A Structural Approach to the Analysis of Drama [Reprint 2015 ed.] 9783110824728, 9789027918413

Citation preview

DE PROPRIETATIBUS L I T T E R A R U M edenda curat C. H. VAN SCHOONEVELD Indiana University Series Maior, 15

A STRUCTURAL APPROACH TO THE ANALYSIS OF DRAMA

by

PAUL M. LEVITT

1971

MOUTON THE HAGUE . PARIS

© Copyright 1971 in The Netherlands. Mouton & Co. Ν.V., Publishers, The Hague. No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 79-159466

Printed in The Netherlands by Mouton & Co., Printers, The Hague.

For my Mother and Father

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you Doug, Margaret, Sandra. As well, the author gratefully acknowledges the financial support provided by the Council on Research and Creative Work of the University of Colorado toward the costs of publication.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Structure in the Dramatic Text Point-of-Attack Stage Directions and Stage Properties Continuation and Closure Rhythm The Whole Analysis: Riders to the Sea

9 24 35 53 67 84

1 STRUCTURE IN THE DRAMATIC TEXT

I In life things happen aimlessly, carelessly, even stupidly. Not so in art, where the unseen hand of the artist, an idea Henry James was fond of, directs the organization and course of the work. To discover the organization of a literary work, that is, the relatedness of all the parts included in the whole as they are, is the proper subject of structural criticism. It little matters whether or not writers consciously attempt to hide the principles of organization by which they are guided. Such principles are necessarily implicit in the choices they make. Reluctance to separate things can be a weakness. To concentrate on the wholeness of the whole, eschewing analysis, maintaining with Wordsworth that "We murder to dissect", makes it impossible to discuss the structure of a particular work of art. If the idea of structure as a concern of literary criticism is to be anything more than a vague architectonic metaphor, we must determine first what structure means and second how it may be apprehended and analyzed in a play. I propose that structure has to do with the way something is organized, in this case, a play. Any inquiry into the organization of a play requires at the outset a decision as to what "parts" constitute that organization. Simply, what are the constituent parts in the dramatic structure? For reasons given later in the chapter, I maintain that the scene, as understood in French classical drama (that is, the entrance or exit of any player constitutes a new scene), is the basic unit of play construction. I define dramatic structure as the place, relation, and function of scenes in episodes and in the whole play. To avoid the confusion which often results from treating the terms structure and form synonymously or interchangeably, I am restricting the term form to mean the ultimate organization, the appearance of the whole, the overall pattern which results from the conjunction of the parts of a play.

10

STRUCTURE IN THE DRAMATIC TEXT

Dramatic structure, then, has to do with the scenes of a play and how those scenes are organized and related. All structure is based upon and constituted by relations. For there to be a construction at all, it must be in terms of some kind, or kinds, of relation. A play in its entirety is itself a whole structure; it has an ultimate form which is greater than the individual forms of its parts. But also, the play has structure; it has elements or parts which are organized together according to some principle of association or order. The process of relations by which the parts are organized into their final form is the structure of the play. Having proposed very generally a definition of structure, I want to look at some other ideas on the subject, indicating why I think they are inadequate. Afterwards, I would like to return to my own conception of structure, and develop it further. The more familiar approaches to structure are inadequate because they classify archetypes and ideal forms rather than analyze particular works. Definition of structure by type (comedy, tragedy, melodrama, and so on) seems to me to be useless because such definition all too easily assumes that the type is the paradigm for all like examples containing similar elements. I would think that before we can construct a paradigm or before we can classify meaningfully, we must first determine what kinds of analysis lead to the most valuable classifications or descriptions. Analysis therefore precedes description. Paradigmatic classifications, although useful for generic criticism are considerably less useful in understanding a particular play, or the character of dramatic structure. Classification is not analysis. Furthermore, I submit that any account of the structure of a play ought to give critical explanations concerning the place, relation, and function of scenes in the play, and not just classificatory descriptions. If we take, for example, the respective essays of Richard Sewall and Northrop Frye on the "form" of tragedy and the "structure" of comedy, I think we will find that both men fail to make the necessary distinction between analysis and classification. (Analysis has to do with structure and classification with form.) Sewall rightly maintains that the hero's pilgrimage from ignorance to perception is tragedy's form. The linear action representing this progression does have form-quality. But formquality is not structure. Toward the end of his essay, Sewall confuses the two. "[The tragic hero] proceeds, suffers, and in his suffering 'learns'. This is the phase of 'perception'..." 1 "But the perception which com1

Richard B. Sewall, "The Tragic Form", Essays in Criticism, IV (October, 1954), 356.

STRUCTURE IN THE DRAMATIC TEXT

11

pletes the tragic form is not dramatized solely through the hero's change, although his pilgrimage provides the traditional tragic structure". 2 Contrary to Sewall's view, the tragic hero's pilgrimage actually provides a metaphor for the traditional tragic form. His pilgrimage is linear, characterized by a left to right movement, so to speak, which is a metaphorical statement about the form·, the tragic hero begins in ignorance, passes through a period of awakening, and ends in awareness. For Sewall, or for anyone else, to talk about the "structure" of tragedy (or comedy, or melodrama, etc.) is useless because to define structure by genres or subject matter assumes that a predetermined structure inheres in each. A traditional pattern or form, perhaps, is suggested by a genre's subject matter (for example, the moral and spiritual linear passage of the hero in tragedy, which Sewall speaks of), but knowledge of a tragedy's or comedy's structure prior to a reading of the dramatic text is prescience. Similarly, what Northrop Frye means by structure is virtually genre: an arrangement of plot and subject matter. Dramatic comedy . . . has been remarkably tenacious of its structural principles and character types. . . . What normally happens is that a young man wants a young woman, that his desire is resisted by some opposition, usually paternal, and that near the end of the play some twist in the plot enables the hero to have his will. In this simple pattern there are several complex elements. In the first place, the movement of comedy is usually a movement from one kind of society to another. At the beginning of the play the obstructing characters are in charge of the play's society, and the audience recognizes that they are usurpers. At the end of the play the device in the plot that brings hero and heroine together causes a new society to crystallize around the hero, and the moment when this crystallization occurs is the point of resolution in the action, the comic discovery, anagnorisis or cognito.s A further difficulty here is that if we, like Frye, take the plot structure to be the play's structure, we are ignoring the totality of the play in favor of a part — an admittedly important part — of that totality. Most studies in structure are, in fact, studies in plot structure — which is only to say that a plot does have structure. But so do several of the other elements in the play. If we are willing to concede that the dramatic text exists at different levels, all analyzable, then we can speak not only of the structure of plot, but also, among other things, of the structure of action and theme, the structure of specific episodes, the structure of 2

Ibid., p. 357. Northrop Frye, "The Mythos of Spring: Comedy", in Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), p. 163. 8

12

STRUCTURE IN THE DRAMATIC TEXT

the characters, the structure of time and space, and the structure of the dramatic language.4 Although such fine distinctions are often useful, if we wish to analyze the play's total structure, and not levels within levels, we must comprehend the relations and functions of all the parts in the play. To return to Frye, my argument with his system is that he takes the plot and subject matter to be the play's structure. Even if the plot, when looked at independently, has its own structure, it is not the play. If Frye's terminology accurately represents the way he looks at structure, then he is misleading on two accounts. One, a specific structure is not endemic to any genre. (A plot situation or a form perhaps.) Two, the paradigm which Frye gives us for a comic plot may permit us, as it has Frye, to describe what generally happens in comedy, but by limiting structure to plot alone, Frye ignores the structural relations of the whole play. And after all the plot is not the whole play. The tendency to classify rather than to analyze is most pronounced in those critics who view structure as a broad architectonic metaphor. Like other metaphors, the architectonic metaphor works by means of an implied analogy in which the parts of a play are compared to the parts of a building. In the following example from Marian Gallaway's Constructing a Play, the parts of a play are compared to the joists of a building. Usually the skeletal structure of a play is fairly simple. It rests upon five bases, each of which is as integral to the play as the joists of a building are to its form and strength. There is a desiring individual or group of individuals, the protagonist of the play; there is the object desired; there is a factor which makes the objective difficult to obtain; there is a definite ending to the story; and there is a clear and logical course of action leading to this ending.5 The problem here, as I see it, is twofold. One, which parts of a play are to be compared to which parts of a building, or the reverse? And two, if such comparisons are to have anything more than general descriptive value, must not the analogy be expanded to include or imply the means by which analysis of the separate parts can take place? For ultimately what we want to determine is the relationship — the order and arrangement — of the parts to the whole. Frequently in critical discussions, the structure is identified with the arrangement, number, and order of the major characters in a play. The In practice, the structure of the dramatic language means the arrangement of words, for which the term style is usually employed. 8 Marian Gallaway, Constructing a Play (New York, 1950), p. 44.

STRUCTURE IN THE DRAMATIC TEXT

13

patterns and configurations which result because of the allegiances and faiths and side-taking of the major characters, so the argument goes, constitute the structure of the play. Any pattern should hopefully tell us something, especially a pattern in which comparisons and contrasts are an integral part of the overall conception. In Romeo and Juliet, for example, two houses are at war: the Montagues and the Capulets. Each house has one child; each child has one confidant; and each child dies at the end. Certainly an understanding of the patterns and configurations which result when the characters in a play take sides, have allegiances, form into groups, shift their obedience from one faith to another (in short, show order, number, and arrangement) is valuable to an understanding of the way a playwright works out his plot with respect to the larger meaning of the play. But the point is that by regarding such patterns as the structure of a play, we neglect to see that the whole play has structure. To outline the disposition of the major characters in "family-tree fashion" is to treat only part of the play. The exemption of minor characters (which is characteristic of this type of analysis) suggests the weakness of the approach. A last approach — one which has long been practiced, at least since Gustav Freytag's Technique of the Drama (1863) — is to maintain that the varying degrees of emotional intensity, called rising and falling action, which result from the action in a play, constitute a play's structure. The difficulty here is that to hold that the pattern formed by increasing or decreasing emotional involvement is synonymous with the structure is to confuse the excitement brought on by the action with the parts of a play. Action is emotionally more or less intense at different times in a play. That the action, if it could be charted, rises and falls indicates that there is tension, calm, strain, rest, and the like in a play, which is only to say that dramatic action usually involves conflict. Confrontations, resolutions, and peripety are germane to the dramatic art. The pattern which results from rising and falling action is not the structure of a play. Clearly, such a pattern represents only a cardiographie reading of a play's rhythms. To define structure as the pattern of rising and falling action in a play, and to undertake an analysis using this definition, can only lead to the general conclusion that there are moments of emotional crisis and moments of lull in a play, and that they can be described and located. But such a reading does not determine a play's structure. It tells us only that a play entertains by inciting emotions to a varying degree. Probably an accurate reading of rising

14

STRUCTURE IN THE DRAMATIC TEXT

and falling action in a play would not be unlike the physician's cardiographie reading: steady, rising, steady, lower, rising, steady, and so on.

II The term "structure" comes from architecture. In literature what we mean by structure is simply organization. Whether used as a noun ("The structure of . . . ") or as a verb ("To structure . . . "), the term refers to how something is organized. But there is another matter which is central to this question, namely: what is it that is being organized? To organize is to have something to organize. Before we can talk knowingly about organization, we must first decide what it is that comprises that organization; specifically, what parts comprise that organization. In drama studies, the term which causes disagreement is "parts". The question for us then is, what do we mean by parts? If we can determine this, and the function of those parts, we can, I believe, arrive at an understanding of what structure means and what it can teach us. However, I know of no accepted and traditional method of finding out what the basic parts or units of play construction are. But there can be no doubt that "the discovery of the component units remains", as Alan Downer points out, "the first step in the analysis of the total structure of a play". 6 Generally, acts, episodes, or scenes have been given as the constituent parts in a play's structure. The comments of a few representative critics will be enough to point this out. Monroe Beardsley, Robert Daniel, and Glenn Leggett, editors of Theme and Form (1956), are quite emphatic in their choice of the Acts. "Nearly all modern plays, those of the past four centuries, are divided into acts·, these are the major divisions, corresponding to the chapters of a book. . . . The division into acts emphasizes the structure of the play".7 In Understanding Drama (1961), Cleanth Brooks and Robert Heilman propose that the component units in the organization of a play are arrived at through "the arrangement of the larger elements, especially the episodes".8 (I will subsequently be taking issue with the idea of using "larger elements" as the constituent parts in play structure.) 6

Alan S. Downer, The Art of the Play (New York, 1955), p. 170. Monroe Beardsley, Robert Daniel, and Glenn Leggett, Theme and Form (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1956), p. 697. 8 Cleanth Brooks and Robert Heilman, "Glossary", in Understanding Drama (New York, 1961), p. 51. In the same glossary (p. 48) they define episode as: "A loose term 7

STRUCTURE IN THE DRAMATIC TEXT

15

Kenneth Thorpe Rowe, in Write That Play (1939), specifies scenes, that is, conventional scenes, which enable stage properties, and hence time and place, to be changed within an act. "Scene divisions either in a one-act play or within an act of a long play", Rowe explains, "are primarily a stage device for representing change of place or lapse of time, or both. Scenes are at the same time inevitably structural units, as a wise dramatist would not subject his audience to the break in attention of a change of scene except to bring onto the stage something which must be there.. .". 9 Alan Downer distinguishes in The Art of the Play (1955) between the formal and technical usage of the word "scene" — as the place of action or setting, and as a formal division within the act — and the constructional (structural) use of the word. "The basic unit in the dramatic structure is properly called the scene",10 writes Downer. "As the basic unit of play construction, however, it means simply a portion of the total play in which the stage is occupied by an unchanging group of players. When anything happens to change the constitution of the group (i.e., the exit or entrance of a player) a new scene commences".11 This, of course, is the classical French practice of scene division. My own practice is to regard scenes in this last sense — Downer's sense — as the constituent parts in the dramatic structure. 12 However, I make the following additions. The basic unit in the dramatic structure is called the scene. As the basic unit of play construction it means simply a portion of the total play in which the stage is occupied by an unchanging group of players. If anything happens to change the constitution of the group (that is, the exit, or entrance of a player) a new scene commences. It is understood that scenes take place in time and space (a condition which forces us to take into account the environment of the play and its stage properties). Moreover, to say that the whole (the play) has structure is to say that it has discernible parts (scenes), and that the rearrangement, transfer any unit of action in a play, such as the 'robbery episode' in Henry IV. However, a play composed of a series of episodes not causally united in a single action is said to have episodic structure". 9 Kenneth Thorpe Rowe, Write That Play (New York, 1939), p. 161. 10 II Downer, p. 169. Ibid., p. 170. 12 Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent uses of the word scene (or scenes) in the book will conform to Downer's definition. That is, I will use the word scene to mean the unit of action marked off by the exit or entrance of a character, and the phrase conventional scene to mean the formal division within an act (eg. Act One, scene two).

16

STRUCTURE IN THE DRAMATIC TEXT

position, or change of any one, or some, or all of the scenes implies changes in the structure of the play, but not necessarily in the meaning of the play. For although each scene is discernible and distinguishable as a separate entity, nevertheless, no scene is really separate from the whole which is its substantial ground. The scenes are the "building blocks" in the structure. Specifically, then, structure is the place, relation, and function of scenes in episodes and in the whole play. The value of this definition is that it enables us to approach structure with a particular clarity. We can distinguish the parts of a play easily and, therefore, we can more clearly determine the function of each. The argument for using larger elements (acts, episodes, and conventional scenes) as the constituent parts of a play is that they are especially useful in describing the form or shape of the entire play. The larger elements permit us to look at a play and immediately determine its construction, whether it is episodic, panoramic, scenic, "classic" (i.e., focused and concentrated), or otherwise. Generally, though, what is gained by using the larger elements is not an insight into how a play is constructed, but rather an over-view of the formal divisions which give shape to a play. The disadvantage of using larger elements as the constituent parts is simply that they lend themselves more to classification than to analysis. The larger elements resist close analysis. For example, analysis of the relationships between acts is almost inevitably done in the broadest and most general terms. Bernard Shaw, for one, in The Quintessence of Ibsenism, speaks in these terms. Comparing what happens in the three acts of a French well-made play with what happens in the three acts of an Ibsen play, Shaw remarks generally about what goes on in each. "Formerly you had in what was called a well-made play an exposition in the first act, a situation in the second, and unravelling in the third. Now you have exposition, situation, and discussion...". 13 We have only to compare Downer's statements about structure with Shaw's to see the possibilities for analysis in the former and the necessity for classification in the latter. Furthermore, acts and conventional scenes are not, as a matter of course, natural divisions. Act and conventional scene divisions are more likely to be determined by the demands of staging, sitting, and cigarettes than by the natural rhythms of a play. Nor is the comparison of acts to chapters, as Beardsley, Daniel, and Leggett propose, rewarding. To speak 13

George Bernard Shaw, "The Technical Novelty in Ibsen's Plays", in The Quintessence of Ibsenism (New York, 1928), p. 213.

STRUCTURE IN THE DRAMATIC TEXT

17

of acts, on the one hand, as "corresponding to the chapters of a book", and, on the other hand, as "the structure of the play", is to suggest that the acts of a play and the chapters of a book constitute the structure of play and book. (Do we speak of the 67 chapters in Vanity Fair as its structure?) The advantage of using scenes as the constituent parts is that they follow the natural method of a play and thus lend themselves to close analysis. Certainly, the method of rendering meaning through the juxtaposing of characters, and not through the telling of an author, is properly the method of drama, and not of narrative forms. (However, this is not to say that there are not novels — for example, the later works of Henry James — which are more dramatic than narrative in conception.) Having to do without authorial narrative,14 the playwright is almost wholly dependent upon dramatic juxtapositions (which create scenes) to communicate action and meaning. This means that the structure of dramatic forms lends itself to analysis, because dramatic forms have an observable and analyzable parts structure (composed not only of scenes resulting from dramatic juxtapositions, but of the larger elements of acts, episodes, and conventional scenes). Once aware of the constituent nature of dramatic forms, to determine dramatic structure we have only to decide which are the component units of the total structure. In the drama, since action and meaning are conceived through the juxtaposing of characters — a method which forms scenes — it would seem to follow that if we wish to work analytically with play structure, we must begin with the basic unit of play structure — the scene. Construction by scene, according to Lennox Robinson, is the way the playwright himself organizes the dramatic material. In Towards an Appreciation of the Theatre (1945), Robinson offers the aspiring playwright this advice on "how to construct a play" (emphasis mine). The play being mapped out in his mind the wise playwright will make an outline, a précis of his play running to, say, a thousand words. In writing this he will discover that ideas which he thought were clear-cut are in reality muzzy, a couple of pieces are missing from the puzzle, the ends are not neatly joined. That outline may have to be done over and over again until it seems right. He should then proceed to plan the sequence of the scenes in his acts, treating his acts in the French manner, that is to say the entrance or exit of a character marks a new "scene" (no change of scenery being necessarily implied). And he will note what facts are to be conveyed in each scene.15 14 Some people may be inclined to argue that the Greek chorus, or the raisonneur in nineteenth-century French drama, or the like, is an implied authorial narrative. 15 Lennox Robinson, Towards an Appreciation of the Theatre (Dublin, 1945), p. 16.

18

STRUCTURE IN THE DRAMATIC TEXT

For the critic, no less than the playwright, such a method is valuable. First of all, the use of scenes to explicate structure encourages and promotes structural criticism because it makes the component parts of a play available to the critic for analysis. Second, the focus on scenes emphasizes the importance of exits and entrances in the meaning of a play. If we acknowledge that behind the structure of a play rests the intention of the playwright, and that through the structure the playwright suggests his areas of emphasis and concern, then, remembering the definition of structure given earlier, we cannot ignore how a scene comes into being — namely, through exits and entrances. A play rises out of the interplay of scenes, within the enclosing atmosphere of an idea. Since exits and entrances determine the beginning and ending of a scene and the start of another, they indicate, first, that the playwright develops the play's statement through scenes, and, second, that the position of scenes is governed by that statement. In other words, exits and entrances create new scenes; scenes are how the idea is realized; therefore the meaning of a play is necessarily related to exits and entrances. To argue otherwise is to propose a break between structure and content. Using the scene makes it possible to analyze the structure of one act plays, stasis plays, and plays in which the stage is occupied for long periods (for example, Harold Pinter's The Caretaker) by an unchanging group of players. If, in plays of this type, we were to use any part larger than the scene to analyze structure, the plays would elude analysis. Take, for example, a one act play; it concludes at the point at which act analysis begins. Should the play lack episodes, as many plays do, or should the play be constructed from a single episode, as many plays are, the most we could say about such a play, after "analyzing" it by episodes, is that in the episode which, in effect, constitutes the whole play, such-and-such happens. We could not discuss the relations between the parts (episodes) because the entire play is one part — the episode.16 In short, anything we said would be descriptive, not analytical. In contrast, because the scene describes, in J. A. Withey's words, "a relationship integral to the total human experience that is the play", 17 14

However, in plays of more than one episode, the relationship of the episode to the play (rather than of the scene to the play) is primary. This is because in episodic plays there are wholes (the episodes) within the larger whole (the play). Scenes then take for their whole the episode in which they appear, not the whole play. If we are going to understand those scenes which have meaning only within the context of a specific episode, we have to treat the episode as the whole. 17 J. A. Withey, "Form and the Dramatic Text", Educational Theatre Journal, XII (October, I960), 205.

STRUCTURE IN THE DRAMATIC TEXT

19

by determining the relationship of one scene to another, we are in a position to see the mutual relation of the constituent parts of the action to the whole play. To proceed in this way I feel increases the opportunities for analysis and makes structural criticism possible and meaningful. ΠΙ Different critical approaches to literature clearly have different values and expectations. What those values are and how they hope to satisfy their expectations can be determined by the different questions each asks. Hence each is limited; it can do only as much as the questions it asks make it possible to do. Structural criticism is no exception. Structural criticism contains within it nothing more than the questions it is able to ask, and what those questions discover is information about the way the work is organized. "The structural critic's questions", according to Richard Schechner, "are very simple: 'Why does this scene follow that one? What is the shape of the entire play? Why does this character say or do that nowT "18

For the structural critic, there remains, however, one question which is and must be primary to the others. What is the underlying organizational principle which unifies the whole work? Not until the unifying principle is discovered can the mutual relation of the scenes — the constituent parts of the structure — to the whole play be seen. In other words, before we can analyze the relation of the part (or parts) to the whole, we must know what the whole is or means. (Hence the question of unity is a structural question concerning the relation of the parts to the whole.) But to understand the whole is to understand what underlying principle of organization governs the order and arrangement of the parts causing them to unite into an intelligible whole. That is, to understand a play is to understand what unifies the action of it: plot, character, theme, or some combination of these. In a valuable article entitled "Les Problèmes de la structure du drame", Irena Slawinska points out that structure and unity are not separate questions, but are of an inseparable nature. Le concept de structure est lié à l'idée d'unité d'entité intégrale, où tous les éléments tendent vers l'un, liés par une dépendance mutuelle. L'analyse du drame doit donc faire ressortir cette unité finale aussi bien que l'interdépendance des parties constitutives et leur fonction assujettie à la réalisation du but final. 18

Richard Schechner, "TDR Comment: Theatre Criticism", Titiane Drama Review, IX (Spring, 1965), 22.

20

STRUCTURE IN THE DRAMATIC TEXT

Le nœud de cette unité est la signification, le sens final et tout premier de l'œuvre qui organise le tout et s'en asservit les éléments partiels. La structure du drame peut être analysée sur différents plans où nous devons chaque fois revenir au même principe, celui de l'œuvre totale. L'essentiel n'est point de suivre le courant d'action ni d'étudier ses étapes: le nœud du drame, le point culminant, la péripétie — mais de saisir le principe, l'idée première que a décidé du choix de l'auteur quant à tel ou tel fait.19 Discovery of the unifying principle, then, indicates what principle of selection underlies the relationship between the play and its parts. Or, as Norman Holland explains in The First Modern Comedies (1959): "In reading . . . I proceed from the hypothesis (which usually turns out to be correct) that everything in the play is there for a purpose, and go on from there to develop the relations between the parts, that is, the unifying principle that informs the whole".20 In most plays, the discovery of the unifying principle is not, after all, such an arcane thing. In brief, to understand how the whole play works is to understand how the whole is unified. Analysis of scenes, however thorough, cannot provide an understanding of the whole play. As in a Gestalt, the parts (scenes) derive their meanings from the position, function or purpose they serve in the whole (play). Certainly, the entire experience we call the play cannot be found in an act or scene of it. If examples were needed from the physical world, we need only consider that hydrogen by itself or oxygen by itself does not have the properties found in H2O. Once knowing "the unifying principle that informs the whole", we can determine what function each scene serves, why the scenes are arranged the way they are, and which scenes belong and which do not. 19

Irena Slawinska, "Les Problèmes de la structure du drame", in Stil-und FormProbleme in der Literatur (Heidelberg, 1959), p. 108. (My translation.) The concept of structure is bound to the idea of unity of the integral entity where all elements lead towards the one bound by a mutual dependence. The analysis of the play must therefore make evident this final unity as well as the interdependence of the constituent parts and their function subject to the realization of the final goal. The core of this unity is the meaning, the final and primary sense of the work which organizes the whole and which ties down its partial elements. The structure of the play can be analyzed on different levels where we must each time come back to the same principle, that of the total work. The essential is not at all to follow the current of action nor to study its stages: the heart of the drama, the culminating point, the reversal — but to seize the principle, the primary idea which determines the choice of the author in relation to such and such a fact. 20 Norman N. Holland, The First Modern Comedies (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1959), p. 7.

STRUCTURE IN THE DRAMATIC TEXT

21

The unifying principle is the operative principle which underlies and governs the place, relation, and function of each scene in a play. Analysis of scenes in isolation is unrewarding because it is blind to the view of the whole. In plays where the scenes (or episodes) are readily separable (that is, unrelated to the whole), in order for us to know this, we must first know what the unifying principle of the play is. Thus, to know, for example, that the middle scenes of Dr. Faustus are irrelevant, is to know how the play is put together, that is, how it is organized. To allow that a part or parts of a play are irrelevant is to indicate that we understand the unifying principle which informs the whole. Hence, irrelevancy is a question of structure. How often have we been enjoined from appreciating a play (or movie) because of an incongruous scene or digressive episode? Certainly as critics, we may agree that however interesting an irrelevancy may be by itself, the play's effect can be vitiated by a single, irrelevant, absorbing experience. Take, for example, the hyperbolical scenes of passion in the eighteenth-century Heroic drama. Scenes in which the playwright is "painting the passions" are not called forth for reasons germane to the structural needs of the play. But as tours de force they serve the melodramatic function of generating passion for passion's sake. Also, in the eighteenth-century Sentimental drama the practice of irrelevantly magnifying or focusing on the feelings, disregarding the overall scheme of the play, resulted in what Eric Rothstein calls "an emotional serial drama" 21 — a drama composed of a series of emotional episodes. To "play" for the big scene depreciates the effect of the play as a totality. A scene (or scenes) pronouncedly extreme and pyrotechnical suggests that the scene is of greater importance than the play. Rothstein argues : [If we wish to] work from the emotional situation rather than from the total order of the play, [then what must follow is a] drama with more passion, more distress; in short, for drama concentrated in a succession of moments, a series of effective incidents rather than a ramified totality. [Everything else in the play must cede to the skillful arrangement of emotional episodes.] To be persuasive, pleasure had to be deeply satisfying; to be satisfying, it demanded sensationalism; and sensationalism, in turn, bludgeoned the sense of a providential whole out of recognition.22 21

Eric Rothstein, "English Tragic Theory in the Late Seventeenth Century", English Literary History, XXIX (September, 1962), 312. 22 Ibid., p. 311. Rothstein further writes (p. 317) that "the depreciation of plot . . . ed directly to emphasis on parts instead of the whole".

