PETER BARNES AND THE NATURE OF AUTHORITY Liorah Anrie G o l o m b A thesis subnitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Centre for Study of D r a r n a in the University of Toronto @copyright by Liorah Anne Golomb 1998 National Library Bibliothèque nationale du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliograp hic Services services bibliagrap hiques 395 Wellington Street 395, nie Wellington OttawaON K 1 A W Ottawa ON K1A ON4 Canada Canada The author has granted a non- exclusive licence allowing the National Libmy of Canada to reproduce, loaq distriiute or sell copies of this thesis in microfonn, paper or electronic formats. L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive permettant à fa Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduire, prêter, distri'buer ou vendre des copies de cette thèse sous la forme de microfiche/film, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format électronique. The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts fkom it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. PETER BARNES AND THE NATURE OF AUTHORITY Liorah Anne Golomb Doctor of Philosophy, 1998 Graduate Centre for Study of Drama University of Toronto Peter Barnes, among the most theatrically-minded playwrights of the non-musical stage in England today, makes use of virtually every elernent of theatre: spectacle, music, dance, heightened speech, etc- He is daring, ambitious, and not always successful. While he obviously does not share the staging sensibilities of Renaissance playwrights, Barnes does share their perspectives on authority. He writes predominantly about the outward self and the private self, the significance of representation and the power of public display, corruption and innocence, order and chaos. 1 explore such questions as what attraction these themes hold £or Barnes, what connections exist (economically, socially, and politically) between Renaissance and post-industrialized England, and how Barnes and his Renaissance mentors use their work as cultural barometers and/or forecasters. But Barnes is still a modern playwright, and the discussion is not limited to his connection to the Jacobeans- I have identified five subthemes into which his plays fall. The first chapter, dealing with The Rulins Class and The Bewitched, is concerned with the continuity and preservation of the status quo through inherited power, even though it is decayed, corrupt, and anachronistic. The next chapter features two simple, unambitious priests, Father Flote in R e d Noses and Father Morrone in Sunsets and Glories, who reluctantly accept positions of authority; paradoxically, empowerment cornes £rom rejecting power. In Chapter 3, featuring Leonardors Last Sup~er and Clap H a n d s H e r e Cornes Charlie, we find that authority is not necessarily held by the strong, wealthy, or educated, and we see how some members of the underclass react to sudden empowerment- The construction of a persona1 identity, which would seem to be the one act over which we have inviolable control, is threatened when characters meet their likenesses in the four one-act plays discussed in Chapter 4: Noonday Demons, The Real Lons John Silver, Nobodv Here But Us Chickens, and The Three Visions. Chapter 5 compares two kinds of tyranny, autocratic and bureaucratic, in Laucrhter!. And in the concluding pages we glimpse at another, surprisingly uncynical , side of Peter Barnes as exhibited in one of his more recent plays, Heavenfs Blessinqs. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION - - . - - . . . . - - . . - - . . . , , . . . C W T E R 1: K e e p i n g A u t h o r i t y i n the Farnily: The R u l i n s C l a s s and The Bewitched . . . . 8 CHAPTER 2 : Inriocence i n Charge: R e d Noses and Sunsets and G l o r i e s . . . . - - - - . . - 56 CHAPTER 3 : The Bite of t h e U n d e r d o g : C l a ~ H a n d s Here Cornes Charlie and Leonardofs L a s t Surmer - . . - . . . . . . . 109 CHAPTER 4: The C r i s i s of Identity and t h e Double: N o o n d a v D e m o n s , The Real L o n s John Silver, Nobodv H e r e B u t U s C h i c k e n s , and The Three Visions . . . . - . . . . - . - 151 CHAPTER Power P e r f e c t e d : L a u s h t e r ! CONCLUSION: Things Are Looking U p : H e a v e n ' s B l e s s i n a s - . - - . - - . . . - . . 231 W O R K S C I T E D . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245 INTRODUCTION Sorne are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em. Twelfth N i q h t 1I.v-145-46 During the past £ive or six years, whenev~r I have been asked the subject of my thesis by anyone who doesn't have an unusual interest in contemporary playwrights, the answer "Peter BarnesI1 elicits a blank look- sometimes there is some faint recognition of The Rulins Class, Bames's first theatrical success ( 5 t was done into a movie with Peter OfToo1e"), and sometimes someone has seen an amateur production of Red N o s e s . Since 1993, the mention of his Academy Award nomination for the screenplay adaptation of Elizabeth Von Arnim's novel, Enchanted A~ril, gets a relieved smile - which disappears when 1 inform the person that screenplay adaptations are Barnes's hack work, and his original work is much different. Besides, he didnrt win. That is the reaction to my subject's m e r e name. When I've stated my thesis to be about "Peter Barnes, a living English playwright, and his psycho-socio-economic-political connection to the Elizabethan-Jacobean mindset (as we understand it)," 1 am looked upon with profound suspicion. Peter Barnes is almost better known for his obscurity than for his plays. His lack of recognition is brought up in nearly every interview he has given and in much of the small body of criticism on his work. You can count on one hand the number of surveys of contemporary British theatre or theatre generally that include him.' His dramaturgy puts him at a disadvantage: his language is lavish; his staging, spectacular; his settings are as broad as the history of the world. He is daring, ambitious, and not always successful. Barnes gives us magnitude (of theme, character, costume, idea) at a time when Britainfs playwrights have largely focused on the minutiae of the ordinary lives of ordinary characters, from aison Porter's ironing in 1956 to Kyra Hoiiis's preparation of a spaghetti dimer in 1995.~ "One of my tasks, Bames has said, has been to try and get us back to the days when the audience went into the theatre not to get a slice of life, which they get anpay (and they don't have to pay for it) but to get something extra. If there is any rnotto 1 have over my desk it is the one word MORE. 1 want more of everything. More of comedy, more of drama, more of tragedy, more of parody, more of music, more, more, more, more. Not less, less, less . His work demands, and gets, highly skilled actors and directors, but often, the pieces cal1 for production values found today only on the musical stage: complicated lighting, reverberating sound, and deep wings and high fly space to accommodate huge set pieces. Phantom of the O~era has its chandelier; The Bewitched has its eight-foot-long phallus. Unfortunately, a play by Peter Barnes does not generate the revenue of an enterprise like Phantom, and more, more, more also costs more, more, more. Needless to Say, he is seldom produced . 3 Considering his appreciation of and frequent reliance on the visual elements of the stage, it rnay seem odd that the theatre Barnes most admires is that of the Elizabethan and Jacobean public playhouse. One draw is the language; he has often declared his admiration for the writing of early modern England, and he acknowledges being inspired it. Good work has been done on the origins and functions of Barnesfs peculiar neologisms, unexpected metaphors, and kenning14 so there is no need to focus on them here except to let the reader know that what may look like the result of my having fallen asleep over the keyboard is likely to be an accurate quote. Rather than scour for any technical or stylistic affinities Barnes rnay have with his Renaissance predecessors, 1 examine his work chiefly in tenns of the various ways in which it reflects his one overriding concern: the nature of authority. This aspect of Barnes's oeuvre is illuminated in part by linking it to the thematic and sociopolitical preoccupations of the Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights and in making this link, 1 explore such questions as what attraction Renaissance themes hold for Barnes, how he appropriates them, what connections exist (economically, socially, and politically) between Renaissance and post- industrialized England, and how B a r n e s and his Renaissance mentors use their work as cultural barometers and/or forecasters. 4 For Barnes, the world turns on the constant shifting of power. Every relationship, from the one w e have with ourselves to how we fit into the world power structure, is based on authority - who has it, how to get it, how to keep it, how to get rid of it, how to avoid being the victim of it. Like the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, Barnes mites predominantly about the transfer of authority, the outward self and the private self, the significance of representation and the power of public display, corruption and innocence, order and chaos. His characters succeed according to how well they understand the basic immutable elements of human nature: people are self-senring, as we see in Leonardor s Last Sup~er; we are cowards, unwilling to take risks to help one another, as Auschwitz shows us; when we do help our less fortunate brothers we are repaid with ingratitude, as Aylmer is in Cla~ Hands Here Cornes Charlie; in The Rulins Class we find that when love is offered, we reject it; and when we are given a chance to be independent and responsible, as in The Bewitched, we beg to be ruled. But although he is steeped in the Renaissance, Bames should not be seen as a Renaissance playwright out of his time; he is a modern playwright writing on modem themes, and doing so with a Briton's-eye view. He can be compared to his contemporaries Pinter and Hare in his fascination with the psychology of power or to Churchill, Bond, Brenton, or Barker in his liberal use of history to highlight modem inequities of class and gender structure. We should also take care not to collapse the four centuries between the reign of Elizabeth and the Conservative govemment of Ted ~eath.' Barnes owes a stylistic debt not only to his theatrical idol, Ben Jonson, but to Wilde, Sheridan, Shaw, Monty Python's Flying Circus, popular music, Broadway shows, even advertising. He is by no means immured in the 17th century- Instead of taking a chronological approach to Barnes's dramaturgy, 1 have identified five subthemes into which his plays fall, and devoted a chapter to each. The first chapter, dealing with The Rulins Class and The Bewitched, is concerned with the continuity and preservation of the status quo through inherited power, even though it is decayed, corrupt, and anachronistic. The next chapter features two simple, unambitious priests, Father Flote in Red Noses and Father Morrone in Sunsets and Glories, who reluctantly accept positions of authority; paradoxically, empowerment comes £rom rejecting power. In Chapter 3, featuring Leonardofs Last Supper and Clap Hands Here Cornes Charlie, we find that authority is not necessarily held by the strong, wealthy, or educated, and we see how some members of the underclass xeact to sudden empowerment. The construction of a persona1 identity, which would seem to be the one act over which we have inviolable control, is threatened when characters meet their likenesses in the four one-act plays discussed in Chapter 4: Noondav Demons, The Real Loncr John Silver, Nobodv 6 Here But Us Chickens, and The Three Visions. Chapter 5 compares two kinds of tyranny, autocratic and bureaucratic, in Lauqhter!, doubtless Barnes's most controversial play on several levels. And in the concluding pages we glimpse at another, surprisingly uncynical, side of Peter Barnes as exhibited in one of his more recent plays, Heavenrs Blessinss. Barnes is an inveterate researcher and 1 have followed him (and detoured) down many avenues beyond the realm of theatre studies. My sources have included material by or about 16th century sociology, 20th century psychology, the womanfs movement, the music hall, Leonardo da Vinci, Ivan the Terrible, Elizabeth 1, James 1, Charlie Chaplin, Margaret Thatcher, the Black Plague, gender issues, Ingmar Bergman, and Me1 Brooks. 1 have tried not to conflate real figures from history with Barnesrs versions of them and ultimately, the "realU figure isn't the one that matters - though as a point of interest, each time 1 thought that something was too bizarre to be real, it turned out to have corne £rom an actual historical account. Al1 things are possible, including, one supposes, the more frequent production of Peter Barnes's plays . ENDNOTES - INTRODUCTION 1. The only ones I ' m aware of that are written in English are Martin Banham, ed., The Cambridse Guide to the Theatre, rev. ed. (Cambridge UP, 1992) ; Richard Allen Cave, New British Drama in Performance on the London Stase: 1970- 1985 (Gerrards Cross, Bucks.: Colin Smythe, 1987) ; Ruby Cohn, Retreats from Reaiism in Recent Enslish Drama (Cambridge UP, 1991); Christopher Innes, Modern British Drama 1890-1990 (Cambridge U P , 1992) ; and Harold Hobson (who called The Bewitched "one of the most important plays of the modem generationIf [203]), Theatre in Britain: A Persona1 View ( O x f o r d : Phaidon Press, 1 9 8 4 ) . 2. In John Osborne's Look Back in Ancrer and David Hare's Skvlisht, respectively. 3 - Peter Barnes, Veter Barnes and the Theatre of Disturbance,I1 interview with Yvonne Shafer, Theatre News 14:9 (1982) 8. 4. William McLaughlin devotes a chapter of his dissertation on Barnes to his use of laquage. vrScotsmen i n Hobnail Boots': an analysis of the original works of Peter Barnes," diss., U. of Pittsburgh, 1987. Bernard Dukore also looks at Barnes's unique linguistic style and how it operates in both The Theatre of Peter B a r n e s (London: Heinemann, 1981) and Bamestorm: The Plavs of Peter Barnes (New Y o r k : Garland Publishing, 1995). 5. At the time of this writing, the Labour party is in power with Tony Blair at its head. However, the latest of the Barnes plays discussed in this thesis was writton while Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister. Keeping Authority in the Family: The Rulins C l a ç s and The Bewitched One of the most distinct ways in which the dramaturgy of Peter Barnes stands apart from that of his contemporaries is in his treatrnent of the family. When a twentieth-century play puts a family on stage, its m e m b e r s are generally bound to the unit by some intangible yet inescapable quality: shared characteristics, genetics, Freudian complexes, ancestral sins.' Determining the cause is beyond the scope of this work; what matters is that the individual, with no material need to remain connected to his people, finds that he is somehow indissolubly linked to them. Alison Porter is driven back to her parents in Osborne's Look Back in Ancrer (1956) not because she cannot adjust to reduced f inancial circumstances but because her llloyalty,tl a quality Jimmy Porter values above all, is divided between her husband and her family. In Pinter's The Homecominq (1965), Ted is drawn back to his working class family, held together it seems only by the constant struggle for domination, from which he has removed himself both geographically and socially. That both Alison and Ted ultirnately leave the parental family a second time does not lessen the strength of the pull which made them return to it. Isobel the graphic artist and Marion the Tory junior minister, sisters in David Hare's The 9 Secret Ra~ture (1989), share neither values, lifestyles, nor common memories of their father; Marion cheats Isobel in a business deal with no sense of sibling allegiance; and yet Isobelrs attempt to escape her family fails when she realizes its futility. And in Cary1 Churchill's Cloud Nine (i980), double casting, in addition to what it says about sexual relationships and the construction of gender, literally causes members of the family to become one another. Ibsen had explored this terrain in 1881 in Ghosts for example, and later, in the United States, OrNeill made much of this bond in works such as Lons Davrs Journev into Niaht (1940) and Mouminq Becomes Electra (1931), his version of the Oresteia. But in the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic tradition, although emotional familial bonding and the assumption of inherited behaviour are rarely entirely absent, they are f requently (to our minds, uncornf ortably) intertwined with extragenetic concerns over estate, lineage, power, position, or duty. While Lawrence Stone's contention that real parents in Early Modern England w e r e less attached to their offspring than those of today has been debatedf2 in the drama at least there is a lessened sense of either an affective or a metaphysical attachment, or else this attachrnent is made to connect with worldly goods. The in every You Like 10 ambiguous nature of family relationships is evident genre of Shakespeare's plays. While Orlando in Aç 1t3 feels that Inthe spirit of my father, which 1 - think is within me, begins to mutiny against this senrituden 1 - 2 - 2 3 , it is equally true that the servitude under which he labours is at the hands of his brother, who exercises control by virtue of primogeniture. In 1 Henrv VI, Talbot offers several reasons in trying to dissuade his son from entering the battle against the French: In thee thy rnother dies,4 our household's name, My deathts-revenge, thy youth, and England's fame: Al1 these and more we hazard by thy stay; AI1 these are savfd if thou wilt fly away. (IV-vi.38-41) The natural Eear of a father for his son's life, here expressed, if at all, as Why youthttl is wedged in among the less affectionate matters of revenge, continuation of the line, and duty to country, al1 of which may be expressed in tems of worth. Paradoxically, the ahility to place a value on a life decreases its value; a child should be priceless to its parent. Shakespeare's use of the word "hazardM is similarly telling. It is a gambling term, and in our view of society we don't like to think of o u children as chips to be wagered at the roulette table, nor do we care to put them in the position of risking our love. This of course is the position in which Cordelia finds herself, and she is warned by Lear, IrNothing will corne II of nothingtt and I1Mend your speech a little, / Lest you may mar your fortunesu (I.i.89, 93-94). And when Cordelia fails to mend her speech, Lear tells her sui tor the D u k e of Burgundy, When she was dear to us we did hold her so, /-But now her price is fallenn (I.i.195-96). The cormection of material For wealth to power in Kins Lear is made by Dollimore: Learrs behaviour in the opening scene presupposes first, his absolute power, second, the knowledge that his being king constitutes that power, third, his refusal to tolerate what he perceives as a contradiction of that power. . . . Even kinship, then - indeed es~eciallv kinship - is in-formed by the ideology of property relations, the contentious issue of primogeniture being, in this play, only its most obvious manifestation .' various reasons Peter Barnes would rather find himself in the Company of Ben Jonson than in that of Shakespearet6 and it is in Jonson's Seianus that we find perhaps the most horrifying example of the state's exigencies encroaching upon those of the family: I will not ask why Caesar bids do this, But joy that he bids me. . . . Were it to plot against the fame, the life Of one with whom 1 twinned; remove a wife From my warm side, as loved as is the air; Practice away each parent; draw mine heir In compass, though but one; work al1 my kin To swift perdition . . . . (111.714-15, 726-31)' Aside £rom the imagery, two elements of this speech are disturbing: first, it is spoken not by power-hurigry Sejanus but by Macro, a guard with an eye only a rung or two up the ladder, whose reasonable and seemingly benign philosophy is that The way to rise is to obey and pleasew (111.735). Second, Macro speaks in soliloquy, Tiberius having j u s t exited, so the words are spoken for the benefit only of the audience and not of the emperor. Appallingly, Macro is an ordinary servant of the state expressing, by implication, ordinary sentiments.' The distinction which 1 am trying to make between emotional (or psychological, or genetic) and material bonding is admittedly subtle and fluid, more a question of nuance than of two discrete categories. Perhaps it is best to Say that in the drama of Renaissance England, an ambiguity is present which would discornfort Our increasingly affection-based definition of f a r n i l ~ . ~ And in an express reversion to this earlier sensibility, Barnes's depiction of family relations (with the exception of that in Heaven's Blessinqs, written in 1989 and as yet unproduced) more closely resembles those of early modem England than of the mid-to-late twentieth century. In his produced work, Barnes has featured only three families: the Lascas of Leonardo's Last Sumer, the Gurneys of The Rulins Class, and the King, Queen, and Queen Mother of The Bewitched. Of these, the first is without property but resembles a Renaissance portrayal of family i n that the basis of their unity is material: their partnership in both business and crime. It is the propertied families with which we will be concerned in this chapter. As small, insular institutions whose members are either born into them or carefully selected from without, Barnes's privileged families serve as a convenient metaphor for the power- and wealth-hoarding English upper class. The impetus of the plot in The Rulins C l a s s (1968) is that a family wants to hold its house and lands, but this is not Chekhov's The Cherrv Orchard: unlike Madam Ranevskaya, the Gurneys are not quite outdated.I0 They are not about to hand their property over to the middle class any time soon, and when it goes it will have to be pried from their cold dead fingers, not allowed to slip through t h e m . We are always aware that Jack is not merely the heir to a large estate; he is a peer of the realm, an actual lawmaker whose final acceptance into society cornes when it is clear that he will use his vote t o protect the interests of his family and others like it to the detriment of the cornmon people. The same point is graphically made in The Bewitched (1974) in a scene near the end of the play in which Carlos, heretofore preoccupied with the business of getting an heir, is confronted with peasants and the effigies of starving children and recognizes that as a figure of authority he plays an innate role in their plight (II-xii). The continuation of the family is equated with the continuation of an oppressive class system in an equation which can go both ways. To attach a theory to this idea, we might turn to DoIlimore: Materialist theory ... argues that those areas of human life commonly thought to be antithetical to and independent of the political realm - for example subjectivity, personal identity, gender identity, the privacy of the the family, aesthetics - in and of ten actively reproduce home, the int f act actually , the exploita imacy of inc lude, .tion, repression and oppression visible in that larger public realm. " The Rulins Class immediately plunges its audience into a world which highlights the importance of lineage. Beginning with the Prologue, Barnes approaches this issue from al1 sides and both transparently and symbolically. A speech is being delivered to the Society of St. George by the 13th Earl of Gurney, a man whose very title dates his family and its estate half way back to the Norman Conquest. As it sets the tone for the play, it is worthwhile quoting the entire speech here: The aim of the Society of St. George 1s to keep green the memory of England And what England means to her sons and daughters. 1 Say the fabric holds, though families fly apart. Once the rulers of the greatest Empire The world has ever knowri, Ruled not by superior force or ski11 But by sheer presence. (Raises g lass in a toast.) This teeming womb of privilege, this feudal state, Whose shores beat back the turbulent sea of f oreign anarchy . This ancient fortress, still commanded by the noblest Of our royal blood; this ancient land of ritual. This precious stone set in a. silver sea.12 15 The thing that jumps out at us from this panegyric is that the last five lines parody John of Gaunt's speech £rom Richard II (II.i.40-68). While both Gaunt and the 13th Earl praise the English value system and its expansion, a somewhat narrower perspective is taken by the Earl: where Gaunt's %ceptrrd isleu houses "This happy breed of men, this little worldIrl the Earl of Gurney's flfeudal staten exists for "pri~ilege~~ and "the noblest / Of our royal blood." And while Gaunt ends with regret at what has become of "This precious stone set in the silvew sea," the Earl happily proclaims its essentially urichanged continuance. Thus, the class rank of Barnes's introductory character is established, along with his desire to protect it. And the method of protection - propagation - is likewise suggested by the language of the speech: Ilsons and daughters, If fam mi lie^,^^ "teeming womb," and again, "royal b10od.~~ The 13th Earl's speech is a success, but his mind is heavy with more i m p o r t a n t matters. As he confides t o his servant Tucker, If It ' s al1 based on land, and for the Wake of the family. Gumey nametf (81, he is planning a marriage t o Grace shelley,13 a middle class woman but one whom his half brother Charles has recommended as ffgood breeding stock. ~arnil~ foals welln (9). The loss of four of his five sons is treated as the loss of four layers of protection, and the fifth, Jack, does not seem reliable in 16 the breeding department for reasons we later leam. It is also noteworthy that the 13th Earl reminisces about his father the 12th Earl - that he loved his bed, was a great shot, and enjoyed a large breakfast. In the Prologue alone, then, we have memories of the 12th Earl, the presence of the 13th Earl, and plans to produce a 14th Earl, making prominent the theme of Earnilial continuation. Visually this continuation is established by Barnes's direction that the main set of the play, a room in the manor, feature "portraits of past Earlsn (16) . As Stone mites, T t was the relation of the individual to his lineage which provided a man of the upper classes in a traditional society with his identity, without which he was a mere atom floating in a void of social space."14 But what Stone places in the past tense, Barnes sees as being current. Unfortunately, before he can commence breeding, the 13th Earl dies by accidentally hanging himself to death. Only the death is accidental; the hanging is intended as part of an auto-erotic ritual practiced by the Earl which includes dressing in a ballet tutu, tri-cornered hat, long underwear and sword, and rambling on in fragments about the great days of British world domination. His last words as he draws his sword refer to a Sudanese uprising against the British in the mid-1880s: T o m squares men! Smash the Mahdi, and Binnie Barnes!" (11). The Earl is made to stand 17 for Empire, and Empire is therefore made ridiculous. Moreover, such mad behaviour suggests inbreeding, which is reinforced by the introduction in the next scene of the play's protagonist, Jack, fresh from the insane asylum and believing himself to be Jesus Christ. That the newly-established 14th Earl of Gurney should assume the persona of a decidedly unpuritanical God of Love is particularly ironic within the context of the social circle in which people of his station normally move. Throughout, Barnes portrays the upper crust as suffering from an absence of love on every level. Two society ladies are driven out in a mad stampede when Jack asks them simply, Van you love?" (36). Grace, the woman to whom the 13th Earl was to be wed, is the former mistress of his brother Charles and is later married to Jack in a ruse devised by Charles himself. Charles's wife Claire has an affair with Jack's psychiatrist chiefly in order to manipulate him. The couple refer to their son as a £001 and a disappointment (37), and Jack's suggestion that they "Relax. Have sexIr prompts Charles to declare, "hefs not only mad, hefs Bolshie! " (29) . Further, they cannot envision the presence of love in others. When Jack suggests that Tucker stays with the family, despite having inherited a large sum, out of love, Sir Charles briskly dismisses the concept: "Love? Tucker? Rot." (27)'' The family is united only by its common need to continue the line; to circumvent the provisions of the 13th Earl's will, Jack must have a son so that his relatives can declare him incompetent yet keep intact the estate on which they al1 live. The desire for a "blessed eventn is frequently expressed rather as a group effort: says Sir Charles of the 13th Earl, Wnderstood his duty to the family. Had to start breeding again" (17); Claire states simply, IfThe Gurneys must have an heirI1 (66); and after the christening of her son, Grace notes that the baby "saved you Gurneys from becoming extinctu (77). The absence of affection becomes noticeable amidst such talk of children as baton carriers in some sort of genetic relay race, a point which Barnes reiterates in The Bewitched when King Carlos and Queen Ana, whose sexual relations throughout the play have been treated as state business, find themselves together as mere husband and wife only to learn that they are incapable of conducting small talk.16 The objectives of both families are the same as those Stone accords to the landed classes of pre-Reformation England: "the continuity of the male line, the preservation intact of the inherited property, and the acquisition through marriage of further property or useful political allian~es.~~" By the end of The Rulinq Class, the family's political power is virtually self-contained. Claire's brother is a bishop, her son Dinsdale is headed for the House of Commons, and Jack has taken his place in the House of Lords. As Tucker notes early on, "The family. Ifve seen 'em at work a'fore. They got the power and they made the rulest@ (30). And as the family operates like a political unit, so is the definition of family extended to make that unit stronger. A little joke of Barnes's exploiting the cliché about sexual conduct in boysf boarding schools is revealing: Claire describes Sir Charles's willingness to rnarry off his own mistress first to the 13th Earl, then to Jack, as ~incestuous,~ and Charles counters, "Donft talk to me about incest. I remember young Jeremy Gore. You knew his father and 1 went to school together. But you went ahead and seduced his son. Thatfs incest, madam" (45). Similarly, the Master in Lunacy, sent to determine Jack's sanity or lack thereof, declares Jack fit once it is established that they both belong to the I1familyn O£ Etonians (11.3). Barnes, howevex, also presents the limits of the expandable family unit. Daniel Tucker certainly doesn't fit within those boundaries; the inheritance of cash (but notably, not land) left him by the 13th Earl may make him uppity, but it does not liberate him from his status as servant. L i k e the forgotten Firs of The Cherrv Orchard, his long-standing and faithful presence amons the family does not equal a position within it. As he asks himself what keeps him from leaving the Gurneys, Tucker, a bit in his cups, concludes: Fear and habit. You get into the habit of serving, Born a servant, see, son of a servant. Family of servants. From a nation of servants. Very first thing an Englishman does, straight from his motherfs womb is touch his forelock. Thatfs how they cari tell the wrinkled little bastard's English. (31) Lest anyone question whether this speech represents Barnesrs view, he responded to a question about characters such as Tucker, servants who collaborate in their own servitude, by saying : Thatfs this country. We are a nation of servants, it' s the one thing we do well, produce waiters and valets and servants, and we've always been that way, wefre very servile. How else could we have had a conservative government for thirteen years ?la So, money does not buy this particular brand of power, the power to really rule, which the aristocracy holds close to the vest through rare and cautious admittance to its ranks. Even those with a certain degree of authority may find themselves forever excluded. Dr. Herder may have controlled much of Jack's life during the years he spent at the "dancing academyfU as Jack calls the asylum, but on two separate occasions Barnes emphasizes his permanent exclusion from the ruling class by having members of the family, Sir Charles and Bishop Lampton, question whether Herder is English, and by following the negative response with a telling "AhhhH (24, 53) . And even as Grace, allowed to m a r r y into the family, secures a title and a certain degree of status ("Sixty m i l e s outside London an awful lot of cap tugging and forelock touching still goes onv 1911 ) , Charles reacts to a lack of discretion on her part with, "Madam, Jonson's Seianus, the same play which expresses Macrors horrifying willingness to sacrifice his family to the state, provides the stage with an instance of power exclusion very l i k e the one Barries gives us. Sejarius has been elevated by the emperor Tiberius from "obscure and almost unknown gentrym1 (V. 573) and indeed £rom his origins as "the noted pathic of the timen (1.216) to llcourt-god, IrReared equal with TiberiusIr (1.203, 219) . But Sejanus is not equal with Tiberius; ~iberius is head of the Roman Empire because Augustus C a e s a r chose him for his heir, as Tiberius will choose an heir, from among the royal family, to follow him. Sejanus comes from an unimpressive bloodline but he * uses the metaphor of a great progenitor to express his ion : A race of wicked acts Shall f low out of my anger, and O' erspread The worldfs wide face, which no posterity Shall e'er approve, nor yet keep silent . . . . (11.151-54) It is only at the point that Sejanus leaves metaphor and actually attempts to marïy into Tiberius's family (after creating an opening through the murder of Tiberiusts son Drusus) that the emperor sees that his favourite seeks to cross an unbreachable boundary. In fine political fashion, Tiberius is able to remove himself from the responsibility of denying Sejanus his suit by calling upon various external reasons why the marriage cannot take place: it would lower Liviafs place in society, the Senate, the people, nor Livia's family would such a match (111.551-59). The emperor can thus and neither approve refuse Sejanus without causing enmity Tiberius acknowledges the full request : between them. But privately significance of Sejanus's To marry Livia? Will no less, Sejanus, Content thy aims? No lower ob j ect? Well ! ' T i s then a part of supreme ski11 to grace No man too much, but hold a certain space Between thfascender's rise and thine 6wn flat, Lest, when al1 rounds be reached, his aim be that, Sejanus, like Tucker, Dr. Herder, and especially Grace Shelley, exists for the use of the aristocracy, not for inclusion within it. Barnes did not need to search a dramatic tradition for his view of the aristocracy as a closed society, but it is curious that, in 1968, a year filled with civil rights rnovements and student rebellions in North America and Europe, he chose to focus on such an antiquated and dwindling segment of Britain's population. Was the ruling class still ruling in 1968? One contemporary reviewer, John Wardle, felt that "the shots are at the aristocracy of many yesterdays ago.n20 Similarly, B. A. Young, declaring the play "wildly out of date," felt that "the real power-maniacs to-day are at the other end of the social scale. Al1 the millions of the Ford Motor Company canFt prevent a handful of men from overruling a Trade Union agreement and bringing production to a halt. But to Ronald Bryden the original Nottingham production gave off "the brimstone smell of revoluti~n,~~~~ and the subsequent London production was not about the aristocracy but about "Toryism, yesterday's, today's and tomorrow's: about the desire to conserve, and its consequences . "" Irving Wardle concurred: Veter Barnes's theme is the violence sanctioned by right-wing tradition and you could Say that his examples of it - hanging judges, blood sport enthusiasts, and the birching lobby - are a rnusty old crew , n24 Could Barries, then, be using a not-quite extinct past to comment on a current state of affairs? Although he does not daim to have had such a strategy in mind,25 it would indeed be in keeping with a dramatic tradition quite common to the Renaissance and then relatively abandoned until the last quarter of this century, when so many British playwrights , among them Arden, Churchill, Barker , Brenton, 24 Bond, Wertenbaker, and Hare, found historical settings and events useful for getting across very immediate political ideas or agendas. And what the critics seem to have forgotten is that Barnes, even in his only published play set at the tirne of its creation, brings in a dimension of English history by making the Victorian era coexist with the contemporary . In the second act of The Rulins Class the 14th Earl, having been wrestled to the ground just before intermission by a huge ape in evening dress, rejects his identity as J-C., the New Testament God of Love, becoming instead Jack, the Old Testament God of Punishment, embodied in Jack the Ripper. The choice is interesting not only for the contrast between universal acceptance and the desire for revenge, but because the victims of the famous Victorian murderer were women, specifically, prostitutes. The unempowered embraced by Christ in the Beatitudes, for example, are precisely those against whom the new Jack turns. Symbolically, Claire and Grace are silenced first with a kiss, then with a knife (99, 119), expressing both male dominance over womenfs voices and bodies, and the cowardice which motivates such violent expression. Power and the authority which it commands is belittled when it is exercised over an already impotent segment of the population. In keeping with Jack's new reality, the house is progressively Victorianized at his direction with heirlooms from the attic, which not only signifies his reactionary attitude but serves to reinforce a sense of lineage, an attachment to the past which in Barnes is always to be read without nostalgia and as counterproductive. Grace has borne a son, who, incidentally, the J-C. of Act One would have called Bussay dfAmbois (67). perhaps in the hope that he would be virtuous. The irony is that Chapman's Bussy, at least, is initially poor and he attributes his virtue to that poverty: Who is not poor, is monstrous; only need / Gives form and worth to every human seed" (Bussv D'Ambois, I.i.3-4),26 whereas the Gurney child will be bom privileged. The boy, in any case, is christened Vincent Henry Edward Ralph Gurney (77), and continuation of the Gurney line has been secured, with the appropriate pomp and dignity intact. As in the Prologue, past, present, and future exist simultaneously, but they are trapped in a place which should be long dead. When Jack cornplains to the Master in Lunacy that "You're MOCKED in the Strand if you speak of patriotism and the old QueenIl (87) he is referring not to Elizabeth II but to Victoria, monarch during the great age of British imperialism, the era commemorated by the 13th Earl in his speech to the Society of St. George; and at the same time he speaking of the current queen, who, regardless of any virtues she may possess, still confirms, by her very presence, a tradition of aristocracy rather than of meritocracy. And when Mrs. Treadwell, one of the society ladies who felt so threatened by Jack's former persona, remarks that "He's so like his father. He gets more like him every day, it's frightening" (95), we are, indeed, meant to feel frightened. It is not insignificant that the Jack of Act Two proudly wears the ancestral robes which in the first act he would have had burned: the devolution of the son into the father and even grandfather could never have occurred in J.C., champion of the brotherhood of man. The family of mankind neither requires nor values such trappings. The obvious Elizabethan example of the wayward son retuming to claim the rights and responsibilities of the father is, of course, Prince Hal. In both cases the son embraces an expansive society from outside his class and station, although Shakespeare has his prince privately distance himself £rom that society at the same time he publicly immerses himself in it. Upon becoming the father - in Hal's case, by succeeding Henry IV as patriarch of England and in Jack's, by siring a son, entering the House of Lords, and in the metamorphosis described above - each narrows his definition of society, enclosing himself in a small circle. Falstaff is banished; Tucker is allowed to be arrested for a murder he did not commit. Hal leaves off whoring at Mistress Quickly's; Jack as Jack the Ripper degrades women to whores and kills them. It bas been argued that Prince H a l uses Falstaff and Company as a conqueror uses an alien culture, learning its language and ways in order to exercise power,27 and indeed we hear this intention from the prince's mouth: "1'11 so offend, to make offence a skill, / Redeeming t i m e when men think least 1 willI1 (1 Hen. IV I.ii.211-12). Jack similarly uses the trust and confidence he has acquired to dispose of those who befriended him. Claire and Grace corne to love him and he murders them for it (II. 6 ; p . ) . Dr. Herder, realizing that Jack has murdered, is put in the untenable situation of having either to deny that he has cured his patient, or to acknowledge that he has, but that the cure is worse than the disease (II. 8) . And Tucker, who dropped his servile pose long enough to w a r n J - C . of the family plot against him, points to the aspect of betrayal by shouting, as he is being taken away for the murder of Claire, "Judas Jack Iscariot! You've sold me down the sewer, hard-hearted, stony-hearted, like the restu ( 1 . 