Hogarth’s ‘Marriage à-la-Mode’ and traditions of alterity

In 1993, Ruth Mellinkoff analysed mediaeval European iconography to discover a “specific pictorial code common to later medieval representations of Jews” (Hassig 25). The visual system Mellinkoff describes “depicts Jews as physically repellent, evil, and subnormal”, emphasising their role as “rejecters and murderers of God” (ibid). Common features of the code include distortions, deformities, grotesque facial expressions, dark or reddish skin and hair, blemishes and badges. Debra Hassig builds on Mellinkoff’s work to suggest that there is, in addition to any specifically anti-Semitic iconography, “a more general pictorial code that underlies not only representations of Jews, but also other members of the medieval underclass as well as their ideological parallels”, a code expressive of “sin, evil, barbarity, and subhumanity” (25). Mellinkoff and Hassig thus both detect and describe a detailed visual code, common across much of Western Europe for hundreds of years, which exists to depict and condition responses to alterity, to the oft-threatening and always suspect alien that hovers on the fringes of society. Hogarth seems to draw on the remnants of this tradition, consciously or otherwise, in his depictions of the bodies and visual characteristics of the characters of Marriage à-la-Mode[1]. Characteristic elements of mediaeval iconography appear in Hogarth’s paintings[2] in ways that inform our understanding of his story, while imposing moral comment on it.

Hassig explicates the common mediaeval understanding of the body’s ability to physically reflect mental or moral characteristics, grounded in a detailed theological discourse drawn from Aristotle (28-29). Signs of courage or cowardice, intelligence or stupidity, or willingness to hear the word of God, can all be reflected in physical aspects of the body. Under this system, xenophobia quickly appears - “swarthiness or dark skin indicates a coward, as does extremely wooly [or curly] hair” (28) – as does a co-dependent ethnocentricity, wherein the weakness of the sun in northern climes and its ferocity in the south lend justification to the theory that only in the centre of one’s cultural map do the perfect conditions for ideal humanity exist. Darkness of skin and hair and grotesque features can thus indicate a foreigner, but these markers could hardly be morally neutral. Their extreme version (and there is a solid continuum) is the fantastical bodies of the Monstrous Races, creatures from the extremes of the earth (or beneath it) with two heads, wings on their shoulders, faces fixed on backwards, etc – foreign in the extreme, bestial or diabolical.

The same visual code applied to geographical foreigners could be frequently applied to, for example, the tormentors of Christ (or of saints), and, by extension, to devils[3].  Common markers of vice included “ill-proportioned bodies, contorted postures, and ugly facial features... [including] large, pointy, or bulbous noses; mouths with fleshy lips... grotesque expressions; ruddy or dark skin; and facial blemishes” (29). Similar markers could be used to designate disease, although in most mediaeval iconography physical disease stands as a visual code for moral deformity rather than being represented as literal in itself. Common mediaeval iconography thus settles into a distinct ‘us’ and ‘them’, where distinctions in types and degrees of alterity – whether caused by geographical distance, physical or mental illness, religious differences or simple imagined monstrosity – are collapsed into a single, easily comprehensible set of visual signs that indicate ‘alien’, with an implicit moral judgement.

Hogarth’s characters in Marriage à-la-Mode are not caricatures, not exaggerated as most late mediaeval art can be (or as some of Hogarth’s own other work). They are painted naturalistically, giving more force to those features of their faces that partake in this tradition. While the faces of the main characters are not obviously grotesque, they surround themselves with characters – largely foreigners – with exaggerated noses or loose-lipped mouths (the apothecary and his assistant, the castrato, flautist, hairdresser and African servant). In moments of fashionable fancy, they indulge in facial expressions as extravagant and ridiculous as any monster could manage (see, for example, the swooning admirer of the castrato), as if to align themselves more nearly with those fashionable foreign objects they have brought into their homes. Curled hair is often a sign of alterity in mediaeval art; here, curls are affected to display membership of fashionable society. Curled and powdered wigs are prominent, and ‘The Toilette’ allows a glimpse of two heads of hair being done up to match. The gentleman with his head in curling papers draws attention to his own ridiculous appearance by the exaggerated delicacy with which he sips his cup, preventing a neutral reading of the image.

Dark colouring is an obvious indicator of foreign origin to an English audience, as indeed it remains in the case of the African or Eastern slaves seen in ‘The Toilette’ (and, to a certain extent, of the apothecary). In contrast, the reddish hues and darker skin of the mediaeval alien are also reflected in contrast with the fashionable pallor of the more ridiculous characters, a kind of exaggerated Englishness that becomes all the more foreign for it.

The custom of painting beauty spots on one’s face to contrast with that pallor is perhaps a more sinister echo of the blemishes associated with the mediaeval other. If we read them solely as beauty spots they are self-inflicted and ridiculous, a deliberate choice to deform oneself with the fashions that Hogarth ridicules. But of course, the dark spots have a darker purpose, in that, while they may be politely read by others within the scene as beauty spots, they are for Hogarth and his audience signs of encroaching syphilis – also, of course, self-inflicted. The destructive nature of the whole cycle is made explicit in the parallel between beauty spot and syphilitic deformity, less a visual pun than indistinguishable and inseparable symptoms of a single cause.

Similarly, the twisted and awkward stance of mediaeval aliens such as St Agatha’s tormentors is reflected in the self-inflicted deformities of Marriage à-la-Mode. The two central figures of ‘The Marriage Contract’ – the earl and the alderman – are both affected by it, one sitting awkwardly and inelegantly in this elevated setting with his sword poking between his legs, the other forced to rest his gout-ridden leg on a footstool. More serious physical deformities are shown by those suffering from advanced stages of syphilis – the bowed legs, the broken nose and bulldog face. It may also be noted that, in contrast to the tall, elegant bodies of the morally upright, mediaeval aliens rarely stand erect: similarly, the characters of Marriage à-la-Mode rarely rise to their feet. The only moment in which the viscount is seen out of a chair is in the moment, ironically, of his death and fall – in which the twisting of his legs recalls the bow-legged fate that would have awaited him had he lived.

These deformities of shape also find echo in the fashionable choices of the elite. The broken-nosed statue on the mantelpiece in ‘The Tête à Tête’ seems to mock its owner, whose syphilis is as yet only evidenced by the black spot on his neck. The child in ‘The Toilette’ points with laughter to the horns of a statuette, suggesting another kind of ‘monster’ that the new Earl resembles, as his wife arranges an assignation with Silvertongue. The “puffy and pregnant Chinese idols” (Lichtenberg 41) on the mantelpiece in ‘The Tête à Tête’ sit there naked and leering, as if in comment on the distortion of the human body invited into the very household by their owners. And, it must be said, the exaggerated ‘pug’ faces of the African slaves (fashionable accessories just like the statues) resemble the increasingly twisted faces of the child in ‘The Lady’s Death’ and the apothecary, both of whom are in the advanced stages of syphilis. This repeated alignment suggests a deliberate equation of the physical state of characters with the alien and contemptible other, drawn into that similarity by their own choices and excesses.

