Initially, the primary appeal (to its original 17th century audience as well as to our own) of John Ford's Tis Pity She's a Whore is the shock value of it. Once this appeal is satisfied, however, the play does still have more to offer.
At the start of the play, Giovanni, our protagonist, confesses his intense love for his own sister to the Friar, his tutor and mentor. What is striking about Giovanni's character at first is his sensitivity. We feel certain of the genuine nature of his feelings, the earnestness of his appeals to the Friar. Giovanni believes in the truth of his own arguments, which are based on a principle not unlike the primary one of the Metaphysical poets: the idea that earthly love is the closest we can come to knowing heavenly love, and therefore the closest we can come to knowing God. Giovanni is not a deliberate blasphemer. His love for his sister, so his argument goes, adds the familial love of brother and sister to the romantic love of intense passion, thus taking the degree of feeling to an unprecendented height. The Friar can only respond that incest is wrong because God abhors it and by saying that Giovanni will surely be damned for his sins. It's the equivalent of a parent telling a child because I said so as sole answer to the question why. Such reasoning often stops the child: an authority figure is an authority figure, after all, and the threat of punishment remains a powerful sway. Not for Giovanni, though, whose passion represents the kind of intense depth of feeling that Renaissance dramatists sought to instill in their characters.
At the same time that we develop a sympathy for Giovanni, we have to question the legitimacy of his enterprise, knowing as we do that ill fates are certain to befall both him and and his sister, whose feelings are equal to (or almost equal to?) Giovanni's own. By drawing us toward an incestuous pair of lovers, whose power to evoke sympathy is rivalled only by their power to evoke horror and disgust, Ford brilliantly leads us in to an examination of the incest taboo, one of the most universally shared taboos in all of human history (and in prehistory, no doubt). Without going into the discussion here, let us say that it is impossible to read (or, I imagine, to witness) this play without going over the arguments in your own head. What Ford gives us is the awful -- the truly grisly -- fate of his characters as admonition against breaking the taboo. This is what happens to you, he seems to be saying, if you engage in this sort of behavior. So the shock value of the play eventually gives way to a very conventional take on morality. That's certainly the only way to get it past the censors, but I also doubt that Ford ever had any intentions of truly questioning the universal moral sensitivities of civilized cultures. With Renaissance dramatists, I generally assume that their primary motivation in writing a particular play is to bring as many bodies into the theatre as they possibly can. They do that by offering lyrical insights into characters whose depths of feeling transcend everyday experience, transcend mere morality.
Though 'Tis Pity offers few speeches of great grace or depth, Giovanni does present to us a compelling and dynamic character. By the end of the play, we have born witness to a sense of moral ruination so complete that we can only agree with Brian Morris (editor of the New Mermaids edition of the text) that Giovanni has become a full-bore psychopath as a result of the alienation engendered by his actions. Passion gives way to insanity, and we lose our sympathy for Giovanni. Thus Giovanni comes closer, in the end, to Tamburlane or Macbeth than he does to Romeo. Perhaps this is the cost of his particular crime: for Annabella, the cost is her life, for Giovanni, his sanity and his moral bearing. 'Tis Pity does not attain the sophistication of Shakespearean language, but it does boast a complexity of character and theme. The action of the play is straightforward and brisk. It's hard to believe that Ford could get away with this sort of thing in the 17th century, so near to the inaugural of the Puritan interregnum, but maybe this play is exactly why the Puritans shut the theatres down. In any case, the moral message ends up being a pat one, after all. This is not the kind of behavior you should be engaging in if you want to lead a fruitful or a happy life.
Monday, March 26, 2012
Shakespeare's Coriolanus
In ways, Coriolanus is an underrated tragedy. It's easy to see, however, why it's not so famous as some of the others in the Shakespearean canon.