22

STRUCTURE IN THE DRAMATIC TEXT

TV The process of determining structure starts, as I have said, from the point of view of the whole rather than from any single part. But even though we assume a whole-parts relationship when we begin our analysis, such relationship can only be demonstrated by determining what function a scene serves. Thus, relationship inheres in function. It is stated in this way because to understand how scenes are related to the play (or episode) and to each other, we must understand the function of each of the scenes. We look at a scene and we see that certain things are said and done. To determine the function of a scene is not to ask what is said and done, but why and how something is said and done (with respect to what is accomplished in terms of the whole play or an episode), where it is said and done (with respect to the environment of the play and its stage properties), when it is said and done (with respect to the time of its occurrence in the chronology of the play). We cannot say what the author wanted to do. The finished work is given and understood. We know what is there, so why repeat it? What we do not know, and what the question of function can get at, is whether what is there should be there, and if so, why, and if not, why not. It is not enough merely to say that this speech follows that speech, or this scene that scene; rather we must ask why and how and say why and how. But to show why and how information or a character's response is needed, and needed at a certain time and not at another, is answering the question of function. If, for example, we say that exposition in Act One serves a useful purpose, then we should be able to say why and how it does, where it does, when it does. Ideally, each scene in a play is performing a specific function. It is for us to determine what that function is, and to decide if it is purposeful, inevitable, necessary, effective, irrelevant, or what, remembering that scenes are called into existence to serve character, theme, plot, or some combination of these. Moreover, a scene may be where it is and doing what it is for reasons other than the above: possibly for motivation (which will be apparent later in the play), for contrast (which makes the introduction of a foil desirable), for theme (which proffers the audience alternative values and moral electives from which to choose right or wrong behavior, or from which we see that there can be no choice), or for reasons of foreshadowing, and so on. Scenes are not understood arbitrarily, divorced from the play and their own ambience. Too many critics fail to realize that there exists

STRUCTURE IN THE DRAMATIC TEXT

23

not only the interrelatedness of the whole and its parts, but also the interrelatedness of scenes with other scenes. Furthermore, critics fail to see that the analysis to get at the relationship of scene to play (or episode), and scene to scene, is not an analysis of just any relationship which would connect them, but of the specific structural forces and devices working to make such relationships possible. By determining the overall function and interdependence of scenes we also (and this is important) make it clear that scenes may be put into a graded order, thus determining the effect derived from the resulting sequence (for example, working toward an "obligatory scene"). This is only to say again that the order and arrangement of scenes contribute to a play's meaning. What structural forces and devices help to determine the place and arrangement of scenes in a play will be the subject of chapters two through five.

2 POINT-OF-ATTACK

The point in the story at which the curtain goes up affects the structural pattern of a play. Following William Archer's terminology, I choose to call this starting point the "point-of-attack". If a playwright dramatizes the whole story or a major portion of it (an early point-of-attack), the resulting structural pattern will be diffuse. If a playwright dramatizes only a part of the story (a late point-of-attack), the resulting structural pattern will be concentrated. Each point-of-attack — early or late — has its own structural pattern and its own characteristics. It is irrelevant to ask which approach is generally the better one. Depending on the material which is to be dramatized, an early or late point-of-attack will be appropriate. According to Clayton Hamilton, if the playwright is interested in causes, he will begin his play at the start of the story; if he is interested in effects or results, he will begin near the end. Any story, to attract and to enthrall attention, must exhibit the crisis, or climax, of a series of events, but the individual artist is left at liberty to determine how far before the crisis he shall set the initiation of his narrative and how far beyond it he shall set the end. If he is interested mainly in causes, he will choose to depict in detail the events that lead up to his climax; and if he is interested mainly in effects, he will prefer to devote the major share of his attention to those subsequent events that are occasioned by crisis. Thus we discover in practice two types of narratives, — in one of which the main events look forward and are interesting chiefly as causes, and in the other of which the main events look backward and are interesting chiefly as results.1 According to William Archer, where a play begins depends "chiefly on the nature of the crisis and the nature of the impression which the playwright desires to make upon his audience".2 The point-of-attack establishes how a play is seen and thus, as Alan Downer observes, provides 1 2

Clayton Hamilton, Studies in Stagecraft (New York, 1914), pp. 176-177. William Archer, Play-Making (Boston, 1912), p. 86.

POINT-OF-ATTACK

25

us with a point of view from which to observe the action. "If . . . one of the characteristics of dramatic action is to provide a kind of commentary on itself", writes Downer, "one of the most important functions of structure is to give the spectator a point of view about the action he is seeing".3 Whether the point of view will be distanced, because a play commences near the beginning of the story, or close up, because a play commences just prior to the climax, depends upon the effect the playwright wishes. The structural pattern elicited by an early point-of-attack is to be found in plays which panoramically survey life, rather than those which dissect a moment in it. In particular, the playwright will have to start his play early in the story if, by its very nature, the story shifts from one place to another, consumes hours, days, years even, joins heaven and hell on-stage, and, in short, abandons the Unities. Plays of this kind take for their material the large sweep of historical narratives, epic poems, pastorals, religious stories, biographies, and the like. The panoramic dimensions of this structural pattern can, for example, be seen in the full title of Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, namely, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Dr. Faustus. The structural pattern of the early point-of-attack play, then, is characterized by inclusiveness. In such plays, practically the entire story is encompassed by the dramatization taking place on-stage. A later contemporary of Shakespeare who was offended by the abuses of the panoramic drama of his day was moved to ridicule a stage where you shall have Asia on one side and Africa on the other, and so many under-kingdoms, that the player when he cometh in, must ever begin by telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived. Now ye shall have three ladies walk to gather flowers, and then we must believe the stage to be a garden. By and by we hear news of a shipwreck in the same place, and then we are to blame if we accept it not for a rock. . . . Now of time they are much more liberal. For ordinary is it that two young princes fall in love; after many traverses she is got with child, delivered of a fair boy, he is lost, groweth a man, falleth in love, and is ready to get another child, — and all this in two hours' space.4 Such breadth of action requires numerous scenes, events, characters, and episodes. Hence the looseness of this structural pattern. Because most of the action is staged, there is little need for exposition. The absence of a concentrated point of view in an early point-of-attack play increases 3

Alan S. Downer, The Art of the Play (New York, 1955), p. 179. * Ibid., p. 179.

26

POINT-OF-ATTACK

the problem of how to achieve unity. To control the varied events and diffuse action in a play of this kind, the playwright unifies his play, as Alan Downer observes, through repeated references to the central idea. The unity of panoramic drama is achieved by a structural pattern of maximum diffuseness controlled by constant reference to the central idea. Always the selection and arrangement of incidents is made with the intention of demonstrating the idea in detail and in depth, sometimes in terms of a single hero, sometimes by balancing or contrasting one hero against another. 5

The temptation in the early point-of-attack play, which is to be resisted by the playwright, is injudicious selection of scenes — the inclusion of scenes which contribute nothing to the overall effect of the play. The addition of irrelevant scenes, even if good theatre, can weaken the structure of a play. The difference is often the difference between good and bad drama, between a grab bag of assorted action and a conscious and deliberate building to an effect; in short, between the circus and art. In contrast, the structural pattern of a late point-of-attack play is a concentrated one because the action is confined to the few remaining moments or hours before the climax. Because the play begins so late in the story, the selection of scenes is limited by what came before. (The alternative choices for what can follow logically are few.) Compression of time being as great as it is, this kind of play usually conforms to the Unities. Classical in its antecedents, the late point-of-attack play is characteristically heavy in exposition. Because the play begins prior to the climax, there is a need for exposition to fill in what happened before the curtain was rung up. In An Essay for Dramatic Poesy, John Dryden graphically describes how conformity to the unity of time in the classical drama creates the need for exposition and thus contributes to the distinctive structural pattern of that drama. This rule of time, how well it has been observed by the Ancients, most of their plays will witness; you see them in their tragedies, (wherein to follow this rule, is certainly most difficult,) from the very beginning of their plays, falling close into that part of the story which they intend for the action or principal object of it, leaving the former part to be delivered by narration: so that they set the audience, as it were, at the post where the race is to be concluded; and, saving them the tedious expectation of seeing the poet set out and ride the beginning of the course, you behold him not till he is in sight of the goal, and just upon you.® 5 β

Ibid., pp. 182-183. John Dryden, Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker (Oxford, 1900), I. 39.

POINT-OF-ATTACK

27

Though most plays are not without some exposition, the manner in which it is revealed may range in extremes from a purely formal prologue or a perfunctory conversation between master and servant to the analytic method where the antecedent circumstances are largely introduced as present action, and past and present continually act and react upon each other (such as we find in Ibsen and Arthur Miller). To set apart a portion of the play for exposition commits a large part of the total action of the play to discussion, talking about the past. Dramatic exposition decreases the need for numerous characters, action, and events, because the relationship between past events and present action can be explained more effectively by a few characters than a dozen; moreover, in all likelihood only a few characters have shared in that relationship between past and present. With so much of the time devoted to exposition, there is little room to initiate new action. Therefore, the narrative tendencies and the concentrated structural pattern of a late point-of-attack play generally make it well suited for problem plays, debates, and the question-and-answer type of drama. In brief, demonstration and variety are the chief characteristics of the early point-of-attack play. The hero in this drama is the master of his own fortunes. His fate is not stamped in prior actions and decisions; he is in a progressive state of self-determination. As Downer observes: Any action, any decision, any choice was of equal importance in determining the fate of the hero. For in a sense the hero had no fate, or at least he created his own fate as the result of a series of action. At no moment in his life, save the very last, could any action be decisive, any choice final. So the hero's life is spread before us panoramically, from the beginning of his important actions, if not from his birth, to the concluding moment when further decision or choice is impossible.7

On the other hand, a late point-of-attack play is particularly adapted to showing how the past influences the present, how today's misfortunes are rooted in yesterday's events, how eifects grow from prior causes. "The hero's doom", as Downer remarks, "is decreed before he is permitted to assume the role". 8 The present action, as distinct from the exposition of the past, "is concerned with bringing about the inevitable, foredoomed ending".9 Most plays fall into one or the other of these structural patterns: loose or concentrated. In particular, the loose pattern has been appro7

Downer, p. 180. Ibid., p. 181. » Ibid. 8

28

POINT-OF-ATTACK

priated by the Broadway musical and the movie "epics" of recent years, while the concentrated pattern has for some time now been the standard form of the realistic drama.

II I have selected Bertolt Brecht's Galileo as an example of an early pointof-attack play and Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts as an example of a late pointof-attack play to show how the starting point in each determines the structural pattern, and hence the point of view. I have treated each play in the following order: the point in the overall story at which the play begins; the way in which the point-of-attack determines if the structural pattern in the play will be loose or concentrated; the way in which the number of characters, time, place, and action are affected by the point of view in the play; and the way in which each playwright, given the point-of-attack he has used in his play, has solved the structural problem of unity. In Galileo, Brecht dramatizes the story of Galileo Galilei from the point of the Italian's discoveries, which were made possible by the invention of the telescope, to his last years, when he was placed under house arrest by the Holy Office. The opening lines of the play announce the decrepitude of the old science and, shortly thereafter, Galileo expresses the belief that "the millennium of faith is ended" and "the millennium of doubt" 10 is begun, and a would-be student of Galileo's, just returned from Holland, reveals the discovery of the telescope. From this beginning, we can hazard an enlightened guess as to what will follow. Given a man of Galileo's intellectual abilities, a telescope, and Galileo's belief that to doubt is to learn, we can expect to see a succession of marvelous discoveries. And if we remember anything about the circumstances surrounding Galileo's experiments and conclusions, we should anticipate trouble from the Holy Office. After all, the name and the work of Galileo are not so distant that we cannot presume to know what the nature of the conflict in Brecht's play will be, especially once we have seen what the initial ingredients of the play are. It is to be noted that Brecht chose to dramatize only the famous years in Galileo's life, the later years. Brecht was willing to ignore what was not dramatically important: Galileo's birth, childhood, education, adolescence, and 10

Citations from Galileo in my text are to Bertolt Brecht, Galileo, trans. Charles Laughton, in Seven Plays by Bertolt Brecht, ed. Eric Bentley (New York, 1961).

POINT-OF-ATTACK

29

similar matters. Just to encompass the productive years of Galileo's life is panoramic enough. We follow Galileo's career through thirtythree years, as dramatized in fourteen episodes, through four cities, Padua, Venice, Florence, and Rome, and through several altercations with the Holy See, ending in house arrest. Brecht, it is important to remember, thought of himself as writing, what he called, "epic theatre". Therefore it is not unusual — in fact, it is conscious and deliberate — that his plays generally, and Galileo particularly, are expansive in subject matter and treatment. The early point-of-attack in Galileo, which makes it possible to dramatize a period of thirty-three years in the astronomer's life, leaves little to be filled in. What we learn through exposition is fragmentary, but important: that as a young man Galileo resided in Siena, that in order to earn enough money to pay for his own research work and to put aside a dowry for his daughter, Galileo tutored students, made a weather chart for the Army, designed a water pump and irrigation works for the city of Venice, and that just prior to the opening of the play Galileo requested an honorarium from Venice to pay for his many expenses. In short, the whole of the exposition is devoted to showing us that Galileo has been in constant need of money in the past and is, in the present, equally poor. It is this need which will motivate Galileo's departure for Florence and the patronage of the Medicean family. Thus, the exposition is functional. It provides the reason for Galileo's leaving Padua-Venice and traveling to Florence, which in turn initiates the conflict with the Church. As expressed by the Curator, who has come to inform Galileo that the Venetian government cannot recommend his request for an honorarium, the subsidies in Florence will be sufficient, but then, too, there will be the Inquisition. Curator (cool): Mr. Galilei, if you want money and leisure, go to Florence. I have no doubt Prince Cosimo de Medici will be glad to subsidize you, but eventually you will be forbidden to think — in the name of the Inquisition. (Scene 1) To fill this changing panorama, Brecht has had to use more than forty characters, which does not take into account the "extras" in street scenes or palace scenes. Although confined to Italy, the action moves from Galileo's study in Padua to the great arsenal of Venice, to a house in Florence, to a hall in the Collegium Romanum, to a Cardinal's house in Rome, to a garden of the Florentine Ambassador in Rome, to a

30

POINT-OF-ATTACK

market place, to the Medicean palace in Florence, and so on, until the play symbolically ends with one of Galileo's students standing at a small Italian customs house early in the morning, preparing to start a new day in a new country, free of the Inquisition, with Galileo's new theory of motion in his possession. If all of these scenes give the impression of a world well populated and teeming with action, it should be remarked that at no time do the numerous scenes get out of hand. Although the structural pattern is episodic, it is not without concentration. The early point-of-attack permits the playwright more choice (the more distant the climax, the greater the possibilities for action from which to choose); but it also demands extraordinary self-discipline on the playwright's part, lest he indiscriminately include unrelated matters or materials for their purely theatrical effect. Brecht's scenes are never static; we never have to wait on them. They all contribute to the forward action in the play; there is no forestalling. Unlike Christopher Marlowe, who, for example, dissipated the effect of Dr. Faustus' pilgrimage to hell by being unselective in his choice of episodes and by introducing the conflict at the end of the play instead of showing it throughout, Brecht keeps the spotlight on Galileo and his conflicts at all times. With the exception of the action concerning the betrothal of Galileo's daughter, Virginia, Galileo or Galileo's ideas or influence holds the stage for the entire play. The unity here results from constant reference to and focus on the central character. It is the biography of a man, or rather a man's soul and intellect. Hence we never leave his side; we are always witness to his aspirations, fears, successes, disappointments, and the like. To intensify the structural pattern in the play, and hence bring a greater sense of progressive order and unity to the play, Brecht (and in one instance — point number three — Brecht's translator) introduces the following unifying devices. (1) At the end of each scene, there is some comment or clue which announces or points to the succeeding scene. (2) Galileo's pilgrimage is not only linear in form, it is linear geographically; he travels southward from his early experiments in Padua-Venice to Florence and then to Rome. (3) At the start of each new scene, there are a few lines of verse, often accompanied by a date, which sum up what is going to happen and when it is happening. For example: In the year sixteen hundred and nine Science' light began to shine At Padua City, in a modest house

31

POINT-OF-ATTACK

Galileo Galilei set out to prove The sun is still, the earth is on the move. (Scene 1) January ten, sixteen ten: Galileo Galilei abolishes heaven. (Scene 3) Eight long years with tongue in cheek Of what he knew he did not speak. Then temptation grew too great And Galileo challenged fate. (Scene 8) The effect of these devices is to heighten the impression that Brecht has selected only the most important scenes from the life of Galileo and compressed them into a brief span of stage time. Thus we may say that although the early point-of-attack in Galileo freed Brecht to populate his large panorama with diverse scenes and action, he held to dramatizing only the pertinent episodes in a man's fight for enlightenment in the midst of ignorance. Ghosts begins at the end of the story, just prior to the climax. Because Ibsen starts the play at the end of the story and dramatizes on-stage only the final consequence of Mrs. Alving's decision, made years before, to maintain propriety at any cost, the past and present action are revealed together and experienced as one. The successively revealed events which lead up to Mrs. Alving's tragedy are the play. The play is exposition. Hence the on-stage action is meager, limited to Oswald's return from Paris and the revelation of his sickness. Generally, in a late point-of-attack play the action is abbreviated; what happens on-stage is usually the result of decisions made prior to the opening of the play. Moreover, in the late point-of-attack play, the structural positioning of scenes is carried out with the idea of getting at past events in order to explain present ones. The place and role of the scenes in such a play are designed with the thought in mind of fostering suspense through a series of concatenated discoveries. There is a progressive uncovering and discovering of the past. In Ghosts, through the first two acts there is a complete discovery of those things which occurred in the past revealing the story of guilt and responsibility which was not apparent at the beginning of the play. The progressive discovery pattern begins with Engstrand and Regina in the opening scene. What follows constitutes a causal sequence, with each discovery bringing about the next. According to Robert Donovan, the pattern of progressive revelation is that of the detective story.

32

POINT-OF-ATTACK

This kind of structure is, as everyone knows, the typical pattern of the detective story. Such fundamentally human concerns as crime and punishment lie outside the scope of detective fiction, in which the murder may take place before the story begins, and the retribution may finally catch up with the murderer after it ends. The plot of the detective story consists simply in the discovery — withheld, of course, as long as possible — of the one hypothesis which will account for all the disparate facts or "events" that make up the story. The interest is centered, in classical specimens of the genre, not in the events, but in the process by which the events are rendered meaningful, ordinarily in the activity of the detective as he proceeds toward a solution. . . . The beginning, middle, and end of such an action can be described only in terms of the reader's awareness; the beginning consists of the exposition in which [he is] made aware of the mystery, that is of the facts that require explanation; the end consists of his reaching a full understanding of the mystery which confronted him, for when all is known the story must come to an end. The middle, then, is comprised of his successive states of partial or incorrect knowledge.11 Even the technique which Ibsen used to tell his story in Ghosts is, as Francis Fergusson observes, the technique of the mystery thriller. "[The play] may . . . be read as a perfect well-made thriller. The story is presented with immediate clarity, with mounting and controlled suspense; each act ends with an exciting curtain which reaffirms the issues and promises important new developments". 12 Because of the limited space for action in the late point-of-attack play, the chief interest is shifted from action to idea, as revealed through discussion. "Instead of showing events in their chronological order", observes Martin Ellehauge, "dramatists . . . transferred part of the action to a time prior to the opening of the play and narrated it to the audience through dialogue. . . . It was regularly used by D u m a s and elaborated by Ibsen, whose technical achievement Dr. Archibald Henderson describes as 'the identification of action with exposition'." 1 3 It is this last — "the identification of action with exposition" — which accounts for the heavy concentration of discussion and debate in the late point-ofattack play generally and in Ghosts particularly. Henderson further remarks: Narration of dramatic intensity and pictorial appeal is needed effectively to reveal the long chain of causation which has led to the crisis exhibited in the 11

Robert Donovan, "Structure and Idea in Bleak House", English Literary History, XXIX (March, 1962), 190-191. 12 Francis Fergusson, The Idea of a Theater (Garden City, New York, 1953), p. 163. 13 Martin Ellehauge, "The Initial Stages in the Development of the English ProblemPlay", Englische Studien, LXVI (Leipzig, 1931/1932), 375-376.

POINT-OF-ATTACK

33

drama itself. Narration in dialogue form, of scenes dramatic in effect, thus necessarily supersedes, in large measure, direct dramatic presentation. The method of fiction in sustained suspense is freely employed by the dramatist of the ripened situation. The most significant of all the revelations arising out of the antecedent events is reserved until the conclusion of the drama. The penalty of the method is revealed in the consideration that the complex web of antecedent events, which can only be conveyed to our senses through narration, becomes vastly more important, dramatically as well as determinatively, than the events of the actual drama itself.14 Characteristic of a late point-of-attack play, as well, is its concentration. In Ghosts, five characters (enough to handle the exposition, which is the tragedy), a single setting (the living room of Mrs. Alving's home), approximately twelve hours of time, and a single plot constitute the stuff of the play. The conciseness and compression of the structure tell us immediately that this is a late point-of-attack play. The structural pattern resulting from this economy and concentrated focus is one free of episodes, one in which each scene follows logically from the preceding scene, in well-made play fashion. In fact, as Francis Fergusson remarks, "in this play, as in so many others, one may observe that the conception of dramatic form underlying the thesis play and the machine-made Boulevard entertainment is the same: the logically concatenated series of events (intriguing thesis or local intrigue) which the characters and their relationships merely illustrate".15 No wonder this structure was frequently adapted for use by problem play writers who were looking for a concentrated form to demonstrate their dramatic syllogisms. Since logic demands maximum concentration, a late point-of-attack play served their needs. Ghosts, which is plotted, according to Francis Fergusson, "as a series of debates on conventional morality, between Mrs. Alving and the Pastor, the Pastor and Oswald, and his mother", is the finest example of its type: a thesis play done in focused form. The method which especially heightens the suspense of Ghosts is that of revealing only part of what is known. Even if such a technique has now become a cliché, having a revelation which we have been waiting for interrupted at the crucial moment still excites tension and interest. In addition to the plot concentration in Ghosts, a type of concentration which gives most late point-of-attack plays their unity, Ibsen's play gains further unity from two other sources: the character of Mrs. Alving and the theme. Out of a total of three acts and twenty "scenes", Mrs. 14 18

Archibald Henderson, The Changing Drama (New York, 1914), p. 79. Fergusson, p. 163.

34

POINT-OF-ATTACK

Alving appears in all three acts and sixteen of the twenty scenes. The closest any of the other characters come to this kind of participation in the play is Manders, who appears in twelve of the twenty scenes. In short, Mrs. Alving's presence is central to the structure and meaning of the play. It is her tragedy and it is she who therefore occupies the stage a majority of the time. Furthermore, there is the theme of the play, as represented in the title of the play, Ghosts. In particular, the word "ghosts" refers to Oswald's affection for Regina, which parallels Oswald's father's affection for Regina's mother. In general, the meaning of "ghosts" refers to a repeated action. In particular, "ghosts" refers to the idea that the sins of the father are visited on the children (in this case, Oswald is dying of syphilis, which he has supposedly inherited from his father), and that the old, dead beliefs and values by which we lived in the past, return to haunt us in the present. (Mrs. Alving sacrificed self and son for propriety and now the effects of that sacrifice have returned to haunt her.) The various levels at which this theme occurs give an added dimension of unity to the play. As a final word, it should be stressed that most playwrights begin the action of their plays at neither the start nor the end of a story. But where a playwright does begin his action in the story will, to a reasonable degree, govern the extent of the exposition, the number of characters, the treatment of time and place, and the manner in which unity is effected.

3 S T A G E DIRECTIONS A N D S T A G E PROPERTIES

I am taking the liberty of including a brief discussion of exits and entrances in a chapter entitled stage directions and stage properties because in the dramatic text exits and entrances are printed in the stage directions and are an integral part of them. Moreover, to ask why certain characters enter and exit where they do and for what reasons is working toward an understanding of the function and relation of a scene with respect to the whole and to other scenes. The development of ideas entails stage business — the coming and going of characters. In any play, we look for a correlation between the development of the idea and the appearance and departure of characters. The arrival on stage of each new character supplies a new element in the conflict, so that the subject of the play is advanced and developed in every case. Therefore, how the playwright gets his characters on-stage and off-stage and for what reasons is inextricably related to the function and interdependence of scenes and to the meaning of a play. (William Archer once commented that one of the marks of a good playwright is that his exits and entrances are unlabored, natural transitions.) If not haphazardly done, exits and entrances work toward a perceptible end, maintaining a rhythm and logic corresponding to the growth of ideas and meaning in a play. Because the drama presupposes conflict and progressive action, abrupt shifts between scenes are often called for to precipitate confrontations and to forward the movement. Shifts of this kind can blur relationship, inviting the charge of irrelevancy. A t such times, to discover scene interdependence we must frequently rely on the intelligibility of the entrance and exit pattern evident in a play. Exits and entrances condition the spectator to expect or anticipate what is to come, because the logic which governs the action in most plays holds that the exit of one man anticipates the entrance of another. Similarly, a scene can "inhere" within another scene, needing only an exit to have it materialize. The first act of Shaw's Arms and the Man, when Bluntschli

36

STAGE DIRECTIONS AND STAGE PROPERTIES

is concealed behind the curtains, and Raina is nervously directing Louka, the maid, to leave, is an example of one scene masking another. When she does leave, the celebrated scene between Raina and the chocolate cream soldier commences. In this instance, the exit of Louka is the link between the two scenes. And knowing this, the spectator anticipates the scene, looking forward to its start. The longer he waits, the greater is his demand that the scene must be played. Clearly there is no problem concerning relationship between scenes of this nature. Not all scenes, however, are so organically related. Fully aware of this, the playwright foreshadows and prepares for later scenes through, among other things, his stage directions and stage properties. When stage directions and properties set up expectation for future action, bring out character, facilitate exits and entrances, create atmosphere, set the plot in motion, or carry the action over "dead spots", they exceed their conventional function of respectively setting the scene and furnishing the stage, and thus become meaningful in a structural sense.

II Stage directions are of two kinds: written and spoken. We experience them as printed commands in the dramatic text and as "announcements" in the dialogue of a play. In the first instance, they are instructions concerning the time and place of the events, actions, movements, entrances and exits, sound effects, stage properties, costumes, or setting. Occasionally, as in Shaw's formal and lengthy stage directions, a character's personality and history are given. (But this is an outgrowth of the playwright's designing the play to be printed and read, and of the playwright's emphasizing discussion and debate, allowing little occasion to develop character outside of the argument.) In the second instance, the dialogue serves as a verbal stage direction to announce the arrival of a character (often detailing the personality and history of that character) and serves to indicate the action which is taking place off-stage. In this last sense, it is a kind of scene within a scene. The limitations of the Abbey theatre stage, for example, inhibited the presence of numerous characters on-stage at the same time. Thus, when Christy Mahon is winning at the games, in Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, how he is winning, what he is doing and saying, and, at the last, that he is returning are narrated through several excited voices. The Messenger in Greek drama serves a similar function. Prior

STAGE DIRECTIONS AND STAGE PROPERTIES

37

to Agamemnon's return (in the play of the same name), the Messenger announces the details surrounding the king's travels, his dress, the trappings of his chariot, and finally his entrance. The written stage direction, though a particularly modern phenomenon, traces its history to the practice of the Restoration playwrights who, like Wycherley and Shadwell, according to George Pierce Baker, "often prefixed to their printed plays elaborate summaries describing the dramatis personae. . . . 1 Their purpose was doubtless the same as that of certain modern dramatists who, with a view to making plays less difficult for those unaccustomed to reading them, greatly amplify the stage directions before their plays go to print". 2 From the following dramatis personae notes to William Wycherley's The Plain Dealer and Thomas Shadwell's A True Widow, we can gain some insight into why the written stage direction in the modern drama has become as important as it is. First, William Wycherley's The Plain Dealer. Manly, Of an honest, surly, nice humour, suppos'd first in the time of the Dutch War, to have procur'd the Command of a Ship, out of Honour, not Interest; and chusing a Sea-life, only to avoid the World. Freeman, Manly's Lieutenant, a Gentleman well Educated, but of a broken Fortune, a Compiler with the Age. Vernish, Manly's Bosom, and onely Friend. Novel, A pert railing Coxcomb, and an admirer of Novelties, makes Love to Olivia. Major Oldfox, An old impertinate Fop, given to Scribling, makes Love to the Widow Blackacre. My Lord Plausible, A Ceremonious, Supple, Commending Coxcomb, in Love with Olivia. Jerry Blackacre, A true raw Squire under Age, and his Mothers Government, bred to the Law. 1 2

George Pierce Baker, Dramatic Technique (Boston, 1919), p. 276. Ibid., p. 278.