7 ) "Presume not that 1 am the thing 1 was,I1 says King Henry V, "For God doth know, so shall the world perceive, / That 1 have tumfd a w a y my former self; / SO will 1 those that kept me companyI1 (2 Hen. IV V.v.56-59). In echo, Jack brings the House (of Lords) down with God the Son wants nothing only to give freely in love and gentleness. It's loathsome, a fou1 perversion of life! And must be rooted out. God the Father demands, orders, controls, crushes. We must follow Him, my noble Lords. (118) And in the event the spectators didnft happen to be drawing the comparison between Prince Hal/~enry V and J.C./Jack themselves, Barnes nudges them to it by having Jack end his speech by quoting Henry V ' s cal1 to battle precisely, substituting only his name for Shakespeare's king: 1 see you stand like greyhoundç in the slips Straining upon the start. The game's afoot Follow your spirit; and upon this charge Cry, God for Jack, England, and Saint George. (The Rulins Class, 118; Henrv V, III.i.31-34) In Shakespeare's play this speech indicates how fully the prince has come to be that which he is expected to be, and the same is true for Barnes. Jack is cheered wildly by the peers, and Sir Charles exclaims, "He's one of us at last! (118) . But in Barnes the blossoming of Jack is no cause for celebration since we cannot approve of what he has become; and further, Barnes may be attempting to force us to reevaluate Shakespeare's llheroictl Henry V as well. The ranks which Jack has joined by becoming Ilone of usv1 are the ranks of the dead: his ancestors, outmoded and inhumane principles, and above all, a musty past to which England clings. The legislative body before which Jack makes his rousing speech consists of nmouldering dumznies dressed as Lords and covered w i t h cobwebsm and "gai tered LORDS wi th bloated stomachs and skull-like facesm (117) . This scene cornes at the end of the play, but the decadence of the aristocracy was prefigured in the first moments as we watched the 13th Earl, ridiculously costumed, flirt with death as only those who are reasonably sure they won't die can. Perhaps the audience thinks back on this absurd beginning when they hear the characters of the House of Lords scene (sans Jack) exit singing: "Let us now praise famous men And our fathers that begat us. Such as did there rule in their kingdoms Men renowned for their power." (118) What Barnes is establishing is more than authority coming into its own; it is the strong abusing the weak becauçe they are in a position to do so, and the father-son continuum is the means by which this strength avoids becoming diluted. Tuckerrs Gethsemane reference is not really apt; Jack is rather acting very much in the Old Testament manner of the patriarchal god of the Book of Job, above being held accountable- "Behaviour which would be considered insanity in a tradesman is looked on as mild eccentricity in a lord," says Jack to Herder. " I ' m allowed a certain lat-i-tude" (110). We never get to see Jack's son, but Barnes so thoroughly weaves the pattern of the son 30 succeeding the father that the circle seems quite securely closed. What happens, then, when the continuum is broken? This is the premise of Barnes's other major family play, The Bewitched, "It is a sober fact," wrote Harold Hobson in his review of the play, Vhat the most important thing in Europe in the 1690s was Carlos 11's p e n i ~ . ~ ~ ~ ~ And indeed it would seem that Hobson (even if he did have his reproductive facts a bit confused) had correctly assessed both the historical reality and the theme of Peter Barnes's play in which nearly every moment of a three and a half hour performance and nearly every one of almost forty characters is devoted to helping Carlos, last of the Spanish Hapsburgs, produce an heir to the Spanish throne. Failing a natural heir, one must be chosen, and two opposing factions exist: the Queen Mother Mariana supports José of Bavaria while Carlos's wife Queen Ana is for Charles of Austria. The outcome against which both sides struggle is French control of Spain, and it is precisely this which Carlos achieves when, on his deathbed, he names as his successor Philip of Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV. Arnong the historical consequences of this legacy were the War of the Spanish Succession and the French and Indian Wars, so that a single king's failure to produce a son had a profound impact not only on the fate of Western Europe but on North America as well. As in a prologue 31 The Rulins Class, Barnes opens The Bewitched with which immediately introduces the importance of procreation among the ruling elite - in this case, a patriarchal monarchy. Funeral bells signifying the death of Felipé, heir to the Spanish throne, segue into a forma1 undressing of King Philip IV. Once the series of attendants has left him, the king prays, ironically, to the Blessed Virgin, "Tip my lance, plant my seed, that another son may be born tf inherit this Thy Kingdom" (194) . Moments later he confides to his fantasy lover, summoned from his imagination to help put him in the mood to Ildo sheet-duty wi' the Queen, " : One last assault on Evefs custom house where Adam made his first entry. No sin inft for 't will be no pleasure. A King who dies w'out an heir betrays his kingdom and his G o d . He leaves behind a hole in nature, and holes must be filled, eh Beatriz? Else they destroy the world. (195) As Queen Mariana enters she 1s followed by a procession of monks, the court priest gives a blessing and sprinkles holy water, and the skeleton of Saint Isidore is placed near the bed to serve as a cham. Thus the point is made that procreation, for most of us a personal and, most likely, inconsequential decision in tems of universal import, is in the case of a ruler a matter of duty and responsibility not only to the people but to the world and indeed to God. The union of Philip IV and Queen Mariana does in fact produce a son, the bir th of whom Barnes announces in a spectacular coup de théâtre: Ls.d.1 Lights d o m to a Spot on the widening crack which seems full of dark, glutinous liquid. It stirs as something rises out of it. First a hand, then a shapeless body emerges completely wrapped in a pale, pink feebly out of the crack where it lies curled up membrane: ~auiing itself it flops ont0 the floor tight. (197) This, of course, is Carlos II, a sight so horrifying that one look at his new son causes Philip IV to die of fright. Again, Barnes presents one generation only to emphasize its passing, as Shakespeare does by opening 1 H e n r , VI with the funeral of King Henry V. As a specimen of human life, Carlos may be wanting, but although he is imperfect he is good enough to perform the task for which he was created: securing the continuation of the Hapsburg line in Spain and keeping authority, for one more generation at least, within the family. In our time, as we watch a British royal family which seems to have little interest in continuity beyond the already accomplished production of Iran heir and a spare, lEzg the importance of primogeniture may appear outmoded and irrelevant. With few exceptions (the Kemedys would be one) , the I1childrent1 of those in power are, so to speak, adopted. John Major was the hand-picked heir to Margaret Thatcher's Tories and Ronald (and Nancy?) Reagan groomed George Bush to take over the reins. Neither Mr. Major nor M r . Bush, however, were able to produce any strong political When asked whether in creating The Rulincr Class and The Bewitched he intended to speak to contemporary methods of maintaining power, B a r n e s responded: I think ruling elites will always try and hold to the extent of their power, but not during one lifetime, but for generations. So, it's inevitable that if you're dealing with that subject you must touch on or at least show interest in this biological urge. Itfs not only to do with power, itfs also particularly imrnortality. And the only way the majority of people can be immortal is to have children? My line's imrnortality and the set of silver that goes with it is not, however, the same as that of the Gurneys and their peerage in perpetuity, or that of the Hapsburgs and their command over a substantial portion of Europe. The next time we meet Carlos he is a hideously deformed, drooling adult, the unfortunate possessor of the most pronounced of the Hapsburg j a w s . The decay and corruption which Barnes places in the psyches of the Gurneys through the suggestion of congenital insanity is in Carlos made physical and, hence, more conspicuous. The matter of succession is again in the forefront as Ana of Neuberg, Carlos's queen, and the Queen Mother Mariana argue over choosing an heir, while Carlos's only contribution to the debate is to make pathetic and absurd promises that he wonrt die. The scene ends with al1 three characters falling into epileptic seizures, which in the case of Carlos is later explained by the court doctor as having been caused by "part icular f ou1 vapours f rom a uterus (20 5 ) . That a womanfs reproductive system should be blamed for Carlos's condition is an interesting sidenote, and consistent with the way such symptoms would be diagnosed in wornen at the time. In Shakespeare and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen, the Gaoler's Daughter runs mad with love for Palamon until a doctor is finally brought in. He advises the girl's wooer, a man in a social position more appropriate to her own, to pretend to be Palamon and t o "Please her appetite, / And do it home; it cures her ipso facto / The melancholy humour that infects hern ( V . i i L 3 ' As Coppélia Kahn notes: From ancient times through the nineteenth century, women suffering variously from choking, feelings of suffocationj part similar to those of and lethargy were sa ial epil .id t ysis , convulsions aphasia, numbnes il1 of hysteria, caused by a wandering womb. 32 The prescription, then, for this "wornan' su affliction was sexual intercourse, placing the cure in the hands - or more accurately, the penis - of a man. Again, "holes must be filled." If we consider that as an individual his only truly important function is to weigh down Ana's womb with a child, Carlos possesses t h e sole meana of his own cure. 35 While producing an heir might not end his seizures, it would remedy Spain's ills, and, as Barnes knows, the health of a king and his country are not simply metaphorically linked. In response to an ambassador who claims to speak for France, Carlos says, "But 1 do not speak f r Spain. 1 - Spain" (229). Carlos is more than a patriarch; he is at once father and mother of his country as well as every child of that union. a patriarch condition. Bames Boasting to But if he cannot succeed in the primary task of - having children - then Spain is in a sorry risks no subtlety in expanding on this theme. the Spanish lords because Ana is finally pregnant , Carlos crows : CARLOS. 1 wooonJt die now, the Queen carries my SON. ... I've proved myself King, IIfI've the blood, balm, crown, sceptre and the BALLS! (He shambles round thrusting o u t his crotch.) 1111 humped, jocked, rutted, clicked and shafted. Haaaaven't 1 the finest gap-stopper, the largest whore-pipe, the biggest penis-stick i' Spain? TORRES. Like Atlas, Sire, you balance our world on 'ts tip. (212) The world proves to be but precariously balanced: the foetus is miscarried. The Archbishop Pontocanero and the grandees determine that Spain has offended God and must appease him by presenting an elaborate and gruesome auto da fé. God has already expressed his complete lack of interest in the king's fertility, however, by sending only a bolt of 36 lightning in response to Carlos's plea, MIfve prayed t' you. Where's my son?" (252). still, as a spectacle an auto da fé has a convenient side effect: there is a connection between violence and sexual arousal. The Archbishop recalls that "Nine months after the last auto generale, there was an almighty outcrop or births," and Motilla, the royal confesser, responds, "The stench O' burning flesh seems but t' stir up Our vile lust f f life. l1 (258) In fact the pretense that the auto has a religious purpose is quickly discarded. Barnes shows h o w little thought is given to the Spaniardsl God in a scene where a J e w who has finally converted after five years of torture is bribed to recant Christianity: only as a Jew can he be burned alive. Likewise, skeletons and effigies are paraded through the arena to add to the body count- Indeed, there seems to be an historical context for padding the procession in this fashion: as Foucault mites, in Europe from the middle ages through the eighteenth century, the value of the public display of torture was as an object lesson not to the accused, who in any case would not live to benefit £rom such education, but to the spectators, and therefore, humiliation and tonnent continued beyond the point of death.)" During the procession in The Bewitched, al1 eyes rest on Carlos's crotch, waiting for sexual arousal; one lord uses a telescope for better viewing. The act ends as a 37 ~monstrous phallusftr eventually reaching eight feet long, grows from between the king's legs while a choir sings Hallelujahs, and "When it overhangs the edge of the rostrum a PRIEST emerges f r o m out of the darkness, bends u n d e r it and lifts it on his shoulders.~ The queen moves to meet them until she is l1 Mpaled on the t i p of the co los sa l phallus. Clinging to it, she is l i f ted off her feet and borne backwards w h i l s t the voices soar: 'Deathfs mightiest powers have done their worst, and Jesus hath his foes dispersed; Let shouts of praise and joy outburst . . . 1 Il (272-73). Ana exits, naturally, by riding the phallus of fstage. However, despite the enormity of both the religious display and the resultant erection, no çhild is produced. Eventually Carlos chooseç José of Bavaria as his heir, but in keeping with his misfortune, it tums out that José has died, and attempts to make Carlos fertile must continue. Medicine, the Church, astrology, have al1 failed to improve Carlos's condition; evil forces must be at work. The king's confessor, Father Froylan, determines that Carlos is the victim of witchcraft because he achieves erection but produces infertile seed, while a second opinion, that of the Archbishop, argues that the king is possessed. In either case, Carlos and his overbred Hapsburg ancestors are freed from blame, and this is how it must be in a political system which insists upon divinely inspired monarchs, placed in power and protected by God himself: "Nat al1 the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm off from an anointed kingn (Richard II III.ii.54-55). Just as Spainfs health is a reflection of that of Carlos, the king's health is a reflection of that of God- A n impotent monarch would be an imperfect creation suggesting nothing less than an imperfect creator and an orderless world: [Inquisitor-Generall VALLADARES. The King's bound t' Godf s throne wit a gleaming chain. ~ r a y f ' him. The Pray f f him. His sins stain the coming-years, f' if he sows bad seeds now 'tis future Kings who'll reap bad harvests. But if he sows no seeds, 'tis worse, f f authority and submissionfre the twin poles on which Jehovah turns the world and wi'out an heir the King's no longer its standing pillar. [ . . . ] Fr in loving and praising him [Carlos] , we love and praise thee, Lord, ff hefs thy true representative , the very image o f thy monarchy o'er al1 creation. (319-20) true significance of whether or not Carlos is bewitched or possessed is that if he is, the world is following an ordered, divine design and there is no persona1 responsibility; but if his impotence has its basis in nature, then IlBlind chance rules the worldm (304, 305), the Spaniards must themselves create order £rom chaos, and there is, in effect, no God- A natural heir to the throne would therefore prove both God's interest in man and the necessity of rnonarchy. Looking back to The Rulins Class, it becomes clear in this context that the simultaneity of the birth of Jack's son and his acceptance of his role as aristocrat has significance beyond dramatic juxtaposition. It is in putting this sort of metaphysical problem upon the stage that Barnes, often tenuously labelled neo-Jacobean for reasons of his language and stagecraft," really connects with early modem England. Compare with Valladaresrs speech above these lines from King James to his son, printed in 1616: GOD giues not Kings the stile of Gods in vaine, For on his Throne his Scepter doe they swey: And as their subiects ought them to obey, So Kings should feare and serue their God againe If then ye would enioy a happy raigne, Obserue the Statutes of your heavenly King And from his Law, make al1 your Lawes to sp~zing.~~ Obviously it is useful for the sitting authority to position himself near to God, not only for when things go awry but, as Francis Bacon notes : Envy, which is the canker of honour, is best extinguished by declaring a man's self in his ends rather to seek merit than fame; and by attributing a man's successes rather to divine Providence and felicity, than to his own virtue or p01icy.~~ To this Barnes adds that when providence seems less than apparent, it is better to be associated with another supematuxal being than to take blame oneself. Once Satan, speaking through the possessed Nuns of Cangas, confirms the king's bewitchment, Father Froylan and Carlos are jubilant: FROYLAN. Praise be t' God! 1 k n e w 't. You're bewitched, Sire ! CARLOS (joyfully, w a v i n g trident) . BBBBB eeee If m bewitched ... 's not my fault, 's nothing wrong. 1 IIIIItm jusf bewitched, bewitched, bewitched . . . . (306) Ironically, what has proven so difficult a task for Carlos is effortless for his subjects. In scenes seemingly peripheral to the main action, Barnes reinforces the notion of patriarchalism so prevalent in The Bewitched by presenting two sets of commoner fathers, both shown in the process of passing their professions dom to their sons. On the day on which the son is to replace his father at court, Sebastien de Morra, the court jester, advises his son Rafael: MORRA- [ . . . ] You've been at Court long enough to know who's in, whofs out. Remember, the King's always in. Thy only cal1 is t' entertain, tf fil1 an - idle hour. RAFAEL. 1 believe 1 can do more and mix a little purpose wir my wit . MORRA. Fatal. Ifve survived two reigns by having no purpose 'cept tr please. If thou has a message, send 't bymessenger. ( 2 0 3 ) ~ ~ Similarly, the Chief Torturer Alcala tries to teach his apprentice son to respect their profession: ALCALA. [ . . . ] Tl tickle a true confession f rom a relapsed sinner takes time and patience, now werve tf gouge 't out, quick and bleeding. Standardsfre collapsing, Gomez. Werre turning this house of truth into a butcher's shop. 1/11 go brain-mad wifout our integrity as craftsmen. GOMEZ. Ours isn't a craft, but a trade. Our profit lies in bulk. [ . . . ] Who caïes about the kality O' the pain, so long as 't hurts? (314) 41 Perhaps the primary point being made by Barnes through these brief scenes is simply that it is in the nature of sons to rebel, or perhaps the playwright is lamenting the loss of quality control: they donlt make lem like they used to (although in The Rulincr Class Barnes demonstrates that they make lem exactly like they used to). But the fathers and sons also serve to indicate Carlosls sonlessness, his inability to pass on his profession. In I Henrv VI John Talbot's attempt to succeed his father is prefigured in the scene between the French Master Gunner and his boy (1V.i-1-SI), so that Shakespeare, like Barnes, illustrates the persona1 and societal importance of continuity among al1 classes. Further, in the digenerational jesters and torturers of The Bewitched are depicted two motherless households. Alcala relates that his wife left him twenty years before, but de Morra makes no mention of a wife at all. Ana, the queen, has likewise been marginalized; although she is present, the Court's efforts to produce an heir have centred on Carlos, as though he should be capable of a wombless conception. Why privilege the male's part in the reproduction process? We should consider that objections to our own contemporary feminist movement often focus on the womanls perceived inability to succeed in the workplace because of the tirne commitment involved in her role as rn~ther.~' But here Barnesfs thinking is again rooted not in this century but in the English Renaissance. A ready comparison between The Bewitched and K i n s Lear cornes mind . The thorough absence of Lear's wife in Shakespeare's play prompts Kahn to Through this conspicuous omission the play articulates a patriarchal conception of the family in which children owe their existence to their fathers alone; the motherfs role in procreation is eclipsed by the fatherfs, which is used to affirn male prerogative and male p~wer.'~ Hinton, explicating various political writings on patriarchalism, notes that a way of thinking became necessary in seventeenth century England which could reconcile the two divergent interests of monarch and commonwealth, On a most basic level, the question becomes one of servitude: by what law, natural or divine, do societies put themselves under monarchal rule? The justification, Hinton finds, was achieved through the analogy of the family: As the Church was the bride of Christ and bishops were married to their sees, so kings were to be married to their commonwealths. As the father loved the son and the son honoured and obeyed the father, so kings and commonwealths were to be understood as comprising a single farnil~.~' And this family, in which love flows downward while honour and obedience fly up frorn below, adhered to a system of patriarchalism. Stone cites a 1618 work, God and the 43 Kinq, by one Richard Mocket, which argued that al1 subjects were children of the king and which so pleased James 1 that "he ordered it to be studied in schools and universities and bought by al1 hou~eholders.~~' However, as is true today, during the seventeenth century there were different ways to use the family analogy. In terms of power, Hobbes went so far as to privilege the mother because, although she contracts to serve the husband in the marriage compact, it is only she who can verify pater nit^.^^ As Aaron says to Tamora's sons of the mulatto child which he sired, I1Nay, he is your brother by the surer side, / Although my seal be stampèd in his facet1 (Titus Andronicus IV.ii.126-27).43 This is precisely what gives Queen Ana a greater degree of potential power, although she is virtually ignored as an agent of reproduction, than has the king. Carlos's power is a matter of display, £rom his very position as the son of hiç father the former king, to his expected function as the father of future kings. Though it seems insignificant today (and in fact c m be detrimental to a politician), in 17th century Spain an erect male sex organ was a visible display of authority; lacking that, the power that Carlos wieldç is incomplete. Even so, there are places where the king's authority is unchallenged. Carlos cannot master court dancing but he c m have the dance changed to suit his jerky movements; IlThe perfect hamony of the dance glorifies the perfect harmony of God's universe" (214), and rather than admit that the universe is chaotic, the conception of harmony is modified. Order is preserved only if everyone at court dances like their spastic monarch. Such is the prerogative of the king. Greenblatt calls a sign of power "the ability to impose one's fictions upon the world: the more outrageous the fiction, the more impressive the manifestation of power, t144 and Stephen Orgel, commenting on Prosperofs masque in The Tempest (111, iii) , asserts : Imagination here is real power: to rule, to control and order the world, to change or subdue other men, to create; and the source of the power is imagination, the ability to make images, to project the workings of the mind outward in a physical, active form, to actualize ideas, to conceive actions. 45 The relationship of authority to display and invention in Jacobean England has been discussed extensively in recent y e a r ~ , ~ ~ but the lack of imagination and physical grace with which B a r n e s imbues Carlos can only mock his authority in Our eyes. Our attention is directed not to the harmony which Carlos makes in his own image but to the absurd and sad fact that not one courtier will correct him. But if Carlos has authority his display of it nonetheless consists of being on the field running around in circles, while off in the sidelines are two who are really calling the plays. Surprisingly, they are neither grandees nor church officiais, in this play portrayed as reasonably obedient, but women: the queen and the queen mother. It is they, we recall, who argued so passionately over an heir, and as Carlos held no opinion, it is reasonable to assume that either of them might have controlled the choice if the other had not existed. arian na has been seen throughout to be politically savvy, as when she defends the choice of José to the grandees: "My lords casnft see Charlesfd 've governed wifout a Regent or Council of State? José's pliable" (210) . Her grasp on her son is literal and eternal; even in death, her skeleton hand reaches out of its sarcophagus to grab his shoulder (283). And the king is likewise dependent upon her. He pleads with the skeleton: Help me Marna. God gave me crown, sceptre, throne: as he reigns in the heaven so I reign on earth. 1 stretch out my hand t' bring order tf the Universe. But Mama, t ' has no edge, no bottom, no centre, no 'nowt, 'beforef or 'after'; one thing doesn't lead tf another . . . 1 flounder, Marna. Help me rule, Marna. (283-84) Ana, too, has significant influence. She commands the authority - or inspires the fear - to enable her to extract valuable gifts £rom the Court with a mere glance (286), and although she is aware of her unpopularity, it does not concern her; during her brief pregnancy she confides to her cornpanion, IISpanish lords deserve t' be gutted of their surplus gold and silver - sneezing at me i f the shadows, jeering behind corners! ... But my power g r o w s wif my 46 bellyV1 (218). As the discussion on legitimacy, above, demonstrates, a pregnancy would indeed empower her, if only until the child is born (about the time when Grace Shelley ceases to be useful) . The true extent of this power which is unique to women is demonstrated before Ana's miscarriage is comonly known. In a deception instigated by Father Motilla, Ana agrees to be impregnated by Almirante, one of the lords. The planned adultery, or "State business,~ as Ana refers to it (244), is sanctified by the presence of the priest, who carries a bible and keeps a sharp ear out for sounds of pleasure x But w e do not forget that Ana is committing a mortal sin. Like harmony, sin is a malleable notion. Ironically, Ana and Almirante are interrupted by Carlos; by his presence the king bungles the conception of his own heir. Should the world of The Bewitched, then, be perceived to be balanced in the centre of Ana's womb rather than on the tip of Carlos's penis? Such a view could never be reconciled with a patriarchal society. Two of the strongest women in Shakespeare appear in the Henrv VI trilogy: Joan la Pucelle and Queen Margaret. Both do a man's job, soldiering, better than their male counterparts, yet neither is permitted much glory. The accomplishments of each are diminished, in the case of Joan by attributing her power to the supernatural, and in Margaretfs case, by turning her into a bitter, cursing hag (chiefly in Richard III). Peter Barnes clearly does not have a feminlst agenda, nor would I wish to impose one on his work. But the question of how power is held and passed down in such a way as to leave no vacancy for the formation of a democratic goverriment is very much inherent to The Rulins Class and The Bewitched, and to the extent that they participate in this essentially male-controlled process, the presence of Grace Shelley and Queen Ana provokes the question: why do the women behind the men not move forward? Why, for that matter, does the vast common majority not end an aristocratic, patriarchal system so seemingly contradictory to their welfare? In each of these two plays. the door to doing just that is opened and it is the people themselves who slam it shut. J . C . offers love, equality, equanimity - and he is deemed mad for it by his family, his butler, and most of al1 by the middle-class, until he asserts authority and practices hate, superiority, and self-interest. A reverse movement occurs in The Bewitched when, in a moment of post-epileptic clarity shortly before his death, Carlos realizes that authority ff'Twill make a desert of this world / Whilst therefs still one man left t f gif commands / And another whofll obey 'ernlt (327). It is the peasants themselves who, upon hearing Carlos's decision that hefll abdicate, "let out terrified shrieks and f leew (329). Perhaps Carlos makes his unfortunate choice of heir in punishment for such cowardice. ENDNOTES - CHAPTER 1 hi11 bibliographie information for editions of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays is given in the list of works cited. 1. Lawrence Stone finds that by 1750 characteristics of what he labels the modern family developed in the middle and upper classes of English society: ~lintensified affective bonding of the nuclear core at the expense of neighbours and kin; a strong sense of individual autonomy and the right to persona1 freedom in the pursuit of happiness; a weakening of the association of sexual pleasure with sin and guilt; and a growing desire for physical privacy." The Familv, Sex and Marriase in Ensland 1500-1800, abr. ed. (London: Penguin Books, 1979) 22. Although his point about sex and guilt seems debatable - think of the Victorian era or the 1950s - the first t w o characteristics, particularly in their almost contradictory combination, shed some light on the discussion of families in contemporary drama, below. Much of the struggle which characters such as the Tyrone brothers or Alison Porter undergo does seem to arise from being pulled between the need to bond with the family and that to assert autonomy. 2. Stone holds that as a defence mechanism against high infant mortality rate, "parents were obliged to limit the degree of their psychological involvement with their infant childrenn (571 , and that high adult mortality rates "severely reduced the companionship element in marriage and increased its purely reproductive and nurturance functionsn (81). But cf. Christopher Hill, who finds that Stone draws this conclusion from insufficient data ( " S e x , Marriage, and the Family in England," The Economic Historv ~eview 2nd series, 31 LI9781 : 450-63) . And Lynda E. Boose, who fauits new historicist studies of family generally, notes: Vhen new historicism locates itself upon the site of family, sex, and marriage, the literal arena of domestic space has a way of losing its local habitation through its name and turning into its descriptive other. ... 'The familyf of the Elizabethan-Jacobean era has thus been repoçitioned as a metaphor for the Elizabethan-Jacobean state, and scholarly focus consequently shifted away from literal families and their reproduction back ont0 the patriarchal state and its self-generating modesIt ("The Family in Shakespeare Studies; or - Studies in the Family of Shakespeareans; or - The Politics of Politics, Renaissance Ouarterlv 40 [1987] : 731). Nonetheless, when the family in question ~ a political unit, as are those of Barnes under discussion in this chapter, it seems fair to view it a political unit. 3 . Unless otherwise noted, a l l ref erences to Shakespeare's plays are to the Arden Shakespeare. The full bibliographic information of each volume is given in the list of works cited. 4. Emotionally? Or because her identity consists solely of being the rnother of young John, whose end of existence would also signify the end of his mother's value and hence, life? And note the very opposite reaction of Volumnia in Coriolanus to the questionof her reaction should her son die in battle: "Then his good report should have been my son; 1 therein would have found issue1I (1-iii-18-19, The Pelican [Viking-Penguin] Shakespeare). 5 - Jonathan Doliimore, Radical Traqedv, 2nd ed - (London: Hanrester Wheatsheaf, 1989) 198-99. 6. In "Staging Jonson, If Barnes mites, If Shakespeare gives us rulers, Jonson, the ruled, and proves they are every bit as important. ... One can hear his voice as one cannot hear Shakespearef s (in Ian Donaldson, ed. , Jonson and Shakespeare [Austraiian National University, 19831 162); defending Jonson against charges of being hopelessly connected to the popular culture and laquage of his time, B a r n e s counters, "Some of Shakespeare is so over-complicated 1 swear three-quarters of the audience donft know what the hellfs going on, They sit there because it's culturally acceptableH ("Ben Jonson and the Modem Stage, Gambit 6:22 [1972] 5); and in the introduction to Surisets and Glories, he feels it necessary to relate: "Shakespeare, seeing Jonson on a toilet and reading a book said that he was sorry Jonson's memory was so bad he did not know how to shit without a book. This is probably the only remotely, half-decent joke Will ever made - if he made itm (London: Methuen, 1990) vi. Keeping in mind that Barnes has caught plenty of flak for his editings and adaptations of Jonson - particularly of The Devil is an Ass and Eastward Ho!, to which he added scenes - it does seem that in the matter of Jonson's accessibility, B a r n e s is trying t o have it both ways. If al1 that separates Jonson £rom a modern audience is a bit of antiquated slang, there should be no need, for example, to tag a speech to the end of The Devil is an Ass which has Satan banning demons from the too-wicked Earth. For the text of that scene, see Barnes, "~taging Jonsontf 160-61. 7. The Xevels edition. The full bibliographie information is given in the list of works cited. 8. Stuzrt Kurland, however, finds this speech "no doubt extreme." I1'No innocence is safe, / When power contentsf : The Factional Worlds of Caesar and Sejanus," Comparative Drama 2 2 3 (Spring 1988): 65. 9. If what holds for North America also holds for England, even the barest definition of family no longer requires blood or marriage ties; neither do ties of blood or marriage necessarily constitute a family. l!Familyu is an ever-broadening concept. 1992 witnessed the introduction of legislation in Canada bestowing certain benefits to same-sex couples formerly available only to married or common-law heterosexual couples; in the United States, a boy successfully I1divorcedl1 his parents in court (New York Times, 10 July 1992: A 1 3 ) ; and the Republican incumbent lost the U.S. presidential election when his strategy to extol "family valuesn backfired. 10. The play itself, though, is arguably anachronistic and irrelevant, as 1 discuss further on. Even upon its debut thirty years ago, the aristocracy as an institution was for al1 intents and purposes extinct. 11. Dollimore xxvii. 12. Peter Barnes, The Ruliris Class, Bames Plavs: One, (London: Methuen, 1989) 7. Further references to the play will appear parenthetically in the text. 13. A glance perhaps to Grace Kelly, American actress curn Princess of Monaco? 14. Stone 29. 15. This line, and his disregard for Grace Shelley's will in the two rnarriages he has arranged for her, suggest to me that Sir Charles's reaction is also rooted in the same thinking which for so long kept Hollywood from showing black couples kissing on screen: a refusal to acknowledge the humanity, of which love is the most celebrated evidence, of the unempowered. Domination is better accomplished when the dominated is considered innately inferior. 1 6 Peter Bames, The Bewitched, Plavs: One 321. Fbrther references to the play will appear parenthetically within the text. 17. Stone 37. 18. Peter Barnes, persona1 interview, 2 Nov. 1992. 19. For a note tracing this sentiment to Machiavellifs Discourses, see Philip A y r e s ' s note to Act III, lines 637-42 of Sejanus His Fa11 (Revels ed. 173) . Kurland reads as "almost an afterthoughtu the fact that Tiberius leaves until the end of his letter to the Senate Sejanusfs "aspiring to be our son in-lawu (V.588), whereas I find the placernentpof this infraction deliberately strong because it packs the most punch, Kurland 63. 20. John Wardle, "Shots at a double target, " rev. of The Ruïins Class, The Times 9 Nov. 1968: 19. 21. B. A, Young, rev. of The Rulins Class, The Financial Times 27 Feb. 1969: 3. 22. IfNottingham Discovery, rev. of The Rulins Class, The Observer 17 Nov. 1968: 2 4 , 23 . "Tricks in Toryland," rev. of The Rulins Class, The Observer 2 Mar. 1969: 27. 24. "Overloaded With G~od'Material,~~ rev. of The Rulinq Class, The Times 27 Feb. 1969: 7 , 1 feel, too, that The Rulins Class still has relevance, even after three decades, even though modem Tories corne largely from the middle class (Margaret Thatcher and John Major both have middle-class roots) , even when the Democratic, Liberal, and Labour parties are in office in the national governments of the United States, Canada, and Britain, respectively. An audience could mentally substitute CEOs or media moguls for earls and dukes and corporate boardrooms for the House of Lords, and Jack's speech and the coûp de théâtre of the lordsf decay, would lose nothing in the translation. 25. In answering a question about bis use of history generally, Barnes reasoned that it keeps the play from - dating, and in responding to the observation that The Rulinq Class doesn't seem dated, he said, The thing is that, that is, again, a very closed world in which fashion doesnrt much corne into it, actually, as itJs supposed to be about the aristocracy. Those sort of worlds, theyrre very particuiar . Personal interview, 2 Nov. 1992. 26. Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin, eds., Drama of the Encrlish Renaissance II: The Stuart Period (New York: Macmillan, 1976) . 27. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakes~earean Nesotiations: The Circulation of Social Enerw in Renaissance Ensland (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988). 28. Harold Hobson, "Royal Fantasia," rev. of The Bewitched, Sundav Times 12 May 1974: 38; reiterated in Harold Hobson, Theatre in Britain: A Personal View (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1984) 203. 29. Attributed to the late Diana, Princess of Wales. 30. Barnes, personal interview, 2 Nov, 1992. 31. The New Penguin Shakespeare. 32. Coppélia K a h n , luThe Absent Mother in 'King Lear, Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, eds., Rewritins the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Earlv Modern Euro~e (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) 33. Kahn also suggests that Lear is suffering from hysteria: "Regan and Goneril betray and disappoint Lear by not being mothers to hirn, but in a deeper, broader sense, they shame hirn by bringing out the woman in himW (45, citing Kins Lear IIAv.274-88, and including Lear: lutouch me with noble anger, / And let not womenfs weapons, water-drops, / Stain my m a r s cheeks!I1). Although not quite identifiable as hysteria, instances of men made (or perceived to be) mad over love exist, among them the behaviour of the cousins in The Two Noble Kinsmen, which, after they have seen E r n i l i a , moves £rom intense affection to confused cornpetition and eventually pits them against one another in a battle to the death; and more familiarly, Poloniusrs diagnosis of the Prince in Hamlet: "This is the very ecstasy of love, / Whose violent property fordoes itself / And leads the will to desperate undertakings / As oft as any passion under heaven / That does afflict our naturesm (II. i) . 33, Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A l a n Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977) Part One, esp. 34, 45, 58. 34. See, e.g., William J. Mc~aughlin, Wcotsmen in Hobnail BootsIf: An Analvsis of the Orisinal Works of Peter Barnes, diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1987, and Bernard Dukore, The Theatre of Peter Barnes (London, 1981) . But see Ronald Bryden, introduction, The Bewitched: "[The Bewitched] penetrates to the heart of the Jacobean melancholy which is also our own: the discovery that 'the new philosophy casts al1 in doubtf, that the universe is absurd and al1 the comforting beliefs in which we were reared are frantic constructs to mask this intolerable truthH (ix) . 35. King James 1, Basilikon Doron, The Political Works of James 1, ed. Charles Howard McIlwain (New York: Russel & Russel, 1965) 3 , 36. Francis Bacon, Essavs (London: Dent, 1972) 160. This essay came to my attention via Dollimore 90. See also Jonathan Goldberg's discussion in James 1 and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare. Donne, and Their Contem~oraries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983) 6-7. 37. Two points of interest regarding the scene between Morra and Rafael: first, it is ironic that Morra uses the phrase, "who's in, whofs outur and states that "the King's always in," because it recalls Learfs Act V reunion with Cordelia, where he envisions their imprisonment t o be filled with Talk of court news; ... / Who loses and who wins; whofs in, whofs outu (V.iii.14-15) at a time when the king is definitely not in. The second point is to acknowledge Barnes's debt to Sam Goldwyn. 38. See, e.g., Phyllis Schlafly, The Power of the Positive Woman (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1977). 39. Kahn 35-36, 4 0 . Hinton, R. W. K., wHusbands, Fathers and C~nquerors,@~ Political Studies, part 1, 15:3 (1967) 291. Such an analogy obviously becomes problematic in the case of a ruling queen, and some of the thinkers of whom Hinton mites - Filmer, Hobbes - were born during the reign of Elizabeth. Still, the family analogy was employable by the Commons to daim closer kinship, and therefore greater fealty, between Elizabeth and her subjects than between the queen and Mary Stuart. Hinton 296. 41. Stone 110. 4 2 . Thomas Hobbesf argument, from Leviathan, summarized by R. W. K. Hinton, "Husbands, Fathers and Conquerors,~ Political Studies, part 2, 16:l (1968) 56. This brand of feminism based on biology arises, incidentally, in a Darwinian context early in our century, in C . Gasquoine Hartley8 s The Truth About Woman : IlThe female was the start of life, and woman is the main stream of its force. Man is her agent, her helper; hers is the supreme responsibility in creating and moulding life. It is thus certain that wornanfs present assertion of her age-long rights and d a i m for truer responsibilities has its cause rooted deep in the needs of the race." (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1914) 3 8 4 . 43. The Pelican Shakespeare. 44. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioninq from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) 13. 45. Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975) 47. 46. In addition to Orgel and Greenblatt, see, e.g., Goldberg, James 1 and the Politics of Literature, CHAPTER 2 Inriocence in Charge: Red Noses and Sunsets and Glories In The Rulina Class and The Bewitched , Peter Barnes presents power structures which have become insulated and degenerate but to which the proffered alternative - true egalitarian empowerment - has been rejected by a populace unprepared to assume the responsibility of self-government. The putrefaction depicted in the House of Lords scene of the earlier play and in Carlos himself in the later is left to fester to still greater degrees of rot, In this pessimistic outlook only one condition is indicated which could alter the scenario: the complete and sudden disappearance of the existing authority base. Such is the situation in the worlds created by Barnes in Red Noses (1985) and in Sunsets and Glories (1990). In Red Noses, the absence of authority is quite literal. It is 1348 in Auxerre, France and the Black Death is raging; most of the clergy have fled; in Avignon, Pope Clement VI has immobilized himself b e t w e e n t w o £ires, giving audience only via his reflection in a mirror; the nobility are nowhere to be found. No one is really minding the store. The vacancy of power is not as thorough in Sunsets and Glories, set primarily in Naples at the end of the thirteenth century, where the problem is one of electing a n e w pope: the structure of the College of Cardinals still stands and a king still rules, but two years pass during which the Church is without a head, and in that time Europe bas become vulnerable to invasion by both the Turks and disease. In these plays, the circle of power, so securely impenetrable in The ru lin^ Class and The Bewitched, has been breached, and the sort of change the Gurney butler, Tucker, could cal1 for only because it was safely improbable becomes inevitable. What seeps into the broken circle is a kind of anti-authority, leadership which refuses to lead; and whereas J - C - and Carlos attempted without success to pass the responsibility of government to the commons, the pwotagonists of Red Noses and Sunsets and Glories inspire those around them to author their own lives by thernselves refusing the position of authority, It may seem perverse of Barnes to have set Red Noses, a play rife with his signature slapstick and groan-inducing humour, during such a horrific period of European history as the Black Death of 1348-50. Not only was the disease itself dreadful, its psychological side effects were even more so: the desperate will for self-preservation caused some to put their faith in numerous bizarre yet ineffectual preventions and cures and at times fed to the abandonment of values such as love and charity towards one's fellow or even towards one's family. Here it should be said that Barnes researched his subject well. The value of a theatrical work, of course, is neither limited to nor enhanced by its degree of historical accuracy; but it is worth noting that nearly al1 of the pathetically inadequate precautions taken by his characters (arnong them sniffing scents, dancing frantically, sitting stock still, swatting the air, cross-dressing) as well as the behaviour the characters exhibit towards one another, have been documented, although Barnes liberally mixes remedies used in several different outbreaks.' But we do not need to be overly particular: both Barnes and history provide us with a Dr. Antrechau who developed a theory of how plague spread, and whether the doctor lived in Toulon in 1721 and his theory blamed microscopic winged worms, as history would have it, or whether he lived in Auxerre in 1348 and cited a white mist, as B a r n e s would have it, is triviaL2 Discussion of plague conditions and mentality in this chapter, therefore, will be limited neither to the plague during which Red Noses is set nor to the relatively mild plague which coincided with the death of Elizabeth and the ascension of James. It is assumed that in Europe, whether during a plague of the fourteenth century or one of the eighteenth, conditions which combine great fear with little knowledge will elicit similar human reactions. While thewe are many reports of distasteful responses to life during pe~tilence,~ times of plague have also been seen as, if not joyous, at least free, cleansing, and offering opportunities for egalitarianism which are not normally available. A rather cheery description of the plague comes from the Roman poet Franscesco Berni: Plague time is the golden age, that divine first state of innocence of humanity. It is the finest time of the whole year, for then there are no talkative bores, no creditors, no crush in the churches, no schools, no boredom, no exertion, and no pecuniary troubles. It brings freedom to the individual, a wise enjoyment of life, free £rom al1 external restriction, deliberate relish of al1 earthly pleasures and a turning to God and divine art. Such a passage almost makes one long for corpse-filled streets, even though its comparison of plague time to prelapsarian Eden is clearly tongue-in-cheek. Still, we can imagine that it contains some genuine truth. The poet is putting a positive face on a chaotic circumstance. The confusion and incomprehensibility of the plague, combined with the absence of church or state authority, has certain political implications, some of which are liberating. Al1 the rules become null. The concept of theft falls apart when houses are left open and property is left unprotected, because the owners have either fled or died. The concept of sexual propriety disappears in the face of death. And the concept of social order disintegrates when pestilence strikes al1 strata of society indiscriminately. This absence of socio-economic discrimination is a favourite motif of Thomas Dekker's in his writings on the plague of 1603, and is nicely (if somewhat morbidly) quipped here : Therets one, who in the morne with gold Could haue built Castells: now heers made A pillow to a wretch, that pïayde For halfe-pemy A l m e s , (with broken lim) The Beggar now is aboue him.' Today it would be difficult to discuss plague without looking at Artaud, who not only addresses the social ramifications of the disease, but goes on to use his findings in forming a theory of theatre. He cornes to this conclusion: The theater like the plague is a crisis which is resolved by death or cure ... from the human point of view, the action of theater, like that of plague, is beneficial, for, impelling men to see themselves as they are, it causes the mask to fall, reveals the lie, the slackness, baseness, and hypocrisy of our world; ... and in revealing to collectives of men their dark power, their hidden force, it invites them to take, in the face of destiny, a superior and heroic attitude they would never have assumed without it." In their very different ways, Berni, Dekker, and Artaud are describing the plague as a time when the very constructs of normal society are destroyed, when beggars and rich men are equal and when death and disorder bring life and freedorn. Social structure, in other words, falls apart, leaving the way open for reconstruction in, perhaps, an inverted fashion or in a way which parodies the hegemony of more ordered times. Within the recent cultural memory of the people of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, there were other, less lethal, times when similar phenornena occurred: during periods of festival. Puritan influence had begun to constrict the content and practice of festival, carnival, and itinerant performance,' but these outlets of popular expression remained a part of the cultural heritage of the Renaissance. Historians of popular performance agree that carnival and other holiday practices challenged the chain of authority: servants dressing and acting as lawyers, doctors, or lords, for example, mocked the significance, necessity, and authority of actual lawyers, doctors, and lords. As C. L. Barber puts it , "holiday licenseM was disruptive because "to act 'My Lord of Misrule' or be created one of his retainers says 'We are as good as Lordsr and at the same tirne, 'Lords are no better than we.rm9 Where the historians disagree is in their interpretations of authority's tolerance of customs which clearly belittled it. Conservative views support one or another variation on the "safety valveN theory, that license for these virtual rebellions was given to the plebs on specified occasions in order to prevent actual rebellion. Burke finds value in this theory although he does not feel that allowing rebellion in jest necessarily will contain it to mere jesting.1° And Barber writes that while the Anglican and Catholic churches "allowed nature to have its day," their tolerance was limited: [Tlhe release of that one day was understood to be a temporary license, a vmisrulen which implied rule, so that the acceptance of nature was qualified. Holiday affirmations in praise of folly were limited by the underlying assumption that the natural in man is only one part of him, the part that will fade.'' Michael Bristol points out, however, that interpretations such as these assume that authority was at al1 times pulling the strings, that it was in the hands of the powers that be to permit the disruption of order or not, and that the only group served by such disruption was, ultimately, those in authority. He argues instead for a consideration of sixteenth-century social structure as being under constant revision, its limitations subject to redefinition in a sort of cultural struggle between the populace and the elite, and he notes that authority does not rest solely with ruling institutions: Carnival is an heuristic instrument of considerable scope and flexibility. Though it is a festive and primarily symbolic activity, it has immediate pragmatic aims, most immediately that of objectifying a collective determination to conserve the authority of the community to set its own standards of behavior and social discipline, and to enforce those standards by appropriate means. At the same time Carnival is a form of resistance to arbitrarily imposed foms of domination, especially when the constraints imposed are perceived as an aggression against the customary noms of surveillance and social control. It is, finally, an idiom of social experimentation, in which utopian fantasies are perfonned and collective desires for a better lif e are expressed. l2 There are, of course, some important dif f erences between festival and plague: the former is a scheduled, man-made event under the control of its participants, a time of corporal indulgence and fattening, while the latter is organic, unpredictable, devastating, wasting. Although Bristol disagrees with Barber and Burke as to how much control over festival the ruling elite actually held, it is clear that no one controls the plague. The consequences of both events are, however, related: for a period of time, power - to drop social convention, to imitate and mock one's social superiors, to revel, and to lose onef s quotidian identity - is released to those who are under other circumstances excluded from power . Citing Dekker' s plague writings, Bristol concludes, "The plague becomes a kind of grim and terrifying Carnival, a seriocomic transformation of the hierarchies of everyday existence. "13 And Bakhtinr s assessrnent of carnival is strikingly sirnilar to Berni's assessrnent of the plaque: Camival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in Ft, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces al1 the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During camival time life is subject only to its laws, chat is, the laws of its own freedom. It has universal spirit; it is a special condition of the entire world, of the worldrs revival and renewal, in which al1 take part.14 The threads which connect plague, festival, and empowerment make up the fabric of Red Noses. The play sets us d o m firmly in a plague-ridden world, and we are confronted at the outset with the chaos of various individuals - Viennet, Moncriff , de Bonville and his wif e, Father Flote - each trying to stave off the plague in a different way. A confounding of expectations occurs in the character of Dr, Antrechau: as a doctor he should be able to cure and comfort, yet he can only admit defeat and cruelly keep the il1 at bay. Viennet tears at his scabs to convince himself that if there is no pain, there is no pestilence. Moncriff has a rotation of herbs to sniff. Madame de Bonville dances in the belief that constant rnovement will Save her. And Father Flote, in the midst of a spasm, prays to God for guidance. There is no common belief, no community, no normalcy; the world is inverted, a vacuum exists, and it is therefore unavoidable that into this chaos must corne those who would attempt to recreate it in their own image. In plague history as in Barnes's play, factions develop, no one of which has the omnipotent authority of the church or the state, but each of which has its own interna1 rnechanisms, rules, and what may loosely be called systems of government. Some will inevitably try to maintain normalcy during the abnormal circumstances of plague, as Barnes demonstrates in his gold merchants, who carry on their amual meeting although there are but two of the guild left, and in his whores, who, like good economists, take advantage of the law of supply and demand to up their fees - as if money continued to have meaning. But others respond to the absence of authority by accepting the carnivalesque reality and forming new microsysterns. Barnes features three such alternative governments: the Black Ravens, whose response to the plague has both socialist and capitalist resonances; the Flagellants, who take it upon themselves to atone for the sins which they feel brought about the plague; and the Floties who, under the direction of Father Flote, endeavour to bring levity to an essentially bleak situation. Dekker confirms the existence of individuals who sound very like Barnes's Ravens: Only a band of Desper-vewes, some fewe Empiricall madcaps . . . turned themselues into Bees (or more properlie into Drones) and went humrning vp and downe, with hony-brags in their mouthes, sucking the sweetenes O£ Siluer, (and now and then of Aurum Potabile) out of the poison of Blaines and Carbuncles: and these iolly Mountibanks clapt vp their bills vpon euery post (like a Fencers Challenge) threatning to canuas the Plague, and to fight with him at al1 his owne seuerall weapons . . - . 