What Coriolanus lacks, as critics have noted, is the interiority of Shakespeare's most famous works. In the later years of his career, Shakespeare made at least a partial movement away from the innovations that he pioneered in his earlier plays, which culminated in the intense interiority of Hamlet. Late plays such as The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline shy away from a developed sense of interiority, but others such as The Tempest at least partly embrace it in a way more in keeping with the old (new) fashion. After reading Coriolanus, what really strikes me about Shakespeare is that he must have been interested in exploring different ways of revolutioning our understanding of depth of character; he offers us unprecedented insights into the internal lives of his characters not only through soliloquies and other revealing speech acts but through other experimental methods as well. He looked at character from every angle, and indeed some plays, including both Hamlet and Coriolanus, can almost seem like exercises in methods of character development. In Coriolanus, Shakespeare develops his hero's character by examination of act and externally-directed gesture. Coriolanus gives us another way of demonstrating character, the opposite of the method Hamlet uses. Coriolanus' character is developed precisely by his not speaking.
For this to work, Shakespeare has to make it clear that he is giving us another kind of character completely. The title character simply does not possess an internal life that is not represented clearly and accurately by his words and deeds. Coriolanus' most defining trait, outside of his absolute superiority as soldier and general, is his absolute forthrightness in word and attitude. He may be capable of irony -- particularly sarcasm, directed to the plebeians and their tribunes -- but he is incapable of dishonesty, of dissembling. What good would a soliloquy do for such a man? Nothing he could say in private to himself would tell us any more about him than what he says in public does. There's nothing he feels that he doesn't say before all. If Coriolanus were a novel, it would have to be in a very detached third person.
Coriolanus stands out among Shakespeare's Romans -- he's no Brutus, with his deep internal agonies, and not a Mark Antony, either, with his many brooding contradictions or slippery sense of character. It's not until the very end that Coriolanus ever feels a conflicted sense of duty. Before that, when exiled from Rome by the tribunes and their followers, he simply joins the side of Rome's enemies. It's less a matter of revenge and more a sensible career move: he's a soldier, and he needs to find work. Today, we think little of the ousted C.E.O. who moves on to head another company, or of the professional athlete who moves from one city's team to another's. Coriolanus doesn't agonize over the decision or the act. He just does what it is in his nature to do. If he can't fight for the Romans, he will simply have to fight for their enemies.
Coriolanus also stands out among Shakespeare's warriors -- he's no Macbeth or Othello, either, with their respective internal agonies. Unlike Macbeth, Coriolanus is incorruptible; his strict and militaristic sense of duty prevails without question. Unlike Othello, Coriolanus does not allow himself emotional luxuries like love. The one emotion he feels is anger, but even then his anger seems a very distant second to his stoical observeance of his sense of duty. When he does allow something else to enter in -- his feelings of pity for his mother, who to this point proves as warlike in her attitude as her son is in his deed -- it enters in swiftly, like a dagger. What affects Coriolanus is at least in part the fact that his mother bowing before him (instead of his bowing to her) violates his sense of order, his sense of right as it is supposed to be practiced. "The gods look down, at this unnatural scene / They laugh at." Before his mother kneels to Coriolanus, not even the thought of his wife and child's destruction can move him. To see his warlike mother cowed, however, unmans the warrior.
Coriolanus does possess a fascinating sense of character, one that we associate archetypally with the soldier. Coriolanus is the most ancient of Shakespeare's Romans, but his portrait also seems eerily like that of the soldier of today.
What Coriolanus lacks, as critics have noted, is the interiority of Shakespeare's most famous works. In the later years of his career, Shakespeare made at least a partial movement away from the innovations that he pioneered in his earlier plays, which culminated in the intense interiority of Hamlet. Late plays such as The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline shy away from a developed sense of interiority, but others such as The Tempest at least partly embrace it in a way more in keeping with the old (new) fashion. After reading Coriolanus, what really strikes me about Shakespeare is that he must have been interested in exploring different ways of revolutioning our understanding of depth of character; he offers us unprecedented insights into the internal lives of his characters not only through soliloquies and other revealing speech acts but through other experimental methods as well. He looked at character from every angle, and indeed some plays, including both Hamlet and Coriolanus, can almost seem like exercises in methods of character development. In Coriolanus, Shakespeare develops his hero's character by examination of act and externally-directed gesture. Coriolanus gives us another way of demonstrating character, the opposite of the method Hamlet uses. Coriolanus' character is developed precisely by his not speaking.
