, 25-26, 86, 9697, 137, 146, 177; as drama, 14, 20, 40, 60, 158-59, 165-68, 176 Real-life reference. See Reference: real-life Reference: literary, 32, 88-95, 100-101, 103-4; real-life, 32, 91, 95-101, 103-4, 112; self-, 92, 103-17, 118n.l Remarque, Erich, 22-23 Renaissance, 16, 35, 39, 59, 64-65, 77-79, 85; Continental, 38, 46; English, 34, 36-38, 46, 94 Restoration, English, 39 Retrou, Jean, 38 Return from Parnassus, The, 37 Riemann, Georg. See Geometry; Riemannian Ritual, 21-22, 49-51, 53-55, 58, 60-63, 65, 66n.5; “Year King,” 49-50, 84, 171 See also Ceremony Robin Hood, 77-78, 89 Rockefeller, John D., 96 Role playing, 32, 36, 39, 46, 52, 66n.5, 67-86 121; allegorical, 73-74, 77, 83-84; involun tary, 73-74, 76, 82-83, 86; voluntary, 73-74, 76, 80-83, 84 Romanticism, 25, 40, 59, 111, 148 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 69 Rowley, William, 37 Rycroft, Charles, 63, 107 Sackville, Thomas, 37 Sapir, Eldward, 26 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 40 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 15, 17, 50, 58 Schechner, Richard, 44, 62, 149; Dionysus in '69, 98-99 Schiller, Friedrich von: Don Carlos, 25; Wilhelm Tell, IS Schlueter, June, 31 Schmidt, Henry J., 149 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 65 Scribe, Eugene, 24 Scuddry, Georges de, 38 Secondary process thought. See Thought: sec ondary process Second Shepherds' Play, 11 Self-reference. See reference: selfSellers, Peter, 86 Semiosis, 98 Semiotics, 16, 27, 51, 63 Serban, Andrei, 44 Shakespeare, William, 15, 19, 22, 24, 31, 38-39, 45-46, 56, 58, 60, 68, 70, 77, 81, 85; and “the
Index great chain of being,” 136; and “the green world,” 135, 136; and “humours” theory, 142. Works: Antony and Cleopatra, 78, 114-15; As You Like It, 15, 36, 67, 74-75, 79, 80, 133-47; Comedy of Errors, 122, 133-34; Cymheline, 36; Hamlet, 16, 33-34, 36, 38-39, 41, 44, 49, 5556, 58, 67-68, 75, 78-79, 83, 90, 92, 94, 96, 133; Henry IV, Part I, 21, 36, 78, 103^, 114, 116, 118n.l, 127; Henry IV, Part 2, 78; Henry VIII, S6, Julius Caesar, 78, 115; King Lear, 36, 49, 56, 78, 94, 122, Love’s Labour's Lost, S6-, Macbeth, 33, 36, 49, 55-59, 77-78, 87, 97, 133; The Merchant of Venice, 56, 67, 73, 75, 89, 134, 136; A Midsummer Night's Dream, 36, 67, 105, 134-35; Othello, 49, 56-57, 61, 67-68, 7378, 83, 122, 133-34, 150-51; Pericles, 35, 36; Richard II, 36, 57-58, 64, IK, Richard HI, 36, 58, 84; Romeo andJuliet, 40, 88-89; The Taming of the Shrew, 33, 34, 36, 38, 56, 74, 134; The Tempest, 36; Timon of Athens, 58; Troilus and Cressida, 36; Twelfth Night, 33-34, 67, 74, 79, 121-22, 134; The Winter’s Tale, 114, 135 Shaw, George Bernard, 23, 68, 70, 164; Heart break House, 81-82; Major Barbara, 84; Man and Superman, 56; Misalliance, 81-82; Pyg malion, 82-83, 92-93 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 59 Shepard, Sam: Buried Child, 84 Shephard, William, 98-100 Sheridan, Richard, 39; The Critic, 93 Shklovsky, Viktor, 24, 44, 62 “Show business” play, 42 Socrates, 100-101, 130-31 Sophists, 64, 130-31 Sophocles, 36, 91, 130; Oedipus at Colonus, 35; Oedipus the King, 50, 57, 121-32, 136, 162-63 Space: ways of thinking about, 110-11, 146 Stalin, Josef (marshal, U.S.S.R.), 82 Stanislavski, Constantin, 14, 16, 84, 86, 177 Star Wars (film), 27 Stein, Peter, 44 Stoppard, Tom, 115; The Real Inspector Hound, 43; The Real Thing, 43; Rosencrantz and Guildenstem Are Dead, 94; Travesties, 43 Strasberg, Lee, 84 Stratford, Ontario, 149 Streisand, Barbra, 77 Strindberg, August, 65, 179; A Dream Play, 4041, 44, 81; The Father, 88-90, 121, 158-63; Miss Julie, 82 Structuralism, 13-17, 19, 50 Surrealism, 41
189
Swan Theatre: drawing of, discussed, 37-38 Symbolism (literary movement), 13, 92, 168, 170n.5 “Sympathetic magic,” 51-52 Synge, John Millington: Playboy of the Western World, 83 Terence, 47n.l, 77 Tesson6rie, 38 Theatricalism, 13 Thought: contraction. 111, 115; displacement, 111-13, 116; expansion, 111-12, 115; field of, 109-10, 116; primary process, 107-11, 114, 130-31, 146, 159, 179-80; secondary process, 107-10, 114, 130-31, 159, 179-80 Time, 143-47, 172, 175; ways of thinking about, 110-11, 144-46 Toller, Ernst, 41 Tolstoy, A. K., 91 Tootsie (film), 70 Turner, J. M. W., 108 University Resident (URTA), 86
Theatre
Association
Vakhtangov, Eugene, 44 Valency, Maurice, 170n.5 Vega, Lope de, 38 VictorIVictoria (film), 70 Villiers, George: The Rehearsal, 39, 93 Wannamaker, John, 96 Washington, George (U.S. president), 95 Washington Press Club, 96 Watts, Alan, 160 Wayne, John, 22 Webster, John, 37, 77 Weissman, Philip, 87n.2 Well-Made Play, 24 Whitehead, Alfred North, 105 Wilde, Oscar: The Importance of Being Earnest, 43, 81,93 Williams, Tennessee: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 176 Wilshire, Bruce, 112 Wilson, Lanford, 15 Wilson, Richard, 54 Wycherley, William: The Country Wife, 61, 7374, 76-77 Yang/yin, 160-62 Yeats, William Butler, 16, 176 Yentl (film), 70, 77