15 By exposing themselves to the plague, these wdronesu likely built up an immunity, and, it seems, made money doing it;16 reason enough f o r their actions. Barnes invests his Black Ravens with a clear purpose, but what that purpose is cannot even be agreed upon by the factions's two representatives, Scarron and Druce. When questioned by Flote, Druce gives profit as his reason for "greasing, " i. e. , deliberately transrnitting the plague by spreading the pus collected from boils ont0 objects people will touch, but Scarron's motivation is both levelling and purgative: That 's not it at all. We grease f o r a higher purpose, to wipe the slate clean, turn the world underside up, crack the Universe. We grease because we hate. 1 travelled through my life in the world's bowels like Jonah in the dark fish- Now 1'11 stride into sunlight palaces. Grease the fat bellies out. War, famine, pestilence, the worldfs dying only to be born again. Just as the seed corn rots in order ta sproutWand bear good fruit, so mankind must stink to flower in glory. Salvationfs built on putrefaction. (16) As in any faction, it is the responsibility of the leader to have a crusade; the followers can be motivated by persona1 necessity, like soldiers in an army. In this faction Scarron is clearly the brains of the operation, as demonstrated not only by the relative quality of his speech but by dint of his authority over his associate, as when he orders Druce to leave off sexually abusing the dead and dying bodies (16). Like the peasant taking on the role of a lord during festival, Scarron ironically places himself in a position of power even as he abjures its inequity. Anarchy doesnJ t last long in Red Noses; in the absence of centralized power, the characters merely form smaller governments. Through Scarron Barnes is, however, revealing a far more hopeful outcome for the putrefied social structure than he was able to envision in The Rulinq Class and in The Bewitched. In those plays, rot gave way only to even greater rot; as thorough as corruption becomes, there is no point where it seems that the only possible next step would be a healthy reconstruction. In Red Noses and in Sunsets and Glories, the possibility of a social recovery in which the meek might indeed inherit the earth is considered and even occurs, if only for a time. The historical Flagellants travelled primarily through Germany during the mid-fourteenth-century plague, putting on exhibitions of public self-scourging and gathering followers and admirers who supported their conviction that the diseaso was a punishment from God. Philip Ziegler provides an interesting take on this group: They did achieve something. In some at least of the towns they visited they brought about a spiritual regeneration, ephemeral, no doubt, but still real while it lasted, Adulterers confessed their sins, robbers returned stolen goods. They provided some diversion at the places along their route and left behind them a fleeting hope that their pain might bring an end to the greater sufferings of the plague-stricken. l7 But he goes on to note that on the negative side, the Flagellants - unwashed, bleeding from open wounds, and therefore al1 the more susceptible to contagion - were also a significant factor in spreading the pestilence. When Barnes examines the question of the palliative value of comedy in Red N o s e s and still more prominently in Laushter!, he is balancing similar qualities: the comfort, release, and sanity which humour cari offer on one side of the scale, weighed against the goal-attainment which sober action can accomplish on the other. Of course in Red Noses, unlike in Laushter!, there is no weapon, no coalition, no earthly power which can stop the destruction, Barnes's Flagellants (again, he uses two to stand for the lot) are set up as foils to the Floties, or Red Noses; their very sombre purpose is made ridiculous when Father Flote and the Master of the Flagellants, Grez, engage in pounding one another with clubs. The laughter which this live Punch and Judy show elicits is taken by Flote to be a sign £rom God instructing him in his purpose in life. Both groups attempt to position themselves near the Prime Power, Christ, as they vie for permission to use the same forum on the same day: GREZ. We sought Pope Clement in Avignon, found him a sucking dog-leech selling Christ's cross and flesh for profit. His court is a stinking bank of usury. We Say no man need go to Avignon or Hel1 to find Pope or Devil. Both lodge in his own breast. . . . On Easter Monday in the square in Auxerre we'll denounce false world, f alse Church. Wer re Christ s red meat, hacked raw. They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. Closest to Him when speared, flayed, racked . FLOTE. On Easter Monday in the square in Auxerre wefll put on a honey-pellet show thatfll set toes a tap-tap-tapping. Your suffering's nothing to mine. Despised, rejected, laughed at, If m closer to Hirn than you. And Ifve got better legs. (32-33) In any event, the square is not assigned on the basis of one daim being more valid than the other, but according to chance: it happens that some violent bodily tics of Flote's help the gold merchants, who control the booking of the square, in their sexual endeavours (33). In contrast to the Ravens' refusal to acknowledge any power other than, perhaps, death, or to the Flagellants' deliberate distancing from what remains of ecclesiastical authority, Flote, despite his faith in his work, is willing to submit to the command of Pope Clernent VI even if he should order the disbanding of the Floties (50-51). However, it does not suit the purposes of the pontif f to do so, for reasons which will be examined b e l o w . There is much source material available on the Flagellants and a fair bit on the Black Ravens, or similar types. But in creating the Floties, Barnes seems to have picked up on a mere footnote in plague studies. Here is Nohlfs entire entry on an analogous group: A particularly interesting feature of the Middle Ages are the ecclesiastic fraternities of fools which were founded to combat the fear of death - for instance, "The Company of the Foolt' of Aarau under the patronage of the plague saint St. Sebastian and the Virgin Mary. Unfortunately no details concerning them have been preserved, and we only know that on the outbreak of great epidemics they cheered the hearts of the people by public masquerades and processions. l8 Whethew or not this passage served to inspire Barnes to create his comic troupe, once the connection between festival and plague is established, it is fitting that the Floties should exist in the climate of Red Noses- They are carnivalesque figures not so much because they are entertaining (in fact their chief entertainment value lies in being lousy), but because they are acting out roles which under normal circumstances they could never play. When the peasant acts the judge during Carnival, he temporarily becomes the judge and enjoys the perquisites of the judge, if only in an impermanent reality. Father Flote's party of revellers is made up of Le Grue, a blind juggler, and his assistant Bembo; the Boutros Brothers, a pair of one-legged dancers; Frapper, a stuttering stand-up; Marguerite, a lascivious nun; Brodin, a mercenary turned underpaid entertainer; Rochfort, an aristocrat; Father Toulon, a rigid priest; and Sonnerie, who communicates only with bells but is understood by all. They are led by the most simple of men, Father Flote, who, far £rom having any political ambitions, States simply, ~ ' r n God's blind instrument, His obedient servant, chosen to bring the salvation of joy to the fearful and pain-rackedN ( 5 0 ) . As during festival time, these characters are playing at being what they are not; in fact, most of them are playing at being, or at least are taken for being, more than they are. Outside of plague or festival a simple priest like Flote could not attract such followers any more than an uncoordinated blind man could find employment as a juggler. But during the plague al1 are welcomed into the Flotie fold, unquestioned and unjudged. In taking on some of the more unqualified performers, Flote reasons that "Failing to be good they succeeded in being completely bad" (39) . Even those who would oppose the clowns - Father Toulon, or the unwittingly comic Master of the Flagellants in the scene noted earlier - must take up their red noses, literally or figuratively- In this inverted state of affaixs, failure equals success, ineptitude equals ability, no one is excluded and no one is exempted. Here is a utopian society indeed, not quite as Sir Thomas More meant the word but in the sense that impossible dreams are fulfilled, plain men become leaders, governments are toppled and restructured, Such freedoms can only occur when the centre of a society gives way. The 13th Earl of Gurney, as J.C., failed in his attempt to empower the individual because he was operating alongside the very solid monolith of British patriarchy. No plague, carnival license, or sudden absence of power forces the chaotic circumstance necessary to incite real change. The death of the 12th Earl and the ensuing kerfuffle over inheritance creates only a minor inconvenience in the scheme of things. In much of Shakespearean comedy, as well, the disorder which drives the plot seems to be just that: a good 71 theatrical device of a temporary nature. Al1 will be sorted out when the lovers awake from their midsummer night's dream; the shrew will be tamed and man will regain his dominant position over woman; the duke will re-establish justice and mete it out, measure for measure. In the non-comedies, of course, a new order may arise from the ashes of the old (we hope that Denmark under Fortinbras will be less rotten), but where in Shakespeare is true rebellion possible? Perhaps the nearest we come to this possibility is in the Henry VI trilogy. As 1 mentioned in the previous chapter, the trilogy opens with the death of Henry V, and although an heir exists, King Henry VI has neither the experience, wisdom or desire to hold power effectively. Like Middleton's Constantius of H e n s i s t Kinor of Kent, who will be discussed in connection with Sunsets and Glories, Henry VI has, by being so disinterested and ineffectual in the task of centralizing authority, achieved a sort of absence even while he wears the crown. There is a dangerous sense of carnivalesque inversion throughout the Henry VI tri10g-y.'~ It begins, before Henry V is even laid in the ground, with the succession of messengers delivering news of French revolts which overturn completely the victories of Henry V; continues in the image of the woman-warrior Joan la Pucelle; is personified by Jack Cade in the middle play; and doesnft end until the defeat of yet another woman-warrior, Queen Margaret, who not only usurps her husbandfs place on the battlefield but shoos him away as 7 2 though he were a pesky dog, Al1 are signs of a disordered, decentralized universe in which the disenfranchised segments of the population, namely, women and the peasant class, briefly threaten to upset the status quo. The two characters who best embody this threat in the trilogy are Joan la Pucelle and Jack Cade. hile Shakespeare endows Queen Margaret with great rnilitary prowess (see, for example, her speech to the troops, 3 Henrv VI V.iv.1-38), her status as queen gives her a certain leeway, particularly since her ability no doubt called to mind Elizabeth's recent victory over the Spanish Armada. Joan, however, is not nobility but only the daughter of a shepherd; and more significant than her actual station is her claim of being noble (1 Henrv VI V. iv. 21-22. 36-41) . Phyllis Rackin, interpreting a mid-sixteenth century account of Joan's crimes, notes the double subversiveness of the historical Joan of Arc's actions: "Assuming masculine dress, Joan has violated biblical prohibition and the gender regulations that governed women's 'estater in society. Assuming a coat of arms, she represents a threat to the entire social order. n20 In a Platonic view of imitation, Joan's crimes of impersonation are the crimes of theatre itself, but in a less paranoid mode w e are generally happy to enjoy disguise on stage even where we might find it threatening or warped in real life. (What percentage of the audience who were entertained by, Say, La Case aux Folles would be equally pleased to serve tea to a fernale impersonator in their home?) Bristol's take on the perversity of disguise outside the playhouse is also relevant here: To W e a r another man's clothes or to permit the indiscriminate exchange of garments is to display contempt for the most fundamental values. Temporal authority has the duty to enforce and to regulate expressions of identity in the social integument, for to do otherwise is to fail to observe the difference between, for example, Jew and Christian. The participants in Carnivalesque travesty radically confuse and transgress social space - in Carnival a crown & just a funny hat, and a fumy hat, or some even more inappropriate object, is a ~rown.~' The paper crown and declaration, V'm GodN ( 5 7 ) which Barnes gives to Father Toulon for the performance of Evervman are not sufficient to "radically confuse and transgress social space," even if Grez, embodying Plato's nightmare, is confused: "It's a lie. 1 know that voice. He's not God. It' s Father Toulonm (57) . Theatre in which a division exists between performer and audience, whether it takes place during an atmosphere of festival or not, maintains a distance which would seem to counter serious subversive intent; thus we laugh at Grez or at Shakespeare's Bottom for failing to make the proper distinctions. Conversely, Joan's subversion is still more profound when we see her as assurning - perhaps masquerading in - the role of Christ when she is neither performing for an audience nor participating in a communal performance such as Carnival: like the Christian saviour, she has been sired by both a poor man and by a great power; her 74 words stir an army of followers; her influence exceeds her authoritative station; and her death is viewed as a martyrdom- An additional discornfort in comecting Joan to Christ is her s e x : devout women in Catholicism do not aspire to be Christ but to be bis bride, a role traditionally understood to be subservient and filled with denial, As Barnes's nun, Marguerite, cornplains: "When Jacques died of the hot sweat, 1 f e l t the Church ' tween my thighs rnisery-moaning and holding me. 1 thought cold chastity would clean my bones, sober my heart- Mistake. Dead, Jacques was more alive than the living Christu (34). For Marguerite, the act of taking up her red nose and metaphorically tossing away her wedding band is akin to Joan's refusal to play the wife: both are inversive acts with subversive consequences.22 The more obvious carnivalesque character in the trilogy is Jack Cade, Like Joan, Cade makes claims of noble birth, defying anyone to prove that he is not the bastard grandson O£ Edmund Mortimer (2 Henrv VI IV.ii.129-39), a statement based upon faulty logic and as difficult to prove or disprove as Joan's. The very act of Cade presenting his argument as logical mocks rhetoric itself as a reveller mocks the mathematician by pretending to be one, or as Touchstone, for example, mocks the art of argument in his speech on "a lie seven times removedm (As You Like It V.iv.67-811, or, to bring Barnes back into the discussion, as the Floties mock artistic talent by performing. The difference is, the reveller and the 7 5 Floties have license for the tinte of the festival (or plague) only, and Touchstonefs license cornes with his rnotley dress; but Cade is acting out of season. His inversion of the rules, conventions, and values of his society - making education a crime, for example, or insiçting upon having the maidenhead of al1 girls before they are married (2 Henrv VI IV-vii) - would be safe and amusing during Carnival; outside of it, however, the donning of the role of Lord of ~isrule becomes not only inappropriate, but dangerous . I1But then are we in order when we are most out of order," declares Cade (1v.ii.182-831, and Barnes would seem to Say the same. Flote and his ragtag troupe succeed in alleviating the horrors of life during something as incomprehensible and chaotic as plague by being themselves still more incomprehensible and chaotic. To describe their performance of Evervman, for example, as amateurish would be an insult to amateurs everywhere. Poor stuttering Frapper is given the job of prompter, Flote as Death entirely subverts awe by taking a pratfall upon one of his entrances, and the perfomers must break character to silence an audience which has not been convinced to suspend its disbelief. At the intemal Barnes takes a tip from Jonson's Evervman Out of His Humour by having Flote's audience deliver the kind of criticisrn and commentary which his own audience might be thinking: "Rubbish. They havenft shown the world as it is or how we can change it"; "It al1 looks penny-pinched and tat-like to me. They should've spent more money on the whole thingt ; "No bloodn (60 -61) . If the moral of this Everyman, in which the title character dices with Death and wins, is supposed to be an admonition to straighten up and fly right, it fails miserably. But that is not its moral. That would be the moral of an Evervman which conformed to the dominant paradigm. Flote's version delivers a far more subversive message: BRODIN. . Death doesnft count, and probably doesnrt read or write either. When he comës again werll play it to the very end. Whether dying in a privy or marble halls, green field or white bed, the hand pointing to zero, the smell in your throat, donrt do Deathf s job for him. Donr t start dying before you die, already half dead. Donr t go easy, make him work for you, let the calendar tear its own leaves, fight dirty. (63) It is the shortest of steps to go from suggesting that Death is a force which can be opposed to imagining the same of popes and kings, which is what Brodin then does: FIRST LEPER. ... Kingsss decree al1 lepersss be banished, Princesss of Provence set mobs to massacre USSSS. ROCHFORT. Scapegoats are needed. The poor are always destroyed, not because they're poor but because they' re weak . BRODIN. Hunting wouldnr t be such fun for lords if the rabbits had swords. Cuirassiers, Brother Leper, Cuirassiers! (66) Brodinrs cal1 for the lepers to take up swords borders on the seditious, and we will never know what effect it might have had on them since they are promptly murdered by a mob. But it is doubtful that a threat of armed lepers would cause much concern. Rackin holds that, in the final analysis, although the Cade rebellion as dramatized in 2 Henrv VI is dangerous in the sense that the rebels' cornplaints are very real and timely, ultimately they are made too ridiculous to be taken seriously: Potentially subversive, they [the rebellion scenesl seem finally designed to justify oppression. Dissident sentiments are first evoked, then discredited and demonized as sources of anxiety, and finally defused in comic ridicule and brutal comic violence. 23 The Cade rebellions, in other words, are made carnivalesque by Shakespeare, and hence, safe. Whether Shakespeare was politically conservative or as subversive as he felt could get away with, he seems to have purposefully deflated the validity of the Cade rebels. Barnes would not be held back out of fear of offending the powers that bel but the question remains: has he, too, taken his comic rebels too far and hence, buried their political validity? Most states, even those with an autocratic bent, will to some degree tolerate a plurality of voices such as make themselves heard in Red Noses. Even Machiavelli supported the Roman practice of allowing the plebs to protest: "every city should provide ways and means whereby the ambitions of the populace may find an outlet, especially a city which proposes to avail itself of the populace in important un der ta king^."^' And on the face of it, there is no reason to consider either the Flagellants or the Red Noses to be subversive threats. The Black Ravens are another story, as they are deliberately spreading the plague and singling out the wealthy to boot. So if Pope Clement VI does not find it necessary, for most of the play, to declare even the Ravens heretic, why should he care whether one group of people is going around flogging itself and another is flogging its audience with bad jokes? Barnes's characterization of the relationship between Pope Clement VI and the Flagellants is, again, historically accurate; they were tolerated, even admired, until such time as they became too popular and too independent of Church doctrine.25 Mere popularity, however, is not what makes the Red Noses a potential menace to the Church, and Father Flote's obedience is never in question; the threat comes from the power (and the politics) of humour and irnpersonation. In his essay "Filthy Rites," Stephen Greenblatt describes a Z u f i i ritual performed for a European observer in which the Europeans themselves are mocked, yet the observer cornes away feeling superior. He postulates that humour is always a tool of the oppressor: The gesture of insult is at the same time an acknowledgement of defeat, for the satiric hurnor of the oppressed, no matter how telling it may bel always assumes the condition of oppression, perhaps even reinforces that condition, both by releasing aggression nonviolently through laughter and by confirming in the minds of the conquerors the impotence of the ~onquered.~~ Here is the essence of both the perceived danger of the Floties - that they will mock the sobriety of Christianity and the authority of the Church - and of their inherent harmlessness. Before he catches the spirit of the Noses, Father Toulon, oblivious to the insult contained in his remark, tries to persuade the pope to bar the Floties' actions, arguing, "Laughter produces freedom. It's against al1 authority, ripping off the public mask to show the idiot face beneathtl ( S O ) , but Clement VI is well aware that Carnival rnay be held, that in fact it is in his best interests for it to be held, because at the end of the day, his purposes will have been served by it: Living behind a mirror, 1 look out and see therers liberation in the plague air as well as worms. The restraints, customs and laws of centuries buckle, the old moulds crack - happen they should crack - but the green force that liberates the poet and thinker also frees the maniac with a butcherfs knife. The wayfs rough; no level roads left. 1 see you as a useful lubricant, Father [Flote] ; holy oil. (51 Father Toulon's concern about the ripping off of masks is interesting in light of Artaud's similar assertion about plague and identity. The freedom of festival (or of plague) allows for the putting on of masks by the common people, either literally as was the practice in some parts of Europe, or figuratively, in that, as Burke writes, lTarnival may be seen as a huge play in which the main streets and squares became stages, the city becarne a theatre without walls, and the inhabitants, the actors and çpectators, observing the scene from their bal~onies."~' Toulon worries that the masks which are put on by the Floties - their characterizations - will cause the public masks worn by the great to fall; and at the same time he admits that what lies beneath these masks are idiot faces. It is not without a measure of subversive humour 80 that Barnes casts Toulon as God in the Noses' production of Evervman. Artaud likewise finds characterization a means of unmasking, but he expects to find not idiots but heroes beneath the mask. The dorming of a mask, disguise, or characterization - impersonation generally - as a means to expose deceivers and hypocrites is among the most pervasive devices in Renaissance drama. We find it in the history genre in the service of Shakespeare's Prince Hal, whose mastery of the technique is both impressive and complex. To cite just two instances of Hal's use of false identity: disguised as a robber he exposes Falstaff's cowardice (1 Hen. IV II.ii.88-981, and afterwards, playing at having been absent from the robbery of Falstaff, the prince exposes him as a liar (1 Hen. IV II.iv.156-261). 1 have chosen these examples because of the significance of Falstaff's defense. Having been himself unmasked, he claims to have seen through Hal's disguise: "By the Lord, I knew ye as well as he that made yeu (1 Hen. IV II.iv.263). Falstaff would have it that the prince cannot hide his identity; in an extension of the lfsafety valve" theory of festival, Hal may have his day of pretense, but in the end, he is always the prince. If an ordered universe requires peasants to reassume their identities after festival, then it must also require princes to reassume theirs. But, as Greenblatt's interpretation of characterization indicates, it is Falstaff who, ultimately, can never benefit from deception; that distinction lies solely with the authority figure, in this case, Hal. 28 Not surprisingly, Barber again takes, and assigns to Shakespeare, a conservative view of Prince Hal as a carnivalesque figure: Shakespeare dramatizes not only holiday but also the need for holiday and the need to limit holiday. ... The issue, in his hands, is not whether H a l will be good or bad but whether he will be noble or degenerate, whether his holiday will become his everyday . 29 Barnes would seem to support this concept of the danger of holiday and everyday intermingling becoming confused with one another; he differs £rom Barber, though, in that he would view such chaos as a positive, perhaps necessary, step towards the development of an egalitarian society. His Floties are acting in season when they perform a skewed Evervman during a period of general disorganization; once the plague has ended, however, carnival-tirne ends with it, and criticism of authority is no longer tolerated. "Now the plague has passed," says Clement VI, I1we must immediately limit, tame, subordinate, rule. Submission and belief, the twin poles of the world must be restored. And quick, else they acquire a taste for the other waym (87). Suddenly, mockery of authority has become unfashionable, and when the Red Noses stage their version of the birth of Christ, the Church cries out "Anathema!" and the audience cornplains that it is being made to think (98) . (Here, incidentally, 1 feel that Barnes has veered off course: there is nothing particularly intellectually challenging in the second play, and it would have been more consistent to have the audience take offence on the grounds of moral depravity . ) What does the Church find so upsetting about the Floties' production of Christ and Kinss? Though the irony is evident, Marguerite, in her role as the mother of al1 the slain Jewish infants, is not uttering anything treasonous when she tells her children, "Don't cry, my little lambs, m y lambkins. If you had lived you would have learned to love your rulers for the way their softest whisper is obeyed like a shouted comrnand" (103). Herod is the only figure given a comical treatment, and he isnft exactly a hero of the Judeo-Christian world. However, to the Jacobean way of thinking, even such a one as Herod enjoys a special relationship to God. As King James saw it, a wicked king is sent by God for a curse to his people, and a plague for their sinnes: but that it is lawfull to them to shake off that curse at their owne hand, which God hath laid on them, that 1 deny, and may do so iustly. The Archbishop agrees, telling Flote, "You mock God. For the authority of kings, yea even Herodfs, cornes from God, and in mocking them you mock Himn (98) . Again, the problem lies not in the material but in the timing. Comedy - in fact artistic representation generally - which foregrounds inequality is acceptable, desirable, and appropriate only during equalizing circumstances and times of social upheaval. Once order is restored, it loses its flavour. As Flote answers the cries that his play isnrt No, it isnft funny, In the days of pestilence we could be f m y but now werre back to normal, life is too serious to be funny. Godrs a joker but His jests fa11 flat, (He takes off his red nose.) It isnrt funny when they feed us lies, crush the light, sweep the stars from the heavens. Isnft fumy now ineqÜalityf s in, naming rich and poor, mine and thine. Isn't funny when power rules and men manifest al1 their-deeds in oppression. Isnrt funny till we throw out the old rubbish and gold and silver rust, Then itfll be funny. (103) Whether Flote and his troupe accomplished anything during their period of holiday license, or whether holiday was successfully contained in its place, is a question to which Barnes gives two answers. Flote sees himself as a fa i lure: 1 tried to lift Creation £rom bondage with mirth. Wrong. Our humour was a way of evading truth, avoiding responsibility. Our rnirth was used to divert attention whilst the strong ones slunk back to their thrones and palaces where they stand now in their saggy breeches and paper crowns, absurd like me. (103-04) Recalling Greenblattrs assessrnent of humour and power, Flote would seem to have arrived at the same conclusion, that laughter is an ineffective tool in the cause of redressing social intbalance, that in the end it always serves the status quo, %aughterfs the ally of tyrantsrft as the Author says in produced around the that finished Red Noses. In that play, he explores this premise in the context of the Holocaust, and indeed, there is an irresistible connection to be made with the humour developed by the Jews over the course of their history of oppression. Barnes made this connection and revealed his mixed feelings about comedy in Our 1992 conversation: ... it's too easy to sit on the very comfortable assurnption that comedy is for the oppressed against the oppressors, and that it's a sort of cleansing wind that sweeps through society, and that if we can laugh at something then we are in some way alleviating the misery and the problem. . . . 1 think there are many, many occasions when the comedy is used to quietly justify rage and anger, and I certainly would use it. The Jews have one of the greatest senses of humour in the world. There is more than a true connection between the fact that they're always laughing, that they always make jokes about things that have happened to them, the oppression and the pogroms and the rest of it , I wonder if it would have gone on for so long if they hadnrt got a sense of humour. ... if you block off that outlet, maybe you'd have a revolution.'* The readiness with which the stage audience desert the Red Noses would indicate that Flote, and his creator, are justified in their pessimism. The Pope's subsequent attempt at erasure of the troupe also leaves us wondering about the effectiveness of being a lone voice in the wilderness: "Let the Floties sleep forgotten, their light, ashes. They have never been. Sand out their namesu (106) . But in the next breath Clement VI recognizes the futility of erasure: "Yet to be nameless and have lived, showing how men should live, is a true remembrance. . Fatner Flote thought he'd failed. No man fails completely who shows us gloryN (106). And the replaying of the Floties' voices in an epilogue leaves us agreeing that a voice once heard can never be completely silenced . 85 To return to the mysterious Company of the Fool mentioned earlier, Of Sebastian, the third century A.D. saint selected as their patron, Butler's Lives of the Saints records that his body "was pierced through with arrows, and he was left for dead" at the order of Emperor Diocletian, but that he later rose and spoke to the emperor about his cruel treatment of the Christians. "This freedom of language, " Butler continues, "coming £rom a person whom [~iocletian] supposed to be dead, for a moment kept the emperor speechless; but recovering £ r o m his surprise, he gave orders for h i m to be seized and beaten to death with cudgels, and his body thrown into the common sewer . tl 33 Flote and his followers are also pierced through with arrows yet rise to speak again, and there the play ends- The Emperor tried to silence Saint Sebastian, but his story was recorded and continues to be remembered, as will that of the Red Noses whenever the play is produced or read. They have not gone to the trouble of speaking £rom beyond the grave only to go, finally, unheard, and the question posed by Brodin's Voice - "Father, we were famous but do you think we' 11 live?" (109) - is answered even as it is being asked, Barnes's epilogue, in fact, is rather superfluous; the characters have already corne back to life by appearing on stage, as surely as Hamlet and Company return to life with every performance of that play. (St. Sebastian, incidently, in addition to his status as plague saint, is the patron saint 86 of archers - an i rony when one considers that he was the target - ) What is more to be feared than either death or erasure is to be ignored; and that is the unhappy fate which much of contemporary English d r a m a has been facing for several years. The thought that somewhere, a spectator or reader was taking in and in some way being made to think about the questions of authority raised in Red Noses is a happy one which, when t h e play was written in 1978, a still-idealistic Barnes had the luxury of possessing; by 1985, the year it finally received its first production and six years into the Thatcher government, he had become less hopeful. "The world has moved on in seven years , he wrote, "and not towards the light . 1134 In Sunsets and Glories (1990), his most recently produced play, Bames almost recovers his optimism; to date it is the most idealistic of his staged theatre, but that idealism is ultimately crushed. (Heaven's Blessinss, which will be discussed in my concluding chapter, is an actual happy-ending fairy tale taken £rom Old Testament Apocrypha, but it has not yet received a production.) In Sunsets and Glories, the contagious political innocence of Marcel Flote is transferred from one small-time priest to another, Father Peter de Morrone, with the significant difference that Morrone goes on to head not just an easily squashed band of entertainers, but the powerful Catholic Church itself. Sunsets and Glories might be grouped with The Rulinq Class and The Bewitched in that it presents the problem of how to fil1 a void in a power structure which elects £rom within its own ranks, if we view the College of Cardinals as being a non-reproductive equivalent of the aristocracy. Indeed, the brief opening scene, in which Pope Nicholas IV is litexally stamped out by the foot of God, more than evokes the opening scenes of the plays discussed in Chapter 1 (as well as, for anyone who has ever seen it, the anirnated title sequence of Montv Pvthonfs Flvina Circus) . The College is every bit as reluctant to elect Father Morrone Supreme Pontiff as was the Gurney farnily to allow mad J - C . to inherit the esCate and the seat in the House of Lords. The Gurneys had to acquiesce, finally, to the intricacies of the law; the College is likewise subject to an authority even greater than itself. Once Cardinal Malabranca nominates Morrone (apparently receiving his name via divine inspiration), the other cardinals, in tu rn , object to the nomination on the grounds of Morrone's inexperience as a leader, and in the next breath find themselves electing him. The first reaction of Cardinal Orsini to the nomination, for example, is Teter who? Do you mean that old, raggedy-arsed hermit who lives in the Abruzzi rn~uritains?~~~ But as he listens to Malabranca humming the "Te Deum," something happens within him: ORSINI. Peter de Morrone is a peasant, untutored in worldly affairs with no experience of ruling. He's a man of wondrous sanctity and goodness, but - . - (He suddenly f a l l s on his knees.) In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, I elect Peter de Morrone ruler of the Church of God. (4) For once, the realpolitik of the Church is made to submit to the authority of the divine, and Peter de Morrone becomes Pope Celestine V. We should perhaps feel a bit disconcerted at finding Godts presence at a papal election unusual (Malabranca finds it so odd that he spends Celestine's entire reign believing himself to be dreaming), but Barnes's portrayal of the College of Cardinals as a collection of politicos with private agendas, motivated not by love of God but by wealth and power, seems al1 too natural. In David Harets Racins Demon, first produced only months before Sunsets and Glories, the point is less cynically but quite clearly made that actual faith is rather out of sync with the workings of the modern Anglican Ch~rch.~~ Religious belief is likewise a credential of lesser importance in Barnesrs thirteenth-century clergy, and matters of the spirit, when they are thought upon at all, are connected to political gain. Cardinal Gaetani explains that he has refrained from carnal activity for practical as well as spiritual reasons. The Holy Father is a saint. But hefll be destroyed 'less 1 can protect him. To do that, I must stand by him but herll not allow it if 1 stink of lust. (16) The Elizabethans and Jacobeans were also clear on the difference between a man of the cloth and a man of faith. (Perhaps ours is the first culture to expect, naively, purity from our religious leaders, and to find it so shocking when they disappoint-) The truly spiritual figures we find in the drama of the Renaissance are rarely, if ever, holding positions in the Church, and the churchmen we find are rarely engaged in spiritual activity. We get reports such as those £ r o m Machiavel in the Prologue to Marlowe's The Jew of Maita ka. 1592) and from Malevole in Marstonr s The Malcontent (1604) : Malevole, responding to the question of whence he has come, answers, "Frorn the public place of much dissimulation, the churchm (1 Aii.4) 3 7 ; reasoning why men will not sin in future years, he says, "Because (thanks to some churchmen) our age will leave them nothing to sin with" 1 - i i . O . The audience makes allowances for Malevole because he is "the mal~ontent,~~ but that licence doesntt dilute the sentiment- And Machiavel assures the audience that wise rulers, even those who head churches, know and use his instruction: Admired 1 am of those that hate me most. Though some speak openly against rny books, Yet they will read me, and thereby attain To Peterfs chair: and when they cast me off Are poisoned by my climbing followers. 1 count religion but a childish toy, And hold there is no sin but ignorance. (Pro. : 9-15) 38 Political savvy makes popes, then; not a God-whispered word in the ear of the electing body of cardinals. Webster provides a deliciously corrupt and hypocritical Cardinal in The Duchess of alf fi (ca. 1614) , complete with a scene between the Cardinal and his mistress in which we hear him boast how he taught her to lie to her husband (II.iii). (A touch of humour follows when the arriva1 of a former lover of Julia's suggests that, in fact, the mistress did not need the Cardinal's instruction-) In a darker context, though, Webster reminds us how far the Cardinal's power extends. We are permitted to eavesdrop on two pilgrims who are discussing the Duchess's banishment £rom the state of Ancona: 1 PILG. But 1 would ask what power hath this state Of Ancona, to determine of a free prince? 2 PILO. They are a free state, sir, and her brother showed How that the Pope, forehearing of her looseness, H a t h seized into thf protection of the Church The dukedom which she held as dowager. 1 PILG- But by what justice? 2 PILG. Sure 1 think by none, Only her brotherf s instigation. (III Av.27-34) 39 In Sunsets and Glories, too, the authority of the secular rulers Charles II and Maria of Naples is eclipsed by that of the Church which, far from being the tool of the aristocracy that The Rulincr Class (witness the character of Bishop Lampton), must be carefully courted by the monarchs; indeed, they seem to rule by the grace of the Church. Much of the plot of Sunsets and Glories is driven by the tug-of-war between those who would have Pope Celestine hold court in Rome and those who would prevent him from leaving Naples, taking the seat of power with him. When, near the end of the play, Gaetani becomes Pope Boniface and proposes to do just that, Charles and his queen are reduced to shuffling around the palace in carpet slippers : MARIA. . . . We ' re no longer at the centre. Pope Boniface ignores us and sends us home. We play our last scene in poor light, pushed to the margin, flip-flop. CHARLES. 1 didn't ask much. 1 had a simple dream, of ruling the world. Where was I wrong? 1 betrayed Father Morrone and Judas hanged himself in a potter's field for it, but kings betray their subjects daily and thrive, flip-flop. MARIA. We shrink; 1 feel myself shrinking, the squeaking consort of a minor princeling in the wet fish trade. (78) 1 want to be careful, though, not to make it seem as though Renaissance playwrights necessarily faulted the clergy for its secular activity; on the contrary, the corrupt prelate fares far better on the Renaissance stage than does the holy innocent - or, at least, than does he who would leave political matters in the hands of God. In a reversal of (perhaps not strongly-held) expectations, Shakespeare has Henry VI out-do the Cardinal in Christian sentiment during a KING. 1 prithee, peace, Good queen, and whet not on these furious peers; For blessed are the peacemakers on earth. CAR. Let me be blessed for the peace 1 make Against this proud Protector with my sword! (2 Hen. VI II. i. 32-36) - Any suspicion that the king is motivated purely or even substantially by religious belief, however, should be allayed when Henry. upon learning that al1 the French lands won by his father are lost, reacts, "Cold news, Lord Somerset: but God's will be done!" (2 H e n . VI III.i.86), or when he sits himself d o m during battle and declares: "To whom God will, there be the victo~y!