Indeed, Hogarth seems to hint that his characters go so far as to approach, not only the Italian or French foreigner, but the ultimate other represented by the Monstrous Races, in which the human blends repulsively with the animal. In the very first painting the coupled hounds serve as a metaphor for the young couple, a metaphor that could be sympathetic; but over the course of the series, the animal imagery begins to lend more serious comment to the moral state of the characters. In ‘The Tête à Tête’ a little dog points out his master’s transgressions with his excitement over the hat in the viscount’s pocket (the angle of his body recalling the viscount’s presumed erection). In ‘The Toilette’, the walls are lined with paintings of classical and biblical scenes that approach the animalistic: Lot reduced to an animal by alcohol and the prospect of sex with his daughters, Io and Ganymede in the embrace of Jupiter’s various incarnations. The latter, with the hint of castration offered by the angle of the eagle’s head, seems to deliberately suggest a comparison with the castrato seated below, implying that the contents of the other paintings should also reflect on the remainder of the characters. In ‘The Lady’s Death’, finally, the dog rises to the level of the humans as he stands on a chair to steal the head of a pig from the table – and the expression on the face of the pig recalls suspiciously the face of the dying Countess, whose father is busily removing the ring from her finger. Spatially, the usual ‘them’ – the animal, the foreigner – is equated exactly with the humans who represent the centre and apex of social existence, precisely those one would expect to be the epitome of the ‘us’.

Indeed, the spatial difference between the old alien and the new is at the heart of Hogarth’s apparent concerns. Where Mellinkoff’s monsters are “subnormal”, outside and degraded below the privileged circle of Christian society, the problem with Hogarth’s monsters is precisely that they are not. They are supernormal, the upper echelon of society, welcomed and treasured, and they invite into that precious core of Englishness those foreign “deformities” that corrupt it, for imitation by the less fashionable. Alien they are not, but worse – they aspire to it. Geographically, they are at the centre of society (and often of the frame), as the glimpses of London through the windows suggest; and they are enclosed, indoors, not outdoors on the more liminal, socially ambiguous zone of the streets. Indeed, every window looks out not onto a street, but over it. Far from being debased below society’s scorning heels, Hogarth’s creatures are elevated above them. Indeed, as we are reminded by the glimpse of scaffolding through the window in ‘The Marriage Settlement’, the hands of the populace are engaged in erecting the high seats of the mighty – as they are the final scaffold of Silvertongue, elevated finally and ironically to his death.

I do not suggest that Hogarth was deliberately reviving visual motifs that he felt to be mediaeval. The effectiveness of such symbolism requires on it being both commonly agreed and, on some level, intuitive. The grotesque and deformed can be, in any culture, a convenient visual code for moral deformity or subhumanity, built on an instinctive sense of revulsion which artists can emphasise by contrasting such visuals with the elegant and the shapely (see the contrast between Agatha and her tormentors in the appendix). However, the possibility – indeed, likelihood – of a negative symbolism constructed around the grotesque arising spontaneously in several different cultures need not imply that it arises spontaneously at different temporal moments within one culture. I propose that Hogarth draws on (and slyly alters) visual codes that are not mediaeval, but eighteenth-century, with centuries of cultural weight behind them. A language must be understood by its audience, after all. Contemporary comments suggest that, indeed, this deliberate twisting of nature on Hogarth’s part was received with sensitivity. Lichtenberg has much to say about the hideous distortions of, for example, the body of the Italian castrato (which he compares to the equally dismaying body of the black servant in the background), the twisted body of the apothecary and the “most outrageous artistic motifs from northeastern Asia” on the mantelpiece (41). To Lichtenberg, these ridiculously affected deformities are like the fish inhabiting the bushes carved into a clock in ‘The Tête à Tête’, “something one rarely gets to see in nature” (43): as unnatural, one might say, as the Monstrous Races that inhabit the fringes of mediaeval maps.

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Cited:

Hassig, Debra. “The Iconography of Rejection: Jews and other Monstrous Races”. Image and Belief: Studies in Celebration of the Eightieth Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art. Ed. Colum Hourihane. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. 25-46.

Lichtenberg, Georg Cristoph. Hogarth on High Life. Trans. & ed. Arthur S. Wensinger & W. B. Coley. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1970.

Mellinkoff, Ruth. Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

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[1] Yes, that link goes to Wikipedia. Yes, I am suggesting use of Wikipedia as a source. Seriously. It has the best-quality digital images of the paintings on the internet, at least so far as I’ve been able to find, and enough of a commentary to tell the story without heading into disputed territory of interpretation.

[2] I here consider the paintings primarily rather than the engravings, as it allows me to take into consideration elements of colour that add to my argument. For convenience, however, I use the names given to the individual engravings - ‘The Toilette’, ‘The Marriage Settlement’ etc – rather than referring to the paintings by number.

[3] For example, see the torment of St Agatha. Note the grimaces, full lips and curled hair of her tormentors, the contrast between the colour of her skin and theirs (red in colour in the manuscript, not used lightly given the cost of red ink) , their twisted postures (as emphasised by the folds of their clothing), their obvious physical exertion and the phallic overtones in the positioning of their pliars. By contrast, Agatha seems oblivious to the proceedings (almost smug!), her body is elongated and elegant and she is elevated above the level of her tormentors, approaching Heaven in her position and Christ in her semi-crucified attitude.

Of Gypsies and Foundlings: Facts observed from Fielding's 'Joseph Andrews' and other texts.

SAPIATUR.

1. OF GYPSIES. That gypsies will frequently, contrary to all logic and often irrespective of any regard for personal interest, safety or gain, break into homes at their convenience and replace children with other children.  It must be stressed that:

a)  they will do this even when both children are equally healthy, therefore with no apparent gain to their own gene pool;
b) likewise, they will frequently exchange children already abducted for new abductees, and therefore we cannot assume that any particular child abducted will remain with his/her abductors in any permanent sense, as the nature of foundling statistics is such as to befuddle any attempt to determine precise percentages of children abducted and passed on relative to children abducted and retained;
c) we therefore cannot assume that gypsies retain any children at any point, as we have no evidence of their doing so, and everyone knows that lack of evidence is evidence of lack in the best logical tradition, and therefore:
d) gypsies stand to gain nothing from this remarkably frequent abduction of children (which appears indeed to be their sole function in all narratives in which they appear, and therefore occupies at least 100% of their time), and must therefore be acting from selfless motives.

A little consideration, and the observation of the fact that their activities are invariably focussed on small rural communities, will quickly reveal this motive.  Gypsies are concerned to stimulate, or we may say stir, the gene pool in order to prevent and counteract the effects of inbreeding.  The further consideration that the babes selected for this mixing process are inevitably the strongest, most beautiful, most healthy and frequently most noble of character available in the district further supports this theory, as it ensures a) that those most likely to find mates do so in a town that is not that of their birth and b) that the resulting children will be similarly perfect and amazing.

That gypsies devote their lives to these endeavours, for which they are frequently persecuted, must stand as a witness to the selflessness with which poor persecuted misunderstood minorities are always secretly jolly happy good-hearted folks, who probably burst into frequent highly coordinated dance routines to the tune of a Hammerstein song, if we could only see past our sad, sad prejudice.

As a side note, it should also stand that gypsies are therefore single- (well, multi-, but they only function as a single entity anyway, on account of the aforementioned minority thing) handedly responsible for the development and perfection of the Aryan race, which is probably why Himmler advised keeping a few of them around for experimental breeding purposes.  They serve a vital genetic function, after all.


2. OF FOUNDLINGS. That all foundlings have a strawberry mark somewhere about their person, but necessarily in such a position that it must be hidden from all other characters until the opportune moment.  This position may vary according to the whim of the author.