38

STAGE DIRECTIONS AND STAGE PROPERTIES

Olivia, Manly's

Mistriss.

Fidelia, In Love with Manly, and follow'd him to Sea In Man's Cloaths. Eliza, Cousin to Olivia. Lettice, Olivia's Woman. The Widow Blackacre, A petulant, litigious Widow, alwayes in Law, and Mother to Squire Jerry. Lawyers, Knights of the Post, Bayliffs, and Aldermen, a Booksellers Prentice, a Footboy, Sailors, Waiters, and Attendants. 3

Second, Thomas Shadwell's A True Widow. Bellamour, A Gentleman of the Town, who had retired some time into the Countrey. Carlos, A Gentleman return'd from Travel, with Wit enough left to love his own Countrey. Stanmore, A Gentleman of the Town. Selfish, A Coxcomb conceited of his Beauty, Wit and Breeding, thinking all Women in Love with him, always admiring and talking of himself. Old Maggot, An old credulous Fellow, a great Enemy to Wit, and a great Lover of Business, for Business-sake. Yo. Maggot, His Nephew: An Inns of Court-Man, who neglects his Law, and runs mad after Wit, pretending much to Love, and both in spight of Nature, since his Face makes him unfit for one, and his Brains for the other.

J

Citations from The Plain Dealer in my text are to William Wycherley, The Complete Works of William Wycherley, ed. Montague Summers (Soho, England, 1924), Π, 104.

STAGE DIRECTIONS AND STAGE PROPERTIES

39

Prig, A Coxcomb that never talks or thinks of any thing but Dogs, Horses, Hunting, Hawking, Bowls, Tennis, and Gameing; a Rook, a most noisie Jockey. Lump, A methodical Blockhead, as regular as a Clock, and goes as true as a Pendulum, one that knows what he shall do every Day of his Life by his Almanack, (where he sets down all his Actions before-hand, a mortal Enemy to Wit. La. Cheat. The true Widdow, that comes to Town, and makes a show of a Fortune, to put off her self, and her two Daughters. Isabella, Her Eldest, a Woman of Wit and Vertue. Gertrude, Her Youngest, very foolish and whorish. La. Busy, A Woman of Intrigue, very busie in Love-Matters of all kinds, too old for Love of her own, always charitably helping forward that of others, very fond of young Women, very wise and discreet, half Bawd, half Match-maker. Steward, To Lady Cheatly. Players, Door-keepers, and many other Persons, Audience to the Play in the Play.4 We can see from Wycherley's and Shadwell's notes that both men are setting up careful distinctions concerning the personalities of their characters. Both writers could have expected that their plays would be read, as well as performed. During the closing of the English theatres (1642-1660), printed plays were widely circulated. It was at this time that "closet drama" took hold. The reading of plays became as fashionable then as the reading of novels became in the latter half of the eigh4

Citations from A True Widow in my text are to Thomas Shadwell, The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, ed. Montague Summers (London, 1927), III, 287.

40

STAGE DIRECTIONS AND STAGE PROPERTIES

teenth-century. Thus, it would not be unreasonable to assume that, in part, Wycherley and Shadwell had in mind a reading public when they penned their notes. Also, at this time, actors and stage managers and theatre house operators were becoming celebrated figures, frequently enjoying an even more exalted position than the writer himself. The result was that the actors, or directors, or managers often took it upon themselves "to interpret" a role and give it their own special flair and trademark. Needless to say, it became a common complaint on the part of playwrights that their plays were unrecognizable, wrenched out of shape and meaning to fit the personality of the performers or the director. (This is not an uncommon complaint even today.) To guard against this kind of egomania, some of the playwrights resorted to writing in how the characters were to be played and their particular qualities and traits. (Not that it helped; it did not.) But the modern practice of including lengthy and detailed stage directions, while no doubt used for many of the same reasons that Wycherley and Shadwell wrote dramatis personae notes, is an effect of the realistic movement in the nineteenth-century novel. The proliferation of elaborate stage directions, which detail a character's disposition and genealogy, corresponds, according to Archibald Henderson, to the rise of the realistic novel in the last century (emphasis mine). One notes with interest, in the contemporary drama, the presence of epic, in contradistinction to purely dramatic, qualities as a consequence of the influence of fiction. The most striking superficial illustration is the elaborate "stage-directions" of the realistic and naturalistic dramas — let us say of Shaw and Hauptmann. In reality these are no longer "stage-directions": they are minute scenic descriptions and character delineations. For the first time in the history of the drama, the stage-direction becomes an intrinsic part of the

play. The information contained in these scenic descriptions and character delineations in reality constitutes a wealth of epic detail.5 The stage direction makes it possible for the modern playwright (who, it seems, has almost always tried his hand at writing novels) to have the best of both worlds: the dramatic and the narrative. He dramatizes meaning in his play, and through the exposition in the stage directions he explains himself and his characters. The demand for a realistic art form, and especially the demand for psychological accuracy, have, in many cases, forced the playwright to analyze and explain motivations in the stage direction so that the stage action will not have to wait on it. 5

Archibald Henderson, The Changing Drama (New York, 1914), p. 78.

STAGE DIRECTIONS AND STAGE PROPERTIES

41

Moreover, the playwright, in hopes of capturing a "real" setting or atmosphere, of portraying life as it is, willingly resorts to the descriptive technique of the novel. Although there are those who object to the inclusion of any but the most abbreviated information in the stage direction, on the grounds that a good playwright will render meaning, not tell it, such information tends to assure the playwright that his text will have the range and clarity of the novel. In the modern drama, especially, stage directions are written to be read. For example, we need only look at the text of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie to see that the play is to be read as much as it is to be performed. The stage directions call for flashing key words and phrases on a screen suspended from the rear of the set. Although the expressionistic device seems rather heavy-handed, it establishes mood in the play and serves as an introductory device to each scene, creating a pattern of transitions between scenes. Furthermore, without Williams' prologue, which introduces the setting — the thirties, Guernica, and American isolationism — and which introduces the conception of the play (a memory play), The Glass Menagerie would lack context and meaning. The stage directions to The Glass Menagerie are an integral part of that work, giving Tom Wingfield's gossamer memories, recalled at a time when the whole world was on fire, meaning and shape. What is to be emphasized, then, is the fact that the printed stage direction serves an invaluable function in a play. This is not to say that all stage directions do. But when stage directions serve the cause of the whole play, contributing to the meaning and effect of the work, they become essential structural elements, without which a play would suffer. The verbal stage direction serves no less important functions than the printed stage direction. It facilitates the smooth flow from one scene to another by having the first character, on hearing or seeing the second, alert the audience to the latter's arrival. When that alert is accompanied by an introduction concerning the character's history and/or personality, the verbal stage direction is serving as exposition, providing background and characterizations for the audience. Occasionally, the speaker will even characterize himself. During those moments when the off-stage action has a direct bearing on the staged action, the verbal stage direction serves as a description of the absent action, creating, as it were, a scene within a scene. Most of us have, at one time or another, read or seen (on television, or on the stage, or in the movies) the spoken stage direction which provides a "straight" announcement to the effect that another character

42

STAGE DIRECTIONS AND STAGE PROPERTIES

is arriving: for example, "Here comes Cassio now"; "Look, there's John" ; "I can see her getting out of the cab" ; "I hear her in the hallway" ; and so on. A corollary to this device is the one which was so widely used in the nineteenth-century French theatre, where one character asks about a second, and immediately thereafter the second character appears. The utterance of a person's name was tantamount to bringing him onstage as if by magic. This practice became so characteristic of the practitioners of the well-made play that Shaw, who contemptuously called such tricks "Sardoodledom", could not resist parodying his own use of the device in Arms and the Man, itself a well-made play. Early in the second act, Petkoff (Raina's father) has returned home from the war with Sergius (Raina's fiancé). The two of them are sitting conversing with Petkoff's wife, Catherine, in the garden of Major PetkofT's house. After briefly alluding to the wrong way in which he won the battle, Sergius asks about Raina, his fiancée. The parody which follows is self-explanatory (emphasis mine). Sergius. . . . But enough of myself and my affairs. How is Raina; and where is Raina? Raina [suddenly coming round the corner of the house and standing at the top of the steps in the path] Raina is here. Petkoff [aside to Catherine, beaming with parental pride] Pretty, isnt it ? She always appears at the right moment. Catherine [impatiently] Yes : she listens for it. It is an abominable habit.8 We can laugh with Shaw at Shaw because we know that he knows how absurd this device is. But how can we apologize for Ibsen's clumsy use of the same device in The Master Builder ? Although Ibsen obviously intended that it should have symbolic meaning (as will be seen), the "announced" entrance completely undercuts the seriousness of the context in which it appears.7 Midway through Act One, Halvard Solness, the master builder, expresses to Dr. Herdal his fears that youth and new ideas will one day destroy him. When Solness points to the door, as a gesture of emphasis to impress upon the doctor his concern that the • Citations from Arms and the Man in my text are to Bernard Shaw, Complete Plays with Prefaces (New York, 1963), ΠΙ. 7 Ibsen probably learned numerous devices of this kind while serving as director of the Bergen theatre (November 6, 1851 to the summer of 1857) and the Christiana theatre (September, 1857 to 1862), as he frequently produced pièce bien faite plays by Scribe and others.

STAGE DIRECTIONS AND STAGE PROPERTIES

43

younger generation is figuratively on his doorstep, trying to get in at the door, a knock is heard at that same door and Hilda Wangel enters. And it is she who causes the death of Solness at the end of the play. Solness. The luck will turn. I know it — I feel the day approaching. Some one or other will take it into his head to say: Give me a chance! And then all the rest will come clamouring after him, and shake their fists at me and shout: Make room — make room — make room! Yes, just you see, doctor — presently the younger generation will come knock at my door — Dr. Herdal (laughing). Well, and what if they do? Solness. What if they do? Then there's an end of Halvard Solness. (There is a knock at the door on the left.) Solness (starts). What's that? Did you not hear something? Dr. Herdal. Some one is knocking at the door. Solness (loudly). Come in. (Hilda Wangel enters by the hall-door. . . .)*

To have smooth, unlabored exits and entrances is not easy. The excuses and motivations needed to implement exits and entrances have to be prepared for well in advance if the play is to appear natural. More important than the "straight" announcement type of spoken stage directions (including the kind we have just seen in the well-made play) are, from the standpoint of structure and function, the ones which not only announce the arrival of a character, but also characterize him. They enable a new scene to be initiated with the audience in possession of enough information to permit the scene to be played without having to wait on the exposition. Scenes two, three, and four in Act Three of Molière's The Misanthrope provide such an example. It is important, I think, to notice here how Molière gets double and triple duty out of a single speech. First, the spoken direction announces to the audience that someone is coming. (Célimène hears a carriage below.) It is Arsinoé, a so-called friend of Célimène, but really competing with Célimène for the love of Alceste. Second, Célimène tells us about (or rather assassinates) Arsinoé's character. And third, when Arsinoé does appear, the greeting Célimène extends to her is hilarious in contrast to Célimène's preceding comments. 8

Citations from The Master Builder in my text are to Henrik Ibsen, The Master Builder, trans. Edmund Gosse and William Archer, in The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, ed. William Archer (New York, 1908), X, 224-225.

44

STAGE DIRECTIONS AND STAGE PROPERTIES

Célimène. I hear a carriage below. Do you know whose it is? Clitandre. No. SCENE III. Basque. Arsinoé, Madam, is coming up to see you. Célimène. What does the woman want with me? Basque. Eliante is down stairs talking to her. Célimène. What is she thinking about, and what brings her here? Acaste. She has everywhere the reputation of being a consummate prude, and her fervent zeal . . . Célimène. Psha, downright humbug. In her inmost soul she is as worldly as any; and her every nerve is strained to hook some one, without being successful, however. She can only look with envious eyes on the accepted lovers of others; and in her wretched condition, forsaken by all, she is for ever railing against the blindness of the age. She endeavours to hide the dreadful isolation of her home under a false cloak of prudishness; and to save the credit of her feeble charms, she brands as criminal the power which they lack. Yet a swain would not come at all amiss to the lady; and she has even a tender hankering after Alceste. Every attention that he pays me, she looks upon as a theft committed by me, and as an insult to her attractions; and her jealous spite, which she can hardly hide, breaks out against me at every opportunity, and in an underhand manner. In short, I never saw anything, to my fancy, so stupid. She is impertinent to the last degree . . . SCENE IV. Célimène. Ah! what happy chance brings you here, madam? I was really getting uneasy about you. Arsinoé. I have come to give you some advice as a matter of duty. Célimène. How very glad I am to see you! 9 In Molière's play, Célimène serves functions which the modern playwright has been inclined to relegate to the written stage direction: the announcement of entrances and character exposition. But what is to be remembered is that whether the stage direction is written or spoken, it becomes an essential structural device when it serves to link scenes and promote relatedness between them. The "scene within the scene" seems to be a characteristic of plays written f o r theatres known to have limited stage machinery, which made • Citations from The Misanthrope in my text are to Molière, The Dramatic Works of Molière, trans. Henri Van Laun (Edinburgh, 1876), ΙΠ, 317-318.

STAGE DIRECTIONS AND STAGE PROPERTIES

45

scene changes virtually impossible. This is true of "focused" plays as well as "panoramic" plays. The scene within the scene is not a consequence of any one kind of play, rather it is a consequence of a play's being restricted in setting by the exigencies of the stage and the playhouse in which it was performed. The Elizabethan theatres and the Abbey theatre are notable examples of famous playhouses in which scenery changes were described in the course of the dialogue rather than carried out by a stage crew. To indicate a change of place (location) and to give the impression of taking the audience "out of the playhouse" to other climes and places, and thereby increase the scenic variations in a play, the playwrights who wrote for the Abbey theatre and the Elizabethan theatres were forced to include place information and landscape descriptions in the speeches of their characters. Pandaras' description of the marching army in Troilus and Cressida and Enobarbus' description of Cleopatra's barge in Antony and Cleopatra are just such examples. Although the description of Cleopatra's barge is a poetic tour de force, it is short enough to be included here. On Enobarbus' return to Rome, Agrippa questions him about the luxury it has been rumored the Roman soldiers enjoyed in Egypt, and Cleopatra's triumphant entrance. Enobarbus' recital of his Egyptian sojourn includes the famous description of Cleopatra's barge on the river Cydnus, a scene which, since we cannot physically see we demand to hear about. Structurally, the scene within the scene here serves the necessary function of bringing into the theatre of the mind that same view of the stately queen as the one which "pursed up [Antony's] heart". Enobarbus. I will tell you. The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold; Purple the sails, and so perfumed that The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver, Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made The water which they beat to follow faster, As amorous of their strokes. For her own person, It beggar'd all description: she did lie

46

STAGE DIRECTIONS AND STAGE PROPERTIES

In her pavilion — cloth of gold, of tissue — O'er-picturing that Venus where we see The fancy outwork nature. On each side her, Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids, With divers-colour'd fans, whose wind did seem To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool, And what they undid did.10 (II, ii, 190-205)

Through close analysis, then, of the stage direction, in either of its two instances, we may discover and disclose how the playwright subtly uses stage directions to initiate scene changes, to foreshadow action, to indicate characterization, and to narrate scenes within scenes.

Ill

The stage property, a corollary to the stage direction, is, according to J. L. Styan, also a device of great importance in implementing meaning and transitions in a play. In a good play all the agencies of the dramatist from the literary meaning of the word to the non-literary effects of motion and stillness are brought into use as an integral expression of meaning which is indivisible in performance. 11 . . . A stage property can be a vivid token of expression and understanding

When an inanimate object is used for more than decorative purposes, whether to foreshadow, or to carry the action over "dead spots", or to assist the plot, it becomes an essential structural feature, contributing to meaning in the scene and clarifying the relations between scene and play. The stage properties in Shaw's Arms and the Man, for example, are used for setting the scene and also for overall symbolic purposes, as pointed out by the editors of Theme and Form. Like the objects that are named and discussed in stories and poems, stage properties are inclined to take on the multiple meanings of symbols. In Act I 10 Citations from Antony and Cleopatra in my text are to William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. M. R. Ridley (London, 1954), pp. 62-63. 11 J. L. Styan, The Elements of Drama (Cambridge, England, 1960), p. 48.

STAGE DIRECTIONS AND STAGE PROPERTIES

47

of Arms and the Man the stage direction calls for some paper-backed novels, a box of chocolate creams, and a portrait of Sergius on Raina's chest of drawers. At first these seem to be merely the realistic clutter of an inhabited room, but soon, as Raina picks them up or otherwise draws attention to them, they become full of meaning; from the novels her illusions about life have sprung, the portrait brings her fiancé's presence on the stage even though he is away at the war, and the chocolate creams (since this is a comedy) symbolize the reality of experience as represented by Bluntschli. They become identified with the chocolate that he carries in his cartridge box instead of ammunition, and in the end, when Raina agrees to marry him, he is her "chocolate cream soldier". The presence of the properties on the stage, where at the proper time each may be the focus of the audience's eyes, is vital to their success in conveying these multiple meanings. 12 The stage property is of particular importance because its conspicuousness commands attention and excites curiosity. Its presence on stage invites us to look ahead and anticipate what is to come. Used as a plot device, around which some or the whole of the action revolves, it can link scenes by foreshadowing action in a later scene and by carrying the action over "dead spots". Used as a symbol to project psychic processes into visual terms, the stage property becomes a means to dramatize an inner condition. When the stage property directs our attention to something out of the ordinary (such as the ominous white boards that we find on-stage in J. M. Synge's Riders to the Sea), and thus arouses interest (and often concern) about what is to come, it serves as a structural device linking scenes through an aroused expectancy. At the start of the second act in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, the stage direction indicates the presence of something out of the ordinary (emphasis mine). The room at the Tesmans' as in the first Act, except that the piano has been removed, and an elegant little writing-table with book-shelves put in its place. A smaller table stands near the sofa on the left. Most of the bouquets have been taken away. Mrs. Elvsted's bouquet is upon the large table in front. — It is afternoon. Hedda, dressed to receive callers, is alone in the room. She stands by the open glass door, loading a revolver. The fellow to it lies in an open pistolease on the writing-table.13

12

Beardsley, et al., p. 697. Citations from Hedda Gabler in my text are to Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler, trans. Edmund Gosse and William Archer, in The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, ed. William Archer (New York, 1908), X, 62. 13

48

STAGE DIRECTIONS AND STAGE PROPERTIES

Immediately our suspicions are aroused as to the function of the pistols in the play. Later, when Hedda fires the pistol in the garden as Judge Brack approaches, we are especially curious to know why the pistols are here and why Hedda has discharged one of them. The effect of this is to create an expectancy concerning the future action in the play. When it is subsequently learned that Hedda has given the pistol to Eilert Lovborg with which to kill himself, we feel that the previous action has served as a natural transition leading up to this circumstance. And when the final action evolves — namely, that Judge Brack discovers it was Hedda who gave Lovborg the pistol, a disclosure which contributes to Hedda's suicide -— we find this action to be a logical outgrowth of what came before. However, being the playwright that he is, Ibsen does not use the pistols merely to elicit expectancy for future action. He also uses them to characterize Hedda. They constitute, as Kenneth Macgowan succinctly notes, "the only inheritance left to Hedda from her father's estate; they symbolize her physical bankruptcy". 14 A more conspicuous example of the stage property used as a sign to alert us of things to come is the broken tree which is on stage throughout the entire action of Arthur Miller's All My Sons. The play begins with the following stage direction: The back yard of the Keller home in the outskirts of an American town. August of our era. The stage is hedged on right and left by tall, closely planted poplars which lend the yard a secluded atmosphere. Upstage is filled with the back of the house and its open, unroofed porch which extends into the yard some six feet. The house is two stories high and has seven rooms. It would have cost perhaps fifteen thousand in the early twenties when it was built. Now it is nicely painted, looks tight and comfortable, and the yard is green with sod, here and there plants whose season is gone. At the right, beside the house, the entrance of the driveway can be seen, but the poplars cut off view of its continuation downstage. In the left corner, downstage, stands the four-foot high stump of a slender apple tree whose upper trunk and branches lie toppled beside it, fruit still clinging to its branches. Downstage right is a small, trellised arbor, shaped like a sea-shell, with a decorative bulb hanging from its forward-curving roof. Garden chairs and a table are scattered about. A garbage pail on the ground next to the porch steps, a wire leaf-burner near it.16

14

Kenneth Macgowan, A Primer of Playwriting (New York, 1951), p. 139. Citations from All My Sons in my text are to Arthur Miller, Arthur Miller's Collected Plays (New York, 1957), p. 58.

15

STAGE DIRECTIONS AND STAGE PROPERTIES

49

Everything about the house and yard is neat and orderly, except for the broken tree. We ask ourselves why it is there; what does it mean; what consequences will it have? A psychological anticipation is set up which we expect to have satisfied. Thus, when Frank Lubey, at the beginning of the play, mentions Larry and the tree, and asks what Kate will say when she finds out about it, we expect answers to these questions. The broken tree commands our attention throughout the play; it serves as a persistent reminder that there is a mystery here which remains to be settled. Like the pistols in Hedda Gabler, the tree in All My Sons is more than just an ominous sign. It symbolizes the end of a dream which Kate Keller had to believe in if she was not to hold her husband, Joe Keller, responsible for the death of Larry, their oldest son, who was lost in the war. The stage property for both Ibsen and Miller provides a means to create expectancy and initiate action. It renders a specific structural function: it promotes, through foreshadowing, relations between scenes. There are few better examples with which to demonstrate the stage property as plot device than the pièce bien faite plays of the nineteenthcentury. In the hands of playwrights like Scribe, Sardou, and Augier (or for that matter, Shakespeare in Othello), the stage property becomes a plot device to initiate action and induce peripety in the working out of the plot. (The lost handkerchief might have begun with Shakespeare, but it ended ingloriously with the nineteenth-century French playwrights of the pièce bien faite. In particular, the plays of Eugène Scribe and Victorien Sardou provide what Stephen Stanton calls "[a] plot pattern involving the pursuit of a phantom object". 16 (The "phantom object" is a stage property, such as a fan, or handkerchief, or letter.) Sardou, according to Stanton, was the greater of the two, when it came to using the stage property as a device around which to build the action of a play. Sardou emphasized even more than Scribe the chance vicissitudes of a hand prop, such as a shawl or document, as a way of arousing suspense. In welcoming him to the French Academy in 1878 the director commented: "The letter! It plays a major part in most of your plots, and every detail of it is vital, container and contents. The envelope, the seal, the wax, the stamp, the postmark, the shade of the paper, and the perfume that clings to it. .. ,"17 16

Stephen S. Stanton, ed., "Introduction", in Camille and Other Plays (New York, 1957), p. xxii. 17 Ibid., p. xxiii.

50

STAGE DIRECTIONS AND STAGE PROPERTIES

In too many well-made plays, there would be no action without the hand prop. The whole of the action evolves around possession of it. Every scene is built with this in mind. The prop is, in fact, more important to these plays than most of the characters. The stage property used as a structural device to implement the action in static situations and carry it over "dead spots" can be seen in Shaw's Arms and the Man, which provides us with an especially good example. At the end of Act Two of Shaw's Arms and the Man, Bluntschli, Raina's chocolate cream soldier, arrives at Major Petkoff's house ostensibly to return the overcoat which Raina gave him when he took refuge in the Petkoff house during the action encompassing the first act. Having been routed and forced to flee for cover, because of the successful Bulgarian charge that Sergius, Raina's fiancé, led against the Serbs, Bluntschli climbed into Raina's room and bid there until she found him. We learn through the exposition that Raina subsequently cared for Bluntschli and gave him her father's overcoat to wear when he left. Now, at the end of Act Two, he has returned. Apart from the overcoat's creating some wonderfully exciting moments during the closing moments of the second act, when it appears imminent that Major Petkoff will learn that Bluntschli has it, the real function of the overcoat is to sustain the action through the static third act of the play. The third act is the last act of the play, and it is in this act that all the masks of the poseurs are stripped away: Raina's, Bluntschli's, Sergius', and Louka's. But some device is needed to precipitate the exposures and thus maintain the action over what would otherwise be a "dead spot", a standstill; for little else can happen until the exposures take place. The overcoat serves to carry the action over this static situation. It is discovered that Raina left an autographed picture of herself inscribed, "Raina, to her Chocolate Cream Soldier: a Souvenir", in the pocket of the overcoat, but that Bluntschli, who subsequently pawned and then recovered the coat, did not discover the picture. Bluntschli has already returned the coat to Major Petkoff, who has discovered the picture, but, having forgotten to remove the picture, has given the coat to his wife to sew a torn sleeve. Petkoff. Excuse my shirtsleeves, gentlemen. Raina: somebody has been wearing that coat of mine: I'll swear it. Somebody with a differently shaped back. It's all burst open at the sleeve. Your mother is mending it. When Nicola, the man-servant, returns with the coat, Raina quickly takes it from him and offers to help her father put it on. As she does

STAGE DIRECTIONS AND STAGE PROPERTIES

51

so, according to Shaw's own stage directions, "she dexterously takes the photograph from the pocket and throws it on the table before Bluntschli, who covers it with a sheet of paper under the very nose of Sergius, who looks on amazed with his suspicions roused in the highest degree. She then helps Petkoff on with his coat". Petkoff, trying vainly to locate the photograph through his different pockets, starts to tell Raina that he discovered a strange thing in his coat pocket, all the while becoming more and more puzzled at his failure to locate the picture. Petkoff. . . . Oh, by the bye, Ive found something funny. Whats the meaning of this? [He puts his hand into the picked pocket]. Eh? Hallo! [He tries the other pocket]. Well I could have sworn — ! [Much puzzled, he tries the breast pocket]. I wonder — [trying the original pocket]. Where can it — ? [He rises exclaiming]. Your mother's taken it!