~ (3 Hen. VI II.v.15). It is clear that we are not meant to view him a pious £001 but rather as a £001 who excuses his weakness by calling it Godrs will. A truly spiritual character, and one who bears rather startling similarities to Peter de Morrone, is Constantius in Middletonrs little-known Henqist, Kins of Kent; or The Mavor of Oueerrborouqh (ca. 1616) Constantius, the eldest son of the recently deceased king, had been placed in a monastery becauçe his father felt that it was not within his son's abilities to rule the kingdom. Far £rom being embittered by this choice, Constantius thrives out of the world, and when the people choose him to be their king over the Machiavellian Vortiger, he does so only under protest. Vortiger connivingly offers to run the show from backstage, taking on the burden of authority while leaving the glory to Constantius; what he omits to mention in his gracious offer is that he will also hold al1 real power. In many ways Barnes's Morrone is the direct descendent of Constantius. Constantius finds his election to be cruel, and, once resigned to accept his fate, complains: CONST. 1 feele want And extreme pouerty of Ioy within me, The peace 1 had is parted mongst rude To keepe them quiet 1 haue lost it al1 men, What C& ye ~ingdome gaine by my vndooing? Similarly, Morroners reaction to having been elected pope is: MORRONE ( s ing ing) . "Lord, 1 am tired and 1 am old. It ' s snowing and my feet are cold. Why me? Why me? If 1 leave, it will never be the same. No end to rnisery or to sharne. Lord, answer me if you can. I'm led to slaughter like a la&. Why me? Why me?" (8 Both characters value the spiritual wealth they had gained through living out of the world - Constantius in his monastery, Morrone on his desolate mountaintop - far more than the wealth, power, and position which they are offered and which most men would envy. And both are as out of place in their authoritarian roles as would be the carnivalesque reveller during Lent. Performing his first official order of business, hearing suitors, Constantius tells them: CONST. Pray doe not follow me, vnles you doot To wonder at my garmCen1ts: theirs noe Cause - - 1 giue you why you shold: tis shame enough Me thinks for me to looke vpon my selfe; It greiues me that more shold: the other weeds Became me better . . . . (I.ii.48-53) Barnes, in keeping with his love of spectacle, expresses the same sentiment visually: at his papal instalment, Morrone, dressed in full regalia, takes the ring of St. Peter and his new name, and then runs to greet King Charles II. The papal robe, however, fails to accompany him (10). And while signing blank papers representing as-yet unmade suits, the new pope suddenly begins to topple to the ground from the weight (18). The writing board he had been wearing around his neck is converted into a tiny hut into which Morrone can "crouch cramped in the dark, feasting on stale bread and staler water: 1 want paradise al1 to myself" (20). Constantius, too, is happy only once the suitors leave: Weeres a wishrd howre for Contemplation now; / Al1 still and silent, this is a true Kow long can such a figure live in the world? In the case of Constantius, only through Act Two, scene one. It is Vortiger, of course, who has him assassinated, shortly after the wornan sent to marry the pious king returns, vowing never to marry and to forever forgo pleasures of the flesh. Unfortunately the woman, Castiza, had been engaged to Vortiger, and ber new-found cornmitment to spirituality is not appreciated. Middletonfs play goes on to follow Vortiger and later Hengist in their reigns, exploring the nature of wealth, power, and authority and the various ways in which they are gotten and lost. Morrone £ares somewhat better, for a time. Like Constantius, he brings a sou1 into the fold, performing a psychological exorcism on the ruthless rnercenary Montefelto. Elsewhere, to the amazement of the court and clergy, order and stability are achieved, old arguments are settled, strange alliances are formed. But, Barnes asks, are peace and harmony necessarily the most desirable states of being for either the populace or those in power: GAETANI. . . . The Holy Father has done good - brought peace to Sicily - though wars are what nation states are for. He has cured-~ontefelto and by so doing lost a soldier for Christ. And Guelph and Ghibelline are united - thus making them doubly dangerous. Good is Janus faced. What is the link between man and God, man and man? Fear. God wants to be feared rather than loved. So does man.... The Holy Father is good but isnf t feared, so he cannot hold and who knows what hellish chain of events will result from just one act of unconsidered goodness? ( 3 3 ) The wheels turning in Cardinal Gaetani's head are quite visible. He is not the power-hungry, scheming character that Vortiger is; he is, however, a political realist, and in that he is truly Machiavellian, as the Renaissance thinker would have understood him. Felix Raab summarizes Tudor comprehens ion of Machiavelli this w a y : On the one hand we see Machiavelli as the sage political observer; on the other we see him identified with the horror of atheism, of a political world no longer determined by the Will of a universal Providence rnanifested in Christian precepts of political morality." Raab identifies this conflict as one between "policyv and "religion," and he makes a case for increased attention paid to this conflict in the Jacobean years: The general tenor, then, of political writing in Our period [1603-401 was anti-Machiavellian in the sense that most men could not accept the basic assumptions upon which Machiavelli's statecraft was built- ~lthoÜgh they frequently agreed on points of detail and cited Machiavelli as a weighty authority, there was a point at which his blatant secularism aroused hostility and rejection. For many, that point was "politick religionm, the principle of religion as a political device Like the Renaissance thinker described by Raab, Gaetani comes to an impassable obstacle in accepting Machiavelli's argument: how to fit in his Augustinian beliefs. He settles his self-debate on the side of Christian belief: GAETANI. 1 cannot act against the laws of man and God. The blessed Peter sits like a rock on St. Peter's rock, if needs be, till the seas dry, the suri blacks, the light fades. (The light fades to darkness. ) Only a Pope can pull d o m a Pope. (33 1 This is not to say that completely to God, only that expediency such as murder to detexmines that "Only a Pope 96 Gaetani will leave Morrone he will not exercise a secular dethrone him- When Gaetani can pull d o m a Pope" he is not expressing helplessness but rather the necessity of getting Morrone to abdicate on his own- To thiç end Gaetani is not above using deception, and in the following scene we see the whore Sophia being coached to act the part of the Angel Gabriel. The plan is that the Ange1 will urge Morrone to abdicate on the grounds that having the power of Pope w i l l eventually corrupt him, Charles and Maria have, offstage, come to the same conclusion as Gaetani, that no human being can destroy a Pope; curiously, they have also arrived at the same solution- Their Angel Gabriel, played by Queen Maria, will try to convince Morrone to remain Pontiff. This doubling technique, frequently enlisted by B a r n e s , challenges individuality and by extension authority, and will be more thoroughly discussed in Chapter 4 - The identical Gabriel costumes are one type of disguise used in Sunsets and Glories; as 1 have already suggested, Barnes is also playing with the concept of travesty, of being falsely dressed, when he shows how ill-suited is Morrone to the papal vestments. Though not to the extent that it exists in Red Noses, there is a hint of festival atmosphere in Sunsets and Glories: in this case, the holiday unreality of an unknown hermit becoming Supreme Pontiff. Morrone as Pope 97 Celestine becomes a king-clown figure, and like the costumed peasant, he only plays at being Pope; but as Barber noted, such role-playing presents a challenge to the authority structure. The Floties wore the red nose as the proud emblem of their foolishness; Morrone, however, becomes a clown when he puts on the most respected of costumes, the papal dress. Atop his mountain, in his poverty, Morrone is a saint-like figure, an ascetic with a direct line to God. There is something penrerse, however, about Morrone dressed as Pope Celestine V, wearing the trappings of earthly power; it is the same sort of perversion created when the Maid of Orleans dresses as the Master, throwing our sense of order and propriety out the window. That Morronefs gown does not move with him in the sight gag noted above is more than an expression of the emptiness of authority or the essential nakedness of great men (though I think we are meant to see these things as well) ; it is a visual reinforcement of how unsuited Morrone is to occupy St. Peter's chair. As Constantius complains, the other weeds became him better. Morrone cannot wear the mask of authority and be taken for anything other than an impersonator: the mask always points to itself and therefore to the artificiality of authority. Essentially, seeminq and beinq are, for Morrone, inseparable states, and therein lies the essence of both his true power, and of his incompetence as a ruler, Both Montefelto and Mistress Maifreda, a woman claiming to be the true pope, comment on how little Morrone looks like what he daims to be, yet his quiet influence over them accomplishes what the law and the Church have failed to. And after Morrone's unconventional diplomacy sets James of Aragon and Charles II towards resolving a conflict, Gaetani comments: GAETANI. Your Holiness seems to have put two royal fools on the road to talking peace. But at what cost to your dignity? It matters. The Pope's power lies as much in his image as in his canons. The mask is more important than the face. MORIIONE. No, itrs more important to be than to appear- 1 shouldfve remembered al1 men are princes and not fear them. (29) This is the conflict between policy and religion which, as Raab notes, was of such concern to Jacobean thinkers. Morrone has aligned himself with essence, spirituality, seul; with the Jesus who warns: Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of al1 unclea~ess. (Mt. 23 :27) Gaetani on the other hand has aligned himself with appearance and policy - the sort of policy expressed by the very king under whose direction the above passage was translated into English, James 1: It is a trew old saying, That a king is as one set on a stage, whose smallest actions and gestures, a l1 the people gazingly doe behold: and therefore although a king be never so praecise in the discharging of his Office, the people, who seeth but the outward part, will ever judge of the substance, by the circumstances." Likewise, in The Prince, Machiavelli cautions: Men in general judge by their eyes rather than by their hands; because everyone is in a position to watch, few are in a position to come in close touch with you. Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are." The similarity of James's thinking to Machiavelli's is striking but not surprising, and in fact both offer sensible and even self-evident advice worthy of being followed by anyone in the public eye. That Morrone does not choose to follow this wisdom shows him to be a fool, albeit a holy one, disconnected £rom the realities of the world. 1 would go so far as to suggest that Barnes deliberately emphasizes the fantasy world in which Morrone lives by making the characterts last scene as pope so reminiçcent of Tinkerbell's dying scene in Peter Pan. Morrone addresses the audience from downstage centre : MORRONE. Brethren, 1 am Pope Celestine the Fifth, soon to be plain Peter de Morrone the First again. An old man who wants to die as he lived, at peace. But 1 will stay Pope if just one of you stands up and shouts '1 believe in goodness and virtue. 1 believe in truth, purity, justice and mercy!' Shout and believe it . . . (44 Unfortunately, no one believes in fairies quite strongly enough . In contrast, Cardinal Gaetani is completely immersed in real~olitik, and, once elected Pope Boniface VIII, he wears the papal costume easily. 1 have for the most part been using the tems "powerm and "authorityU rather interchangeably, and indeed the two qualities are usually found in the same character. In Sunsets and Glories, however, they are not, and Barnes makes this distinction most clearly, The two popes serve as very embodiments of this difference. Morrone has power; that is, he possesses an inherent quality which emanates f rom hirn and inspires others to behave in a humane marner without the threat of law or punishment. It is, simply put, a divine quality - an interpretation Barnes seems to want us to find when he has Sala tell the post-papal Morrone, who claims that he can influence no one because he does not preach, Tou yourself are the word" (62). Compare, of course, the first passage of the Gospel according to John: "In the begi~ing was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was Godn (Jn. 1 : 1) .. Gaetani lacks power in this sense of the word - in fact, there is no indication that he has any spirituaf calling - but he is expert in practicing authority. His first official act as Pope Boniface VI11 (and the first thing the audience hears after the interval) not only re-establishes the authority of the position, but expands it beyond any precedence: GAETANI. 1 declare the Bull Sanctum, which establishes the singular oneness of the Holy Church and its absolute necessity for salvation. To those who argue they are not subject to the authority of the One Church and its ruler we proclaim they do not belong to Christ's flock. But the One Church has two swords, two powers, spiritual and secular, but the secular power is subordinate to the spiritual power of the clergy which is not human but Divine. We declare, determine, proclaim, pronounce that henceforth every human being is subject absolutely to Our authority, the authority of the Roman Pontif f , absolute. (47) With his lawyer's mind, Gaetani/~oniface has created - authored - a way to rule every soul on the planet, whether his authority will be recognized by those souls or not. Morrone/Celestine also does some reasoning: comparing the vast differences between Christ's mission and what the Church has become, he rejects authority, concluding: MORRONE. 1 ask; when you al1 honour me, that means you are al1 more humble than 1 am, which means you are al1 better than 1 am. So why should you al1 honour me when 1 should honour a l 1 of you? I am not worthy. (31) It is Pope Boniface who can command even the stars to shine: GAETANI. The stars shine brightest on winter nights like this ... shine . - . shine on for me ... As he points , the stars shine i n the d a r k n e s s above them a s they ex i t upstage centre and right . ( 5 0 Yet it is before Morrone that the new pope kneels and asks to be blessed (66) ; it is a recognition of Morrone' s power over Gaetanifs soul. Finally, the difference between power and authority is revealed when Gaetani orders Morrone to die, and Morrone has the power - the soul-connection to the angels, including the Angel of Death - to do so ( 8 4 - 8 5 ) . Under whom will the people choose to live? Will they be ruled, or inspired? When the papal and secular courts begin to feel that they are being punished for the abdication of Morrone, Gaetani brings the old hennit back, declaring, "If you want him back, take him. . . . Poor, humble, despised, his powers increase by abstinence and sufferingtl (80). Silently, Morrone performs miracles, removing each cardinal's and 102 courtier's obstacle to perfection, but, as Carlos found in The Bewitched, people reject the existential burden of empowerment; they prefer "a fireside and an overstuffed chairf1 (82) to the discornfort - Barnes calls it guilt but it seems akin to Sartre's nausea - which cornes of being free, self-authorized beings. Interestingly, the difference between Morrone and Gaetani is also one of chaos and order, which, as Dollimore reminds us, was a dichotomy with which the early seventeenth century was preocc~pied.'~ Cardinal Orsini tells Morrone, I1You are a man of chaosN (81), and it seems a fair assessment: we have seen the miscast pope bumble about in a mass of flying papers, known that his mind can accommodate such contradictions as the presence of two ange1 Gabriels, seen him conduct diplomacy by completely countering the rules of mediation. He is, like Father Flote or Jack Cade, carnivalesque, an exception to the rule, a dream such as the one Cardinal Malabranca believes he is having and which ends upon Gaetani's installation as pope. Gaetani is a man of order; like Pope Clement of Red Noses, he defines when holiday has ended by tightening the reigns of authority, thereby reasserting his supremacy as author. His view of the Christian Church contrasted against Morrone's demonstrates this orderliness; Morrone sees the Church metaphorically, as "The river of life," but Gaetani gives a far more pragrnatic definition: GAETANI. It is a centralized, coherent and structured movernent with objectives and rules, disciplines and prerogatives. It camot be governed by saints. Its lower orders may be made up of good men but it can only flourish in the world by installing Judas as chief steward- (83) Not only can the Church not be governed by saints, apparently, it must never be known to have been so. As Clement finds it necessary to erase al1 evidence of Flote and his followers, Gaetani, too, must erase Morrone. Erasure is not a technique invented by Stalin or historical revisionists; although he calls the practice "exceedingly cruel," Machiavelli endorses erasure as a means whereby a new prince can establish himself in a seized land. He recommends razing everything and replacing it with buildings and institutions which bear only the new prince's stamp: in short, to leave nothing of that province intact, and nothing in it, neither rank, nor institution, nor form of govemment, nor wealth, except it be held by such as recognize that it cornes £rom y o ~ . ~ ~ Dying, Morrone predicts that the seeds planted by his existence will grow and their fruits be gathered and enjoyed by a future generation: "In due time 1 will come to hamestu (85). And he does: Barnes calls for rows of wheat to sprout up until the stage becomes a dense wheat field. But Gaetani knows that men are not ready to follow the Celestine example, and he orders, "Send in the reapers!" (85). In the epilogue, Gaetani confirms that Morrone has been thoroughly erased by the Church: "Pope Celestiners deep in oblivion's pit. The Church condemns him for incompetence as if that had ever been a bar to high office. They're asharned of him because he shamed thernM (86). As i n R e d N o s e s , the question is raised as to whether something of goodness is left after its source has been eradicated and forgotten. A more pessimistic Barnes is in evidence as, rather than give Peter de Morrone the last word as he gives it to the Floties in the earlier play, it is Gaetani who delivers the epilogue of Sunsets and Glories, alone, disheartened, spiritually lost . He inf orms the audience that "1 made a mess of it but my mess had musclem (86) . The suggestion is that, while the anti-Machiavellian prince cannot rule, neither can t h e prince who practices real~olitik; we are left having t o examine the nature of authority itself. ENDNOTES - CHAPTER 2 Full bibliographie information for editions of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays is given in the list of works cited- 1. See, e ,g., Johannes Nohl, The Black Death : A Chronicle of the Plaque Compiled from Contem~orarv Sources, trans. C.E. Clarke, abr. ed. (London: Unwin Books, 1961) ; Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (New York: The John Day Company, 1969) ; and Thomas Dekker, The Plasue Pamphlets of Thomas Dekker, ed. F.P. Wilson (London: Oxford UP, 1925). 2. Nohl 53 ; Peter Barnes, Red Noses (London : Faber and Faber, 1985) 11. Further references to Red Noses will appear parenthetically within the text. 3. E.g. as a source O one another ( Nohl cites Boccaccio~s preface to The Decameron information regarding family m e m b e r s abandoning ) , as well as an anonymous G e r m a n writer, who reports that, contrary to one's eqectations that Ifthe proxirnity of death would act as a deterrent £rom sin," robbery and burglary rates increased (30). 4. Quoted in Nohl 156. 5. Dekker, Newes from Graues-ende, The Plasue Pamphlets 95. 6. Antonin Artaud, IlThe Theater and the Plague," The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1957) 31-32. 7. For example, in 1541 a proclamation was passed in England forbidding the practice of sending up Church officiais in popular rituals such as the election of boy bishops; under Elizabeth, the English Act of 1572 required licensing of various classifications of travelling-performers; and James 1 issued orders prohibiting several typei of entertainments , including plays, from taking place at the Stourbridge Fair. See Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Earlv Modern Europe (New York: Harper & Row, 1978) 210, 99, 112. 8. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloornington: Indiana UP, 1984) ; C L . Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedv: A Studv of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton UP, 1959); Michael Bristol, Camival and Theater: Plebian Culture and the Structure of Authoritv in Renaissance Enqland (New York: Methuen, 1985); and Burke. 1 have no explanation for the fact that historians of festival have names begiming with B. Barber 3 7. Burke 199-204. Barber 10 . Bristol 52. Bristol 195. Bakhtin 7. 15. Dekker, The Wonderfull Yeare, The Plaaue Pam~hlets 37. 16. It's not clear to me how they made their profit. Did they charge to suck out the poison £rom boils to help those infected with, but not yet dead from, the plague, or sel1 the pus for use either as a murder weapon or as preventive medicine, or use it, as Barnes's Ravens do, to kill off the rich and then steal their possessions? In Leonardo's Last S u ~ ~ e r , Lasca profited during the Plague of 1494 by selling bottled farts and later, excrernent, because he had observed that those exposed to these elements seemed immune. 17. Ziegler 96. 19. See related discussions in Bristol 89-90; and in PhyLlis Rackin, Stases of Historv: Shakespeare's Enslish Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990). 20. Rackin 202. Rackin refers to a passage in Edward Hall, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke (1548), quoted on the same page. 21. Bristol 64-65. 22. Pilso note Leonard Tennenhouse~ç comments on the change in attitude towards Carnival which he notes occurred between Elizabeth and James, specifically as related to a less generous view of women. As Tennenhouse sees it, a correlation can be drawn between a lenient view of Carnival under Elizabeth, when women were seen as being means to expand the aristocratic body, and a rather more sinister perception of festive behaviour once James had firmly excluded women from positions of authority. Power on Dis~lav: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres (New York: Methuen, 1986) 117-18. 24. Nicc016 Machiavelli, The Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick, trans. Leslie J. Walker, S.J. (London: Penguin Books, 1983) 114. 25, Ziegler 92-95. 26. Stephen J. Greenblatt, "Filthy Rites," Learnins to Curse (New York: Routledge, 1990) 63-64. 27. Burke 182. 28. For a related discussion focussing on what he tems "disguised ruler plays,I1 see Tennenhouse, Power on Display 154-59. A salient assertion from this section reads: "In suggesting the possibility of a monarch-free bureaucracy, 1 must hasten to add, absent rnonarch plays offer no alternative to a monarchy- Quite the contrary, their whole purpose is to dernonstrate what happens with the loss of the monarch's presence; the ensuing disorder cal l s forth new and distinctively Jacobean strategies of representing the orderly state" (156) . 2 9 , Barber 192, 195. 3 0. James 1, "The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, The Political Works of James 1 67. 31. Peter Barnes, Laushter!, Barnes Plavs: One 343. 32. Peter Barnes, persona1 interview, 2 Nov. 1992. 33. Butler's Lives of the Saints, ed., rev- and supplemented H e r b e r t 3. Thurston, S.3. and Donald Attwater, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1956) 129-30 . 34. Peter Barnes, introduction, Red Noses 7. 35. Peter Barnes, Sunsets and Glories (London: Methuen Drama, 1990) 4. Subsequent references to the play will appear parenthetically within the t e x t - 36. David Hare, Racins D e m o n (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1990) . 37. The New Mermaid edition. 38. Fraser and Rabkin edition. 39. Fraser and Rabkin edition. 40. Quotations from this play are from the version edited by R.C. Bald (New York and London: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1938), but 1 have also consulted the version bearing the title The Mavor of Oueenboroush, The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. A.H. Bullen, vol- 2 (New York: AMS Press, 1964). For the dating 1 consulted Professor Leslie Thomson, University of Toronto, who infomed me that current scholarship places the play circa 1616-19, with the earlier date seeming more likely. 41. Felix Raab, The Enslish Face of Machiavelli: A Chansins Intemretation 1500-1700 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964) 69-70. 42. Raab 90. 43. King James 1, "Basilikon Doronn 43. 44. Nicc016 Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin Books, 1961) 100-01. 45. Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Trasedv, 2nd ed. (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989) 93. 46. Machiavelli, T h e Discourses 177. The Bite of the Underdog: C l a ~ Hands Here Cornes Charlie and Leonardo's Last Sumer In Peter Barnes's dramatic vision as we have examined it thus far, those who opportunistically take advantage of others are usually the types we w a n t them to be: greedy, power-mad authoritarians cornfortable with climbing on the backs of their social or economic inferiors. Many of these empowered authoritarians experience moments of doubt and regret, but ultimately Jack, Earl of Gurney saves his own hide by sending Tucker to the slaughter; Carlos names an heir certain to leave Europe in even worse shape than he £ound it; Clement VI sacrifices the Floties at the altar of Order; and Cardinal Gaetani commands the only pure-hearted man he has ever known to die, not because goodness cannot exist in the world, but because it cannot exist in his world. Fathers Flote and Morrone are the two characters who, being immutably good, are in a position to exercise their will over others and resist doing so, and it is no coincidence that each seems to be more saint than man. It is pleasant to think that wicked oppressors are at the top of the power structure as they should be and that the rest of us are good and kind folk who havenrt forgotten basic human decency. But before w e grab Our forks and knives and settle dom to eat the rich and powerful, we should look at those plays of Barnes's which more closely examine opportunism and the human impulse to enrich ourselves at the expense of others. As the old saw has it, power corrupts; when B a r n e s snatches that power from its usual holders and offers it to members of the underclass, as he does in Clap Hands Here Cornes Charlie and in Leonardo's Last Supper, he reminds us that the adage applies to any of us. The ugliness of selfish oppression is not lessened for being practiced by those who are, themselves, traditionally oppressed. As Dukore notes of Leonardo's Last S u ~ ~ e r , "Property and authority concern not only the ruling class, who have them, but also the middle class, who want them. 1 should own that my use of the term Noppressionlf above is in a broad and vaguely Marxist sense. Neither Charlie of the first play up for discussion nor the Lascas of the second are being oppressed by an individual; their wills are not being subjugated to that of a more powerful being or collective which sets about consciously to keep others dom. They were not bred to the most hopeless rungs of society: the Lascas are merchant class, while Charlie is an itinerant entertainer, perhaps even formerly of the stage. These characters are, more accurately, victims of an oppressive system - capitalism - which undervalues individuality and overvalues cornmodity. When the price of their stock falls, so too does their ability to exist in their societies. However, as we shall see, even the victimized are not without resources . Clap Hands Here Comes charlie was originally written in 1966, significantly revised in 1990, and still awaits production. Conceived, as was The Rulincr Class , before Barnes turned his hand almost exclusively to historically-situated theatre, Charlie is set in the present - in fact in both mpresentsu of its quarter-century-long birth, as Act Two takes place twenty-four years after Act One. The Charlie of the play's title is Charlie Ketchum, who seems to ber judging from his vast knowledge of popular music hall songs and patter-like speech, a former Variety artist fallen on tough times.' Now an occasional Street musician and full-time vagrant, Charlie is tldiscoveredm in a mission house by Michael Ayirner, a television presenter of BBC ilk, who brings the unfortunate sou1 home for the weekend and provides him with a bath, fresh clothing, and good food. But as we might expect of a Barnes character, Charlie's gratitude is less than complete: he rapes Aylmer' s wife Joan and attempts to rob the couple, then returns uninvited with others, raids the liquor supply, and destroys the furnishings. When Joan walks in on them, Charlie beans her with a bust of Bertrand Russell, killing her. The second act takes place a quarter-century later. Charlie is released, due to budgetary constraints, from the psychiatric hospital where he had been placed for his crime, but the world has changed: he is no longer a quaint tramp, the individualist hobo whose freedom we al1 secretly envy; now he is one of the legion of urban homeless fighting for a patch of the cardboard city. In the mid-1960s Aylmer can idealistically conclude his television segment on beggars by philosophizing: AYLMER' S VOICE . ... It is said that the quality of a nation's civilisation can be judged by what it throws away. As we have seen, our buskers are too vivid a of that civilisation to be lightly disregarded. They are the last individualists . . . 4 but by 1989 Charlie muses: KETCHUM. England's dead, m'dear. They've turned mean with the years. I thought theyfd-set out flags to greet the retum of the old battler. In the old days me and my kind were one-of £S. Now there ' s thousands and thousands of mumbling bastards tramping the gutters of England. (2.58) Charlie is the modem-day equivalent of what was known in Tudor and early Stuart England as a Vnasterless mann: he is able-bodied, mentally competent (despite his term in hospital) , deliberately rootless, and unemployed. As an entertainer he is not unskilled, but the demand £or his particular skills is slight. Having outlived his profession, Charlie has been left without a place in the structure of society - or perhaps he has given up his place - and now he circles the periphery of order, a walking reminder that not everyone can be made to fit in. A.L. Beier, in his work on vagrancy in England between 1560-1640, differentiates between the masterless men in his study and "the dom-and-outs, of ten middle-aged alcoholics, of the early 1960s in Britain" and finds thern more comparable to " the unemployed of the Great Depression of the 1930s, or the 113 jobless millions of today's inner cities. Our Charlie is no alcoholic, and he hardly cultivates the dom-and-out demeanor of one who is beyond hope. Rather, he thinks highly of himself and expects others to think the same. He cheerfully sings snatches of music hall songs throughout, and finds it unthinkable when Joan suggests that Aylmerfs assistant, Diana Bishop, rnight not want him (1.21) . (Diana later rejects Charlie on what she presumes to be the safe grounds that he doesnrt have at least f1,000 11-291, a fact whose importance will become clear shortly.) While he sleeps at the play's start, one of his flophouse acquaintances wams Aylmer, " ' E r s not like usu (1.06) . Explaining to his wife why he wants to focus a special television program on Charlie, Aylrner tells her: "He doesn' t work, he doesn' t Save, he doesn' t get onf . Hers what I've been looking for, the real thing, one hundred percent proof; he' s unique" (1.11) . It seems quite clear that Barnes is not using the Charlie of Act One to represent mid-1960s vagrants in Britain. He has other characters to serve that function: Charlie's acquaintances and fellow street-performers Zacchaeus, an alcoholic; Gunboat Smith, a petty criminal; and Joe Gaff, a paranoid who sees "Lituaniansn as the chief cause of the world's evils. Charlie, on the other hand, if he has not quite chosen his lifestyle, has certainly embraced it, rnaking him a source of wonder, envy, and fear to men like Aylmer who have taken the prescribed road to success. He resembles Tudor-S tuart as an unruly doesn't seek 114 masterless men in their most important attribute: person in an ordered system, and one moreover who integration, he represents chaos. In agreement with Christopher Hill, who notes that "such men - servants to nobody were anomalies, potential dissolvents of the societyrn6 Beier writes : The masterless man represented mutability, when those in power longed for stability. He stood for poverty, which seemed to threaten their social and polit ica l dominance. Fundamentally, in prescribing that the vagrant be employed, governments were preoccupied with a problem of disorder. ' Aylmer's employment of Charlie for his quality of being unemployed, therefore, is not so ironic when we look at Aylmer as being quintessentially societal and having the need to bring disorder into the realm of order. Aylmer is part of the codifying establishment of which Charlie complains towards the end of the play when, told that research has turned up no record of his life, he responds: KETCHUM. Perhaps 1 wasnrt born then? Perhaps me Dad just pissed up against a wall one hot day and 1 hatched out in the sun? Thatf s the trouble now, you've gutta have yer bits of paper else youfre not real , not breathing . That ' s how they keep you under, do the dirty on you, by bits of paper. (2.93) As a character Aylmer seems to be far more symbolic of a type than is Charlie, which further highlights the latter's uniqueness. The bust of Bertrand Russell which sits in his livingroorn in Act One serves as a convenient shortcut to reading Michael Aylmer's nature: it says of him that he is lef t - leaning, educated but not intelliaensia, proud England's successes, and a bit fawning. Russell was, after all, still alive at the time during which the act is set, and there is something perversely deifying about displaying a bust of a living human - one who is moreover an unrepentant atheist and egalitarian (even if a titled landowner). The joke of Bertrand Russellfs plaster likeness being used as a murder weapon by a member of the underclass is at the expense of facile leftists like Aylmer who perhaps remember only the philosopher's early, unqualified writings, such as: The more unfortunate sections of the population have been ignorant, apathetic from excess of toi1 and weariness, timorous through the imminent danger of immediate punishment by the holders of power, and morally unreliable owing to the loss of self-respect resulting from their degradation. * * . But the modern world, by the increase of education and the rise in the standard of comfort among wage-earners, has produced new conditions, more favourable than ever before to the demand for radical reconstru~tion.~ Aylmer, who boasts that he knew Earl Russell at Cambridge (1.17), is only doing his part to bestow dignity upon a less fortunate being by raising Charliets "standard of comfortfM and he expects a positive outcome for his trouble: a reconstruction of Charlie's moral fibre. No consideration is given to Charliets nature; he is clay to be molded by Aylmer, who in innocent arrogance has set the vagrantts misfortunes dom to a set of circumstances which, as an enlightened member of a more privileged class, are his o m to influence. "1 shouldntt work on so many committees but I always want to be involvedfU he tells Joan. The worldfs changing, taking a few more faltering steps towards the light" (1.31). Later in his career, Russell pinpoints the error of assuming the best of everyone, and notes a tendency of the empowered to attribute, as a sort of consolation prize, superior virtue to those to whom they deny full equality.' It is the mistake Aylmer makes when he romanticizes Charlie's unfettered life. Of course Aylmer is nothing if not well-intentioned, but it is the paternalistic concern of one who knows his existence to be uniquely correct and who would impose that existence, beneficently, on another. Aylmer, assisted by his wife, is in fact attempting to civilize Charlie, and Charlie would not be civilized, Civilization is usually both the professed goal of colonialism and its justification; as a national policy, it assumes that one's own culture is so unquestionably superior to another's that it can only be beneficial to a l l , and no doubt pleasing to Gad, to replace the native language, religion, and way of life with that of the colonialist. At the same tirne, the ucivilizedfl may be drawn to certain aspects of the %avageIU as Mannoni, taking a psychological approach to colonialisrn, observes: The savage ... is identified in the unconscious with a certain image of the instincts - of the id, in analytical terminology. And civilized man is painfully divided between the desire to 'correct' the 'errorst of the savages and the desire to identify himself with them in his search for some lost paradise (a desire which at once casts doubt upon the merit of the very civilization he is trying to transmit to them) because of his unconscious and ambivalent attitude towards his mernories of his own early childhood.1° We donft need to speculate about Aylmer's childhood in order to appreciate how Mannoni's obsemations on mixed feelings apply: we have seen this ambivalence in his actions towards Charlie. Despite Aylmer and Charlie both being born Englishmen, the values of cleanliness, industry, possessionf sexual propriety and so forth held by Aylmer are so foreign to Charlie's existence that it can hardly be said the two come from the same culture. Like Mannoni's colonialist, Aylmer feels a paternalistic responsibility to correct Charlie, to turn him into his idea of a proper person, but he is confounded by a nagging sense of guilt for having disrupted a kind of Eàen, and the superiority of his own lifestyle is brought into question. When Charlie is released from the institution in Act Two and surprises Aylmer and his former assistant, now second wife Diana, he is able to invoke and make use of this guilt and self-doubt: KETCHUM. . . . 1 must say you two look your age - guilt can do terrible things, Mike me lad. If it wasnrt for you and your kind Ifdrve had a really full life as a layabout and lowlife. AYLMER. I know you were saved [frorn execution] because they changed the law. But at least we were doing our best, we were organising a petition to the Home Secretary to try and get your sentence commuted. ( 2 . 7 4 ) Intending to organize a petition may not be the most committed form of protest, but it is more than one would expect £rom the widower of a victim on behalf of her murderer. Much recent scholarship by those critics who keep one eye on the arts and the other on historical tex ts focusses on Shakespeare's The Tem~est as being in or operating alongside of the discourse of early seventeenth-century c~lonialism,'~ and 1 think adding Clap Hands Here Comes Charlie to the equation further sheds light on Barnes's play as being, like Shakespeare's, one concerned with the power imbalances inherent to colonization, as welL as the economic, cultural, and ethical implications. There are surface commonalities linking the two plays: like Caliban, labelled by Trinculo a foul-smelling fish (The Tempest II. ii.25-27) ,12 Charlie unwashed; much is made of his stench, a point of pride for him, as well as an economic necessity: KETCHUM. . . . 1' 11 lose me stink if 1 wash and If ll stanre if 1 lose me stink, 'cause al1 I 'ave to do is sidle up to an easy mark, dom-wind, stick out me hand and he'll pay just to get out of smelling distance. But one wash and itfs all over. One wash and I'm left clean and Stoney back on the Holyhead Road. 1'11 be sat there smelling of carbolic, al1 me strength washed away . (1.14 ) He speaks in argot and music hall patter, colourful language but incomprehensible to those around him. At his trial for Joanfs rnurder he asks: "Wherers the altar? The old piano? The trizzer? The shouse? (the JUDGE looks bemused) Has anybody got a pot for a pee? ! " (1.48 ) . Caliban, although he remains on the island of his birth, for the convenience of his captors also has had to learn a new language, as Miranda reminds him: MIRANDA. . . . 1 pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish, 1 endowfd thy purposes With words that made them known. (I.ii.355-60) Miranda, practicing what Stephen Greenblatt identifies as "linguistic colonialism,~" never questions that Caliban's quality of life is improved by having learned her language any more than Aylmer questions the goodness of the act of bringing Charlie into his home. But Charlie repays his gracious host by raping and murdering his wife; Caliban, too, has repaid Miranda by atternpting to rape her, and his further gratitude is this: "You taught me language; and my profit on 't / Is, 1 know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning m e your language!lr (I.ii.365-67). Charlie has a way with curses, too; my persona1 favourite, to an uncaring Anglican priest: KET 'CHUM. (s inging) "May your eyes go rheumy and your arse go slack. May your dentures stink and your bridgework crack. May you sweat and have scabs on al1 your pores. May you have Brights Disease and Bright have yours. But most of al1 1 pray you end up poor. You hairy loathsome git-eyed bore." We could cal1 such â discrepancy between societal behaviour as defined by Aylmer or Prospero and that as practiced by Charlie or Caliban a misapprehension of culture. Charlie exhibits such a misapprehension when he tries to play according to what he perceives to be the rules. After he kills Joan, we see Charlie experiencing what appears to be a crisis of conscience as he debates with himself whether to "scarperU or stay (and note the parodic phrasing): KETCHUM. ... You gotta stay fer her sake. Stiff upper, face the music, old soldiers-never. Only one life to give . Duty. ( w h i p s out medals and &ns them on his chest) Itfs the right thing to do, Charlie, but why is the right thing always so bloody hard. and the wrong thing always so bleedinr easy? (1.38) Having decided to stay, Charlie picks up the telephone receiver and confesses his crime- His confession, however, is made not to the police but to a Fleet Street tabloid, to which he offers to sell his story for E l , 000. It will be remembered. that this is the sum Diana claimed Charlie would need to have before she would consider him as a suitor. It is also noteworthy that it is the exact sum and no more. On his own turf, money has little importance; when Joan tries to get rid of him with cash at their first encounter, Charlie thinks the notes she is giving him are for use as toilet paper - and low quality toilet paper at that (1.11) . Charliers decision to sell his crime story is an interpretation of right and wrong according to what he sees as the morality of people like Aylmer, Joan, and Diana: the acquisition of wealth. This is reinforced in Act Two: the act opens with what appears to be a business meeting, complete with a report on international stock markets. It turns out, however, that the Chairman is Charlie, the executives are fellow patients, and the boardroom is in the mental hospital where they al1 reside. Charlie is playacting at being a participant in the circle that runs things, as a child imitates adults. Can we, perhaps, Say that Caliban's attempted rape of Miranda is in imitation of what Prospero has done to his rights to self-government and the island? Aylmer's resemblance to Prospero in this comparison is not, of course, in terms of artistry, although Aylmerrs medium - television - could be interpreted as being the successor, as the collecter and disseminator of knowledge, to Prospero's books; and since Aylmer has mastered his craft to the extent that in Act Two it is revealed that he has been offered a knighthood, we can assume he possesses a degree of wizardry in his field. Aylmer's less tenuous connection to Prospero, as 1 have already suggested, is as a colonialist. He has gone to Charlie's flophouse - into his world, in fact - and appropriated its riches: Charlie himself. He profits from the flophouse "nativeu in great disproportion to the native himself; aside from his earnings as a television presenter, Aylmer's career is furthered by the docurnentary he has made of Charlie's life. As Trinculo says of the English, "any strange beast there makes a man: when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian" (The Tem~est, II. ii. 31-34] . While prof essing to appreciate Charlie's distinct way of life Aylmer prevents him £rom living it, setting himself up as a government to whose rules, such as bathing, respecting property, and showing gratitude, Charlie must conform. When Charlie fails to live up to Aylmer's standards he is expelled and later confined. A significant connection between Charlie, the masterless man, and Caliban, the savage, is in terms of their peripherality and the threat, including sexual, which that poses to the nom. Vagrancy and savagery are connected in that both pose threats, one internal and one external, to the social structure while at the same time pointing to the flaws of that structure. Paul Brown observes: Masterlessness analyses wandering or unfixed and unsupervised elements located in the internal rnarghs of civil society .... Savagism probes and categorises alien cultures on the external margins - of ekanding civil power .... Masterlessness reveals the mastered (submissive, observed, supervised, deferential) and masterful (powerful, observing, supervising, teleological) nature of civil society. Savagism (a-sociality and untrammelledlibidinality) reveals the necessity of psychic and institutional order and direction in the civil regime.'" Charlie has more than a bit of the libidinous savage in him; in addition to the business with Joan, his first encounter with Diana is marked by a farcical moment of confusion which results in him holding her panties, acquired, naturally, while reaching up her dress. Notably unaware of acting in a manner most of us would find inappropriate to a first meeting, Charlie instead complainç of the shoddy workmanship of the knickers (1.09 . Towards the play's end, Diana, having endured being pursued by Charlie at every turn, tells him, "You're everything 1 hate and fear, Ketchum. Youfre everything hairv!" (2.91), and that single adjective is particularly evocative of every oversexed man-beast from the satyrs to mountain men; although curiously, on a literal basis Europeans are more hirsute than most of the %avageu races whose land they have colonized. But Diana is not being literal, and if 1 123 were casting Charlie 1 would not ask the auditioners to show me their chests. She is using the term to express a lack of civility, particularly an inability to keep one's libido in one's metaphoric pants, and as a civilized woman, and one moreover who is sexually ftcold" (2.80) , she f inds this f rightening and threatening . l5 Both Brown and Mannoni note a tendency among colonists to project their own sexuality ont0 the natives Citing among other evidence the courtship and marriage between John Rolf e and Pocahontas, Brown writes that the presumption of a heightened sexuality in the uncivilized was common, as was the image of the European as tarner of this sexuality: "Such tropes as that of the coloniser as husbandman making the land fruitful, or of the wilderness offering a dangerous libidinal attraction to the struggling saint, are ubiquitous," and he continues, Y . . the proof of Prospero's power to order and supervise his little colony is manifested in his capacity to control not his, but his subiectsf sexuality, particularly that of his slave and his daughter. Unsurprisingly, Mannoni also connects sexuality to The Temest, arguing that Prospero's reasoning for enslaving Caliban on the grounds that he tried to viofate Miranda is illogical and motivated by sexual guilt springing £rom improper desires: "The 'inferior being8 always senres as scapegoat; our own evil intentions can be projected on to h i m . " 1 7 f am in danger of taking this psycho-sexual interpretation much further than the text or even the subtext of C l a p Hands Here Cornes Charlie will permit; after all, the fear of Charlie's libido is not mere projection. It is significant, however, that not one but both of "Aylmer's womenN have been accosted sexually by the chaotic, unmanageable Charlie. This would suggest that Aylmer is a rather ineffective colonizer; as keeper and extender of the dorninant/dorninating culture, he should possess a certain degree of control which he seems to lack, judging by his inability to keep the savage away from the women - Prospero manages to keep both Caliban and Ferdinand from violating Miranda. But Charlie, unempowered though he may be in Aylmer's world generally, proves to have potency in one area, and Aylmer is impotent to keep the sexual threat at bay- As a point of curiosity, there is one other resemblance, though not a direct parallel, between Clap Hands Here Comes Charlie and The Tem~est, As Kermode mentions in his edition of Shakespeare's play, the identification of Prospero with his creator is widely accepted." That point will not be debated here, but oddly enough, Charlie also contains a character who lends himself to identification with the playwright. The character, a friend of Michael and Diana (now the second Mrs. Aylmer) , is a playwright with a corny sense of humour ("The only lucky thing that ever happened to me was 1 once went to the Fuhrer's bal1 and as you know he only had one" C2.671) and the name of Peter Barnes. As a strictly parodic : Prospero rnay 12s Prospero figure , though, he is get his puppet-strings tangled now and again (e.g., the wedding banquet masque rnakes him nearly forget Caliban- plot to assassinate him [IV.i.139- 4 2 ] ) , but he still pulls the strings. The character B a r n e s , in contrast, is little more than a burnbler with so little control over his creatures that they accuse him of being a fraud (2.69-70, 2.75-76). But behind this metatheatrical joke there does lie a serious question which our Peter Barnes foregrounds through his Peter Barnes: who gets to tell the story, or, who owns the truth? Not the playwright, apparently, whose stage manifestation doesnft know his characters any more than they know him. And not the voice of the dominant culture, which though Ifve concentrated on Aylmer is really a chorus which includes Joan, Diana, Barnes, and most of the minor characters; that voice is subverted often enough by those speeches true. Charlie may be poor of Charlie's which ring undeniably and politically powerless, but he is not without the ability to control and manipulate.Ig He understands the Aylmers of this world and how best to use them. As he has done with the art of stinking his way to a handout, he has honed the skill of telling the tale his listener expects to hear. If Aylmer had been searching for a pirate Charlie would have appeared with a peg leg, eye patch, and shoulder-trained parrot (he is already equipped with the 126 patch). Interviewing, Aylmer asks Charlie how he got started on the road, and he is answered with two well-worn excuses: in the first Charlie claims to have been in The War (no particular one) and been unable to readjust to civilian life, but he immediately, without explanation, and unprompted, changes the story to one about jilting a woman at the altar (1.6. Aylmer protests that both these stories can't be true, and Charlie replies cryptically, Truth is as long as longN (1 . 