From this it logically follows that:

a) If your newborn has a strawberry birthmark anywhere on his/her body, he/she is destined to be lost for several years from an age young enough that he/she will not remember you.  You may choose to barricade the house, purchase a brace of fine Dobermanns and tattoo your name and address on your infant’s back if it makes you feel better, but it will not prevent the inevitable;
b) if you lose your child, do not hope to recover him/her until he/she would be at least fifteen/sixteen years of age and in the flower of man/womanhood.  You need not, however, fear for your child: they may have been raised in poverty, or occasionally servitude, but they will be honest and upright and an example to all neighbours, and also hot;
c) after this time has passed, if you discover a person of approximately the right age possessed of a strawberry birthmark, it is vitally important that you check its location, as otherwise you are quite likely delightedly embracing someone else’s foundling (they are rather common, after all);
d) that all this could be prevented if only parents of newborns with strawberry marks had the foresight to register those marks and their positions with the National Database of Strawberry Birthmarks for the Recovery and Return of Lost Infants.

Impressions of Waller's panegyrics

Waller’s republicanism is problematic. He dresses Cromwell in royal purple, as if determined to cling to the traditional forms of heroics in reality as in poetry:

- ‘Panegyric’ is full of monarchical language, sometimes applied toCromwell and sometimes to the England he will create: the oppressedpetitioning Cromwell (29-30), England receiving the tribute of other nations’ toil (61-64), England as a lion obedient only to Cromwell (165), etc.
- ‘Liberty’ is defined as the relief of surrendering responsibility tothe “strong and yet a gentle hand” of a higher power, not the lack of interference that some fools believe it (‘Panegyric’ 1-8). The same idea recurs later, with feminised England resting in Cromwell’s arms as the world in the arms of Augustus - hardly a model republican hero (169-172)! The prominent placing and repetition of the word “One!” (124-125) emphasises (unintentionally?) the literal meaning of monarchy, while Cromwell’s “ancient line” in the same verse suggests the hereditary privilege that might fit him for it.
- Replaces the traditional populus>nobility/church>monarch>God figure with Europe>England>Cromwell>?. God not really visible, except insofar as Cromwell is occasionally given divine attributes. Wistful reference to restitution of the “well-born man” (‘Panegyric’ 126) perhaps reveals audience. He seems to write for the traditionalists doubting republicanism, himself included: he paints Cromwell in the royal image to reassure, creating a world in which nothing has really changed.
- His subsequent panegyric to Charles then feels less a change of heart than a relief, more comfortable and natural than his verses in praise of Cromwell.

His writing contains an exceptional number of surely unintentional ironies, usually at his own expense:

- Augustus isn’t a republican hero, and you extol him, while reproving Brutus for regicide? And Cromwell saves us from the evil results of regicide (‘Panegyric’ 151-156)?
- Charles might not appreciate being celebrated for his skill in raping women then accidentally killing them (‘To the King’, 33-36). Simile should really be complimentary on both levels.
- Holland is not “content” to bow before England (‘Panegyric’ 101-104), and will shortly assert this – particularly re. “bending sails”(Panegyric’ 18).
- “Man alone can, whom he conquers, spare” (‘Panegyric’ 116), unless the man is Charles I.
- You know, the sea is not traditionally described as “constant” (‘Panegyric’ 56). If Romeo had tried to swear by that instead of the moon, he would have met with exactly the same rebuke. And the sea proves inconstant in ‘To the King’ - she, having“revolted”, “trembles to think she did your foes obey” (16-17). This may be intended as an oblique apology or grovel for all that earlier panegyric for the other side, but it highlights the irony of the earlier “constancy” of the sea – and the poet.
- Quality he seems to admire most in a monarch(ical figure) is military might, which is equated with sovereignty. Despite the length of his panegyric to Cromwell, he praises little but that, other virtues being mentioned fleetingly if at all. Similarly Charles is introduced in terms that define his greatness by his power to cause injury (‘To the King’ 3-4). Cf. Dryden (eg, AM 22-25), for whom valour and piety (and beauty) are necessary corollaries to military might. With Charles more than Cromwell, Waller invokes the possibility of his power turning on his subjects, thus granting him the magnanimity of restraint. It is the traditional tension between wrath and mercy (Froissart’s Edward III and the burghers of Calais, Arthur to Rome’s
emissaries, Chaucer’s Theseus to Palamoun and Arcite), but without the necessary mediæval corollary of largesse.

Thoughts on Aphra Behn's "The Rover"

1. What does ‘libertine’ mean to Aphra Behn?
2. She has three female roles strong enough to be played by Barry, Betterton and Gwyn, and each given full scope to develop her part. Have we seen all three in one play before? What does this say about her writing?
3. Masks abound, in self-consciously ridiculous numbers. Is there a deliberate blend of stage and life?

1.

◦ Hellena is the obvious candidate for female libertine, though Angellica initially looks to fit the role better. Possibly they provide competing models? Hellena proposes to manage it enough to keep it on an acceptable  social level through discreet handling, while Angellica perhaps comes to regret her public sign, despite the wealth that results. Hellena more successfully reclaims her own role in society and the household, liberating herself not only from the conventional jealous Spanish brother and potential convent but from conventional thought and philosophy.

◦ How shall we compare Hellena to her classical namesake? Hellena takes action rather than being acted upon, as Helen is. In addition, Hellena is full of personality and repeatedly insists on defining it herself, where Helen is and always has been the empty object of men's projections.

◦ Angellica shows an admirable and comparable ability to parry wits with Willmore and articulate the opposite side of a conventional point of raillery, but seems to find herself, apparently incongruously, defending the normative married life (eg, II.ii.108-15).

◦ Florinda is more conventional in both her social aims and her inability to defend herself when put into a traditional position of female helplessness (hence her honour is more often in danger of compromise than that of the two women who care less for theirs), but does take more proactive roles than usual in pursuing her aims. For example, assuming a disguise to investigate the fidelity of one’s potential spouse is more usually a male gambit on the stage (eg, Così fan tutte).

◦ If we take Hellena to be Behn’s preferred model of the female libertine (as she seems to be), we must assume that libertinism is not just about sex, or her role could have ended in Act I Scene ii. It must, then, pertain in a particular attitude, or a freedom from any particular attitude, and/or the ability to successfully shade it into a socially acceptable lifestyle in which availability is under the woman’s control and a matter of suggestion rather than publication.

2.

◦ In Act I, Hellena deliberately and consciously toys with the conventional female roles of nun, gypsy, witch (ii.189), scold (potentially, in the first stages of her conversation with Willmore), courtly beloved (ii.213-16) and libertine – the latter primarily by denial, including the double effect of the mask. Although all of these are conventional and to some extent restrictive, Hellena’s rapid evocation of so many possibilities and her insistence on her own agency to choose or change her choice (eg, ii.204-05) simultaneously scupper the notion of a single interchangeable creature called “woman” (as Blunt would believe) and emphasise Hellena’s agency in determining her own career.

◦ Willmore draws a distinction between the mind and the beauty (body?) of a woman, admiring Angellica for one while he can “contemn” her for the other (II.ii.73-4). This immediately invites comparison with the  asked woman whose conversation he was so enamoured of in the previous act, whose beauty was the subject of verbal sallies that appeared to attract him as much as Angellica’s beauty. Does the distinction between two different models of female presentation suggest two different kinds of self-modelling? Which seems to work better?