For this to work, Shakespeare has to make it clear that he is giving us another kind of character completely. The title character simply does not possess an internal life that is not represented clearly and accurately by his words and deeds. Coriolanus' most defining trait, outside of his absolute superiority as soldier and general, is his absolute forthrightness in word and attitude. He may be capable of irony -- particularly sarcasm, directed to the plebeians and their tribunes -- but he is incapable of dishonesty, of dissembling. What good would a soliloquy do for such a man? Nothing he could say in private to himself would tell us any more about him than what he says in public does. There's nothing he feels that he doesn't say before all. If Coriolanus were a novel, it would have to be in a very detached third person.
Coriolanus stands out among Shakespeare's Romans -- he's no Brutus, with his deep internal agonies, and not a Mark Antony, either, with his many brooding contradictions or slippery sense of character. It's not until the very end that Coriolanus ever feels a conflicted sense of duty. Before that, when exiled from Rome by the tribunes and their followers, he simply joins the side of Rome's enemies. It's less a matter of revenge and more a sensible career move: he's a soldier, and he needs to find work. Today, we think little of the ousted C.E.O. who moves on to head another company, or of the professional athlete who moves from one city's team to another's. Coriolanus doesn't agonize over the decision or the act. He just does what it is in his nature to do. If he can't fight for the Romans, he will simply have to fight for their enemies.
Coriolanus also stands out among Shakespeare's warriors -- he's no Macbeth or Othello, either, with their respective internal agonies. Unlike Macbeth, Coriolanus is incorruptible; his strict and militaristic sense of duty prevails without question. Unlike Othello, Coriolanus does not allow himself emotional luxuries like love. The one emotion he feels is anger, but even then his anger seems a very distant second to his stoical observeance of his sense of duty. When he does allow something else to enter in -- his feelings of pity for his mother, who to this point proves as warlike in her attitude as her son is in his deed -- it enters in swiftly, like a dagger. What affects Coriolanus is at least in part the fact that his mother bowing before him (instead of his bowing to her) violates his sense of order, his sense of right as it is supposed to be practiced. "The gods look down, at this unnatural scene / They laugh at." Before his mother kneels to Coriolanus, not even the thought of his wife and child's destruction can move him. To see his warlike mother cowed, however, unmans the warrior.
Coriolanus does possess a fascinating sense of character, one that we associate archetypally with the soldier. Coriolanus is the most ancient of Shakespeare's Romans, but his portrait also seems eerily like that of the soldier of today.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
The Odyssey Reconsidered
Questions abound regarding the authorship of this most famous of clasical texts. What strikes me most immediately, having just read The Odyssey for the first time in nearly twenty years, is the deliberate artfulness at work in the narrative framework of the story, which seems instinctively to me to be the handiwork of a single visionary poet. "Homer," I would guess, is not just a concept, but a real person who once lived and breathed as you and I do. Whether his name was really Homer and whether he was really blind -- those issues may be uncertain, but they are also more or less irrelevant. What we have here is a fine display of the poetic craft, and poetry is written by a poet.
My own relatively uneducated guess (I haven't read up on this topic) would be that Odysseus' recounting of his travels in Books 9 to 12 -- the most famous stuff, about the Cyclopes and the Sirens and dreadful Scylla and Charybdis -- is lifted pretty straight from the oral tradition. Much of the narrative is clipped and lacking in the rich descriptive detail that characterizes the rest of the poem. It's especially interesting to note that the episode with the Sirens is given a few brief and relatively straightforward stanzas. The destruction of three-fourths of Odysseus' men at the hands of the Laestrygonians occurs in the blink of a poetic eye.