17) . The truth is, Aylmer is welcome to believe whatever he likes; Charlie is not concerned with accuracy, he is concerned with results. Sob stories open pursestrings. Accuracy belongs in the realm of the accountant, the shopkeeper, or the television presenter. At times Charlie is less creative in his campaign against fact and relies on childish bullying to redesign the world as he thinks it should be - insisting & nauseam that the bust of Bertrand Russell is of a con artist named Pie-Face Pearson (1.17) , or, more disturbing in its repressiveness, that the three patients released from hospital with him in Act Two take on the narnes, quirks, and identities of his three former flophouse mates from the first scene (2.59-61). Even at his bleakest moments, like a tornado Charlie maintains control over himself while chaotically destroying everything in his path. Nearing the end of the play, and of his life, Charlie winds up a homeless street-person living outside Waterloo Station - only to be asked to leave by the "official, self-appointed representatives of Cardboard City Community Association UKl1 (2.83) . They are concerned with his potential to %tir." This act, of course, takes place during the tenure of Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister who said, Tou camot have f reedom unless you have order, w 2 0 which makes it al1 the more curious and horrifying of Barnes to present as regulationists those who, like Charlie, have been "freedM from the mental hospital to the Street, or who have suffered because others were "freedtI of the burden of supporting social programs. But again, Charlie is not a typical member of the homeless : Cs.d.1 Before anyone can stop him he puts the trumpet to his lips and blows. He hits a long piercing note of power and volume which reaches a crescendo and blows away every cardboard box and packing case to reveal, j u s t before the FADE OUT, astonished DERELICTS caught frozen like dummies in various domestic poses: washing in a tin bath, a family eating, a man reading, a woman cleaning, a couple making love. ( 2 . 8 4 ) This is the most theatrical, Barnesian, moment in the play, and perhaps the most disquieting. We are not permitted to catch the derelicts drinking bad wine or passed out in soiled clothes, but engaging in activities such as we do, only without a home to do them in; and their insufficient shelter is destroyed not, this tirne, by the Tories or the aristocracy or the capitalists but by one who possesses only one thing more than they do: the potential to %tir." Barnes is nudging his audience towards a Brechtian stance of being able to see through eyes quite alien to its own, to shift its point of view in spite of itself, to dislike Charlie, be disgusted by him, and yet to empathize with him. As Greenblatt observes of Shakespearef s monster, Charlie is not just like us: "Caliban is deformed, lecherous, evil-smelling, idle, treacherous, naive, drunken, rebellious, violent, and devil-worshippingn2' . Indeed, most of Greenblattfs adjectives apply equally to Charlie. It is natural to those of us who are industrious, refined, clean, honest and so on to see from Aylmer's perspective. But when we note Charlie's ingratitude for Aylmer's gifts, we also ought to squinn a bit: what the donor sees as a gift, the recipient m a y see as an intrusion, and in that case, why should he be grateful? Ultirnately, the defense of a world which includes Charlie Ketchum in it cornes from none other than the ghost of Joan, who tells Aylmer: JOAN. From the other side it isnft your disorder but your order that looks so horrible. White haired and slack jawed Charliefs feet are still as light as a four year olds. He turns and turns those who can truly see his dancing, for in their hearts he works both weeping and rapture in one. (2.81) Joanfs sou1 rests in Heaven; we know this is so because in the Epilogue, after listing his many names and titles, Satan tells the now-deceased Charlie, "Actually 1 prefer the Great AdministratorI1 (2.103). "You could define Hel1 as a perfect bureaucracy," Old Nick tells him. "We give Our souls security and an eternal peace in (2 .los) . Naturally, Charlie exchange for a worthless freedornI1 could not l a s t long in such a place, and he manages to get himself bounced from Hel1 much as he did from Michael Aylmer's home or £rom the Cardboard City Cornmunity. A s he ascends towards Heaven he finally receives the welcome he missed when he was released £rom hospital: a choir of angels sing Nine o'clock and nothing doin'. what a du11 and dreary night! Just a good tirne gone to min, not a bit O' fun in sight. Take a look what just blew in. Hurry up, unlock the door. Itrs that great big muggins werve been waiting for ... Charlie Ketchum - Clap Hands! Here cornes Charlie! ... (2.107) Charlie Ketchum is in his Heaven and al1 is disjointed in the world, which of course is how it should be in a Barnsonian universe. Meanwhile, in another corner of that universe occupied by the characters of Leonardors Last Supper (1969), an oversized reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's IfThe Divine Proportion," the well-known illustration which places man securely in the centre of a geometrically-ordered and decidedly non-Barnsonian universe, d r a w s our visual attention while a Lecturer informs US: The Renaissance began in Italy in the Fourteenth Century and spread over Western Europe. In an extraordinary burst of intellectual energy the human spirit recovered its freedom after centuries of political and spiritual oppression .... Gothic night dissolved, making way for the birth of modem man And and the achievements of our age ... Renaissance - a noun, meaning, a new birth: revival: resurrection. 22 there the battle lines are drawn. In Clap Hands Here Comes Charlie the dramatic aqon is fought between freedom and comfort, independence and CO-option, savagery and civilization; in Leonardo's Last Supper, it is between high culture and base greed, sublimity and the grotesque, darkness and enlightenment: the Gothic night and the Renaissance dam. But is the canvas on which the Renaissance is painted a palimpsest, as the Lecturer suggests, so that its advent erases al1 that has gone before, or is it more comparable to a layer of a pentimento, adding a dimension to the picture without obliterating what lies beneath? The qualities assigried to terms like "Renaissancen and "GothicH are, of course, far less cooperatively categorical than the Lecturer suggests. Certainly we must also question the Lecturer's smug placement of the Renaissance hegemonically above the Middle Ages, though his lecture no doubt recalls that of many a teacher of European history. It is Barnesfs (1 suspect, joyful) task in Leonardofs Last Supper to take these familiar sentiments and make them strange to us, forcing, again, a reexamination of our assumptions. A compact and unified one-act, Leonardofs Last S u ~ ~ e r takes place in the charnel house run by the Lasca family: father Angelo, mother Maria, and teenaged son Alphonso. Native Florentines, they left their homeland some ten years earlier, leaving behind a pile of bad debt; they now ply their trade in Amboise, France and drearn of returning to Florence, That dream becomes a plan on the day they are awarded the corpse of their countryman, Leonardo da Vinci, to bury in a lavish - and expensive - funeral ceremony. But al1 is r u i n e d when Leonardo sits up in his coffin: reports of his death were , to the f amily s annoyance greatly exaggerated . 2' There being no money in non-burials, the Lascas do what they must to earn their bread. Never mind the art which might have been created, the inventions which might have improved daily living, the value of a man's life or the bond among Florentines: Leonardo is the personification of rational humanism, the Lascas are the personification of blind greed, and in the end greed squelches humanism in a tale that is as timely as that O£ U S . Senator Jesse Helms versus the National Endowment for the Arts. As the Lecturer sees it, the Renaissance was a time of freedom, but we know that it was also an age of putting things in order, of categorizing, systematizing, and codifying manr s observations about his world. Thus, when Leonardo da Vinci wants to express his joy at the rightness of things in Barnesrs play, he does so in terms of geometry: ttAll's mathematical again: heart, lungs, brain, sinews. The span of my outstretched ams equals my height. From the roots of my hair to the bottom of my chin is exactly l/lOth of my heightrtt and so forth (146). And if al1 were not mathematical again, the historical Leonardo would have done his best to make it be so. Writes Roger Whiting: He refused to abandon his conviction that there were regular causes behind natural effects. Thus he insisted that everything must have a mathematical explanation, increasing-the complexity of his drawings to support this . 24 Nature may stray £rom the formula; art must bring it back on path. As Leonardo advises the young artist: Measure on yourself the proportion of the composition of your limbs, and if you find any discordant part; take note of it and make v e e sure that you do not adopt it in the figures that are composed by you, because it is a common vice of painters to take delight in making things similar to themselves . 2s At one and the same time Leonardo da Vinci assumes nature's perfection while insisting upon correcting its pesky imperfection. There is a reluctance to include nature's darker and uglier aspects : disorder, corporality, excess - the Gothic, the Lascan (to recall Barnes's characters) . The Renaissance never completely supplants the Gothic era (in fact Whiting goes on to note the connection between Leonardors faith in mathematics and that of Medieval alchemists such as Alhazen, Pecham, and Roger acon^^) ; they are on the cusp of one another, CO-existing in a way which makes life difficult for lecturers on history. Rabelais, for example, is a younger conternporary of Leonardo, and is creating Garsantua and Pantasruel after the death of the quintessential Renaissance artist - The terni "Gothic" is in fact particularly slippery, taking on different meanings and encompassing different time periods dependent upon whether, as an adjective, it modifies art, architecture, music, or an historical period. MaryBeth Inverso identifies Barnes's work as being neo-Gothic, thematically and structurally akin to works such as Dracula and Frankenstein, and-although she does not specify Leonardots Last SURD~T in her discussion, it clearly belongs with the Gothic text as she defines it: Gothic literature absolutely pulverizes any sense of a morally operative universe, instead substituting a radically amoral one in which the innocent perish alongside the wicked - or instead of thern- Hence the Gothic tends to be obsessive about injustice, whether meted out by a demonic god or by his minions here below , 27 She also notes that the only two roles available on the Gothic stage are those of victim or tyrant, and that when one role is escaped or lost, the other is assumed. She sees the Gothic figure as an "ernbattled creature frantically struggling to maintain his grip on a world that constantly threatens to wriggle out of his contr01."~~ This will prove to be a very accurate description of Leonardo da Vinci. If Leonardo, or Barnes's Leonardo at any rate, has a preference for the exalted in nature, then the Lascas are his worst nightmare. Not only do they deal in nature's abject, they embrace it. Their profession as disposers of life's ultimate waste product, the corpse, is hardly incidental. And back in Florence, Lasca profited during the plague by selling bottled farts and "Lascat s Excremental Goodnessrl (142) . Ironically, Lasca partially credits his plague-time success to Leonardo : LASCA. My nostrums and remedicinal powders were the finest in Florence. The public always looks f' something new and fresh. 1 gave it to 'em, thanks in part to your famous method, Signor da Vinci. You said to look to facts as they are and not to rank superstition and magic. 'Swhat 1 did. I used me eyes and ears, In time o f pestilence 1 noted that tomturd men and privy cleaners never fell sick. They were protected by the stench O' their work, (142) The familyfs first attempts to prove themselves human (and not creatures of hell) to the newly-risen Leonardo include Lasca blowing his garlic breath into the artistfs face and Ange10 retching into a bucket (139). The contrast between these most earthy of humans and Leonardo da Vinci - whose imagination set man winging towards the heavens - is sharp : the inventor of flying machines, the creator of "Mona Lisam and "The Last Supper, l1 the mind behind "The Divine Proportion, '1 can scarcely be imagined to belong to the same species as the Lascas. The comection is made still more rlubious by the stage picture Leonardo, and the audience, see when he awakes from his death-like sleep. Alphonso is costumed as Death, his role in this (and every) year's production of "Everyman in ~ e 1 1 " ; ~ ~ Lasca père is sporting the crow mask he wore at plague-time to protect himself while tending to the dying; and aria is caught in an unseemly pose: T w o fiends, and a woman with her skirts up, lr says the artist upon seeing the family. "It's the And yet, they are comected. For starters, Leonardo and Lasca share an interest in human anatomy, Discussing the apparent resurrection, the two men demonstrate their comrnonality as well as their difference: LASCA. Yourre not just corpse-dancing are you, Signor? My dead 'uns oft thresh about a bit in their coffins, not wanting to go- Corpse-dancing we call it DA VINCI (off -handed) . Rigo Mortis . The muscles tighten after death making the limbs contract and jerk compulsively, giving the appearance of life. LASCA. Thatfs it, corpse-dancing. (138) Though Leonardo cari call it by its (nearly correct) Latin nameIo and knows the scientific reason for its occurrence, his practical knowledge of the phenomenon is not greater than the rnorticianfs. Nor, as Lasca knows, will be his ability to cheat decay. Speaking while Leonardo is still thought to be dead, he muses : LASCA. 'A a cloud-topping man. But now he's wrapped in cool crêpe. His mind was the light of the world, they saith, but his fleshfll rot, red, green and black, jüst the same- Hetll ooze away like that idiot Notary we dug in last week. His tongue'll swell and eyes pop out like old Gentile Bardi the tom-turd man- (136) The only winners in this contest are the survivors - and of course they only enjoy that status until they, too, are equalized by death. Al1 persona1 power, authority, talent, intelligence, beauty, and wealth end with the last breath, as Evervman hot Alphonsofs, but the extant version) reminds us: GOOD DEEDS. Al1 earthly things is but vanity: Beauty, Strength, and Discretion do man forsake, Foolish friends, and kinsmen, that fair spake - All f leeth Save Good Deeds, and that am 1. 3' It is often not until "al1 earthly thingsm have fled and that last breath has been drawn that those in the ranks of the Lascas can assert their equality or indeed, as survivors, their superiority. Lasca tells a story of ernotionally bonding with his father during the funeral of a Young, rich, beautiful prince - "Fortune's Darlingt1 - and how together, while bowing before the dead prince, they pissed ont0 the corpser s face (134-35) . Such action is, of course, a sadly impotent demonstration and yet one which is conceivably very satisfying to those who, during the prince's life, may have felt similarly treated by him. Both Lasca and Leonardo spend a fair bit O£ time with dead bodies: the former treats corpses for burial and other forms of disposal, while the latter attends dissections to gain a better understanding of human anatomy - though Whiting notes that Leonardo made this study despite having no stomach for it,32 while Lasca thrives amidst the dead and dying. The plague of 1494, he fondly reminisces, was "Lasca timew: LASCA. ' Twas a time of f ear and opportunity. An upright man could make his way without benefit O' breeding or influence. 'Twas a time of truth. With bedrooms and parlours rank with death, no man could prate on about love and honour; such wordstd stick in a throat soon to be vomiting plague-blood, Twas a tirne for the man O' business. For the only question asked was 'how does it profit me?' (141) In the previous chapter we explored plague as a time, like Carnival-time, when the normal is flipped on its head and essential truths about human nature are exposed as the mask of social convention falls. This is the point being made by Lasca, but to him, truth is the condition whereby man admits to being selfish. When al1 the niceties of life are stripped away (as the flesh is stripped £rom the bone in Lasca's line of work) , we are left with a being who, at base, exists only to take advantage of opportunity, without consideration of morality, ethics, or his fellows. Lasca possesses an assured non-belief in the essential goodness of man, which goodness Leonardo is counting on in his last moments, and doesn't find. The things the two men have in common only make more striking their basic dissimilarity, which is neither their station in life nor their aesthetic appreciation, but that they have conflicting understandings of human nature- Indeed, considering his fate, it would seem that Leonardo's understanding is wrong. In featuring members of the socially inferior class prevailing over those of the upper, not by class struggle but by sheer individualistic wit, guts, determination, or greed, Leonardo's Last S u ~ ~ e r iç perhaps the most Jonsonian of Barnes's plays. The motif of alchemy and Lascars talent in that area (having, in a sense, turned excrement into gold) has been noted by Christopher Imes, as has the resemblance between the narnes "Lascan and Volpone ' s servant "Moscaaf . 3 3 To expand upon this observation, it is noteworthy that una mosca is a fly, and una lasca is a roach - two common, if unwelcorne, varieties of household pests. And Volpone's promise of his imminent death as a means to gain fortune does connect the morbid with the acquisition of wealth. But trying to tie Leonardo's Last Su~ner to Volnone or The Alchemist leads only to a cul-de-sac. More than style, themes, or motifs, it is cynicism which the two playwrights share: the cynical eye that trains itself on the pickpockets at the fair, the Roman functionary who so artfully rises to the top, the mischievous youth pulling one over on Morose: those who possess a fine comprehension of human nature and who know how to use it, For al1 that he knows about art, mathematics, physics, and the human body, Leonardo seems plainly stupid when, having spent an hour or so with the Lascas, he expects that they will forfeit the profit they were promised for his burial because "Your reward is the gratitude of future generations" (149). As with Charlie Ketchum, good intentions and gratitude are useless in a practical world. Leonardo is answered by Alphonso in what might be an anthem of youth: ALPHONSO- Hrrrrrrzzzzzzzz . . - I ' m the future, and I'm not grateful. The futurerll only be grateful if we sunrive. We' re needed. Your re a luxury . We ' re the new men you scholars prate on about. Y& put us in the centre O' the Universe, Men or trade, o'money, we'll build a new heaven and a new earth by helping ourselves . (149) Alphonso has his own interpretation of the figure in "The Divine Proportion," as though the outstretched arms grabbed for riches while the spread legs rested on the backs of others - 1 3 9 Then, in a horrifying parody of Christ's last supper and the crucifixion combined (Leonardo , paraphrasing the Gospels , even says "friends, friends you k n o w not what you ..." [150]), Leonardo is disposed of in a manner which exceeds in crassness even Alphonse's speech, while the philosophical conflict over whether the essence of man's nature is humanity or self-interest is argued one last time - with self-interest coming up the clear winner: LASCA. Nothing personal, Signor. This is just business. DA VINCI. Stay ... stay let me live ... for blood . . . I'mRCY . . . - . . ME ... Mmmmmmmm [s.d.l DA VINCI'S voice - - . Oh let me not die again . . . truth and beauty a . flesh and I'm a man like you . . . WEtRE MEN 1s cut off as he is plunged headfirst into the bucket of excrement, urine and vomit. He struggles frenziedly, splattering the LASCAS as they hold him under. His stmggles soon grow weaker; legs stop kicking, arms f laying. Finally no movement at al1 - (150) The play's title, then, comes up a triple pun: it refers to the famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci; to the event that painting depicts; and to the abject human waste products on which the character Leonardo dînes in his ultimate meal. A less dignified end for such an exalted figure could hardly be imagined - But it was, as Lasca says, just business. " Barnes has, it seems, been intrigued with the notion of death as a capitalist enterprise for as long as he has been writing plays. The Time of the ~arracudas,~~ pl-oduced in 1963 in San Francisco and Los Angeles, is about a couple who, unbeknownst to one another at the time of their marriage, each makes a practice of marrying, then murdering in order to get the spouse's insurance money. They find one another out early in the play, and the comedy springs £rom whether or not there will be honour among thieves - or murderers. And Philip and Stella are not the only ones in Barracudas whose livelihoods trade on the misfortune or demise of others: incidental characters include a policeman, an insurance agent, a funeral director. Like them, Philip and Stella are professionals, though it could not be said they serve the public; they are indeed gleefully self-interested- The idea also surfaces in Cla~ Hands Here Cornes Charlie when Charlie tries to turn the accidental killing of Joan into an opportunity to make some money . Looking at Leonardo's Last S u ~ ~ e r £rom the perspective of its music, Elizabeth Winkler likewise notes the Lascas' concern for the state of their purse over the state of their souls. She points out the irony in the choice of spiritual sung by the family when it first gets Leonardo's (presumed) corpse : A variant O deliver Dan as celebrat f the iel? , ion O Negro spiritual "Didri't my Lord " the tune was originally intended f spiritual deliverance and as expression of faith-in religious salvation. The Lascas, however, employ it to convey their hope of material rirofit and deliverance £rom material poverty. '" This perversion of spiritual matter, its alchernical transformation from soul-fodder to meat, continues through the 141 play's remaining moments: after Leonardo is tnily dead d aria blesses the holy family, and Lasca, discounting the possibility that the artist might rise yet again, says: "Another blessed miracle'd be too much to inflict on hard-working Christian folk like us, We deserve better O' the good Lordn (151) . Leonardo da Vinci never stood a chance against the Lascas. If in his normal, rational, mathematical world he might have been protected against them by virtue of having a social position which would force their respectful treatment (if not actual respect), there is no such protection in the Lascasf charnel house. The charnel house is outside the sphere of society; it is the Lasca family's owri dominion where rich and poor, important and comrnon, are al1 handled in the same fashion. Once someone enters this world, whether they had been prince or privy cleaner in life, they must submit to Lasca and the tools of his trade. Charlie Ketchum gains a similar freedom f r o m society by taking an opposite approach: rather than create a srnall kingdom, he takes the world for his own. While in The Rulins Class the Gurney butler, Tucker, had an existence so interwoven with those he served that he could not escape it even when given the means to do so, Lasca and Charlie have avoided this trap: Charlie senres no one and Lasca provides the same (essential and indispensable) service to all. (Leonardo da Vinci, on the ironic other hand, depends 142 upon the commissions and patronage of others, and funding to artists is the first item in many a list of budget cuts.) Though as outsiders they are exempt £rom many of the rules, the system can rein in even the Ketchums and Lascas of this world when it needs to. Charlie, still subject tu the law, spends two dozen years in the psychiatrie hospital; the Lascas are forced into bankruptcy and exile with the creation, by his peers, of the Apothecaries' Guild, which set prices and standards for his successful product, "Lascals Excremental GoodnessN (143 -44) . These characters can be knocked dom but, given half a chance, they don't stay dom. They stand apart from Tucker, or from the Head Footman and Keeper of the First Door in Barnes ' s (unbroadcast ) radio monologue "A True-Born Englishmanu (1990) . 3 6 The subject of this caustic piece has worked himself up through the ranks to reach the pinnacle of his career: he opens the first of three sets of doors in the Banqueting Hall of Buckingham Palace. "The Germans have schools for servants where they teach people the principles of service. We English don't need to be taught. It cornes natural, something we drink in with our mother's milk," says the f ootman, echoing ~ucker . 37 It is not the Lascas' Florentine nationality that saves them from what Barnes sees as a national characteristic (after all, as in Shakespeare or Jonson, no rnatter where they are set, ail of Barnes's plays are about England). They, like 14 3 Charlie, are masterless men, and their livelihoods must come £rom a different source than the wealthy, the ambitious, the political. The price of refusing to live within the dichotomous servant/master arrangement is to orbit society, an outsider dispossessed of goods and country, But what they do have which the True-Born Englishnan and Tucker lack is an unusual ability to recognize opportunity, and a still more unusual ability to grab it. As a corollary, it would seem that the means of oppression are in and of themselves not creators of amoral beings, but that the amoral exist in every class, and their ability to practice their inhumanity is limited only by their access to such means. Pope Celestine V, with his opportunity, might have made rnany men suffer, and did not; Lasca takes his opportunity to end one man's life for his own personal gain, and he uses it, very disturbingly, with no hesitation. 1 alluded to Sejanus earlier to support a claim of Jonson's cynicisrn, and such an allusion may cal1 for a word about one of the supreme opportunists of Jacobean theatre, Shakespeare's Iago. In many ways Sejanus and Iago are cut from the same cloth: both gain through their ability to slither through every available crack, and neither is troubled by the immorality of his actions. These qualities (such as they are) are descriptive, too, of Charlie and the Lascas, but unlike the Barnes characters, Sejanus and Iago have a driving passion (which, reduced to one word, is ambition for Sejanus 144 and jealousy for Iago). In contrast, Barnes's characters have rather bourgeois desires: they only need money, and then, only for its power to obtain, in Charlie's case, a woman, and in the Lascas', material goods. There is no need to destroy or to reign on a grand scale; there is only a persona1 need of the sort most of us have, coupled with a willingness to satisfy it in ways most of us are not. Though 1 have grouped C l a ~ Hands Here Cornes Charlie with Leonardors Last Surmer in this chapter, there is one screaming difference between Charlie Ketchum and the Lasca family: in the end we are urged to evaluate Charlie's character as a sort of Puck, a mischievous but admirably free soul, lovable and ultimately necessary: a bit of spice to heat up the bland porridge that is, often, life. Even his murder is forgiven by the victim herself. And the murder, which was largely accidental, is never his really unconscionable act: that is the attempt to profit from the murder. 1s intention al1 that separates the charming Charlie from the grotesque Lascas, who also murder and profit by it? To be sure, killing an artist of the stature of Leonardo da Vinci leaves more of a void in the world than killing an ordinary person, but most legal and moral systems do not care to make such a distinction. The murder of Leonardo is dramaturgically more significant than that of Joan, being the central action in the one-act, while Joan's demise is just one incident in a full-length play of much larger scope. And to some extent we can justify Charlie's actions because he is more "done againstU1 than most. But 1 don't believe there is a real distinction between Charlie and the Lascas in this regard; it is only that Barnes chose to make Charlie, in spite of his filth and bad temper, somehow cute, while the Lascas are decidedly uncute. After the voice of the Lecturer returns to eulogize Leonardo, the stage directions cal1 for Alphonso and Lasca to I1savagely descend on the corpse, hacking and cutting to drain off the bloodN while Maria, in a Brechtian moment, stands beneath the drawing of "The Divine Proportion," holding a knife and singing the popular Song "Mons Lisan "in a beery, maudlin voicen (151). The fact that representation can so affect our ethical judgment is a point Bames himself will make in Laushter!, which contrasts personalized murder and cruelty with the institutionalized variety. In both C l a ~ Hands Here Cornes Charlie and Leonardo's Last Su~per, Barnes demonstrates that there are many roads to gaining the upper hand. Though the temptation is often overwhelming for those who are, it is not necessary to be born into the ruling class to be an opportunist and small-scale oppressor. Charlie trades on his image as homeless, unemployed, disadvantaged, and powerless to gain control over those around h i m ; the Lascas simply recognize the power of endurance. Regardless of one's stature in life, death will come, and when it does the Lascas will be there to profit £rom it. Were's to Old Mortality then, Our sure and certain 146 provider, If of fers Lasca in a toast (128) . But the p r o f i t they gain is not purely monetary; there is a sense of having lived long enough to see those who in l i f e had the social s t a t i on t o treat the Lascas as i n f e r i o r s felled, to know that they will decay just the same as those who keep charnel houses. Full bibliographie information for editions of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays is given in the list of works cited. 1. Bernard F. Dukore, The Theatre of Peter Bames (London: Heinemann, 1981) 20- 2- Al1 the dates are approximate, both within the world of the play and "in real lifem: for example Act One is set in the Spring of 1965 but then reference is made to the present day as being 1964. Dukore dates the play itself to 1964 (The Theatre of Peter Bames), while William J- McLaughlin places it in 1966- tfScotsmen in Hobnail BootsM: An Analvsis of the Oriainal Works of Peter Barnes, diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1988, 8. Although the revision was much more recent, in the Fa11 of 1992 Barnes could not give me the exact year in which the play was finished but estimated 1990. Since no play is truly finished before it receives a production, 1 am happy to consider Clap Hands Here Comes Charlie to be a work-in-progress and to be not overly concerned with its dating. For a complete description of the earlier version, see Dukore's work cited above. 1 am using the revision, in typescript; my gratitude to Peter Barnes for his generous permission to do so. 3. For a general history of music hall and Variety theatre, see Roger Wilmut, Kindlv Leave the Stase! The Storv of Varietv 1919-1960 (London: Methuen, 1985). Wilmut notes that after the first World War Variety went through many changes and lost popularity, but by 1960 "the corpse was t m l y coldu (17). The timing is right for Barnes to have conceived Charlie as a former professional entertainer, although there is no evidence of that given in the text and we don't know whether Charlie sings poorly or well. 4. Peter Barnes, C l a ~ Hands Here Comes Charlie, ts., 1.09. Subsequent references will appear parenthetically within the text using Barnes's folio style: the first digit indicates the Act, and the numbers after the period indicate the rurining page count . S . A.L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vaarancv Problem in Ensland 1560-1640 (London: Methuen & Co- Ltd,, 1985) 3 - 6 Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Dom: Radical Ideas Durins the Enslish Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1975) 40, 7. Beier 9-10. 8, Bertrand Russell, Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Svndicalism, 3rd ed- (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966) 14, 9. Bertrand Russell, "The Superior Virtue of the Oppre~sed,~~ Unpopular Essavs (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976) 69-75. 10. 0. Mannoni, Pros~ero and Caliban: The Psvcholocrv of Colonization, trans. Pamela Powesland, 2nd ed. (New York: Frederick A - Praeger, 1964) 21- 11. See, e.g., Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, "Nymphs and reapers heavily vanish: the discursive con-texts of The Tem~est," John Drakakis, ed,, Alternative Shakes~eares (London: Routledge, 1985) 191-205; Paul Brown, "'This thing of darkness 1 acknowledge minef : The Tem~est and the discourse of colonialism,~ Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds-, Political Shakes~eare: New Essavs in Cultural Materialisnt (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1985) 48-71; Thomas Cartelli, "Prospero in Africa: The Tem~est as colonialist text and pretext," in Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Comor, eds,, Shakespeare Re~roduced: The Text in Historv and Ideolow (New York: Routledge, 1987) 99-115; and Stephen J. Greenblatt, Learnincr to Curse: Essavs in Earlv Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), ch. 2. 12. The Arden Shakespeare, See, generally, 14. Brown 50-51. 15. The New Shorte among its definitions of unpleasant, frightening; ill-mannered," Greenblatt, Learnins to Curse, r Oxford English Dictionary "hairyN: V i q . Difficult; crude, clumsy" and "Uncouth ch. 1 6 Brown 51. 17. Mannoni 106. 18. Frank Kermode, introduction, The Tem~est by William Shakespeare, 6th ed. (London : Routledge-Arden, 1958 ) lxxxi- 19. William J. McLauglin, using the/an earlier version of the play, also locates Charlie in the discourse of control and makes a brief and valid comparison to Shaw's Pvmalion. "Scotsmen in Hobnail Bootsn 153-54. 20. "Margaret Thatcher: The Downing Street YearsrU A & E r s Biosraphv, Arts and Entertainment Network, 1993. 21. Greenblatt, Leamincs to C u r s e 2 6 . 22- Peter Barnes, Leonardo's Last Supper, Eames Plavs: One (London: Methuen, 1989) 126. Subsequent ref erences to this play are to this edition and will appear parenthetically within the text. 23- Apologies to Mark Twain. 24. Roger Whiting, Leonardo: A Portrait of the Renaissance Man (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1992) 93. 25. Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo on Paintinq, eà. Martin Kemp, trans. Martin Kemp and Margaret Walker (New Haven: Y a l e U P , 1989) 120. 2 6 - Whiting 93. 27- MaryBeth Inverso, The Gothic Impulse in Contem~orarv Drama (Ann Arbor, MI : UMI Research Press, 1990) 2. 28. Inverso 59- 29. Thanks to Professors Alexandra Johnston and Anne Lancashire, both of University of Toronto, for replying, via REED-L (the electronic discussion forum of Records in Early English Drama), to my query on whether there is evidence suggesting a no-longer extant piece called vEveryman in Hell." Both replied that to their knowledge, the answer is no. 30. B a r n e s may be commenting on Leonardo's lack of formal education, a point about which the artist seems to have been touchy . See Leonardo da Vinci, I1Preface : Knowledge, Learning and Experience , " in Kemp. 31. Evennnan and Medieval Miracle Plays, ed. A.C. Cawiey, (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1959) 232. 32. Whiting 8 5 - 33- Christopher Innes, Modem British Drama 1890-1990 (Cambridge : Cambridge UP, 1992) 305 - 34. Peter B a r n e s , The Time of the Barracudas, ts- 35. Elizabeth Hale Wirikler, The Function of Sons in Contem~orarv - British Drama (Newark: U. of Delaware Press, 1990) 218, 36. The piece was, as Barnes reports, "submitted [to the BBC] , bought, cast with the actor, Antony Sher, and scheduled," but then reconsidered and cancelled, "not because," Barnes reckons, "of politics, sex, or bad language . . No, the piece had references to royalty and that is something that & taken seriously in dreamland." Peter Barnes, introduction, The S~irit of Man and More Barnes' People (London: Methuen, 1990) viii. 37. Bames, The Rulins Class 100. CHAPTER 4 The Crisis of Identity and the Double: Noondav Demons, The Real Lona John Silver, Nobodv Here But Us Chickens, and The Three Visions In exploring power relationships in this thesis, 1 have looked at the interaction of Peter Barnes's characters and at how they exercise authority and control over one another. This power-wielding has taken many forrns, obvious and subtle, large and small, from the power of kings over their subjects to Charlie Ketchun's ability to manipulate, or Father Morronets irresistible sway. When relationship is missing, though - when a character stands alone - what happens to the seesaw of power? outside of the realm of any govemment or external authority (other than, perhaps, the omnipotent playwright as ultimate author, or a Divine Creator even more powerful than he), it would seem that the character, or any of us, achieves autonorny: governor and governed are one. 1 may, at times, wonder whether 1 am the person 1 believe myself to be; 1 may disguise and try to influence the way my identity is perceived by a political or social group; but somewhere, 1 like to think, there is a "real me," hidden as it may be to the world in which 1 live; no one can disrupt the essential nature of that core. Alternatively, there may be no core; my identity may be a tablula rasa upon which 1 am free to construct any being I like - either way, my identity is not subject to outside 152 authority. To be stripped of authority over selfhood equates to the very disconcerting - or liberating (depending upon whether one takes the modern or the postmodern view) - prospect of being utterly powerless. At the heart of this line of thinking is the assumption that uniqueness is a true characteristic of identity - that, like sncwflakes, no two selves are alike. It is Barnes's task to blow that assumption right out of the water. We have already had a taste of what happens when a character is confronted with the suggestion that he is not in fact unique in the scene from The Rulins Class between JC and the Electric Messiah - JC seems to have formed a new identity overnight, and it is a far more dangerous one. The question which 1 did not raise in my earlier look at The Rulins Class but which is central to this discussion is, Who is the 14th Earl of Gurney when he is neither Jesus Christ nor Jack the Ripper? Barnes does not show us; there is no moment in the play in which this state of being occurs. 1s there even such an animal as the "realn Earl? Who decides who the E a r l will be: his inner being, societal circumstance, nature? 