◦ Modern romantic sensibility would suggest that Willmore would quickly tire of Angellica and return to Hellena because he loves her for her mind, but Angellica’s mind is as interesting as Hellena’s and Hellena’s face, it appears, as good as Angellica’s. Nor does Hellena offer a safely normative haven from the relationship
with a whore, given her later offer. However, the repeated concealment of the face and insistence on recognition of the mind throughout the play rather suggest it would be a disservice to Behn to attempt to read the mind/body distinction solely in one aspect of one relationship in the work, or indeed to read it only in the
context of relationships and not individuals.

3.

◦ Hellena is not above playing with the double meaning of the mask (prostitute/modest woman, allure/repel, subject/object), teasing with the allure of chastity to create the potential of seduction, consciously evoking the literal and euphemistic nunnery in calling Willmore “Father Captain” (II.243-47).

◦ Can we draw any useful contrasts between Hellena’s mask (tempting by concealing, implying chastity and riches) and Angellica’s picture (tempting by publicising, stating availability at the cost of riches)? Both increase desirability through constructing exclusivity, but from opposite sides. Angellica is a public woman, easy if you can just get the money, and Hellena costs nothing – but a few words in front of a priest. Both the mask and the picture are erected between the woman and the world at her will and in full consciousness of the  implications, and removed when the woman changes her mind.

◦ Florinda does not use her mask so consciously as Hellena and Angelica, or so effectively. She and Belvile, in fact, repeatedly fail to recognise each other’s substitution for Antonio in an honour-laden duel, and the scene that ensues, not to mention Pedro’s near rape of his own sister, question sharply the ethics of disguise. Florinda belongs to another world, the world of other Restoration Spanish plays in which the woman is a thing to be guarded and argued over. The world of masks and wits to which Hellena is aptly suited repeatedly lands her sister in danger.

◦ What does Moretta mean to call Willmore “the only Enemy to our Trade” (II.ii.181)? On the surface, courtesans, certainly; but her position alone on stage in direct conversation with the audience, the presence of so many well-known actresses in this play (all well-known and well-discussed outside the theatre as well, and
carrying the weight of audience recognition onstage with them), the play with faces and seemings and masks in Willmore and Angellica’s preceding conversation and, not least, the popular equation of theatre women with mask-wearing public women of another kind all help to break down the walls between Moretta speaking for whores and Behn/Leigh speaking for actresses. If we allow this, how do we read it? Is Willmore opposed to publication (in whatever sense of the word)? Or pretence? While possibly attracted by it (though that may be a little too Jungian)? His preference of Hellena (able to discreetly manage infidelities) over Angellica (publically unfaithful) suggests something of the former. Is this sort of attitude in men commonly encountered by women in Behn’s circles, either in the context of sexual encounters or the publication of her words in an overwhelmingly male sphere?

◦ Cf. Belvile calling Willmore “a Prince aboard his little wooden World” - well, yes, it could be an allusion to the wanderings of Charles II as Womersley would have it, but there’s a much more immediate little wooden world in which an extravagant character like Willmore shows himself a Prince. And the echo of the obvious quote from As You Like It inverts the image to suggest that perhaps this extravagance, untrustworthy and impractical and shallow as it may be, is perhaps all that is necessary to make someone appear a charismatic leader in the real world too. On the other hand, perhaps this reflects backwards on Charles, the Royal Rover. Willmore's flexibility with regards to his sex life and to the situation in which he finds himself both have strong echoes in Charles, suggesting an uncontrlled, opportunity-driven monarch, at his strongest when responding to the gusts of fortune rather than attempting to orchestrate his own fate.

Chaucer rails against the Pope

How's this for an inaugural example of an early modern use of the mediaeval?

(Image from EEBO)

Does anyone know who this Sir Geoffrey Chaucer chap is? He must be rather a brave fellow, to be writing poems about how the Pope is the Antichrist at the time when the Canterbury Tales was written. Perhaps that's why we haven't heard of him - they silenced him! Possibly for plagiarising from Langland.

He doesn't seem very subtle. The poem starts:

They mowe by lawe, as they sayne

Us curse and dampne to helle brinke

Thus they putten us to payne

With candels queynte and belles clynke

And so it continues. Harry Bailey doesn't even make a dirty pun out of "queynte".

Still, it was kind of them to set it out nice and plain for the capacity and understanding of the simpler sort of readers.

So the specifically Catholic elements of the mediaeval were, natural, evil and "dampnable"; but Chaucer remains respected enough that a) he may be cited as evidence against Catholicism (and get knighted in the process) and b) he must be saved as a literary figure worthy of respect by attributing this opinion to him (with appropriately mediaeval-reminiscent script and spelling). Let's just hope no one asked to see a manuscript of it in Adam Pinkhurst's hand.

Choices, challenges and chance in the first part of Dryden's Conquest of Granada

Imported from Mony wylsum way.

Alright, so time to 'fess up: I am studying a Restoration course this semester and am thus not always thinking about the mediaeval. So I am having non-mediaeval thoughts sometimes. Such as about The Conquest of Granada.

I like to think I'm still not a terrible person?

The first part of Dryden’s Conquest of Granada was written in a society regaining its confidence after the upheavals of the Civil Wars, the Protectorate and the Restoration. It depicts a nation besieged from without, blithely (and wrongly) confident in its own power despite strife and divisions within. However, Dryden does not focus on the city as a direct analogue for English society in the past generation. Instead he explores the human motivations behind each character’s shifts of loyalty that destabilise their society, challenging his audience to self-analysis in a way that perhaps they could not have stood five years before. Almanzor and Lyndaraxa stand out from the general confusion, not for their constancy, but for the control that they alone manage to retain over their own power of choice.

The play opens to an image of a society perfectly ordered, or perfectly controlled. Powerful men – the king and the patriarchs of the leading families – sit in luxury and discuss the day’s games, a mediaeval-style tournament of male prowess and display (under the eyes of the ladies, naturally), with some fashionable local colour in the form of Spanish bulls. As in any era, the expensive and' extravagantly organised games are a display and proof of centralised power; and naturally, as the King expects, the heroes of the establishment[1] affirm their superiority over their hypermasculine opponents. The only catch is that the audience doesn’t see it. Uninvolved in the off-stage action, the audience’s point of view is limited to that of the character-turned-narrator, who thereby asserts his control of the events and world portrayed. The spectator relies on the perceptions of the most interested parties - and their complacent view of their world is soon dispelled by the “confus’d noise within” (I.I.98) that signals the beginning of civil disorder.

The eruption of combatants onto the stage – shocking after the elegant inaction and controlled, distant violence of the preceding speeches – exposes the flaws in Boabdelin’s model of kingship. In his world view, his authority and the system that sustains it are built of rock, not of people: an independent structure that stands regardless of the differences of mere mortals. Magnificent though he may be initially in confronting the armed mobs, his words have no effect because he does not realise the possibility of his subjects having opinions and agendas of their own, nor the necessity of addressing these to resolve the cause of the conflict. To manage the passions of a nation a king must surely first acknowledge them, but the competing hatreds exchanged across him – murders, superiority of family claims, racial or religious contamination - pass by unnoticed. It is his very insistence on absolute authority rather than disputation that causes the situation to escalate, recalling Charles I’s stubborn obliviousness to the depth of the currents, until the water around his stately galleon churned visibly white. Almanzor’s challenge (“I alone am king of me” etc, I.I.206), predicated on individualised honour and choice rather than state-harnessed honour and obedience, is incomprehensible to Boabdelin, alien to his stone-built tower of a world, and consequently unanswerable.