The overcoat and the photograph here are used to reveal to Sergius that Raina has loved, not Sergius, but Bluntschli since their first and only encounter. In turn, Major Petkoff learns that the unnamed ladies who, it was rumored, had protected one of the enemy (namely, Bluntschli) during his escape from the Bulgarian charge, are none other than Catherine, his wife, and Raina, his daughter. This disclosure is followed by the discovery that Bluntschli is not married, as Raina thought, and that Louka and Nicola are not engaged, but that Sergius and Louka wish to be. Once the unmasking is over, the play has reached its natural conclusion. It therefore ends just after the "discovery scene". The overcoat and photograph in Arms and the Man are examples of how stage properties can function as a catalyst to incite action and carry the action over what would otherwise have been a "dead spot". Also, the overcoat provides a natural transition between Acts Two and Three. It is an essential stage property, without which the play's rhythm would have been impaired. The use of stage properties as symbols to dramatize an inner condition is characteristic of Expressionist drama. The stagecraft in these plays is justly famous because of the way it assists the playwright in objectifying the inner state of the protagonist's mind. The greatest difficulty faced by the expressionist playwrights was finding a means to dramatize an inner condition — such as a person's soul. In non-representational (that is, symbolist) staging they found a solution. Through the use of eerily Ut stages and distorted properties — for example, Jürgen Fehling and Hans Strohbach's production of Ernst Toller's Man and the Masses,

52

STAGE DIRECTIONS AND STAGE PROPERTIES

in which they used masks and impossibly high stools and desks — the expressionist playwrights effectively created a phantasmagoric world in which they depicted the associative and indistinct workings of the mind. In the opening stage direction of August Strindberg's A Dream Play, for example, we note how the setting evokes the effect of decay and ruin through the juxtaposition of beauty and ugliness. An impression of clouds, crumbling cliffs, ruins of castles and fortresses. The constellations Leo, Virgo and Libra are seen, with the planet Jupiter shining brightly among them. The background shows a forest of giant hollyhocks in bloom: white, pink, crimson, sulphur-yellow and violet. Above thisrisesthe gilded roof of a castle with aflower-budcrowning its summit. Under the walls of the castle lie heaps of straw and stable-muck.18 Through these properties, Strindberg is able to achieve a dream effect and express his theme of human suffering in a world where, as Elizabeth Sprigge explains, "[the] Earth itself stretches heavenward, the Castle grows up out of the manure, the giant hollyhocks climb to the light, and man himself ascends by the ladder of suffering". The symbolically charged properties illustrate, in general, the contrast between man's physical state and his spiritual state; and, in particular, they project into visual terms man's psychic yearning for beauty in the midst of ugliness. Hence, the stage setting contributes to the unity of the play by prefiguring the overall pattern of thought and action in it. As a general rule, in most plays there are usually no gratuitous events, just as there are no aimless exits and entrances, superfluous stage directions, or irrelevant stage properties. A good playwright is economical with his action, making one thing do for several things.

18

Citations from A Dream Play in my text are to August Strindberg, Six Play of Strindberg, trans. Elizabeth Sprigge (Garden City, New York, 1955), pp. 197 and 199.

4 CONTINUATION AND CLOSURE

What Kurt Koffka (German-U.S. psychologist)1 defined as the "law of good continuation" and the "law of closure" are essential psychological principles applicable, of course, to the study of mental behavior, but also applicable to the study of structure and rhythm in a play. According to the law of good continuation, as explained by T. C. Pollock in The Nature of Literature (1942), if prior stimuli have been organized in terms of a certain pattern, the mind will tend to experience immediately succeeding stimuli in terms of this pattern. One's mind will attempt to continue this pattern in a "good" way and to reject stimuli which do not contribute to this "good continuation". "Good" is defined here in terms of characteristics such as simplicity, regularity, and symmetry. . . . According to the law of closure, if a number of stimuli have been organized as part of a unit, the mind will prefer to experience stimuli which will help this unit to a "good" conclusion.2 For the purpose of structural criticism, the important point is that in accordance with the law of good continuation the earlier scenes in a play constitute an incipient order, an inchoate pattern of experience, which the succeeding scenes must continue in a "good" way or be received as "bad" or "irrelevant". And in accordance with the law of closure, a play is satisfactorily concluded when the succeeding scenes have completed the pattern in a "good" way. For example, in Molière's The Miser, Frosina's plan (IV, i) to dupe Harpagon by means of a sham lady of fortune creates an expectation in the audience for the execution of that plan, with its promise of chastening Harpagon. When, instead, the entire scheme is dropped and the play is then concluded with a deus ex machina — the "miraculous" discovery of parentage — what the audience resents, although not by name, is, first, the playwright's dis1 2

Kurt Koffka (1886-1941) was one of the founders of Gestalt psychology. Thomas Clark Pollock, The Nature of Literature (Princeton, 1942), p. 127.

54

COlSrriNUATION AND CLOSURE

regard for "good" continuation and, second, his indifference to a closure issuing from "good" continuation. Because Frosina's plan is not realized, there is a violation of its implicit organization. Perhaps this is only to say that all good drama creates forward movements, patterns of anticipation and expectation. In any play, as the earlier scenes progressively develop an action, the spectator or reader psychologically anticipates the "good" continuation or closure of that action. He does so because he is working from a familiar pattern of experience (an archetype), which he perceives in a play. But, as Alan Downer observes, even if the experience in a play is not perceived as an archetypal experience, we are never wholly unprepared for what happens, if what happens does so logically. "Although the events of the plot cannot always be anticipated by the spectator, they never come as a total surprise to him — unawares, he has been prepared for them by what a French playwright called 'the logic of events' ". 3 Preparation and rhythm, in a structural sense, then, are the result of action (or scenes) taking place in a temporal series. T. C. Pollock observes that "the fact that linguistic symbols are received in a time-order by the writer makes it possible for the writer not only to prepare the setting for the reception of symbols, but also to concentrate on one particular type of effect".4 The preceding scenes in a play create a rhythm which helps to determine the effect produced by the succeeding scenes. Thus, the law of good continuation and the law of closure are essential psychological features which contribute to the rhythm of a play by establishing the psychological relationship between the parts (scenes) of a play. According to the law of good continuation, each new choice the playwright makes increasingly limits his particular choices in the future. This is only another way of saying, as Moody Prior does in The Language of Tragedy (1947), that the more we know about something — a person, the weather, a disease, a play — the less unpredictable that something becomes. Also, the more we know about something, the more we can say what is probable and necessary about that something. Prior explains the principle in this way: Character, for instance, is an important factor in any scheme of probability and necessity in a play; what we know about a character gives us grounds for comprehending his actions and also restricts the way in which he will meet the contingencies of the situation. Moreover, though the character 3

Alan S. Downer, The Art of the Play (New York, 1955), p. 188. * Pollock, p. 131.

CONTINUATION AND CLOSURE

55

becomes more fully understood as the number o f episodes in which he functions is multiplied, that very enlargement of our knowledge actually limits the probable ways in which the character can behave. For instance, the behavior of Othello when he dismisses Cassio for unbecoming conduct while on duty anticipates his judgment and murder of Desdemona, and so, once we take into account the intervening differences in circumstances between the two events, his horrible act of perverted justice and honor becomes a matter o f necessity. Moreover, in any given dramatic situation there are only a finite number of possibilities within which the play may properly move, any one of which may be probably determinant in the outcome. A s the progress of the action eliminates one or more of the possibilities, the others become increasingly probable. 6

We might call this effect, to coin a term, "the law of diminishing possibilities". It simply means that each new choice restricts the playwright's succeeding one, because each new choice progressively exhausts the possibilities for alternative action. This effect is particularly important because it provides us with an understanding of how the playwright's choices determine the pattern of action and rhythm in a play. Once a pattern is recognized, the audience anticipates the continuation of that pattern in a "good" way. To the extent that the succeeding scenes contribute to a recognizable pattern, we experience them in a "good" way. If the succeeding scenes disrupt that pattern, we receive them in a "bad" way. For example, were Sophocles' Oedipus not to discover the truth about himself, the effect would be to upset the whole impression of the play, because the pattern of action and rhythm throughout has increasingly built to a predetermined scene and effect. When the sequence of action and rhythm in a play presses the audience to expect a scene which must be played, that scene is called the scène à faire,6 or the "obligatory scene". "An obligatory scene", William Archer says, "is one which the audience (more or less clearly and consciously) foresees and desires, and the absence of which it may with reason resent".7 Certainly the American movie western has familiarized most of us with the "obligatory scene". At one time or another, we have waited to see the hero's single-handed cliff's edge battle with the villain(s), or the hero's horseback pursuit and capture of the villain, or the good homesteaders' defense of their wagon train against the barbarous Indians. Each is an obligatory scene, made necessary by the progress 5

Moody Prior, The Language of Tragedy (New York, 1947), pp. 4-5. Scène à faire is a term invented by the nineteenth-century French critic and champion of the pièce bien faite. Francisque Sarcey. 7 William Archer, Play-Making (Boston, 1912), p. 227. β

56

CONTINUATION AND CLOSURE

of the preceding action, and even preceding plays and movies with similar conventions, themes, plots, and the like. The obligatory scene is simply an effect of the law of good continuation. The preceding scenes in a play begin a pattern of action which must be continued until it is concluded to the audience's satisfaction. The obligatory scene is the scene which offers that satisfaction. When a playwright neglects to exploit a particular eifect implicit in the pattern of action and rhythm in his play, we question why. Were the scene in which Candida chooses between Marchbanks and Morell not to take place, the cumulative effect of the action and rhythm in the play would be dissipated. According to the law of closure, if only a part of a total pattern of action is present, we tend to complete the pattern in a "good" way. (This is known as the "closure tendency".) For example, when Everyman starts out on a journey "to prove his friends — if he can" (in the play Everyman), the law of good continuation is set in motion, governing to an increasing degree the pattern of action involved in that journey. Each refusal Everyman suffers from his friends prepares us for the next, securing us in our belief that eventually Everyman must go with Death. The cycle of action is completed when a total pattern is formed. After Fellowship, Kindred and Cousin, and Goods reject Everyman, and Good Deeds accepts him, we tend to regard that cycle of action — Everyman's testing of his friends — as complete. We recognize that the pattern begins with Everyman's hope to find someone to accompany him on his "journey", and that it will not be completed until the action exhausts certain possibilities. Specifically, in Everyman the pattern cannot be completed until the action shows that with the exception of Good Deeds, all one's human and material attachments in this world are, at Judgment, ephemeral. At this point, we experience "good" closure. The circuit is closed. Were the action to stop prior to this point, we would observe that the pattern was incomplete, violating "good" continuation. Were the action to continue beyond this point, we would observe that the pattern had already been completed, violating "good" closure. This last condition, in fact, is what we commonly call an anticlimax. An anticlimax occurs when the action in the play exceeds the point of "good" closure. In other words, the play should have ended prior to the point at which it did because the pattern of action was already complete. What has been said about the uninterrupted action in Everyman is also true of an interrupted action, such as we find in plays with a double

CONTINUATION AND CLOSURE

57

plot. A pattern of action begun in one scene or act and not completed until several scenes or acts later is still subject to the laws of anticipation and completion. It is because Frosina's plan in The Miser is completely ignored after having been introduced that we find fault with the dramatic structure of that play.

II By way of example, I have selected Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere''s Fan to show how the psychological effects of good continuation and closure underlie the pattern of action and rhythm in a play. In the latter part of the chapter, I have used different plays to demonstrate how the possible choices of dramatic action, character delineation, and language become increasingly limited as a play progresses; and how the laws of good continuation and closure predetermine the ending of a play and, when there is one, the "obligatory scene". In the first act of Lady Windermere's Fan,9 we learn that Lady Windermere is having a party that same evening to celebrate her twenty-first birthday. Her husband, Lord Windermere, with whom she is very much in love, has given her an elegant ostrich-feather fan as a birthday gift. Having provided that exposition, Wilde begins to construct the pattern of action which will follow in the play. Lord Darlington calls on Lady Windermere and during the course of their conversation he reveals that he loves her, suggesting that she should go away with him. When she declares herself in favor of "Ideal Love" and self-sacrifice for one's husband, Lord Darlington asks: Lord Darlington. Do you think then — of course I am only putting an imaginary instance — do you think, that in the case of a young married couple, say about two years married, if the husband suddenly becomes the intimate friend of a woman of — well, more than doubtful character, is always calling upon her, lunching with her, and probably paying her bills — do you think that the wife should not console herself? Lady Windermere, who has a reputation for being a "good" woman, replies: Lady Windermere. Because the husband is vile — should the wife be vile also? 8

Citations from Lady Windermere's Fan in my text are to Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Garden City, New York, 1923), ΥΠ.

58

CONTINUATION AND CLOSURE

Shortly thereafter Lord Darlington leaves. But we are left wondering why, if Lady Windermere has rejected Lord Darlington's advances and has severely answered his "hypothetical" question, apparently ending his hopes, this brief scene was shown to us. It would be unusual to start a play with a concluded action. However, we know that such scenes are not thrown out aimlessly, so we suspend judgment about this initial scene and patiently wait. What we discover after the play is completed is that the proposition, "should a woman who has learned of her husband's infidelity 'get even' by entering into an affair of her own", underlies the entire pattern of action in the play. In fact, Lady Windermere's Fan is primarily a dramatization of the pros and cons of that question. Just prior to Lord Darlington's exit, the Duchess of Berwick and her daughter Agatha Carlisle enter. After a few insignificant comments are exchanged, the Duchess expresses her regrets to Lady Windermere that Lord Windermere is seeing another woman, a Mrs. Erlynne. Duchess. He goes to see her continually, and stops for hours at a time, and while he is there she is not at home to any one. Not that many ladies call on her, dear, but she has a great many disreputable men friends — my own brother in particular, as I told you — and that is what makes it so dreadful about Windermere. We looked upon him as being such a model husband, but I am afraid there is no doubt about it. My dear nieces — you know the Saville girls, don't you? — such nice domestic creatures — plain, dreadfully plain, but so good — well, they're always at the window doing fancy work, and making ugly things for the poor, which I think so useful of them in these dreadful socialistic days, and this terrible woman has taken a house in Curzon Street, right opposite them — such a respectable street, too. I don't know what we're coming to! And they tell me that Windermere goes there four and five times a week — they see him. They can't help it — and although they never talk scandal, they — well, of course — they remark on it to every one. — And the worst of it all is, that I have been told that this woman has got a great deal of money out of somebody, for it seems that she came to London six months ago without anything at all to speak of, and now she has this charming house in Mayfair, drives her pony in the Park every afternoon, and all — well all — since she has known poor dear Windermere. It is here, for the first time, that we see clearly the direction in which the action will proceed. The Duchess' accusations establish the relationship between this scene and the previous one, between Lady Windermere and Lord Darlington. The implications of Lord Darlington's "imaginary instance" are now brought into focus. G o o d continuation demands that we discover whether or not the Duchess' charges (and Lord Darlington's

CONTINUATION AND CLOSURE

59

allusions) are true. If these events were n o t returned to, we would wonder why Wilde h a d troubled to bring them up. After the Duchess and her daughter have left, Lady Windermere, her suspicions roused, searches her husband's desk in order t o find his check book. At first she only comes u p o n his "regular" bank book which discloses nothing out of the ordinary. But then she discovers a private, locked bank book, which she cuts open. It is in this "secret" check book that she reads of the large sums of money Lord Windermere has been giving to Mrs. Erlynne. Lady Windermere. How horrible! I understand now what Lord Darlington meant by the imaginary instance of the couple not two years married. Oh! it can't be true — she spoke of enormous sums of money paid to this woman. I know where Arthur keeps his bank book — in one of the drawersof that desk.I might find out by that.Ivf///findout.[Opensdrawer.] No, it is some hideous mistake. [Rises and goes CJ Some silly scandal! He loves mei He loves mei But why should I not look! [Returns to bureau, takes out book and examines it, page by page, smiles and gives a sigh of relief.] I knew it, there is not a word of truth in this stupid story. [Puts book back in drawer. As she does so, starts and takes out another book.] A second book — private — locked! [Tries to open it, but fails. Sees paper knife on bureau, and with it cuts cover from book. Begins to start at the first page.] Mrs. Erlynne — £ 600 — Mrs. Erlynne — £ 700 — Mrs. Erlynne — £ 400. Oh! it is true! it is true. How horrible! [Throws book on floor.] At this inopportune moment, Lord Windermere enters. Seeing what his wife has done, he tells her that she has n o right to spy on him. An argument ensues, in which Lady Windermere accuses her husband of infidelity, which he denies, defending Mrs. Erlynne's character against Lady Windermere's charges. During the course of the argument it is revealed that Mrs. Erlynne is a widow and wishes to be received in good society. Lord Windermere. I am not going to give you any details about her life. I tell you simply this — Mrs. Erlynne was once honoured, loved, respected. She was well born, she had a position — she lost everything — threw it away, if you like. That makes it all the more bitter. Misfortunes one can endure — they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults — ah! there is the sting of life. It was twenty years ago, too. She was little more than a girl then. She had been a wife for even less time than you have. Margaret, you could save this woman. She wants to get back into society, and she wants you to help her.

60

CONTINUATION AND CLOSURE

Lord Windermere asks his wife to invite Mrs. Erlynne to the party she is giving that evening. Lady Windermere indignantly refuses. Lord Windermere insists. When Lady Windermere again refuses, he addresses an invitation card to her himself and has the servant take it to her at once. At this point in the action, we know that we are moving toward a "confrontation" between Lady Windermere and Mrs. Erlynne. We are already anticipating the scene; it is obligatory. But, as William Archer points out, for reasons of expectancy, Wilde was not content to end the scene here. Here some playwrights might have been content to finish the act. It is sufficiently evident that Lady Windermere will not submit to the apparent insult, and that something exciting may be looked for at the reception in the following act. But Oscar Wilde was not content with this vague expectancy. He first defined it, and then he underlined the definition, in a perfectly natural and yet ingenious and skilful way. The day happens to be Lady Windermere's birthday, and at the beginning of the act her husband has given her a beautiful ostrich-feather fan. When he sends off the invitation, she turns upon him and says, "If that woman crosses my threshold, I shall strike her across the face with this fan." Here, again many a dramatist might be content to bring down his curtain. The announcement of Lady Windermere's resolve carries forward the interest quite clearly enough for all practical purposes. But even this did not satisfy Wilde. He imagined a refinement, simple, probable, and yet immensely effective, which put an extraordinarily keen edge upon the expectancy of the audience. He made Lady Windermere ring for her butler, and say: "Parker, be sure you pronounce the names of the guests very distinctly tonight. Sometimes you speak so fast that I miss them. I am particularly anxious to hear the names quite clearly, so as to make no mistake". I well remember the effect which this little touch produced on the first night. The situation was, in itself, open to grave objections. There is no plausible excuse for Lord Windermere's obstinacy in forcing Mrs. Erlynne upon his wife, and risking a violent scandal in order to postpone an explanation which he must know to be ultimately inevitable. Though one had not as yet learnt the precise facts of the case, one felt pretty confident that his lordship's conduct would scarcely justify itself. But interest is largely independent of critical judgment, and, for my own part, I can aver that, when the curtain fell on the first act, a fivepound note would not have bribed me to leave the theatre without assisting at Lady Windermere's reception in the second act. 9 By exciting expectation for the scene between Lady Windermere and Mrs. Erlynne, Wilde links the end of the first act and the start of the second. We are to be witness to a scene which must be played — our sense of good continuation demands it. Once the scene is played that » Archer, pp. 178-179.

CONTINUATION AND CLOSURE

61

unit of action, which constitutes only a part of the overall pattern of action in Lady Windermere's Fan, is completed. A closure is effected because the unit is completed in a "good" way. But although that unit of action, when completed, satisfies our expectations, there still remain other aspects of the overall pattern of action in the play which need to be continued, if we are not to be disappointed. It yet remains to discover why Lord Windermere is giving Mrs. Erlynne money and who she is. Then, too, we anticipate that Lord Darlington will be heard from again, otherwise why would Wilde have had him confess his love to Lady Windermere? We can assign a function to his alluding to Lord Windermere's supposed affair (it substantiates what the Duchess says in the next scene and generally contributes to precipitating the action in the play), but why was it necessary for him also to express his love for Lady Windermere? This remains to be answered. Also, there is the matter of the ostrich feather fan. Hand props in well-made plays are notoriously functional. We want to know why the fan has been introduced and what part it will play in the action. These unanswered questions maintain expectation, prompting us to look ahead and anticipate their solution. If the action is to be continued in a "good" way, Wilde must answer these questions and the question: should a wife "get even". But somehow he must find a way to join in a single pattern the following actions, which are not entirely related: Lord Windermere's relationship with Mrs. Erlynne; Mrs. Erlynne's "history"; Lord Darlington's professed love for Lady Windermere; and the fan. The party provides the catalyst. During Lady Windermere's birthday party, Lord Windermere, through no fault of his own (which Lady Windermere does not know), is compelled to spend the evening as Mrs. Erlynne's escort. Lord Darlington seeing Lady Windermere's growing consternation once again declares his love for her, begging her to run away with him — if she has the courage. Lord Darlington. My life — my whole life. Take it, and do with it what you will. . . . I love you — love you as I have never loved any living thing. From the moment I met you I loved you, loved you blindly, adoringly, madly! You did not know it then — you know it now! Leave this house tonight. I won't tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world's voice, or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too much. But there are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely — or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. You have that moment now. Choose! Oh, my love, choose!

62

CONTINUATION AND CLOSURE

Lady Windermere. [Moving slowly away from him, and looking at him with startled eyes.] I have not the courage. Lord Darlington. [Following her.] Yes; you have the courage. There may be six months of pain, of disgrace even, but when you no longer bear his name, when you bear mine, all will be well. Margaret, my love, my wife that shall be some day — yes, my wife! You know it! What are you now? This woman has the place that belongs by right to you. Oh! go — go out of this house, with head erect, with a smile upon your lips, with courage in your eyes. All London will know why you did it; and who will blame you? No one. If they do, what matter? Wrong? What is wrong? It's wrong for a man to abandon his wife for a shameless woman. It is wrong for a wife to remain with a man who so dishonours her. You said once you would make no compromise with things. Make none now. Be brave! Be yourself! Lady Windermere. I am afraid of being myself. Let me think! Let me wait! My husband may return to me. But, in fact, Lady Windermere does not think that her husband will return to her. Consequently, she decides to accept Lord Darlington's offer. Lady Windermere. To stay in this house any longer is impossible. To-night a man who loves me offered me his whole life. I refused it. It was foolish of me. I will offer him mine now. I will give him mine. I will go to him! [Puts on cloak and goes to the door, then turns back. Sits down at table and writes a letter, puts it into an envelope, and leaves it on the table.] Arthur has never understood me. When he reads this, he will. He may do as he chooses now with his life. I have done with mine as I think best, as I think right. It is he who has broken the bond of marriage — not I. I only break its bondage. [Exit.] It is Lady Windermere's decision which provides Wilde with the incident he needs to bring together the separate units of action in the play. Just as we are wondering what is in the letter and what will happen when Lord Windermere reads it, Mrs. Erlynne intercepts it, crying out as she reads it: Mrs. Erlynne. No, no! It would be impossible! Life doesn't repeat its tragedies like that! Oh, why does this horrible fancy come across me? Why do I remember now the one moment of my life I most wish to forget? Does life repeat its tragedies? [Tears letter open and reads it, then sinks down into a chair with a gesture of anguish.] Oh, how terrible! The same words that twenty years ago I wrote to her father! and how bitterly I have been punished for it! No; my punishment, my real punishment is to-night, is now!

CONTINUATION AND CLOSURE

63

This is the first really important exposition we have concerning Mrs. Erlynne's past. It is immediately followed by this total disclosure: Mrs. Erlynne. What can I do? What can I do? I feel a passion awakening within me that I never felt before. What can it mean? The daughter must not be like the mother — that would be terrible. How can I save her? How can I save my child? A moment may ruin a life. Who knows that better than I? Going to Lord Darlington's rooms to bring her daughter (Lady Windermere) home, Mrs. Erlynne and Lady Windermere are forced to hide because Lord Darlington and several other men, Lord Windermere among them, enter the lodging. But Lady Windermere's fan is found by one of the men and recognized by her husband. This discovery is accompanied by a rustling of the curtains, behind which Lady Windermere is hidden. As Lord Windermere rushes toward the curtains Mrs. Erlynne enters from the other side of the room and calls to Lord Windermere. All the men in the room turn and stare at her, amazed to find her there. While the men are so diverted, Lady Windermere slips out from behind the curtains and exits unnoticed, arriving home undetected. Mrs. Erlynne goes on to explain the fan by claiming to have mistakenly walked off with it when she left the party. Subsequently, Lord Windermere returns home, inveighs against Mrs. Erlynne's misbehavior (being discovered in Lord Darlington's rooms) and tells Lady Windermere that she is never to see Mrs. Erlynne again, declaring that the fan he bought his wife is now detestable to him, tinged with immorality. In typical well-made play fashion the mention of Mrs. Erlynne's name is the cue for her entrance. Apparently she has called on Lady Windermere to return her fan. Shortly after Mrs. Erlynne's entrance, she asks Lady Windermere if she may have a picture of Lady Windermere and her son. This provides the means to get Lady Windermere off-stage. During her absence, the reason for Lord Windermere's patronage of Mrs. Erlynne is disclosed: Lord Windermere. But rather than my wife should know — that the mother whom she was taught to consider as dead, the mother whom she has mourned as dead, is living — a divorced woman going about under an assumed name, a bad woman preying upon life, as I know you now to be — rather than that, I was ready to supply you with money to pay bill after bill, extravagance after extravagance, to risk what occurred yesterday, the first quarrel I have ever had with my wife. When Lord Windermere goes to see if Mrs. Erlynne's carriage has arrived, it provides Mrs. Erlynne with an opportunity to speak with Lady Windermere alone. During this time Mrs. Erlynne extracts from

64

CONTINUATION AND CLOSURE

Lady Windermere a promise that she will never tell her husband what really happened. Before leaving, Mrs. Erlynne, who is planning to depart from England and live on the Continent, asks Lady Windermere if she might keep her fan. Lady Windermere gives it to her, knowing that in removing the fan she is removing the symbol of her own misconduct and an object which has become hateful to her husband. With the absence of the fan and Mrs. Erlynne, peace and happiness are restored to the Windermere home. Lady Windermere's decision to go to Lord Darlington's home, her intercepted letter, and her meeting with Mrs. Erlynne in Lord Darlington's rooms, then, are the circumstances which provide Wilde with the means to bring the different actions to a good closure. Each of the actions is returned to and continued, as we had psychologically expected it would be. Each action is concluded according to the logic implicit in the total scheme. Lord Darlington's love for Lady Windermere was needed as a motivation to persuade that lady to leave her husband, just as Mrs. Erlynne had left Lady Windermere's father years before. But unlike Mrs. Erlynne, who did lose her husband, Lady Windermere nearly loses her husband. The fan, a symbol of Lady Windermere's guilt, becomes for Mrs. Erlynne a symbol of self-sacrifice, of parental love — something she had never experienced before. The past, which Mrs. Erlynne attempts to conceal in order to be admitted into polite society, and Mhich Lord Windermere tries to conceal from his wife, cannot be so easily forgotten (one of the more familiar Victorian dictums). Each action satisfies an expectancy aroused earlier in the play. We may laugh at the nature of the intrigue itself and the values involved, but such matters are a question of taste. To move on to another part of the discussion, I said earlier that as a play progresses the possible choices for dramatic action, character delineation, and language become increasingly limited. I want to point out that in any plot in which the action moves, as it were, from left to right, the action is self-limiting. Each successive event or episode limits the possible choices for action in the future. Each scene carries within it the germ of later scenes. For example, at the end of Act One in King Lear, Lear has departed from Goneril's house because of her insistence that fifty retainers are quite enough. But even though the act is over we know that this unit of action is not. The law of good continuation psychologically prepares us to expect that in Act Two we will find Lear at Regan's house. The unit of action is not completed until Lear exiles himself from Regan's house, as he had previously done from Goneril's.