1s individuality possible, are we in charge of it or are others, and what threatens our sense of it? In short, what are the politics of identity?' As an aside, in the same play the Earlfs bride, Grace Shelley, invents herself first as Marguerite Gautier and then as Lady Grace. Her identity is entirely self-constructed. In her wedding night monologue she 153 tells us of her past perfonning career as a stripper, and then boasts: "Nobody need worry about me fitting in. Al1 1 have to do is play it cool. 1 c m cock my little f inger [a gesture, 1 am told, commonly made in striptease performances] with the best . u2 In The Rulinq Class, one threat to a sense of identity is the challenge to individuality, and nothing presents that challenge quite so forcefully as encountering a doppelganger. It is that situation in which the characters in Noondav Demons (1969) , The Real Loncr John Silver (radio, 1986) , and Nobodv Here But Us Chickens (television, 1989) find themselves. In a fourth piece, The Three Visions (radio, 1986) , it is not a question of meeting one's double, but of meeting oneself at different stages of l i fe . The use of doubles on stage did not originate with Peter Barnes; he merely perverted it. The Elizabethan play which springs to mind here is of course Shakespeare's farcical Comedv of Errors, in which being unwittingly doubled is the cause of chaos for the Antipholus twins and the Dromio twins who serve them. As in Barnes, too many individuals try to occupy too few places, not understanding why their world has suddenly gone mad. Notably, however, the ultimate uniting of the twins brings about order, whereas juncture is the point at which order falls apart in the Barnes plays. It is only in the last scene of the Comedv, when the twins are recognized as such, that al1 is righted, not only for the two pair of 154 brothers, but for the parents of the Antipholi, the goldsmith, the courtesan, the off-stage kitchen wench - and perhaps for the city of Ephesus itself, whose laws would othewise have demanded the execution of an innocent man. And in keeping with most of Shakespeare's comedies, the proper pairing of the twins is a kind of marriage which is appropriately celebrated with the promise of a feast. In Barnes, adversity and violence corne of one character meeting his double- Bames exhibits a special interest in the double elsewhere in his work: two imposter Angel Gabriels visit Pope Celestine with contradictory advice (Sunsets and Glories act 1, SC. 9); the dwarf father and son jesters dress like the Spanish grandees in The Bewitched, but because they are miniatures, they mock authority (act 1, SC. 2). These matching sets are used politically, but they do not cause any crises of identity; the jesters do not think themselves to be grandees, and the Gabriels know that they are, in fact, a whore and a queen, disguised. When I asked Barnes about his use of doubles, he replied: T t has to do with theatre, to do with the fact that drama is in the end conflict ... One can actually personify [the conflict within oneself] by having a doppelganger to actually be there visibly to show the other side, what the struggle is. lt3 The nature of conflict is a battle for supremacy, and when the battle takes place within one entity or between two entities claiming the same identity, winning and losing become 155 peculiar concepts. In The Real Lons John Silver, Henry and Madge, a married couple, and their friend George discover, as they meet to leave for a fancy dress party, that they are al1 wearing identical Long John Silver pirate costumes. (Who but Peter Barnes would present a radio comedy based on a sight gag?) The three spend the play contending for the right to be the notorious buccaneer for one evening- While each defends his or her right to the identity al1 wish to Wear - the identity each, in fact, feels belongs to him alone - the disappointment of their daily lives is revealed. That only one of them rnay use the identity at a tirne is never questioned, and speaks to the importance of individuality in building identity. There is more at stake here than showing up at a cocktail party and finding another guest wearing the same ensemble (traumatizing as such an experience may bel . By the play's end, the struggle to earn the identity of Long John Silver gets ugly, the insults escalate, accusations fly, a pistol is even drawn - fortunately, it is the toy one that came with the costume. This evening is clearly the last, desperate moment these characters have to redefine themselves. They fail; there is no more a point to being a mass-produced pirate than there is to being jus t another housewife, supervisor, or Company cashier. And, too, how can the costume which so particularly represents what each feels is his or her true self be shared? How can it express the individuality of three different 156 people? The three Long John Silvers, ultimately realizing that Song they cannot escape themselves, Einally mite in a bleak and dance : 'We struck out for the sea, sea, sea- But it was not to be, be, be. We wanted to be bold, bold, bold, To start breaking the mould, mould, mould. But life is so grey, grey, grey. Dribbles away, away, away. NOW weJ re lost and weJ re cold, And we' 11 al1 soon be old - . ' 'Arr, Jim 1ad.1~ Noondav Demons examines the appropriation not of a clearly mythic and occasional persona, but of one that the "ornerN considers to be his own unique core. St. Eusebius is an ascetic Christian whose rejection of comfort is so extreme that he lives alone in a desolate cave, in horrid squalor, lice-ridden and maggot-infested, willingly chained, consuming only old olives, older bread, and muddy water which he further contaminates by adding dirt from the ground. A more unenviable existence can hardly be imagined; and yet another virtually identical ascetic, St. Pior, comes along to usurp Eusebius from his post. "Another will corne, just as ... as ... as me, but with smaller feet," predicts Beckett's Estragon (and it comes to pass),' as though the world somehow requires a certain number of hobo-clowns, martyr saints, or frustrated graduate students, and when one is removed, another pops into its place - but they do not occupy the same space at the same moment. Eusebius8s sense of self is bound to his singular expression of his devotion to God, as surely as chains bind 157 his body to this place. Confronted by another just as himself who demands the space he inhabits, St. Eusebius is made to fight for the only possession he has or wants: his selfhood. Barnes again pits two nearly identical characters against one another in Nobodv Here But Us Chickens- George Allsop is a man who believes himself to be a chicken and has been placed under psychiatrie observation because of it. As it happens, Allsop believes himself to be no ordinary cockerel, but Very Important Poultry: Goldcrest, Cock of the i or th, who, as the character tells us, "crowed the morn [Christ] was born in Bethlehem? When H e m , a man claiming to be the equally irnpressive cock Chanticleer, "who crowed the night Christ was deniedu ( 4 9 ) , is thrown into the room with him, the uniqueness which Allsop thought he had achieved is duplicated and therefore made common. In contrast to the t h ree pirates, however, t h e two roosters (after some initial mistrust) decide that they are "the Yin and Yang of itw (49) and join forces against a common enemy that would rob them of their identities, As a group, these short plays raise questions about the nature, value, and problems of persona1 identity; indeed, into whether we author (and authorize) ourselves, or are written, This insecurity over ownership and control of identity, the last province of personal agency, has been a significant motif in Western popular culture throughout the second half of this century, for example in films ranging from the classic 1956 horror film Invasion of the Bodv snatchers7 to the recent movie The et.' In Bodv Snatchers, the technique used by the alien invaders to achieve world domination is to create an exact duplicate of a person known and trusted by his community. The shell is used, but the essence is replaced; the identifiable and the identity are separated, In The Net, a woman is stripped of every number that identifies her in the modern, computerized, networked world. With no one to verify her identity, she simply cannot &.' To my knowledge, however, Peter Barnes is the first contemporary English- language playwright to depict identity theft? The examples above suggest an anxiety-ridden society nearly obsessed with its vulnerability to invasion - an understandable concern during the Cold War. The fear is that invaders will replace every aspect of a familiar way of life and replace it with their own. Invasion of the state is also invasion of the individual. Now, the question is, how thoroughly can the individual be invaded? It is a question which Barnes poses in the plays being considered here, and, in exploring it, the findings of a couple of experts in the field of human identity will help to define terms and identify certain problerns with persona1 and social identity generally. The two main criteria usually considered essential to a sense of personal identity are, according to Rom Harré: first, "the individual should be self-conscious, that is be 159 aware of their experiences as constituting a persona1 unityw and have the "capacity to identify [oneselfl as a unique person among others," and second, "a person's present actions must be located in an autobiographym;" L e . , one must have a sense of persona1 narrative. The persona1 identity problems faced by the characters in the plays under discussion here are generally that of sameness: their uniqueness, that is, numerical singularity, is challenged when they are confronted with another who appears to be the same as them (another martyr saint, another pirate, another chicken). Although the cliché has it that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, to these characters it presents the greatest threat. To further cornplicate things, the social identities of these characters who unwilling meet their doppelgangers axe total constructions to begin with. Harré writes of two of the constituents of social identity being 'Yolen and "human category1I: "The distinction between child and adult, male and female, black and white, and so on 1 shall call one of category, while that between bank manager and priest 1 shall call ' role. A woman reassigns her human category by dressing and acting masculine in The Real Lonq John Silver; she also takes on a role which differs radically £rom the one her husband and friend expect to find her in. In Nobody Here But Us Chickens, Allsop doesnft stop at altering his human character: he leaves the category of human altogether. Even St. Eusebius, striving to achieve a state of pure essence, has built his role as a martyr. In addition, some characters are identifiable as one numerical person but with such a fractured narrative that they seem to become different people. The chief example of this phenomenon in Barnes is JCfs transformation to Jack in The Rulins Class, and the assumed transformation he underwent in becoming JC before the action of the play; but the psychomachia within St. Eusebius when he seems inhabited by the devil, or in Carlos when by his rnother (in The Bewitched, act 2, SC. 3 ) ' are other examples. The Three Visions, a radio play about the making of a radio play, offers a third (albeit temporally and spatially unlikely) identity problem: a consistent personal narrative is split among three numerically distinct individuals who soon come to realize that they are the sarne person at different phases of his life. A t tirnes, one's view of oneself clashes with societyfs - what Harxé terms Vom ring] unstuckm - and he identifies two major ways in which this could happen. First , If [t] he persona1 sense of identity may not be matched by adequate social constituents of personal identity. ... one's projects may not be matched by what other people take to be one's prospects."" In Red Noses, Father Flote's acting troupe is filled with characters whose prospects do not meet their projects but who carry on regardless, and so we get a stuttering stand-up comic, a pair of one-legged dancers, and a blind plate- spinner. Failure to succeed in these projects is an asset to the Fioties: "Failing to be good, they succeeded in being completely badn (39) - But in The Real Lona John Silver, such failure is little short of a persona1 tragedy. The identity each character tries to project by doming the Long John Siiver costume fails to be accepted by his or (especially) her peers. Having already insinuated a connection between penis size and piracy (HENRY: "How can you look more like Long John than 1 do?" GEORGE: "Because my parrotrs bigger than yours O . . " [ 3 4 ] ) , 1 4 George tells Madge: GEORGE. I 1 m sorry, Madge, I'rn a bit uruierved. The sight of you two wobbling around on wooden legs .., Now Madge, I1ve been a f riend for f if teen years and I1ve got to tell you the truth. Madge, you're a woman. HENRY. Ifve told her that but she wonrt listen, shers obsessed. Shers having trouble knowing what she is - animal or mineral. Shels lost touch with reality. (35) But when the three express what they had hoped to get from spending a night as Long John Silver, it is evident that Madge is for once in touch with reality, and through her costume had at last - briefly - exceeded the limitations of her social station as a housewife: MADGE. 1 wanted . - . 1 wanted to throw off for a night, this skin that doesn't fit me ... but if yourre wedlocked and weak it destroys your rnentals . 1 wanted to win instead of living a borrowed life knittingrnittens ,,. 'Arr, Jim, Jim.' (38) Clearly, there are political implications of attempting to expand the societally-acceptable borders of one's identity. Madge becomes a threat to the men by momentarily trying to escape her station in life; the men threaten each other by suggesting that the otherts masculinity is inadequate to the role. 1s there something inherently inappropriate in Madge's choice to dress as a male swashbuckler simply because she is a woman? She is headed to a fancy dress Party, where the whole point is to be something which she cannot be on any other day of the year. Yet the men react as though she had committed a crime against nature. when George and Henry put on the Long John Silver costume, they becorne boys playing pirate; when Madge wears it, she becomes an abomination. The men cannot articulate why Madge's sex should make her ineligible to dress as Long John Silver, but 1 will speculate that her cross-dressing contributes to the sense of worthlessness - perhaps emasculation - the men feel in their daily lives. In revealing the contrast between the lives they lead, and the person they see their true selves to ber they explain the significance Long John Silver to them. Says Henry : Oh yes, I eat my cheese and Mamite sandwiches every day and catch the six forty-three home every evening. And these four walls go on being four. My lifers a Eorm of petrified dreaming, I 1 m s t i f f with the cares afid worries of it. But deep dom, Long John Silver is the true me - mean, murderous and magnificent. 'Urr Jim lad, we live rough and risk swinging at noon ... ' I ' m not giving him up; not ever, r , a a . (32) Likewise, George, unable to convey convincingly the thrill of his job as the supervisor at the gas Company, where he sends teams of men rushing into danger when "[al gas main bursts. a gas cooker' s faulty, a radiator springs a leakm ( 3 6 ) , comes to admit : I've had enough of paying excess £are at the end of the journey like an honest man. 1 sit at my desk at South Eastern Gas and think of the Mongols with their wild horses and their towers of skulls. (37) Despite the incongruous irnagery (perhaps the original title was "The Real Ghengis Khann), al1 ultirnately must acknowledge the mundane reality of their lives. Says Henry (with a nearly embarrassing lack of subtlety), "we give ourselves a role to play so as to have some pretext for living and mine was taken f rom me . . . ' A r r , Jim Jimu' (3 9) . What has taken Henry's role £rom him? Life, of course: a society which rewards conformists and punishes eccentricity (while paradoxically touting it as a tourist attraction); the anti-art, pro-capitalism England of the Thatcher government, perhaps; something in his nature that holds him back £rom taking risks. And, Madge. His (and George's) disappointment in life is compounded by the notion that a woman can play as good a pirate as a man can, even though she lacks the male apparatus. In her costume, Madge has acquired a degree of freedom which rivals theirs and removes their thin security blanket of knowing that, first, by virtue of their sex they are closer to being Long John Silver than Madge can ever be, and second, no matter how unnecessary they are in the world, at least they are not wornen. Women8s rejection of ferninine cloLhing as an expression of independence has historical precedence. A decade or so before Barnes wrote Lona John Silver, some American women made a public gesture of removing their bras,'' a fairly insignificant action performed by a minuscule percentage of feminists, yet which became the universal metaphor for (perceived) aggressive, unfeminine, symbolically castrating wornen. The connection drawn is understandable: there is no common item of clothîng more gender-specific than a bra. But for good or ill, a bra 3s a binding device, and the protesters releasing themselves £ r o m this bond were making a conscious declaration of liberation. In addition to so-called bra-bumers, who cast off women's clothing, another category of women whose style O£ dress emulated or suggested a man's led to the perception of feminists as being aggressive, unfeminine, and symbolically castrating. Many women denied being feminists to avoid such characterization, and it was not uncornmon to hear men equate the very daring act of a woman wearing pants to the office with the end of civilization as they knew it- In early modem England, a woman in man's dress was perceived as being far more than a protester; she had the potential to bring about far-reaching disorder, as expressed in a 1620 letter by John Chamberlain: Yesterday the bishop of London called together al1 the Clergie about this tome, and told them he had expressed commaundment from the King to will them to inveigh vehemently and bitterly in theyre sermons, against the insolencie of Our women and theyre wearing of brode brirnd hats, pointed dublets, theyre haire cut short or shome, and some of them stilettaes or poinards, and such other trinckets of like moment: adding withall the y£ pulpit admonitions will not reform them he would proceed by another course: the truth is the world is very far out of order, but whether this will mende yt God knowes . l6 One of the unnatural women referred to in Chamberlain's letter was no doubt Mary Frith, l7 or Moll Cutpurse, who was credited with having several underworld occupations, but was most infamous for wearing men's clothing. This she apparently did on a daily basis, in defiance of the sumptuary law, not for carnival or to disguise her sex (which she made no attempt to do), but as a persona1 preference. Middleton and Dekker memorialized Moll in The Roarinq Girl (c. 1610) . The playwrights take a very kindly view of her misdeeds, but at the same time, make much of her attire.'' They present her as being a strong, independent woman who never "dwindled down to a Mrs . rr as Madge has (LJS 32) ;19 indeed, in the last scene she points out that, while Sir Alexander Wengrave has been tearing his hair out worrying that his son would marry her, no one has considered that she might not agree. She will marry, she says: When you shall hear Gallants void from sergeants' fear, Honesty and truth unslandered, Woman manned, but never pandered, Cheats booted, but not coached, Vessels older ere theyrre broached; If my mind then not be varied, Next day following 1'11 be married. (V.ii.219-225) Which is to Say, never. And in not marrying, Moll usurps the privileges of men to go about unescorted and unmasked, to keep her wealth and property her own, and to maintain her independence. In an essay on The Roarins Girl, Marjorie Garber draws a connection between female tranvestitism and emasculation. Garber expands the feminist reading of the play as being "a metaphor for the changing condition of womenn by arguing that [the playf s] anxiety is not so much based upon womenf s emancipatory strategies as upon the sexual inadequacies of men, u20 and she notes that Moll ' s clothing, particularly the codpiece she has made for her in Act 11, scene 2, spurs that sense of inadequacy. 1 donrt h o w that the overriding sema1 mood in The Roarins Girl is inadequacy; there is a variety of sexuality expressed by the characters, including men being aroused by Mollfs masculine representation. About the only man who pursues a woman dressed as a woman is Gallipot, whose pregnant (and therefore hyperfemale) wife spums him for being an "apron husbandw (III.ii.33). And Laxton is not quite the eunuch Garber sees him as being; he is aroused by Mollrs androgyny: "[Aside] Heart, 1 would give but too much money to be nibbling with that wenchu I I . i . 9 - 9 Mol1 finds it strange to see the young lovers, Sebastian and Mary, kiss while Mary is cross-dressed, but Sebastian replies, "Ifd kiss such men to choose, Moll; / Methinks a woman's lip tastes well in a doublet" (IV.i.48-49). George and Henry should be so secure in their masculinity. Because Madge's flirtation with transvestitism is by way of a costume, she brings to mind Rosalind from As You L i k e It or Viola £rom Twelfth Nisht, but the Shakespearean women play at being men to transport their bodies through the forest or into court. Madge's disguise transports her soul. As Garber points out, Rosalind and Viola differ £rom Mol1 Cutpurse on the grounds that they are disguised for reasons of necessity; Moll's mode of dress is not a disguise at all. And Madge's Long John Silver costume disguises her sex while expressing her desires. Harrérs second major way in which a sense of identity cari come unstuck occurs when one's social identity is weak, borderline, or undesirable, leading to a cultivation of a more acceptable identity to present to the public. This may be motivated by one's own feelings of social inadequacy, or a very real external threat may exist: a homosexual finding himself to be amongst violent homophobes might find it prudent to "rnake a deliberate effort to display the distinguishing marks of an approved social identity.l12' This subversion of oner s "trueM identity serves as a survival technique in the same way as does a charneleon's ability to camouflage itself. Harrérs premise is nicely demonstrated, with an ironic twist of course, in Nobodv Here But Us Chickens. In his Authorrs Note to the set of plays about disability to which Chickens belongs, Barnes begins: There are so many conditions which are handicapping in the widest sense - being an Arab in Israel, a Jew in Syria, being a woman, gay, black or poor anywhere. These handicaps prevent people making the normal responses to their surroundings, stifle their opportunities and create prejudices in others. Yet w e al1 make sure we suffer disabilities to some degree or other. 22 Bames's observation that we desire some degree of disability is pertinent here. Disability serves to set one person apart from others in the same way that having an extraordinarily able dimension does. Perhaps Long John Silver was a particularly fitting syrnbolic choice: three able-bodied characters long to Wear the identity of a half blind, single- legged villain. To be something more than just another face in the crowd, some defining characteristic, positive or negative, is necessary. And if Long John's body is marred, it became so in adventurous forays, not from sitting behind a desk. Allsop, the principal fowl in Nobodv Here But Us Chickens, is driven by this need to stand out. As he describes his former existence, it is plain that Allsop was already a chicken in almost every sense; what changes is the characterts attitude towards chickenhood: ALLSOP. I asked myself the question 'Who am I?' Am 1 an obstacle or an opening, a wall or a door, a man or a chicken? P d been with the firm of Harcourt and Ridley, man and boy, but 1 slipped out of orbit; couldn't cope. ... So 1 was taken away to rest. . . . 1 touched peace, at last, in the oxder of the henhouse, cluck-cl uck-cl uck, cock-a-doodl e-do ! 1 saw the top birds pecked al1 the others and those in the middle ranks pecked those below but respected those above, whilst the fowls at the bottom took it £rom everybody. This was the England 1 knew and loved! ( 4 4 - 4 5 ) And, as long as ~llsop is going to be a chicken, he might as well be Goldcrest, the one at the top - the one that doesn't get pecked, Unless, of course, an equally impressive cock is thrown into the same henhouse. Hem, too, has taken a step up in the world by becoming Chanticleer: HERN- I was a bank teller for twenty years before 1 found myself. People would corne to my window for money. I'd count out £ive - ten - twenty - fifty - hundred; quick - quick - quick - quick. Two tellers to a cage. Caged birds crarnped and grey. Then the light came and 1 spread my wings - (47) When, at the end of the play, Hern and Allsop decide to rejoin the world, they do so by developing working social personae. While still knowing themselves to be chickens, they play at being men, and that is al1 that the world requires of them. 23 In the a r t i c l e I've referenced here, Harré seems to assume a core identity, and begins his discussion by stating, T h e basic distinction tha t will be deployed in this chapter is that between the fact of persona1 identity - what it is that makes a human being this or that particular person - and the sense of personal identity - how people experience their unique self. w 2 4 Not al1 sociologists would agree, however, that there a "fact of personal identityN; James J. Dowd, for example, proffers the concept that al1 identity is construction, that there is no authentic self. ~ o w d takes a postmodernist view of personal identity: now that the I1death of the author, has occurredI2~o1e theory encourages . a recognition or reappreciation of the once remarkable notion that the self is an image we construct from the materials at hand. in a sense, a self resembles a wardrobe: we pick up bits and pieces of identity along the way and, as long as these elements fit and are suitably stylish, we will Wear them for the time beingO2= In Dowd's view, the nature of identity shifts away from being determined by environment, G o d , and/or genetic inheritance, ont0 the individual, as self-author. The paranoia such a school of thought would create in the powers that be is obvious: we are no longer creations, but creators; we are the gods of the tiny universes of ourselves. It becomes clear why the real Mary Frith's presentation of herself landed her in prison for awhile. But even the freedom of self-authorship does not give license to be anything at all. Thinking back to the discussion in Chapter 2 of Tudor- Stuart dress code, we recall that in the 16th century, except during brief periods of Carnival implicity or explicitly sanctioned by the Church or state, self-creation is not the privilege of the common man. Nor is it now, according to Dowd : In the current age, civilization's discontents are not restricted to those with unruly ids but include those who have failed to acquire a self that is estimable in some way and that can withstand public scrutiny . '' As both Harré and Dowd note, popular acceptance of the identity claimed is necessary for an individual's smooth fusion with society. Even if we do have the power to author and authorize ourselves, it is limited by the external authority of the public. Without the safety nets of make- believe or mental illness, an unconvincing identity is a virtually non-existent one. When the mainstream public feels sufficiently threatened by an excessive display of individuality, one way of dealing with the unacceptable self-creation is to institutionalize the offender, taking him away from the public eye, as Allsop was presumably taken away in Nobodv Here But Us Chickens. Ultimately Hem convinces him to perform the role of a very ordinary man to regain entrance to the mainstream, where he will spy on men and attempt to sabotage their plan to eliminate chickens. In order to maintain uniqueness (as an agent in the exciting world of fowl espionage), Allsop must now be a chicken pretending to be a man; in actuality, a man pretending to be a chicken pretending to be a man; in reality, the same man he was before he was Goldcrest- He seems to re- glue himself, to borrow Harréfs terminology, via this intricate path. That such a thing might be possible gives weight to the argument that we have a great capacity for designing ourselves, and even psychochernical imbalances or physical restrictions may be partially within Our power to re-write. Strangely (or not, considering Barnes's vast intellectual storehouse of trivia), it has also been observed that mental patients in the world outside of Barnes are capable of acting normal, when it is called for, but the awareness that they are doing so as a performance reinforces in them the reality of their abnormality. In a related vein, another interesting tidbit 1 found 172 while lurking around the sociology researchers is the classification of people according to whether their idea of their llreal selfn has an winstitutionaln or an nirnpulsell emphasis, In this school of thought, those with an institutional emphasis feel that they are their real selves while performing well within a group; those with an impulse ernphasis feel that when they perform well in a group, they are conforming at the expense of their true selves.28 Clearly, the characters in both Lons John Silver and Chickens feel their true identities to be sublimated by the workaday world in which they must function; they express their impulsive natures only on special occasions such as fancy dress balls or nervous breakdowns. The cruel Barnsian irony is, these departures from conventional society lead only to a new conventional society. Becoming a chicken or a pirate suddenly becomes the most normal thing in the world to be: wherever you go, there you are. The issues of persona1 identity raised by Barnes in these plays also emerged in the theatre of the English Renaissance. In her discussion of identity on the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage, Ernily Bartels argues that our modern notion of character was sown when the rnedieval stage convention of the platea, that floating anywhere £rom which a farniliar stock character with a predictable pattern of behaviour often speaks directly to the audience, met with an emerging locus, where the locale and characters are rneant to be understood as being specific and indi~idual.'~ The thoughts, intentions, and emotions of platea characters are external (think Iago, Richard III, and Learts Fool), while those of the locus figures are often tied to turbulent interior struggles of identity ( think Lear , Hamlet , Othello) . Unexpectedly, she finds that in playing types, the stock characters have a more authoritative presence than do those meant to have depth and individuality: For platea characters carry the weight of being and perfom as subjective, rather than submerged or subjected, selves - not because of what they (or we) see within themselves, but because of what they (and through thern, we) see in others, in the state and status quo, and what they do, and can do, with what they see .Io Locus figures on occasion are transformed, if only irnpermanently, into stock figures, and then they, too, gain increased authenticity. Bartels finds this to occur in Kinq Lear, for example, when Edgar plays at being mad Poor Tom, and when Kent pretends to be Learfs cunning servant." Freedom of expression is made possible through restriction (to standard types) of identity; it is precisely this restriction which frees the characters of The Real Lons John Silver. As on the Elizabethan stage, the "realn and the "fictional" meet - in fact, they do so in the very title of the play. Was there ever a Ivreal" Long John Silver? Madge, Henry and George are basing their ideal personae on a movie pirate who has become the icon of his kind. The opening stage direction reads: "HENRY BOWER hobbles into sight Down Stage Centre as Long John Silver complete with peg-leg, crutch and a stuffed pa r ro t on his shoulder. He speaks in an exaggerated 'Robert Newtonr accentm (29) . Robert Newton's pirate creations for film include: Long John Silver in Treasure Island (1950) , Lonq John Siiver (1954), and "The Adventures of Long John Sirver" (television, 1955), as w e l l as the title character in Blackbeard the Pirate (19521, and a Royal Navy lieutenant impersonating pirate early Hitchcock film, Jamaica Inn (1939). These film fantasies are the source of three people's dreams and disappointrnents. Jonathan Dollimore sees in the growing cornplexity of character during Shakespeare's era "the realisation that identity itself is a fiction or construct," and, in line with Bartels, finds that ftlheatrical disguise and play were net merely a representation of this, but in part the very means of its discovery . . . rt 32 One tidy example, Marlowe's Tamburlaine, certainly illustrates Renaissance theatre's exploration of self-created identity, and, in a perverse way, so does Barnesrs Allsop. Says Tamburlaine: "1 am a lord, for so my deeds shall prove, / And yet a shepherd by my parentage" 18m Goldcrest, the original Cock of the North! . . - Dr. Exley keeps saying L ' m a man like him, as if that's something to be proud of. ... Toms and cities change their names, 1 changed rny being, blotted out, no roadsigns, not even a station. 1 won8t go back to living a lie. Now 1 stand newborn, consumed with faith in my chickemess . . , ( 4 5 ) Each aspires to transcend the limitations of his birth and become the perfect creation of his world. Each does so largely by sheer faith in his ability to create himself as he chooses. In Barnes's Thatcherite England, for the middle class, that creation is a chicken. Philip Massinger's 1631 play, Believe As You List," provides us with a character who has suffered from being too much a locus figure. After having spent twenty-four years in self-exile, shamed for having lost his army in an ill- conceived campaign, King Antiochus returns to Carthage, now a piece of the Roman Empire. If his identity is believed, he will likely be restored to the throne, and Flaminius, the Roman governor, will have to face a rebellious populace and perhaps even step dom. The politics of identity in this play are quite palpable- Flaminius, because he doesn't like the consequences of acknowledging Antiochusrs identity, simply refuses to believe it, even in the face of al1 evidence, short of a DNA test: FLAMINIUS : The relation the villain made, in every circumstance appeared so like to truth that I began to feel an inclination to believe what 1 must have no faith in. By my birth 1 am bound to serve thee Rome, and what 1 do necessity of state compels me to. (II.i.120-126) Unlike Tamburlaine and Allsop, Antiochus is not creating himself; he merely wants to resume the identity he legitimately had before his unfortuate battle. But he has no faith in that identity. Tamburlaine and Allsop assert their conquerority and chickenhood, respectively, but Antiochus, for much of the play, cannot convincingly project hirnself as a king. In the very first speech, his companion the Stoic advises him to f orget the contemplations of a private man and put in action that which may comply with the majesty of a monarch. (1,it6-9) But Antiochus8s telling response is: How that title, that glorious attribute of majesty that troublesome, though most triumphant robe designed me in my birth, which 1 have w o r n with terror, and astonishment to others affrights me now! (I.i.10-15) Later, in preparation for presenting his case to Flaminius, Antiochus does dress the part, but complains, "this shape that you have put me in suits il1 / with the late austereness of my lifeu (II.ii.120-121); he cannot even convince himself that hefs no imposter. But gradually he learns, or recalls, how to Wear the identity he would like to be seen in, and in the end, Antiochus successfully authors and projects himself. Flaminius feels the threat and tries to suppress the king's identity by reversing the first step Antiochus took towards reinhabiting his title: he strips him of majestical clothing: FLAMINIUS. Have you forced on him the habit of a slave? SEMPRONIUS. Yes, and in that Pardon my weakness, still there does appear a kind of majesty in him. (1V.i~. 31-34) By now a mere refusal to accept Antiochus as king is not enough; Antiochus has managed to "acquire a self that is 177 estimable in some way and that can withstand public scrutiny," in Dowdts words, cited earlier. And Flaminius's power is sufficiently broad so as to compel others to disbelieve the king's identity, in sp i t e of what they know to be true. Three merchants who, after a comical inspection which includes comparison to their memory of Antiochusfs moles, scars, and extracted teeth, conclude that the man before them is who he daims to be (I.ii.182-95). Though unable to sway Flaminius from his refusal to believe, they have, by their acceptance of him, authorized Antiochus to be Antiochus. But finally they recant; fear for their lives, generated by the threat of Flaminius's disapproval, makes them betray the king: If . . . having proved Our testimonies could not help him / we studied our safetiesI1 V i . 8 - O . With no one to confirm his identity, Antiochus is not permitted to be Antiochus. Still, he is enough like Antiochus to present a threat to the State, whether Flaminius truly disbelieves (Righly unlikely), or not. Only by going about as an imposter of himself, renouncing both his monarchic right and his persona1 identity, can Antiochus live. It is an ironic condition which Allsop also experiences: to be himself, he must hide himself, but his disguise looks exactly like him. Noondav Demons shares with The Real Loncr John Silver and Nobodv Here But Us Chickens the device of one character being surprised by meeting his very close likeness, but in this case, the identity being duplicated is neither appropriated from popular myth nor the result of a deluded mind. To the extent that there is such a thing, we are seeing the "realN St. Eusebius: a religious hennit who lives in isolation £rom al1 society and al1 material goods. Yet he, like every character we have seen in this chapter, would transform himself- Feeling the threat of the Devil within him, he says: He canst not harm me. 1 riddeth myself of old style man and am becorne as one new: new eyes, ears, hands, heart, head. These years or prayer and pain hath transformed me. In destroying my body 1 destroyed Space and Time. '' Eusebius, by attempting self-fashioning, performs the Creator's role and assumes his privileges, including the privilege to destroy God's creations Man, Space, and Tirne. It is while he is boasting of having been "caught up even unto Heaven and seen the consuming £ire o f the Lord a thousand, thousand times brighter than-n-n-n-nu (1571, in fact, that Beelzebub is introduced, speaking from within the ever- lessening body of Eusebius. The devil tries to convince the saint that his life, like his body, is wasted. This, indeed, is suggested in the enigmatic ending of Noondav Demons: after Eusebius defeats Pior, he seems finally to have realized nothingness ("Yea, now 1 enter Him, burst brain's last barrierH he says, as the set becomes "a blue infini ty of spacem [180] ) ; but then St . Pior rises, and is joined by another St. Eusebius, and the two take a surreal curtain ca l l . The original St. Eusebius looks on, praying for mercy (180-81). His eternity will be spent watching his own story be played over and over, himself duplicated again and again. As his demon has foreseen: You'll be resurrected in the second half o f the twentieth century as a stage freak. Your agonising abstinencefll be treated as a subject for laughter. You'll be regarded as just another figment of your authorrs grotesque imagination. Woonday Demons' by Peter Barnes. (161) It seems a rather infernal end for one of Christ's most dedicated servants, and perhaps Barnes is trying to make a statement about the insignificance of spiritual devotion, a theme which forms the basis of his yet unproduced play Heaven's Blessinqs, to be discussed at the end of this thesis. It is certainly demonstrated, however, that Eusebius is not self-authored; worse, he is a creation of a man, noi of a god, and he cannot prevent the treatment he will receive on the stage. When he tempts Eusebius with riches, women, and power, Beelzebub apologizes for the lack of originality: Vt's Temptation Time, folks! 1'11 slip you three standards. It's routine stuff, but don't blame me. Blame Saint Anthony with his B-picture Temptationsn (158) . Supporting Bartelsr theories on platea figures, the more this demon gives us what we expect in a demon, the more we credit him. Beelzebub is not just the tempter inhabiting the martyr's body; he is the audible evidence of the psychomachia taking place within Eusebius. And he is the "realv Eusebius too. When Eusebius tries to exorcise him, he says, "1'11 go when youfre good and ready, and not before, same as alwaysm (157). Like JC/Jack, Eusebius/~eelzebub~s elves are fragmented and cannot be joined, though trapped in the same person. The medieval stage characters vice and Virtue have been internalized, and both speak from the same mouth. On the Elizabethan stage, the conflicted thoughts of a character often take the form of soliloquy. Reading the Elizabethan soliloquy as a descendant of the morality play, Catherine Belsey notes: As the literal drarna discards allegory, and morality personifications give way to social types, concrete individuals, the moral conflicts externalized in the moralities are internalized in the soliloquy and thus understood to be confined within the mind of the protagonist. The struggle between good and evil shifts its centre from the macrocosm to the microcosm. 36 Without the soliloquy, Elizabethan playwrights would not have been able to let us into a characterfs head, or at least not as gracefufly. Barnes, not generally known for graceful subtlety, provides his saint with a sort of indoor-outdoor convertible moral conflict: though Eusebius houses both good and evil, he can evict one of the tenants. Eusebius extracts from deep within hirnself a huge black spider which obviously represents evil. Soon after he rids himself of that dernon, however, St. Pior enters the action. 1s he, as Eusebius accuses, a devil in a saint's disguise? If so, it is more than a little ironic that this demon presents himself to Eusebius as his double. For the purposes of this discussion, however, 1 will take St. Pior at face value and consider him a legitimate individual. The confrontation of the two holy men brings about a kind of chaos that the demons have not been able to accomplish. Two formerly contemplative recluses who literally would not harm a fly engage in a cornpetition that ranges £rom verbal insult to attempts at levitation to comic book physical violence to, finally, murder. Interestingly, the possibility that Eusebius and Pior might both be the Christian martyrs they appear to be never arises; the initial reaction is complete mistrust : ST EUSEBIUS. Demon or Man, you were sent by the Devi1 to rnake me doubt . ST PIOR. Demon or Man, you were sent by the Devil to confuse and corrupt me, (178) What shakes the faith of these two ascetics is being confronted by themselves. At their first awareness of one another, each believing the other to be an emissary from the underworld, Eusebius shudders and says, ".., thou hast nefer corne to me in such a loathsome guise!" while P i o r , repulsed, tells his double, "Thou must be the mightiest of demons for thou hast the mightiest of smells ! (164) . Each sees and smells hirnself - not only the unsavouriness, but the £utility of being hirnself- You spend seven or so years festering away in the desert, just killing tirne waiting for your too too sallied, sullied, and solid flesh to melt, and what should pop up but a duplicate, making you suddenly twice as corporeal! In the words of St . Eusebius, " Tis true Godf s house has many mansions, but this one is occupied" (167) . When we get d o m to the barest bones of who we think we are in the scheme of being - what we think Our place is (in the case of Eusebius it's very literally a place, a particular mound), we can't hold it, we can' t clah it . Why would anyone want to steal the place of a starved, filthy hermit-martyr? Barnes gives no reason. The identity displacements that take place in al1 of these play are unintentional, and clearly coincidental in the case of The Real Lons John Sil~er.~' Had the likenesses in any of these works not met each other, they would have enjoyed their several identities in undisrupted peace, whether there were three Long John Silvers or three thousand. Barnes puts the doubles and triples together and stands back while they play out the scene, which in each case must unfold as it does, in a battle for ownership of the identity. To have St. Eusebius invite St. Pior to set up his mound next to his own would be to avoid the conflict that is the nature of drama, and the reality of the nature of men. This, regardless of the undesirability of the prize: "an ill-favoured thing, sir, but mine own," says Touchstone of his Audrey (AYL, V.iv.58). Like food and water, having something unique to cal1 your own seems to be necessary to sustain life. The soul and the body cannot be completely separated; identity is made up of both. However, in Barnes's world, body and soul can be fragmented. The three characters in The Three Visions, Barnes (age 55) , Old Man (74) , and Young Man (31) , encounter one another at the BBC. Barnes has gone there to record his new radio play, The Three Visions; Young Man is there for the first time to discuss a project on Ben Jonson; and Old Man gets out of saying why hef s there by tripping and falling into the equipment. It doesnrt take them long to realize that they are encountering themselves in different years and at different phases of one life, not unlike Dickens's Scrooge, but without the Victorian moral lesson. The greater debt Barnes owes here is to Samuel Beckett. As in Beckett's Krap~' s Last Tape (1958) , ir, The Three Visions age conf ronts youth, but whereas Krapp does that via audiotape, Barnes has his older and younger selves present themselves fully, in forms which are capable of conversing with one another. Now youth can confront age, too. Circularity expresses inescapability in Visions: a sound effects tape canft be shut off; there is joking about the impossibility of navigating one's way out of the circular Broadcasting House; and of course we are auditing a play about the recording of the play we are auditing. Most significantly, a circle of one man's persona1 history is presented in such a way that his past, present, and future exist in the same moment rather than linearly. Though it moves back and forth on a linear plane, Krappfs tape achieves a similar effect: an old man listens to a tape of himself at 39, and the 39 year old is commenting on a tape he's just played of himself as a foolish youth, Krapp begins his last birthday tape with, I1[j]ust been listening to that stupid 184 bastard 1 took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe 1 was ever as bad as thatW? It's as if he wasnyt the same person; in Visions, Old Barnes quite literally is not the same person he once was, as we can tell for ourselves. And yet he is; each of the three is no one other than Peter Barnes, the underrecognized writer. Al1 three Barneses are rightful owners of the life and the identity they al1 share. "Oh yes," says the old man to the other two, V'm the writer - the Peter Barnes. " "No, youyre just Peter Barnes. You see, I ' m Peter B a r n e s , too, If replies the young man. 3g If they are al1 dreaming, they wonder, whose dream is it? The temptation is to think of middle-aged Bames, whose age is the same as that of the author of the piece, whose time is the time of the audience, and who does not have a qualifier preceding his name, as the "truew Barnes- But, if self-agency means having the authority to direct one's life, none of the Barneses, including the youngest, has that authority. Young Barnes has an outburst when his older selves tell hirn that he will never achieve his idealistic goals, and the middle-aged Barnes responds: "It's no good you shouting, just as it's no good us giving you advice. You're going to become the perçons we aret1 (111). There is a plastic knee in Young Barnes's future, a body that has suffered from neglect, and worst of a11, the foreknowledge that he has "risen from obscurity and [is] headed for oblivionlI (110) (though 1 hope to help change that prediction). For his part, the only purpose the young man serves for the elders is to rernind them of their lost hopes and unattained dreams. Even Krapp can find his moment of happiness and play it repeatedly. On the question of whether we are bom with a set identity, or whether we build it as we go along, Barnes clearly cornes down on the side of the former. He introduces the volume that contains both The Real Lons J o h Silver and The Three Visions with this assurance: In a sense they are al1 true stories, only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. Though set in different times and places, they celebrate the particularity of individuals, each of whom has a distinctiveness which makes them that which they are and no other. . Such individuality, visible yet unknowable, is a defence against cruelty which feeds on complacency and indif f erence . 