Boabdelin’s tower, however, is soon shaken and divided by the factionalism of civil war, prompting a flurry of about-turns from almost every major character. Abdalla rebels, Abdelmelech vacillates, Boabdelin throws his lot in with just one clan of his empire, and Abenamar and Selin turn against their respective children, who both abandon filial obedience for love. Rather than let these instances simply pile up, Dryden links them with imagery of wind and water, shifting, insubstantial and helpless. Memorably, Almanzor calls Boabdelin a “weathercock of State”, who “stands so high, with so unfix’t a mind, / Two factions turn him with each blast of wind” (III.I.10-12). Abdalla applies this idea to humanity more generally when he laments the insubstantial nature of “frail reason... kick’d up in the Air / While sence weighs down the Scale”: human conscience is too easily “born away: And forc’d to count’nance its own Rebels sway” (III.I.58-63). The same imagery recurs throughout the play, undermining each individual’s attempts to explain away their decisions and changes. The effect of this is to attribute the mutability not to the direct cause of each occasion, but to basic human nature, subject to chance.

The first major defection, Abdalla’s, is also the one Dryden examines most closely, exposing his ongoing fascination with the interior reasonings of these changes. It is initiated by Lyndaraxa’s half-promise to renege on her affections for Abdelmelech, and cemented by the excuses offered him by one of Boabdelin’s strongest subjects. Abdalla’s own consciousness of the moral implications of his decision (II.I.174-253) makes him look curiously helpless. He portrays himself as “tost” like a helpless ship between “love and vertue” (II.I.184), opposing internal forces which will decide his fate for him without the possibility of his own intervention. His plea to Zulema to second his flagging honour so it might “renue the fight” (II.I.189) also seems to absolve him of any personal responsibility for his decision, and Zulema’s persuasive arguments against that honour conveniently finish the job. After the event, he shows no hesitation in laying the blame on Lyndaraxa, using the language of the scorned chivalric lover (III.I.72-74) and of chauvinistic mistrust:

This enchanted place,
Like Circe’s Isle, is peopled with a Race
Of dogs and swine, yet, though their fate I know,
I look with pleasure and am turning too. (III.I.95-98)

To cast Lyndaraxa as Circe implicitly turns Abdalla into unfortunate victim made bestial through womanly wiles, incapable of honour or conscious decision; but it also implies that all of Granada is peopled by men who cannot retain their shape, or lack the moral drive to wish to.

Abdelmelech and Abdalla are equally helpless in their inability to renounce Lyndaraxa. Despite the knowledge of her changeability, each lacks the power to choose to turn away, or to take any other path than the one down which she drives them. Abdelmelech, for example, perceives that her heart “was never fix’d, nor rooted deep in Love” (III.I.164); but, through her skilful handling, he is begging permission within twenty-five lines to pledge his own constancy to the inconstant target, while Lyndaraxa mocks him with the possibility of his own future defection (“You would be perjur’d if you should I fear”, III.I.190). By the time he presses Lyndaraxa to run away with him as “proof of love to me” (IV.II.36), the city is a mess, Almanzor has changed sides and the tides of war twice, and the audience is as conscious as Lyndaraxa of the fruitlessness of any such proof. In this world as presented, no person can be proven, and a person who trusts in such proof is left vulnerable and manipulable.

Lyndaraxa plays to reserve the moment of choice only because she is more conscious of this fact than are the men around her: she admits freely to herself that “I my self scarce my own thoughts can ghess, / So much I find ‘em varied by success” (IV.II.4-5). She speaks the unacknowledged creed of almost every other character in the play when she declares that she “will be constant yet, if Fortune can” (IV.II.7), consciously placing her own steadfastness in the power of that most fickle of deities. By contrast, each man appears to believe his current loyalty to be the only admissible possibility, leaving himself subject to Fortune’s whims.

Almanzor is an exception within this general turmoil. The difference lies not in his stability of loyalties – he is the most infamously changeable character of all – but in his consciousness of the power of his own choices. Instead of reacting to changes in Fortune, Almanzor causes them: if Boabdelin is a weathercock turned by each passing wind, Almanzor turns himself, knowing the wind will swing to follow him. Initially, Almanzor seems to stand in opposition to human fickleness. On his first appearance, he appears to provide a stable moral centre to the play, disproving the supremacy of the old regime and epitomising a new system based on personal honour and conscience. He stands up to the irrational judgements of a tyrannical king (I.I.204-231), advocates responsibility with power (I.I.218-20), notes the weakness in the current system (I.I.226-29, I.I.285-86, III.I.10-12) and offers to fix it by pinning the weathercock with his own immovable weight:

The word which I have giv’n shall stand like Fate;
...
But now he shall not veer: my word is past:
I’ll take his heart by th’roots, and hold it fast. (III.I.9-14)

With these words, the king seems but a butterfly, weak and movable: Almanzor, staunch and strong, standing for eternal principle against self-interest and factions’ advice. But Abdalla’s request immediately following unsettles this comforting impression. Remaining firm to his own individual “word”, Almanzor commits himself to the ultimate social disruption of civil war. As various characters comment, including Almanzor, from that point he takes on Fortune’s role (“I am your fortune; but am swift like her”, IV.I.30), and his actions govern the consequent reactions of the remaining characters. Almanzor is characterised not as a changeable subject to the vagaries of the Fortune’s wind, but as the agent of change, steering the fortunes of others “as winds drive storms before ‘em in the sky” (III.I.526).

The change is not in Almanzor, it should be noted, but in the audience’s growing realisation of their inability to trust any moral advocate, no matter how charismatic. The terms in which he agrees to help Abdalla (III.I.21-28), and announces to Boabdelin his intention to continue to change sides as he chooses (IV.I.54-55), are consistent with his first glorious speeches that win the stage to him. His very first line (“I cannot stay to ask which cause is best; / But this is so to me because opprest”, I.I.128-29), despite its consciousness of the arbitrary nature of any such judgement, shows a determination to retain control of the moral context of his decisions – and potentially the power to change his choice at a later date, if the first judgement should prove erroneous. By consciously assuming the power and responsibility for his shifts in loyalty, and acknowledging the possibility of Fortune changing, Almanzor reserves to himself the power of change rather than the Fortune-shaped reactions of his compatriots.

The sheer number of these human changes, once realised, makes the whole world appear mutable. The city of Granada has little concrete existence of its own. Unlike the village and houses of Sir Samuel Tuke’s The Adventures of Five Hours or the streets and rooms and islands of Thomas Shadwell’s The Libertine, the writing of Conquest evokes no firm sense of locale. Most scenes could be set indoors or outdoors, in a hall or garden or a street, or on a blank stage. The strongest scene-painting in the play is the opening description of the bullfight (I.I.1-98), an event which takes place offstage and therefore exists only in the words of its narrators. While a hypothetical set might provide some context and colour, its effect is little next to the spoken word: the theatre’s lack of a cohesive authorial voice ensures that in most plays the characters and their words are the world. Juliet’s orchard is vividly alive, regardless of staging choices. But Granada, as a city, is barely there: she has her only substance in the minds of her inhabitants, and she is soon forgotten. As a society, she is only as substantial as a group illusion. In the first act, by questioning certain fundamental issues of social organisation - the proper nature of government and kingship (I.I.194-288), the right to inheritance and title (I.I.292-346) – Dryden destabilises the social structure binding the individual characters together. With these things recognised as insubstantial, the characters themselves are left to hold their world together unassisted. As each wanders off whithersoever he (or potentially she) would, the whole of social structure becomes illusory.