CONTINUATION AND CLOSURE

65

Once Lear has exhausted the possibility of living with his daughters (either one), that unit of action is completed; his logical alternatives for action are fewer than they were at the start of the play. Each choice narrows the field; and so it goes until the action becomes almost selfdefining, leading us down a progressively narrower tunnel, as it were, until we are brought to an ending predetermined by the logic of what came before. When the law of diminishing possibilities is applied to a character, it simply means that the more familiar we are with a character the more predictable is his behavior. Increased knowledge of a character limits the possible ways he can behave in a manner unfamiliar to us. When he does act in an unpredictable manner, we say that he is acting out-ofcharacter. Hence, the greater the character portrait, the more limited is the playwright in devising new ways for that character to act in subsequent action. For example, the more we know about Shakespeare's Cleopatra, the more we know that she will die before submitting to Caesar's wish that she return to Rome. The more we know about Shaw's Morell, the more we know that he is the weaker man whom Candida must choose. The more we know about Tennessee Williams' Amanda Wingfield, the more we know that she cannot prevent Tom from leaving because she is driving him to it. The law of diminishing possibilities also restricts the choices of language available to the playwright. If he is not to repeat himself, he must constantly find new ways (new language units) to express the attitudes and values of his characters. The same idea applies to how a play ends. The pattern of action impressed on the story early in a play grows increasingly more influential. For this reason, writers frequently say that their stories "write themselves". Once a train of events is set in motion, it does not stop until a destination, arrived at over an ever narrowing track, is reached. The extreme of this situation is the "obligatory scene". Because each choice limits the succeeding one and progressively delineates character, story, and speech, the playwright can work toward a single moment, or effect, or scene in a play; namely, an obligatory scene. When the whole of the action conspires to lead the audience to expect a certain scene, the playwright, as John van Druten observes, has no choice but to show that scene. (Not to do so would be to create a reversal so extreme as to disrupt the overall impression of the play.) You take a play about a young man who has an unknown illegitimate brother or sister. (So many plays used to be all about that; were there more of those

66

CONTINUATION AND CLOSURE

in the older days?) The "scène à faire" is the scene where they discover the fact, and of their meeting as such. This is understandable. We have all recognized such scenes coming way ahead of themselves. In A Streetcar Named Desire the scene of the rape was an obligatory scene. We foresaw it, we knew it had to happen, it would have been a serious mistake to have left it off stage. The last line of that scene indicates its necessity to us: "We've had this date with each other from the beginning". The audience has had the date, too, and it had to be fulfilled. The disillusionment scene with Mitch in the same play is equally obligatory. There was a story that used to be told in conferences in motion picture studios. If you have planted a volcano early in the picture, and have planted the danger of its eruption, you cannot finish the picture without showing that eruption. You cannot have a character remark: "You remember that volcano that we were all afraid would erupt? Well, it erupted last night". The eruption was the "scène à faire". You had to write it. 10 Subtle, b u t vital, psychological patterns take shape as a play progresses. The more apparent the pattern becomes, the more it predetermines and limits the choices for subsequent action. The inclination of the mind to f o r m patterns accounts for the psychological effects Kurt Koffka called the "law of good continuation" and the "law of closure". It is these effects which help to explain how the structural process of relations takes place; that is, how the parts in a play are organized into their final form.

10

John van Draten, Playwright at Work (New York, 1953), pp. 178-179.

5

RHYTHM

While other structural devices contribute to the growth of a play, it is rhythm, as J. A. Withey notes, "which determines the direction of the growth'n (emphasis mine). Rhythm is created by change. Without change there is no rhythm. John Dewey, in Art as Experience (1934), speaking of rhythm philosophically as an aesthetic principle, defines rhythm as . . . ordered variations of changes. When there is a uniformly even flow, with no variations of intensity or speed, there is no rhythm. There is a stagnation even though it be the stagnation of unvarying motion. Equally there is no rhythm when variations are not placed. . . . The change not only comes but it belongs; it has a definite place in a larger whole. . . . There is no rhythm of any kind, no matter how delicate and no matter how extensive, when variation of pulse and rest do not occur. 8

Dramatic rhythm is created by two change-producing elements : recurrence (for example, the recurring relationships between characters within scenes and recurring words, phrases, symbols, and motifs in a play) and reversal (for example, a change in fortune; a sudden or unexpected change of circumstances or situation). The rhythm issuing from recurrence3 creates an identifiable pattern or "beat" which conditions the audience to expect certain events, while adding force and meaning to other events which have already taken place. "Each beat", says Dewey, "in differentiating a part within the whole, adds to the force of what went before while creating a suspense that is a demand for something to come".4 During the course of a play, the spectator's expectancy is increased in proportion to his exposure to 1

J. A. Withey, "Form and the Dramatic Text", Educational Theatre Journal, ΧΠ (October, 1960), 206. 2 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York, 1934), p. 154. 3 Recurring relationships are, according to Dewey, "relationships that sum up and carry forward" (p. 166). 4 Dewey, p. 155.

68

RHYTHM

the pattern of rhythm or beat at work in the play. It is recurrence that satisfies that expectancy. Moreover, as Dewey remarks, in so doing, recurrence "also institutes a new longing, incites a fresh curiosity, establishes a changed suspense".5 That is, when there is recurrence of any kind in a play, it is not mere repetition; it is different because it is repeated in a different context. In Bernard Shaw's Candida, for example, when Morell and Marchbanks are on stage alone in the first of two such scenes, Morell regards Marchbanks with supreme self-confidence and condescension. Marchbanks, on the other hand, is timid, unsure of himself, and even somewhat frightened. And although at the end of the scene Marchbanks bravely challenges the idea of Morell's happy marriage to Candida, and Morell exhibits the effects of this challenge by coming close to physically attacking Marchbanks, Morell remains contemptuous of Marchbanks' cowardice. In contrast to this scene in Act One is the scene in Act Three which finds a self-assured and confident Marchbanks deriding a now humbled and apologetic Morell. Discovered in the intervening action was Marchbanks' strength and Morell's dependence. Another point about recurring relationships is that the scene in which a relationship is repeated is not merely an extension of a prior scene.6 Even if the later scene is related to earlier ones, it is independent also, serving a distinctly individual function. As Dewey observes, "recurring relationships serve to define and delimit parts, giving them individuality of their own. .. .They also connect; the individual entities they mark off demand, because of the relations, association and interaction with other individuals. Thus the parts vitally serve in the construction of an expanded whole".7 The second of the change-producing elements is reversal. In any conflict, expectation is aroused about the fortunes of one or more of the characters. If that expectation is unfulfilled, we experience a reversal. Reversal promotes change by violating expectation. Because characters in conflict are subject to unexpected reversals, the expected rhythmic pattern is often violated, delaying or even denying fulfillment. But there must be expectation before there can be a violation of it. We expect one thing to happen and something else does. 5

Ibid., p. 169. A repeated relationship, writes Dewey, "gains force because the new contexts in which it is found, color it and give it a new value, even if only that of a more insistent, precise and cumulative enunciation of a theme" (p. 166). 7 Dewey, p. 166. β

RHYTHM

69

While we are surprised by this, the accompanying effect of elation or disappointment excites new rhythm in the play. I. A. Richards, in defining reversal in Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), states: There can be no surprise and n o disappointment unless there is expectation and most rhythms perhaps are made up as much of disappointments and postponements and surprises and betrayals as of simple, straightforward satisfactions. Hence the rapidity with which t o o simple rhythms, those which are too easily 'seen through', grow cloying and insipid. 8

In other words, if expectancy were constantly satisfied, as, for example, it is in the stock situations and cliché-movies of Hollywood, the rhythm of a play would necessarily grow "cloying or insipid". Although we usually associate reversal with the somber fortunes of a tragic hero, it is also one of the most effective (and often used) techniques in comedy. Without reversal, the melodramas of the nineteenthcentury and the "classic" comedies of the silent films — the great chases and train robberies, the pratfalls of Charlie Chaplin, the escapades of Laurel and Hardy, the mad car rides of the Keystone Cops, to name only a few — would have been impossible. For the surest way to incite action and regulate the rhythms of play and movie is through a controlled series of reversals. Depending on where the reversal is located and how it is timed, it can command practically unlimited variations in rhythm and excitement — the possibilities for excitement limited only by the number of reversals in the work. In fact, scenes and episodes in plays and in the cinema are often devised entirely for reasons of rhythm. A writer or producer of action-filled movies, such as Alfred Hitchcock, will frequently choose a hazardous setting because it is ready-made for reversals, like the hazardous setting Hitchcock used for the chase in his movie North by Northwest — the precipitous rocksculpted faces on Mt. Rushmore. As the rhythm of recurrence and reversal guides the action of a play, the silence or interval which follows a completed action permits the spectator to assimilate that action. A silence in a play's rhythm enables the audience to draw together and absorb the recurrent and dissimilar rhythmic units in the play. For example, as reversal occurs, there is a relaxation of tension. The values and energy, accumulated from what came before are released. At this moment there is a rest, a rhythmic pause, which enables the spectator to "take in" the just completed 8

I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (New York, 1924), pp. 137-138.

70

RHYTHM

action, seeing its meaning and relationship to the preceding action. This interval permits the spectator a moment to synthesize present action with past action, experiencing all that has preceded as a unity. Recurrence and reversal, then, are the means by which the playwright creates rhythm. The overall pattern of rhythm in a play results from the psychological effect(s) the playwright impresses upon the form of the work in order to condition the audience to expect one thing and not another.

Π I have selected Victorien Sardou's A Scrap of Paper9 and Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding10 to demonstrate how rhythm directs the growth of a play. The first work exhibits all the characteristics of a good melodrama and has similar qualities to those I mentioned as being associated with the silent films. It is an extreme example — my reason for selecting it. The second play, The Member of the Wedding, is a melancholy story of adolescence and loneliness, tinged with comedy and tragedy alike. It is the opposite of Sardou's play. It dramatizes a seemingly static situation; yet when looked at closely, the play reveals a rhythm which corresponds to one of the more important themes in the play (as expressed respectively by Frankie and Berenice) : "That the world is certainly — a sudden place". "Sometimes sudden, but when you are waiting . . . it seems so slow". For ease of discussion, I have outlined the course of the main action in Sardou's play. Prosper Block, who has been traveling throughout the world, returns to his uncle's home, only to learn that he must marry in order to inherit his uncle's estate. Arriving at the home of the Vanhoves, Prosper, an old boyfriend of Mrs. Vanhove (Clarisse), expresses the wish to marry Clarisse's sister, Marthe. Clarisse, having grown jealous and hateful toward her old boyfriend, refuses to give her consent. During an exchange between the two, we learn the circumstances of their affair three years before, and that Clarisse, on being forced to marry 9

Citations from A Scrap of Paper in my text are to Victorien Sardou, A Scrap of Paper, trans. Léonie Gilmour, in Camille and Other Plays, ed. Stephen S. Stanton (New York, 1957). 10 Citations from The Member of the Wedding in my text are to Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding (New York, 1951).

RYHTHM

71

Vanhove against her wishes, left an impassioned billet-doux for Prosper in the Sèvres porcelain statuette on the mantel. (The statuette had always served as their "mail box".) It is discovered that the letter is still there, as the house has been shut up for the past three years. At this point in the action, Suzanne, Marthe's godmother and a friend of Clarisse, enters. She immediately takes in the situation between Prosper and Clarisse, surmising that there must be an incriminating letter involved. After some fancy footwork, Prosper retrieves the letter from its hiding place, swearing he intends no blackmail of Clarisse. He only wants the letter to insure that Clarisse will not interfere with his marital plans. He regards the letter as a defensive weapon to protect him from Clarisse's vindictiveness. Suzanne swears to both Clarisse and Prosper that she will get the letter back and destroy it. This concludes the action in the first act. In the second act, Suzanne appears at Prosper's quarters and he invites her to find the letter, if she can. Prosper leaves. Soon after, Clarisse, who is also looking for the letter, arrives. Suzanne, the more clever of the two women, finds it, but rather than destroy it, she decides that she will have Prosper, unknowingly, destroy it himself. In that way her victory will be complete. As Suzanne is informing Clarisse that she has found the letter, Clarisse's husband, Vanhove, knocks at the door. Clarisse, afraid that her husband has discovered that she and Prosper were once in love, hides in another room. Suzanne admits Vanhove, who, with his hunting dogs, has tracked Clarisse to Prosper's rooms. To prevent Vanhove from searching the house, Suzanne declares that she has been Prosper's mistress. Vanhove swears that he will force Prosper to marry her and exits. Clarisse thanks her friend for saving her from being compromised and then leaves. Before Prosper's return, Suzanne devises a means of tricking Prosper into throwing the billetdoux into the fire without his knowing it. She crumples up the letter so that it appears to be just a scrap of paper and places it next to the fireplace. She then throws all the matches into the fire so that Prosper will have to light the lamp from the piece of paper. This is exactly what Prosper does after his return, with one exception. After lighting the lamp, he unfortunately throws the lit piece of paper out of the window. Suzanne tells him that the scrap of paper was really the letter. The two of them run outside to look for the paper, as the second act concludes. In the third act, we learn that the flame was extinguished and the paper was used to hold a beetle a friend had collected. Marthe's boyfriend, Paul, looking for a piece of paper on which to write a love letter

72

RHYTHM

to Marthe, comes upon the paper, releases the beetle, and on the unwritten side of Clarisse's original love letter to Prosper, he writes one of his own to Marthe. Paul asks one of the servants to put Marthe's letter (which is on the other side of Clarisse's letter to Prosper) under Marthe's dish at dinner. The servant does so, but the guests sit at different seats at dinner. Consequently, the paper is found by the wrong person. At this stage in the "now you see it and now you don't" game, Sardou calls off the tricks. Both messages are discovered, with one exception, Clarisse's signature was destroyed by the fire. In order to discover who wrote the side with the destroyed signature (Paul's side of the letter having already been identified), it is suggested that Vanhove, Clarisse's husband, should read it, because he is familiar with the handwriting of everyone present. The letter is given to him to identify. However, before reading it, Vanhove is interrupted by Prosper who claims that the letter is his. Vanhove, believing that Prosper has compromised Suzanne, the woman whom Prosper has just agreed to marry, asks Suzanne if she wishes to see the letter. Suzanne declines, saying she trusts Prosper and is familiar with its contents. She suggests that Vanhove burn the letter, and he does so. With the burning of the letter, the audience can rest comfortably, knowing that Prosper will marry Suzanne, Paul will marry Marthe, and Clarisse has maintained her honor. On that happy note the play ends. It is evident from the description just given that the play abounds in recurring relationships and, especially, in reversals. The first of the many reversals occurs early in the play. Clarisse has just revealed to Prosper that before leaving for Paris to marry Vanhove, three years before, she left a love letter for him in the Sèvres porcelain statuette on the mantel. As they go to look for it, Clarisse's husband (Vanhove) enters. Prosper. Then it must be there. Clarisse. Oh, you've frightened me so! I dare not look! Prosper. I will look. Clarisse. No, no — let me. Prosper (stopping short). Someone — Clarisse. My husband! Because they have been frustrated once in their attempt to discover if the letter is still there, we can expect they will try again. That is, expectancy is aroused for a future attempt. In the intervening moments, as we wait for Prosper and Clarisse to try a second time to recover the

RHYTHM

73

letter, Clarisse asks Prosper to withdraw his request to marry her sister, Marthe. Prosper refuses. This brief exchange is important because it creates conflict where before there was none. To have reversals we must first have opposition. By manufacturing an argument between Prosper and Clarisse, Sardou creates opposition and provides the means for a seesaw struggle. From the point of Prosper's refusal, the reversals become especially meaningful and exciting because the success of the one person must be accompanied by the defeat of the other. Once having defined the two sides, Sardou begins the long sequence of reversals. First it appears that Clarisse, who is quietly making her way to the mantelpiece, will find the letter. (It is taken for granted that the letter is still there.) But just as she is going to remove it, Suzanne enters, causing Clarisse to leave the letter, come forward, and greet her friend. Reversal. Prosper (turning and seeing Clarisse on the point of lifting the Flora and taking the letter). Confound it! Too late! She's taking aim! Enter Suzanne Suzanne (gayly). It is I! (All turn abruptly and Clarisse withdraws her hand without having taken the letter.) This provides Prosper with his chance to retrieve the letter. But as he is proceeding toward the mantel, he is delayed by a friend. Reversal. Prosper (seeing Clarisse go to embrace Suzanne). Saved! My turn now! (He starts towards the Flora, but Colomba stops him midway.) Now it is Clarisse's turn again. Approaching the porcelain figure, Clarisse is preparing to remove the letter when Prosper inhibits her success by calling her name, a stratagem which causes everyone to look at her, making it impossible to recover the letter. Reversal. Finally, Prosper has an opportunity to take down the statuette. As he attempts to remove the letter, Clarisse tries to take it away from him, claiming that the statuette needs dusting. (A seeming reversal for Prosper.) But Prosper, who is not prepared to lose the statuette, blows the dust off of it himself as he whispers to Clarisse that her husband is watching her. Thus Prosper retains possession of the statuette. (A reversal for Clarisse.) But as he removes the letter, it falls to the floor. (A seeming reversal for Prosper). However, by putting his foot over it, he recovers it. (A reversal for Clarisse.) The first act ends with Suzanne informing Prosper that she will force him, in one way or another, eventually to relinquish the letter.

74

RHYTHM

By the end of the first act, we have already been introduced to a pattern of rhythm in the play which we can expect to find repeated in the future, even if not exactly. It is a rhythm created by frequent reversals, primarily involving Prosper, Suzanne, and Clarisse. I should remark here that I am limiting my comments to the reversals and recurrences which pertain to the major characters and action in the play. To be more inclusive would involve the reader in impossibly intricate plot details. The first major recurrence occurs between Prosper and Suzanne in Act Two. At the time of their previous meeting (in Act One), Prosper accepted Suzanne's challenge to recover the letter. Suzanne (in a low tone). Come, give it up with a good grace — Prosper. Give what up? Suzanne. The letter. Prosper. My antidote! Never. Suzanne. I shall force you to give it up. Prosper. I'll wager you don't. Suzanne. I'll wager I do. Prosper. A declaration of war? Suzanne. To the death! Prosper. And we are to begin hostilities? — Suzanne. After luncheon. But give me your arm — her husband is watching us. In Act Two, the implications of their agreement are developed. The recurring relationship sums up what happened in the past, carries the action forward, and promotes expectation. We know that Suzanne will try to outwit Prosper by guessing where he has hidden the letter. The second recurrence involves Suzanne and Clarisse. As in any repeated relationship, we gain an increased knowledge about the characters who are involved in it. We learn that Clarisse is rash and not particularly clever; she lacks a sense of humor as well as insight. Suzanne, on the other hand, is patient, careful, and intelligent. Given this information, we are better able to understand the meaning of their behavior in the first act and better able to anticipate their behavior in the succeeding acts. Sardou follows the repeated relationship between Suzanne and Clarisse with a return to the seesaw rhythm, which we have by this time come to associate with the search for the letter. After several false starts, Suzanne discovers the letter in Prosper's tobacco can. (Reversal for

RHYTHM

75

Prosper.) At this moment, Vanhove interrupts the two women ; Clarisse, who fears that her husband has discovered her previous relationship with Prosper, hides in another room. After Vanhove leaves, Clarisse's return from hiding constitutes another recurrence. The repeated relationship cannot be the same because in the interim additional meanings and impressions have gathered. For example, we learn that Vanhove is a recklessly jealous man who regards a woman's honor as sacred. Prosper's return occasions a repeated relationship between him and Suzanne. This recurrence, because of the many incidents which have occurred since their last meeting, alters the direction and nature of their future relationship. In the interim, Suzanne found the letter. So when Prosper discovers that the burning piece of paper he threw out the window was really the love letter, he is no longer competing with Suzanne. The contest is over. The hunt for the letter is now conducted according to different ground rules, as it were. In particular, Prosper and Suzanne work together to recover the letter because they have fallen in love. It will not do for Prosper to be implicated in an old love affair with Clarisse. Having established a romantic link between Prosper and Suzanne, and returned the rhythm in the play to the familiar helter-skelter seesaw pattern, Sardou maintains the madcap pace through the third and final act. But being the showman he is, Sardou does not permit the pace to slacken. Rather, he accelerates it, climaxing the rhythm with the one scene we have anticipated from the beginning: the "obligatory scene" in which the letter is read and passed on to Vanhove (Clarisse's husband) for him to determine the handwriting. However, discovery is averted when Prosper "admits" to being the writer of the letter. This last reversal saves Clarisse (and Prosper). Vanhove burns the letter without looking at it, to the joy and contentment of Clarisse, Prosper, and Suzanne. In turning from Sardou's farcical, madcap romp, A Scrap of Paper, to The Member of the Wedding, we turn from the furious, oscillating rhythm of farce to the subdued and controlled rhythm of a lyrical, and carefully muted, story of adolescence and loneliness. The Member of the Wedding concerns the experiences of a twelve-year-old girl, Frankie Addams, and the memory and experiences of the Negro housekeeper, Berenice. Practically the entire action is set in the kitchen of the Addams' house. The plot concerns a single event: the marriage of Frankie's brother Jarvis. The story commences in August, two days before the wedding is to take place, and ends on a late November afternoon of the same year, 1945. Almost the entire action in the first act is devoted to

76

RHYTHM

establishing Frankie's loneliness. She lives in a small southern town with her father and Berenice. Her mother is dead and her brother is stationed at an Army Camp. It is the Friday afternoon before the Sunday afternoon wedding. After an initial background scene in which Frankie's brother, Jarvis, and his fiancée, Janice, are introduced, the action is turned back on Frankie and Berenice in the kitchen, where it remains for the rest of the play. Frankie and Berenice's extended conversation, though, is frequently interrupted by John Henry, Frankie's seven-yearold cousin. Less frequent interruptions are occasioned by friends of Frankie and Berenice, especially the latter. Frankie's loneliness is emphasized by the marriage which is to take place shortly. With the marriage of her brother she will be left alone with her father and Berenice. We also learn in the first act that Frankie has few friends. When her cousin, John Henry, asks her to come with him to play with the other children, she replies: Frankie: [They're] just a crowd of ugly, silly children. Running and hollering and running and hollering. Nothing to it. Yet she wants to be accepted by the other girls in the neighborhood. When she is not elected by the girls to join their club, she orders them "off her property" and ridicules the girl who is elected. John Henry. (He goes to the back door, and looks into the yard. Several young girls of thirteen or fourteen, dressed in clean print frocks, file slowly across the back yard.) Look. Those big girls. Frankie (running out into the yard). Hey, there, I'm mighty glad to see you. Come on in. Helen. We can't. We were just passing through to notify our new member. Frankie (overjoyed). Am I the new member? Doris. No, you're not the one the club elected. Frankie. Not elected? Helen. Every ballot was unanimous for Mary Littlejohn. Frankie. Mary Littlejohn! You mean that girl who just moved in next door? The one who plays the piano all day long? Doris. Yes. The club unanimously elected Mary. Frankie. Why, she's not even cute. Helen. She is too; and, furthermore, she's talented. Frankie. I think it's sissy to sit around the house all day playing classical music.

RHYTHM

77

Doris. Why, Mary is training for a concert career. Frankie. Well, I wish to Jesus she would train somewhere else. Doris. You don't have enough sense to appreciate a talented girl like Mary. Frankie. What are you doing in my yard? You're never to set foot on my Papa's property again. (Frankie shakes Helen.) Son-of-a-bitches. I could shoot you with my Papa's pistol. John Henry (shaking his fists). Son-of-a-bitches. Frankie. Why didn't you elect me? (She goes back into the house.) Why can't I be a member? Frankie constantly complains that she never goes anywhere or does anything. In particular, her constant complaint is that nothing ever happens. One minute she says she will change her name and travel. The next minute she poignantly reflects on the one good friend who moved away. Frankie. It seems to me that before this summer I used always to have such a good time. Remember this spring when Evelyn Owen and me used to dress up in costumes and go down town and shop at the five-and-dime? And how every Friday night we'd spend the night with each other either at her house or here? And then Evelyn Owen had to go and move away to Florida. And now she won't even write to me. Her father is a middle-class merchant who is too busy to spend any time with his daughter. Her friends, in effect, amount to Berenice (who is more like a mother to her than a youthful companion) and her sevenyear-old cousin. In consequence of her loneliness and boredom, her brother's wedding takes on special significance for her. Frankie makes herself believe that her brother and his wife will permit her to accompany them on their wedding journey. In fact, she has to believe this because it is her way of telling Berenice that she is wanted. Frankie. I tell you I know where I'm going. It's like I've known it all my life. Tomorrow I will tell everybody. Shush, just now I realized something. The trouble with me is that for a long time I have been just an "I" person. All other people can say "we". When Berenice says "we" she means her lodge and church and colored people. Soldiers can say "we" and mean the army. All people belong to a "we" except me. Not to belong to a "we" makes you too lonesome. Until this afternoon

78

RHYTHM

I didn't have a "we", but now after seeing Janice and Jarvis I suddenly realize something. I know that the bride and my brother are the "we" of me. So I'm going with them, and joining with the wedding. This coming Sunday when my brother and the bride leave this town, I'm going with the two of them to Winter Hill. And after that to whatever place that they will ever go. (There is a pause.) I love the two of them so much and we belong to be together. I love the two of them so much because they are the we of me. Also in Act One, we are introduced to Sis Laura, the old Negro vegetable lady, and to T. T. Williams and Honey Camden Brown, Negro friends of Berenice. T. T. Williams is a man about fifty who represents the Old Order of Negroes in the South — servile and overly polite. Honey Camden Brown, who is about twenty, is a light-skinned, nervous, volatile, conspicuously dressed, independent New Order Negro. He is Berenice's foster-brother. At the time of T. T. Williams's and Honey Camden Brown's first appearance, we are told that Honey was involved in a skirmish with a white M.P., who clubbed Honey over the head with his night stick. With this information as a background, it will now be possible to analyze the effect of the recurrences and reversals on the rhythm in the play. The first of the repeated relationships occurs between Frankie and Berenice. The resumption of their relationship, at the start of the second act, once again brings to our attention Frankie's decision to leave with Jarvis and Janice after their wedding. But the uncertainty which characterized her decision at the end of Act One is now gone. In Act Two she is determined that Jarvis and Janice will take her with them. She tells Berenice that if they refuse, she will kill herself. Frankie (after a pause). That's all right. But you wait and see. They will take me. Berenice. And if they don't? Frankie (turning suddenly from washing her hands at the sink). If they don't, I will kill myself. Berenice. Kill yourself, how? Frankie. I will shoot myself in the side of the head with the pistol that Papa keeps under his handkerchiefs with Mother's picture in the bureau drawer. The recurring relationship here repeats Frankie's earlier decision and impresses upon us her determinedness. In Frankie's avowal to kill

RHYTHM

79

herself, if she is left behind, is the germ of a new idea, which creates a new anticipation. Besides wondering if Frankie will be permitted to accompany the newlyweds, we now have cause to wonder whether or not her threat is an idle one. The rhythm, therefore, begins to accelerate. The second major recurrence, also in Act Two, takes place when T. T. Wilhams and Honey Camden Brown come to tell Berenice that Sis Laura Thompson, the old vegetable woman has died. Sis Laura's death constitutes the first reversal in the play. Also, it is the first time in the play that the impression of immutability, which we receive from Frankie's complaints that nothing ever happens, proves false. Things happen, but suddenly. Although we know that the life about us is in a state of constant flux, we can only see its effects. Sis Laura's old age seems constant and unchanging — until she dies. Her death seems sudden because we cannot see the imperceptible decline of her body into death. Change appears to be sudden because we cannot see its subtle, progressive stages. Hence, our lives appear to be unchanging, interrupted only occasionally by moments of sudden change. In the play, for example, we learn that Honey Camden has been involved in a fight with a white M.P. This should tell us, first, that Honey is not an obsequious Negro, and second, that it will be from this quarter that sudden change will come. The violent rhythm of his life creates a pattern which implies that his life will be concluded "suddenly" and violently. In other words, the pattern of rhythm which McCullers associates with Honey should invite us to expect violence in the future. During the same repeated relationship, in addition to learning that Sis Laura has died, we also discover that Honey Camden, unlike T. T. Williams, refuses to "sir" white men. When Mr. Addams asks Honey if he will work for him, Honey replies, "I ain't got the time". Mr. Addams, accustomed to the exaggerated deference he receives from Negroes like T. T. Williams, replies: Mr. Addams. I'll be so glad when the war is over and you biggety, worthless niggers get back to work. And, furthermore, you sir me! Hear me! Also, we discover that Honey carries a razor, as he says, "for folks that calls me a nigger". This revelation enables us to learn what Berenice's feelings are toward Honey. Berenice. Put up that razor, Satan! I worry myself sick over you. You going to die before your appointed span.