40 This optirnistic view is not supported by The Real Loncr John Si lver , Nobodv H e r e But Us Chickens, Noondav Demons, or The Three Visions; Barnes isn't as sunny a playwright as he is an introduction writer. The characters in al1 of these plays get stripped to the core in the act of attempting to redefine themselves, and the core, we find, is an inviolable tyrant. It holds the power; it authorizes our existence and allows - or denies - any attempt at self-creation. It is limited, of course, by physical and other immutable boundaries; a man camot turn into an actual chicken or meet himself at different stages of his life (though 1 suppose Henry, Madge, and George, if they were willing to lose an eye, half a leg, and take to the seas, could become reasonable facsimiles of 186 Long John S i l v e r ) . But we do see, in life, many cases where by sheer will, a person transcends the limitations of his body. Unfortunately for these charactexs, they cannot escape themselves. ENDNOTES - CHAPTER 4 Full bibliographic information for editions of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays is given in the list of works cited. 1. There has been a large volume of work done on this question by literary critics in the past two decades. To give just a few of the major examples: Stephen Greenblatt is largely responsible for getting the bal1 rolling with Renaissance Self-Fashioninq (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Catherine Belsey writes of the ernergence of individuality on the Elizabethan stage in The Subiect of Trasedy (London and New York: Routledge, 1985); in The Tremulous Private Bodv (2nd ed., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), Francis aarker takes Belsey's work and puts a Foucaultian spin on it; and Jonathan ~ollimore explores the shift of thinking in seventeenth century drama which decentred man and disnqted religious teaching in Radical Trasedv (2nd ed., New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989). ~mily ~artels's essay on the coexistence of stock and developed characters in Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre will be addressed below. 2. Peter Barnes, The Rulins Class, in B a r n e s Plavs : One (London: Methuen, 1989), 62 (stage directions omitted). 3. Peter Barnes, personal interview, 2 November 1992. 4. Peter Barnes, The Real Lons John Silver, in The Real Lons John Silver and Other Plavs (Barnes's People III) (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1986) , 39 . Subsequent references will be given parenthetically within the text. 5. Samuel Beckett, Waitina for Godot (New York: G r o v e Press, Inc. , 1954) , 34 recto. 6. Peter Barnes, Nobodv Here But Us Chickens, in Revolutionarv Witness and Nobodv Here But Us Chickens (London: Methuen, 1989), 49. Subsequent page references will be given parenthetically in the text. 7. Invasion of the Bodv Snatchers, dir. Don Siegel, perf. Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter, Walter Wanger Pictures Inc., 1956. The source of al1 bibliographic information for films and television series is The Internet Movie Database Ltd ( I M D b ) , http://us.imbd.com, "1990-1997. 8. The Net, dir. Irwin Winkler, perf. Sandra Bullock and Jeremy Northarn, Columbia Pictures, 1995. 9. Other notable examples in popular culture include "The Prisonerm (dir. Don Chaffey, perf. Patrick McGoohan, Everyman Films, 1968), a wonderfully paranoid and bizarre British television series about a man (possibly a spy ) who finds himself on a strange, fairytale-like island where everyonefs identifying information has been replaced with a number, and everyoners former profession, family, preferences, and for the most part, memories have been replaced with a fantastical existence; and Ridley Scott's la de Runner (perf. Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, and Sean Young, Ladd Company, 19821, in which memory implants, evidence such as photographs and false sense of persona1 history. supplemented by physical mementos, give androids a 10. Of course, he is not the only British playwright of his generation to have explored the implications of messing about with identity and/or duplication, Cary1 Churchill's 1979 piece, Cloud Nine, plays on the political, economic, social and psychological consequences of having one identity as opposed to another, Several of Harold Pinter's plays, including (among others) The Birthday Partv (1958), The Lover (l963), The Homecorninq (l965), and No Man's Land (1975) feature characters whose vague and amorphous selves disrupt the security other characters have in their own: they don't seem to know who they are, but they know who everyone else is, regardless of whethek it matches the characterrs Self-image o r not. And Tom Stoppard uses the challenge the Newtonian laws of in two (sornetimes three) places twinning device in ~ a ~ s o o d to nature by putting characters at once, and to show that a thing and its opposite (the prim and sluttish invented sister) can occupy none of these works is a characterf s proper Mother and her the same space. But in self usurped by his - - duplicate. 11. Rom Harré, Identity Pro j ects, in Threatened Identities, ed. Glynis M. Breakwell (Chichester et al.: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd-, 1983) , 31. 12, Harré 40. 13. Harré 43. 1 4 . The connection was made more crudely during the 1991 United States Senate confirmation hearings of Justice Clarence Thomas, where a pornographie video entitled IlLong Dong Silveru received much attention. 15. This report from an article on The National Organization of Womenrs World Wide Web site connects the role of clothing to politics: In perhaps the first picket ever by NOW members, activists in August 1967 dressed in vintage clothing to protest the old-fashioned policies of The New York Times, which then segregated help-wanted ads by gender. ... In September 1968, New York N O W members and other womenrs liberation activists picketed the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and though no bras were actually bumed that day (some were thrown into a trash can) , this is the event from which the myth of the bra burners evolved. (no author) "History of Marches and Mass Actions, http://www.now.org/history/protest~.html downloaded 29 Jan 97 . 16. The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed- Norman Egbert McClure (Philadelphia, 1939) , II , 2 8 7 , Quoted in Anne Hermann, I1Travesty and Transgression: Transvestitism in Shakespeare, Brecht, and Churchill," Theatre Journal 41:2 (March 1989) , 135. 17. Or "Firth, as Norman Rabkin has her in his edition (Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin, eds., Drama of the Enslish Renaissance, vol. 1 (New York: MacMillan, 1976)). 1 use this edition here, but have used the more common form of Moll's name. 18. For a fuller discussion of the siqnificance of clothing in The Roarins Girl, see Marjor of the Transvestite: The Roarinq Girln, Renaissance, ed. David Scott Kastan and ie Garber, "The Logic Stasins the Peter Stallybrass (New York: Routledge, 1991) 221-34. 19. Barnes is giving a nod to William Congreve's The Wav of the World (1700) : Mrs. Miliamant dictates a long list of conditions which must be met by her suitor Mirabell. "These articles s~bscribed,~ she says, "if 1 continue to endure you a little longer, 1 may by degr&& dwindle into a wifeN (IV-i) - S i x Restoration Plavs, John Harold Wilson, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company: Riverside Edition, 19591, 367. 20. Garber 221. 21. Harré 42. 22. Peter Barnes, Author's Note to Revolutionary Witness & Nobodv Here But Us Chickens (London: Methuen, 1989) , 41 . 23. As a point of interest, perhaps, to someone considering producing this piece, 1 note a difference in interpretation of Chickens between Bernard Dukore and myself. Dukore understands both Allsop and H e m to be deluded; 1 suspect that Hem is pretending to be a chicken as a ploy to lure Allsop back into the world. His willingness to eat a chicken sandwich is a main factor leading me to this interpretation. See Bernard F. Dukore, Barnestom: The Plavs of Peter Barnes (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc - , 1995) . 24. Harré 31. 25. Roland Barthes, Imaqe Music Text , ed - and trans . Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977) , 142-48. 26. James J. Dowd, "Aporias of the Self," in Linda Marie Brooks, ed., Alternative Identities: the Self in Literature , Historv, Theow, (New York and London : Garland Publishing, ïnc., 19951, 246. 27. Dowd 246. 28. From the research of Ralph Turner, summarized in A. Paul Hare and Herbert H. Blumberg, with selections from the works of Ervine Goffman et al., Dramatursical Analvsis of Social Interaction (NY: Praeger Publishing, 19881, p. 82. 29. Bartels cites Robert Weimann, in Robert Schwartz, ed., Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 19781, as the source for her understanding of platea and locus- 30 . Bartels 179. 31. Bartels 175-80. 3 3 . Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great. Part 1, in Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin, eds., Drama of the Enslish Renaissance, vol. 1 (New York: MacMillan, 1976) . 34. Philip Massinger, Believe As You List, in The Plavs and Poerns of Philir, Massinser, vol. 3, ed. Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson (London: Oxford Ue, 1976) . 35. Peter Barnes, Noondav Demons, in Plavs: One (London: Methuen, 1989), 156. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically within the text. 36. Catherine Belsey, The Subiect of Trasedv: Identitv and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London and New York: Routledge, l98S), p. 43. 37. A possible exception is the Hem-Allsop doubling in Nobodv Here But Us ~hickens. There is support for - interpreting Hern as being connected to the institution, playing a trick on ~llsop-in order to bring him back into accepted reality one way or another. This is Dr. Herder's rationale for introducing the Electric Messiah to SC in the pivotal scene in The Rulina Class. 38- Samuel Beckett, Krapprs Last Tape and E m b e r s (Faber and Faber Limited, 1958), 17. 39. Peter Barnes, The Three Visions, in The Real Lonq John Silver and Other Plavs (London: Methuen, 1989) , 105. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically within the text . 40. Peter Barnes, tlIntroduction, Barnes's People III (London: Faber and Faber, 19861, ix. CHAPTER 5 Power Perfected: Laucrhter! Kings, popes, murderers and the mentally il1 are at the centre of Peter Barnes's plays, but the real protagonist of every play discussed in this thesis is Power. The E a r l of Gurney, the Lascas, Pope Clement, Carlos - are al1 vehicles for this protagonist, which has the blind ontogenetic mission of continuing itself. On occasion authority lands in the lap of someone who would far rather not have it; Father Morrone, for exarnple, finds that even unwanted power can be difficult to shed. And as with any entity possessed of a survival instinct, the better it can master its environment, the better it will survive. Power per£ected would have complete control, and in Laushter! (1978) , Barnes explores the use of annihilation as the ultimate rneans of securing the perfect power: power which is so total that no opponent is left to challenge it. In common with most of Barnes's work, Lauqhter! is an historical play; in this case, it seems more like two historical plays held together by a few thin strands of thread. The first of these two pieces, Tsar, is set in sixteenth century Russia during the reign of Tsar Ivan IV, dubbed Ivan the Terrible. His Oprichnina ("an army of licensed gangsters ... entitled to rob and slaughter non- Oprichniks with impunityt1 ) ' has been menacing Russian gentry, clergy, and peasants for seven years, sometimes murdering entire families on the flimsiest pretext. The Ivan to whom we are introduced seems tired, alternatively boastful of his horrible deeds and fearful for his soul: he wears the robes of a monk, not of a tsar, but canrt quite bring himself to relinquish his authority, even to his own son- The history is more recent in the second part of Laushter! - The year advances to 1942, and the setting changes to the stuffy offices of government contractors in Berlin. These civil servants could be anywhere; they seem to be as bored with and disconnected from their work and as frustrated with their l ives as plenty of civil servants in plenty of offices around the globe. They could be contracting for the building of low-cost housing or for a symphony hall. In this case, as gradually becomes apparent, they are contracting for the construction of the crematoria of Auschwitz. The elements shared by the two historical situations are government-sanctioned social division, territorial expansionism, theft of property, and of course, mass murder - none of which are brought to mind by the title Laushter!. In fact, there are few subjects widely considered less tasteful joke material than the Holocaust. Joking about the brutality of Ivan the Terrible might have seemed equally crass four centuries ago. Unfortunately for the purposes of this chapter, what jokes there might be about Ivan's reign are not readily available, at least not to an English speakere2 194 Clearly, Barnes's choice of title is meant to be ironic, but it is also a sincerely-presented topic for the audience's consideration. The playwright offers the premise that, in some of the very circumstances where we value it most. humour is in fact a dangerous and perhaps lethal weapon. It isn' t always clear, though, how this weapon is used and by whom. At times it seems to be a tool for self-defense; at others, a method of self-destruction. It can assert its usersr collective spirit, or it can shield the emptiness which once contained their spirit. Laughter, Barnes suggests, is not always the best medicine; sometirnes, it can be the best poison. The first character in the play introduces the argument against laughter. A present day Author bearing lecture notes on the nature of comedy begins to address the audience and has his credibility irnmediately shredded by a series of slapstick gags. begiming with a pie in the face. "Comedy itself is the enemy," he lectures, and indeed it does seem to be his persona1 adversary. "Laughterfs the ally of tyrantsftl he proclaims (still covered in custard pie). "It softens our hatred. An excuse to change nothing, for nothing needs changing when it ' s al1 a joke . Then, in between his bowtie spinning and his boutomiere squirting him, he urges "So we must try and root out comedy, strangle mirth, let the heart pump sulphuric acid, not bloodtt (343). Of course, no one can give serious consideration to a lecture delivered under such circumstances, so the Author becomes an illustrative example of the very lecture which he is being prevented £rom giving. Unflappable, he continues: Ifin the face of Atilla the Hun, Ivan the Terrible, a Passendale or Auschwitz, what good is laughter?! Root it out! Root it out!" while suffering the final indignity of having his silly underwear be exposed after his trousers suddenly drop (343 ) . The scene changes to the very uncornical set of Tsar, featuring an executioner's block, the image of the cnicified Christ, and Prince Odoevsky, who "wears a loincloth, his hands are bound, and heavy weights attached to his feet, so the sharpened point of the [wooden] stake, which is covered with congealed blood like candle grease, is driven up through his body" (344). A Gregorian chant is heard. The sombre tone is maintained as Ivan the Terrible enters in the habit of a monk. Ivan has left Russia in the hands of the ineffective Semeon Bekbulatovich, whose brief reign seems to have been so uneventful that he doesnft even rate a mention in some history books. ' During his sabbatical, Ivan has tried to lead a holy life in an attempt to be delivered £rom his sins. He kneels before the impaled prince and conducts a prolonged conversation with him on the nature of spiritual and physical tonnent, or rather, Ivan speaks while the prince contributes moaning, groaning, and the occasional blood-curdling c r y of agony. mSmile,M he tells him, your chastizer's human, not divine, who gites his victims, mercv. Smile, my son, that Christ stakes me not you! You buy forgiveness cheap. . . . Tonnent scours you clean, turns me rancid. You go d o m purif ied, 1 putrify [sic] . My painr s inf inite, yours has a stop. (345) It is not until the moment of his death (literally at Ivan's hands) later in the play that Prince Odoevsky makes his first decipherable utterance : I t G o d Save the Tsar ! " (3 52 ) . In creating his Ivan the Terrible, B a r n e s emphasized the historical Ivan's apparently conflicted sou1 which drove - or licensed - him to commit the most egregious acts against individuals and, with equal vigour, commend his victims' souls to God. One modem historian, seemingly an apologist for Ivan, sums up his discussion of the Tsar with this entreaty: To some contemporaries Ivan showed high gifts and a broad understanding. To others he seemed to veer neurotically between orgies which were often profane and a repentance which could scarcely be credited. But he is always a real human being and therefore he commands our sympathy even in the midst of his enormities -' This line of reasoning runs parallel to that which values laughter for its quality of lightening the burden of the oppressed- No crime is so appalling that it cannot be forgiven by Christ, regardless of how many times it is repeated; no treatment is so inhumane that it cannot be alleviated with humour; and every appeal for forgiveness evidences humanity. Even to accept repentance and relief under these terms is, 1 think Barnes would argue, to be an accomplice to the perpetrators. Still, the staged Ivan seems entirely sincere in his piety. Creating a mood which could hardly be more sober, a 197 spotlight isolates Ivan, and his prayers to be alone with God seem answered. Speaking to God he says, "Only here, alone, wir a few simple tools - nails, hammer, axe, canst I raise a tabernacle tg Thy glory and find my true peacew (346). Immediately the mood is most bizarrely altered as "a giant six-foot Nail with two legs, [dashes] in, pursued by a seven- foot Hammer" (346) . The Hammer strikes him dom and is immediately followed by a giant two-legged Axe which is running after a seven-foot Tree. On its way upstage, the Axe pauses long enough to attack the Tsar. 1 imagine the audience's collective jaw dropped. If God is listening to Ivan, he mocks him in response. Terrified by the vengeful tools God (or insanity) has sent him and feeling himself to be an assassin's target, Ivan desperately pleads "Who canst Save me?!" ( 3 4 6 ) . On cue, a herald announces the arriva1 of Semeon Bekbulatovich, the substitute tsar, who immediately places his head on the chopping block. He so desperately wants to be relieved of the crown of authority that if his head goes with it, so be it. Again we see the "twin polesIt of authority and submission6 at work: Ivan at one end, and at the other, Semeon, who claims, " I t m one or nature's natural crawlers. 1 long t' submitu (347). Here is something of a reversa1 of the situation in Massinger's Believe As You List (discussed in Chapter 4). Antiochus cannot convince anyone that he is the king, because his clothing and appearance are those of a beggar. Here, Ivan cannot be un-tsared, and Semeon cannot be powerful, no matter what each one wears. The people, refusing to accept Semeon's authority even though he wears the crown, have rejected him with their ridicule, and he has found himself defenseless in the face of it. Ivan, in contrast, shows him how a real tsar deals with derision. Pointing to the irnpaled Odoevsky he says, "He doesn't laugh. He shakes and splits his sides but not wi' laughter. None gowf ' t in God1 s presence, nor ' afore a Tsar who carries death i' his fingerstl (348). Laughter did not ally itself with the niler in Semeon's case; in fact it proved itself a pretty useful weapon in the hands of the people. And Ivan understands this potential threat. Humour is something which must not be allowed to nin rampant. The çurreal chase scene described above immediately deflates the seriousness of what went before it, illustrating the Author1s point and showing the power of unharnessed comedy. Later, Ivan plays the straight man to a courtier's foil, and together they wrestle a joke to t h e ground: IVAN. Prince Reprin once spake tnith's truth t' rny face. SHIBANOV. Ird like to meet hirn, Sire, and shake bis hand . IVAN. I'm not going t' the trouble or having hirn dug up jus ' so you canst shake his hand- SHIBANOV. ' T i s true, Sire, truth must be buried grave- deep else we al1 wake naked frorn our dreams. (355) The first three speeches constitute a joke; the fourth is a pin stuck into the joke, popping it. The intended effect of these theatrical shenanigans, 1 believe, is to make the 199 audience hyperaware of its response. Youtre laughing at the Author, an involuntary clown, and then boom!, you are presented with a horrifying stage image. Yourre settling into a scene of soul-searching when boom! again, animated tools absurdly interrupt. It is like watching the Benny Hill production of Macbeth. Expectations are shaken; assumptions are questioned; emotional responses are highlighted, so that reactions which usually reçide in the background and to which we give little thought - laughter, pathos, fear, pity - are brought to the fore in such a w a y that they beg to be examined. The de facto notion that laughter eases suffering obscures the important question: should suffering be eased, or should it be felt to the fullest to prod the sufferers into taking action against their tormenters? Anesthetized, is the impetus to find the source of the disease lessened? If the pain never ceases, would we then face the source and, to use a recurring phrase from the play, root it out? Would observers, seeing the true extent of suffering, be quicker to intemene? An examination of this sort led Barnes to mite Laushter!: "What 1 questioned was the old cliché that runs if we can laugh at our rniseries and at the injustices that afflict us, somehow laughing alleviates those injustices and those miseries and makes it bearable.It7 Even sot Barnes canrt always he lp trying to get a laugh where he can. Sent into a fit of rage at the lack of expression of his replacement during the reading of a strongly critical letter from the exiled Prince Kurbsky, Ivan fulfills the drearn of directors everywhere when he tells Semeon, Tou ha' authority' s staff , cross and globe tipped iron . U s e Dramatize ! , " pins the messenger8s foot (not Semeon's) to the ground with a spear and has him IlRead 't again. This time w i ' feelingt1 ( 3 4 8 - 4 9 ) . A few lines later the Tsar delivers a groaner of a pun when, defending his use of violence, he enlists his impaled vict im: I1There8 Prince Odoevsky takes my point Making dramatic displays of those he feels have betrayed him is only one way Ivan works to keep his power close and his authority whole. Punishment is good; prevention is better, so the Tsar anticipates treachery: 'II kill cold. A computed 12O,OOO grimed t'death, told t' the sword. Al1 were about t f betray me, there's nothing too cowardly f' ' e m t' ha8 the courage t' do. 1 knew their certain guilt by a certain sweating ' tween my f ingers, here, hereM (350) . Much as the Nazis justified ghettoizing Jews on the basis of what they might do and not on any actual crime,' the Tsar leads his Oprichnina in the murder of entire families based only on a gut feeling that they might one day rise against him. Providing a psychological gloss on the real Ivan, one historian mites : ït was Ivan's fa te to aspire al1 his life to autocracy and always, whenever he rid himself of one overly burdensome counselor, to fa11 into the hands of another. H i s passion for autocracy and his inability to make himself really independent of those around him filled his sou1 with bitterness; he liked to conceive of himself as a victim, and he lusted to wreak vengeance on those who hurt him and to "defend himself -. . ." It was this that made him seek solace in the frightful sufferings to which he subjected his enemies, real or imagined.' Whether Ivan's paranoia has any basis in reality or is merely a justification for his murders is uncertain. He is. at any rate, following the circular reasoning which has served bloody tyrants, real and staged, well through the ages. Hitler ( who implied character in Auschwitz) t h a t if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe !la - then, having brought about the war and given himself an excuse to murder his "enemies," he gloated oves the accuracy of his own prophecy. It doesn't take much of a gift of prophecy to predict what one will himself bring about. Daniel Goldhagen writes: On January 30, 1941, the eighth anniversary of his assumption of power and precisely two years after enunciating his apocalyptic "prophecy, " [Hitler] reminded the nation that he had "pointed out that should the other [sic] world be plunged into war by Jewry, the whole of Jewry will have played out its role in Europe. They [the Jews] may also laugh about it even today, just as they laughed earlier about my prophecies. The coming months and years will prove that 1 have been rightu [Goldhagenf s ernphasis ornittedl . " Again, Barnes exhibits his kinship to his Renaissance predecessors. In Macbeth and in Kins Richard III, Shakespeare highlights how paranoia about the possible future works in conjunction with greed and ambition. While Macbeth's destiny was foretold by the Weird Sisters and was not of his own authorship, Macbeth takes it upon himself to ensure that events will unfold in the way they have been predicted. We the audience know that Cawdor has already been given to Macbeth before the witches speak to him and that they have not caused the future to happen. The timing of his receiving the news £rom the King's messenger is coincidental, but Macbeth reverses cause and effect when he tells Banquo: "Do you not hope your children shall be kings / When those that gave the Thane of Cawdor to me / Promisrd no less to them?" (Mac . I.iii.18-20). The murders of Duncan, Banquo, Lady Macduff and her children; the suicide of Lady Macbeth; his own death - al1 occur because Macbeth tried to make happen that which he already believed will happen, and which he therefore need not have taken action to cause. Interestingly, for al1 the confidence he has placed in his oracles, Macbeth rejects them once the events which herald his downfall have occurred: MACBETH. 1 will not yield, To kiss the ground before young Malcolmrs feet, And to be baited with the rabblers curse. Though Birnarn Wood be corne to Dunsinane, And thou opposr d, being of no woman bom, Yet 1 will try the last . . . . (Mac. v.viii.27-32) Only now does Macbeth break from the false logic which has allowed him to transfer persona1 responsibility ont0 fate. Prophecy also serves Shakespeare's Richard, Duke of Gloucester, but whereas Ivan and Macbeth use it to convince themselves of their blamelessness, and Hitler to deflect blame, Richard uses it to map out his future. He fully knows hirnself to be the shaper of his fate. The predictions which he makes are tools to an end, not factors in a circular proof, and we know this from the outset: RICHARD, Plots have 1 laid, inductions dangerous , By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams, To set m y brother Clarence and the King In deadly hate, the one against the other; And if King Edward be as true and just As 1 am subtle, £alse, and treacherous, This day should Clarence closely be mew'd up About a prophecy, which says that 'G' Of Edward's heirs the murderer shall be - (m I.i.32-40) Of course ' G f will be Edwardrs murderer, but it will stand for Gloucester, not for George, Duke of Clarence- Even with the play's serious treatment of the supernatural - for example the dream-giving ghosts of the final scene, or Richard's hot potato reaction to Margaretfs curse (I.iii), there is never a sense that Richard is, or believes himself to be, caught up in an unalterable destiny, "a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stagem (Mac. V.v.24-25). He is the playwright. Regardless of the degree to which they believe in the tide of fortune, by placing themselves as conduits as opposed to actors in the course of events, Richard, Macbeth, Ivan, and Hitler are able to position themselves both within events, innocently victimized like everyone else, and outside of them, as prophets. Personal responsibility and blame are thoroughly deflected- The difference between Richard and the other three ill-intentioned rulers is that Richard has no need to delude himself as to the righteousness or necessity of his actions- Announcing his intention to kill the children of Edward IV, who would succeed to the throne before him, Richard plainly confides to Buckingham, nI wish the bastardç dead, / And 1 would have it suddenly performfdu ( I U , IV.ii-18-19). Macbeth, however, is not so blatantly self-serving. Kenneth Muir offers this explanation for the exceptional and unnecessary length Macbeth goes to in ordering Banquo's murder: He wants [the murderers] to do the deed out of hatred of Banquo, and not out of the need of money, so that he himselt shall be relieved of some part of the guilt - so that he can c ry , 'Thou canst not Say 1 did it. '12 At the same time, it is important for the tyrant to inspire fear and the belief that he personally punishes his enemies. Unlike the German "desk-murderersWl3 we meet in Auschwitz, far £rom pretending to have no connection to the tortures and murders he is responsible for, the historical Ivan : devised and even personally administered ingenious foms of death, often inflicted before an audience, as in the grim orgy over which he presided in a Moscow square on 25 July 1570, and which included the dismemberment and boiling alive of previously tomented victims . l4 Sirnilarly, in Barnes the Tsarevitch, trying to persuade his father the Tsar that he is qualified to take over the subjugation of the Russian people, assures his father that he is filled with hatred. Ivan disagrees: Not 'nough t' sustain the terror needed t' root out disobedience, There canst be no rule wi'out terror, ... ' T i s easy t f bring one man tr obedience, most're happiest on their knees. Some need only an imperious look t' kiss royal arses, others the symbols of Cross and Crown, still others, authority's true reality - gnout and gallows. One man's trembling carcass's small but Holy Russia stretches £ r o m Srnolens t' beyond the River Ob, from Kola in the Arctic North dom almost t ' the Azovian Sea. Tt bring this vastness tr obedience needs terror on an equal scale and I see no sign you're equal tf it yet. (357, 358.) Then father and son take a stroll down the memory lane of torture as they recall how "iron hooks pierced soft eyeballs, hot needles levered nails £rom broken fingerstl (358) and other atrocities they committed together. Meanwhile, as Shibanov reads the roll cal1 of the dead, "[rlows of white cardboard faces appear above the wall: their childlike outlines are drawn in black with dots for eyes and downward curves for mouthsu (358) . And still Ivan rationalizes his killing by turning it into a natural process: "What difference if sixty thousand die natural, scattered across the Urals in a day, or unnatural i f a city called Novogrod. We re-multiply . . . . Al1 s in heavenly balanceu (359) . When the Tsarevitch demands Ivan's crown, they fight and the Tsar inadvertently kills his beloved boy. This is the crown, and the authority it represents, that Ivan refused to take back £ r o m Semeon only moments before. The Tsarevitch had accused his father of denying him the crown out of hatred and fear of h3s potential power, and it is true that by appointing a weak man to his position, Ivan's subsequent return to power can be seen as being done under protest. Once again responsibility is transferred while authority is neatly maintained. The Tsar rnakes a final appeal to be released £rom his reign: IVAN. 1 confessed tf the Council 1 cut the cedar, slew my heir- Thoose another Tsar,' I craked. But they answered 'We want only you as our Tsar gi'en us by God. ' So 1 cried out, ' Holy Father, Lord God Almighty, 1 sleered my son!' 'Me too,' He answered, showing me his mercy, His terrible mercv. Who canst Save me?! (363) This the, it is Death, traveling under the name Samael, l5 who answers the call. He appears not in the customary black cowl and scythe get-up, but in the form of a beancounter, an auditor for whom dying is merely "Debit entries in the ledger .... In the end al1 accounts must be closed. It' s a matter of good book-keeping; hygieneu (364 ) . He dispassionately directs Ivan to "Give me the crown, then go fa11 into your graveu (364). Clean, convenient, efficient: this is, literally, the future of Death, as it will be practiced under the Nazis. Ivan's massacres were conducted sloppily and, Samael explains, "In the coming years they'll institutionalize it, take the passion out of killing, turn men into numbers, and the slaughterf ll be so vast no one mind'll grasp it, no heartfll break 'cause of itu (365). Only then will autocratic mass murder approach perfection. A few bars of "Deutschland Über AllesN are the segue out of Tsar and into Auschwitz. The executioner's block remains onstage but otherwise there is no sign of the violence of Ivan's world - only rows upon rows of sterile filing cabinets; a monument to bureaucracy. It is, one imagines, the sort of place Samael might work as he tabulates his endless Stream of the dead. It certainly has the ring of institutionalization: the act opens with an administrator, Cranach, dictating a memo to his secretary Else which begins: WVHA Arnt Cl (Building) to WVKA Arnt D1/1. Your reference ADS/MNO our reference ~~/14/102/01- Copies WVHA Amt D IV/2, Amt D IV/4: RSHA OMIII: Reich Ministry PRV 24/6/D. Component CP3 (ml described in regulation E ( 5 ) serving as Class 1 or Class II appliances and so constructed as to comply with relevant requirements of regulations L2(4) and (6), L8 (4) and (7) . (369) And so on. A jumble of letters and numbers which, having no comprehensible meaning, sound silly and harmless. It is late in the war, in Berlin, and the officeworkers are suffering from persona1 hardship. Food and other commodities are short; Cranach has lost a son in the war Pliberating the Ukraine from the Ukrainians" [375]) ; Else has lost a string of fiancés to it. These are unexceptional people victimized by their unfortunate circumstances. They are even decent people, who take care of their aging parents and avoid doing business with companies who underpay their foreign workers. Clearly, they are not shooting, gassing, or brutalizing anyone . l6 Gradually we come to understand that the "appliancesU being built are the crernatoria of Auschwitz. But the civil servants suffer from what Goldhagen terms "bureaucratie myopia."17 They seem to be ignorant of what they are contributing to. Stroop, an ancient clerk, wonders at the two 208 tons of Kyklon B rat poison that the government has ordered, saying ItThere can't be that many rats in the whole of Genany . It Cranach enlightens him : tfKyklon B isn' t being used to kill rats but to discredit this department. We built those complexes in Upper Silesia. If Gottleb and Arnt D prove they're overrun with vermin werre blamedI1 (373) . The more likely use for rat poison at Auschwitz, of course, is on humans. It is Christmastirne and even in this bleak environment, there is a degree of camaraderie fueled by a quantity of black market schnapps. The celebration extends even to Gottleb, a Nazi with a grudge against Cranach who has corne to the office to persuade Cranach to award a contract to Krupps. Eventually there is an overflow of drunken sentiment and a loss of good judgment, and Cranach and Gottleb set aside their differences. Stroop makes a joke about Goering's wife. "Don't laughrt1 warns Cranach. I1It's an offense to make people laugh. Jokes carry penalties . So don ' t (3 95 ) - and then proceeds to make a joke himself. This sets off a string of jokes and Gottleb, while laughing and even contributing, calls out the penalties as the jokes become riskier: £ive years' hard labour for one, fifteen years for another, 30 for one which goes that the war will be over "when Franco's widow stands beside Mussolini's grave asking who shot the Führert1 (395-96). Finally Cranach goes too far and tells a capital offense joke: "Listen, listen, what do you cal1 someone who sticks his finger up the Führerr s arse? Gottleb: "Heroic," Cranach: "No, a brain surgeon ! ( 3 96) . Gottleb stops laughing; Cranach has fallen into his trap. Gottleb has recorded everything and can blackmail Cranach into awarding the contract to Krupps. Laughter can indeed be lethal. Stroop and Else turn against Cranach to Save their jobs, but the transference of their all-too portable loyalty proves to have been unnecessary. The tape recorder f a i l s , so Gottleb pulls out the heavy artillery: the truth. "Auschwitz is where itrs happening.,," he tells the officeworkers. "You're strong, live; your re pretty, live; you're too old, too weak, too Young, too ugly. Die. Die. Die. Die. Srnoke in the chimneys, ten thousand a weekm (401)- He threatens to split your minds to the signs, sounds and smells of Auschwitz. Then 1'11 be rid of you. You'll go of your own accord- You piss-legs havenrt the pepper to stay in WVHA Amt C knowing every file you touchrs packed tight with oven-stacked corpses. No way then to hide behind the words and symbols. (402) Gottleb, like Ivan the Terrible, is a proponent of dramatizing violence. As he narrates a very detailed description of Auschwitz and al1 the atrocities taking place there, the wall of f iling cabinets opens. A mound of faceless straw dummies painted blue tumble out while the Sanitation Squad moves through, gathering the valuables of the dead. Writhing in pain from having reality forced upon them, the staff corne to see the mental picture of infants used for footballs, thousands gassed, and the skull-cracking of those not yet dead which Gottleb has been drawing. They admit to seeing the truth, but each rnakes an excuse for his or her inaction: Cranach has a second mortgage on his home; Stroop is so near retirement; E l s e has an old mother to caxe for. These are legitimate reasons of great importance to each individual, as they rnight be to any of us. Miniscule as their needs are in the face of thousands of people being burned every day, they are big enough to prevent them £rom sticking their necks out, and I'm certain Barnes wants his audience to feel an uncornfortable recognition of these characters as people much like themselves. Rallying his staff, Cranach fights Gottleb by turning words such as "gas chambersul and "ovensn back into memos, sequences, and other bureaucratic camouflage until he succeeds in getting the file drawers to close back up. l t A l l gone 'phoof', nothing disturbing left," says Stroop (408) . The desk-murderers can continue their civil service duties with few, if any, ethical pangs; in fact, once they have dispatched with Gottleb, Cranach and his staff join together in singing (albeit with savage overtones) : "This is a brotherhood of man A benevolent brotherhood of man. A noble tie that binds, Al1 human hearts and minds Into a brotherhood of man. " (409) Barnes doesnrt let the audience get off so easy. An unseen announcer introduces "the climax of this Extermination Camp Christmas Concert, the farewell appearance of the Boffo Boys of Birkenau, Abe Bimko and Hymie Bieberstein - 'Bimko and Bieberstein!IU (410). Of course we know where this is headed- The song-and-dance team is dressed in striped concentration camp uniforms, yellow Stars of David, and black-ribboned morticiansr top hats. Their patter is typical, but for its sub ject rnatter: BLEBERSTEIN. Bernie Litvinoff just died. BIMKO. Well if he had a chance to better himself. BLEBERSTEIN. Drunk a whole bottle of varnish. Awful sight, but a beautiful finish. Everyone knew he was dead. He didnrt move when they kicked him- He's already in the ovens. (410) As was the case in Tsar, the humour here is being deliberately deflated by the mention of the ovens. Bames, who has written "at least 1 have provided a good home for scores of old jokes who had nowhere else to go, 1t'8 f ully understands the mechanisms of a joke; he knows where to put the nbaDUMdum.m He is quite pointedly killing the jokes, along with the comics. "1 could be wrong but 1 think this act is dying," says Bieberstein as we hear the hiss of the hydro-cyanide being released (411) . That jokes about the Holocaust are generally looked down upon is not to Say that no jokes about it are made.lg They are; and not just about Hitler (parodied in his own lifetime by Charlie Chaplin) but about the victims - sometimes b~ the victims - as well. Steve Liprnan's Laucshter in Hel1 is largely a collection of jokes made by al1 groups of Nazi victims: ghettoized Jews, camp prisoners, occupied Europeans, and the German people themselves; in fact some of the jokes told by the office workers in Auschwitz were in circulation during the war. Much of the humour coming £rom the camp prisoners testifies to a brutal self-awareness of their situation. For example: One friend parting from another consoles his friend: "We'll meet again some day in a better world - in a shop window as soap. m2' In Joshua Sobol' s Ghetto, another play set during the Holocaust and which incorporates joke-telling, an SS off icer asks a Jew: ''Tell me, what is the difference between partial liquidation and total liquidation?" "Ki11 fifty thousand Jews and not me, that's partial liquidation. Ki11 me, that's total.m22 It's difficult even to read or hear these jokes with no sense of shame, as if even listening to thern indicts the hearer as being complicit in the crime, or at the least, in the moral crime of cheapening the experiences of the victims. On the other hand, if this is the celebrated humour of a persecuted people with an indominatable spirit, is there anything wrong with being amused? 1s the discomfort there because we have laughed or smiled and temporarily been distracted £rom a monstrous situation? Does it extend to some sort of collective guilt the West carries for failing to act? Once again: if we werenrt laughing, would we have been acting? At this point we need to test the statement made by the Author in the first scene: is laughter the ally of tyrants? Considering that both of the tyrants in Laushter find joking insufferable, it wouldn't seem to be. Ridicule drove Semeon off t h e throne, but he was never a tyrant which, of course, is why people could afford to laugh. Jokes boomeranged back on the characters in Auschwitz without even grazing the fascists who were the subject of them. Degradation is the root of al1 humour, according to some theories, 23 so it cornes as no surprise that dictators would have a paranoid f e a r of it. As Arthur Koestler put it: "the impression of the ~ludicrousness' of another's behaviour always implies an assertion - conscious or unconscious - of your own superiority; you smile at his expense."" But if these dictators understood laughter in the same way as the Author, they would welcorne it, As Pope Clement knows, and as Father Flote cornes to see in Red Noses, where there is hopelessness, as during the pfague, laughter can be a soothing balm; but where the suffering cornes £rom systematic, institutionalized inequity, its palliative properties make it a false friend of the ~ppressed.~~ The same entertainment that brings comfort to the dying can be used to distract t h e m from the source of their misfortune. Laushter! w a s written before Red Noses but thernatically, it picks up where the latter left off: with a great number of unfranchised people who live according to the dictates of a few. Father Flote cannot in good conscience put on a humourous Easter pageant in such circurnstances. He realizes that after the plague society will return to business as usual, and laughter will indeed befriend Church and State. l 'Our mirth was used to divert attention whilst the strong ones slunk back to their thrones and palaces," he tells the Pope.26 So the question becomes, was there a window of opportunity for rebellion by the French peasant, Ivan's victims, or the Jews which a fog of comedy obscured? 1 cannot attempt to answer that question here, and 1 realize the potential offensiveness of raising the issue because it lays blame on the victims. But since it is obvious that Barnes is assuming, at least for the sake of his dramatic exploration, that uprisings might have been possible, that is the perspective 1 have taken, Father Flote and the Author are echoing Koestler's conclusion that laughter prevents the satisfaction of biological drives, it makes a man equally incapable of killing or copulating; it deflates anger, apprehension, and pride. The tension is not consummated - it is frittered away in an apparently purposeless reflex, in facial grimaces, accompanied by over-exertion of the breathing mechanism and aimless gestures. To put it the other way round: the sole function of this lwcury reflex seems to be the disposa1 of excitations which have become redundant, which cannot be consummated in any purposeful rnannerm2' Laughter, then, is dangerous to the oppressed in two ways. First, outsiders in a position to help are made to laugh, their discomfort is soothed, and their sense of responsibility to act becomes dulled. Second, when the humour comes £rom the victims themselves, we rnay be fooled by the ability of someone to joke in the face of certain death. Indignation at the perpetrator turns into a hobbling admiration of the victim's bravery. Or it may seem that the situation canrt be al1 that bleak if comedy is still possible. (The quantum leap of faith in human nature in this argument assumes that people will extend help to the suffering so long as their situation is appropriately serious. As we see £rom the office staff in Auschwitz, this is not a safe assumption-1 Laughter indirectly senres the offenders in that it allows them to carry on their offenses. These offenders did not create the laughter; they do not control it; often they are even the butt of the joke - yet they are the beneficiaries of it. There is another side of the coin, of course. For the inmate in a concentration camp or, presumably, those Russian boyars who watched t h e i r neighbours being slaughtered and k n e w that they were next, the anesthetizing quality of laughter is a blessing. Who wouldn't w a n t relief £rom such pain? The Author would agree that humour temporarily releases the oppressed from their suffering; his qualm is with the utility of being released mentally while still imprisoned physically. Several writers have explored the correlation between liberty and laughter and found that humour thrives under repression. In C a r y 1 Churchill's play Mad Forest, set in Romania just before and just after the assassination of Ceaucescu and his wife, three young men who have been drinking wine are telling anti-Ceaucescu jokes in a scene similar to the joking scene in Auschwitz. Teliingly, the scene ends w i t h a joke about a violent attack on a Securitate man's car. The revolution will not be won with only an arsenal of j ~ k e s . ~ ~ An emigré from Nazi Germany writes: In a free society the joke is like a pleasant spice - just an after-dinner anecdote which goes dom well with coffee and brandy. In the West it is indeed a luxury. Jokes are not necessities. They are only one out of many possible ways of criticism- In totalitarian countries jokes are the onlv way. The next step after the joke is the political assassination. There is nothing in between." Similarly, Salcia Landmann notes that modern Israelis have far less humour in their society than did the persecuted Jews of Nazi Germany because they defend themselves with arms instead. Humour is "a means of expressing forbidden thoughts which weigh heavily upon us, and which we cannot even put into words - let alone convert into deedsn (my emphasis) .30 Others, however, find humour to be the best resource a victim can turn to, not only for comfort but as a means of revolt. Ron Jenkins opens his discussion of the subject with this statement: "In a world fraught with danger and despair, comedy is a survival tactic, and laughter is an act of faith.w31 Steve Lipman feels that "humor is one of the greatest gifts God gave mankind to pull itself out of de~pair."