Despite the gloominess of such a point of view, the final vision, for its first audience, need not have been so bleak. For those who made the comparison between the events in Granada and the storms of the last generation, there remains sufficient distance in Dryden’s writing that they need not have assumed Granada’s downfall was England’s. There is no consistent parallel between any character in the play and any on England’s recent political stage, though there are occasional passing similarities. Granada’s character is sufficiently foreign, especially with the real Christians hovering at the gates, that the audience could be in no danger of identifying themselves completely with the Moors who comprise her population. Dryden challenges his audience to consider the nature, causes and moral implications of the changes humans make under pressure, but England is not Granada. England has come through the wars, is not doomed, and can consider these questions in retrospect, without the danger being pulled to pieces from within.

-------------

[1] Almanzor, the triumphant stranger, is potentially a threat, and will so prove; but at this point the speakers claim him as their hero, the epitome of those qualities that they treasure in the world their words create. Though Abenamar recognises him as "more than man" (I.I.48), he appears to consider it only a matter of degree: the challenge implicit in this difference is not recognised.

Conan Doyle exorcises the Restoration

Imported from Mony wylsum way.

I’m half-TAing for three classes, one of which is on the genre of the mystery novel.  Unsurprisingly, it contains The Hound of the Baskervilles.  In fact, I’ve a bundle of essays in my bag beside me on the bus right now on how The Hound is both Gothic and anti-Gothic.  The basic intent of the set question is that the story contains Gothic elements and creates an atmosphere highly suggestive of the supernatural, cashing in on the thrill inherent in that genre, but has it both ways in that cold science and human agency carry the day. But I attended the lecture just now, and found myself questioning what Gothic actually means in this context.

The prof taking the course highlighted certain elements in the story that he regards as particularly Gothic – the emphasis laid on the age of Baskerville Hall (at one point he called it mediaeval), the animal savagery  in the face of Selden (the convict hiding up on the moors) – without explaining just what made them Gothic in the society in which Conan Doyle was writing.  The age of Baskerville Hall – its decrepitude? Suggestions of a dark past? The (probably figurative) ghosts of past ages of who-knows-what morality? The fact that the sheer size of the house (temporally as well as spatially) suggests ominous and unknowable secrets? What was it in the figure of Selden that would give the average reading Victorian a frisson?  Both, I think, are linked in the story that initiates the drama, the 18th century manuscript telling a story of the 17th, the story of Sir Hugo Baskerville.

The prof in question pointed, again, to certain aspects of this story as Gothic, and again I would have preferred to shift his emphasis.  He spoke of Hugo Baskerville as the Gothic villain because, as a lord of the manor, he ought to take a paternal attitude towards his dependants and he fails rather spectacularly in this.  He also pointed out the final vision of the hellhound lifting its bloodied jaws from Hugo’s throat, and the horror of his erstwhile companions.  Now, I certainly wouldn’t dispute that a Gothic story needs a good old bad-to-the-bone villain who epitomises the worst of humanity, or even something beyond the human, and also a good shock of gore.  But ingredient don’t make atmosphere; and for me the Victorian terror lies elsewhere.  The strongest Gothic moment in that tale-within-a-tale, so far as I’m concerned, is the moment when Hugo Baskerville rides off ahead of his companions into the dark on the moor, surrounded by his dogs, baying for the blood of his hapless (female, naturally) victim.  There we have simultaneously the moment when human darkness turns over completely to the diabolical, and the terror of the darkness and the unknown in the dark, of what is happening ahead on the moors, until that moment of shock and revelation when the hound raises its head.  And Hugo?  Well – he’s set very precisely in historical time.  He’s a Restoration libertine. 

The libertinism of the Restoration, of course, was looked back on with varying degrees of romanticism and dutifully appalled fascination by later generations.  Filtered through Conan Doyle’s eyes, the Restoration (in the person of Hugo Baskerville) stands in for the darkest and cruellest in English history, a time of the most shocking and unmentionable drunken depravities known to man (or fiend)[1].  The age of the house is partly sinister because it provides a link to the deeds of this man, the ethos of this time, in the vast and unsettling halls that swallow you up in visions of old carousing and predation, the darkness beneath the surface.  And there we have Selden – the animal in man, the werewolf, the vampire, the monster hidden under the veneer of civilisation that Hugo Baskerville became when he consigned his soul and body to the devil if he might only overtake the girl, clapped his spurs to his horse and sped off with his hounds.  The modern villain of the novel, Stapleton, is associated through his own actions with both the devil-invocation and uncontained sexuality of Conan Doyle’s libertine era.  In creating the devil dog, he consciously calls up the “devil” to do his work, just as did his ancestor Hugo[2], and his adultery and exploitation of the two women in his life turns them both into interchangeable victims (though not so helpless as the nameless damsel).   Plus there’s the tiny issue of gruesome murder, of course.

The Gothic need not recall the Restoration in its every occurrence, of course, but I think it’s fair to say that in Hound of the Baskervilles Conan Doyle does relate it to a time period and corresponding (perceived) historical mindset.  As such, it turns into a metaphor for the terrors within, the supernatural and diabolical that give rise to the werewolf but are always ultimately human. Holmes defeats these elements of the story and proves them false by the powers of Reason and Science and Logic – the thinking man’s triumph over the savage.

There we are – I have convinced myself.   

I don’t say this in criticism of the prof in question.  This is all, after all, beyond the scope of the lecture.  But certain of his statements and omissions started me thinking – and that’s certainly something to thank him for!

 

[1] Which just goes to show how sex-obsessed the Victorians really were, because only part of the libertine movement was about sex.  A large part of it was about freedom of religion, too, while Conan Doyle’s vision completely excludes the divine and is scrabbled over by greedy fingers of the devil.

[2] Though with differences, necessitated by the physicality of the events in the real world.  Both men intend to run their victims to death, probably by setting their dog(s) on them – in Hugo’s case his real dogs never get a look-in, as something far scarier than them comes along. Both the damsel and Sir Charles Baskerville die of fright after fleeing their pursuer, rather than being mauled.  And Hugo calls on the devil to help him catch the damsel, while Stapleton builds his own faux devil, and presumably, in doing so, gives the real one his soul once his body is sucked down into the mire (devoured by his master below!).

Dryden his Tale of the Wyf of Bathe

Imported from Mony wylsum way.

Only one of my courses for this semester is mediaeval: the other is as close as I can get, restoration literature. Which means I actually have to read up and remember what the Rump Parliament did and memorise a new set of names and motivations and get a feel for the time and develop an opinion on Cromwell's motives and, far from least, read a lot of new work by people like Dryden, Pope, Milton, Marvell, Sidney and a certain Earl of Ill-repute.

The only text I've actually acquired so far is not the stipulated edition of Dryden's poems (ed. Hammond and Hopkins), but a much prettier one, which is a very important consideration, the Globe edition published in 1881 by W. D. Christie, still with beautifully tight binding, and containing a lengthy and very Victorian account of his life, complete with repeated assurances that he was a very discerning man because he liked Shakespeare when no one else of his era bothered with him, and repeated moralising judgements on his lifestyle and relationship with his wife. It pleases me very much.