80

RHYTHM

Her expression of concern is cause for a new expectancy in the play: the welfare of Honey Camden. That expectancy is further heightened when Honey asks Berenice for a dollar and she refuses to give it to him because she is afraid that he will buy marijuana cigarettes with the money. Instead she gives him thirty cents, enough for two beers. As in all recurring relationships, this one enlarges upon what we knew before, and leads us to expect a continuation of the rhythm associated with these men. Honey's independence in a southern setting, his skirmish with a white man, his razor "for the folks that calls me a nigger", and Berenice's concern for him are conspicuous signals inviting us to anticipate subsequent violence. One of the more subtle contrasts in this play, which has to do with rhythm, can be observed in the different ways adolescents and adults regard time past and time present. The adolescent, as represented by Frankie, is quick to forget. The everyday occurrences seem banal and uninteresting (the "nothing ever happens" idea). But to the adult, as represented by Berenice, the past is prologue to the present. Frankie cannot remember the people she once knew who are now dead. Berenice, on the other hand, remembers in meaningful detail the past events in her life. This distinction between adolescent and adult is especially important to the concept of rhythm in the play because it means that reversal is practically impossible to an adolescent like Frankie. What she swears today that she will never forget, she has forgotten three months later (in November). Hence, tragedy becomes meaningless. It was because Berenice could not forget the happiness she had with her first husband that she subsequently tried to find men who were like him. The consequence of her remembering was that every marriage, after the first one, failed. To Frankie, as to most adolescents, the past is that indeterminate period of growing-up. It is the future, tomorrow, that is meaningful. Frankie's buoyancy and resilience preclude tragedy. Reversals are only momentary and transient annoyances. Therefore, we can expect and do expect that Frankie's reversals will be short-lived, but that Berenice's will be lasting ones. Act Three, scene one, begins with a recurrence, as T. T. Williams and Berenice are discovered on-stage together. From the standpoint of character, the only further dimension to be added to what we already know about these two is that Williams is an extremely gentle and sensitive person. However, a further dimension is added to their previous meeting when we learn that the reason for Honey Camden's absence is that he went off somewhere "to get high on reefers". Berenice, who is

RHYTHM

81

concerned that Honey in his drugged state not have another skirmish with the police, has "got two people scouring Sugarville to find him". The expectation that something terrible will befall Honey grows. The increased expectancy brings the scene ever nearer, making it seem more and more inevitable. (Although we expect to arrive at some final decision concerning Honey's welfare, it is not mandatory that he meet a violent end. If he does not, it will constitute a reversal.) The recurrence between Berenice and T. T. Williams is followed by a reversal involving Frankie. When Frankie attempts to go with her brother and sister-in-law and is rebuffed, Jarvis and Janice return (recurrence) to comfort Frankie, who has fled into the kitchen. The Jarvis and Janice recurrence serves to sum up what we knew about them before and indicates what will take place in the future. Like any newlyweds they wish to be alone, but are not unsympathetic toward Frankie, inviting her to come and stay with them as soon as they are settled. Their departure is as uneventful as the lives we know they will live. Act Three, scene two, begins with a repeated relationship between Mr. Addams and Berenice. Having seen Mr. Addams only briefly in his previous appearances, we are now very much aware of his presence as he declares: Mr. Addams. I never was a believer in corporal punishment. Never spanked Frankie in my life, but when I lay my hands on her . . . Frankie has run off. Following the departure of Jarvis and Janice, Frankie ran away. Mr. Addams' comments are too limited to invite speculation as to what will happen beyond them. Thus our expectancy is limited to the threatened punishment. Mr. Addams' exit is immediately followed by Frankie's return, which constitutes a recurrence. From her brief explanation to Berenice, we can see a change in Frankie. She has matured considerably since we saw her last. The recurrence therefore provides us with a changed relationship. Judging from what Frankie says, we can expect that she will conduct herself more maturely in the future. Frankie. When I was running around the dark scarey streets, I begun to realize that my plans for Hollywood and the Merchant Marines were child plans that would not work. I hid in the alley behind Papa's store, and it was dark and I was scared. I opened the suitcase and took out Papa's pistol. (She sits down on her suitcase.) I vowed I was going to shoot myself. I said I was going to count three and on three pull the

82

RHYTHM

trigger. I counted one—two — but I didn't count three —because at the last minute, I changed my mind. Frankie's speech is succeeded by still another recurrence: Honey Camden's entrance. Honey's reappearance is a natural extension of what came before. With each of Honey's successive appearances, it has become increasingly apparent that this behavior "would cause him trouble, if not tragedy, by the end of the play. The cumulative effect of his appearances has been to invite us to expect the worst. Honey himself expresses this idea when he says: Honey. Don't you dare cry. I know now all my days have been leading up to this minute. No more "boy this — boy that" — no bowing, no scraping. For the first time, I'm free and it makes me happy. (He begins to laugh hysterically.) What has happened is that Honey has had to run from the Police because he attacked a Mr. Wilson, a white man, who would not serve him. The pattern of rhythm has inexorably led to this situation. Honey Camden's entrance also serves at least two additional functions : it gives us further insight into the extent of Berenice's charity and concern (she gives Honey six dollars and tells him how to escape and where to hide); and it forces us to expect a subsequent scene or disclosure which will conclude the story of Honey Camden Brown. At the end of the scene, a new expectancy is instituted when we are told, just prior to Honey's exit, that John Henry is sick with meningitis. McCullers shifts the action in the last scene of the play (Act Three, scene three) to a time three months later. The elapsed time enables her to conclude all the previously aroused expectations in the play and to show that "the world is certainly a sudden place". The last scene briefly reviews what has happened since those three summer days in August, and concludes the play by emphasizing the point that in youth, the rhythms of life are forward moving and continuous, while in adulthood, they proceed by starts and stops. For Frankie, who is youth, all her initial vexations have been reversed. She has a best friend again — the girl (Mary) whom she had ridiculed earlier. She is now friends with the neighborhood children who originally snubbed her. Her wish for change has come true in other ways, too. Her father has purchased a new home. She is to move. Berenice's reversals, however, are not such fortunate ones. They involve matters of life and death. Berenice, unlike Frankie, does not have a lifetime to forget and recover from reversals.

RHYTHM

83

In this last scene, when we learn that Honey was caught and hanged himself in jail, that John Henry has died of meningitis, and that Berenice will not be working for the Addams family any longer, we cannot help but reflect on McCullers' theme that the rhythms of life are marked by sudden changes and long periods of waiting in-between. Perhaps, after all, change (and thus tragedy) are impossible for an adolescent to comprehend. Consider the transition from one idea to another in the following speech by Frankie, and the sustained quality of tragedy in the succeeding speech by Berenice. Frankie. It's peculiar — the way it all happened so fast. First Honey caught and hanging himself in the jail. Then later in that same week, John Henry died and then I met Mary. As the irony of fate would have it, we first got to know each other in front of the lipstick and cosmetics counter at Woolworth's. And it was the week of the fair. Berenice. The most beautiful September I ever seen. Countless white and yellow butterflies flying around them autumn flowers — Honey dead and John Henry suffering like he did and daisies, golden weather, butterflies — such strange death weather. It is characteristic of Carson McCullers' superb literary skill that the structure reinforces the content. The recurrence and reversal pattern in the play corresponds to the sudden changes in life which affect the characters, and gives The Member of the Wedding its haunting rhythm and lyrical quality.

6 THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

In this chapter, I have used John M. Synge's Riders to the Sea to show how the whole analysis will look when the preceding theory and categories are put together to form a unified and systematic criticism. I have selected Riders because it is short enough to permit a detailed analysis, and thus exhibit what structural criticism can do. In conforming to what I said earlier, I have begun by discussing the overall meaning of Riders. The major thematic strain of recurring death is initiated in the title of the play and is maintained through allusions to the books of Exodus and Revelation. The biblical allusions combine not only literary levels, but also temporal levels: they bring together past, present, and future in a continuum of now. The title Riders to the Sea alludes to the fatal ride in Exodus by Pharaoh's horsemen who pursued the Israelites to the midst of the sea and, in consequence, suffered the Lord's wrath for their disobedience. ("Then sang Moses and the children of Israel this song unto the Lord, and spake, saying, I will sing unto the Lord for he hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea" [Ex. 15:1].) In particular, the title applies to Michael and Bartley, the two sons of Maurya's who figure in the play, and upon whom Maurya's vision centers. Synge gives to all the drowned fishermen of the Aran Islands, including all the men in Maurya's family, the fate associated with Pharaoh's horsemen. He thus expands the dimensions of the tragedy and gives the play universality. However, Synge is even more indebted to the Revelation of Saint John the Divine than to Exodus for the imagery and allusions in Riders. The revelation purports to be the revelation of Jesus Christ to His servant John in Patmos "to shew . . . things which must shortly come to pass" (Rev. 1:1). It sums up the theme of earthly mortality present in both testaments, while developing, among other things, the Alpha and Omega metaphor — the end of life on earth and the beginning of the life to come. Riders, too, concerns the Alpha and Omega of life. And as well,

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

85

Riders has a vision of the future (and also memories of death in the past), and an overall plan which shows "things which must shortly come to pass". The impression of an unbroken cycle of death inevitably working itself out is a direct result of the organization in the play. By interweaving the elements of the action in such a way as to suggest the presence of a fatal nexus binding each male member of the family to the next, Synge captures the timeless rhythm of recurring death. Through the figures of the two horsemen — Michael and Bartley — are symbolically represented the death of the first rider in the past and the death of the last rider in the present. The riders to the sea are the beginning and the ending, the first and the last riders, victims of the relentless repetition of the eternal pattern. The play begins as the tragedy, begun many years before, nears completion. Four sons, a husband, and a husband's father have already drowned. There is fear that a fifth son (Michael) has drowned, and that the sixth son (Bartley), the last, is readying himself to go down to the sea. The exposition establishes the relationship between those who have died in the past and those who will die shortly. The present action portrays Nora and Cathleen's concern to identify "a shirt and a plain stocking [that] were got off a drowned man in Donegal" in order to determine if they are Michael's, and the concern of all three women — Maurya and her daughters, Nora and Cathleen — as to whether or not Bartley will leave. There can be little doubt that the brevity of the one-act form encourages a late point-of-attack. Riders, in commencing at a point in the action just prior to the climax, exhibits all the characteristics of that structural pattern. In addition to the dramatic exposition, we accordingly find a simple plot, restricted character development, and a concentrated theme. As in all Synge's plays, with the exception of Deirdre of the Sorrows, the unities of time, place, and action are observed. Scenes are few (seven), but, as Ernest Boyd remarks, "[Synge] concentrates the action upon essentials, and by a wonderful employment of the means legitimately at his disposal, he causes [Riders] to move swiftly to the climax, whose inevitability broods over each scene. It is unnecessary to know the legend; every line and gesture involves the dénouement and prepares for it with consummate art". 1 With time and space so limited, the demand for a relevant selection of scenes is increased. Synge 1

Ernest Boyd, Ireland's Literary Renaissance (New York, 1922), p. 332.

86

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

meets that demand by investing each of his scenes with almost preternatural intensity, forcing concentration on every action and gesture. He manages this effect, in part, by keeping the action unencumbered, free of complexity. For the simple way is often the more profound. The point-of-attack in the play gives us a view close up. The first scene begins near the end of a story which really began with the death of the first rider to the sea. But as we are ignorant of the past, the first scene must alert us to the nature of the conflict, those engaged in it, and how it is proceeding. In general, this is what the first scene does; it functions, in large, as exposition. However, the first scene also performs other functions. The scene and setting are immediately established in the opening stage direction. Scene. An Island off the west of Ireland. (Cottage kitchen, with nets, oil-skins, spinning wheel, some new boards standing by the wall, etc. Cathleen, a girl of about twenty, finishes kneading cake, and puts it down on the pot-oven by the fire; then wipes her hands, and begins to spin at the wheel. Nora, a young girl, puts her head in at the door.) While all of these things are familiar to us, the white boards seem out of place. Thus, we are absorbed in a kind of minor mystery right from the start. The sense of uneasiness we have about the white boards is reinforced when the scene itself begins on a note of secrecy. Nora, the younger daughter, is speaking in hushed tones, presumably to show consideration for someone (as yet unnamed) in the cottage. From the older daughter Cathleen we learn that the person is not well. Cathleen. She's lying down, God help her, and may be sleeping, if she's able. Why she should need God's help we are not as yet informed, but implied in the invocation, "God help her", is that humans cannot. The mystery is intensified because we now wish to know who the woman is, what it is that troubles her, and what it is that places her beyond human help. We, the audience, though, must wait for our answer. With a fine sense of dramatic timing, Synge, having already fully engaged our attention, shifts to the source of another mystery — the bundle which Nora is carrying under her shawl. As it turns out, the contents of the bundle are no mystery — "a shirt and a plain stocking were got off a drowned man in Donegal" — but the clothing does serve as a device to introduce the uncompleted action

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

87

concerning Michael, which began before the play opened. (And in the words, "drowned man", we have our first glimpse of the omnipresent fate which haunts the riders to the sea.) The clothes were given Nora by the "young priest". It is important at this point for Synge to establish that the priest is young. His youth will subsequently explain his ignorance of the sea and his naive faith that God will protect Maurya's sole surviving son from the sea. Immediately following the mention of the clothing, there is a stage direction2 which indicates a silence in the action. The silence calls attention to the next speech. Nora's line — "We're to find out if it's Michael's they are, some time herself will be down looking by the sea" — begins our slow initiation into the knowledge that the clothes brought by the priest may possibly be those of the sisters' missing brother (Michael), who it is feared has drowned, and that the woman lying ill in the cottage, who is suffering from this dread possibility, is the mother to Nora, Cathleen, and Michael. Also, for the first time, we are given an insight into the horror which must attend the life of a mother in a place where the husband and sons live under the constant threat of death. In the image of a mother searching each new tide for her son's body, Synge captures the whole tragedy of these island people. Cathleen's reluctance to accept the idea that these may be Michael's clothes, because they were found in "the far north", prompts Nora to reply: Nora. The young priest says he's known the like of it. "If it's Michael's they are", says he, "you can tell herself he's got a clean burial by the grace of God, and if they're not his, let no one say a word about them, for she'll be getting her death", says he, "with crying and lamenting". Again and again, but always subtly, Synge reminds us that this is a tale told against a background of death. As the fishermen's lives are played against a background of death, so how a man is buried becomes important. Suggestively Greek-like in its implications, the burial ritual takes on added importance for a seafaring people, where so often the drowned bodies of the dead are never recovered. Once having enlisted our concern for Michael's welfare, Synge deftly leaves the matter unresolved, moving on to other matters of exposition, namely, the subject of Bartley. Wasting no strokes, Synge, in two brief speeches, establishes that Bartley, presumably the last living son in the 2

I will discuss stage directions and stage properties independently later in the chapter.

88

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

family, is resisting both priest and family by "going this day with the horses to the Galway fair". Thus, the lines along which the tragedy will proceed are clear. While we anxiously wait for the completion of an event (Michael's journey) which began before the play opened, we are witness to the start of a new event (Bartley's forthcoming trip). The first event is sustained long enough to permit the second event to begin. This organization contributes to the idea of an inexorable fate, because the overlapping actions proclaim the relatedness of both events. Even as Bartley is preparing to journey to the sea, we suspect that his passage is a renewal of Michael's passage, as Michael's was a renewal of the journeys of those who preceded him. The very nature of the pattern seems to demand that Bartley must die too. T o underscore this inexorability, Synge emphasizes the ineffectualness of religion in contest with Nature. The young priest, reports Nora, has said: Nora. "I won't stop him [Bartley]", says he, "but let you not be afraid. Herself does be saying prayers half through the night, and the Almighty God won't leave her destitute", says he, "with no son living". Ironically, the priest speaks of knowing G o d ' s will, but as it will turn out, he knows little about the sea and those who live by it. Throughout the play, Synge seems to be saying that to these islanders religion is effectively served when it refrains from pretending to cure and, instead, enlists its power to relieve. Religion cannot dispel the persistent sea, but it can provide an anodyne to the victims of it. A s if to contradict the priest's assertion that "the Almighty G o d won't leave her destitute with no son living", Synge follows this statement with the fact of a raging sea. Cathleen. Is the sea bad by the white rocks, Nora? Nora. Middling bad, God help us. There's a great roaring in the west, and it's worse it'll be getting when the tide's turned to the wind. In addition to the subtle rebuke implicit in the juxtaposition of speeches, the condition of the sea becomes a matter of importance because Bartley is planning to venture out on it. This brief discussion, then, also serves as preparation; it foreshadows the conditions under which Bartley will die. Thus, it will come as no startling surprise to us that Bartley is subsequently drowned near the "white rocks". The threatening sea now firmly in mind, Synge can relax his grip. He does so by turning the discussion back on the bundle. However, he

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

89

puts off the solution to the mystery surrounding it by bringing on stage the very person who is to be prevented from seeing its contents — the mother (Maurya). Her coming is quite naturally cause for concealing the bundle, which Cathleen does in the turf-loft. The effect of this is to create a renewed interest in the bundle and to heighten the mystery about its owner. The scene ends by preparing us for the entry of this tragic woman who this day is to learn of the death of her fifth son and is to bury her sixth. The preparation is accomplished by returning to the terror image of a mother searching the shore for her son's body so that he might, at the end of all, receive a decent burial. "When the tide turns she'll be going down to see would he be floating from the east". The first scene, then, provides exposition; it introduces the character of the antagonistic sea; it indicates plainly the nature of the contest between the sea (fate) and man, and, to a lesser degree, between fate and man's religion. By delaying the appearance of the mother until the second scene, Synge has gained dramatic intensity. In the interim, we have gained some insight into her personal tragedy. So when she does appear, our concern for her has already been aroused and her fears are not unfamiliar to us. In a manner of speaking, the first scene has been looking ahead to Maurya's entrance. Also, in delaying the action begun in the first scene, by bringing on Maurya in the second, Synge has provided a context for Maurya and a situation to which the action can and must return. Scene two presents us with the somber portrait of a near-defeated mother aimlessly raking the coals of the fire and quietly repeating her words for comfort. Maurya (sitting down on a stool at the fire). He won't go this day with the wind rising from the south and west. He won't go this day, for the young priest will stop him surely. She does not have to say much because her gropings and abbreviated speech poignantly say what there is about her broken life. The scene begins with Maurya contentiously asking Cathleen if there is not already enough turf on the fire, making apparent her frustration and unhappiness concerning Bartley's departure. We are quick to sense that she is protesting one thing because of an inability to prevent another. Cathleen answers her mother's petulance by telling her that the fire is needed to bake a cake for Bartley to take with him if he goes to Connemara. Unlike Nora, who has the directness of youth and is without tact, Cathleen, knowing well her mother's fears, says that Bartley will want

90

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

the bread "when the tide turns if he goes to Connemara" (emphasis mine). The solace implied in the word "if" is intended for Maurya's benefit. Cathleen is indicating sympathetically that the important and fateful decision about Bartley has not been settled yet. Maurya, wanting and needing to believe this, repeats to herself that "He won't go this day". The quiet which seems momentarily to settle after Maurya's pronouncement that "the young priest will stop him surely", is abruptly interrupted by Nora's contradictory words : Nora. He'll not stop him, mother, and I heard Eamon Simon and Stephen Pheety and Colum Shawn saying he would go. To Nora's words, there can be no answer — only proofs. Dramatically this means that a new scene is needed. If Nora's information is to be shown wrong, then Bartley uiust be confronted and a decision reached. There is no other alternative to the action. And Synge, knowing this, closes the scene with Maurya asking the whereabouts of Bartley. Nora's descriptive answer, in which she brings our attention back to the sea and the condition of it, prepares Bartley's entrance, that is, the third scene. Hence the second scene establishes the emotional intensity of Maurya's concern for Bartley while, at the same time, preparing and building for his entry. This scene makes apparent the conflict between mother and son, a conflict toward which the action is moving. We have heard that Bartley is planning to leave. We know that Maurya is trying to prevent him from doing so. The natural rhythm of the action is working toward the next scene — Bartley's appearance and the decision which must attend the confrontation between Bartley and Maurya. Consequently, we may see this scene as the catalyst for the succeeding one. The third scene is made necessary because the second scene eliminated any possibility for alternative action. The conflicting assertions which pass between Maurya and Nora, as brief as they are, initiate a dialectic of thesis and antithesis which requires a synthesis. The third scene provides just that. Also, the second scene introduces the device which will provide the means to get Maurya naturally off-stage in the fourth scene, namely, the bread. When, in the fourth scene, Maurya hurries off to find Bartley in order to give him the bread, we regard it as a natural outgrowth of the action. We do so, because the bread does not appear to be a device originated only to satisfy the needs of the moment. The third scene begins with Bartley's sad and quiet inquiry about

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

91

"the bit of new rope". Synge uses the rope as a means to build to the question of Bartley's leaving. Bartley, sensitive to the feelings of his mother, enters sadly and quietly. His quiet bearing indicates his decision to go and his uneasiness about it. In his request for the bit of new rope is the suggestion that the rope is needed for his journey. His decision is made. His sisters, assured of the futility of trying to get him to change his mind, answer him directly and precisely. It is at this point that Maurya speaks. Maurya. You'd do right to leave that rope, Bartley, hanging by the boards. (Bartley takes the rope.) It will be wanting in this place, I'm telling you, if Michael is washed up to-morrow morning, or the next morning, or any morning in the week, for it's a deep grave we'll make him by the grace of God.

When Bartley ignores Maurya's charge to leave the rope behind, Maurya comes right back to it. Maurya. It's a hard thing they'll be saying below if the body is washed up and there's no man in it to make the coffin, and I after giving a big price for the finest white boards you'd find in Connemara.

But Bartley needs the rope for a halter and is not to be put off by this kind of emotional extortion. He answers by denying that Michael's body will ever be found. However, this is the only time Bartley directly addresses his mother. Hereafter he will seek to evade Maurya's entreaties by ignoring them. Conscious now that Bartley will not be intimidated into staying by an emotional appeal to his sense of familial responsibility, Maurya is reduced to the one plea which has, all along, fathered and fed all her fears — to be left with no son living. Maurya. If it [Michael] wasn't found itself, that wind is raising the sea, and there was a star up against the moon, and it rising in the night. If it was a hundred horses, or a thousand horses you had itself, what is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only?

How to answer the profound sadness of this plea? Bartley cannot, so he does not. He digresses to the affairs of the home, telling Cathleen what must be done in his absence. Maurya, desperate to keep Bartley from the sea, interrupts Bartley's directions to Cathleen and contentiously questions her daughter's ability to do the tasks Bartley is setting for her. Maurya's indirection will be lost on no one. Pathetically, she is trying to say that only a man can perform these jobs and that Bartley,

92

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

the last male member of the family, is needed around the house to do them. Studiously avoiding Maurya, Bartley continues his instructions to Cathleen, "It's hard set we'll be from this day with no one in it but one man to work", only to have Maurya pick up his words and mimic them by altering their meaning, "It's hard set we'll be surely the day you're drowned with the rest". In the manner of a mother who has become desperate and frustrated, she follows this up by trying to instill a sense of guilt in Bartley for leaving. She implicitly accuses him of selfishness for not remaining at home to care for the women. "What way will I live and the girls with me, and I an old woman looking for the grave". For a moment, the tension is dissipated as Bartley exchanges his shirt for one of Michael's. But we are brought back immediately to the point of his leaving as he inquires of Nora if the boat is coming. Nora replies by describing its entry into the harbor. This brief exchange is for matters of preparation. We are now aware that Bartley's departure is close at hand. In place of an obvious last minute exclamation to the effect that Bartley must be going because the boat has arrived, or some similarly awkward device, Synge has given us, instead, a natural exit made possible by "planting" the fact that the boat is in sight prior to Bartley's actual exit. To Bartley's statement that he will return "in two days, or in three days, or maybe in four days if the wind is bad", Maurya, as if in gesture of defeat, turns away from Bartley and sadly apostrophizes about the cruelty of a son who will not follow his mother's wishes. "Isn't it a hard and cruel man won't hear a word from an old woman, and she holding him from the sea?" Bartley's fate, which we have guessed at all along, is first realized, symbolically, in his exit speech. Bartley (taking the halter). I must go now quickly. I'll ride down on the red mare, and the gray pony'll run behind me. . . . The blessing of God on you. Those familiar with the Apocalypse will have a presentiment of tragedy, knowing that the red mare and the gray pony invoke the memory of the Four Horsemen (Rev. 6:1-8). The third scene, then, settles conclusively the question of Bartley's staying or leaving. It indicates the depth of Maurya's sorrow, which we need to understand if we are to comprehend her final resignation and stoic peace. The apocalyptic symbolism here at once reinforces the biblical imagery of the title and focuses attention on Bartley's exit, emphasizing the likelihood of his dying. Moreover, not only does the apoca-

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

93

lyptic symbolism foreshadow the death of Bartley at the end of the play, but it also prepares us for the continuation and development of that symbolism in Maurya's dream. Synge is looking ahead, carefully preparing for his succeeding scenes; therefore, he must arrange Bartley's exit early in the play. The playing time of Riders is so short, it is necessary to get Bartley off-stage early enough in the action to allow time for his dying. The fourth scene imperceptibly grows out of the third, beginning, as it does, with Maurya's prophetic cry, which accompanies Bartley's going out the door. Maurya (crying out as he is in the door). He's gone now, God spare us, and we'll not see him again. He's gone now, and when the black night is falling I'll have no son left me in the world. The intensity of the action is broken by Cathleen's rebuke of Maurya. Cathleen. Why wouldn't you give him your blessing and he looking round in the door? Isn't it sorrow enough is on every one in this house without your sending him out with an unlucky word behind him, and a hard word in his ear? Among the islanders, it is a man's place to find a living on the sea. And although a man's departure is cause for fear, it is the proper form for the women to bid him well, all the while remaining impassive to the possibility that death may attend his journey. From this point on in the scene, the whole of the action is directed toward getting Maurya off-stage. To accomplish this naturally, Synge returns to the cake, a device which he "planted" earlier in scene two. Maurya is raking the coals of the fire. Nora, seeing what she is doing, directs her not to remove the fire from under the cake. Hearing this, Cathleen suddenly cries out, "The Son of God forgive us, Nora, we're after forgetting his bit of bread". Both Cathleen and Nora are quick to express their concern for Bartley having to go without "his bit of bread" and "he after eating nothing since the sun went up". Mad at herself for forgetting the bread, Cathleen transfers her annoyance and blame to Maurya. But Maurya, absorbed in her unhappiness, does not seem to hear. Cathleen then gives Maurya the bread to give to Bartley. Cathleen (cutting off some of the bread and rolling it in a cloth; to Maurya). Let you go down now to the spring well and give him this and he passing. You'll see him then and the dark word will be broken, and you can say "God speed you", the way he'll be easy in his mind.