~~ Referring to the prisoners' cabaret in the Theresienstadt camp, created and performed by the finest Jewish artists (pointedly, "most of whom were eventually murdered in Auschwitz " ) , 3"oy Kif t concludes that " the great achievement of the Theresienstadt cabaret [was] its ability to bolster the will of its audiences to cling to hope and refuse to capitulate even in the midst of the most appalling circumstances . 1 1 3 4 Considering the outcorne, that great achievement seems impotent. And even though the Theresienstadt prisoners had a surprising degree of creative f reedon?, [tlhe one area which was taboo, for obvious reasons, was any attempt to satirize the Nazis. The fact that the authors, performers, and audience were unable to hit out at their captors may partly explain why they turned a lot of bitterness and anger on themselves, albeit mostly in a mild and ironic f orm . 3s The problem with Lauqhter! is that it is not a play where, like the camp prisoners, we are laughing at Our own miseries. We can8t enjoy the sense of superiority Koestler and ergs on-'^ describe, for exarnple, when it is anchored to a sense of guilt. The pleasure the Theresienstadt prisoners rnay have been given by laughter is seasoned with bitterness, and they were not in a position to laugh at, and feel superior to, their captors. In any case, it doesn't serve much of a practical purpose to humiliate an adversary when actual retaliation is not possible. Whether we laugh £rom the inside of a threatening condition, as victirn, or £rom the outside, as audience, laughter may be a tool to elevate the spirit, even to release it from subjugation, but it is inadequate to the task of actual rebellion; as a "survival tactic, it falls shy of the mark. As an interesting contrast to Kift's assessment, Liprnan f inds that l1 [s] urprisingly, the j okes [made by Jews under the Third Reich] reflected virtually no yearning for physical revenge or punishment. Retribution was described as in the future, in God' s hands , u3' Lipman finds a certain heroic stoicism where Kift found powerlessness. The original production of Laushter! seems to have put some people on the defensive, presumably because any treatment of Auschwitz in a non-tragic context is suspect as potentially irreverent. Art Spiegelman, for exarnple, told the story of his parents' experiences in Nazi Germany and their survival of Auschwitz in Maus, a two-part comic book (or I1graphic novel, " as the genre is coming to be called). At the begiming of the second book, Spiegelman questions his right to do the story. He tells his wife: Just thinking about my book ... it's so presumDtuous of me. 1 mean, 1 can't even make any sense out of my relationship with my father ... H&W am 1 supposed to make any sense out of Auschwitz? ... of the 1 feel so inadequate trying to reconstnict a reality that was worse than my darkest dreams. And trying- to do it as a comic stri~! [. . . ] Reality is too com~lex for comics Barnes is more confident of his right to mix his Auschwitz play with humour, but his audience did not seem to share that confidence. 1s it coincidental that bis access to the London stage for his original work dried up after Laughter!? It would be seven years before another of his plays was given a London producti~n~~, and there have been none since. This doesn't seem to be just the result of Barnes's production requirements clashing with the reduced financial resources of the theatre, nor was it felt that the quality of his craf tsmanship had gone downhill . Apparent ly , Laucrhter ! struck a Sour chord with theatregoers: When that show ILauqhter!] was on at the Royal 219 Court 1 used to feel the hatred of the audience for me, during the show and after the show, they actually loathed being confronted with it, particularly in that form. Irm sure if P d have done it in a sentimental form - they were so totally embarrassed it turned to a very, very palpable antagonism. 1 did the play some years ago, 1 don't know if things have changed, but it certainly was much too advanced for anyone to take, certainly an audience." The fonn to which Barnes ref ers is the broad, vulgar, circus- like comedy which he has used in many other plays. There was no great public uproar when he subjected one of the worldf s greatest minds to the most base elements in Leonardo's Last S u p ~ e r , nor when he mocked Christianity in The Rulins C l a s s , nor when, in The Bewitched, he made light of the torture the Spanish Inquisition inflicted upon thousands of innocent people. And I ' m guessing that there would have been no uproar over Tsar if it had been separated from Auschwitz, Clearly, an audience can laugh at agony and violence without hating itself or the playwright for doing so. Further, audiences have even laughed at Nazi Germany without self-reproach - but there again, it could be argued that laughter befriended the tyrants by downgrading the experience of the victims. Charlie Chaplin's 1940 parody of Hitler, The Great Dictator, is among the best-known pieces of comic artillery of the second World War. Chaplin had such strong faith in the power of comedy to wound and maim that he went to great trouble and persona1 expense to make the film. But he came to question this faith after the war, once extensive information about Nazi crimes began tc surface, saying, "Had 1 known of the actual horrors of the Geman concentration camps, 1 could not have made The Great Dictator; 1 could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis. " 4 2 But Rudolph Arnheim, having himself fled Nazi Germany, had an unwavering belief in the political potential of comedy. In his review of The Great Dictator, he wrote that IlCharles Chaplin is the only artist who holds the secret weapon of mortal 1aughter.11~~ e faulted the film only for its narrow focus on Hitler which should have been, the critic felt, trained on the wider problem of fascism. Other examples of unmistakably anti-Nazi, widely-seen contemporary popular comedy include Disney and Looney Toons cartoons and a Three Stooges short.44 It must have been nearly impossible for Arnericans to miss seeing one or more of these pieces, which would have been shown, along with feature films, at cinemas across the country. Like Auschwitz at the beginning, the focus of these comic works was the Nazi government and its adjuncts, not the more emotionally- compelling stories of mass executions or prisoners in the camps; therefore, unintentionally, the creators made the parodied dictators come off only as war enemies, not perpetrators of genocide. The focus is directed in such a way as to make it possible for people, including Barnes's civil servants, to pretend they donrt see. Evidently, speaking 221 about committing heinous crimes against hurnanity c m be comic; performing them cannot be. Of course, a perceived tastelessness is not the only possible reason for Laushter!'~ massive failure. One critic fouid the play to be simply bad and unfunny, but admits that when he did laugh (at lines which he says had been "appropriatedn) , he felt sheepish; at the same time he insists (defensively, 1 think) that his discornfort was unnecessary: I1our revulsion at Auschwitz is not altered in the slightest. 11" Another objected to the writing in Tsar and found Auschwitz dull, and cites two dozen satirists spanning the whole of Western writing to demonstrate that laughter and horror can CO-exist. He insists that no one laughs at the two events which drive the plots of these plays anyway, and he "camot see how laughing at other things makes us think them more acceptable. u46 Barnes doesnr t dispute that we can laugh at atrocity and still recognize it as an atrocity. His question is, should we, or should we cut dom any attempt at humour and talk revolution instead? At the least he asks his audience to consider the question, and not toss it off so glibly. Parenthetically, it seems that distance - geographic or chronological - influences how well we rally around our "brotherhood of manM in its most dire moments. There are, no doubt, real~olitical issues at work which complicate involvement £rom outside governments, but 1 have not noticed a 222 signif icant American (or British) grassroots effort to f ight the recent genocidal slaughter taking place in Rwanda or Bosnia. Barnes is probably greatly overestimating the likelihood that people in the relatively cornfortable West will take significant risks to help end someone else's crisis, no matter how it is presented. It isnr t only a comic treatment of atrocity that allows or, in Koestler's view, causes inactivity; we see the same inertia when exposed to news footage of rotting corpses - as long as they aren't rotting in our own backyard. Laughter is not the only private reflex that a totalitarian government would control. Every facet of an individual's life, including thought, if that were possible, m u s t be made transparent to the tyrant if he would have and maintain complete, hermetic power, Anything kept hidden from authority is a potential threat and must be exposed: rooted out. In his (unfavourable) review of Laushter!, Robert Cushrnan observes that: "The refrain, 'root it out, root it outr is taken up by the actors ... whenever they succeed in raising a chuckle. "" Again, we see the deliberate def lation of any humour which might distract £rom the horrors brought about by Ivan the Terrible or Adolph Hitler. But there is also another way the refrain is used: as a talisman capable of warding off threats and undesirable events. As noted earlier, the Author urges his audience to root out laughter. Ivan calls for uprooting four times: of his 223 sins, while asking G o d for deliverance (346); when calling for disobedience to be rooted out (There canst be no rule wi'out terror. No opinion's innocent, therefore al1 opinions must be guilty" ([357]); while trying to rid himself of his position as Tsar (362); and in his last moments, as he tries to stave off Samael, a.k.a. Death (366). In Auschwitz, each character has a tum at using the metaphor. "Al1 those cretins, mongoloids, parapalytics, sclorotics and diarrectics - who doesnft want to root out pain?" Cranach asks in defense of the Nazi euthanasia program, while in the next breath claiming, "It was al1 repugnant to me on moral grounds" (372). Gottleb, in the play's only literal use of the verb, orders the Sanitation Workers who are robbing gassed Jews to root out their gold teeth (405). The phrase becornes a group chant used to drive away Stroop's happy prewar memories (391) and, finally, the reality which Gottleb has tried to force upon the 5nnocent1' civil servants (408) . The roots grow deep, however. Despite the efforts made by dictators to quash every seedling of individual dignity and human rights, a l 1 tyrannies do eventually crumble and al1 tyrants with them. It is only a mixed blessing; at the end Tsar, Ivan has turned into a statue and a target for bird droppings, though he died declaring his immortality. Power not perfect when it is subject to erasure by the certain eventuality of time. But the end of one tyranny only seems bring temporary relief to the brotherhood of man; another springs up in Germany - or in Haiti or Cambodia or Uganda. In that sense, Ivan is immortal. B a m e s has rarely ended his plays with goodness plainly triumphant. Sometimes it hints at its existence, only to be crushed: "Send in the reapers!" orders Cardinal Gaetani in Sunsets and Glories, as the fields of wheat grow where Father Morrone died, and then are burned in "a Universe robbed of salvation. u48 In the epilogue to The Rulins Class, Grace' s Song declaring her love for ber Jack is punctuated by her scream as he kills her. The grotesque idiot P h i l i p V ascends to power as the coming of the Age of Reason is heralded in The Bewitched, and [s.d.] The lights fade down to a night sky with stars; the music and sounds dissolve into a cold night wind. Then one by one the stars go out. The wind too finally dies. Silence. Darkness. C~rtain.~' Repeatedly, Barnes sends his audience home with a pessimistic reminder of the hopelessness of hope. That will change in Heaven's Blessinss, the happy note that will end this thesis. ENDNOTES - CHAPTER 5 Full bibliographie information for editions of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays is given in the list of works cited. 1. Ronald Hingley, Russia: A Concise Historv (1972; rev, ed. New York: Thames and Hudson Inc., 1991) 48. 2. Steve Lipman states that "quite a few jokes [by the victims of Nazi Europe] were reworked versions of earlier ones against the Russian czar and other despised regimes," but he fails to offer any documentation or to specify which czar and which despised regimes he is referring to. Laushter in Hell: The Use of Humor durina the Holocaust (New Jersey: Jason Aronson Inc., 1991) 68. 3. Peter Barnes, Laucrhter!, in Barnes Plavs: One (London: Methuen, 1989) 343. Subsequent page references will be given parenthetically within the text- 4 - For example there is no mention of him in Hingley, OD. cit., or in Miliukov, and al1 of two sentences in Lawrence (both cited below) , 5. John Lawrence, A Historv of Russia, 7th rev. ed. (New York: Meridian-Penguin, 1993) 108. 6. See Peter Bames, The Bewitched, Barnes Plays: One (London: Methuen, 1989) 319. 7. "Theat re of the Extreme: An Interview with Peter Barnes." With Mark Bly and Doug Wager. Theater (Spring 1981) 46. 8. Daniel Goldhagen describes a German perception of Jews which seems ironic in light of the powerlessness of the - - Jews under the Nazis: In Germany during the Nazi period, putative Jewish evil permeated the air. It was discuçsed incessantly. It was said to be the source of every il1 that had befallen Germany and of every continuing threat, as real to Germans as that of a powerful enemy a m y poised on Germany's borders for the attack. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willins Executioners: Ordinarv Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Vintage Books, 9. Paul Miliukov, et al,, Historv of Russia, vol 1: From the Becrinninss to the Empire of Peter the Great, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1968) 122. 10. Qtd. in Goldhagen 142. Il. Goldhagen 147, quoting £rom Eberhard Jakel, Hitler's World View: A Blue~rint for Power (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981) 62. 12- Kenneth Muir, introduction, Macbeth (London: Rout ledge-The Arden Shakespeare, 1984) lvii . 13. Goldhagen 164. 1 4 . Hingley 49. 15. An Intemet search turned up the name Sarnael as being connected to Jewish mysticism. By far the most complete information 1 found was from "The Kaballah FAQ [Frequently Asked question^]^ by Colin Low: The angel Samael is also important in Kabbalah. Scholen shows (in "The Origins of the Kabbalahn) that in early medieval Kabbalah, Samael retained some of the characteristics of the Gnostic demiurge Ialdebaoth (the blind god), and derives the name from meaning "blindll. He is attributed consistently to the planet Mars and the sephira Gevurah, and is the source of al1 the nastiness in the world. He appears in various guises as the Dark Angel and the Angel of Death. The suffix -el betrays his divine origin, and Kabbalists have been divided between placing him at the head of a demonic hierarchy (alongside his wife Lilith) , and viewing him as an unpleasant but necessary component of creation. Sanael is identified with the serpent in the Garden of Eden, a tempter and a poisoner of life. http://www.digital-brilliance.com/kab/faq.htm 5 Oct 97. At f irst this description doesnt t j ibe with Barnes's tlovexworked head clerk,I1 but upon learning that sephira means "countingU and Gevurah means "strength," it becomes clearer why Barnes chose this Powerful Counter to be his Death. Thanks to Sam Brezel and Owen Rumelt for help with the Hebrew. 16. In very recent news, Maurice Papon, a former police supervisor under the Vichy regime, is soon to be tried in France for allegedly signing orders which caused 1,690 Jews to be sent to Auschwitz. Michel Slitinsky, a Holocaust survivor and the person who uncovered documents leading to Papon's arrest, said "He 3s not an executioner nor a sadist. But with his pen, he was able to do more than tortures." Papon has claimed that he was just following orders. CNN Interactive, www-cnn.com, 7 Oct 97. 17. Goldhagen 12. After arguing that knowledge of Jewish persecution and slaughter was pervasive among Germans, Goldhagen rejects "bureaucratie myopiau as a rationale for the Holocaust: Since it is clear that tens of thousands of Germans who understood al1 too well what they were doing were willing to kill Jews, there is no need to concoct an (empirically unsustainable) alibi of incomprehension to explain why some others did not understand quite what it was that they were doing or did not realize that they had the responsibility to Say "no." (384-85) This may be an over-generalized conclusion Goldhagen drew from his extensive research, but at least one other account supports his assertion. Michael Verhoeven' s 1990 film Das Schreckliche Madchen (The Nastv Girl), based on a tme story, shows the wall of silence a high school girl hits when she tries to write an essay called "My Home Town During the Third Reich.;l She is frustrated at every turn and eventually ostracized by her neighbours, al1 of whom, she f inds, were aware of, and many complicit in, actions against the Jews . 18. Peter Barnes, introduction, Barnes Plavs: One (London: Methuen, 1989) ix. 19. When discussing Barnes's use of the comic here, 1 place more emphasis on the second part of Laushter! than on the first, partly because as a Westerner living in the second half of the-twentieth century, Auschwitz is more meaningful to me, but also because there is more meat to g n a w on. There are nearly twice as many pages to Auschwitz as there are to Tsar, and it tackles the issue of laughter far more directly. 20. In The Great Dictator, dir. Charlie Chaplin, perf. Chaplin, Paulette Goddart, and Jack Oakie, United Artists, 1940. 21. Steve Lipman, Laushter in H e l l : The Use of Humor Durinq the Holocaust (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc.) 151 - 22, Joshua Sobol, Ghetto, in a version by David Lan (London: David Hern Books, 1989) 20. 23. This I1theory of degradationn and its proponents are summarized by Arthur Koestler in The Act of Creation (New York: Macmillan, 1964) 53. 24. Koestler 54. 25. See the discussion of Red Noses in Chapter 2 of this thesis. 26. Peter Barnes, Red Noses (London: Faber and Faber, 1985) 104. 27. Koestler 51. 28. C a r y 1 Churchill, Mad Forest (London: Nick Hem Books, 1990) 23-24. 29. George Mikes, Humour in Memoriam (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) , 252 (qtd. in Lipman, 27-28) . 30. Salicia Landmarin, "The Origin of Jewish Humor: An Analysis of its Sources and Some ExamplesIM Jewish Journal of Sociolocry, December 1962 (qtd. in Lipman 136) . 31. Ron Jenkins, Subversive Lauqhter: The Liberatinq Power of Comedv (New York: The Free Press-Macmillan, Inc., 32. Lipman x-xi . 33. Introduction to Roy Kift, "Comedy in the Holocaust: The Theresienstadt Cabaret," New Theatre Ouarterly 1996: 299. 34. Kift 307. 35. Kift 305. 36. I1Always r a t h e r humiliat ing f o r the one aga ins t whom it is d i r e c t e d , laughter is r e a l l y and t r u l y a k ind of soc ia l f r agg ing .Ht Henri Bergson, Lauqhter (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956) 148. 38. A r t Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor's Ta le , p a r t II, "And H e r e M y Troubles Beganl1 (New York: Pantheon Books. 1 9 9 1 ) 14 , 16. 39. Red Noses opened a t t h e Barbican i n 1985; i t was written i n 1978. See P e t e r Barnes, l t In t roduct ion," Red Noses, London: Faber and Faber, 1985. 40. The Royal Shakespeare Company had v e r b a l l y committed t o producing Red Noses, Black Death ( l a t e r , Red Noses), bu t backed ou t , pleading poverty, a f t e r keeping t h e s c r i p t fo r t h e b e t t e r p a r t of a year. In 1982, however, the RSC produced Nicholas Nicklebv, an adaptat ion of a Charles Dickens novel which had a cast of 43 and otherwise demanded resources f a r g rea t e r than Red Noses would have- A t t h i s p o i n t B a r n e s questioned t h e RSCfs excuse, See Mark Bly and Doug Wager, T h e a t r e of t h e Extreme: An Intenriew with P e t e r Barnes," Theater (Spring 1981) : 44 . 41 . P e t e r Bames, interview with the au thor , 2 Nov. 1992 . 42. David Robinson, Chaplin: H i s Life and A r t (New York: M c G r a w - H i l l 1985) 506 . 43. Qtd . i n Robinson 507. 44. Lipkin 237-38. 45 . Robert Cushrnan, "Nat s o Fumy, Rev. of Laushter! , by P e t e r B a r n e s , and Dinqo, by Charles Wood. The Observer 29 Jan. 1978: 28. 46 . Bernard Levin, le possession is nine p o i n t s of the Law." R e v . of The Dvbbuk by Schloime Anski, Laushter! by P e t e r B a r n e s , and A Dav Forever by Michael Sharp. The Sundav Times, 5 Feb. 1978: 35, 47. Cushman 28. 4 8 . P e t e r Barnes, Sunsets and lorie es (London: Methuen, 1990) 86. 49- P e t e r Barnes, "The Bewitched," in Barnes Plavs: O n e (London: Methuen, 1989) 3 3 8 . CONCLUSION Things Are Looking Up: Heaven's Blessinss 1 will close my discussion on the theatre and politics of Peter Bames with a few words about Heaven's Blessinss (19891, an (as yet) unproduced and unpublished one-act which Mr. Barnes generously let me read. The play dramatizes the Book of Tobit £rom the Old Testament Apocrypha, a sort of proto- Book of Job with a few notable differences, chiefly that the relation of cause and effect between wowship and reward is quite straightforward. What makes Barnes's version significant to this thesis is that, like the Biblical story from which it is taken, there is a happy ending. An unqualified happy ending, in fact; one could even go so far as to cal1 Heaven's Blessinss a sweet play. For once, sunflowers grow, and they are not hacked dom. In the original, Tobit is a Jew who as a young man was captured and brought to Assyria. Most of the Jews in Assyria have assimilated and some, like Tobit's nephew Ahikar, even hold important positions at court. Under King Semacherib, practicing Jewish rites and customs is an offense, but i n spite of the danger it puts h i m in, Tobit refrains from eating the food of the Gentiles, goes to Jerusalem for feasts, pays tithes to the sons of Levi, and most importantly, he gives dead Jews the proper burial which his religion demands, but Assyrian law forbids- 232 When someone informs the king of Tobit's illegal burials, an order for his execution is made. He flees Nineveh, losing al1 of his property but saving his wife Anna and their son Tobias. Soon the old king is killed, and Tobit returns and is reunited with his family. And then, in what is certainly among the more bizarre events in the Hebrew Bible, one night while sleeping against a wall after secretly burying a Jew, Tobit is blinded by bird droppings. His wife works to support them, but one day Tobit accuses her of stealing a kid goat that was given to her as payment, and he is so anguished at having wrongly reproached her that he prays to die. (As an interesting sidebar, after a two-verse introduction, Tobit tells his own story and sings his own praises for most of the next three chapters up until the point where he asks God for death; after that, even though he does not die, the remainder of the 14-chapter Book is written in the third person.) Parallel to Tobit's story is that of Sarah, the only child of Raguel, a wealthy Jewish shepherd- The demon Asrnodeus is in love with Sarah and for that reason, he has killed off her seven bridegrooms before they had a chance to consummate the marriage. Sarah, like Tobit, prays for death, but because she doesnft want to leave her father alone, she amends her prayer to ask that the villagers stop reproaching her. Immediately: 3:16: The prayer of both was heard in the presence of the glory of the great God. 17: And Raphael was sent to heal the two O£ them: to scale away the white films of Tobit's eyes; to give Sarah the daughter of Raguel in marriage to Tobias the son of Tobit, and to bind Asmodeus the evil demon, because Tobias was entitled to possess her. At that very moment Tobit returned and entered bis house and Sarah the daughter of Raguel came do- from her upper room.' The two families are brought together when Tobias and the angel Raphael (posing a s Azarias, a relative of Tobitf s) stop for the night with Raguel on their way to retrieve money from a friend. As he was sent to do, and with the aid of the vital organs £rom a special fish, Raphael sets everything right. He then tells Tobit and Sarah that he is an ange1 who heard their prayers, brought them to the attention of the Holy One, and was then sent to help them. There is none of the doubt about causality which the Book of Job creates: "Do good," Raphael says, "and evil will not overtake you" (12 : 6) . Barnes keeps the plot of Heaven's Blessinss close to the original story, adding only an Assyrian captain and a drunken rabbi to the cast of characters. And these are among the rnost uniformly sympathetic and human characters Barnes has written. He has always made a point of trying to fil1 even minor roles with rounded characters; in fact he made a particular effort to do this in Eaas and ~ravv, another unproduced play which he wrote not long after finishing Heaven's ~lessinss. T've got this bee in my bonnet about main characters and minor characters," Barnes told me, speaking of Eass and Graw, "and If m very very conscious at the moment that 1 wonf t write a minor character .... So nobody cornes on stage unless the moment they come on stage theytre important .... [Olne of my fixed ideas of the moment, is to try to give everybody their tremendous moment in the suri. '13 The bee has been buzzing in Barnes's bonnet from the outset. Even his most unexceptional characters have a story to tell; the butler in The Rulins Class, for example, con£ ides to the audience: A lot yer don8t know about Daniel Tucker. Just old faithful Tucker. Give doggy boney. Just 'ere for comic relief. Know who I really am? (Beckons confidentially. ) Aiexei Kronstadt, Number 243 . Anarchist-~rotskyist-Communist-~evolutionary.~ At least Tucker has a name and enough stage time for character development. But Bames gives individuality even to his spear carriers- As the First Attendant succumbs to the plaque in Red Noses he cornplains that writers are always killing off little guys like him, writing stories where some characters are important and others just disposable stock - First Attendant, Second Peasant, Third Guard. Storiesfre easier when 'tisnft possible to care for everyone equal. Thatrs how itty-bitty-bit people like me come to be butchered on battlefields, die in droves on a hoo- hooo-ooooh. But we First Attendants are important too. Wetve lives. I've lodged in the chaffinch, lived in the flower, seen the Sun coming up. I've discovered unbelievable things. I ' m an extraordinary person. 1/11 tell you a secret ... 5 which we never get to hear, because at that moment he dies. Respect for the individual is a fundamental political issue for Barnes, as discussed in Chapter 4 . Perhaps it is one of the reasons why he is more appreciated by actors than by critics and producers . 6 It isn't just story-telling which becomes more challenging if the collective "little people" are individuated; it might become more difficult, ethically, for the elite - the Jack Gurneys of this world - to screw them over - In his Introduction to The Real Lons John Silver and Other Plavs Bames wrote: 1 do not write about ordinary men and women. The variety and enormity of the w&ld and its people and their infinite possibilities make belief in the ordinariness of ordinary people a blasphemy. The earth contains multitudes of beings unique in their creative energy for good and evill So many Trojan Helens called Ada, so many Leonardos called Fred- Genius is not the exception but the rule-' Tobit and his family are just the sort of unrecognized, powerless, "ordinaryu people who might have been pulled £rom the faceless crowd. Neither powerful lawmakers nor notable outlaws, they are basic law-abiding people - though Tobit's religious laws sometimes conflict with the Assyrian ones. Barnes even forgoes a prime opportunity to play with the language of an ancient people and instead writes simple dialogue in plain modern English for the characters, including the ange1 Raphael and the devil Asmodeus, to speak. While there are undeniably fairytale elements to the story (Sarah's seven husbands, or the huge fish with the magical guts), 1 think Barnes is trying to keep this play real. An audience can directly identify with these people, free £rom the barriers of class, power, or times long gone. Moreso than most of us, perhaps, Tobit is noteworthy for being particularly charitable and good, but not in mythic proportions or beyond the range of human capability. 236 Still, the Tobit of Heaven's Blessinqs lacks even the few small faults possessed by the original; Bames omits the biblical Tobit's temporary mistrust of Anna and Raphael- Indeed, it is difficult to find bad in any of the characters, including the demon Asmodeus, who explains to Sarah and Tobias on their wedding n igh t that despite his mother's advice to stay away from those evil creatures known as human beings, and despite her contention that demons do not love, he has fallen in love with Sarah, He didn't kill Sarah's seven former husbands maliciously; he %ent them to darkness and silence. Demons cal1 that bliss . And, just before he leaves her, Asmodeus touchingly tells Sarah, "1 was dazzled by your soul- light, hoping we could gaze together into the eyes of the Lord, shining like t h e first sunn (51) . It is not, as in t h e Book of Tobit, the burnt fish liver that sends Asrnodeus away. He leaves on bis own, pointedly frying the liver hirnself on his way back i n t o the mirror from which he emerged. Therein lies the significant divergence Barnes takes from his source material: there is no consistent cause and effect in HeavenJs Blessinss. Things work out nicely, but they do s o in the context of chaos, and not according to some divine scheme or cosmic plan. God is still an important figure - for example, Raphael reminds Tobit that "Of course, you wouldn't've needed healing if He hadri't injured you in the first place, But that's His wayu (62) . In 237 soliloquy, the angel reveals a greater understanding of God's ways : 1 heard the Lord Say, "Let things be done decently and in order-" But there's no decency here, no order here, only disorder the final enerny ... Yet, yet, yet, since al1 things come £rom Him there must be good, even in that disorder, for it contains the possibility of change. I had become petrified in rny certainties, now plunged in doubt and disorder, I'm given the chance to change and grow. Thatrs the reason for God' s unreasonableness , ( 5 7 ) Raphael is indeed changed by his experience on earth. He cornes away considerably less pristine than when he arrived - he cornplains several times that the earth is filthy, and that he's grow. filthier by the minute - but with the grime and soot has come the ability to laugh. Barnes is briefly revisiting the question of laughter's value that he explored in Red Noses and in Lauqhter!, and this time, he at leaçt entertains the possibility that the palliative quality of laughter is essentially good. Raphael first tells Anna that "Humourts of the devil's party. 1 donrt need it." "We do," she replies. "Itts a precious b a h for the suffering worldlm "Suffering ennoble~,'~ he declares, and Anna counters, "It embittersn (23). On the other hand, before the wedding ceremony, Sarah and Tobit urge them al1 to rejoice in the Lord and put on a merry face though T o b i a s may be doomed. Raguel says, "When my sheep are troubled and they baa-baa-baa, panpipes, flutes and songs send them skipping." "So they go more easily to slaughter," answers the cynical Anna (40) - By 238 the end, however, Raphael does corne to appreciate, and perhaps need, humour - In the stage directions at his entrance, Barnes specifies that Asmodeus resembles Raphael, and a likely directorial choice would be to have the two roles played by the same actor. Neither ange1 nor demon finds much redeeming value in man at first. Aside £rom the filth, Raphael finds people to be filled with needless questions and petty concerns, and he doesntt understand the subtleties of human speech, confusing story-telling with lying (which lrusurps God's prerogative and recreates the world in [the liar' s] own image" [23] ) . To Asmodeus, men are "malignant bundles of rage, hate and murderH whom even dernons find frightening (50). But both underestimate the ability human beings have to rise t u the occasion, and both leave their visit to earth with a revised opinion of mankind. People were not what they had expected them to be. They donft arrive at the same conclusion; Raphaelfs opinion of people improves, but Asmodeus leaves feeling disappointed at Sarah's choice of an unadventurous life on earth. Pug, the demon in Ben Jonson's The Devil is an Ass who begs to be sent to London to show just what trouble he is capable of stirring up, also changes his opinion of people. He leaves in humiliation, having found himself to be no match for the wicked, vice-ridden bunch he finds there. "A scar upon our name!" Satan upbraids him. "Whorn hast thou dealt with / Woman or man, this day, but have out-gone thee / Some way, and most have provfd the better fiends?" (V.iv.60-62) .' The fault is not entirely Pugfs, though: as Satan reminds him, the year is 1616, and the vices men breed themselves threaten to make those devised in hell redundant (Li). Asmodeus has the same complaint : My day is passing, Sarah. Soon 1 wonrt be needed, men carry their own private demons with them. Nature eliminates the superfluous and we'll fade. Ifm already fading, Sarah. (50) B a r n e s has made known his disappointment at the lack of attention given to Jonson on the English stage, sometimes sounding (understandably) bitter at the great imbalance in production and study which privileges Shakespeare over the half-dozen or so other playwrights who contributed so much to the wealth of early modern English theatre." Doing his part to remedy this neglect, Barnes has edited, adapted and/or directed several productions of Jacobean plays, among them Jonson' s The Alchernist, Volpone, Bartholomew Fair, The Silent Woman, The Macmetic Lady and, in 1972 at Nottingham and 1976 at Edinburgh, The Devil is an Ass .ll Yet, until Heaven's Blessinas, 1 have not found Barnes's work to be much akin to Jonson's. The notable exception is Seianus, a h i s to ry play filled with power, intrigue, lust, and the intriguing lust for power - like The Bewitched, for instance. Even in Seianus, authority is not one of Jonson's chief concerns, nor are class issues; for h i m , it isn' t a matter of who can command whom, but of who can outwit whom - and who remains when everyone else is done betraying Lovewit returns to the 240 one another. In The Alchemist, when house his servant Face has been using as a base of operations for his con games, Face's sharp mind saves him from being punished, but it hasn't served to advance his position in society, and it hasn't improved the status of his class. Mosca earns a whipping and life imprisonment for his part in cheating the greedy fools of Venice, but Volpone, who [b]y blood and rank a gentleman, canst not fa11 / Under like censuren (V.vii.117-181, will spend the rest of his life in crippling leg irons and chains, an even more severe punishment. His class standing bas not won him any privileges. In one play the wicked are punished; in another, they get away with it - and neither outcome should be taken as an object lesson. There most certainly, there is It is that sense of his mentor Jonson. When is no rhyme or reason in Jonson, and no Grand Scheme O£ Things. the chaotic that Barnes takes from asked whether he would characterize the Jacobean world as "one without a moral center or at least a 'center that does not hold,'" Barnes answered Yes, they were adrift in a world without a purpose, which is what my plays are about. What 1 try t o do with m y plays is to show a world seemingly without purpose; but in order to stay sane and sunrive you have to conduct your life in a w a y knowing that the universe is purposeless, but your own life has a purpose, 1 suppose that is the definition of courage and a good life.12 In Heaven's Blessinss w e have it on God's authority that the world has no purpose, faith is useless, and the only reason for life is that it be lived. Man is at the centre of 241 the universe, and God really doesnft trouble himself overmuch with his affairs. In fact, it is the other way around: "Heaven above is conditioned by you below. So if youfre charitable, Heaven too is charitable, if you' re j oyf ul , Heaven rejoices, if you sing, Heaven is full of songw (68) . Even God - the Supreme Being, the ultimate power wielder - rejects the role of authoritarian. Where is the struggle for power in Heaven's Blessinss? Why arenrt the innocent being trampled? Where is the darkness? These elements, typical in most of Barnes, are nowhere to be seen in Tobit's story. 1s this a sign of a new Peter Barnes, one filled with cheery optimism? Probably not. After all, Sunsets and Glories, which closes with black-clad reapers cutting d o m the golden wheat which has sprung up around Father Morrone, was produced a year or so after Heaven's Blessinss was written. But just this once, Barnes sends us out of the theatre with bright light and an uplifting Song until "LIGHTS FADE D O W as Heaven and Earth sing together for a momentn (68). One final note. Peter Barnes has spent seven hours of most days for over 30 years reading and writing in the British Library Reading Room, a ritual which he kids himself about in The Three Visions: YOUNG MAN. So 1 s t i l l chain myself to the oars at the British Museum Reading Room? BARNES. .., Yes, Irm still there or some other public venue, doing my tirne. Grey days without it. See, these are the calloused hands of poetry." Barnes even schedules his vacations to coincide with the week that the Reading Room closes for inventory-taking and cleaning. Not knowing that, 1 very nearly missed being able to meet with him - and be given the typescripts of Heaven's Blessinss and C l a ~ Hands Here Cornes Charlie - because that week happened to occur during my trip to London. In October O£ 1997 the Reading Room closed its doors for good, ending a long tradition for Peter Barnes just at the tirne that my years with his work have come to a close (at least for now) . The books which were at the British Museum branch are moving to a new reading room at St. Pancras, and 1 don't know if Barnes will go with them. The Reading Room's closing marks the end of 140 years of use by many of the worldfs most influential thinkers; now there is an opportunity for a new tradition to begin. Perhaps it will portend a renewed interest in the spectacular, inventive, grandiose and uniquely theatrical gems which Peter Barnes has given us. ENDNOTES: CONCLUSION Full bibliographie information for editions of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays is given in the list of works cited. 1. Electronic version of the Holy Bible, Revised Standard vers University of 19951, http:/ - ion (including Apocrypha) , Virginia Library Electron /etext.lib-virginia.edu. prepared for the .c Text Center (Oct . 2. Bernard Dukore gives a full account of the plot of Esss and G r a w in his book Barnestom: The Plavs of Peter Bames (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1995) 74-83. 3 . Peter Barnes, persona1 interview, 2 Nov. 1992. 4 - Peter Barnes, The Rulins Class, B a r n e s Plavs: One (London: Methuen, 1981) 31. 5. Peter Bames, Red Noses (London: Faber and Faber, 1985) 20. 6. Many of the brightest star actors in Britain's theatrical firmament have performed in Barnesrs original stage, television, or radio plays, including Peggy Ashcroft, Eileen Atkins, Claire Bloom, Simon Callow, Sean Connery, Tom Conti, Judi Dench, Paul Eddington, Peter Eyre, John Gielgud, Derek Godfrey, Aiec Guinness, Nigel Hawthorne, Wendy Hilier, Trevor Howard, John Hurt, Jeremy Irons, Freddie Jones, Ian McKeilen, Peter OrToole, Bob Peck, Sian Phillips, Donald Pieasence, Joan Plowright, Stephen Rea, Alan Rickman, Paul Scofield, Antony Sher, Jeremy Sinden, Peter Ustinov, Harriet Walter, Timothy West, and Irene Worth. 7. Peter Barnes, introduction, The Real Loncr John Silver and Other Plavs (London: Faber and Faber, 1986) ix. 8. Peter Barnes, Heavenrs Blessinss, ts., 50. Subsequent references to this play will appear parenthetically within the text. In quoting £ r o m this typescript, 1 have corrected typing errors which occur in the original. 9. The edition used is Ben Jonson, The Devil is an Ass, Gamini Salgado, ed. Four Jacobean Citv Comedies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975) . IO. See Chapter 1, n.5. 11. The others of which I am aware are A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, A Mad World, Mv Masters, and A Trick to Catch the Old One by Thomas Middleton; The Soldierrs Fortune and The Atheist by Thomas Otway; and by John Marston, The Dutch Courtesan and, combined into one play titled Antonio, Antonio & Mellida and Antonio's Revense. He also adapted Eastward Ho! to such an extent that he added his name to the three original collaborators, Jonson, Marston, and George Chapman. 12. Mark Bly and Doug Wager, "Theatre of the Extreme: An Interview with Peter Barnes, If Theater (Spring 1981) : 43 - 13. Peter Barnes, The Three Visions, The Real L o n s John Silver and O t h e r Plavs 108. WONS CITED Plavs Barnes, Peter. Barnes' People II: Seven Duolocrues. London: Heinemann Education Books, 1984. Barnes Plays: One, London: Methuen, 1989. The Bewitched, Barnes Plavs: One. C l a ~ Hands Here Cornes Charlie. Unpublished play, 1990. Heavenfs Blessinss. Unpublished play, 1989. Laucrhter ! Barnes Plavs : One. Leonardots Last Su~per. Barnes Plays: One. Noondav Demons . Barnes Plavs : One. The Real Lonq John Silver and Other Plavs (Barnes's People III). London: Faber and Faber, 1986. Red Noses. London: Faber and Faber, 1985. Revolutionarv Witness & Nobodv Here but Us Chickens. London: Methuen, 1989. The Rulins Class. Barnes Plays: One. The S ~ i r i t of Man and More Barnesr People. London: Methuen, 1990. Sunsets and Glories. London: Methuen, 1990. The Time of t h e Barracudas. Unpublished play, 1963. The T h r e e Visions. Barnes's People III. Beckett, Samuel. K~~PP's Last Tape and Embers. London: Faber and Faber, 1958. ---. Waitincr for G o d o t . New York: Grove Press, 1954. Churchill, Caryl. Mad Forest. London: Nick Hem Books, 1990. Congreve, William. The Wav of the World. Wilson, John Harold, ed. Six ~estoration ~lavs. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959. Eveman and Medieval Miracle Plavs, ed. A S . Cawley. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1959. Fraser, Russell A. and Norman Rabkin, eds. Drama of the Enalish Renaissance. 2 vols. New York: MacMillan, 1976. Hare, David. Racincr Demon. London: Faber and Faber, 1990. Jonson, Ben. The Devil is an Ass. Ed. Garnini Salgado. Four Jacobean Citv Comedies. Hannondsworth: Penguin, 1975. --- Eveman In His Humour (England version). Ed. Martin Seymour-Smith. London: A & C Black, 1966. - - - . Seianus, his fall. Ed. P h i l i p J. Ayres. Revels ed. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1990. Marston, John. The Malcontent. Ed. Bernard Harris. London: W. W. Norton-New Mermaid, 1967. Marlowe, Christopher. The Jew of Malta. Fraser and Rabkin 1. ---. Tamburlaine the Great, Part 1. Fraser and Rabkin 1. Massinger, Philip. Believe As You List. The Plavs and Poems of Phili~ Massincrer. Ed. Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson. Vol. 3. Oxford UP, 1976. Middleton, Thomas. Hensist, Kins of Kent; or The Mavor of Oueenboroush. Ed. R.C. Bald. N e w York and London: Charles Scribnerrs Sons, 1938. ---. The Mavor of Oueenboroush. The Works of Thomas Middleton. Ed. A.H. Bullen. Vol. 2. New York: AMS Press, 1964. Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Ed. Agnes Latham. London: Routledge-Arden, 1967. The Comedv of Errors. Ed. R.A. Foakes. London: Routledge-Arden, 1962. Coriolanus. Ed. H a r r y Levin. William Shakespeare: The Com~lete Works. New York: Viking-Penguin, 1969. Kina Henrv IV, Part 1. Ed. A.R. Humphreys. 6th ed. London: Methuen-Arden, 1960. Kina Henrv IV, Part 2. Ed. A.R. Kumphreys. 6th ed. London: Methuen-Arden, 1966. Kins Henrv V. Ed. J.H. Walter. London: Routledge- Arden, 1954. Kins Henrv VI, Part 1. Ed. Andrew S . Cairncross. London: Methuen-Arden, 1962. Kins Henw VI r Part 2 . Ed. Andrew S. Cairncross . Rev. ed, London: Methuen-Arden, 1962. Kins Henrv VI, Part 3 . Ed. Andrew S. Cairncross. London: Methuen-Arden, 1964. Kins Lear . Ed. Kenneth Muir . London: Methuen-Arden, 1972. Kins Richard II, Ed. Peter Ure. 5th ed- London: Methuen-Arden, 1961. Kins Richard III. Ed. Antony Hammond. London: Routledge-Arden, 1981. Macbeth, Ed. Kenneth Muir. London: Routledge-Arden, 1984. The Tempest. Ed. Frank Kermode. 6th ed. London: Routledge-Arden, 1958 Titus Andronicus. Ed, Virgil K. Whitaker- William Shakespeare: The Com~lete Works. New York: Viking- Penguin, 1969. Shakespeare, William and John Fletcher. The Two Noble Kinsmen. Ed. N.W. Bawcutt. Hammondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1977. Sobol, Joshua, Ghetto, in a version by David Lan. London: David Hern Books, 1989. Webster, John. The Duchess of Malfi. Rabkin and Fraser 11. Historv, Theorv, Criticism, and Literature Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and its Double. Trans. Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1958. Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale. Boston: Houghton Miff lin, 1986. Bacon, Francis. Essays. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1906. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 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