What pleased me more, of course, was the discovery that he had 'translated' some of Chaucer's poems from the Canterbury Tales. So of course I was immediately distracted from questions like "which of these poems are we likely to be studying this semester" to questions like "ooo, what does he do with this line or that line in the tale of madame de Bath?"

The answer tends to be that the actual lines stay the same, but the setting and connotations shift - sometimes quite a way.

For example, he takes Chaucer's 'fairyland' introduction and makes something sanitised and pretty of it, with some very Shakespearean fairies:

The king of elves and little fairy queen

Gambolled on heaths, and danced in every green;

And where the jolly troop had led the round,

The grass unbidden rose, and marked the ground.

Nor darkling did they dance; the silver light

Of Phoebe served to guide their steps aright,

And, with their tripping pleased, prolonged the night. (3-9)

Compare this to Chaucer's simple

Al was this land / fulfild of ffairye
The Elf queene / with hir ioly compaignye
Daunced ful ofte / in many a grene mede [1] (3-5)

Dryden then casts this into nostalgia in returning to the present day:

I speak of ancient times, for now the swain
Returning late may pass the woods in vain,
And never hope to see the nightly train. (16-18)

Despite Chaucer’s “ ther as wont/ to walken was an Elf / Ther walketh now...” form (17-18), he has no palpable sense of loss or regret. He remains more matter-of-fact, stating that one existed and the other exists, while Dryden repeats “in vain” three times in six lines (17-22) and depicts milkmaids[2] sighing over uneaten cream left out for the little folk. Interestingly, the effect of this is resentment against the priests and friars, which translates nicely into an anti-papist sentiment that is, naturally, missing in poor Chaucer’s original.

The other interesting thing in this introduction is the depiction of these little country rituals relating to the fairies:

In vain the dairy now with mints is dress'd,
The dairymaid expects no fairy guest,
To skim the bowls, and after pay the feast.
She sighs and shakes her empty shoes in vain,
No silver penny to reward her pain. (19-23)

I didn’t know about the mints, or that the fairies were meant to leave payment in your shoe (conflation with the fairy cobbler idea?). Perhaps the lack of fairies in Britain today can be directly attributed to the lack of mints.



[1] Sadly, I lack my Riverside, so quotes from the Tale come from a transcript of the Hengwrt manuscript, because that's more fun to read.
[2] Does the pastoral count as idealistic nostalgic in itself at this point? If Shakespeare was any indication, I’d guess so. Civet is of a baser birth than tar, after all!

Chaucer and Mozart: Twin souls!

Imported from Mony wylsum way.

Alright, so the last post wasn't really mediaeval in subject. Neither is this one - but it has a mediaeval connection, in that I leap-frog from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Mozart along a common thread. Never mind that each leap is 200 years long.

I was chatting to a cellist friend, who's staying in this house while rehearsing for an audition for the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. She mentioned that she'd like to get to know the operatic repertoire a little better, and... well, it ended up with me having one of my besotted little raves about the three Mozart/da Ponte operas, particularly my favourite, Così fan tutte.

For those who don't know it - well, it's easy to summarise. Remarkably easy, for an opera. One of the reasons I love it is for its beautiful structure - it has a lovely symmetry, both musically and dramatically, which makes it a joy to listen to and gives it the perfect action curve for a theatrical piece. There are six characters - three women, three men (two sopranos, one mezzo, one tenor, two basses - symmetry!), consisting of two pairs of lovers, their older male friend (Don Alfonso) and a ladies' maid, Despina. Don Alfonso makes a bet with the headstrong, enthusiastic young men that, despite their passionate belief in their lovers' fidelity, no woman can possibly remain faithful. They're not made for fidelity, and so "così fan tutte" - all women behave like that. To prove the women's fidelity, the younger men agree to pretend to go off to war, then to dress as foreigners and each attempt to win the fiancee of the other man. Eventually, it works; a wedding feast is prepared, and in the middle of it the men slip off and return in their own persons to upbraid their erstwhile fiancees for unfaithfulness.

A two-sentence summary like that is a little misleading. The young men (Guglielmo and Ferrando) take most of the active verbs, reducing Don Alfonso's role to the initial bet, their lovers' to passive ciphers, and leaving the maid Despina out altogether. But Don Alfonso and Despina in fact run the whole affair - Alfonso is the puppet master from start to finish, and lets Despina think she is one too, though he doesn't let her in on the whole affair and she is, by the end, reduced to humiliation with her mistresses. Despina also provides an important thematic counterpoint, in that she tries to urge the women on to love, asserting feminine independence from men and their ability to choose their own path (while Alfonso maintains they have no choice but to fall), and pointing out repeatedly that men are just as unfaithful as women, if not more so. The summary, however, is not misleading in one thing: the two noblewomen (Fiordiligi and Dorabella) are passive. But to what degree, and just how - this is the critical problem!

Whenever I explain Così to anyone, I usually find myself excusing it. Don Alfonso is proved right - women are like that - so it can come across as horribly misogynistic. Its performance history has suffered from that - I believe in the nineteenth century it was rewritten to have Despina reveal the secret to her ladies early on, so that they are only playing along for most of the second act, and turn the tables on the men in the final scene. But you see, knowing the opera, and knowing (to a certain extent) Mozart and his librettist da Ponte... I can't believe that we are meant to watch it so superficially. If it were a work of non-operatic literature, no one would believe that was the intent. Perhaps operatic audiences are just too used to having morals on the surface, simple but very loud answers, tragic or comic. If the point of the opera were simply "ha, see how faithless women are!" we would be laughing at them by the end. But we aren't - the level of sympathy and the psychological depth in the music of the women - particularly in the second act, when they feel themselves beginning to give way - are such that we increasingly rebel against Don Alfonso's instructions - just as the young men are becoming too drawn in to back out. We can't lay blame easily - the women are played on, Despina is just going along with her cheerful philosophy of 'do unto men as they do unto us', the young men pledged their honour as soldiers to obey Don Alfonso's instructions for 24 hours in the blithe confidence that they would win the bet easily, and Alfonso - well, the indignant lads forced him to promise to prove his assertion, at swordpoint. Over breakfast! And the final scene is heartbreaking. They have to marry - there's no other way forward, no other way to end the opera and insist that it is a comedy, Alfonso and social expectation and genre constrain them, but the music... how on earth are these couples going to ever trust each other, or anyone else, ever again?