94

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

No doubt Nora and Cathleen are concerned about Bartley going hungry and Maurya not giving him her blessing, but they are also anxious to open the bundle hidden in the turf-loft. Maurya takes the bread, asking Cathleen if it is not already too late. Cathleen, eager to see her go, advises her to hurry. To Maurya's protest that "It's hard set I am to walk", Cathleen instructs Nora to give their mother Michael's walking stick. The giving of the stick is an item of symbolic importance, because it portrays how the possessions of the dead serve the living, and it also depicts the pervasiveness of death. Both the shirt Bartley is wearing, which belongs to Michael, and the stick "that Maurya takes to support her on her way to the spring well (itself a life-image)", remarks T. R. Henn, "belonged to the dead Michael". 3 It is this fact which inspires Maurya's poignant speech, about how "the living and the dead seem to meet through their possessions",4 which so poetically concludes the scene. Maurya (taking a stick Nora gives her). In the big world the old people do be leaving things after them for their sons and children, but in this place it is the young men do be leaving things behind for them that do be old. The fourth scene is a transitional one; it is necessary because Maurya did not exit with Bartley. To have had Maurya leave with Bartley would have undermined the dramatic effect of his going out alone, and Maurya crying out to him to stay. But once having left Maurya on-stage, Synge must get her off, if the bundle of clothing is to be opened. The cake, as previously indicated, is the device Synge uses to get Maurya off-stage. The fifth scene begins with Cathleen telling Nora to wait before retrieving the bundle of clothing. Our fears are at once engaged; what if Maurya should return and find the girls examining what may prove to be Michael's own shirt and stocking? When Maurya is out of sight, Nora takes the bundle from the turf-loft, explaining, as she does so, how the young priest has said that should they positively identify the clothes as Michael's, they may wish to speak to him about it. Presumably, he wants to instruct them on how to prepare their mother for this terrible disclosure, or to comfort Maurya himself. The priest is mentioned here in order to introduce unobtrusively more exposition concerning the clothes. Since it was the priest who originally gave the sisters the clothes, he must know something about the circumstances surrounding their 3 4

T. R. Henn, ed., The Plays and Poems of J. M. Synge (London, 1963), pp. 39-40. Ibid., p. 325.

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

95

recovery. Unsurprisingly, then, mention of the priest provides Cathleen with the cue she needs to ask Nora how the clothes were found. Nora replies: Nora (coming down [from the loft]). "There were two men", says he, "and they rowing round with poteen before the cocks crowed, and the oar of one of them caught the body, and they passing the black cliffs of the north". Synge resumes the exposition, not only to elicit further information, but also to intensify the suspense. He does this artfully through Nora. Her speeches, while revealing her concern for Michael's fate, develop the thematic background by heightening the tragic aspects of death by drowning. Nora (giving her a knife). I've heard tell it was a long way to Donegal. Cathleen (cutting at the string). It is surely. There was a man in here a while ago — the man sold us that knife — and he said if you set off walking from the rocks beyond, it would be seven days you'd be in Donegal. Nora. And what time would a man take, and he floating? Nora's line is immediately succeeded by a silence, which permits the audience time to reflect on the terrible implications of her macabre question. The tension intensifies as the bundle is opened and there is still no decision. Cathleen remarks how difficult it is to know for certain; Nora responds by offering to bring Michael's shirt from the hook so that the material in the two shirts can be compared. But the shirt is gone. (Synge is here supervising the growing tension and suspense by means of a controlled peripety.) Cathleen remembers that when he left, Bartley exchanged Michael's shirt for his own. Cathleen. I'm thinking Bartley put it on him in the morning, for his own shirt was heavy with the salt in it (pointing to the corner). There's a bit of a sleeve was of the same stuff. Give me that and it will do. On comparing the flannels they find them to be the same. With the tension and suspense now markedly increased, Synge delays the discovery a last time to gain the added momentum of a cumulative expectation. Cathleen remarks that it is difficult to identify such a common material. Cathleen. It's the same stuff, Nora; but if it is itself aren't there great rolls of it in the shops of Galway, and isn't it many another man may have a shirt of it as well as Michael himself?

96

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

The pattern of statement and counter statement is terminated abruptly as Nora, who has been counting the stitches in the stocking, cries out the discovery that the clothes are Michael's. Nora explains that the stocking is the same one she knitted for Michael: "It's the second one of the third pair I knitted, and I put three score stitches, and I dropped four of them". Cathleen, not wanting to believe that Michael is dead, counts the stitches herself, only to share in Nora's sorrow as she confirms her sister's discovery. It is appropriate that the drowned brother is recognized by a dropped stitch, because it demonstrates how important the trivial, small, insignificant things become in a life of denial, fate, and death. The discovery made, Nora plaintively apostrophizes on a death so completely dehumanizing — the death of a man lost at sea. Nora (swinging herself round, and throwing out her arms on the clothes). And isn't it a pitiful thing when there is nothing left of a man who was a great rower and fisher, but a bit of an old shirt and a plain stocking? Nora's plaint is emphasized by the silence commanded in the following stage direction. The previous action having been fully assimilated during the silence, Synge leaves the subject of Michael to begin the preparation for scene six. There is a sound on the path; Maurya is coming. Fearful that Maurya should find the clothes, the sisters hide them in the corner. To prevent Maurya's finding out that Nora has been crying, Cathleen directs: "Keep your back to the door the way the light'11 not be on you". Maurya's entrance marks the end of scene five and the start of scene six. Scene five is directly related to scene one. The question of Michael's clothes is raised in the first scene and settled in the fifth scene. Why the fifth scene? Simply, it is because what happens in the fifth scene could not be played until Bartley had departed, his fate uncertain, like those before him, and until Maurya had made her exit, in search of Bartley. Before Synge could return to the Michael question and its resolution, he had to set in motion the theme-idea öf an Alpha to Omega cycle relentlessly and fatally working itself out in the deaths of Maurya's sons and husband and husband's father. To create the effect of recurrent death, Synge constructs the action in such a way as to suggest the presence of a fatal nexus binding each male member of the family to the next. He accomplishes this by beginning a second action (Bartley's leaving) before the first action (Michael's clothes) is concluded, which gives the effect of the separate actions being related. The overlapping pattern of action, resulting from interrupting the action in one scene in order to begin (or continue) action of a similar kind in the next scene,

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

97

provides Synge with the means of showing how the lives of these men are fatally linked together. Also, Synge was obliged for dramatic reasons to begin a second action before he could resolve the first. Not to have overlapped the action would have created a "dead spot" following the resolution of the Michael question, which in turn would have compelled Synge to find "something" to occupy the stage from the time that Michael's death is discovered until the time that Bartley's subsequent death is known. (Not many plays can stand such "dead spots", and especially not a one-act play.) Synge does not permit any relaxation of tension or interest; the Michael question sustains the suspense until the Bartley question is reintroduced. Commenting on the function of this scene in Riders, Kenneth Rowe observes: The Michael theme serves here to fill a rather long stage interval in which there is no further development on the Bartley question. The material is completely functional dramatically; suspense is sustained by the secondary dramatic question, the thematic background and mood of the play are developed, and realization of the danger by sea to Bartley is intensified.5 The sixth scene begins as Maurya returns from looking for Bartley. She enters slowly, in silence. She is still holding the bread. We sense that Maurya's weary and reticent entrance is the result of her having missed Bartley. We would little suspect that it is because she has seen Bartley. Consequently, almost half the scene is played ironically, because it is played under the assumption that Maurya's depression is the result of her unsuccessful attempt to intercept Bartley. Her eventual revelation, therefore, is doubly effective, discovering at once the irony of her having in fact seen Bartley and the vision which is at the heart of the play's meaning. Cathleen breaks the silence, asking, "You didn't give him his bit of bread ?" But Maurya does not answer. Instead, there is a stage direction which tells us that "Maurya begins to keen softly, without turning round". The bread has gone undelivered; Maurya has not made contact with Bartley. In all times, bread has been equated with life and the living. The important allusion here is that of coming forward, making contact, receiving the bread. To fail to make contact is, symbolically, to die. And this, precisely, is what Maurya's keening represents — death. Unlike the modern man's practice of using language to rationalize his 6

Kenneth Thorpe Rowe, Write That Play (New York, 1939), p. 103.

98

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

hurts, Maurya's keening, as an expression of her tragedy, is primitively ritualistic. There comes a point when language is incapable of communicating feeling. At such times, we substitute ceremony for speech to represent in symbol what we cannot capture in word. Accordingly, when lamentation supplants language as the expression of Maurya's grief, we can only stand overwhelmed before the degree of feeling which makes language inadequate. The action which occurs after Maurya's keening is devoted to intensifying the suspense and heightening the mystery concerning Maurya's strange behavior. To get at what it is that has caused Maurya to act in this unlikely manner, Synge uses the familiar technique of question and fragmentary answer, which gives the dialogue a staccato effect. This sort of stop-and-go procedure, where a little more information is gained with each new question, is characterized by a growing momentum climaxed by an unusual exposure. In this case, the cumulative rhythm is climaxed by Maurya's revelation that she has seen "Michael himself". Cathleen answers: "You did not, mother. It wasn't Michael you seen, for his body is after being found in the far north, and he's got a clean burial by the grace of God". But Maurya is not to be put off, and Cathleen's contradiction only urges her to a complete confession of what it is she has seen. Maurya (a little defiantly). I'm after seeing him this day, and he riding and galloping. Bartley came first on the red mare; and I tried to say "God speed you", but something choked the words in my throat. He went by quickly ; and "the blessing of God on you", says he, and I could say nothing. I looked up then, and I crying, at the gray pony, and there was Michael upon it — with fine clothes on him, and new shoes on his feet. What Maurya has seen is, apocalyptically, the end of Michael and Bartley's life on earth. (And certainly nowhere is the imagery of Revelation more evident than in Maurya's vision.) The allusion underlying her vision reinforces the idea of a terrible destiny being visited upon the men in her family. We are uneasy upon hearing what it is that Maurya has seen, remembering the red horse and the gray (pale) horse Bartley and Michael ride and the fine clothes and new shoes that Michael's phantasm wears. For the red and gray ponies remind us of the Four Horsemen — and death. Michael's fine clothes remind us of the new linen in Revelation (emphasis mine): "And to [the righteous] was granted that [they] should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white: for the fine Unen is the righteousness of saints" (Rev. 19:8). "And the

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

99

armies which were in heaven followed [the Word of God] upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean" (Rev. 19:14). What Maurya has seen is a vision of death and the promise of the life to come. The horses Michael and Bartley ride symbolize the brothers' deaths, and Michael's new clothes his life to come. In terms of the dramatic action, Michael and Bartley represent the Alpha and Omega of male life in their family. (The "first" of Maurya's last two remaining sons, Michael, has already concluded his fatal ride as the last son, Bartley, is beginning his.) By dramatizing only the final steps in the fatal pattern, Synge is letting the part stand for the whole. The Michael and Bartley action represents in small the larger cycle of mortality which has taken the lives of eight men. Moreover, Synge emphasizes the chronology of this cycle by having the "first" son (Michael) dressed in fine clothes and the last son (Bartley) not. This is to indicate in time that Michael is already dead, but Bartley has not died yet, although fated to die. The horror of what Maurya has seen is swiftly underscored when, in the next speech, Cathleen begins to keen, saying as she does so, "It's destroyed we are from this day. It's destroyed surely". The effect of this is to show that when the implications of Maurya's vision are understood, as they are by Cathleen, there can only be one response to their terrible meaning — a lamentation for the dead. But Nora, who is younger and less experienced, naively exclaims: "Didn't the young priest say the Almighty God wouldn't leave her destitute with no son living?" This statement provides Synge with the means to bring back into focus the minor theme of religion versus Nature. At the same time, Synge heightens the tragedy by completing the exposition. Maurya (in a low voice, but clearly). It's little the like of him knows of the sea. . . . Bartley will be lost now, and let you call in Eamon and make me a good coffin out of the white boards, for I won't live after them. I've had a husband, and a husband's father, and six sons in this house — six fine men, though it was a hard birth I had with every one of them and they coming to the world — and some of them were found and some of them were not found, but they're gone now the lot of them. . . . There were Stephen, and Shawn, were lost in the great wind, and found after in the Bay of Gregory of the Golden Mouth, and carried up the two of them on the one plank, and in by that door. The priesthood performs its ministry on land, removed from any habitual commerce with the sea. To speak of what God will or will not permit concerning matters of the sea is utter presumption. One thing has nothing to do with the other. The sea is a natural, terrible, and

100

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

arbitrary law unto itself, abiding no man's laws and no man's God's laws. When Maurya says, "It's little the like of him knows of the sea", she is accusing the priesthood of speaking about the sea out of ignorance. She sees no causal relationship between God and Nature. If anything, the sea creates a need for God, a need to believe in something which can redress the hurts of this world. It is taken for granted that God has no dominion over the waters. The priest has it reversed. This is the assumption underlying Maurya's statement. Having lost eight members of her family to the sea (she only knows about six for sure), she finds the priest's assertion irrelevant, knowing religion has no control over Nature. It is because these people regard God and Nature as being independent that God can continue to exist for them. If nothing else, the multiple tragedies these people have suffered, because of the sea, have dissuaded them from any belief in God's hegemony over Nature. At the end of this speech (which concludes only the first part of a larger speech), there is mention of the door through which two of Maurya's dead sons were carried. Synge calls our attention to it because it is a fateful door. It will presently admit the last of Maurya's sons. Synge has divided Maurya's speech for reasons of preparation. He must foreshadow Bartley's death if it is to appear as a natural consequence of the action. He does this by inciting a new mystery concerning a sound Nora has heard on the beach. Nora (in a whisper). Did you hear that, Cathleen? Did you hear a noise in the north-east? Cathleen (in a whisper). There's some one after crying out by the seashore. Having the exchange take place in whispers increases the suspense and maintains the quiet that followed the first part of Maurya's speech. If the speech is to be effectively resumed, that quiet must not be violated. Moreover, having learned that someone is crying out on the beach, we are alerted and prepared to receive what we have been anticipating all along — Bartley's death. But when it does come it seems all the more natural because of the way Synge has prepared us for it. The quiet ends with the resumption of Maurya's speech. Maurya (continues without hearing anything). There was Sheamus and his father, and his own father again, were lost in a dark night, and not a stick or sign was seen of them when the sun went up. There was Patch after was drowned out of a curagh that turned over. I was sitting here with Bartley, and he a baby, lying on my two knees, and I seen two women, and three women, and four women coming in, and they crossing

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

101

themselves, and not saying a word. I looked out then, and there were men coming after them, and they holding a thing in the half of a red sail, and water dripping out of it — it was a dry day, Nora — and leaving a track to the door. Maurya's speech is the focal point of the play. It sums up the whole range of her personal tragedy. It is a mother's testament to a life of suffering, recalled at a prophetic moment of sheer hopelessness. To expand and extend the significance of this moment, Synge, in what is perhaps the finest touch in the play, dramatizes the idea of recurrent death by repeating in the background in pantomime the dreadful homecoming pageant which Maurya has been describing in the foreground. As Maurya recounts the men who have passed from her to death and the manner of their dying and their homecoming, a similar scene (a "ghost scene") is shortly to be reenacted in silence, as the townspeople, bearing the dead Bartley, enter noiselessly in the background. By means of the pantomime, Synge captures the ritualistic significance of death and creates a fugai quality in the whole play. It is here that Synge finally harvests the labor of constructing a pattern of repetitive action in which background, theme, and language are repeatedly interwoven. Throughout the play Synge has been emphasizing the inevitability of premature and violent death suffered by the Aran islanders. Like a mythic ritual, death fills the present as it has the past. The background of a relentless and formidable sea has been particularly influential in persuading us to this idea. In addition, Synge's language reinforces the theme and mood. Almost chant-like, the redundant cadences of the prose seem to duplicate the awful regularity of the sea and the keening of the women, serving to remind us simultaneously of death and sea. In the sixth scene, Synge had two alternatives for action available to him. He could have followed the discovery of Michael's clothes either with Bartley's "death scene" or with Maurya's return. But the former action would have vitiated the dramatic effect of having Bartley brought in as Maurya is describing a similar entrance which took place in the past. Also, it would have created a time problem. Instead, Synge chose to bring Maurya back on-stage. But once that was done he had to find some reason for her being there. This he accomplishes through Maurya's vision. The vision is completely functional; it serves to secure the imagery and meaning in the play and to implement the theme. The agure of the red and gray horses reinforces the timelessness of Michael's find Bartley's ride and the meaning of the play's title; it introduces the

102

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

richness of the death imagery in Revelation, while the mention of "fine clothes" suggests the salvation of the righteous. Notwithstanding Synge's efforts to permit enough time for Bartley's death to occur (an early exit, three intervening scenes, and the proximity of the cottage to the beach), we know, as L. A. G. Strong says, that "a very few (terrestrial) minutes pass between Bartley's departure and the entry of the neighbours bearing his dead body: certainly not enough for all to happen off the stage which we are told happened". 6 If there is something of a time problem here, we are inclined to ignore it. Time being as short as it is in a one-act play, we make allowances for what in fact could not occur, but does. Furthermore, as Strong goes on to point out, "so skilfully have our minds been prepared for the tragedy, so anxiously do we push forward to learn what has happened, that we never think of the time measured by the watch on our wrist or in our waistcoat pocket. Such a play as Riders to the Sea takes us out of time altogether".7 As the villagers quietly enter, Maurya asks, "Is it Patch, or Michael, or what is it at all ?" At this moment all her dead are as one. Her question forces attention on the sameness and the inevitability of the deaths her children and husband and his father have suffered. The theme of an unbroken cycle of death relentlessly working itself out is briefly returned to here, as Maurya can no longer distinguish her sons in death. Maurya's question provides Cathleen with the means to tell her mother that Michael is dead. But it is unusual that Cathleen, knowing her mother's state of mind, would answer as she does. Cathleen's reply is in the form of a question, almost contentiously framed. "Michael is after being found in the far north, and when he is found there how could he be here in this place?" Maurya's reply is rich in imagery, as she depicts the sea cluttered with the bodies of young fishermen. "There does be a power of young men floating round in the sea, and what way would they know if it was Michael they had, or another man like him, for when a man is nine days in the sea, and the wind blowing, it's hard set his own mother would be to say what man was it". There is great tragedy in this speech, because for Maurya to know how unrecognizable a waterlogged corpse is, she would have had to have been witness to the recovery of one. And then we remember that she has been witness to three such deaths in her own family: her sons, Stephen, Shawn, and Patch. β 7

L. A. G. Strong, Common Sense About Drama (New York, 1937), p. 53. Ibid.

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

103

In the final speeches of the play, Synge again returns to the idea of an unalterable fate which links Maurya's dead. He gains the effect of concatenated deaths by repeating the news of Michael's death and, at the same time, revealing Bartley's death. While handing Maurya the few recovered pieces of Michael's clothing, Cathleen explains to her that they were found in the far north. Then in the next speech, Nora, in a most dehumanizing description tells how the dead Bartley is come home : a speech which echoes Maurya's description of a moment before in the pantomime scene, of how Patch's drowned body was carried into the house. "They're carrying a thing between them and there's water dripping out of it and leaving a track by the big stones". Maurya's, Cathleen's, and Nora's speeches, following one after another, as they do, give the effect of being related. Bartley's death is confirmed when Cathleen, almost too afraid to ask what she already knows, whispers, "Is it Bartley it is ?" Without even hearing the reply of "one of the women" — "It is surely, God rest his soul" — we know that the dread cycle is complete. As Bartley is brought in, Cathleen asks how he was drowned. This is important because the reply to her question by one of the women — "The gray pony knocked him into the sea, and he was washed out where there is a great surf on the white rocks" — brings us back to the symbolism of the horses in Revelation. But it is to be remembered that Bartley was riding the red mare, which means that the gray pony caused Bartley to be thrown from his own horse into the sea below. It is fitting that when Bartley dies, his death is caused by the gray pony, the horse specifically associated with death. ("And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death" [Rev. 6:8].) Also, it is meaningful that Bartley's death resulted from his having been thrown into the sea, because if we remember from Exodus that "the horse and his rider hath [the Lord] thrown into the sea", and the analogue to be found in the meaning of the title, Riders to the Sea, we are reminded by both that being thrown into the sea is equated with death. Furthermore, "the white rocks" to which Bartley's body was carried by the surf are the same ones that Cathleen has mentioned earlier in the play in conjunction with a stormy sea. Cathleen asks: "Is the sea bad by the white rocks, Nora?" By alerting us to the rocks early in the play (rocks associated with a bad sea), Synge foreshadows the place of Bartley's death. By mentioning the rocks a second time, Synge emphasizes the point that death is always close at hand and that it occurs in familiar places. Also, the double reference to the white rocks serves, in the overall design of the play, to introduce the threat of the sea and

104

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

to summarize its symbolism. By significant repetition Synge links the beginning and ending of Riders, reinforcing our sense of the cyclical action operating in the play. After the description of Bartley's death, Maurya kneels beside the table on which his body has been laid. Cathleen and Nora join her. And, as if in deference to mother and daughters, the men kneel also. Maurya then gives what is regarded by some, for example, Rudolph Stamm, as the finest speech in Riders. One of the great things in the play is Synge's handling of the end. If we had time to think about such a question while reading or seeing it, we might be afraid that the reality of the final catastrophe must fall short of what the poet has led us to expect. We know of Maurya's earlier losses; we have witnessed her desperate struggle for her last son. What will be her reaction when she sees him dead, too? Synge has solved the difficulty with great success. There is no loud outburst, but what is more terrible: quiet gratitude for being beyond all torturing fears after fate has done its worst.8 Although Maurya's speech is interrupted in the middle by the coffinmaking preparations, it is to be understood as one long lament. It is an affirmation of life, even after there is nothing left; it calls for the end of suffering and the beginning of resignation. Like the classical drama, Riders presents an inevitable fate which, after it has run its predestined course, leaves the protagonist stoically resigned: but only after the protagonist (Maurya) has put up a tremendous struggle to keep life. As Elizabeth Coxhead remarks: "The forces which have brought her beyond despair are those which bludgeon the protagonists in a Greek tragedy".9 The opening line of Maurya's speech consummately captures this classical attitude and establishes the Greek-like tone of the entire "requiem": "They're all gone now, and there isn't anything more the sea can do to me. . . . " But it would be misleading to think that Maurya's speech is all resignation and fortitude and no feeling. Maurya's peace has come at a great price. All her sons are dead. Her reflections increase our understanding of how tragic her life has been. Maurya (raising her head and speaking as if she did not see the people around her). They're all gone now, and there isn't anything more the sea can do to me. . . . I'll have no call now to be up crying and praying when the wind breaks from the south, and you can hear the surf is in the east, and the surf is in the west, making a great stir with the two noises, and they hitting one on the other. I'll have no call now to be going down 8

•

Rudolph Stamm, Three Anglo-Irish Plays (Bern, Switzerland, 1943), pp. 7-8. Elizabeth Coxhead, J. M. Synge and Lady Gregory (London, 1962), pp. 15-16.

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

105

and getting Holy Water in the dark nights after Samhain, and I won't care what way the sea is when the other women will be keening. (To Nora.) Give me the Holy Water, Nora, there's a small cup still on the dresser. [Nora gives it to her.] Maurya (drops Michael's clothes across Bartley's feet, and sprinkles the Holy Water over him). It isn't that I haven't prayed for you, Bartley, to the Almighty God. It isn't that I haven't said prayers in the dark night till you wouldn't know what I'd be saying; but it's a great rest I'll have now, and it's time surely. It's a great rest I'll have now, and great sleeping in the long nights after Samhain, if it's only a bit of wet flour we do have to eat, and maybe a fish that would be stinking. [She kneels down again, crossing herself, and saying prayers under her breath.] The act of dropping Michael's clothes across Bartley's feet is a gesture which can be better understood if we go back to Nora's speech about those who are lost at sea: "And isn't it a pitiful thing when there is nothing left of a man who was a great rower and fisher, but a bit of an old shirt and a plain stocking?" The garments Maurya holds in her hand are but the symbol of a man. She lets them fall on what is now the shadow of a man. At this moment, we are pathetically reminded that she has been left with no son living. It only remains to give the dead Bartley a decent burial. In those places where the bodies of the drowned are so often unrecovered, burial takes on maternal overtones; it is important that the dead are symbolically returned in burial to a matrix. It is quite natural, therefore, for Synge to interrupt Maurya's speech in order to address the succeeding action to the burial preparations for Bartley. Furthermore, Synge includes the burial details at this time so not to end the play with such anti-climactic stuff. Maurya's final remarks are to be saved for the concluding dramatic effect. The burial subject begins when Cathleen asks the men if they would build a coffin from the white boards. She offers them the cake which Maurya failed to give Bartley. This is of some significance because bread, as remarked earlier, is associated with the living. The bread which Bartley did not receive (symbolically foreshadowing his death) ultimately rewards the labors of the living. It is given to the makers of Bartley's coffin. Synge is here bringing together and summing up the symbolism of the bread and what T. R. Henn calls "the interpénétration of the world of the living by the world of the dead". 10 A particularly 10

T. R. Henn, The Harvest of Tragedy (London, 1956), p. 202.

106

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

human touch occurs when one of the men asks Cathleen if there are nails for the boards and she replies that she forgot about them. Another man answers : "It's a great wonder she wouldn't think of the nails, and all the coffins she's made already". Besides the injection of some fine realism here, this speech begins to elicit the magnitude of the tragic cycle. There is more implied in Maurya's having forgotten the nails than we might suspect. Although Cathleen apologizes for her mother by explaining, "It's getting old she is, and broken", it is more than that. Maurya's concern for boards we can understand, living on an island where there is a natural scarcity of wood. But why should she remember the nails ? The building of coffins is a man's work. The point is simply that had Bartley lived and had Michael's body been recovered, the task of coffin building would have fallen to Bartley. But Bartley's death has left Maurya, with "no son living", with no man left in the house to build a coffin and purchase nails, with no one to bury the dead. Synge's unfaltering sense for the dramatic also shows up in the way he works back into the final half of Maurya's speech. Instead of rushing into it, he builds to it slowly and deliberately. First, there is a stage direction which describes Maurya as she rises conspicuously (because slowly) from her kneeling position. [Maurya stands up again very slowly and spreads out the pieces of Michael's clothes beside the body, sprinkling them with the last of the Holy Water.] Second, there are Cathleen's and Nora's speeches about Maurya's "calm acceptance of her fate". Nora (in a whisper to Cathleen). She's quiet now and easy; but the day Michael was drowned you could hear her crying out from this to the spring well. It's fonder she was of Michael, and would any one have thought that? Cathleen (slowly and clearly). An old woman will be soon tired with anything she will do, and isn't it nine days herself is after crying and keening, and making great sorrow in the house? And finally, there is Maurya's speech itself, which begins in tranquility and, after a momentary delay in the middle (for reasons of emphasis), reaches a point of total resignation. Maurya (puts the empty cup mouth downwards on the table, and lays her hands together on Bartley's feet). They're all together this time, and the end is come. May the Almighty God have mercy on Bartley's soul, and

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

107

on Michael's soul, and on the souls of Sheamus and Patch, and Stephen and Shawn (bending her head); and may He have mercy on my soul, Nora, and on the soul of every one is left living in the world. Maurya observes that the fatal cycle has run out. What began many years before is now complete. The relentless pursuit of the familiar antagonist is over. She can now rest. Ironically, the source of her sadness has become the cause of her peace. While death may disrupt and destroy, it also unifies, joining in death those whom it has separated in life. It is this realization which is at the heart of Maurya's resignation, not Christian submission. To emphasize Maurya's final speech, Synge uses the chorus of peasant women in the cottage as an orchestral introduction. Their keening rises to a crescendo and then falls to silence. Maurya's speech fills this dramatic stillness. [She pauses, and the keen rises a little more loudly from the women, then sinks away.] Maurya (continuing). Michael has a clean burial in the far north, by the grace of the Almighty God. Bartley will have a fine coffin out of the white boards, and a deep grave surely. What more can we want than that? No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied. [She kneels down again and the curtain falls slowly.] The references to burial here are fitting because they correspond psychologically to the close of the play and the final calm which settles on the action. But though the play concludes on a note of calm, the conclusion is not without its intensity, having brought us to an awareness that resignation after tragedy is bought dearly. The last scene in Riders effectively concludes everything that has come before. Maurya's ordeal of waiting to learn about the fate of her sons is over. Bartley's death has been expected and anticipated for several scenes. It is realized at the end of the play. The cycle of death is completed. The white boards, which have been ominously standing in the corner of the cottage, arefinallybrought into play and their significance understood. The atmosphere of uneasiness which opens the play has given way to calm and reconciliation, the atmosphere which ends the play. Briefly, then, in Riders, Synge captures the pattern of death by focusing on a point shortly before the end of the cycle, dramatizing only the last two deaths in the family — those of Michael and Bartley. In this way, and by careful exposition, he compresses past and present action into the closing moments of a tragedy long unfolding. It is this organization,

108

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

combined with the biblical imagery in the play, which gives Riders its extraordinary compactness and intensity, making of the prior drownings and the present tragedy one unbroken action.