Perhaps, then, the project that Homer engaged himself in was that of constructing an elaborate framework to embellish the meaning of the pre-existing text, which was perhaps an oral and never, to this point, a written text. Another possibility is that someone else added the material in books 9 to 12 after Homer had written the rest, with the goal of making sure that the popular elements of the story left out by the poet made their way into the text. We can never know, but it is certainly true that the style is flattened out greatly in this section of the poem, and there is little of the distinguishing genius of the rest of the story at work here, a lesser expenditure of poetic energy. What is present, however, is archetypal story material with a tremendously enduring appeal. Maybe the events recounted have enough to them to speak for themselves.
Other epics begin in medias res, but The Odyssey takes things a step beyond that by giving us the Telemachiad and then, after Odysseus' return, the lengthy matter of our hero reclaiming his wife and his home. The most powerful literary element of this epic, though, is the constant presence of Agamemnon -- in flashback, or as a ghost -- to remind us of what is at stake for Odysseus. Agamemnon is a richly developed foil for Odysseus, and among the highlights of The Odyssey are Odysseus' encounter with Agamemnon in Hades and the conversation between Agamemnon and the ghosts of the dead suitors in Hades. Agamemnon's tragedy highlights the poignancy of Odysseus' comedy and gives it a greater sense of dimension.
The soldier coming home, we are well aware now, faces challenges of all kinds in readjusting to life at home. Things have changed while the warrior was away. What is moving to me about the story of wily Odysseus is the nature of his quest. Other options -- including immortality -- present themselves to him, but all he wants is to return home, to his family, to his people -- to his birthright, his identity. There's a timeless appeal to this notion, which is at the heart of all adventures.
My own relatively uneducated guess (I haven't read up on this topic) would be that Odysseus' recounting of his travels in Books 9 to 12 -- the most famous stuff, about the Cyclopes and the Sirens and dreadful Scylla and Charybdis -- is lifted pretty straight from the oral tradition. Much of the narrative is clipped and lacking in the rich descriptive detail that characterizes the rest of the poem. It's especially interesting to note that the episode with the Sirens is given a few brief and relatively straightforward stanzas. The destruction of three-fourths of Odysseus' men at the hands of the Laestrygonians occurs in the blink of a poetic eye.
Perhaps, then, the project that Homer engaged himself in was that of constructing an elaborate framework to embellish the meaning of the pre-existing text, which was perhaps an oral and never, to this point, a written text. Another possibility is that someone else added the material in books 9 to 12 after Homer had written the rest, with the goal of making sure that the popular elements of the story left out by the poet made their way into the text. We can never know, but it is certainly true that the style is flattened out greatly in this section of the poem, and there is little of the distinguishing genius of the rest of the story at work here, a lesser expenditure of poetic energy. What is present, however, is archetypal story material with a tremendously enduring appeal. Maybe the events recounted have enough to them to speak for themselves.
Other epics begin in medias res, but The Odyssey takes things a step beyond that by giving us the Telemachiad and then, after Odysseus' return, the lengthy matter of our hero reclaiming his wife and his home. The most powerful literary element of this epic, though, is the constant presence of Agamemnon -- in flashback, or as a ghost -- to remind us of what is at stake for Odysseus. Agamemnon is a richly developed foil for Odysseus, and among the highlights of The Odyssey are Odysseus' encounter with Agamemnon in Hades and the conversation between Agamemnon and the ghosts of the dead suitors in Hades. Agamemnon's tragedy highlights the poignancy of Odysseus' comedy and gives it a greater sense of dimension.
The soldier coming home, we are well aware now, faces challenges of all kinds in readjusting to life at home. Things have changed while the warrior was away. What is moving to me about the story of wily Odysseus is the nature of his quest. Other options -- including immortality -- present themselves to him, but all he wants is to return home, to his family, to his people -- to his birthright, his identity. There's a timeless appeal to this notion, which is at the heart of all adventures.
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