It's generally believed that the opera was commissioned - Lorenzo da Ponte and Mozart did not have the freedom to choose their plot, could not decide that the women would remain faithful and disprove the adage, but they could choose how they treated it: spreading the blame, exposing the cruelty to all parties involved of the situation, the plot, the actions of the characters that weren't meant to be cruel, that were all a bit of fun until... And suddenly, as I was explaining this, I realised that this line of argument was familiar - not just from my own previous rants about the opera, but from much more recently:

For which right now myn herte ginneth blede,
And now my penne, allas! With which I wryte,
Quaketh for drede of that I moot endyte.
For how Criseyde Troilus forsook,
Or at the leste, how that she was unkinde,
Mot hennes-forth ben matere of my book,
As wryten folk through which it is in minde.
Allas! That they sholde ever cause finde
To speke hir harm... (Troilus and Criseyde, IV.12-20)

And:

Ne me ne list this sely womman chyde
Ferther than the story wol devyse.
Hir name, allas! Is publisshed so wyde,
That for hir gilt it oughte y-noe suffyse.
And if I mighte excuse hir any wyse,
For she so sory was for hir untrouthe,
Y-wis, I wolde excuse hir yet for routhe. (V.1093-1099)

And so on. Chaucer's uneasiness with Criseyde's fidelity is well-known, of course, and there's little point quoting more of it. But the attitude in both cases seems to me very similar. The essential difference, I think, is the necessary lack of authorial presence in a stage production. But is it necessary? Not really. It's easy enough to add an authoritative moral presence - either through a consistent moral message that's easily detectable (often put in the mouth of the chorus), or physically, in the form of a character whose opinions are meant to be taken as sound judgement (and who is usually, in opera, disregarded, otherwise the tragic ending might be tragically averted). And then, of course, there's the even simpler expedient of sticking to plots that completely fail to challenge the audience's judgement at all and go for their effect by either tickling or punching in the belly. This is the majority of opera.[1]

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that disrupting the easy moral closure of any theatrical piece requires conscious effort on the part of the composer/playwright. Well, either that or extreme carelessness. Which brings us to our convenient midway point, he who made a theatrical piece out of Troilus and Criseyde, he who was the expert at avoiding giving us any hint of his real voice: William Shakespeare.

But even for Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida is remarkably unstable in terms of a moral base. The introduction to the play in the Norton Shakespeare[2] details admirably the competing codes for evaluating actions and events that are thrown at us in a dizzying array within just the first few scenes of the play. Those of them that do recur are never finally resolved, unless it is to be proved insufficient. The only character who might be seen as finally admirable is Hector, and his code is, finally, not sufficient either: we see him abandon it for the sake of glory when he agrees to sell away Criseyde so that he can have his duel with Achilles, and his adherence to it in the end deprives Troy of its greatest protector, Priam of his son, Andromache of her husband, his son of a father, his city of a future. Nothing that is presented to us in the course of the play suffices to judge it: they are all proved limited points of view, belonging only to the characters that speak them, incapable of comprehending the whole world. The scene that brings this most sharply into focus is quite near the end: the scene in which Criseyde, in the Greek camp, finally gives herself to Diomedes. She and he talk in the centre; she comments on her own actions; Troilus and Ulysses watch and comment on that scene; Thersites watches actors and watchers, commenting on all of them; and the audience sees them all. The instability and limitation of every judgement passed onstage is witnessed by the final set of watchers, putting them in a privileged position and inviting them to judge for themselves, but demonstrating in the process the limitations of any judgement at all.

So why the distancing? why the instability? Is Shakespeare disassociating himself from the story, drawing back as Chaucer the narrator does? I don't think so - at least, not in the same way. But certainly, to focus specifically on the question of harsh judgement on the fickle woman - it would be much harder to ascribe any comments passed about her in the play to Shakespeare himself than it is to, for example, imagine him agreeing with the final dismissal of Don John as a villain in Much Ado About Nothing. His attitude to Cressida, so far as it can be detected (which is barely at all) doesn't seem to me very similar to the attitudes of Chaucer and Mozart/da Ponte to their unfaithful women; but there may be a thread of connection there.

Mozart and da Ponte don't dissociate themselves to nearly the same extent. Neither have a narrative "I" to intrude into the theatre - but Mozart was literally in the theatre, remember, dominating the performance in a way that Shakespeare couldn't, even as an actor. As a conductor, he led it, and as composer... well. He gives it a soul which is much easier to trace, to feel, than grasping through printers' errors and actors' amendments for Shakespeare's meanings. The warmth and tenderness in his music, the wit and the humanity and the delicate distinctions in the reactions of parallel characters in identical situations... they are human, where they could so very easily remain ciphers to the plot, as the women seem determined to remain ciphers to social constructions.

... And now I think of it, there are a remarkable number of eavesdropping/spying scenes in the opera too - especially in the second act, where the seduction starts to take effect, and the characters start to obsessively analyse their own actions and feelings, as well as those of the others onstage.

That was entirely too long a post, wasn't it. If anyone read to the end - well done!

I did mention Mozart makes me rave besottedly, right?


[1] As a former singer who adores opera, I have licence to say so, just as I'm allowed by virtue of nationality to poke fun at Steve Irwin's accent.

[2] I don't remember who wrote it, and my Norton is in Melbourne and I am in Adelaide. This will have to do for a citation for now.

Papist, Protestant or Puritan?

Imported from Mony wylsum way.

This quote started me musing:

"The word Puritan is an essential engine [of the attempt to push English religion towards conformation with Rome] ... For this word in the mouth of a drunkard doth mean a sober man, in the mouth of an Arminian, an Orthodox man, in the mouth of a papist, a Protestant. And so it is spoke to shame a man out of all religion, if a man be ashamed to be saved."
Francis Rous, in an address to the Short Parliament of 1640.[1]

We all know words like this, of course - words whose precise meaning is inexact, but whose employment would make anyone scurry to be on the opposite side. Vague enough to mean whatever you want it to mean, you just know that you don't want to identify yourself as one. Very useful in times of national stress, these words are often used to create a sense of 'other' to define a more cohesive 'us' - or, of course, to isolate rivals in the school playground. The word 'Puritan' was (almost) always applied to someone else, some other group - either to define a general, non-specific group against whom we can identify us, or to villify a specific person or challenge that needed to be discredited or attacked.

But wasn't this exactly what 'papist' was used for in the century leading up to the civil war? How do you discard an entire belief system at once? You don't, of course - you cling to some parts of it and gradually work out which bits you want to maintain, as a community - but you don't work as a community, you work as a set of individuals, pulled back and forth by individual preferences and the cacophany of different voices and conflicting systems flying about the place from different parts of Europe. And the printing press, of course, increased exponentially the number of voices that could be heard. So if a country is coming gradually to define our kind of Protestantism, it has to do so while taking all these voices into account, choosing which to listen to. And there is virulent argument, of course, and a word like 'papist' can be applied to whatever you choose to associate with the wrong-headed old way of doing things - vestments, ceremony, ideas about methods of salvation, or, if you're so inclined, anything that does not conform with the most strict ideas of predestination. Your path is defined by away - true godliness is to move away from papism, rather than any clear towards.

But you can only go in one direction for so long. No one wants to live absolutely without ceremony or tradition (certainly not Charles I), and eventually you do need some kind of power hierarchy in the church. And you will never persuade an entire population to live permanently in a state of personal ethical purity, rather than just going along to the ceremony once a week and living fairly normally the rest of the time. So you set up a limit in that direction too - the Puritan, an idea to be regarded with almost as much revulsion as the papist. Perhaps more - after all, at least initially, it's closer to home, and you run more risk of attracting the same accusation yourself, until you work out just what it is and move away from that label too.

And now your identity rests somewhere in between, defining yourself as definitely-not-Puritan and definitely-not-papist as the need arises, and applying the closest word to anything inappropriate that comes along which you ferociously do not want to be us.


[1] Esther S. Cope and Willson H. Coates (eds), Proceedings of the Short Parliament of 1640, Camden 4th series 19 (London 1977), 147. Cited in Michael Braddick, God's fury, England's fire: A new history of the civil wars (London: Penguin, 2008), 49.