II I turn now to a discussion of stage directions and stage properties, continuation and closure, and rhythm in Riders, to show how these structural properties assist in relating the constituent scenes to the whole play. With the exception of stage directions and stage properties, treating these elements separately invites no special difficulty. To some extent I have already included stage directions and properties in the preceding analysis of scenes. But in order to emphasize their specific structural functions, I have also chosen to discuss them independently. The writer of a one-act play, if he is to gain his effect in a few scenes, must find some means to accelerate the action of the play initially and, once having found it, maintain it. According to T. R. Henn, Synge found the means. Riders to the Sea, one of the few effective one-act tragedies in literature, is of considerable technical interest, particularly in the light of Synge's solution to the problem of obtaining sufficient momentum within a single act. He achieves this by simplifying the conflict of Man vs. Necessity into Man VÍ. The Sea : and the impetus is given by the setting of the Aran cottage, the new boards for the coffin, the interpénétration of the world of the living by the world of the dead, and Maurya's final resignation.11 To this we might also add the atmosphere of the play. The setting is accomplished through verbal stage directions, the atmosphere almost entirely through written stage directions. By turning the conflict into one of man versus fate, Synge created a situation in which there was no agent to actively oppose the protagonist. In any stasis play, which Riders is, there is the danger that with the playwright's having eliminated the agency of active opposition nothing remains to sustain the action. So it is with Riders. Fate robs the play of much of its action. To make up for the lost action, Synge substituted atmosphere. The stage directions provide that atmosphere, in particular, the written ones. II

T.R. Henn, The Harvest of Tragedy (London, 1956), p. 202.

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

109

Also, by means of stage directions, Synge expands scenes and extends the borders of the play, thus circumventing the limited setting of an Aran cottage. How to get around the restraints of a short play, we know from W. G. Fay, was a problem which troubled Synge. "He had felt", writes Fay, "what all writers of one-act plays must feel sooner or later, that the concentration demanded by a short play allows one to give only the headings and suggestions of what ought to be full scenes, if truthfully developed".12 Synge's solution was the verbal stage direction. Synge engineered the written stage direction to establish an atmosphere of tragedy in Riders. He directs that the first scene is to be played in low voices, punctuated by the abrupt starting and stopping of the spinning wheel. A gust of wind eerily blows open the door. The sisters are anxiously looking out for someone. The entire atmosphere of the first scene is one of suspense. The stage directions for the second scene prepare us for Bartley's entrance in the third scene. By directing Maurya to exhibit querulousness, Synge indicates Maurya's frustration at not being able to prevent Bartley's leaving. In the third scene, Bartley is directed to be humble and downcast, exhibiting all the signs of guilt for not heeding Maurya's wishes. As he works with the rope halter, a gesture which suggests that he will leave, Maurya looks at the white boards, which presage death. Hence, the stage directions calling our attention to both rope and boards foreshadow succeeding events and carry the action forward by arousing expectancy. The fourth scene establishes Maurya's sorrow at seeing Bartley go. After he has gone, Maurya's total grief is discovered in her mournful cries. The bread is divided and given to Maurya to take to Bartley. Distraught and defeated, Maurya is unsteady on her feet. She is given Michael's stick to support herself. Bread and stick contribute to the atmosphere of tragedy. The bread is used to foreshadow Bartley's death in the future, the stick to signify the uninterrupted succession of death in the family. Maurya is hesitant and slow in going out the door, a condition which effectively contrasts with her new found strength at the end of the play. Scene five begins with the stage directions indicating anxiety and secrecy, as Nora and Cathleen open the bundle of clothes. The suspense is increased when the bundle proves difficult to untie. Once the clothes 12

W. G. Fay and Catherine Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre (New York, 1935), p. 166.

110

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

are removed and Nora returns with Michael's shirt to compare materials, the hint of death is in the air. The atmosphere of the scene is overlaid with foreboding. During this scene we begin to comprehend fully the epic dimensions of the tragedy. In a single line — Nora's cry of discovery — the momentum of the play and the tragic atmosphere are drastically increased. The stage direction instructs that the clothes are to be put away hurriedly. The girl's haste to hide the bundle from Maurya is contrasted with Maurya's slow entrance. The mother's listlessness signals there is something wrong. In our desire to find out what it is that troubles Maurya, we are led right along into scene six. For reasons of contrast, scene six begins inauspiciously. Cathleen is spinning. The sound of the wheel is interrupted by Maurya's keening, which she is directed to do softly. Cathleen is impatient to know if Maurya has seen Bartley. But Maurya ignores her and continues to keen. At once, we sense there is something ominous in this. The atmosphere becomes more intense. Synge heightens the ominousness further by directing Maurya to speak, slowly and softly, in a frightened voice. Not unnaturally, we wonder what the trouble is. Maurya reveals that she has been witness to the most fearful thing imaginable. This announcement causes Nora and Cathleen to crouch down in front of their mother, a movement which has the effect of emphasizing the mystery. When Maurya is only half finished, Cathleen commences to keen. The effect of Cathleen's keening is to accelerate the suspense and intensify the sense of tragedy pervading the scene. As Maurya continues to speak softly, Nora and Cathleen exchange hurried whispers. At this point, we feel the tension cannot last, something has to happen. And something does happen. A ghost scene corresponding to the one Maurya is describing to her daughters unfolds to the rear of the stage. The suspense is at last terminated. Bartley is dead. But the atmosphere of tragedy is maintained by directing the scene to be played in whispers. In the final stage instructions, which give Maurya's long resignation speech its dramatic effect, she is directed to do the following: kneel and slowly rise, drop Michael's clothes on Bartley's body, speak slowly and clearly, put the cup mouth downward, pause while the keening rises and falls, and finally, resume her kneeling position. If we follow only the stage directions through here, we can see how Synge's instructions point the action to the climax, to the moment of resignation, and to the end. The setting, received through the stage directions, maintains the intensity and momentum of the play. It is interesting to note that as the stage directions in the play increase, so does the intensity. The greatest

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

111

number of stage directions occur at the end of the play, the place of greatest intensity. The foreboding atmosphere, for example, grows more pervasive as the silences and whispers increase. Because he had to do without an agent of active opposition to create action, Synge used, in its place, an atmosphere of excitement and suspense. He obtained the momentum he needed by intensifying the atmosphere in the play. And this, as we have seen, he did through stage directions. The mystery and intensity begun in one scene carry us over to the next scene. When one expectation is satisfied a new one is aroused. The effect is one of restless movement toward an increasingly prefigured end. In Synge's hands the spoken stage direction becomes a means to extend the borders of the play by creating additional scenes through description. The tendency to create such scenes is, as Herbert Howarth observes, characteristic of Synge's dramatic art. The communication of the objective scene through dialogue is a striking skill of Synge's plays. N o writer has reproduced pictures of the outer scene so sharply as this egocentric and apparently inward-looking man. It is, of course, common and relatively easy for a sensitive writer to put the thing observed, countryside or town, into descriptive prose, while the action halts and waits on it. Synge puts the country smells, sounds and sights, the streams running between rocks, into his dialogue, so that they belong to the action and go with it, not stop it or obtrude. 13

Martin Lamm, in Modern Drama (1952), describes Synge's technique as Elizabethan. Synge studied Elizabethan drama in his youth, and avails himself of the Elizabethan technique of describing the setting of a scene in the course of the dialogue. H e does not need the endless description of scenery to which comtemporary dramatists generally resort. In a single line he can often indicate the whole poetic atmosphere of a play. 14

Howarth's and Lamm's comments are certainly germane to Synge's method in Riders. A few "visual scenes" from Riders will suffice to show how Synge uses the spoken stage direction to extend the borders of the play, and, as well, to increase the implications of the action. As Bartley is preparing to leave, he asks Nora if the boat has docked yet. Nora (looking out). She's passing the green head and letting fall her sails. 13 14

Herbert Howarth, The Irish Writers : 1880-1940 (London, 1958), p. 222. Martin Lamm, Modern Drama, trans. Karin Elliott (Oxford, 1952), p. 305.

112

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

The priest has given Nora the bundle of clothes to identify. Cathleen asks her sister if the priest has also said where the clothes were found. Nora. "There were two men", says he, "and they rowing round with poteen before the cocks crowed, and the oar of one of them caught the body, and they passing the black cliffs of the north". Maurya relates her vision. Maurya. I went down to the spring well, and I stood there saying a prayer to myself. Then Bartley came along, and he riding on the red mare with the gray pony behind him. I'm after seeing him this day, and he riding and galloping. Bartley came first on the red mare; and I tried to say "God speed you", but something choked the words in my throat. He went by quickly; and "the blessing of God on you", says he, and I could say nothing. I looked up then, and I crying, at the gray pony, and there was Michael upon it — with fine clothes on him, and new shoes on his feet. Maurya describes how Patch was brought home. Maurya. . . . I was sitting here with Bartley, and he a baby, lying on my two knees, and I seen two women, and three women, and four women coming in, and they crossing themselves, and not saying a word. I looked out then, and there weie men coming after them, and they holding a thing in the half of a red sail, and water dripping out of it — it was a dry day, Nora — and leaving a track to the door. Nora describes Bartley's homecoming. Nora. They're carrying a thing among them and there's water dripping out of it and leaving a track by the big stones. As was observed earlier, the Abbey theatre stage, like the Elizabethan stage, inhibited scenery changes. Synge, like the Elizabethans, solved this problem by narrating those scenes which could not be staged. The visual scenes have justly contributed to Synge's fame and his reputation for being the one modern dramatist most like the Elizabethans in technique. In Riders to the Sea it was especially important for Synge to convey the impression of landscapes other than the Aran cottage. The meaning of the play demanded it. If Synge was going to capture the entire range of this tragedy, he had to establish convincingly the presence of an atmosphere presided over by a malevolent fate. The only way he

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

113

could do this was to bring the outside (the sea) inside. Through spoken stage directions (i.e., visual scenes) he invoked the smells and sounds of a menacing sea, the presence of death, and the idea of an endless procession of riders to the sea. The visual scenes emphasize the pervasiveness of the sea and extend the tragedy to include all men who struggle to survive in a hostile environment. Synge also uses verbal stage directions to link scenes. The entrance of a character almost always is preceded by another character's announcement to that effect. Prior to the start of scene two, Nora tells Cathleen that Maurya is coming. Nora (goes to the inner door and listens). She's moving about on the bed. She'll be coming in a minute. Nora introduces Bartley's entrance at the start of scene three. Nora (looking out). He's coming now, and he in a hurry. Nora also introduces Maurya's entrance in scene six. Nora (looking out). She is, Cathleen. She's coming up to the door. The stage properties function as structural devices by carrying the action from one point to another, linking scenes, and foreshadowing events of subsequent importance. The white boards ominously standing by the wall command our attention throughout the play. We ask ourselves: what do they mean; why are they there; how will they be used? The turf for the fire becomes the means to remind Cathleen that Bartley has left without the bread. The bread is a device used to get Maurya out of the cottage. Mentioned in one scene, it is effectively and naturally brought into play in a later scene. Michael's clothes are used to gain time for Bartley's death to occur off-stage, and thus to carry the action over what would have been a dead spot. Each prop, according to Darrell Figgis, becomes a symbol foreshadowing the tragic ending of the play. Turf for the fire in one place, Michael's clothes in another, the ominous white boards, and the forgotten cake in Maurya's hand, all keep the movement in flow past awkward places till its course is accomplished. And it is worthy of note that they each sind all come to be symbols of doom, being thus not only aids to the movement, but heightening, moreover, and intensifying the very cause and tragical colour of its being.15 18 Darell Figgis, "The Art of J. M. Synge", The Fortnightly Review, n.s. XC (December 1,1911), 1061.

114

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

Synge has selected his stage properties with care. They serve several functions at once, as Figgis points out. They are never excrescent stage decorations, but always practical plot devices which advance the action in the play. As we would expect from a good playwright, Synge's stage properties create relations between scenes, while enriching and clarifying the meaning of the play. Because Riders is a tragedy of fate, Synge had to establish as early in the play as possible the sense of inevitability which pervades the action. Once he established an atmosphere of death, the law of good continuation increasingly governed the direction of the succeeding events and scenes in the play. For Synge to complete Riders in a "good" way and not violate the logic implicit in the action, Bartley had to die. We demand it and expect it. When he does die, we have a sense of good closure. What happens had to happen. So strong is the demand for good continuation in the play that we ignore the violation of time in our absorption with Bartley's fate. We hardly realize that not enough time has elapsed for all of the things which do happen in the play really to happen. In general, at the start of the play, we learn of the deaths which serve as exposition to the present action. At the conclusion of the play, when the fatal motion has come full circle, we experience good closure. The overall pattern of action is completed by Bartley's death. The final calm, which emanates from Maurya's resignation speech, corresponds psychologically to the rest or pause in the action which accompanies good closure. The laws of good continuation and closure also govern the relationship between the two lines in the play: those of Michael and Bartley. Scene one begins the question of Michael's fate; scene five answers it. Bartley's fate does not specifically begin until he leaves at the end of scene three, although from the beginning we suspect that he will go. When the clothes in the bundle are identified as Michael's, that action is complete. There is good closure, yet we do not expect the play to end with the identification of the clothes. To the contrary, our sense of good continuation tells us that before the play can end, we must return to the question of Bartley's fate. Once the Bartley action is concluded, the play should end, if it is not to appear anti-climactic. The rhythm which results from the recurring relationships between characters in Riders completes a pattern which points to Bartley's death. After the initial dramatic exposition is exhausted and the main action (Bartley's leaving) is begun, the rhythm of the play gathers force and direction. Each additional scene and repeated relationship progressively

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

115

foreshadows the ending of the play. The first of the repeated relationships corresponds to a marked increase in the tempo of the play. In scene five, Nora and Cathleen return to the bundle they had hidden in the turf-loft at the end of scene one. In the interim, Bartley has left. Maurya has expressed doubts about his safe return, and has gone after him to bring him the cake. The girls make the discovery that the clothes found in the far north are Michael's. Because the discovery is made after Bartley has left, the linking effect of the fatal cycle becomes more apparent. Michael's drowning is discovered at a time when Bartley's fate is uncertain. The overlapping action emphasizes the idea that these deaths are related. Once the identification is made, we ask ourselves, what of Bartley? Suspense is aroused for what is to come. We do not have long to wait to satisfy that suspense. In the sixth scene (the second recurrence in the play), Maurya, bread in hand, returns after having failed to make contact with Bartley. Although the relationship here between the mother and daughters is repeated, it is different. Since Maurya's last appearance, she has experienced the dreadful vision of Bartley and Michael. Also, Cathleen and Nora now know the fate of their brother Michael. Both parties know more than they did before. Therefore, the entire relationship is changed. The disclosure of Maurya's apparition heightens the tragedy of the preceding action and creates a new suspense for what is to come. We know that Michael is dead; Maurya does not. It is this situation which incites a renewed interest in Bartley's welfare. The third and last recurrence in the play occurs in the final scene. It is a double recurrence. First, there is the ghost scene; and second, there is Bartley's homecoming. The ghost scene increases the significance of Maurya's description of her dead ; it is a reenactment, with additional implications, of the scene she is describing. Bartley's homecoming scene is, of course, a different kind of recurrence. He left alive and has been returned dead, a situation which the rhythm in the play has led us to expect. In satisfying an expectancy aroused earlier, his death concludes both the rhythm and the action in the play. The completion of the expectancy creates a stillness which enables us to assimilate the just completed action; a stillness in which to receive Maurya's final speech. Although there is little uncertainty about the outcome of Riders, Maurya's conflict with the sea (fate) is not without its subtle reversals which promote change, and thus rhythm, in the play. Certainly underlying the entire play is an elemental reversal: the rider who goes to the sea in order to live, only to die. It is this twist which gives the play its

116

THE WHOLE ANALYSIS

cruel and pervasive irony. But there are also less obvious reversals. Early in the action Nora quotes the young priest as saying that although he will not prevent Bartley from leaving, there is little to fear because God will hear Maurya's prayers. Nora. "I won't stop him", says he, "but let you not be afraid. Herself does be saying prayers half through the night, and the Almighty God won't leave her destitute", says he, "with no son living". Yet Bartley dies. In fact, his death is anticipated by Maurya, even though it is she who wishfully exclaims: "He won't go this day with the wind rising from the south and west. He won't go this day, for the young priest will stop him surely". Her expression of hope encourages a faint expectation, on our part, for a happy ending. That our expectation is contradicted by the subsequent events intensifies the tragic effect. It is because we were led emotionally to believe, if only for a moment, that there might not be a tragedy, that Bartley's death bas the added interest of a betrayed hope. Another reversal occurs when Maurya fails to give the bread to Bartley. We hardly expect Maurya to miss Bartley, but we are even less prepared for her vision. The report of her vision represents a reversal which creates a new concern for Bartley's welfare. Finally, there is the last reversal: Maurya's thankfulness for an end of suffering. We are struck silent when Maurya, the mother who has fought so hard to save Bartley's life, who has cried, "If it was a hundred horses, or a thousand horses you had itself, what is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only", who has wept bitterly at his leaving, rises to speak her speech of resignation and forbearance. But then we ask ourselves, what else is there? In this way, Synge teaches us about the final peace of tragedy.

INDEX

All My Sons (Miller), 48, 49 Anatomy of Criticism (Frye), 11 n. Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 45, 46 n. Archer, William, 24, 35, 55, 60 Arms and the Man (Shaw), 35, 42, 46, 47, 50, 51 Art as Experience (Dewey), 67 Art of the Play, The (Downer), 14 n., 15, 25 n., 54 n. Arthur Miller's Collected Plays, 48 n. Augier, Emile, 49 Baker, George Pierce, 37 Beardsley, Monroe, 14, 16, 47 n. Boyd, Ernest, 85 Brecht, Bertolt, 28, 29, 30, 31 Brooks, Cleanth, 14

Constructing a Play (Gallaway), 12 Coxhead, Elizabeth, 104 Daniel, Robert, 14, 16 Deirdre of the Sorrows (Synge), 85 Dewey, John, 67, 68 Dr. Faustus (Marlowe), 21, 25 Donovan, Robert, 31, 32 n. Downer, Alan, 14, 15, 16, 24, 25, 26, 27, 54 Dramatic Technique (Baker), 37 n. Dramatic Works of Molière, The, 44 n. Dream Play, A (Strindberg), 52 Dryden, John, 26 Dumas, Alexandre, 32

Educational Theatre Journal, 18 n., 67 n. Elements of Drama, The (Styan), 46 n. Camille and Other Plays (Stanton, ed.), Ellehauge, Martin, 32 Englische Studien, 32 η. 49 n„ 70 n. English Literary History (ELH), 21 n., Candida (Shaw), 68 32 n. Caretaker, The (Pinter), 18 Essay for Dramatic Poesy, An (Dryden), Carswell, Catherine, 109 n. 26 Changing Drama, The (Henderson), 33 n., Essays in Criticism, 10 n. 40 n. Essays of John Dryden, 26 n. Chaplin, Charles, 69 Everyman, 56 Christ, Jesus, 84 Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, The, Exodus, 84 43 n., 47 n. Common Sense About Drama (Strong), Fay, W.G., 109 102 n. Fays of the Abbey Theatre, The (Fay and Complete Plays with Prefaces (Shaw), Carswell), 109 n. 42 n. Fehling, Jürgen, 51 Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, The, Fergusson, Francis, 32, 33 Figgis, Darrell, 113, 114 57 n. Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, First Modern Comedies, The (Holland), 20 Fortnightly Review, The, 113 The, 39 n. Complete Works of William Wycherley, Freytag, Gustav, 13 Frye, Northrop, 10, 11, 12 The, 38 n.

118

INDEX

Galilei, Galileo, 28, 29, 30, 31 Galileo (Brecht), 28, 29, 31 Gallaway, Marian, 12 Ghosts (Ibsen), 28, 31, 32, 33, 34 Glass Menagerie, The (Williams), 41 Hamilton, Clayton, 24 Harvest of Tragedy, The (Henn), 105 n. Hauptmann, Gerhart, 40 Hedda Gabler (Ibsen), 47, 49 Heilman, Robert, 14 Henderson, Archibald, 32, 33 n., 40 Henn, T.R., 94, 105, 108 Henry IV (Shakespeare), 15 n. Hitchcock, Alfred, 69 Holland, Norman, 20 Howarth, Herbert, 111 Ibsen, Henrik, 16, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 42, 43 η., 47, 49 Idea of a Theater, The (Fergusson), 32 n. Ireland's Literary Renaissance (Boyd), 85 n. Irish Writers, The (Howarth), 111 J.M. Synge and Lady Gregory (Coxhead), 104 n. James, Henry, 9, 17 John The Divine, Saint (John in Patmos), 84 Keystone Cops, The, 69 King Lear (Shakespeare), 64 Koffka, Kurt, 53, 66 Lady Windermere's Fan (Wilde), 57, 58, 61

Lamm, Martin, 111 Language of Tragedy, The (Prior), 54, 55 n. Laurel and Hardy, 69 Leggett, Glenn, 14, 16 McCullers, Carson, 70, 79, 82, 83 Macgowan, Kenneth, 48 Man and the Masses (Toller), 51 Marlowe, Christopher, 25, 30 Master Builder, The (Ibsen), 42, 43 n. Medici, Cosimo de, 29 Member of the Wedding, The (McCullers), 70, 75, 83 Miller, Arthur, 27, 48, 49 Misanthrope, The (Molière), 43, 44 η.

Miser, The (Molière), 53, 57 Modern Drama (Lamm), 111 Molière, 43, 44, 53 Moses, 84 Nature of Literature, The (Pollock), 53 North by Northwest (Hitchcock), 69 Othello (Shakespeare), 49 Pinter, Harold, 18 Plain Dealer, The (Wycherley), 37, 38 n. Play-Making (Archer), 24 n., 55 n. Playboy of the Western World, The (Synge), 36 Plays and Poems of J.M. Synge, The (Henn, ed.), 94 η. Playwright at Work (Van Druten), 66 n. Pollock, T.C., 53, 54 Primer of Playwriting, A (Macgowan), 48 n. Principles of Literary Criticism (Richards), 69 Prior, Moody, 54, 55 n. Quintessence of Ibsenism, The (Shaw), 16 Revelation (Apocalypse), 84, 92, 98, 99, 102,103 Richards, I.A., 69 Riders to the Sea (Synge), 47, 84, 85, 93, 97, 102, 103, 104, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 114, 115 Robinson, Lennox, 17, 18 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 13 Rothstein, Eric, 21 Rowe, Kenneth Thorpe, 15, 97 Sarcey, Francisque, 55 η. Sardou, Victorien, 49, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75 Schechner, Richard, 19 Scrap of Paper, A (Sardou), 70, 75 Scribe, Eugène, 42 η., 49 Seven Plays by Bertolt Brecht, 28 η. Sewall, Richard, 10, 11 Shadwell, Thomas, 37, 38, 39, 40 Shakespeare, William, 25,46 n., 49,65 Shaw, George Bernard, 16, 35, 36, 40, 42, 46, 50, 51, 65, 68 Six Plays of Strindberg, 52 η. Slawinska, Irena, 19, 20 η. Sophocles, 55 Sprigge, Elizabeth, 52

INDEX Stamm, Rudolph, 104 Stanton, Stephen, 49 Stil- und Formprobleme in der Literatur, 20 n. Streetcar Named Desire, A (Williams), 66 Strindberg, August, 52 Strohbach, Hans, 51 Strong, L.A.G., 102 Studies in Stagecraft (Hamilton), 24 η. Styan, J.L., 46 Synge, John, Millington, 36, 47, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116 Technique of the Drama (Freytag), 13 Theme and Form (Beardsley, et al), 14, 46 Three Anglo-Irish Plays (Stamm), 104 η.

119

Toller, Ernst, 51 Towards an Appreciation of the Theatre (Robinson), 17 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare), 45 True Widow, A (Shadwell), 37, 38, 39 n. Tulane Drama Review, 19 n. Understanding Drama (Brooks and Heilman), 14 Van Druten, John, 65, 66 n. Vanity Fair (Thackeray), 17 Wilde, Oscar, 57, 60, 61, 62, 64 Williams, Tennessee, 41, 65 Withey, J.Α., 18, 67 Wordsworth, William, 9 Write That Play (Rowe), 15, 97 n. Wycherley, William, 37, 38 n., 39, 40

DE PROPRIETATIBUS LITTERARUM edited by C. H. VAN SCHOONEVELD Series

Maior

1. Marcus Β. Hester, The Meaning of Poetic Metaphor: An Analysis in the Light of Wittgenstein's Claim that Meaning is Use. 1967. 2. Rodney Delasanta, The Epic Voice. 1967. 3. Bennison Gray, Style: The Problem and its Solution. 1969. 5. Raimund Belgardt, Romantische Poesie: Begriff und Bedeutung bei Friedrich Schlegel. 1970. 7. Theodore B. Wood, The Word 'Sublime' and its Context. 1971. 8. Ewa M. Thompson, Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism : A Comparative Study. 1971. 9. David G. Hale, The Body Politic. 1971. 10. Ernest A. Gallo, The "Poetria Nova" and its Sources in Early Rhetorical Doctrine. 1971. 11. David M. Miller, The Net of Hephaestus : A Study of Modern Criticism and Metaphysical Metaphor. 1971. 12. William W. Ryding, Structural Patterns in Medieval Narrative. 1971. 14. Burton Raffel. The Forked Tongue: A Study of the Translation Process. 1971. 15. Paul M. Levitt, A Structural Approach to the Analysis of Drama. 1971. 17. John T. Braun, The Apostrophic Gesture. 1971. 19. Forrest L. Ingram, Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century: Studies in a Literary Genre. 1971. 20. Frances K. Barasch, The Grotesque: A Study in Meanings. 1971. 22. James W. Nichols, Insinuation : The Tactics of English Satire.

MOUTON · PUBLISHERS · THE HAGUE